Re: Epic is turning off Master servers for UT99 & UT2k4; UTX Announced - What To Do?
Posted: Thu Dec 22, 2022 1:59 am
For those wondering, OjitroC is talking about this:OjitroC wrote: ↑Thu Dec 22, 2022 12:04 am However the FTC ruling and Epic's response recognises that, irrespective of the rating of a game, it may be accessed by children under the age of 13 - I quote from Epic's statement on the Agreement "Developers who create a teen-rated or mature-rated game can no longer assume that it won't be deemed to be directed to children, according to the United States Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Younger players who are interested in higher-rated games can find ways to access them". What I have read of statements from FTC would seem to back this up by reference to the need to protect children under the age of 13 from online abuse.
All I'm saying is that there is possibly a link between the FTC Agreement and Epic's actions with regard to their 'older games'. It could just be a coincidence of course, but their decision to no longer want to sell or provide on-line services for a number of older games comes at more or less the same time as the announcement of the Agreement.
https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/ne ... -practices
and is such a load of bullshit (from FTC and Epic)...
I mean, look at Unity for example:
https://docs.unity.com/ads/en/COPPACompliance.html
they have a page specifically for COPPA compliance concerning contextual ads, and they, like everyone else, understand that COPPA is not applicable when the game is rated for a higher age ("mature" for example), because it's not supposed for children to be able to play it in the first place.
So it seems that in this case FTC went after Epic to make an example out of them (due to the big cash cow that is Fortnite), not just to make them comply with regulation, but also to create a huge legal precedent where the company has to consider that classifying a game as "mature" is no longer good enough for COPPA, although there's no legal basis for that, otherwise other companies would be on top of it (including Unity).
Which is so ridiculous because children will ALWAYS be able to access restricted content in one way or another, that's nothing new, and the only way of verifying someone's age, without legal documents or other means that would actually violate a child's privacy even further ( ), is to just ask them how old they are, which as everyone knows it always works...
I mean, if age verification is all that's missing from these games (besides the one already in the stores), that's something they could have easily added, or have let the community add them.
But once again, they're simply not interested in doing so, and ultimately that's the only truth that matters here.
So, again, they could do more, they don't want to, it's that simple.
This sucks...