There is a leaked document of the proposal related to EU KIDS Act , which proposes requiring age verification for all online games. Also note that this proposal is not anywhere near to pass. But it exists and is going to be dicussed

Stop Killing the Internet initiative

If you're EU citizen sign this petition: https://eci.ec.europa.eu/066/public/

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQRcK9nYg9g

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[–] 6 points 14 hours ago (4 children)

Your scenario is like 10-20 years out of date.

Actual scenario: You are a kid with a phone or computer, you download one of the literally thousands of wildly popular free to play games on your device like Fortnite, and you begin playing immediately.

With F2P there is no payment barrier, which is why this sort of thing is coming up now. The constituency asking for it is parents who are having a difficult time telling their kid that they can’t be playing the popular thing that all their friends are playing.

Whether you agree with this approach or not is a separate issue, I’m not saying this is a good thing or well thought out. But the scenario and motivation are clear. The various industry rating systems worked when that was the only way to release a game, not so much when the most popular and high budget games are free.

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  • [–] 3 points 9 hours ago

    I second the call of “bullshit”. As a parent of a teenager the last thing I fucking want is some pedo billionaire asking for my kids ID.

    There are so many things wrong with that. Soooooo many things.

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  • [–] 8 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

    The constituency asking for it is parents who are having a difficult time telling their kid that they can’t be playing the popular thing that all their friends are playing.

    Bullshit, the constituency asking for this is the tech sector, probably primarily advertisers, and governments wanting to keep tabs on their citizens.

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  • [–] -1 points 13 hours ago* (1 child)

    Two things:

    1. This is the EU, not the US. The forces you’re talking about don’t have nearly as much power there, American tech companies hate EU regulation and if they had as much power there as you presume, they would have killed DMA or GDPR first.

    2. You might try actually talking to a parent trying to raise kids in this day and age before dismissing my comment out of hand. I assure you the demographic I’m talking about absolutely does exist.

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  • [–] 3 points 12 hours ago*

    I'm sure the parents exist, but my point is that they aren't the driving force. There's no way this age verification stuff starts popping up all over the world at about the same time with all these governments seriously considering it at the behest of parents. The parents aren't coordinated enough to drive international change like that, and it's not a high enough priority for them to all independently and coincidentally push for it, not to the level seen around the world. The only things that universally move governments like that are moneyed interests and power, and while I'll admit I may be wrong about the exact forces driving it, I don't see much chance at all this is organically driven by parents.

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