I don't play games very often. I take my primary entertainment through education for some odd reason. I'm usually listening to some video to teach me how to do some odd thing that I may or may not actually ever do, but I now know how to. But then I ended up reinstalling Linux the other day because my Python was somehow messing up, and my OS happens to use Python to update, and had somehow fucked up Steam weeks ago, and I just didn't bother to look into why. Yeah, sometimes you just don't wanna unravel the tangle of knots that somehow kinked up your system.
Long story short, I can finally play games again. And I just so happen to have a kick ass graphics card that I ironically bought for training AI.
Yes, I am that geek.
So I've been playing some games for the last few days, rather than looking into the Beem library, which was the entire reason I finally dealt with the issue of my Python fucking up.
I had managed to get it to update my system weeks prior through reinstalling multiple things, but it still wasn't really fully working right, and eventually I just got tired of trying to figure out what got messed up where. Sometimes in updates over months or years things just go haywire when you're on a rolling release distro.
I probably could have fixed it with some help from some Linux guru, but I couldn't be asked.
Then just a few minutes ago, I'm checking out games I haven't played in a while, or at all, and I try launching one that I don't really remember. What I really don't remember was the long AF user agreement that it pops up and forces you do agree with some scary ass language saying that you have to read it in full and it is legally binding and blah blah blah.
Bitch, I paid for your game. Granted, I probably got it on sale, but your ass is forcing me to agree to a contract to play a game I paid for?
I don't think that's even fucking legal.
I'm actually pretty sure it's not.
It's like back in the day when games had long ass user agreements inside the box and they made you agree to them if you wanted to play the game. You didn't read it before you bought it, and the store for damn sure wasn't gonna just give you your money back for a game on a disk back in the day.
This is the same situation. I don't know if I agreed to a similar license when I bought the game before, but given that it wanted me to log into a third party server I have no recollection of, I'm betting it's been updated.
So here I have a game forcing me to read through a legal document, and agree to it, to play even a single player version of the game that I purchased.
Bitch, what?
This kind of shit happens all the time these days.
Companies have gotten used to users not agreeing to random terms of use, and having no power to disagree if they want to play their game. Even if they wanted to disagree, they probably didn't read it before purchase, and if they don't play the game immediately, even if Steam can tell that you only have a few minutes of play logged, they won't fucking refund you if it's more than 15 days I believe.
Do you have any idea how many games I have that I have never gotten around to playing?
It's disgusting.
I get them in sales and in bundles because I WANT to play them...but then playing a game takes up so much time, and I'd usually rather do research, trade crypto, and even read some dumb social media.
I could probably give up some of the social media. But this one that I use actually has this system where they force you to read through other people's shit posts if you don't want to lose money generated from the staked tokens you put in your account.
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Blank Stare Feb 19, 2012, 9-48 AM
BY F Delventhal from Outside Washington, D.C., US (source)
Used under CC BY 2.0 License
The system that they've designed in the US allows limited recompense for the standard individual. What am I supposed to do, start a class action for some dick forcing me to agree to a user agreement to play a game I probably paid $5 or less for?
I think I could maybe win...if it weren't for the fact that individuals have to pay lawyers thousands of dollars to represent them against corporations that by their nature likely have far more money, and a lawyer on retainer. There is established precedent that they're not supposed to force you to agree to a legal document after purchase. And there is mounting case law against the idea that games and digital content is a license, and not an actual purchase of a product. But that's the thing...no one except some insane millionaire would possibly do that. That's why these companies get away with this shit. They have to wait until someone gets so pissed off that they spend thousands of dollars, or go through the hassle to try to start a class action with the help of a large law firm, just to stick it to some shitty company that thought they could get away with some shit because their lawyer said they could.
But even though I think I could maybe win, I probably wouldn't, because the entire deck is stacked against me. We have an entire system that may as well have been designed to screw over the little guy, if it wasn't in fact, designed for just that. One could argue that after so many years of the rich running the place, it kinda is.
Not that I actually would sue them over a shitty user agreement. Not like it's legally binding given the nature of the forced signature. But I have to go through the entire things now to play this game. What the fuck. Otherwise for all I know they're installing spyware and monitoring every application I run under the guise of preventing cheating. And yes, that's a thing.
The point of this entire rant is that I can't play my shitty game, because of this, and I have no recompense, and this kind of shit happens all the time, because corporations know that they can screw people over and force them into shitty user agreements, because they know they have all the power.
And what's worse is that people continue to buy their shitty games!
I and many other people have had enough of this shit that we try to look if there is anything shady for anti-cheat or DRM, but sometimes you just forget to look, or you only look for common ones, rather than having to refuse to play anything that says you have to log in or whatever.
These companies are probably gonna keep doing this shit until it gets so financially detrimental for them to pull this shit that they can't get away with it. And even then they'll likely ignore the incidents that happen after a week or two, or a few months, and another title will come out with horribly bad DRM and it will cause another huge controversy and they'll totally forget about it and do it again until they literally are forced out of business. That's the only way this will stop.
Then another company will buy them up, and the whole process will start again.