http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8044125.stm

I don't think I've ever seen a game that couldn't be completed cos of a glitch

I've seen plenty of games that should never have been released due to the amount of bugs in them and patches required though, and I suspect that's what this is really about

It looks like an absolute can of worms to me, but I did laugh at this for a few reasons:



First of all, there's Francisco Mingorance , then there's getting into the nonsense of 'contractually licensed' with the EU - how daft is the BSA? The EU take these things almost personally (Google, M$ etc)

Regarding 'breach of contract', who the hell was ever gonna go to court over a duff game within the EU?

I have to say, overall and going by the tone of the whole article, I think there's more pros than cons here for the consumer. If I'm reading it right (and some of that's between the lines)

I don't mind it if games need patching because of some unexpected irregularity - the PC is such a diverse platform with dozens of potential hardware combinations that bugs are bound to crop up. What I do mind is the company not bothering to fix them when they come to light.

The smaller developers I can empathise with - while a piece of software isn't on sale there's no money coming in, so I can understand the rush to get it out of the door, especially when they know that it is just going to get torrented anyway.

There's no excuse with console games though - if it works on one PS3 or 360, it should work on them all.

If I'm not mistaken, Far Cry 2 was released last October but only last week was a patch released to fix the random freezes and save game corruption. A small developer I could understand, but Ubisoft have no excuse.

Id happily sue whoever made Two Worlds, quite honestly, the biggest load of moneygrabbing ballsed up rubbish ever...
It reminded me of the AI of the early MoH's on PS1 and suchlike combined with the graphics on a next gen PC, thus making it unplayable (on my old rig fps was around 1).

The AI meant that you could attack dogs and run to the edge f their 'zone' then happily shoot them with arrows whilst they couldnt move further towards you....

It truely was (and is) a crime.

This goes deeper than games. Games may be the target for now - as not being able to lay a game because of a bug in frustrating, and a good bit of PR for the cause. I think that Big Target is software generally. I think the EU wants all software to be treated as tangible goods. If I buy an app and find that it’s junk, because I have broken the seal on the box, I cannot get a refund. You may argue that I should try the demo, if there is one. I could, but it may be that the bug does not manifest itself during the trial period, especially if I am new to that app.

I think that the software industry as a whole will be under fire from this. Games is a good start, and if the EU wins that, then they have precedent to go further.

My only concern will be that loads of smaller software suppliers will simply not make their products available for download on EU IP addresses.