I do not understand the legal consequences of this. There were whales that paid thousands to have items in the game - those just vanish?
Edit: These whales took the game seriously. "Meet you at the office to discuss something" serious. I expect a class action very quickly. Disclosure: worked at zynga.
> There were whales that paid thousands to have items in the game - those just vanish?
Yup.
> These whales took the game seriously. "Meet you at the office to discuss something" serious. I expect a class action very quickly.
Very sure the terms of sale for those items made them contingent on the continuation of the service, which was expressly in Zynga’s discretion. Selling added privileges related to another service that only survive as long as the base service is offered is fairly routine; there's nothing novel happening here, even prior to online games with premium items (of which this is not the first to shut down, anyhow.)
Plenty of vendors sell DRM-free ebooks in widely-supported formats (PDF, ePub); most, IME, publishers that sell directly do, it's the separate big stores that tend to have DRM-infested content.
Actually, many of publishers selling directly not only sell DRM free, but you get a variety of formats when you purchase, rather than purchasing separately by format.
Just buy it and strip the DRM from it. Philosophical arguments aside, the publisher/author got their money, you get a book you own which is what you wanted. Assuming you aren't then hosting it somewhere where everyone can download it for free nobody is harmed and there is no reason not to do this.
I generally avoid them for reference books, but for novels since I very rarely re-read them. I'm willing to make the trade-off for convenience and (sometimes) lower prices, but I go into it eyes open knowing the risks.
I do worry about things like Steam though, which unless the game is available DRM-free from GOG, may be the only place you can buy the game-- or at least no different in terms of DRM lock in and risk of the platform shutting down than other platforms like Epic or Origin etc.
Downpour.com, Libro.fm, and Audiobooksnow.com are my go-to's (the last of these has a tiny handful of DRM'd titles, so check for a "Downloadable" symbol). Each of these has subscription memberships which you should take advantage of; you can cancel at any time, so I usually subscribe, buy, and cancel all at once when I want a book.
Google Play audiobooks are also DRM-Free, but tend to be more expensive.
I do also occasionally buy from Audible, when a book isn't available anywhere else. You can strip the DRM with ffmpeg once you know the key for your account. But most audiobooks can be had natively DRM-Free if you shop around a bit.
I tend to favor ebooks for things that I know have a shorter shelf life. Especially technology stuff. There are books I may read again in 10 or 20 years, but technology books are outdated within a couple of years at most. It seems wasteful to get them on paper.
Depends how you look at it. O'reilly sub is a good value even if it's 'rental' only. If only one could read/access them on kindle.. but that's another, yet related topic.
I didn't mind renting videos and I don't mind "renting" ebooks for an indiscriminate amount of time. The convenience is worth it, having to store every book you purchase comes with costs too.
Yeah agreed. Never purchase those that needs a reader or something. Of course there are programs to extract the pdf files but it's always a bit too much for me. ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY CHARGE ALMOST THE SAME AS A REAL BOOK.
Oh. Why not offer non DRM formats to begin with because I am paying equal to or more than the paperback price of a book and not some bullshit license and shit. OP is saying he/she refuses to accept the whole renting/licensing shenanigans in ebooks. If Apple can sell you a non DRM mp3 for $.99 a pop, why the fuck does it need DRM for an eBook. ?
Your only option is to either buy a paperback or pirate and downloading on kindle and then finding a PDF and then printing it should not happen to a paying customer.
DRM is often the choice of the publisher, not the retailer. (Amazon makes it very difficult to get a DRM-free version though, even when the publisher has authorized it)
I figured someone in this thread should look at the terms of service. It says that Zynga owns the items and you're allowed to use them while the service is offered (5). It also says that their maximum liability is the amount you paid in the past 180 days (14). They make no promises or guarantees that the service will always be available and may withdraw services for business or operational needs (13).
Specifically, it says "you do not own any Virtual Items that you obtained through our Services, regardless of whether you “earned” those Virtual Items or “purchased” them. Your Account and any related Virtual Items are owned by Zynga. Zynga gives you a limited license and right to use your Account and the related Virtual Items while we offer the Services."
In spirit, it's similar: "We sold you a thing, but it's not really yours." Eventually, that changed, presumably because people resented not actually owning the things that they reasonably believe they owned.
It'll be interesting to see how this evolves. This is clearly different, in that "purchased" items only really exist on the Zynga servers; the burdens fall differently. But in the coming decades I wouldn't be surprised to see some consumer protection laws around virtual purchases.
Theres been games that have ported over multiple platforms. Take for example Habbo Hotel. Started off with Shockwave, then before that EOL’d they rewrote it in Flash, and now they are working on a Unity web assembly based rewrite. I think the reality is FarmVille isn't as popular as it once was. I haven’t heard of anybody playing it in years. Funny how games got people to be far more active on Facebook but their usage died down significantly over time. With how addictive those games were for some its probably for the best.
