Yeah fair enough. Good point. Legal consequences for online activity are always a tricky subject because of privacy issues. Can’t trust the very companies I would like to be on the hook for not taking safety serious to in turn take safety of data serious.
(And of course too many people think “it’s like the high seas”, ignoring that those have more laws than many countries and hence why you need marine lawyers if you do shipping 😅)
On Steam it’s per-game configured by the devs, no? Crypt of the Necrodancer tells me it has nearly 100GB space left, while Deep Rock Galactic says it’s capped at ~85MB.
If you can play from say the UK, and you pay money for the game or access to it’s Internet or components, they are doing business in the UK, and hence their business, business interactions and everything are subject to UK laws.
Seriously, we let companies get away with too much. If you provide public spaces, you are responsible for some degree of safety in/on them, and that includes certain personal safety, protection from libel, slander and threats. Likewise if you do business in a country and can make money from customers there, you are responsible for adhering to those countries laws. Want to do business in >200 countries? Yeah, you now have to adhere to >200 sets of laws.
Now you could say “But it’d suck if so many companies no longer release their products globally!”. Sure. OTOH, it sucks much more that companies shirk responsibilities constantly. Companies are supposed to be like persons. So like a person, require them to adhere to local laws and show at least some degree of decency.
And no, it’s ridiculous to assume someone should take steps to protect themselves. It’s a failure of society that we have to do that for something as deranged as online rape or death threats. Because we let both the aggressor and the conductor get away with it, exactly in the way you do, by immediately putting the onus onto the victim.
It’s not that I entirely disagree, but it’s not a black-vs-white thing. Some ribbing is understandable, after all it’s a competitive environment. But the explicitly misogynist, hateful, threatening and illegal needs to be harshly dealt with, to make players understand that it’s an absolutely 0 tolerance police and you will fuck yourself up if you try.
No player should have to go through having to shrug off rape threats.
Learn how to block people and move on with your life.
That’s disgusting. I would argue two things need to happen across the board:
Companies need to collect IRL data if you want to have access to text/voice chat, verify them, and in situations such as these, hand them to the authorities. Yeah it’s a tricky data protection problem, but these would be legally actionable threats IRL, they should not be let off the hook just because it was done online.
More importantly, companies themselves should be on the hook for failing to act. That is, if you want to provice text or voice chat or something, but also do not want to invest enough money to moderate these spaces, then you should be legally liable under the same logic as why the cases should be given to the police in the first place, you’re aiding and abetting such threats. I suspect we’ll very very quickly either see way stricter moderation (good) or the end of text/voice chat in many games (not ideal, but if they cannot be moderated, then so be it).
Well to be fair, only Cataclysm had decent writing. HW1 lived off its world building, but being a fresh setup it did a superb job with that.
Then HW2 mostly coasted on the success of HW1 in world building, bringing much of it down with its shallow design but eh, still good enougthe problem is that by now the world is known in large parts. Bow they need to bring in actual story, especially because we know from Cataclysm that they can do that.