I know that the terms of license agreements probably reserve the right to do this in the fine print, but Warner Bros knows that people don't read those agreements, and they know that they're giving the perception of a purchase.
I always get extremely annoyed when people say "I'm technically not lying because I said X and you just thought I meant Y". Like, no, you purposefully made me believe something that was not true. You know what I was going to believe when you said X, you depended on that fact, and so it's still lying.
Similarly, Warner Bros. certainly wanted people to assume that these were purchases, so it's extremely dishonest to have fine print in there to be able to take that purchase away.
Sure, but there's legal precedent for "lies by omission" too, even legally [1].
I'm not saying that what Warner Bros does is tantamount to perjury, or even enough to sue over, but I do think it's pretty slimy. It might be allowed, but it's still dishonest, it's still theft from an ethical level, and they absolutely, unequivocally, unambiguously are aware of this fact.
Not that I'd ever condone illegal activity, but I'm just putting it out there that piracy is broadly more convenient, cheaper, has no DRM, and you can keep the media for as long as you want.
It's obviously theft as well, but Warner Bros has already set the precedent that "stealing property is ok".
I'm happy to buy games, but once there's literally no legal way to get a game (or movie or show), then piracy is the only solution to keep that piece of media alive.
Sure, I've bought more than my share of movies, games, books, TV series, but at this point I've kind of drawn a line in the sand of "I will only buy physical media" or "I will only buy it if I can get a DRM-free copy" (e.g. GOG.com). I don't like the idea of my media disappearing the second it becomes inconvenient for the entertainment company.
Sadly, it feels like Blu-rays are becoming a rare thing, particularly in the US. I wanted to buy legit copies of Infinity Train and Close Enough before they were taken off HBO Max, but as far as I'm aware there's no legitimate way to purchase Close Enough. At least Infinity Train can be bought off Amazon streaming still I guess.
It feels like these companies want it both ways. They want total control of the media landscape, while simultaneously taking away the media that we actually like, presumably for tax writeoffs.
It’s a sentiment I broadly agree with. It really bothers me that companies feel entitled to milk money out of us forever now, since you can’t purchase stuff anymore. Everything requires a subscription so we can forever have money extracted and given to our benevolent corporate overlords.
I was fine buying blu-rays, I have over 400 of them, but I don’t want to pay $70+ a month until the end of time to sign up for Netflix and Hulu and Peacock and Paramount Plus and Criterion Channel and ad-free Amazon and HBO Max and YouTube Premium and Disney Plus and Apple TV+ and probably a few stragglers I forgot about.
Let me buy the physical media, or a DRM-free download of the TV shows and movies I want to watch.
Until these entertainment companies fix this, pirated content is just simply a better product.
There are groups pursuing a number of legal actions in the arena to fight this practice. Up until recently, it's been mostly subscription games that get shutdown which is a murky grey area but game companies have started doing this with full priced titles that have sold over 14 million units. The best chances of any progress are in the EU.
Yeah, I was one of the people who actually bought Darkspore back when it was new, and while that game kind of sucks and I didn't really want to play it again, it did really bother me that EA decided to make it so that a single-player game can't play without phoning home, and so when they shut off the server it simply didn't work.
I understand not maintaining the multiplayer stuff, but in the case of the single-player stuff, all it would have taken is one patch to disable to always-online DRM, since they weren't going to be making money from it anymore anyway.
It's just theft. This is why I still try and buy Blu-Rays.
Related: The gaming division of Warner Bros. is also planning to double down on "live service" games following the failure of the Suicide Squad game rather than single player games like their highly successful Harry Potter game.[0]
I wonder if Warner Bros. increasingly sees their gaming division as a potential source of tax write offs and are just intentionally wasting money like the Atlas Shrugged character Francisco d'Anconia[1] to ensure Uncle Sam never sees a cent in tax revenue from them. Otherwise, the behavior of this company seems to be objectively insane.
Its actually worse than that: in their mind, Suicide Squad was a "traditional" AAA style game with a live service component (because it has a campaign of some kind), they are planning on doubling down on the Helldivers/Payday 3 style live services that only work as live services with no campaign or story mode.
The live service craze reminds me a lot of the WoW clones that got made in the years following WoW's success. As with MMOs, I think an average person's ability to interact with multiple live services is limited. Keeping up with more than 2 or 3 "seasons" or "battlepasses" is usually impossible unless you have the kind of free time that only kids in school have. Also just like with MMOs, the quality and quantity of new content generally depends on revenue coming in. This sets up a very strong "winner take all" dynamic where the most popular games can ship large, frequent content updates while smaller games often dwindle and die off. It seems like there's little room for modest success with a live service unless you're catering to a niche genre or audience.
I don't discount the probability that spite drives a lot of these counterproductive decisions. But if they are giving up income simply in order to pay zero tax, that is itself objectively insane. Which again, I'd not be surprised by.
As Seinfeld would say: do you even know what a tax write off is? Hiring someone to burn money just to pay less tax makes no sense. You don't get back the money you burned.
> Importantly, this means that some specific versions of these games will be gone, even from those who already bought them
This needs a citation, because for all steam games this is untrue. Once you by a steam game, even once taken down you can still redownload it indefinitely.
This is more nuanced than you might expect. A given product on steam is split up into many "depots", which can be things like "windows beta version 1.33" or "mac version 1.07", and a developer has a lot of freedom to do things to depots even if the product is still in your library.
