My first thought was when it became known yesterday that online games in Russia will be obliged to identify users: how will this affect the conversion and, as a result, the cost of traffic. As it turned out, I was thinking about the wrong thing.
Today, it is becoming more and more difficult and expensive to attract a user. If the launch of the game forces him to enter a phone number, then wait for an SMS, then we will inevitably face a decrease in conversion and, as a consequence, an increase in the marketing budget.
A nice bonus from identification, leveling the problem, is the phone number itself. Companies will be able to create not only a user-friendly player base, but also a new push retargeting tool within a poorly regulated sphere.
I can already imagine a nightmare in the spirit of: “Alexander Georgievich, you haven’t visited our gems for a long time” not as a push-off, but as a text message, from which even the Chinese Nokia 3310, bought in the transition, will not save you.
Against this background, my main concern is associated with an even greater loss of privacy and the risk of being completely naked in front of a game company marketer, who already knows the value of my average session, the average check and (if you believe Maria Donskikh) what I drive and whether I am pregnant.
You may find it funny and not very scary. But let’s keep in mind how messengers have been required to work in Russia since January 1, 2018. In the case of them, the identification procedure will look like this: the application requests the user’s cell number, and then receives the user’s personal data from the mobile operator using this number (which data is not specified in the law).
Apparently, this was done so that law enforcement agencies would not have to do double work in case of checking a particular user correspondence. For example, if an employee of the authorities requested data from a messenger for a specific person, then immediately receives passport data with the phone without contacting the operators.
The scenario with messengers may well be transferred to games with chat rooms if they are finally recognized as organizers of information dissemination and begin to demand that they be added to the appropriate registry.
Although there is still time until June 2018. It was by this date that the Security Council instructed the FSB, together with the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media, to think over the details of regulation.
They may well turn out to be clear and transparent for developers, devoid of the need to work with telecom operators directly and allowing, for example, to limit SMS activation through aggregators, which are not only easier to work with, but also twice as cheap.
Even if this turns out not to be the case, I don’t think that the identification requirement will scare away from working for Russian gaming companies. Despite the popularity of the “womgle” thread and a small market share, Russia is among the Top 15 regions in the world in terms of gaming revenue.
Foreign companies with stable and decent income from the market will not turn away. They will not leave Russia because of the need to identify users, which, on the contrary, may turn out to be a plus for them (but, of course, not if they are obliged to collect passport data, which will entail the need to work closely with the FSB).
This could, in theory, hit the indie segment, whose representatives, as a rule, do not have the opportunity to adapt to regional peculiarities due to over-limited budgets. But here’s a counter question: in which indie game have you met a full-fledged chat that can be classified as an organizer of information dissemination?
For large companies, the adaptation of the project to local features is a familiar topic. In China, there is a requirement for MMO to reduce bonuses from the game if the session lasts more than three hours, and all projects are censored. In South Korea, until 2012, registration in the game was impossible without specifying a social security number (KSSN – Korean Social Security Number).
But in Korea, this was abandoned after data about 13 million users were leaked to the network. And that’s what worries me the most.
The hysteria around how and who will be obliged to do it, how to implement it, an attempt on the right of personal correspondence guaranteed by the Constitution is nothing more than rhetoric within the framework of an authoritarian state.
It is quite another matter to put on stream the collection of personal data (almost passport data), their replication and security. Many of us communicate in more than one messenger and, of course, play dozens or even hundreds of games.
The fact that the developer of each of them will have at his disposal not just my email, social account and my behavioral patterns, as now, but quite specific official data with a phone number, does not delight me. I don’t want to put on a foil hat, but my hand stretches. The main thing is not to start shouting: “we’re all going to die.”
Cover photo: lalesh aldarwish