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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Winning Game of the year is a great honor and I want to first thank everyone that voted for us and I want to congratulate all the other nominees. This has been an incredibly competitive year and you each would have deserved to win this award @CapcomUSA_ @remedygames @insomniacgames @NintendoAmerica

    I want to thank @geoffkeighley and the people that organized the #gameawards for creating an award show so big that it gets mainstream attention. While 30 secs is a bit short , there’s nothing like the game awards and it’s an incredible achievement

    I wore armor at the #gameawards because BG3 is a game that couldn’t exist without its our player community and I wanted to pay tribute to how important they’ve been for the development. You rock community BG3

    Making a game like this only works if you have an incredible passionate and talented team and in that regard I am incredibly lucky with the @larianstudios – they are some of the finest and they did a truly amazing job

    Over 2000 people are listed in the credits and since I can’t call out everyone, I want to focus on a group of people that don’t always get the credit they deserve

    Team QA, team localisation, team customer support, team operations, team publishing, team play testers, and every other developer at Larian, BG3 wouldn’t exist without you and you all deserve to be very proud of this

    I want to dedicate this award to the friends and family members we lost during development including Jim, our lead cinematic animator who passed away last month and personally to my father who passed away the week before we launched our early access campaign

    You don’t get to make something like BG3 if you don’t have the support from the people around you. Personally, I really want to thank 5 special people, a crazy dog and a one-eyed cat for sticking with me

    Big shout out also to our localization partners and @PitStopTweets who had to use every corner of their building to record and performance capture what was an insane number of lines

    To our actors – you did great. I hope our paths will cross again in the future and your agents will remain their usual reasonable selves :)
    I also want to thank @Wizards_DnD and specifically the DnD team for giving us carte blanche. I’m really sorry to hear so many of you were let go. It’s a sad thing to realize that of the people who were in the original meeting room, there’s almost nobody left. I hope you all end up well

    There are many more partners I want to thank. We asked much of you all, but you delivered and without your efforts, BG3 would not be what it is

    I want to end with a story of a conversation I had a long time ago with a publisher. He told me, luckily for them, games are driven by idealism. He meant it in an exploitative way but he was right

    Games are a unique art form, as important as books, music or movies. Many developers, myself included, make games because they love seeing others engage with their creations in a way only games can offer

    They don’t care that much about the money made beyond it being the fuel they need to create new and better games. It’s worth reminding everyone that fuel is but a means, not a goal. Whereto and how we journey are what matter and what we remember

    Thank you.


  • Their next crucial meeting is scheduled for Friday, December 15, during which the EU brokers are hoping to strike a deal. Behind closed doors, negotiators for the Parliament and the Council have presented two fundamentally different positions on a central requirement for independent journalism: the protection of whistleblowers and confidential sources. This “is one of the basic conditions for press freedom”, the European Court of Human Rights declared in 2022. Without this protection, “the vital public-watchdog role of the press as guardian of the public sphere may be undermined”.
    The European Media Freedom Act

    The European Media Freedom Act was proposed by the Commission following outrage over reports of spying on journalists and members of civil society. In July 2021, the “Pegasus Papers” investigation revealed that the government of Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán had used the Pegasus spyware to hack the phones of journalists who had produced reporting critical of the government. The European Parliament set up a special committee of enquiry into the issue and called for the sale of spyware to be banned until the exceptional cases in which the state is authorised to use it are clearly defined in law.

    Subsequently, journalists in Poland, Greece, Spain and Bulgaria were also found to have been targeted by intrusive spyware – in most cases, the protection of “national security” was invoked as reason.

    Meanwhile, the Commission’s proposal, published in September 2022, goes beyond addressing surveillance against journalists. It is meant to safeguard editorial independence of public service media, ensure fairness in state advertising and help to safeguard media pluralism. According to negotiators, the Parliament and member states are still struggling to reconcile their positions on most major points. As an investigation by Follow the Money revealed, the publisher’s lobby had a huge influence especially on member states’ positions.

    In October, a large majority of EU lawmakers passed a text in Parliament that would set strict limits on the surveillance of journalists. According to Article 4 of the draft law, journalists could only be wire-tapped or investigated using spyware if this

    is unrelated to the journalists’ professional activities;
    doesn’t affect or disclose access to journalists’ sources;
    is justified on a case-by-case basis to prevent or prosecute a serio
    
    

  • The European Media Freedom Act is meant to protect the press from government overreach. But behind closed doors, a group of EU member states are threatening to block the new law over their demands for a blank check to use spyware for the purposes of “national security”.

    When Rosa Moussaoui found out her phone had been targeted by the infamous Pegasus spyware, she felt a sense of violence and intrusion. “It’s like being robbed or just finding that somebody has taken your possessions”, she said.

    For Moussaoui, a journalist for French newspaper L’Humanité who investigates human rights abuses by the Moroccan government, the surveillance, though invisible and very hard to trace, created a tangible loss of trust by sources with whom “in most cases I’ve lost contact,” she told members of the European Parliament in March this year. While she continues to work as investigative journalist, being targeted by Pegasus has taken a toll. She felt more on edge during her work, and was worried about the people she spoke with.

    But Moussaoui’s testimony, and that of other journalists from across Europe, seems to have done little to move the needle in convincing some EU players that journalists need more protection from abusive authorities.

    Instead, EU countries are pushing to weaken rules meant to protect journalists from surveillance, a cross-border investigation shows.

    “It’s like being robbed or just finding that somebody has taken your possessions."
    
    

    Internal documents obtained by Investigate Europe, Disclose and Follow the Money show that a group of governments – those of France, Finland, Greece, Italy, Malta, Sweden and Cyprus – have threatened to block talks with the European Parliament in a bid to justify the use of spyware on their computers and phones if their security authorities declare this to be a measure to “safeguard national security”.

    The law aims to protect the independence of journalists from interference by governments and media owners – but now, countries and EU lawmakers are fighting over whether the regulation shall limit the use of spyware and other forms of surveillance by intelligence services.

    “This is the most difficult part of the fight for this legislative text,” said Ramona Strugariu, a lawmaker from the liberal Renew Group and co-lead lawmaker for the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA). After 15 months of negotiations between the member states in the Council of the EU, the European Commission, and the Parliament, the institutions must now agree on a joint text in the so-called trilogue negotiations.