It is interesting since it is not pure EOL. I mean, if Microsoft discontinues support for Windows it does not force you to uninstall it. And with Flash it is exactly the case. Each other day it prompts me to uninstall it even while I didn't ask for any of such support.
It seems like Adobe gave itself permission to control what is on my computer. But does it really have authority to do so?
Actually, all Adobe-provided flash distributions will refuse to run past a certain date. You’ll have to go back a few versions to find one compiled without the kill switch. To use it, you’ll literally have to run it in a VM on an outdated OS with the system time set back a few years.
Thanks, I didn't know that. Seems like Adobe took enormous effort to kill all software written with Flash. While I understand some security concerns I can not stop thinking it is just another way to cripple the web. Obviously propertiary app platforms gain a lots with this move.
How do proprietary platforms gain a lot with Adobe killing Flash? Flash itself was proprietary. And Adobe is advocating for a not proprietary alternative that was recently released and is called HTML5.
Sure, killing Flash sucks for all the games, but Adobe isn’t really doing anything illegal.
Flash is not propertiary platform. Flash is a tehnology that allowed you to run apps in your browser. It didn't control what apps you are allowed to run because it is not a platform but a software.
HTML5 is not near to replace Flash, and with main propertiary platform owners controlling browser market, it may never become Flash replacement.
Morally, shouldn't it clearly be Zynga's fault, since the game was designed so that it only runs on top of a technology stack that can not be replicated by third parties and only they are technically capable of changing this design?
If they sell thousands of dollars worth of digital items then yes, they should have a moral obligation to support those customers. Particularly given the murky exploitative psychological tricks employed by these games to get customers in the first place.
It may be legal to steal digital items from users because of antiquated laws that don't recognize digital items as items worthy of protection, but it certainly isn't moral.
1. Should Zynga buy back those items at a lower price because they are used items?
2. What happens to cars (because we love car analogies) when the manufacturer stops building spare parts? In this case they are either collected from old cars or somebody else build those parts. Maybe should Zynga at least try to sell the game infrastructure with data? That would be like relying on third party spare parts but the car keeps going. Of course if nobody buys the game, maybe even for free, that's it
3. Other ideas?
By the way, this isn't the first time an online game shuts down and players lose everything, right?
There's a big difference between "we're not making spare parts for your car anymore" and "we put a thermite charge in your car's engine, and we're remotely detonating it the day that we stop making spare parts for it".
When Microsoft closed their cloud-based ebook business in 2019, they refunded 100% of the money to the people who lost access to the books they bought. This was the correct response to shutting down servers.
> When Microsoft closed their cloud-based ebook business in 2019, they refunded 100% of the money to the people who lost access to the books they bought.
They probably had different terms of sale; buying books contingent on an external service is less attractive than buying in-game items contingent on the game.
> This was the correct response to shutting down servers.
Depending on the terms of sale, it may have been the minimum legally required response.
Car manufacturers are legally required to provide spare parts for about 7 years after sale. That's part of why discontinued car models are destroyed instead of sold at clearance discount.
And parts can be reverse-engineered/cloned too (as long as they aren't software-locked).
Zynga could offer to it's user to give their users credits to use in an alternate game, if they want.
No, you don't have a moral obligation for it to run in any future tech stack. But it should be able to run in the same tech stack it was running before, or provide some way to interoperate. The game shouldn't be designed in a way that makes it possible for someone else to unilaterally shut down the game with no recourse.
To illustrate, if FarmVille were an offline game that costed $1000, I could still set up a Windows XP computer, install Flash, and play it. It's not trivial, but it's very doable and legal.
But instead, actual FarmVille is designed so that it needs an online infrastructure (so far so good, it's a core part of the game after all), but by design this infrastructure can only be provided by Zynga. You can't replicate it even if you want to.
I'm not very familiar with Roblox, but if I understand it, it's an online platform that allows others to build games on top of it, and like Farmville the servers are exclusively provided by Roblox.
In this case, I would say the moral fault lies mainly in Roblox, since they are the ones providing the platform and hence making the decision to exclusively provide the servers (and that moral fault has not yet happened, it would only happen if when they shut down they don't provide an alternative).
If you are someone building on top of Roblox, I don't think you deserve the same amount of fault, but it's certainly something you have to consider. It's also a risk in that building on top of this design leaves you open to being de-platformed (like, for example with the iOS Store if Apple doesn't like your application).
For what it's worth, I don't think Roblox or Zynga are immoral because of this, just that on this particular topic they are morally faulty.
My bar for what should be acceptable as a recourse is also not very high. Providing any form of alternative like LAN play, closed-source server software, specifications or interoperability with other software would be enough for me. The problem I see with the current situation is the "last resort recourse" there is now in most cases, reverse engineering, is legally shaky, generally against the terms of service, terribly complicated and expensive and not guaranteed to succeed if critical parts of the application are server-side.
