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WarPortal Shuttering EU Ragnarok Online Servers on May 25th - General News
SBFord
Former Associate EditorLegendaryPosts: 33,129Member
WarPortal Shuttering EU Ragnarok Online Servers on May 25th - General News
As a result of changing laws in the European Union, WarPortal has made the decision to shut down Ragnarok Online in most European countries. The decision seems to coincide with the EU's new data protection legislation the GDPR that goes live the same day. The law requires companies to more aggressively protect users' personal data by upgrading storage security throughout the EU. This will not affect CiS or North American servers.
Comments
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So go EU , bring more Law's like this one to us.
Reporter: What's behind Blizzard success, and how do you make your gamers happy?
Blizzard Boss: Making gamers happy is not my concern, making money.. yes!
History taught us that communism fails.
They also removed Ragnarok Online 2 on Steam for EU and Turkey. I didn't know Turkey is an EU country...
You can check it from here. Just look at "LOWEST RECORDED PRICE" and "CURRENT PRICE" you can figure out which countries are blocked.
https://steamdb.info/app/239370/
GDPR's not about nationalism or communism. It's trying to hold companies accountable for selling your personal data or letting it get stolen because they were too cheap or lazy to care.
Fine levels can be pretty painful, and theoretically they can even shut your business down. (source: I've done the GDPR awareness course)
Always tough to know how much a game is making of course but there doesn't appear to be much "buzz" around the game. Be interesting to see what other games do.
The GDPR is attempting a fundamental paradigm shift. Currently, the instant you hand over your personal data, the people who have your data are pretty much free to do what they want with it. The GDPR is now stating that the data subject (us) is always in control of our data.
So, there are new rights in place. For example, the right to be forgotten is one of them, so you can ask any company to tell you what personal data they have on you (which they must supply within 30 days) and then you can ask them to delete it (which they must also do within 30 days).
When collecting personal data - such as registering for a game - companies must now tell you precisely what the data is used for, where it is stored and who has access. If the data is used for more than one thing, the company must collect your explicit consent for each thing. Companies are also not allowed to bar you from using their service if you don't agree to non-essential use.
So, if WarPortal are selling their user's data, that will be illegal from 25th May. WarPortal would have to explicitly tell you who they are selling the data to each time, and they must get your consent before they do so.
There are also big fines in place. 20m euros or 4% of annual turnover, whichever is the larger, is the maximum fine.
Wylf said: The EU protects it's citizens better than the US in just about every conceivable way.
With the UK leaving the EU next year, this is something that I've only really been learning about recently. Particularly in relation to food and drugs, the amount of shit the US feeds it's citizens is astonishing! As part of the EU, the majority of the food you guys eat falls below our food safety standards and so there isn't much trade between us. After Brexit happens, the UK could start trading food with the US......but I really hope we don't!
One of the other interesting things to happen recently is the Facebook crisis. Facebook is going to have to comply with the GDPR and Mark Z told congress that he welcomes these new privacy laws and said they should apply to everyone. As Facebook operates out of Ireland, the new privacy laws would indeed be applied to everyone in the world who uses Facebook.
but then, just a few days after his testimony, Facebook announced that they're changing operations and moving all non-EU citizen's data out of Ireland and back to the US so that they don't have to comply with the GDPR.....
European countries do far more for their citizens than the U.S. in many ways, but that comes along with a much higher tax rate. Benefits always come with costs and both must be considered when evaluating the comparative merit of different approaches.
Reporter: What's behind Blizzard success, and how do you make your gamers happy?
Blizzard Boss: Making gamers happy is not my concern, making money.. yes!
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
Even if they shut down the game, don't they still have users' personal data? Seems like shutting down the game, on its own, would not remove the need for them to comply with new regulations unless they also deleted (or off-shored?) all the users' personal data.
I say this with only my quick review of the GDPR FAQ and Key Changes sections so if I misunderstood the application of the regulations then so be it.
-mklinic
"Do something right, no one remembers.
Do something wrong, no one forgets"
-from No One Remembers by In Strict Confidence