Over the time people paid for DLCs that don’t even exist anymore.
I remember very well back in the time, they said they’d bring contents back, they’re just “vaulted”, well, now the official continuous development is over, where is the content?
If I understand well, if the development is over, the content won’t come back, this promise doesn’t make any sense anymore.
I know there was a few legal problems for them but it seems they’re still well and alive, how?
Apparently even if you have a physical copy of a game, you’re SoL. Even the physical disc is only just a “license” to play the game. You don’t actually have rights with it apparently.
Which is fucking bullshit. Almost nothing else in the world works like that. Once you own something, it’s yours and you can do whatever the fuck you want with it, except video games.
Everything is like that. You buy a CD, DVD, record album, painting, concert ticket, movie ticket, whatever it is, you don’t own the artwork, the creator retains the rights to the artwork, you just own a limited license to view it. You can’t go put on your own concert or show using that license without consulting the owner. You can’t create derivative works without consulting the owner. You can’t make copies without consulting the owner.
It’s not just video games, that’s just how copyright works.
It’s a perpetual license for your copy of the game. That’s why it’s a license because otherwise you would be buying the game, not just a copy.
It’s just like buying music on CD. You’re only buying a licensed copy.
The big question with this stuff is what would happen if Bungie or any other ‘live-service’ game company were taken to court over their licensing. Bungie has no subscription, everything is a one time purchase and there is no expiration date for the software license sold. In theory they should get destroyed in court but ehhh… capitalism, so who knows.
Here’s a great video from the guy that started Stop Killing Games that explains it better than me.
What makes it much more fucked up than music is that it’s not a license to any particular copy of the game, it’s only a license to whatever the publisher says the game is at any given time.
They could replace the entire game with a My Little Pony gardening sim and they’d be completely within their rights. It’s broken.
In some ways it indicates the world needs to come up with more terms to describe owning something. If I own a copy of Mistborne, the book, that doesn’t mean I could produce a Mistborne movie. I’m only permitted to read the works of another person, not make my own off it.
That licensure arrangement has existed a long time, while the word “own” has been in use for both cases.
And the purchase I made for the game was basically rendered pointless when they went F2P, there was no thought or talk of that license having an expiration date until the “content vault” happened.
And then the “vault” itself being an entire legal loophole just so they could delete the entire game people paid money for. People say the data still exists somewhere and it would be too much work to update it all to the new engine, but that’s just cope. It doesn’t exist anymore; they had to use third-party evidence, which is inadmissible, in their big court case, which tells me that it doesn’t exist anymore.
What a goddamn shitshow.
Edit: all that said, if I bought the physical copy of the game, I should still be able to access and play the removed content, because my “license” didn’t change or technically expire.
Not to say the game changed to free-to-play model, and back in the time they were still selling physical copies of it in the stores, lol.