Here’s the tweet, https://nitter.poast.org/SteamDB/status/1788981898108182681
Go on?
I attempted to sell you a car in the UK. I realize I’m unable to and issue a refund.
Fraud exists where?
You should look up what the word “fraud” means in a legal context.
You would have an incredibly, overwhelmingly difficult tike attempting to prove that in court at this moment.
Fraud requires intentional deception and requires you to have lost something. This is a proactive action to prevent misunderstanding and from you purchasing something that won’t work, and refunds your purchase. The loss, and the intent, are both missing.
This is categorically not fraud.
Fraud exists because you were driving the car for a while with your normal drivers license and everything was perfectly fine, but now (for example) Elon says you have to get a specialized additional Tesla certification license from Tesla, but only offers it to countries whose names start with vowels because he was on a ketamine bender one night.
It’s a retroactive, unilateral change to a contract, which is generally considered legally questionable at the very least. And - you guessed it - possibly fraud.
Correct me if I’m wrong but the game isn’t out yet on PC so no one has been playing (driving) the game.
I entered into an agreement with a car manufacturer to be able to sell their cars in the UK. After I had people place orders (and pay) for a bunch of them the manufacturer decided that they were no longer supplying cars to the UK. Forcing me to issue my customers with refunds.
More like I pay you for water in my house and midway in you decided to add berry flavor.
Great, now my spaghetti taste like berry, and I didn’t agree to that.
Please not. I don’t want Sony to retreat entirely from the pc market (and they most likely will do it if they are not on Steam anymore).
So what Sony is saying is that I should just pirate the game since there is no legal way to buy it?
What a complete clusterfuck.
DO I SEE THE FLAG OF ESTONIA?
Hmm.
I haven’t been following this, but if I understand, all this flows from Sony’s decision to (a) disallow developers targeting their platform from selling the game in regions that PSN isn’t available, even on other platforms, like Steam, and (b) not to offer PSN service in the Baltics. I’m not actually sure that it’s legal for Sony to do this.
I don’t think that that’d be fraud – as some people are talking about – but I do know that the EU has had some digital single market legislation that doesn’t let you buy something in part of the EU if you can’t use it in another part. I think that their interest is that they don’t want to have companies creating barriers to movement of labor around the EU, where someone can’t move from EU member A to B because it makes all their digital products unusable. If you cannot play a game in the Baltics, I’m not sure that it’s legal to sell it, under EU law, in France or the like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Single_Market
It might also be legal – not sure. Probably depends on how it’s structured, what exactly Sony is doing, and the specifics of the European Digital Single Market restrictions. And I’m not familiar with the fine points of any of those.
It would be an interesting issue to resolve if the EU were to pursue it. I guess one could argue that PS5s are sold in the EU, even with the PSN restriction in certain regions. I’d guess a resolution to this would have Sony remove all of their content on Steam, which I consider a negative for gaming in-general.
I’m guessing there is, or will be, a carve out for this type of thing. Precedent could be argued with my PS5 example above.
