thanks alot pirates for changing the market now we have all this abusive microtransactions and barely any single-player only games :(

But gaming never had drop in sales like music had. Gaming is constantly growing, in every sector. And we still have as much high value single player games as we had ten years ago. The shovelware has shifted, but gems like F:NV, DX:HR, ME, SPAZ might appear even more often than before.

Actually the decision covered digital products, not physical ones. The strength of legal decisions depends on the court and legal system. The European court - which I believe allows for the setting of precedent like the US/British courts - and the US Supreme Court for instance affect all rulings below them. So if a case ever reaches those levels, then the decisions are binding and are later not subject to any individual lower court judge's whimsies after they are made.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the genie is out of the bottle on that one. Ultraviolet so far seems to be a dud to boot - no positive press and very little press of any kind. It might take off, but for now I don't think it is going anywhere. Then again, as it stands now every digital movie seller (and book seller and games seller and everyone but music seller) uses its own DRM system - so we're not all that well off on that front anyway.

Yes but budgets have risen at a higher proportion than sales, as far as I know.

This is what happens when you allow 3rd parties to control your usage license. To use steam and others, you have to "sign" their Terms of Service. Upon reading the terms you can see that they remove your rights to control the user license you purchase. You must agree to the terms in order to use their services. I don't agree to their terms, so I don't those services.

To end this, you've gotta stop buying from them. A change won't require all gamers. It'll just take a few tens of thousands more. Thats not much at all. It's like with Burger Kings announcement that they will be using 100% cage-free chicken and pork. There was no mass protest, there is no majority mind, it just happened because BK saw the profit in it, and saw the loss in sticking with the old.

This is pretty much the devil right here, nothing is so fucked up as music licensing and it's killed 10s of thousands of great things, hell, that's probably 10s of thousands per year...

just about to post this (different source but same story) and refreshed right before I did - though I heard they had a support page request devoted to the app going offline ... so I'm not sure what the mistake was ;)

so ... beaten but not quite ninja'd ... and I live to tell the tale! :)

According to the comments, they put up a whole FAQ on their help site about the message, which was later removed. So somebody obviously did it on purpose, it's just a question of whether some individual management type did something stupid, or whether they're just in PR panic mode and are trying to cover it up.

And remember, my gaming friends: cloud computing and always-on is the future of the industry.... Clearly, this industry desperately wants to have no future at all.

In our present one.

If you can read the agreement you made with your bank, you can read the agreement that you'll be making with a company you're licensing a game from.

How the hell to you make a mistake like that? "Ooh! Let's write up an entire FAQ page for something we clearly stated with no confusing wording whatsoever!" and then "Oop! Our bad, we totally didn't mean to confuse you when we said your game would stop working. What we meant was that it would absolutely continue working. It was Opposite Day, you see...."

I mean, the first announce had no litigable phrasing. There was no room for semantics. And then, bang!, "Sorry for the confusion folks, we meant something else when we said what we said".