Online Gaming Could Be Stalled by Net Neutrality Repeal, ESA Tells Court (arstechnica.com)

A video game industry lobby group is joining the lawsuit that seeks to reinstate net neutrality rules in the US, saying that the net neutrality repeal could harm multiplayer online games that require robust Internet connections. From a report: The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) yesterday filed a motion for leave to intervene so that it can support the case against the Federal Communications Commission. The lawsuit, filed by a mix of Democratic state attorneys general, tech companies such as Mozilla, and consumer advocacy groups, seeks to reverse the FCC's December 2017 vote to eliminate net neutrality rules. The ESA said its members will be harmed by the repeal "because the FCC's Order permits ISPs to take actions that could jeopardize the fast, reliable, and low-latency connections that are critical to the video game industry."

Comments

Re:This seems entirely backwards.....

[mark-t]

That sucks for the indy game developer though, because their traffic would get relegated to the slow lane until they got big enough to be able to afford to pay for it. With high latency, their games might not ever become popular enough for them to get big because the latency would interfere with play enjoyment.

Re:Warning: Politicall incorrect opinion

[ArtemaOne]

Violent video games were disproven as a means of aggression, and in fact were repeatedly shown to reduce it when Trump's buddy, Hillary Clinton, went after them many years ago. I'm a firm 2A advocate, and voting member in the NRA, but video games are a poor scapegoat as the evidence was gathered already.

Re:This seems entirely backwards.....

[squiggleslash]

I would prefer my ISP to prioritize gaming traffic ahead of other traffic: Youtube / Netflix / Facebook / bittorrent don't have the same latency requirements as online games.

Yup.

In fact, it makes sense to me that gamers should prefer a net neutrality repeal because it would now allow prioritization of that.

Nope.

NN is not about banning the prioritizing one protocol over another. That's normal and has been going on since the Internet was started. NN is about preventing, for example, EA from paying extra so that their packets get delivered faster than, say, Valve's. Or Google paying extra so their packets get delivered faster than EA's.

Repealing NN will probably make things worse for gamers.