I haven’t watched Louis’ video, but I do have a Blizzard account, and up until a couple of days ago I had an active WoW subscription (ended because I wanted to play other games, not to make a point).
I didn’t get presented with any new terms recently, presumably I will in the future should I decide to sign up again, or even dip in on a free trial account.
I did look up the terms though. I’m not in the US so it’s not clear if I’d be bound by it anyway but not only do they have an opt-out clause (11.A.vi) they’re actually less egregious than some EULAs, allowing opt-out via email, rather than requiring a mailed in letter (Roku) and being prominently highlighted at the top.
Lot of folks here dreaming about them going bankrupt, I have to say, I think that’s wishful thinking. The current WoW expansion has been very successful with the highest signups and retention in a long time as they’ve apparently figured out what players actually want. Even without their other IP’s they’re doing ok.
The funny thing is by forcing you to agree to the new terms, the contract can be challenged since one side was coerced to sign it (and didn’t get a chance to sign in voluntarily!).
US courts tend to favor corporations over end users, so there’s still a strong chance a judge will throw the case out anyway, but because this is such an act of bad faith in US contract law, a judge might also rule in the end-user’s favor just to make an example out of Blizzard for being such a dick.
PS: Steam did this a long time ago. I’ve never had any disagreements with Steam but some folks have. I don’t know if anyone’s had the account bricked, which Blizzard, EA and Ubisoft have done.
That’s the hilarious(ly depressing) thing about buying a digital movie, for example, to me.
If you rent it, you get it for a certain amount of time.
If you ‘buy’ it, you also rent it, just for an undisclosed amount of time that they may or may not retroactively take away from you at any point with no warning or compensation.
Your use of the Platform is licensed, not sold, to you, and you hereby acknowledge that no title or ownership with respect to the Platform or the Games is being transferred or assigned and this Agreement should not be construed as a sale of any rights.
From the Blizz terms.
WoW has always revolved around having a server handle everything and your client is just the textures/models viewer where you tell the server what to do, I have been fine with this. But I do agree, it should say something else on the button. Other games that are not MMO shouldn’t be a “license” to play. If you buy it, you can play it whenever and wherever. Features that are not multiplayer should work regardless. Some things just shouldn’t be tied to a server. I really despise modern gaming because of this.
Anecdotal experience: Gran Turismo Sport recently lost its servers. When they went down, the Mileage Exchange shop went with it. This means all the cosmetics for cars. and a few unique cars, are now unobtainable for future players. PD could have patched the shop to be a complete list of everything and you buy it with the plethora of points you will collect in the future as you race. But no, they didn’t.
This is not unique to Blizzard, and has nothing to do with their latest EULA changes. Binding arbitration has been part of their EULA for years, long before the latest one arrived. (The earliest copy I’ve found is from 2018, and I don’t think it was new even then.)
For reference, here’s a diff showing the latest changes: rentry.co/yuu78kqd
Both that and the unilateral changing of terms post-sale are horrible practices that we should all pressure our legislators to make illegal, and perhaps reject by voting with our wallets, but singling out one company for it takes attention away from the larger issue: It has been widespread in the software industry for a long time.
If EULAs are going to be legally binding, there should really be some standard mechanism, an API, on systems to display one such that the system can record a copy and you can see differences and such. Otherwise, you’re entering into a contract with some random party and only they have a copy or and see what changed across versions.
If such a display API is available on a given platform and isn’t used, could simply make the EULA automatically non-binding.
I’m willing to believe that there are legitimately cases where one does need license agreements to fix issues that extend beyond standard consumer law, but the current situation is simply a dumpster fire. Also, some EULAs have been held unenforceable, so even from the standpoint of the software company, it’s a mess as to whether their license is actually going to stand up; there are no clear lines to which a lawyer can conform to make their license hold up.
Some other possible tweaks:
Require that prior to sale, existence of a EULA be prominently disclosed and be readable.
I personally would much rather have industry adopting standard licenses than having every company creating ad-hoc licenses. Like, in the open-source world, the GPL and MIT licenses deal with a number of problems that open source software runs into, and I can learn once what each entails and quit looking at it. I’d rather have there be agreements for commercial software that work the same way. If industry needs flexibility, I think that it’s reasonable to say that they don’t all need to custom-craft solutions. I’d rather like legislation that encourages industry use of a limited number of widely-used agreements rather than hand-crafting them. Maybe add some kind of tax on non-standard EULAs, dunno.
Disallow change-without-notice as a EULA condition; there should be no legitimate reason for this. If you got agreement once, you can get it again. Require that any change notice also provide a way to see the “delta” between the old license and the new license, just the changes.
One thing to keep in mind, though. They have more money than we do and will use this extra step to make it that much harder for them to face any consequences of their negative actions
They need to limit EULAs to something like 600 words.
Make them binding and non-changing to the product purchased, only newly purchased products can get the updated EULA.
They should make a Ethics Policy (things like no cheating, be kind, no swearing, etc.) separate from the EULA. This Ethics policy can be updated whenever.
Make them binding and non-changing to the product purchased, only newly purchased products can get the updated EULA.
So I think I see what you’re getting at, because I was thinking about it in another comment and considered that, but I think that that’s probably overly-strict. There are some cases where legislation requires that a service provider act differently, and their EULA may be incompatible with that. Or where they’ve made a legal error in their initial EULA – you gotta have some route to fix that. Though I suspect that it’s possible to carve a smaller hole for that than is currently the case.
I have another comment where I make one suggestion to tighten up that hole a bit:
Yeah, I think that a EULA change should reasonably permit for some kind of refund. Maybe have some mechanism for deprecating the value of the service based on use – like, if you expect a typical online game to be online for 10 years and a user has used it for 5 and the service wants to change the EULA, mandate the option for a 50% refund in lieu of continued service under the new EULA or something.
That’d make games more expensive, but it’s a risk that companies could factor in when deciding on EULAs and the initial price.
That avoids the possibility of a bait-and-switch where you agree to one (acceptable) EULA, but then the vendor places you in a position of either agreeing to a new EULA or losing your money.
We already do things like that to evaluate how much an old vehicle is worth or how much life insurance is worth or something like that.
That being said, it’d also make games with an online service component more of a formal commitment than is the case today, in consumer law. As things stand, that’s mostly done on the on the honor system or via publishers being concerned about loss of reputation, and…honestly, I’d say that in general, that works pretty well. Companies don’t usually just immediately shut down service. But in order to do that, you’d have to have some kind of minimum concept of service that a consumer is actually expecting to get when they buy a game so that you can value how much of that service they actually received.
EDIT: Honestly, think that there’s a fair argument that games like that should make money via “microsubscriptions”. Like, the problem is more that people pay for an up-front game and get free bundled service rather than pay for service, so we have to come up with some kind of totally artificial value of how much the service is worth. You can’t have every game have a subscription as things stand…I mean, game publishers are not gonna take subscription fees of 50 cents each month for a game, because the transaction costs will kill them, though that might well otherwise be perfectly profitable and a viable way to make money. Hmm. Maybe someone like Steam could aggregate subscription fees from all users on Steam, then dole out the subscription to the game services that a given user subscribes to.
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