They could also push an update to all of the games they plan to pull that makes them unplayable, and potentially delete the older versions, making it hard to get a playable version of the game even though it's still in your library.
It needs to be possible to do stuff like this so that a game developer (or Valve) is able to comply with things like DMCA notices or legal judgments requiring them to stop distribution of a game.
While i'm familiar with depots, i didn't think that you could delete those at will assuming a user had purchased them. Is there just one "master" depot that is locked from being deleted?
And yeah, while you could push an update that bricks the game that is a pretty good way to get valve really angry at you, plus it takes actual malice instead of disinterest.
And Valve can definitely delete stuff if needed by the DMCA or whatever, but that's locked to their side, not the publisher as i understand.
I think there needs to be some minimum regulatory bar for digital consumer rights. At the moment customers are entirely at the mercy of the vendor and digital distribution platform. To me the most egregious issue is not even publishers removing things people bought after the fact, but account bans which can cause you to lose your entire library.
That's easily verifiable by putting the video-game in offline mode.
As far as I can remember, as soon as I put the SD card the Switch game is playable (lots of Switch games don't have updates for them!), I don't think it's just a digital store thing. Also I can put the SD card on another switch and it will also play. Same with my Playstation CDs.
For anyone who hasn’t played Duck Game, while you may not be able to for much longer, I highly recommend it. The dev also said he will keep working on it even if he has to make a “new” game under a different title.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadI know that the terms of license agreements probably reserve the right to do this in the fine print, but Warner Bros knows that people don't read those agreements, and they know that they're giving the perception of a purchase.
I always get extremely annoyed when people say "I'm technically not lying because I said X and you just thought I meant Y". Like, no, you purposefully made me believe something that was not true. You know what I was going to believe when you said X, you depended on that fact, and so it's still lying.
Similarly, Warner Bros. certainly wanted people to assume that these were purchases, so it's extremely dishonest to have fine print in there to be able to take that purchase away.
I'm not saying that what Warner Bros does is tantamount to perjury, or even enough to sue over, but I do think it's pretty slimy. It might be allowed, but it's still dishonest, it's still theft from an ethical level, and they absolutely, unequivocally, unambiguously are aware of this fact.
[1] https://www.wcl.american.edu/impact/lawwire/perjury-by-omiss...
It's obviously theft as well, but Warner Bros has already set the precedent that "stealing property is ok".
Sadly, it feels like Blu-rays are becoming a rare thing, particularly in the US. I wanted to buy legit copies of Infinity Train and Close Enough before they were taken off HBO Max, but as far as I'm aware there's no legitimate way to purchase Close Enough. At least Infinity Train can be bought off Amazon streaming still I guess.
It feels like these companies want it both ways. They want total control of the media landscape, while simultaneously taking away the media that we actually like, presumably for tax writeoffs.
It’s a sentiment I broadly agree with. It really bothers me that companies feel entitled to milk money out of us forever now, since you can’t purchase stuff anymore. Everything requires a subscription so we can forever have money extracted and given to our benevolent corporate overlords.
I was fine buying blu-rays, I have over 400 of them, but I don’t want to pay $70+ a month until the end of time to sign up for Netflix and Hulu and Peacock and Paramount Plus and Criterion Channel and ad-free Amazon and HBO Max and YouTube Premium and Disney Plus and Apple TV+ and probably a few stragglers I forgot about.
Let me buy the physical media, or a DRM-free download of the TV shows and movies I want to watch.
Until these entertainment companies fix this, pirated content is just simply a better product.
I understand not maintaining the multiplayer stuff, but in the case of the single-player stuff, all it would have taken is one patch to disable to always-online DRM, since they weren't going to be making money from it anymore anyway.
It's just theft. This is why I still try and buy Blu-Rays.
Equally depressing that it's entirely unsurprising.
I wonder how much of piracy now is driven by monetary things vs concerns about data ownership.
I wonder if Warner Bros. increasingly sees their gaming division as a potential source of tax write offs and are just intentionally wasting money like the Atlas Shrugged character Francisco d'Anconia[1] to ensure Uncle Sam never sees a cent in tax revenue from them. Otherwise, the behavior of this company seems to be objectively insane.
[0]: https://gamerant.com/warner-bros-focus-shift-live-service-ga...
[1]: https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/a/atlas-shrugged/char...
This needs a citation, because for all steam games this is untrue. Once you by a steam game, even once taken down you can still redownload it indefinitely.
They could also push an update to all of the games they plan to pull that makes them unplayable, and potentially delete the older versions, making it hard to get a playable version of the game even though it's still in your library.
It needs to be possible to do stuff like this so that a game developer (or Valve) is able to comply with things like DMCA notices or legal judgments requiring them to stop distribution of a game.
And yeah, while you could push an update that bricks the game that is a pretty good way to get valve really angry at you, plus it takes actual malice instead of disinterest.
And Valve can definitely delete stuff if needed by the DMCA or whatever, but that's locked to their side, not the publisher as i understand.
As far as I can remember, as soon as I put the SD card the Switch game is playable (lots of Switch games don't have updates for them!), I don't think it's just a digital store thing. Also I can put the SD card on another switch and it will also play. Same with my Playstation CDs.
So typical of our day and age.