Sony's new plan to avoid class action lawsuits

[owsf2000]

These kinds of things are driving me away from the gaming industry altogether. I will still be getting a PS3, but this pretty much tells you why I will never be hooking it up to the internet.

Seriously, things like that should automatically void a terms-of-service. Although apparently the supreme court of the US has already judged that it can be enforced in the US at the very least. I suspect Sony will still be receiving class actions in europe, etc.

Comments

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I saw the email from them about the new TOS, but didn't actually read it yet. I haven't turned my PS3 on for around a month or more now, with no real plans to do so any time soon, so I'd never have even noticed this. That's probably what they were counting on to be the case with most people. Just sneak some bullshit into the EULA and hope nobody is the wiser, since very few people actually read those things.

I agree, shit like this should void it. "Hey, just so you know, we're adding a new clause to the contract such that you have to agree to not sue us if we fuck up again, or else we won't let you use the product you already paid us your money for." But then again, I'm sure they already had the "We can change this shit any time we want and you can't do a damn thing about it, aside from not agreeing to it, which would then mean that you can no longer legally use our product that we leased to you for several hundred dollars" clause in there somewhere, so that makes it okay, amirite?

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

Either way this adds fuel to my eventual plan to review PS3 and other current gen games (which ever ones I end up owning anyway.) the way I originally described a while back. That is, actually reviewing what you bought at the store. No DLC, no patches, no online element. All those things would eventually go away much faster than the disc itself after all. So for those who pick up the disc after those things are gone, this would be the review they'd want to read.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

(Didn't see this until I decided to idly check my friends page, due to not getting an email notification, or else I would have replied sooner.)

I was going to say that it's kind of like if you try to play an old PC game these days long after the devs have stopped supporting it (e.g. my rant in IRC the other day about The Sims 2 and how much encrusted anus EA sucks regarding that game). However, at least with PC games, there's a decent chance that any patches have been saved and uploaded to someone's personal site (no matter how ghetto said site may appear to be) and are thus still available in that manner. It's not a guarantee that you'll be able to find such patches obviously, but at least it's potentially an option. Though that doesn't take into account the fact that old games generally tend to just not run very well on new hardware/operating systems regardless (though in my example of The Sims 2, I haven't had any problems with it on Win7, thankfully, even though there were supposedly "known" issues with it or whatever).

However, I'm not sure something like that would even be possible with console games. Maybe, but it'd probably be very kludgy at best, and would likely be a pretty big pain in the ass getting it from the PC to the console in question, even if it is possible. And I don't know how legal it would be, at least in the case of paid-for DLC rather than patches, even if the original company no longer supports or provides the DLC. Most people consider such "abandonware (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware)" to be a gray area at best, in that regard. Even more so now that sites like GOG and the like exist. (But then, GOG as it exists right now wouldn't be able to help with console shit anyway.)

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

A couple of notes on that however:

Finding patches of long since abandoned games on someone's personal site is also kind of like playing russian roulette with your computer. Unless you know and trust the owner of the site you simply have no way of knowing if the person added their own "extras" (trojans, etc) into the patch. Heck, even if you do know the individual, you'll have to hope that they got it from a trustworthy place AND the patch wasn't corrupted by anything that might have been on their computer.

This is one of the reasons why I don't consider that kind of thing a valid excuse for why it should be accepted practice.

As for abandonware, the whole "gray area" is nothing more than the community's way to justify their use of it. If they ever ended up on the other side of a lawsuit over it, the law would state it's very much "black area". The only thing the person using the software has going for them is the fact that the odds of them being hit with a lawsuit is relatively low at present. And that's why I can't justify the use of those either as a reason to tolerate the spreads of DLC, patches, etc when the dev group should have actually FINISHED their game before trying to hawk it.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Yeah, in my particular case with TS2, I made sure to scan them all before using them, and they came up clean (or at least didn't have anything the various virus/malware scanners I used could detect anyway). I don't say it's a good thing to have to do it that way, because it's obviously not. I'd rather get whatever shit I need from an official source, but if that official source is too stupid/lazy/greedy to continue providing them, the only other alternative is to do without altogether (see previous comment re: console games). But I'd rather have the patches than not have them if I can still get them somewhere, and if Joe Randomdude on the Internet is willing to provide them when the original company isn't (and he isn't being a douchenozzle by pumping them full of malware), then more power to him. But yeah, the fact that EA itself no longer provides the patches is the height of shitty behavior, as far as supporting one's products and customers is concerned. Same with any and all other companies (at least those that still exist anyway) who don't support their shit anymore, even if it's just to provide a simple download location for old patches and shit at the very least. I don't personally care so much about the store closing down, since I never used it, but I still think it's incredibly asinine for them to not provide a place for the people who did use it to still be able to download the shit they bought, even if they can no longer buy any new shit.

As for abandonware, I definitely agree with you in that the law sees things in black and white. No surprise there. But then, the law sees a lot of things in purely black and white with no mitigating circumstances in between, at least when it comes to issues of copyright and such. This is due in no small part to the copyright holders themselves (or their lobbyists, anyway) being the ones who are drafting a lot of such laws these days, so of course they're not going to allow any wiggle room for things like abandonware or whatever. I'm sure you'll agree that's part of the problem as well. The main reason I'd personally say it was a "gray area" is when comparing it to the dickweeds who torrent new shit with no qualms whatsoever, regardless of their supposed justifications to do so. Compared to those assholes, the ones who download mere abandonware are far less deserving of being vilified in my eyes, at least if there is literally no other legit way to get the game in question. If however, a legit way to buy it becomes available, such as if it shows up on GOG at some point, for example, or, in the case of console games, on Wii VC/XBLA/PSN/etc., then my sympathy for them once again drops to zero.