The disagreement concerns the licence's period of validity. If I lease a car, I know how long I can use it.
When I buy a licence to use a game, the publisher can revoke the licence the day after I buy it, and the contract is drawn up in such a way that nothing obliges them to compensate me.
The situation would be much healthier if the publisher announced a ‘5-year user license, including server maintenance and security patches’.
It's like all those ‘lifetime’ licences that only cover one major edition of a software and give you a royal 20% discount on the licence for the next version.
It's a deceptive practice.
> When I buy a licence to use a game, the publisher can revoke the licence the day after I buy it, and the contract is drawn up in such a way that nothing obliges them to compensate me.
On Steam (from Valve) you would be entitled to a full refund in that scenario.
Valve offers full refunds for any game you have played for less than two hours and owned for less than two weeks. In some other situations, they have also applied refunds outside that policy where the game turned out to be a fraud or something.
There are also many titles in people's Steam libraries that are no longer offered on Steam, but you can still download and play if you purchased it prior to it being pulled from Steam.
Valve probably has enough leverage to hold it off for a while, but rightholders seem to be trying to close that loophole. A store I previously bought FLACs from emailed me this week that a new Terms of Service comes into force on October 1 where the change is the service can remove downloads when the rightholder removes the music from sale and requests downloads to be removed as well. A few hours later I got a notification that a number of albums in purchase history will be removed from my available downloads on October 1st.
What if I've played for more than two hours and I'd like to finish the game?
What if Valve changes its refund policy?
What if the publisher forces me to go through another online shop (EPIC game)?
Valve is certainly a consumer-friendly company, but that's not the whole story and it doesn't change the fact that they're hiding vital information from consumers.
If you are required to fully prepay, instead of pay a recurring fee, then the license term should be fixed to eternity, meaning a refund is in order if the license is ever revoked. Otherwise, it should have to be phrased as a recurring payment ($XX for first 2 years, $YY/year after that). This model that you pay fully up front but for an undefined term length is odious and should be illegal.
There has to be some implied period of time for which it's fully usable.
No sane court is going to uphold an adhesion contract where someone pays $100 for a substantially multiplayer game (e.g. not Portal 1) yet the publisher is allowed to disable servers required for the game's multiplayer operation a week later because they cost money to maintain and the userbase hasn't hit targets.
What about physical game disks? I own the disk and can play the game as long as I have the disk. I can also resell or share the disk. Sony once demonstrated this on stage during the PS4 launch.
Digital licenses take away all of this and add the possibility that your licence can disappear at any time.
Physical game disks have maybe one console generation left. Nintendo might keep cartridges around for two tops. The future is basically all digital. When doing his Mea Culpa rounds about Xbox losing the console wars, Phil Spencer talked about how being second in the generation where gamers built up digital libraries was likely too much to overcome.[1] Most game sales already happen digitally[2], and the number continues to rise.
That's very different. In America at least, if you purchase a physical object, you own it. You can do whatever you want with it. It's called the first sale doctrine.
That doesn't hold with games, and that's exactly what this law is addressing. Many (if not most by now, I haven't bought many games recently) physical games are now just an unplayable kernel and you have to download the actual game. If you sell the physical good you are selling a piece of plastic. Quite a few don't even contain a cart or disc in the box, it's just a download code.
Now, yes, you can say "but first sale still holds, you aren't prohibited from selling the object you bought", but most rational people are going to call that nonsense.
I mean, that would be fine if specified except it's a perpetual license that can be revoked at any time. Whether it's one hour or 10 years I'm not sure how it is good-faith to sell such a license without explicitly specifying the license duration and terms. Of course in practice, it is more like "perpetual provided that the entity you are licensing from elects to re-license from the rights-holder every X years" but I really don't see how such an arrangement should even be legal. You shouldn't be allowed to sell those kinds of licenses where the duration is dependent on third-party negotiations that have nothing to do with the initial license sale.
It's an odd world where we willingly trade dozens or hundreds of dollars for a couple hours of entertainment (golf, amusement parks, movies, dinner out, bars, vacation) but we're unwilling to trade similar amount of money for software (games) that give you many, many more hours of entertainment.
There's people who have spent literal days entertained by a game, but then complain they had to spend $70 for the privilege. Where else can you be entertained for a couple bucks an hour or less?
In my opinion, if you license a game and play it for a dozen hours... you've gotten your money's worth already. That said, I too would be disappointed if a game I enjoyed was removed from my library.
The point isn't whether or not it's a good deal. If I agree to license a game for 12 hours in exchange for $70, great. Like you say, I make deals like that sometimes. But that's not what we're talking about here, the licensor is misrepresenting it as a perpetual license and that should just be considered fraud.
Restaurants don't tell me that I'm buying a table in the restaurant; they tell me I'm getting a meal. Movie theaters don't tell me I'm buying a seat in the theater; they tell me I'm seeing a movie.
Paying to play a game for some time is fine, but they shouldn't lie about what terms you're getting.
I think there are more factors at play in this situation.
This is a case where even if you wanted to pay money to continue or start playing a game, you can't because someone else simply doesn't want you to.
This is a consumer-hostile shift from earlier days where if you owned the disk, disc or cartridge and a computer that could play it, you could play the game, no questions asked. I think it's always worth fighting against consumer hostile shifts.
Some people are collectors as much as they are gamers. A license (or whatever) is less valuable to a collector than a game.
