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thephyber • today at 6:03 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

Your complaint is probably moot foot dragging. Companies aren't held liable for breaking a law that didn't exist at the time they released a product.

An ever-evolving game with properties of a SaaS would likely not exist under this new law.

Blizzard already knew how to build self-contained products with self-contained expansions even before WoW was released. StarCraft was the original game and StarCraft Broodwar was the expansion. It will affect game release cycles and properties of what you get with the game, but that's seems like part of the point of the legislation.


Replies

dageshi • today at 8:18 AM

The industry would certainly adapt.

For example, massive expansion of free to play games with cosmetic microtransactions.

When the game ends... what is it that you've bought? The cosmetics, you never bought the game. If they give you an offline "shooting range" mode where you can wander the maps in the cosmetics you bought, have they satisfied the requirements? Again, you never bought the game you bought the cosmetics.

A step farther, loot drops in loot boxes that take time to unlock, on the order of days, weeks or months. You buy something to accelerate the unlock process down to hours. What have you bought? Just a faster unlock of something you'd have received anyway. So what are you owed when the game goes end of life? You didn't buy the game, you didn't buy the contents of the lootbox.