Patrick Breyer and Niklas Nienaß submitted questions to the European Commission on the topic of killing games (the latter in contact with Ross and two EU based lawyers).
EU won’t commit to answering whether games are goods or services.
EULA are probably unfair due to imbalance of rights and obligations between the parties.
Such terminations should be analyzed on a case-by-case basis (preferably by countries rather than EU).
Existing laws don’t seem to cover this issue.
Campaign in France seems to be gaining some traction. Case went to “the highest level where most commercial disputes submitted to DGCCRF never go”.
UK petition was suppose to get a revised response after the initial one was found lacking. Due to upcoming elections all petitions were closed and it might have to be resubmitted.
Also in UK, there’s a plan to report games killed in the last few years to the Competition and Markets Authority starting in August (CMA will get some additional power by then apparently).
No real news from Germany, Canada or Brazil.
Australian petition is over and waiting for a reply. Ross also hired a law firm to represent the issue.
This is a simplified version of simplified version.
EU won’t commit to answering whether games are goods or services.
I think I’d have a category for both.
You can’t call an SNES cartridge a service, but similarly, you can’t call, oh, an online strip poker service a good.
I suspect that most good-games have at least some characteristics of a service (like patches) and most service-games have at least some characteristics of a good (like software that could be frozen in place).
I think that the actual problem is vendors unnecessarily converting good-games into service-games, as that gives them a route to get leverage relative to the consumer. Like, I can sell a game and then down the line start data-mining players or something. I think that whatever policy countries ultimately adopt should be aimed at discouraging that.
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