Warner Bros. Discovery Disappears Games People Already Purchased
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
It's obviously theft as well, but Warner Bros has already set the precedent that "stealing property is ok".
Sadly, it feels like Blu-rays are becoming a rare thing, particularly in the US. I wanted to buy legit copies of Infinity Train and Close Enough before they were taken off HBO Max, but as far as I'm aware there's no legitimate way to purchase Close Enough. At least Infinity Train can be bought off Amazon streaming still I guess.
It feels like these companies want it both ways. They want total control of the media landscape, while simultaneously taking away the media that we actually like, presumably for tax writeoffs.
It’s a sentiment I broadly agree with. It really bothers me that companies feel entitled to milk money out of us forever now, since you can’t purchase stuff anymore. Everything requires a subscription so we can forever have money extracted and given to our benevolent corporate overlords.
I was fine buying blu-rays, I have over 400 of them, but I don’t want to pay $70+ a month until the end of time to sign up for Netflix and Hulu and Peacock and Paramount Plus and Criterion Channel and ad-free Amazon and HBO Max and YouTube Premium and Disney Plus and Apple TV+ and probably a few stragglers I forgot about.
Let me buy the physical media, or a DRM-free download of the TV shows and movies I want to watch.
Until these entertainment companies fix this, pirated content is just simply a better product.
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.
Equally depressing that it's entirely unsurprising.
I wonder how much of piracy now is driven by monetary things vs concerns about data ownership.
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.
So typical of our day and age.