I consider it a fair game to torrent those games that the publisher screws me over. Like San Andreas, the Steam version of which was FUBAR a few years ago and then removed altogether (for new buyers). I've paid for maybe five copies in my entire life, sorry, I'm not paying for the sixth.
I apologize but I find this to be a silly question. I buy because I want to play. I do not have an expectation of indefinite ownership (even though I should have indefinite ownership), hence my comment.
> I do not have an expectation of indefinite ownership
But you said you were nervous about buying these things. What are you nervous about? And why do you pay money anyway if you're nervous about what you're getting?
> even though I should have indefinite ownership
On what grounds? These are companies operating in a free market. They're offering a product whose terms are right out there in the open. If you don't like the terms, don't buy.
The terms are not a negotiated contract - they are dictated by one side and even if they are read by the purchaser, the implications of the terms may not be obvious. Many/most people will not understand that after paying hundreds of dollars for games, their games could suddenly be taken away from them without recourse.
For a ridiculous example, imagine there was a clause buried in the fineprint that allowed the store owner to charge you $5000 to unlock the game whenever they chose to. Even if it were in the T&C, it would be ruled invalid because it was so unexpected.
Similarly, removing the right to play a game you have bought with money because you haven’t played it “enough” (according to the vendor) may also be considered unreasonavlble.
That doesn't mean they aren't a contract. They're simply a contract where your only options as the buyer are to buy or not to buy.
That said, a unilateral contract like this can be treated somewhat differently by courts. See below.
> removing the right to play a game you have bought with money because you haven’t played it “enough” (according to the vendor) may also be considered unreasonable.
As I posted in response to someone else upthread, it would be an interesting case if someone actually did try to take a game store to court on these grounds. Contract law does include general rules about reasonableness, and courts are more likely to apply them for unilateral contracts like these where one party does not have the opportunity to bargain.
For anyone who wants to go down the rabbit hole and learn more about this topic, try Googling "eula unconscionability"
There is a concept in contract law where if an agreement is heavily biased in favor of one party and that party has almost all of the leverage in the relationship, flat out refuses negotiation etc. - then a court can find that contract unconscionable and invalidate it.
That sounds like it might apply to a lot of "take it or leave it" software/online ToS and EULAs, but there's very little case law in this area to my knowledge.
Plus if your contract with Steam is invalidated, where does that leave you? It means Steam has no further obligation to you so you still can't access your games.
Terms are not a contract or a type of contract. Were you instructed to consult your legal team before signing the contract?
What you never signed with a witness and a notary?
So if they put in a term that said you agree to give them your house or 500 you would have to?
Terms of service are the rules outlined by the service provider. Breaking these could get your service cut and you would have a hard time finding a legal recourse.
I agree with your whole opinion on T&C's and abuse by companies, but they are still a contract, mostly because there is no "hard standard" in how a contract can be formed between two parties. Even a verbal agreement can be seen as a "contract" as much as a signed paper.
If I put a piece of tape across the door to your house, and I write "by breaking or removing this tape, you owe me $1000", is that a valid contract? One party shouldn't be able to just make up things that constitute agreement to a contract.
The general consensus for some of the people commenting here (one that I absolutely despise to be clear) is that nobody is entitled to any ownership of anything and should have zero expectations of it, even when spending money on things. Be thankful for what little you get, don't ask for more, and either make your own or shut up. When you start reading these comments with that "lens" you can suddenly understand the logic.
> there's not an alternative way to buy them that does give you that confidence
That doesn't sound to me like a reason for legislation. It sounds to me like a reason for competition.
But for there to be competition, customers have to be willing to put their money where their mouth is. If there were a competitor that charged, say, 20% more for a product that included the confidence you want, would you pay it?
This is a sort of reductionist viewpoint that's ignoring the realities of the market (in this case computer games) and how monopolies are created.
Games aren't fungible with each other. If you want to play Dark Souls, you have to buy it from From software. You can't go to an alternative Dark Souls provider that offers you better terms. Likewise Ubisoft has IP that fans want access to. Therefore due to copyright etc they have small monopolies that aren't as subject to market forces.
Some years back I decided I had had enough of Ubisoft's anti-consumer bullshit, and decided AC: Unity would be my last Ubisoft game (bits of the game that I had bought were locked behind a mobile game and there were paid-for items as well). There have been lots of times I have thought I would love to play certain games (eg Anno 1800) but I've held off because they were Ubisoft games.
These days I try to spend my game dollars in a way that rewards publishers with a more positive stance, but that does mean depriving yourself of certain games etc. I can totally get why people don't do this.
> they have small monopolies that aren't as subject to market forces.
But they are; you yourself give an illustration:
> Some years back I decided I had had enough of Ubisoft's anti-consumer bullshit, and decided AC: Unity would be my last Ubisoft game (bits of the game that I had bought were locked behind a mobile game and there were paid-for items as well). There have been lots of times I have thought I would love to play certain games (eg Anno 1800) but I've held off because they were Ubisoft games
> These days I try to spend my game dollars in a way that rewards publishers with a more positive stance, but that does mean depriving yourself of certain games etc. I can totally get why people don't do this.
In other words, the market forces favor game distributors who do the things you (rightly, IMO) call "anti-consumer bullshit"--not enough consumers are willing to do what you did to deter distributors from doing those things. That's a free market: the voluntary choices of buyers are determining the incentives faced by the sellers. The only way to change those incentives would be for many more people to do what you did.
(I'm even more extreme than you, btw; I have never bought a single online game distributed on these terms and never expect to. All the computer games I've ever played came on CDs or DVDs.)
>> they have small monopolies that aren't as subject to market forces.
