Gordan Freeman's fighting for Consumer Rights! Wanna help? 2024-02-27 18:37:20 (edited 2024-02-27 18:40:56)
Meet Ross Scott:
If this decade could smile, this is what it'd look like.
Ross Scott is the voice of Dr. Gordon Freeman...unofficially in a series called Gordon Freeman's Mind where he voices the Gordon's thoughts over gameplay footage. He started it back in the aughts and is still making it to this day! If you know him at all, it's prolly from that series, but that's not all he's done. While he started back in the day with honestly, pretty impressive machinima shorts, he now largely splits his time between making Freeman's Mind, a series reviewing obscure titles called Ross's Game Dungeon and informing people of the latest games that you can no longer play in a series called Dead Game News. It's that last series that this thread is about.
As of this post, this is the latest video by Ross talking about Ubisoft's open-world racing game The Crew...except it's actually not. His previous video talked about The Crew and how Ubisoft is going to shut down the servers to the game this upcoming April, making the game literally unplayable and a worthless purchase for anyone who bought it...and he wanted to so something about it! He asked his viewers for feedback on what they as consumers can do in response to what he considers to be a straight up illegal practice. This video is him talking about the responses he got and...actions that can be taken to straight up make the practice of shutting down games illegal!
I strongly recommend you watch it, especially if you live outside the US. It's gotta 50+ min runtime, but you only need to watch the first 20, because that's the part relevant to fighting back! Basically, he's calling on anyone who will listen to get him information on how a person who legally purchased The Crew can contact their country's consumer rights associations/gov't dept and lodge a formal complaint against Ubisoft once they shut down the servers so he can compile a system that will allow consumers to lodge those complaints as easily as possible en masse.
...unless you're a US citizen. Yeah, the rest of the video after the 20 min mark is him talking about US consumer rights to videogames and how he found out that...we basically have none. Turns out there's a case that went to court: ProCD vs Zeidenburg that set precedent for consumer rights to computer software in the US that basically stipulated that the EULA is what determines the rights you have to any software you purchase and if it doesn't list any, you don't have any. It pretty much means that US law does not recognize consumer software ownership...period.
...well shit, that's a bummer.
So yeah, if you live across our ponds, watch the video and if ya got any info to provide or know someone who can help, give him an email! He's got it listed in the video and I don't put that shit in posts anymore cause I have arachnophobia. :P
