It would be reasonable for Steam to allow refunds for games that break like this, and bill the publisher for it.
(As an aside, if you get a dishwasher and use it for 10 years, the "general wear and tear" would deny your refund, as it would be reasonable to suggest that ongoing usage would wear down the machine, especially, for instance, if you didn't do the regular maintenance suggested. )
The only times a refund can be denied in Australia when a problem occurs is if it was caused by you or if you changed your mind on a purchase. Otherwise the purchaser can dictate how they are rectified (swap, credit or refund).
Edit: This is assuming you purchase it now. If you purchased it 9 years ago - it would be tough luck. The pivot is the condition at point of sale.
Sure I can run wine/VMware but I can also keep my 100 year old washing machine running with regular repairs which isn’t fixing the issue of deprecation or end of life.
That doesn't excuse it now failing to run on Windows 7.
What about disc rot? Or n64 not working because nobody uses RCA anymore?
Look, already exists: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/run_as_date.html
Disc rot won't affect anyone that made a backup, and anyone that didn't could find an iso I'm sure. An N64 still works the way it always did, just like if you installed this game on windows 7.
Disney has sabotaged people's property by using (allowing a third party to use) a kill switch, and that shouldn't be acceptable.
If a washing machine called home and checked that it's okay to run each time it was connected to power anew, and one day all of a particular model of washing machine was remotely told to stop working, I'm sure that would make the news.
As for disc rot, I truly believe that if you sell discs with copy protection so that the consumers can't reasonably back them up, they should be eligible for replacements when the discs eventually break after normal use.
This, on the other hand, is first of all not a bug; it's the copy protection working as designed. Whoever decided to use a subscription based copy protection system must have known that they'd either have to pay for it for a very long time or eventually fuck legitimate buyers over. It's deliberate and calculated. That it's related to anti-piracy doesn't factor into it. It's not pirates who are suffering from this, which is what critics have been saying about SecuROM for the last decade.
Now, can you argue for the idea that using SecuROM is comparable to adopting an industry standard for video transmission that has proven to be so popular that it's still widely in use now, some 50 years after its invention, without the foresight to instead adopt standards that didn't yet exist?
No, you can't, because the presence of SecuROM is completely orthogonal to the game features that customers are willing to pay for. This is a feature the publisher insisted on, not something the customer asked for.
Moreover, mitigations for the scenario you suggest do exist: you can buy convertors, even high-quality upscalers to convert 70s-era video signals to HDMI signals a modern TV can accept. "Convertors" that mitigate the damage of SecuROM are illegal, again because the publishers insisted on that.
Yes, you can argue for it. That doesn't necessarily mean that the conclusion is right or even that the reasoning is sound. The point of arguing is to find out that it is, if it is. In this case, I was asking the poster I responded to to present his case because I have presented a case for the opposite conclusion, that these are not comparable situations.
> Moreover, mitigations for the scenario you suggest do exist
I think you may be getting my argument mixed up with some other argument, because I did not suggest that scenario, and I clearly argue for why I believe that it's an invalid comparison on the basis that a mitigation isn't even necessary in most cases since most TVs have a composite input and you can still buy new TVs that have composite inputs.
It's a bit more nuanced than that.
The limitation comes from when the consumer could reasonably have become aware of the fault, not from when the purchase was made.
So in the case of SecuROM, that clock has only just started ticking.
Where did this idea come from?
Fortnite made $300 million per month.
The consumer legislation does specify a six-year time limit from then on, but that clock only just started ticking.
However, a refund is not obligatory. Repair i.e. a patch is an acceptable remedy under ACL.
https://consumerlaw.gov.au/sites/consumer/files/2016/05/0553... (Page 17)
This can’t be hidden in a EULA. It has to be prominent or the term will be ruled invalid under the “Unfair Contract Term” provisions of the ACL.
For those not familiar, ACL trumps all consumer contracts with standard terms. There are penalties for misrepresenting ACL (eg “No refunds” signs are banned, so are limits to consequential damages. Warranties are for a “reasonable” time, etc. )
It is one reason I am loathe to buy anything on that platform. they should be required to notify you when you browse a game that it has no support.
Three months after purchase when I got around to starting it, it was too late for a refund...
At least I could crack Tron Evolution
2012 EU ruling : "software is a good that can be resold"
2014 German ruling : "games are not just software, but also "art"(?), they can NOT be resold" https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/02/10/german-court-rul...
2019 French court ruling : "Steam accounts are just software(?), they can be resold" https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108209-ufc-que-choisir-vs-va...
For now at least I will be sticking with valve and if for some reason my access ever gets cut off I will pirate a copy of every game I owned.
I'm curious why you say that. I only run Linux games these days, and most come from GoG. Most tend to have quite good support, and I've had bugs I reported get patched.
They're also behind on patches, and sometimes it matters.
I still have GoG as my preferred store, because Steam needs a little competition to stay honest. (No, Epic is not competition.)
Game companies aren't great at making sure they've added artifacts for all platforms, across all the publishing platforms. Even on Steam different platforms often lag behind each other, and they make the process dead simple.
Valve essentially created linux gaming as a real and viable thing.
There, fixed that for you. ;)
Their EULA kinda covers them fully into not offering refunds in such circumstances as well.
Which does raise the issue, if the OS the game was written for initially loses support and you don't see Microsoft offering refunds, why should games when you have had years of fun. Sure it's a sour pill and back in board game days - nobody expected to purchase Monopoly and suddenly due changes later like an emissions zone introduction, find that they was unable to play that game anymore as their playing pieces all exceeded the emissions limits! Mad analogy I know, but does help curry perspective upon this.
However, it gets down to - did the game being sold mention any of this or forewarned, or indeed - have an expiry date! Nope. Heck, does an OS like XP come with an expiry date or any form of notice that it would ceased to work as sold? I'd guess not.
So much in the land of software and consumer rights or at the very least some level of guarantee is needed or at the very least, existing protection is updated or inforced to shake up this limbo state of consumer miss selling. Which it is when you get to the crux of it.
Still, another way to view it mad-analogy wise is that software is like fuel and if your car stops being unable to get spare parts or is unable to drive down roads it used to be able to due to some new regulation that came in. Well the fuel still works in newer cars that conform and is it the fuel companies fault if you unable to use that fuel in your car any more?
So many ways to look at this, but it certainly makes linux gaming more appealing for longevity and equally makes open source games more appealing as it the edge case, you have the power to fix the issue yourself if you encounter one.
Thinking about it, the only OS that comes to mind that is sold with a definitive support end date from date of purchase would be ChromeOS upon chromebooks.
[EDIT ADD] (1) https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/1736595227854...
Software, even sprinkled with art, is not a usable fuel or a perishable good.
As I said elsewhere, I have no issues with software companies deciding to drop support, but they should also then forfeit their copyright (earlier than normal) and release the source code.
For a store/launcher like Steam, they should remove the DRM. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, Gabe specifically promised to do that when Steam was first introduced, to assuade the fears over DRM !
EDIT : I stopped reading what passes for "communication" on that link on the first page. Note also that I'm raising a somewhat different issue : Steam dropping support for an OS, which OS is the only one that some of the Steam-sold games are working on. (This is certainly going to concern many more games for Win7 than it did for Vista, XP, 2k(?)...)