WarpPortal Ends European Service

In what many are considering a massively anti-consumer decision, WarpPortal – The publishing arm of Gravity Interactive which develops the classic Ragnarok Online and other games – have announced they will be stopping all European service and blocking European access to all of their games from May 25th – the day the new EU General Data Protection Regulation comes in to effect.

In essence, Gravity Interactive have chosen to drop an entire region of loyal customers rather than make changes to comply with the new EU regulations which are designed to force big companies to seek consent for using  and be transparent about what they are doing  with user data.

Here’s WarpPortal’s Official Announcement of this incredibly telling and outright disturbing move

It utterly disgusts me that a company could think to make this choice.

Gravity Interactive have, with this move, essentially told all of their customers that it’s more important to them to be able to collect and use their customer’s data without consent, disclosure or transparency than to comply with new regulation that offers customers some small measure of power regarding what companies do with their personal data.

Rather than offer their players consent and transparency, Gravity have chosen to outright exclude all of the European Union from their services in order to continue harvesting customer data which begs the question exactly what are they doing that they don’t want their customers to know about to the point they will lock out all of the EU to avoid having to disclose it? That’s something I think they really need to answer for, and it’s something all of WarpPortal’s existing customers should be asking.

What are your thoughts on this anti-consumer, anti-privacy move from WarpPortal? Are you in Europe and affected by these changes? Are you not affected, but dropping them in protest? Do you simply not care? Leave a comment below or drop by the MMOByte Discord Server and join in the discussion.