The EULA is there to protect the company. Most EULAs and/or ToS are written more strict than the company can reasonably enforce simply to help expedite scenarios where a true breach occurs. the lighter the EULA is written the more difficult it will be for the company to take action when they need and deserve to.

That said, consumers read the EULA with reasonable expectations attached to the statements. You CANNOT MAKE COPIES!!!! (with skull and crossbone icon)... simply means to most reasonable people that they cannot sell copies and keep the original.

The purpose of the class action, IMHO is to correct the companies that overstep their bounds in what can be truly expected or demanded of the customer. Its one thing to SAY we can turn off the games you bought. Its a completely other thing to actually do it.

In this case, Valve says you don't own the game. Fine. Agreed, the rights owners own it. I still bought a right to play and should be able to play whenever I want. They also include a clause about removing features. Again, I think it can be reasonably assumed that the feature would only be removed in extreme circumstances... I.E. a server melts or a building collapses, and the service will one day be restored. Valve taking games away because they feel like it is not a very strong case in defending the EULA where customers have receipts for purchasing access rights to content.

Simply putting in the EULA that they can remove services does not mean they are in the right to do so without very provable legal reasons.

Obviously its up to the court systems, but IMHO, the class action suite is a way to keep the companies honest. Most of the class action suites I have seen yield a very small sum of money to the person opening the suite (around 5 - 10k) and then about 1 dollar to everyone that doesn't opt out or that opts in and then everything else goes to the lawyers. But as mentioned above, the precedence is what is most important to gamers. Whether a company can or can't get away with that behavior is key.

They didn't replaced PC because they had different purpose, but here we are not talking about a new device but just a different way to use the currently existing one.

That's the issue it does make perfect sense :

- if makes perfect sense for ISP, if they make some agreement with cloud providers they might be able to get their share of the profit (of course they would have to get rid of Net neutrality first or find a way around it) , they might even offer their own cloud based service (which would offer better latency for interactive stuff like games).

- If makes perfect sense for media companies, total control, subscription based pricing scheme, destruction of the second hand market, destruction of import market.

- And sadly it make perfect sense for a lot of "casual" users, all their documents,music, games available everywhere on all of their devices, nothing to configure, no backup to do.

Don't get me wrong as a customer I HATE could based services and I will try to avoid using most of them for as long as I can, but you can't say that using them doesn't make sense.
99% of the issues that average computer users have comes from a mistake they made them self, that's the same reason why a lot of peoples move to Mac and are happy with it, not because they are much more stable or safer than a decent PC, but simply because it's a lot harder to break things.

Those peoples will only see advantage with cloud based applications, with a dumb thin client it become nearly impossible to break something, lose all your data because you forgot to backup them, etc... not a single nano-second will they think about the risks, the privacy issue or the control they gave up.

For you and me maybe, but for the average joe, if he can play any game he want on his TV, his 5 years old computer or is shinning new iGadget he will be ecstatic, do you really think he will care about the latency, the lower resolution, the average video quality or the total loss of any king of potential ownership.

Yeah and maybe that in 10-20 years peoples will laugh about how peoples in 2010 really believed that Internet and/or Smartphones would continue to exists in 2020 and later, it's possible of course, but unlikely.

Once again it's impossible to predict the future, it's just that when all the signs points in the same direction, and for the short term future, it's very hard to pretend it will go the other way.

The only thing you bought is a subscription, subscription which duration is left entirely at Valve discretion, you agreed that Valve has the right to cancel your subscription any time they want, you even agree that Valve can change their EULA anytime they want leaving you only the right to accept it or cancel your account in the next 30 days, you can't "reasonably assume" anything else.

Class action is a good thing and like you said it helps when companies overstep their bounds...but as long as that include actually doing something they can be sued for, Class action is not a magic wand that can correct all wrongs.

If you remember the Spore DRM class action against EA, it wasn't because they used Securom, wasn't because they had online activation, and wasn't because they even had limited online activation, no, the class action was because they didn't inform the users that they had to install Securom and had activate the game online, that's why since then all games using online activation have "require an Internet connection for activation" written somewhere on the box.

In Steam case the EULA was perfectly clear on the subject, they never tried to hide it and the EULA is available for everyone to read before purchase so I don't really see what case peoples could have against them.

