EA Killing Rock Band For iPhone, Game Will Be Unplayable For Current Owners
toucharcade.com
toucharcade.com
Hopefully Apple nails them to the wall on this.
The same thing would happen with, say, Draw Something, if a tornado came through and wiped out their data center. They wouldn't have built a purposeful "kill switch," it's just a de facto one because the server would then be embedded into a tree somewhere.
Sometimes intentionally, like this example, sometimes you'll lose access to things you thought you had bought as companies merge or expire, or through good old-fashioned screw-ups.
I can run a program on my thirty-year-old Apple computer today just as I could when I bought it, even though the company who made the software may have disappeared in the '90s. Records I bought as a kid are still here, and no one can edit or "deauthorize" the books on my shelf.
I wonder if kids born now will grow up without any expectation that buying any form of software or media entitles them to keep and use what they've bought anytime they want?
I don't want to buy licenses. Can we please buy things that are real (like bits, real).
Otherwise you could dodge the whole "apps that are 'trial' versions" are prohibited... Release the app for a small sum, pull it after a while and release a sequel!
Or will this be another case of "some developers are more equal than others"?
Anyone who fucks with their ability to sell feel-good hardware will get the lash. Let's see how fucked-with they feel after this.
It only works for transactions made in the last 90 days though.
From the page:
Will ROCK BAND no longer be available on mobile devices?
Updated: 5/2/2012
I've heard ROCK BAND will not be available after May 31. Is this true?
Yes, we will be suspending support of ROCK BAND after May 31 and focusing resources on other EA titles. We thank everyone for playing ROCK BAND, and we encourage you to explore some of the other exciting titles in our mobile line-up.
Can I still play ROCK BAND if I've already downloaded it?
The ROCK BAND servers will be live through May 31, 2012. If you have already downloaded the game, you can continue to play until then.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57426660-93/ea-not-killing-...
- Song licensing deals expire with unfavorable renewal costs
- Server and other costs outweigh incoming revenue
(Why would the servers be required anyways? To stream content? Couldn't content be downloaded on first run (which means you only need to fund a server&pipe big enough for new purchases))
Probably depends on licensing terms. I can absolutely see record companies licensing under terms that don't allow end-users to save the music locally.
What? Are you being intentionally ridiculous. They license songs. I don't know the terms of these specific licenses but the way they work in general is that they can license the game for a specific use and/or term. I'm not a lawyer so I don't know specific legal terms off the top of my head but there's a different license for the PlayStation version of the game where they are giving the user a copy of the song to have and to hold and one where they would stream, which I assume the iOS version is actually doing. Again, not a lawyer so I don't know the specifics but you will often see something like a TV show having broadcast rights to use a song in their show but they (especially for older shows) may have failed to procure the appropriate rights to use the song on the DVD version.
Now, I don't know too much about the Rock Band app so I'm sure someone more knowledgeable about it is likely to come through and correct me but it sounds like the songs are streamed for the iPhone. This wouldn't be as crazy as it sounds since phones still have relatively limited space and applications with smaller footprints are thus easier to manage.
When you buy Guitar Hero or Rock Band on the playstation, the disc is yours to keep and play forever (I assume). I'd expect the same from an iOS app.
Especially since the .ipa download is 160 MB.
3.3.16 Any master recordings and musical compositions embodied in Your Application must be wholly-owned by You or licensed to You on a fully paid-up basis and in a manner that will not require the payment of any fees, royalties and/or sums by Apple to You or any third party. In addition, if Your Application will be distributed outside of the United States, any master recordings and musical compositions embodied in Your Application (a) must not fall within the repertoire of any mechanical or performing/communication rights collecting or licensing organization now or in the future and (b) if licensed, must be exclusively licensed to You for Your Application by each applicable copyright owner.
Edit: And will this have consequences for any other EA offerings?
Plus, EA certainly doesn't need any more bad publicity after Mass Effect 3 and all their release day DLC drama.
Will all of this be around in twenty or thirty years? I have physical books that are nearly 100 years old in my library. They don't require a third party to exist in order to be usable.
These kinds of things make you re-think some of these ideas.
Another place where this happens much faster is power tools. I still have a number of excellent power tools that are easily 15 to 20 years old. Sawzall, drill, router, biscuit joiner, circular saw, etc.
All of them have a chord and are AC powered.
None of the battery powered tools I bought long ago are around. In some cases the battery packs have been discontinued. In other cases the batteries went bad and the replacement cost for the obsolete packs is just too high.
So, if you want to leave tools and books to your kids, you might want to rethink what you are buying. It is possible to imagine that iBooks and Kindle will not be around in 40 to 50 years.
Anyone know what the TOS say about this for both Apple and Amazon? Do you own your books or have they become licenses that can go poof overnight?
More than games, music, etc., not being able to share books drives me crazy. Everyone in my flat has a small library; we share our books between eachother. When we started getting Kindles, that was stymied: after reading the first book in the Void trilogy on paper, I was unable to let my flatmate (who read the first book after me) read the second book - because I bought it on Kindle. That was... well, lame.
