Yeah, that is done with movies and books here but not games.

i'm pretty sure that whenever you buy any software the terms of licence always give the owner (publisher) the right to terminate services and revoke licences at any time for whatever reason.

so no, this is not legally theft.

it sucks, though. always back up your digital content.

that's because games aren't considered art. not in any legal sense anyawy. Germany has AFAIK recognized games as "cultural assets", but that's not the same.

If the DLC requires you to connect to EA servers on Xbox like it does on PC then no amount of backing up will matter.

Nope, read the licences again. The vast majority of them say that the licence is only terminated if the licencee grossly violates the terms of the agreement.

countless times i've read legal disclaimers stating that the owner retains the right to terminate online services after a set period of time (90 days, i think).

EA's say anytime with 30 days notice (which is what they gave here).

Access to online services is a completely different kettle of fish to a licence to the game. Most companies will reserve a clause to terminate online services within 90 days of notice, but this does not terminate the licence to the software itself.

If EA prevents me from playing online over EA's servers, that's part of the online service and included in the 90-day provision. If EA illegitimately prevents me from playing the offline product by means of DRM, that is not part of the online service and measures taken to prevent further use of the product are a violation of the EULA insofar as I haven't done anything to violate it.

yeah. so? in this case we're talking about a piece of optional DLC for a singleplayer game. i'm pretty sure that closing down online access to it would be covered by EA's 30-days-notice disclaimer before shutdown. the game itself remains playable.

The same thing happen with the film industry also, it took a long time before any preservation was done and quite a lot of films are lost from the early times. if I remember correctly the first preservation attempts was done by museum of modern arts in the 30's and the first body, who's responsibility was partly to preserve films, American Film Institute, was established in the late 60's, that's about 70 years after the film industry started. I still do not think that private companies should be in charge of preservation (then they need to be controlled and funded...) but that there should be something like International Game Institute, who's charted is among other things to preserve games. \we did not learn anything from the early film industry.

You're missing the point. The EULA in force is not the one for The Saboteur. The EULA in question is for the DLC, which is a new agreement. EA no longer providing online services for it - by allowing further downloads for example - is one thing, EA preventing use of the DLC altogether, effectively unilaterally and illegally terminating the EULA, is another.

Actually that might not benefit EA. They don't want people to play their older games (for free), because then people have less incentive to buy newer games from them.

I believe many game publishers feel it would be better for the business if all games had only a limited playtime after purchase (or even the original release date), e.g. all games older than 2 years would vanish into thin air.

Excluding games where people are ready to pay monthly fee for playing the same game over and over again (WoW, whatever SW MMOPRGs EA is now releasing...), or if they play the older games through services with monthly fees. Then it is the opposite, it makes more sense to them to make long-lasting games and keep investing on them, instead of investing into development of newer games.

Planned obsolescence, you say? I've always thought of DRM as a digital form of planned obsolescence. I don't care what it says in an EULA either. It wasn't presented to me like a contract at the sale, and if it would have been, I could have negotiated it or refused it. I don't care if a company wants to push new products as its business model, but if the only way to do that is to make defective products to try to force people to buy new products, they deserve to fail.

I do believe that people would be willing to spend money for a more durable product. At the power company I used to work at, they would regularly spend another $20,000 per truck for the more durable digger derricks and aerial devices after they had previously bought other trucks that would break down and have to be repaired frequently (even though they were non-profit they still had the discretion to not be forced to take the lowest bid unlike some public services.) It wasn't just the cost of repairs that vexed them, it was the down time.

I remember one time a salesman from a certain truck company dropped off a digger derrick for a week to let us test drive it. He knew we probably wouldn't be buying from him since this company was the main reason why the power company decided to purchase more expensive trucks in the first place. The lineman had been vocal about it at trade shows in the past too. So while the salesman was there, one of the lineman tried it out. Tried out the auger and one of the auger teeth fell off and the cheap plastic handle also came off the lever to run it within a minute. "It looks like we'll be buying from Dueco again." Everybody laughs. Good joke.

You probably don't know the names I threw out (I doubt they ship to Finland) but I thought it was a good example of people willing to pay to get products that are not designed to be defective. I think it works out better in the long run. It builds trust.

The problem is that the industry is at a position where it doesn't believe that it needs to build a position of trust. It believes that brand loyalty and marketing alone will continue to sell games now and forever more and that this trust does not need to be earned because the community is too docile for trust to matter.

The constant nosedive in industry sales and the industry doing sweet fuck-all about it paint a different picture about the importance of trust. I think at this point it's inevitable that there's going to be another video gaming crash. It's those companies that have bothered to listen to their customers and go some way to addressing their demands (like CDP) that are doing well at present.

SimonG
From Germany

Enough said. Yeah, Germany seems to be leading the way with batshit insane copyright laws. If I had any more faith in humanity then I'd hope that other nations would pay attention to the feeding frenzy going on in Germany and the innocent people being torn apart in its courts and seek to avoid that at any cost.

But I'd be very wrong if I did.

I agree. I think I've seen you say this before. The threat of used games is gone for PC games so the industry doesn't have any incentive to build trust. But I'm not a docile gamer. I might be just a bit unruly.

Marketing is all well and good and has its benefits, but at the end of the day, it's not about what can the customer do for you. It 's about what can you do for me that I would be willing to give you MY money. If sales are plummeting, that would be where to fix it. That's my take anyway.