You thought all the European General Data Protection Regulation related news was over, didn’t you? Think again. Don’t worry, this bit takes the form of fun trivia rather than an endless onslaught of delivery companies begging to throw pizza promotions at you. Among other things, you can now see every report and commendation you got in Dota 2 since 2015, along with the reason given by whoever snitched on you. This’ll be old news to anyone who’s already part of our fancy supporter program, but I’ve hardly ever been reported and thus claim my title as the nicest person in the world.

Valve have also given everyone access to their Counter-Strike: Global Offensive stats and reports, as well as all sorts of Steam bits and bobs like your chat history (going back two weeks) and community bans. Read the rest of this entry »

With the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into effect today, hopefully spelling an end to e-mails from companies begging me to stay subscribed to their newsletters, another game has chosen this moment to throw in the towel. Torn Banner Studios have removed first-person brawler Mirage: Arcane Warfare from sale and will soon shut down their official servers. The magical follow-up to Chivalry: Medieval Warfare will still be playable on player-hosted servers and with its AI botbuds, so people who already own it can play – but new people can’t join in. Read the rest of this entry »

The European Union’s impending General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) can carve another notch into the barrel of its pen, as the makers of Loadout have cited the GDPR as one of the reasons they plan to shut down the free-to-play arena shooter. Several problems squeezing at once meant it’d be too expensive to rework a game that was already losing money and so, similar to Super Monday Night Combat, it’ll shut down this month. Loadout had entered early access in May 2013, then launched in January 2014. And was pretty good, Old Man Rossignol said in his Loadout review. Read the rest of this entry »

Free-to-play gameshow MOBA-shooter Super Monday Night Combat will shut down when the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force later this month, developers Uber Entertainment have told us, because the cost of reworking it to be compliant would just be too high. A perfectly normal and seemingly above-board game shutting down is a curious knock-on effect of new privacy laws, and raised a few eyebrows when Uber first announced this on Thursday, but it’s understandable. SMNC is six years old and its playerbase is tired: over the past month, SMNC peaked at only two dozen players in-game at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

Valve have overhauled the privacy settings for Steam user profiles, letting us hide more data and setting more of it to be hidden from strangers by default – including the list of games you own. Good. More online platforms should default to hiding personal data. We can now hide our playtime on games if we want too, so our pals can e.g. see that we own The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth but not that we’ve played it for e.g. 871 hours, in case we feel e.g. shame about that (not me: I’ll tell you it’s just that good).

This does have the knock-on effect of locking out Steam Spy, the popular non-Valve site which scans vast numbers of public profiles to estimate how many people own a game and how much they play it. In a secretive industry, it’s one of the few ways to have a sense of how well a game is doing. Read the rest of this entry »