Welcome back to another roundup of MMO and MMO-adjacent industry news bits that just didn’t fit in anywhere else.
First, Tencent has spent part of this week talking up more anti-gaming-addiction features in keeping with ongoing Chinese regulation. Apparently those measures will spread to more games and include a new facial recognition system to stop kids under 18 from using (for example) parents’ devices to skirt the existing curfews and rules. Can’t think how this could possibly go wrong.
But before you freak out too much about China, do note that the highest court the country is actually backing parents who allege game companies are helping kids circumvent blocks and spending inordinate sums (which is to say, more than the $57 US allowed by law per month for those under 18) on games (via Niko Partners’ Daniel Ahmad).
Did you hate Doom Eternal’s Denuvo Anti-Cheat? Yeah, so did just about everyone else who didn’t want a freakin’ rootkit on their machines just to play a video game. Bethsoft and id Software have now promised to roll back usage of the system by next week, though of course if you already nuked the game because of it, you might not be easy to coax back.
Finally, file this one under “this is why we can’t have nice things”: According to Ars Technica, hacking group Winnti has managed to invade a number of MMO development studios in South Korea and Taiwan. The exact games aren’t named, but apparently researchers have determined that the hackers are using stolen Windows certificates to backdoor their way onto studio machines, both compromising game servers and “allowing the attackers to trojanize game executables.” Yikes.
