Whose point is that? Because I don't think it's the previous guy's point, and it certainly isn't mine.
I mean, the law (not a bill, this isn't the US and it has been approved, as per the text) outright bans loot boxes in games "targeted at children or teenagers". No qualifiers. Doesn't even say "paid loot boxes", so technically all videogames are now illegal if they have a loot table anywhere. I'm going to assume cooler heads will prevail and a categorization will come from courts or specific regulatory development, but it's certainly not in the law.
So if you don't like this for doing both at once... well, that's weird, that's why laws have multiple articles. If you're worried that the inclusion is meant to stall the bill that's irrelevant, this has been published and comes in force in six months. If you think they're overreaching by outright banning loot boxes... well, I agree, but I don't think that's the point as the rest of the thread is defining it.
EDIT: Someone in a different thread pointed out that despite referencing slightly differently there IS a definition of lootbox in the law and it does include a requirement for them to be paid, so I'm correcting the record here:
IV – caixa de recompensa: funcionalidade disponível em certos jogos eletrônicos que permite a aquisição, mediante pagamento, pelo jogador, de itens virtuais consumíveis ou de vantagens aleatórias, resgatáveis pelo jogador ou usuário, sem conhecimento prévio de seu conteúdo ou garantia de sua efetiva utilidade;
No, see, there is no logical mistake because at no point was there an argument about universal truths anywhere. There was a note that, despite the headline and article not flagging it, the same regulation covers porn and has some of the issues that anti-porn age verification has had in the past.
You're just doing the thing where you read something on the Internet and it made you angry by not immediately reinforcing your preferences so you nitpicked a random bit you thought didn't check out regardless of whether it was part of the argument or not.
They are the same in the law. They will be treated the same way.
Also, what is your point anyway? That porn should be accessible to children but loot boxes shouldn't? Are you not OK with porn being for adults? The question here isn't whether the content is adults-only, we probably should all agree that's the case. The question is how that's enforced.
I mean, if you want to tell me what you actually think about that I'm happy to listen, but going "these two things feel different to me" doesn't bring anything to this conversation.
How are they different? They're both activities we allow for adults but not for children. For, arguably, good reasons.
I mean, you can be into one more than into another, and you can argue whether or not loot boxes should qualify as gambling, but for practical purposes when it comes to regulation they are fairly interchangeable.
Not that it matters, because regardless of what you and I think, they are listed together in the law. I'm not mixing diffferent issues, the law is specifically, explicitly applying the exact same regulation to porn and loot boxes. Doesn't matter how you feel about it, the Brazilian regulators think they're the same here.
And it's written in pretty much the same way as the UK anti-porn thing, where age ratings alone won't cut it, so if you want to make smut games in Brazil you need to have some sort of "effective" age gating on top of parental controls to allow parents to close it off to their kids.
Art. 12. Os provedores de lojas de aplicações de internet e de sistemas operacionais de terminais deverão:
I – tomar medidas proporcionais, auditáveis e tecnicamente seguras para aferir a idade ou a faixa etária dos usuários, observados os princípios previstos no art. 6º da Lei nº 13.709, de 14 de agosto de 2018 (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados Pessoais);
II – permitir que os pais ou responsáveis legais configurem mecanismos de supervisão parental voluntários e supervisionem, de forma ativa, o acesso de crianças e de adolescentes a aplicativos e conteúdos; e
III – possibilitar, por meio de Interface de Programação de Aplicações (Application Programming Interface – API) segura e pautada pela proteção da privacidade desde o padrão, o fornecimento de sinal de idade aos provedores de aplicações de internet, exclusivamente para o cumprimento das finalidades desta Lei e com salvaguardas técnicas adequadas.
So where are we on this one? We gonna be the "fuck free speech, I hate loot boxes" or "fuck thinking of the children, we like our smutty stuff"?
And you know, if wouldn't hurt my ability to play more games if more of them were shorter.
From the article:
In 2024, a staggering 18,626 games were released on Steam, according to SteamDB, a website that tracks data on the popular PC platform. That’s an increase of around 93% from 2020, when 9,656 games were released.
By my count, if you don't sleep or eat and only play videogames you need every game to be about 30 minutes long on average.
I mean, it wouldn't hurt, but I'm gonna say it's not enough.
In all seriousness, I'm more concerned by the competition from social media and on demand video. I'm typing this, which isn't that interesting of an activity. Idling online is a huge time sink, and it's getting bigger.
Hey, say what you will, but I do think the solution is technological. MS at least has an approach. About time, too. I don't want to overplay it, because a lot of these arguments is very... terminally online, but it's nuts that the DX12/UE5 combo of tech that has now been a thing for ages is still so poorly understood and unadressed on a wider scale.
Also crazy that dev teams don't have enough systems engineers bitchy enough to insist on figuring this out.
I think for BL4 specifically the problem is the game is just... heavy. Not chuggy or stuttery on good enough hardware, but good enough starts kinda high here.
And yeah, it looks better than previous games, but it's a stylized look and it's taking shortcuts meant for photorealism into a space where a lot of stylization is going to cut into the extra bits of indirect lighting or vegetation or environmental detail you're getting out of it.
Blend the confusing shader issues with the disproportionately high frame budget even when things are working fine and you get this stuff. But I'll say that I was shocked at how playable the game is on higher end hardware given what the Internet was saying.
Supposedly that's why it does things this way, right? Instead of the very long compile up front they do a smaller one up front and then run it in the background.
They seem to imply that because the game is heavy by default this is what's causing people's performance issues. I don't know that I agree, but there's probably part of it.
Yeah, the process will be different depending on CPU, so I'm assuming 15 min is the upper bound they're expecting on the minimum supported spec or whatever.
My experience with it has been solid, but I do run high end hardware that is muscling past a lot of stuff.
I think as usual there is some confusion between compilation stutters and the game just being very heavy for the way it looks (which it is). People online seem to be scattershot about it.
And then there's the people talking about it who don't care but like to be mad online, which is also a thing.
And then there's the weird dev that keeps mouthing off for no reason in ways that can't possibly help.
Lots of things on this one.
Still I don't think you're expected to idle for fifteen minutes. That's the point of the background compilation. You can still play more or less fine. Particularly on first boot the first fifteen of this should be a bunch of cutscenes anyway, and those lock at 30 (which I don't like at all and so many games do now for some reason).
I swear I have no idea why they let him talk. He doesn't even own the company, surely someone at 2K could just go... you know... shush.
I don't even think the BL4 thing is that bad, on the face of it. There is really no need to make it worse.
"We have been made aware of some performance issues in certain systems in our new release, we'll be looking into performance improvements in future patches". It's not that hard. At this point just copy/paste whatever the other thousand UE5 games said, go fix the wonky precompilation boot step and stop digging a hole.
Hell, it's even easier than that, because they have actually pretty much put that out. All he really needed to do was shut up about it.
The vast majority of people to be read as "a tiny fraction of players". It's just probably the players more likely to be part of the online community around the game or to play it consistently this long after release. I wouldn't be surprised if only a very, very small percentage of the twenty thousand people playing the game right now ever had installed any mods at all.
While I don't have hard data on this, I can tell you I've played the game since the Flash days and certainly never modded it for this reason or even considered it. Wiki page open onthe side just in case? Sure. Mods? Nope.
I don't have much to disagree with there, frankly. I mean, I like GoW 3 less than you do. I'd genuinely play the Ninja Theory DMC, if I'm honest, but at that point we're splitting hairs.
To be clear, I don't hate these games, I just don't like them much and generally don't play them on purpose. We're coming at it from different angles but meeting pretty much halfway.