http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-05-02-rock-band-ios-no-longer-playable-after-31st-may

That's pretty brazen isn't it? A little message that says the game you paid for will no longer function. Welcome the digital era!

Jesus.

EA must be run by Satan himself, these days they are working really hard on making life miserable for all their customers :D
Looks like they are trying to become as much evil as they can.
Not a good thing since whey own most of the game studios and licences I care about :/

It seems to be the whole game.

Licensing issues. Fscking great.

Never buy anything that doesn't have original music...

No, they can't. Apple would not approve an update that only exists to brick an app. The kill switch has already been silently deployed in the last update.

Actually, Apple could be forced by the same legal issues as EA. If you get a judgement that an app must be shut down, it will be shut down. Apple can't do squid about it.

From what the Eurogamer article suggests, it looks like the rights to use the songs in the game have lapsed, in addition to the rights to use the MTV logos and such. MTV may also own part or all of the game's IP on iOS.

It's not so much highlighting how evil EA is, but I'd take it as a symbol of the dangers of producing and selling (and I'd say, also buying) a game which is heavily dependent on licensed properties.

Gotta love digital distribution. The fact that they sold DLC for the game makes it even worse.

"What, you spent $100 on the game? Why, thanks for rocking with us. Your game will stop working in 30 days."

For me, this is the scariest part of the article:

"EA Mobile's Support site has been taken offline. A basic message states: "This site has been disabled for the time being," with no further explanation."

So you can't even contact them about it. Or about ANYTHING ELSE mobile-related for the entire duration of the fiasco. How wonderful.

Come on, everybody knows that a publisher would neeeeeeeeeveeerr be tempted to use a DRM to do such a thing, neeeeeveeeer. I am sure that all those who will have their game disabled have most probably done some terribly illegally wrong things and deserve it.


(post guarantee 600% sarcasm free)

Yes, either EA or Apple could pull the app from sale but Apple would not approve an update to kill previously purchased content entirely. Also, EA is not relying on anyone accepting a useless update. The kill switch is already in place and it might have been there since v1.0 for all we know.

If the judgement says "kill the app" Apple will do that. They have to do that. The question remains if "killing an app" is legally possible. Considering the fickleness of music licenses and the fact that even GOG had to pull some games from the shelves of people that already owned them, I think that this is a real possibility. This is very, very important here. Blame EA for other stuff, bad licensing maybe, but they certainly aren't happy about this happening.

The point from my perspective is that a boxed disc without DRM on it has no chance of being revoked. Blade Runner cannot be sold today because of license issues, but if you own that game then fuck them, what can they do about it?

It's a risk of digital distribution, and with internet regulation getting going who knows how long piracy can act as a preservation mechanism.

We're in for bad mojo I think.

Indeed. It makes me feel a little bit afraid for some of the games here on GOG. It feels like we're a couple of bad executives and poor business decisions away from getting the whole D&D catalog pulled from GOG.

Gog pulled the games from distribution. They were not required to destroy all purchased copies on customers' personal hard drives. There is simply no precedent for what you are suggesting. And even if EA signed some sort of retroactive content removal contract, Apple did not and would not be bound to any such agreement.