Dev Kills Cloud Version Of Game On Switch, Offers Discount To Rebuy It For Switch 2
from the chutzpah dept
We’ve talked a great deal about the Stop Killing Games movement and those discussions have typically traveled along two paths of importance.
On the one hand, the movement is very important to those of us that care about the preservation of video games. A huge problem with allowing developers and publishers to simply shutdown backend servers needed to run games that were designed to require those same server is that those games simply disappear in their original form. If we accept that video games are both art and culture, and I don’t think either is particularly arguable at this point, allowing shared culture to disappear before it enters the public domain is an unacceptable violation of the bargain that is copyright to begin with. In those instances, developers and publishers got their monopoly, but negated the part where said monopoly is supposed to be limited in nature, with the art ending up in the public domain.
The second path of importance is that of the rights of the individual consumer. The public in large part believes it’s buying a game when it makes these purchases. And, yes, the truth buried in terms of service and other legal documents is that in many cases the public is only buying a limited license to play the game, one which the publisher can revoke in part or whole at any time by shutting down support for the product. But if you think that this fact somehow makes none of this a problem, you’re a corporate boot-licker and you should be ashamed of yourself. Sometimes these shutdowns happen very shortly after the game is released and promises of refunds to those that paid for them can be fleeting.
But, man, if you think it’s bad for a developer or publisher to not make good on refunds of a purchased game it shut down, wait until you get a load of Cold Iron Studios, which recently shutdown the cloud-only version of Aliens: Fireteam Elite on the Nintendo Switch.
Following its announcement in March, game developer Cold Iron Studios has shut down the servers for the cloud version of Aliens: Fireteam Elite on the Nintendo Switch. The game originally cost $30 (or $60 for an “Ultimate” version with additional content).
Cold Iron Studios hasn’t offered customers refunds.
TheGamer reported that affected players are entitled to a discount for the Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game, which is a 2021 co-op, third-person shooter based on the Alien film franchise. However, that would mean paying money for a game that you have already paid money for once.
There’s chutzpah, and then there’s fucking chutzpah. The developer ripped away the ability to play a game that people spent money on. Then, rather than offering refunds, they instead offered to sell the game again to those same customers on the new console for a slightly lesser price. That isn’t giving your customers the middle finger. It’s gather up an entire city’s worth of middle fingers and jamming them up your customers’ noses and then asking them to pay for it.
Now, nobody thinks that this version of the game was bought in massive numbers on the original Switch. But I don’t really see how that matters. If you sell something to someone, then take it away, you should return the money you got for it. If you’re hiding behind the “it’s just a license” mantra, then you’re telling the public not to trust you. And maybe simply to not trust digital purchases entirely. And, given some other recent news, that becomes a pretty big problem.
When companies erase digital copies from people’s libraries and make games harder to access, the recent uproar over the announcement that there won’t be physical discs made for PlayStation games as of January 2028 makes sense.
The folks at Stop Killing Games have this exactly right, because situations like this are not only untenable, but the lack of action is making these companies all the more brazen. The audacity of taking something away from a customer and trying to get them to pay for it again is breathtaking.
As is the unwillingness to act on the part of our government and consumer rights groups.
Filed Under: aliens: firestorm elite, ownership, stop killing games, video games
Companies: cold iron studios
Comments on “Dev Kills Cloud Version Of Game On Switch, Offers Discount To Rebuy It For Switch 2”
They are also requiring you buy another console that maybe you weren’t planning to buy.
Further, for the fucks who like to argue that you didn’t buy x, you bought a license for x: Well then the license should good regardless what circumstances one wishes to enjoy it (what system one might play it on, in this case). This nonsense has always been rent-seeking, whether it is platform-dependency for games or trying to criminalize recording vinyl albums onto cassette, or the same w regards to making works avaikable in Braille.
Haha
Truth in advertising
The big problem I have with this is that all the game “stores” talk about buying a GAME, not buying a temporary license.
If a realtor disguised rental properties as “home sales” and hid the truth in the fine print, he’d go to jail for fraud.
If they said up-front you were just buying a temporary license, I’d have no complaints. I don’t care about “killing games”, I care about people being suckered into thinking they were buying a game when they weren’t.
Do these games come with some kind of formal, written, perpetual commitment to keep the servers running?
If so, what kind of idiots are selling them?
If not, what kind of idiots are buying them?
There’s no way they still have all that money. I’m sure they had to give a cut to Fox, who own the Alien franchise (although Fox did later briefly own the game studio…); maybe also to Ridley Scott, James Cameron, and the H. R. Giger estate, if their contracts are good enough to defeat Hollywood Accounting. And the the studio has presumably been paying for employees and servers; should everyone involved also refund the money they received for this now-failed project?
The most practical thing to do, apart from defaulting, is keep the game running. In which case we can go back to the “I don’t really see how that matters” statement: if the game “sold” only in small numbers, and presumably is being played in even smaller numbers, that makes the servers relatively cheap to operate. In that sense, it does matter. And those servers are several years old, which should help (but maybe won’t because of the “A.I.” bullshit driving up prices).
But the root cause here is that the company took a one-time payment for a continuing benefit. In finance, that’s called “an annuity”—more specifically, “a perpetuity”—and is a highly regulated product. To sell one without any plan on how to provide it is called “fraud”. The fraud happens, and can be prosecuted, at the time and place of sale—not just in the U.S. and only years later when the payor defaults. That the fine print would have revealed the advertising claims (directed at unsophisticated buyers) to be false is not a defense.
If consumer protection regulators are slacking, affected people should try convincing their insurance and financial regulators to act.
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Nowhere NEAR the first software company to do this. McAfee over a decade ago comes to mind.
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If by “this” you mean shutting down servers, yeah, that’s exactly why people are trying to form a movement.
I’m not sure what McAfee thing you’re referring to, although I’m not surprised to see them associated with shady behavior. Whatever it was must have been sufficiently in-character to not even make the Wikipedia page.
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Yanking support for “perpetual” licenses. You know. The thing being talked about?
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“There’s no way they still have all that money.”
That’s a “them” problem, not an “us” problem.
If I got caught stealing money from you, I wouldn’t get out my responsibility to pay it back to you by saying “whoops, I already spent it”.
Guess I know what studio I won’t be buying games from.
Classic bait and switch.
Of course Nintendo Switch developers are going to do abusive shit to their customers. They are willing to spend money on a product from a company that fuckig hates them. So the developers know they have easy marks.