So now, I manage my Kindle with Calibre. Every book I buy gets cracked.
Could they have sold it as a PDF with their normal Kindle DRM? Yes. Would this have been sufficient enough to keep piracy to acceptable levels? Yes. Any miniscule amount of DRM is enough. It's like putting WEP on your router. It will keep out the riff raff (which is good enough for most cases) but anyone who is determined to break your encryption will figure out how to do it. With something like an ebook, I would imagine that 9:1 sales to piracy rate would be realistic, and that's well within acceptable range in my opinion.
I actually have the opposite theory. Will books be around in 20 or 30 years? I mean, books that exist now will continue to exist. But will new ones continue to be printed? Will it continue to exist as a format?
I am an early adopter, but a growing fraction of things I read simply do not come in dead-tree format. We are approaching a singularity where today's hardbacks becomes tomorrow's paperbacks--something to do when demand is higher than anticipated.
I am with you when you are concerned about DRM and how long your iPad will last. But I think DRM-free PDF and ePub are a lot more futureproof than paper. Imagine if your house catches on fire--do you even have a list of books to put on the insurance form? Whereas, I have all my books backed up with geographic redundancy.
Disclaimer: I've scanned all my books, http://sealedabstract.com/lifehacking/the-joy-of-electronic-...
Current digital solutions, however, require more or less constant upkeep. Physical media such as hard drives, DVDs and flash is susceptible to both catastrophic failure and bit rot with a half life of only about 5 years (in my experience). Online storage services which outsource the task of redundant maintained storage avoid this, but to protect yourself from services going defunct you need to have your data on multiple services and keep them constantly synced.
In short, if you stop actively backing up/maintaining your data for even a few years, chances are you'll loose it.
I think there's also discoverability issues with digital media in its current incarnation, but that's another discussion.
An interesting thought experiment is to think of what it would take for ebooks to become as robust or as antifragile as physical books. For instance, would it require the hardware, power supply, and content to fuse into a form as cheap and ubiquitous as paper (and manufacturing of such hardware within the realm of anyone)? What could enable that? A breakthrough in self-replicating 3D printers that are capable of using recyclable material as printer stock?
Dead-tree paper can only really be advantageous as you propose if you consider the cost of producing the physical artifact (printing, binding, shipping) a sunk cost. It may be a sunk cost in 1995, but my thesis is that it will not be a sunk cost in 2030. Stated alternately, it may be a better archival medium, but most books are not purchased on the basis of being reliable archives.
Although independent of the main premise, I do object to bit rot as being applicable to books. My library of ebooks spans 25GB, an amount that pales in comparison to my music collection, which normal people all have in digital format. 25GB can be backed up in minutes a year, and is far less than the effort people extend to climate-control a collection of dead trees and cart it around during moves.
Would you be open to a long bet on this topic?
(Yeah yeah, you're probably thinking C is eternal. But I'm sure people swore that older languages would survive no matter what.)
If something is going to replace the best tool for the job, it will have to be a lot better than "better". Not that it hasn't happened before, but in these two cases, it hasn't happened yet.
I'm assuming that HTML renderers will be around for a while, though. If you're feeling paranoid, throw in a copy of lynx or a quick script to strip out all of the tags :).
Print your favorite photos in black and white on acid free paper if you want them to endure.
I have a number of videos of someone dear to me that I'll never be able to replicate, and I'm very interested in making it last slightly longer than my current harddrive/the lifespan of my amazon S3 backups.
I have half a pg-style-essay on The Great Forgetting kicking around my harddrive. I have this pet theory that future archeologists will have a better conception of 1980s pop culture than what is about to unfold in the decades to come. Or even what's happening right now that large tracts of late 90s/early aughts digital culture is evaporating.
All my digital video on tape from the early 2000s is dead. The early DVDs I burned in 2002-2004 are all dead (due to the organic dye, I guess). Many of the CDs I burned in the late 90s are dead. The most durable digital format I have has been the 5.25" disks, probably due to their ultra low density.
You can get it done from digital easily enough these days however http://www.ilfordlab.com/
"Permanent" is such a strong word. Sure, 100 years, if you get all of the above right.
Getting well past 100 years is simply not within the range of simple silver gelatin prints; the silver will corrode due to the same process that causes silver jewelry to tarnish. True archival stability requires toning. You have three good options: sulfide, selenium, or gold. Sulfide (or "sepia") has a striking brown color which reminds you of old photographs. That's because only the old photographs which were toned survived -- the neutral colored black and white photographs faded long ago. Selenium has a more mellow black/brown color depending on the dilution, and can be made fairly neutral. It is generally preferred over sulfide. Gold, on the other hand, provides a slightly cooler tone (blue or green is possible, if you use enough of it) but it's expensive enough that the cost of the gold can be a significant fraction of the material cost. (Old gold-toned photos survive too, but they're rarer.) (Not all toners increase permanence, e.g., iron-based toners can give you a cheaper blue than using gold but they're water-soluble.)