I don't think its that easy. On Steam's "welcome to Steam" page, it clearly says "Over 1,100 games are available to PURCHASE, download, and play from any computer." When you sell someone something and then put in the fine print that you didn't really buy anything, that is where it gets very grey. Why would someone read that line and assume they wouldn't get to play their games tomorrow? There might be a legitimate reason for Valve to pull a game. If that happens they just need to prove that they were being conscionable. If they decide to pull games to make more money or for a reason that could be construed in a non-kosher manner... then I think a law suite can stand. Again, just because its in a EULA doesn't mean it can be enforced. The courts decide that, I'm only saying there is a strong case to be made if STEAM remains in business and also removes games people paid for. I do read EULAs and its why I haven't bought a single steam game. That is a headache I never want to deal with.

I think part of the problem is that we aren't talking specific enough so its difficult to make the broader points. Rather than get much deeper in I'll just say again that the courts will decide and at that point we have all seen some crazy rulings in both directions :/

However, because this is up for discussion at all, is reason enough to avoid games from the company ;)

I agree that the vast majority of issues people have with their computers are due to their own actions. However, what matters is how much downtime user-caused problems result in, and how that compares to what kind of downtime they'd be dealing with with a fully cloud-based solution. Unless a user is really intent on doing stupid things computers these days can be set up to be pretty resistant to things getting broken, especially when it's configured with the particular user (and what they want to do with the computer) in mind. Personally I'm not sure that a fully cloud-based solution could achieve a similar level of uptime as a well-configured system used by an average user, once you factor in downtime resulting from both the cloud-based provider as well as any intermediaries necessary for the service to function (e.g. the user's ISP). We may eventually reach the point where cloud-based service providers and the intermediaries reach a level of service that they win out in reliability, but I just don't think we're even close to being there yet.

So word out of Gamescom is that Blizzard are pretty much confirming a console version of Diablo 3. One assumes that game will not require a constant internet connection to play. Maybe I will buy the console version when it comes out and then "pirate" the PC version... money goes to Blizz for Diablo 3 without supporting their always online scheme.

Assuming it's a good game anyway.

If your assumption is right and the console version also has multiplayer, it will be interesting to see how Blizzard rationalizes that PC version requires internet for single-player, but the console version doesn't. What was their argument for the "always online" again? :)
Maybe not, but then I don't know if the "casual gamer" will want to pay anything for his games either, when Facebook and Google+ will offer lots of games for free play (as long as you watch their ads). Maybe people who actually pay for their games will be considered truly hardcore gamers in the future.

There are many scenarios which are possible for what the future of gaming looks like. That is one possibility.

I think that analogy does not work because internet and smartphones have already proved their vitality over and over again, "cloud gaming" hasn't. Maybe WoW is the best example, but I think even it can be considered a niche for hardcore gamers. Most gamers have never played or seen WoW, besides one South Park episode.

You said all signs point to cloud gaming, but then some people also say ISPs and operators seem to become more wary of offering unlimited connections to customers, except for premium price. That is the first barrier.

Note, I do not say that clouds are not useful for many things. For example, I do find it very useful that my personal emails are not readable only from my desktop PC, but they are in e.g. Hotmail or Gmail account, and I can access them from any PC with any browser, or even my phone (even thought the user interface is generally quite poor when using a mere web browser for mails).

But for games cloud systems don't offer quite the same benefits, because I don't expect to play exactly the same game (e.g. Half-life 4) on both my PC and my smartphone. There the benefit of clouds is not really that big.

Yeah, I don't think the console overlords would approve of offline and online characters or the auction house either. One assumes they would have to make pretty heavy design changes. Then again there is no real reason they can't have a completely offline mode on PC either, their excuses are all BS.

in the latest patch from blizzard for starcraft 2. the can not now be offline

What Blizzard tells players....
"We're requiring constant On-line connectivity to reduce hacking & cheaters"

Fans rejoice!

What Blizzard tells the stock-holders....
"We're requiring constant Internet connectivity because we will be able to make more money in a shorter amount of time by being able to lead players to the RMAH like sheep to the slaughter, and it'll cut down on pirating. Heck, we are even thinking about charging a monthly fee."

Stock-holders cheer!

There is absolutely nothing in the changes that suggests such a thing. Bitch elsewhere.

(assuming you're talking about the 1.4.0 patch that it is not out yet, and not some future patch that you can see with your power :p)

more slap in the face by blizzard
http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/pause-button-in-diablo-iii

no pause button in single player game lmao

Good, we're in Atari 2600 age now.

Because it's not really single player. It's multi player with only one player.