Warner Bros. Discovery Disappears Games People Already Purchased

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/03/12/warner-bros-discovery-disappears-games-people-already-purchased/

by WarOnPrivacy • 2 years ago

65 32 2 years ago

tombert6• 2 years ago

At some point, isn't this just theft?

I know that the terms of license agreements probably reserve the right to do this in the fine print, but Warner Bros knows that people don't read those agreements, and they know that they're giving the perception of a purchase.

I always get extremely annoyed when people say "I'm technically not lying because I said X and you just thought I meant Y". Like, no, you purposefully made me believe something that was not true. You know what I was going to believe when you said X, you depended on that fact, and so it's still lying.

Similarly, Warner Bros. certainly wanted people to assume that these were purchases, so it's extremely dishonest to have fine print in there to be able to take that purchase away.

AlwaysRock• 2 years ago

Unfortunately, the point of having x in the fine print is so legally companies can say, "Technically we are allowed to do this".

tombert6• 2 years ago

Sure, but there's legal precedent for "lies by omission" too, even legally [1].

I'm not saying that what Warner Bros does is tantamount to perjury, or even enough to sue over, but I do think it's pretty slimy. It might be allowed, but it's still dishonest, it's still theft from an ethical level, and they absolutely, unequivocally, unambiguously are aware of this fact.

[1] https://www.wcl.american.edu/impact/lawwire/perjury-by-omiss...

Denote6737• 2 years ago

If buying isn't owning. Piracy is the practice of attacking and robbing ships at sea.

tombert6• 2 years ago

Not that I'd ever condone illegal activity, but I'm just putting it out there that piracy is broadly more convenient, cheaper, has no DRM, and you can keep the media for as long as you want.

It's obviously theft as well, but Warner Bros has already set the precedent that "stealing property is ok".

wrexx0r• 2 years ago

Cory Doctorow just wrote about this in December, when WB was removing content from the PlayStation Store: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-jame...

jeffwask2• 2 years ago

There are groups pursuing a number of legal actions in the arena to fight this practice. Up until recently, it's been mostly subscription games that get shutdown which is a murky grey area but game companies have started doing this with full priced titles that have sold over 14 million units. The best chances of any progress are in the EU.

tombert6• 2 years ago

Yeah, I was one of the people who actually bought Darkspore back when it was new, and while that game kind of sucks and I didn't really want to play it again, it did really bother me that EA decided to make it so that a single-player game can't play without phoning home, and so when they shut off the server it simply didn't work.

I understand not maintaining the multiplayer stuff, but in the case of the single-player stuff, all it would have taken is one patch to disable to always-online DRM, since they weren't going to be making money from it anymore anyway.

It's just theft. This is why I still try and buy Blu-Rays.

AdamJacobMuller• 2 years ago

Depressing, but, entirely unsurprising.

Equally depressing that it's entirely unsurprising.

I wonder how much of piracy now is driven by monetary things vs concerns about data ownership.

bdw5204• 2 years ago

Related: The gaming division of Warner Bros. is also planning to double down on "live service" games following the failure of the Suicide Squad game rather than single player games like their highly successful Harry Potter game.[0]

I wonder if Warner Bros. increasingly sees their gaming division as a potential source of tax write offs and are just intentionally wasting money like the Atlas Shrugged character Francisco d'Anconia[1] to ensure Uncle Sam never sees a cent in tax revenue from them. Otherwise, the behavior of this company seems to be objectively insane.

[0] https://gamerant.com/warner-bros-focus-shift-live-service-ga...

[1] https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/a/atlas-shrugged/char...

sickofparadox• 2 years ago

Its actually worse than that: in their mind, Suicide Squad was a "traditional" AAA style game with a live service component (because it has a campaign of some kind), they are planning on doubling down on the Helldivers/Payday 3 style live services that only work as live services with no campaign or story mode.

