iOS Rock Band to Stop Working After May 31st

[Wintermoot]

EA being a dick
in other news:
water is wet!
the sun is warm!
what else is new?

 

[drudail]

I'm going to blow everyone's mind with my out-of-the-box opinion here, but EA is not a very good company. Many of the posts are saying that if you didn't want this to happen you shouldn't have agreed to the EULA. On the other hand, if EA didn't want to support the licenses vital to its products it should never have made this game in the first place!

 

[TitanAtlas]

I wonder if there will be a time when i can buy a game for 40 dollars and it working for one or two months only...

 

[Chairman Miaow]

According to EA, the message was sent "in error" and it's not pulling it after all. Which is odd since they also had a support document go live mentioning it that has quietly disappeared.

Perhaps they realised the backlash to a move like this was huge and quickly reversed the decision, blaming it on an error?

http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/5/2/2995299/ea-rock-band-ios

So they accidentally wrote and programmed this message to pop up on people's Ipods when they opened up rock band? OK EA, I believe you!

 

[Yan007]

I wonder if there will be a time when i can buy a game for 40 dollars and it working for one or two months only...

Ever played MMOs?

 

[TitanAtlas]

I wonder if there will be a time when i can buy a game for 40 dollars and it working for one or two months only...

Ever played MMOs?

Nice one, but side note, is that MMOs don't stop working completely...

Still good point on your part ;D

 

[ObsidianJones_v1legacy]

See, now for all the advantages of digital distribution, this is why I'll never accept it. So long as something I put money down for isn't actually under my control I'm not interested. If I purchase something, it's mine, that's just how it works. License selling is just plain wrong, regardless of how you defend it, because this is what companies will do with it, they'll abuse it just like EA abuses.. well, everything. I'll stick to my N64 cartridges and those mysterious forgotten relics the ancient ones called discs, until this license bullshit fucks off back to the Blag'ole.

*steps off of soapbox and hands it to the next guy*

I would run up and agree with you if it wasn't for the fact that it isn't just digital distribution. It's non console gaming as a medium. Awash are the various interwebs of EA or some company getting ticked at some schmo and cancelling their ability to play the game. Battlefield 3 has tons of pages and threads devoted to this.

While I agree with you that I miss the days that when I bought a game, I bought a game... unless we curb these practices with our dollars, all future gaming (not just those sold via digital download) will turn up this way.

 

[Vivi22]

and if Rock Band was under the recent EA Eula wording... that person would lose. It's a contract. It's like if you did work for anyone under contract and the person would decide that even though you did everything to their liking, he wouldn't pay you. The courts would say if he didn't want to pay, he shouldn't have signed the contract.

Something being in a contract does not mean it is legal, or that courts would uphold it. Yes, people who buy the game agree to it's licensing terms, but that does not mean a court wouldn't overturn one or some of those terms if they feel the need to.

And keep in mind, we're not talking about something simple like stopping updates for a game, or something where the implication is that the license is temporary and can be revoked at any time. That may be the wording of the EULA, but it is not a common practice in the industry, and someone can reasonably argue that they didn't know about it. Even if they read the EULA, they may miss it if they're not a lawyer because those are not written for the average consumer who is supposed to read and agree to them.

It's not as cut and dry as you might think, and a court very well could overturn such a clause in the EULA. After all, you paid them money to use the game and the natural assumption is you will be able to play that copy for as long as you have it on your phone. Arbitrarily changing that is not exactly acting in good faith on EA's part and sounds more like a forced upgrade scheme, even if they have backpedaled now.

I would run up and agree with you if it wasn't for the fact that it isn't just digital distribution. It's non console gaming as a medium. Awash are the various interwebs of EA or some company getting ticked at some schmo and cancelling their ability to play the game. Battlefield 3 has tons of pages and threads devoted to this.

To be fair, it's not just non-console gaming that is vulnerable to this stuff. There haven't been widespread incidents like what has happened with EA and Origin users, but the possibility is absolutely there in modern consoles to lock you out of major components if the manufacturers ever decide to give it a try.

 

[ScruffyMcBalls]

See, now for all the advantages of digital distribution, this is why I'll never accept it. So long as something I put money down for isn't actually under my control I'm not interested. If I purchase something, it's mine, that's just how it works. License selling is just plain wrong, regardless of how you defend it, because this is what companies will do with it, they'll abuse it just like EA abuses.. well, everything. I'll stick to my N64 cartridges and those mysterious forgotten relics the ancient ones called discs, until this license bullshit fucks off back to the Blag'ole.

*steps off of soapbox and hands it to the next guy*

I would run up and agree with you if it wasn't for the fact that it isn't just digital distribution. It's non console gaming as a medium. Awash are the various interwebs of EA or some company getting ticked at some schmo and cancelling their ability to play the game. Battlefield 3 has tons of pages and threads devoted to this.

While I agree with you that I miss the days that when I bought a game, I bought a game... unless we curb these practices with our dollars, all future gaming (not just those sold via digital download) will turn up this way.

Oh don't worry, I completely agree with you. This industry, more so than most, needs one hell of a shakeup, and fast. I have a *lot* more to say about the treatment of gamers in general, but I'd need a whole article of my own or a video to explain all of that. It's just that almost all of the recent controversies in the gaming world link back in some way to the concept that this industry shouldn't be one based on physical properties, but digital licenses. That movement, or phase, over to a purely digital medium is just wrong on so many levels and I can't justify it evenly, and it really all began with digital distribution (so far as I'm aware).

 

[Royas]

Well, this is just asking for someone to sue and test once in for all if paying for software gives you some ownership rights regardless of the EULA. Be interesting if that happens.

and if Rock Band was under the recent EA Eula wording... that person would lose. It's a contract. It's like if you did work for anyone under contract and the person would decide that even though you did everything to their liking, he wouldn't pay you. The courts would say if he didn't want to pay, he shouldn't have signed the contract.

What it might do, actually, is prompt people to see the EULA before purchasing. And if people don't agree, to not buy it, costing a lot of revenue lost. There have been so many games that I bought since the age of digital distribution that I did not like their EULA, but you just can't return games on steam.

... In fact, if Gabe got to work on a pre-Eula contract agreement return system, you'd see a mass exodus of big names trying to get their product on steam. They wouldn't want to lose the revenue because they want to hold onto their products with an iron fist.

Captcha: Klatu Berada Nikto.

Man, Captcha. What the hell you smoking? I don't get high, but a brother might need a hit off of that...

Not all contract terms are legal or enforceable. For example (extreme example coming!), if I sign a contract that states that you may, for the small fee of $500, hit me in the face with a bat, you'd still go to jail for doing so. That is, as I said, an obvious and extreme example, but the fact is that no contract is binding until the courts have their say.

The USA is a country where the courts decided, during the great dotcom meltdown, that an advertising company didn't have to honor a contract because doing so would force them to declare bankruptcy. And that was a contract without a lot of difficult or controversial clauses, it was pretty much a "payment for services" contract. Given that occurrence, I am unwilling to bet against any outcome of any suit today. The rhyme and the reason of court decisions seems to have gone the way of common sense.