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by jwueller
678 days ago
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I feel like it's not broad at all, it just demands that the company delivers what they advertised, since they don't usually openly disclose the temporary nature of your "purchase", because it would hurt sales. (No, hiding it in the EULA doesn't count as per EU courts.) - Disagree on it being technically infeasible. It's basically trivial: You're probably already running the Kubernetes config on the cluster anyway. Just release the server binaries/config/docs. Laws are also usually not retroactive, so negotiating licenses that allow for this in the future seems trivial too. - You don't lose IP by distributing anything, just like you don't lose it for distributing the client. I don't own Ford because I bought a Ford car. The only thing licensed IP in a product does it that you can't sell it anymore after it expires. It has no effect on previously sold copies. - EULA/ToS is invalid if it contains unfair/unexpected clauses. They like to call it a service, but that doesn't mean that it actually is, legally. As opposed to SaaS, games are sold as a product with no expiration date. The EULA/ToS also always contain clauses like "terms can change at any time for any or no reason", which is inherently invalid. So the whole EULA/ToS could be invalid on its face too. - This is just about basic ownership rights. If it's a rental/service (with a disclosed price for a specific time period), then it's fine. Otherwise it's a product and you have to abide by the regulation for products. Anything other than these two options is inherently unfair, because you can't assess the value of something if you don't know how long it may be used for. |
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I don't know any company that advertises "game will stay up for X amount of time and will always be playable". On the contrary I'm pretty sure every EULA specifies that they aren't. you're logging into someone else's server, so I should log in knowing that server won't say up forever
>EULA/ToS is invalid if it contains unfair/unexpected clauses.
how is it unexpected 30 years into the internet that "oh yeah, this is a server-based game, it won't stay up forever". It's unfair, but laws are rarely made with a goal of perfect "fairness".
> Disagree on it being technically infeasible. It's basically trivial:
Nothing is trivial in tech. Not unless you're talking on the scale of years. This isn't even a gamedev thing, it's just that there's always random footguns and pitfalls due to the nature of shifting to a attrition strategy instead of a retention strategy.
> You don't lose IP by distributing anything
if you distribute IP you do not own, you end up taking damages while also having the game taken down. very few games are made fully in house anymore.