AlexandrB2• 2 years ago

The live service craze reminds me a lot of the WoW clones that got made in the years following WoW's success. As with MMOs, I think an average person's ability to interact with multiple live services is limited. Keeping up with more than 2 or 3 "seasons" or "battlepasses" is usually impossible unless you have the kind of free time that only kids in school have. Also just like with MMOs, the quality and quantity of new content generally depends on revenue coming in. This sets up a very strong "winner take all" dynamic where the most popular games can ship large, frequent content updates while smaller games often dwindle and die off. It seems like there's little room for modest success with a live service unless you're catering to a niche genre or audience.

skywhopper• 2 years ago

I don't discount the probability that spite drives a lot of these counterproductive decisions. But if they are giving up income simply in order to pay zero tax, that is itself objectively insane. Which again, I'd not be surprised by.

suddenclarity• 2 years ago

As Seinfeld would say: do you even know what a tax write off is? Hiring someone to burn money just to pay less tax makes no sense. You don't get back the money you burned.

metalcrow3• 2 years ago

Importantly, this means that some specific versions of these games will be gone, even from those who already bought them

This needs a citation, because for all steam games this is untrue. Once you by a steam game, even once taken down you can still redownload it indefinitely.

lp0_on_fire• 2 years ago

Steam is a great platform, albeit with flaws. While that may be true over there, it's not on every digital distribution platform.

metalcrow3• 2 years ago

Ah, yeah you're correct. The article also mentions console marketplaces, and those will actually really delete stuff.

kevingadd• 2 years ago

This is more nuanced than you might expect. A given product on steam is split up into many "depots", which can be things like "windows beta version 1.33" or "mac version 1.07", and a developer has a lot of freedom to do things to depots even if the product is still in your library.

They could also push an update to all of the games they plan to pull that makes them unplayable, and potentially delete the older versions, making it hard to get a playable version of the game even though it's still in your library.

It needs to be possible to do stuff like this so that a game developer (or Valve) is able to comply with things like DMCA notices or legal judgments requiring them to stop distribution of a game.

metalcrow3• 2 years ago

While i'm familiar with depots, i didn't think that you could delete those at will assuming a user had purchased them. Is there just one "master" depot that is locked from being deleted?

And yeah, while you could push an update that bricks the game that is a pretty good way to get valve really angry at you, plus it takes actual malice instead of disinterest.

And Valve can definitely delete stuff if needed by the DMCA or whatever, but that's locked to their side, not the publisher as i understand.

AlexandrB2• 2 years ago

I think there needs to be some minimum regulatory bar for digital consumer rights. At the moment customers are entirely at the mercy of the vendor and digital distribution platform. To me the most egregious issue is not even publishers removing things people bought after the fact, but account bans which can cause you to lose your entire library.

sumtechguy• 2 years ago

Is there a list of games?

jeffwask2• 2 years ago

Sweet. There's already a team pursuing a class action over the shutdown of The Crew. Here's another opportunity to pursue.

dyingkneepad2• 2 years ago

And that, gentleman, is why most of my video game collection is in their little disc boxes and SD cards. I avoid digital purchases as much as I can.

Sander_Marechal• 2 years ago

Are you sure those SD cards contain the full, installable and runnable game? Or do they just contain keys for some digital store?

dyingkneepad2• 2 years ago

That's easily verifiable by putting the video-game in offline mode.

As far as I can remember, as soon as I put the SD card the Switch game is playable (lots of Switch games don't have updates for them!), I don't think it's just a digital store thing. Also I can put the SD card on another switch and it will also play. Same with my Playstation CDs.

Nullabillity• 2 years ago

Buying physical media still helps fund the perpetrators of this shit.

verisimi• 2 years ago

You've got to love the name: "Discovery", when it disappears purchases. I'm sure it's legal too.

So typical of our day and age.

leotravis10• 2 years ago

Related discussion from yours truly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39645944

phatskat• 2 years ago

For anyone who hasn’t played Duck Game, while you may not be able to for much longer, I highly recommend it. The dev also said he will keep working on it even if he has to make a “new” game under a different title.

Warner Bros. Discovery Disappears Games People Already Purchased

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