So should companies who provide software and devices worth MILLIONS to factories also port those from DOS 4.something to newer operating systems?
Because they don't. A friend had to source BIOS chips for fried ones for an out of warranty CNC machine from around the world just to not have it fail completely.
I think my post was unclear since you are not the first user interpreting it in this way.
I'm not saying companies should port their software to new operating systems and software stacks (presumably forever). The user would be responsible for providing whatever operating systems and software stack the program was built to work on.
What I'm saying is that it that companies should provide some way for users to continue using the product they bought, on the same software stack they were already using, when the company decides to shut it down. Anything better than the current situation where the online servers just go down and nothing is offered as an alternative would be much better. One pretty good way (but not the only one) they could do this is by releasing their server-side software, as it is. They don't need to open source it, they don't need to port it, and the user would be responsible for providing whatever underlying software stack it was designed to work on.
This is not tricky in the slightest. All the points you make are distractions from the central concept of what people understand purchasing something to mean.
The computers these people played on with auto-updates disabled, would continue to support Flash for eternity.
Your points would be valid if Zynga said "the thing you bought isn't going to run on new devices". But what they're saying is "we're breaking the thing you bought because not very many people can still give us money."
Purchases without a "XX years' functionality" label should be required to be functional in perpetuity or refunded.
If they read the user agreement they would see that the cash value of those items was zero. It is very similar to frequent flyer miles. Their value is zero. Delta can make 1 billion miles worth a diet soda tomorrow if they want.
Plenty of games have shut down after selling virtual goods. FarmVille did not invent the concept of selling virtual things for real money. I doubt a lawsuit will go anywhere.
What did you do at Zynga? It's surprising to think any gamer let alone an employee at a game studio (let alone a studio where whale hunting is the dominant business model) would think this is a new phenomenon and be confused in any way about what happens next. But anyway, nothing happens -- the servers shut down, the game is no more, no one gets sued. I don't even have to go find the EULA to be sure that it contains a clause about waiving class action rights in case anyone wanted to try. FarmVille isn't the first game and won't be the last game to do this. If anything, it's rather refreshing to see a non-gacha game in the long chain of shutdowns.
I think the original post is referring to the fact that they worked at zynga and as per their experience 'whales' met with or wanted to meet with zynga staff to discuss aspects of the game with zynga staff.
On the assumption that almost everyone would be better without Farmville in their lives and that such a loss might at least get some of them to reconsider the wisdom of their behavior, there would be a certain irony if such a class action suit were to be successful.
To play devil’s advocate: addiction fills a void in an unfulfilling life. Arguably computer games are better than drugs and the root cause of the sad life is not the addictive substance.
All that said, I shed no tears for any comeuppance that gets delivered to those who willfully profit off of the misfortune of others.
Unfortunately this predates 'big tech'. The real travesty of the big tech era is that instead of abandoning these antiquated profit driven ideals and improving society it just embraced them to an unimaginable degree while feeding us the same old lie. We're sold the future but in most ways still live in the past.
> To play devil’s advocate: addiction fills a void in an unfulfilling life.
Maybe so, but one would hope that even as far as self-destructive vices are concerned it's possible to pick something with more upside than Farmville addiction.
If you don't pay for physical products or tangible/useful services, then that's what happens. But look at it the bright side. The kind of people who burn cash on games would have instead thrown them on drugs, cigarettes, online gambling, or something even worse had these avenues never existed.
Many people where caught unawares by video game addiction. Cultures convey the dangers of drugs and gambling quite effectively allowing many susceptible people to avoid them, but IAP where a very new thing.
These kinds of games make it worse by using real-time timers (and real-life money).
I tend to get quite addicted to video games, but gave up on even trying those with these kinds of mechanics, as the reward/(danger+cost) ratio is just too bad.
I too think it's preposterous that it's somehow okay for companies to simply make disappear things you've bought/spent money on/anything like that.
This is the main reason I avoid games like this. It's just a trap, nothing keeps the developer from retiring the game whenever it feels like, nothing keeps the developer from releasing an update that completely changes how the game plays. If you like a game now, next week they can rebalance it and introduce microtransactions and that's... perfectly okay it seems?
Reminds me of me of the Green Kayle skin I bought in League of Legends almost a decade ago. Pricks changed the base design of the model and did so for the paid skin as well.
Seems to be a common pattern. Eg in world of tanks/warships, there are "premium" tanks/ships you can buy for money and which are slightly better than the free vehicles at the same tier.
While they are decent enough to not reduce the specs of stuff people have paid for, what they do is boost other vehicles and introduce new ones, which over time has the same effect.
Edit: These whales took the game seriously. "Meet you at the office to discuss something" serious. I expect a class action very quickly. Disclosure: worked at zynga.