> But they are; you yourself give an illustration:
I didn't say they aren't subject to market forces at all. I said they aren't as subject to market forces. They are insulated to some extent by the monopolies created for them my copyright. That's precisely why I gave my example - as something that I (and some others) do but which is almost entirely ineffective.
It's not a free market. Copyright and other IP protections specifically mean the goods are not fungible for the reason I explained.
Don't copyrights preclude meaningful competition here? If a game is sold through Publisher X, Publisher Y can't just unilaterally decide that they want to sell it too.
No. The game developer, who owns the copyright, decides what channels it gets sold through. If game developers knew that people wouldn't buy their games through channels that didn't give good guarantees of ownership and access, they wouldn't sell through those channels.
This sounds great on paper but I really don't think that feedback channel is effective in practice.
First of all, when a game or a platform does poorly, the reason for that can be very hard to discern (unless there's some kind of coordinated vocal protest). "The customers are disagreeing with the fine print of our end-user license agreement" usually isn't high up on the list of reasons.
Secondly, there are many degrees of incentive separation between the game developer and the customer. If the distributor offers the game developer a good lump-sum payment for a platform exclusive, they might not care about the EULA. The distributor might also own the developer.
IP isn't fungible, so competition in the space is subject to much more inefficiency than a market for, say, wheat.
Your point about market inefficiency and misaligned incentives is a valid one, but government intervention, which is what many people in this thread are calling for, does not make market inefficiencies better; it makes them worse.
Ultimately, people get the market they create through their buying decisions. The reason these market inefficiencies and misaligned incentives exist is that game distributors know that people will spend a lot of money on games and won't pay much attention to the fact that they are actually not buying ownership but only a subscription. The only way to "fix" that, if it's a problem, is for people to change their buying behavior so it is no longer lucrative to distribute games on those terms.
> The distributor might also own the developer.
Yes, fair point, I had forgotten that Ubisoft in this case is both.
> government intervention, which is what many people in this thread are calling for, does not make market inefficiencies better; it makes them worse.
I agree in general. Remember, though, that copyright is government intervention too. Are you in favor of getting rid of that? That would solve this whole problem too, since just downloading a new copy without paying would then be perfectly okay.
Competition is very nearly worthless as far as ensuring consumer choice. The market tends to trend towards a small number of players who all act collectively with or without the benefit of collaboration to serve their own interests.
The customer may have preferences along n dimensions where n is a very large number of choices and a small number of choices wherein their ability to effect the distribution of characteristics is limited to avoiding choices which make massive strides along multiple axis away from desirable areas. Regulations force all players into a reasonable space in the game board and let them compete within that space. It is the only practical way to achieve this.
> Competition is very nearly worthless as far as ensuring consumer choice.
It is if the consumers don't demand choice, yes. Which, as a number of other responses in this thread have shown, appears to be the case in this market. The people who are willing to not buy games distributed on terms unfavorable to them are statistical outliers (at least one such person has posted elsewhere in this thread) and don't have any significant effect on the incentives faced by the distributors.
> Regulations force all players into a reasonable space
Into what some unelected government bureaucrats decide is a "reasonable space", perhaps. But any such regulation is far more likely to make things worse, not better, for consumers. Look up "regulatory capture". The game distributors have much deeper pockets and a much more concentrated incentive to simply buy the regulations they want.
These are games we're talking about. They're recreation. For people to be demanding legislation because a recreational activity isn't set up just the way they like it, when they knew the terms perfectly well before they paid their money, is not "participating in cultural works".
Why should recreational works not be protected? Isn't enjoying artwork purely recreational, except we put a greater deal of care into preserving and displaying the historical works.
A lot of games fall into the same categories of digital interactive art. Especially if its mostly a single player game, I may want to re-experience that game later, much like I might watch a DVD or VHS I still own from my childhood.
Of course I wouldn't expect their servers to still be running, which is why getting rid of DRM is important for the sake of archival
I'm glad that people worry about preserving all forms of cultural works but I personally attribute a lesser value to games, cinema and TV.
Keep in mind that players leave long before servers stop working. To me games are more of medium than an object and the artifacts left behind like stories, wikis, screenshots, videos and memes are of a higher importance and also easier to preserve. Let's say that you don't need to have a running Coliseum to understand how it works and it's societal implications.
Also most of what I see in games and movies are things originated or preserved long ago in books. And what games and movies do is summarize things and add action scenes and emotional filler.
I can't think of any "digital good" where there is a risk of losing access in this way that isn't recreational in a similar way to games. So my comments would apply equally well to any such goods.
With service providers (eg. Google/Facebook) it happens every day to thousands of people, and there's little to no recourse although there was usually no financial transaction to begin with. With software you setup on your computer, i'm not aware of any instance, BUT subscription models (eg. Adobe) are really recent and not so long ago software vendors did not have the means to disable software remotely on your machine, because it was usually not (always) connected to the network, and because software that didn't need it didn't make useless network connections.
I bet in a few years we'll have plenty of documented instances.
Hm. I agree online textbooks are different because you're not just paying for the textbook, you're also paying a school tuition, and the school isn't going to refund your tuition just because the textbook provider made a mistake.
I asked another poster just upthread about the software (such as Creative Cloud) case.
You can buy text books outside of school. Let's say I buy some OReilly or Manning e-books, and then they take them away from me. Whereas the physical copy for just a little bit extra remains mine for as long as the copy stays readable (centuries if given care)
It must have been around 2006 when I registered my Steam account. I was just a kid back then. Didn't understand the fact the buy button was lying to me.
You are of course correct but at the same time I often buy games for $5 - $10 on sale that are a few years old and after completion they have little to no replay value. Although many may not be as frugal they might well have the same attitude towards reuse/replay/resale. Play and forget.
