Essentially, has
Flagship's fantastic failure turned marginally honest retailers into fraudsters?
This one's been tickling me for a while now, and the legality around it is not something I've been particularly concerned with, but it's still interesting.
For those not up to speed with the drama:
- Spoiler (show)
- Towards the end of 2007 Flagship Studios released its first foray into the MMORPG/FPS feed-bucket.
Lauded as the must have title of the year, (and carrying all the credit due to its ex-Blizzard employees), by many a pundit and given, (for reasons i still cannot fathom), some of the highest ratings ever recorded in the history of over publicised tripe, Hellgate London was going to appeal to everyone, (kiddies, malcontents, rabid poodles and even half chewed gum stuck to the bottom of public seating).
Bragging a courageous blend of RPG and FPS, along with the somewhat suspect claim of 'randomly generated' maps, the publisher managed to rope in a solid number of juicy sucke... subscribers who were falling over each other to hand over extra cash in order to play with all the content, (as opposed to the modified sticks the 'free' users had access to). Some even went so far as to blow a princely sum for lifetime membership - (naturally, a large number of these individuals were subsequently institutionalised).
Needless to say, the game was average to ok... the content was fairly interesting but it soon dawned on even the dimmest of sane pieces of gum that the gameplay was... dull. The random-map-generator was stuck on "randomly shuffle the same building around the place with some randomly placed chests that spat out random stuff". The maps themselves were, for the most part, grim reminders of what must be like to be a rat in a really simple maze. The avatars available suffered an embarrassingly large number of play-balance-obliterating bugs and the patches required to get in during updates were some of the most ambitious I've seen to date.
Naturally, the business soon tanked leaving all those subscribers a little red in the face... mostly due to high blood pressure.
What has been puzzling me no end is that the product is still on sale, (despite the fact that the servers were due to say their final farewell at the end of Jan, 2009 - possibly not if NAMCO keep them up a wee bit longer, but they will be gone fairly soon).
There are 2 issues here.
Firstly, like most modern DRM victims, the product cannot be played until it has been activated. As activation is handled entirely online, at some point, (in the very near future), retailers will be selling 300+ rands worth of nothing.
Secondly, they have been plugging, (since July/August of last year), half the product at full price as , (even if you were dilly enough to want to pay for the balance of the content), subscriptions were put on hold indefinitely.
While class action is probably out of the question, is there a risk here? If so, what does this say about this type of DRM? Surely the product should have been pulled when subscriptions were frozen, (or, at best, reduced to clear with notification).
<1 baby fur seal for every tldr;..>