On the other hand, an inkjet can be loaded with carbon-based pigments. Carbon-based pigments can be found on cave paintings in France dating back 32,000 years, so they should be stable enough.
I have no doubt that a good inkjet print with carbon-based inks will outlast all of my darkroom prints. In my mind, color inkjet prints have far surpassed color darkroom prints, but that's not as hard as it sounds.
For example, I want to print a PNG file, instead of printing out the picture, I want to preserve its original files hex codes, instead of printing some SVG curves, I would print its XML source instead. Instead of printing formulas, I would print the LaTex source code directly. This could be lossless data printing.
What would be the most effeciant, ink-saving, and easy to recognize, and error-preventing serialization format for printing?
I work in the book trade and while we may see a shift in 20-30 years - certain things will never disappear - coffee table books, most kids books, drawing books etc. "Mainstream" (whatever that means) authors may become virtually exclusively electronic.
Personally I like to look at my bookshelves and what is there - and enjoy viewing others.
No.
Have I purchased any kindle books? Well, only if they aren't available in physical form.
I am confused by people who believe that things on the internet are any sort of permanent - or private, but that's another matter entirely.
I'd be extremely careful when hacking lithium batteries. If you must, follow a guide (http://www.electronics-lab.com/articles/Li_Ion_reconstruct/) and be very careful.
When things go wrong, the results are spectacular (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3o_2mwRPdw).
This is inevitable in the modern world. We want to allow for people to pay for software. We want software to engage with the broader world. Having those two things at once inevitably leads to a situation where software breaks because its "managers" don't want to maintain that engagement anymore.
So pick one of those two and throw it out: make all services pay-for-play instead of one-time-fee. Or disallow non-standalone apps. (Or I guess a third option would be to force the customer and app vendor to sign a contract with a service level agreement). None of those seem workable to me.
In the UK, for example, we have laws like the Sale of Goods Act, under which anything you buy firsthand must meet certain criteria such as being fit for the purpose it was sold for. If it isn't, you are typically entitled to a repair/replacement/refund. However, that need not necessarily be a full refund or replacement with a brand new equivalent, depending on the circumstances.
Typically, if a physical product is found to be faulty within six months of purchase, the onus is on the merchant to prove that it was not faulty when it was bought. After that, the burden shifts somewhat, but the merchant can still be liable for fixing a problem even a few years after the original purchase if the item would normally be expected to last that long. As time goes by, the amount of a refund you might be entitled to receive if the product breaks and isn't be repaired or replaced instead would tend to diminish, to reflect the value you have already received from the use of the product before it broke.
Usually, in physical product world, a court could make a fair determination of how long something might reasonably be expected to last based on the general market, the original purchase price, etc. Of course with software it's harder, because bits don't magically break, but on the other hand there are platform compatibility issues to consider.
As you say, that raises the question of what is a reasonable expected lifetime. If we're talking about pure content -- an e-book, music, a movie, etc. -- then I would argue the answer is "forever". If someone has paid for the content, in the expectation that it was a full purchase and not for example a rental or all-you-can-watch fixed-time subscription, then there is simply no excuse for ever deactivating the product after the purchase.
If we're talking about executable code in an application, then I would argue that the answer must be as a minimum "as long as the supporting platform is available", where by supporting platform I mean the device/OS/etc. necessary to run the code, and not including any sort of artificial dependency introduced exclusively or primarily for the purpose of allowing the software to be disabled in the future. If there is a legitimate dependency on some system outside the consumer's personal control, for example a centralised server used to co-ordinate a multiplayer game and operated at the game developer's expense, then I wouldn't have a problem with a system whereby the dependency was OK but anyone who wanted to maintain the usual legal protections for software would have to leave in escrow a version of the software that allowed third party systems to replace such dependencies if and when the original systems ceased to be available.
11.9. Apps containing "rental" content or services that expire after a limited time will be rejected.
What this means for applications like Rock Band that spontaneously turn into expiring services remains to be determined.
Think about it. It would be even more scummy of them to leave the app up for download with no way to pull the songs required to play the game down from the cloud.
It's shitty either way, especially if you just bought the app but, I don't see a good way out of it.
And it seems fairly ridiculous that EA would not get rights that last for the life of a single product. They've been doing song licensing for 10+ years now.
The problem is games requiring "authentication servers" to do anything. The general thought has been when these servers were removed the last act of the company would be to release an update that disabled the requirement of the servers... however this has never really happened.
It frustrates me as thanks to tools like DosBox I am still playing games on my Mac that I first played years ago (Master of Orion 2 specifically). There is a distinct possibility that every game you purchase will no longer work in 5 years between DRM'd executable, proprietary platforms and authentication servers.
Any functions requiring server access should inform you that they are no longer available, while the game bit itself should still be playable
Obviously login wouldn't work any more, they should offer one final upgrade to let users use the app without logging in
Or [squints suspiciously] are you a class-action lawyer?