Could EA revoke licenses on previous year titles?

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SpudBug

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#1  Edited By SpudBug

Is it possible that with the XB One's policies and control over what the hardware can or cannot play, this opens the door for EA or other publishers to sunset or disable previous year entries in yearly release franchises?

We saw this generation EA shutting down online support for sports games in 2 years or less, what if with Xbox One that means all support or play of that title could be disabled in order to encourage sales of the newer titles? With them pushing "the power of the cloud" it gives all the excuse they need to yank support for single player titles after a certain amount of time..

After the news that Xbox Support stated that being banned from XBL will result in losing all of your disc and download game purchases, I don't think anything is impossible with the Xbox One.

Also, if a company goes out of business like we saw with Midway, THQ, Hudson, Irem, etc. this generation, and their digital games stop being sold (like Double Dragon XBLA, R-Type XBLA, etc) could those games suddenly disappear or become unusable on your system? The current system allows you to redownload those titles if you purchased already.

What if company X buys the rights to Double Dragon releases it a year later, for example. Can they just put in a request to shut down all activations/licenses for the previous publisher's version so that they retain the profits from players of the content?

Yet another example, a game uses licensed music or material that has a contract with an expiration over time. If they think that the costs of re-negotiating those contracts are too much for this now older, lower priced, lesser selling game, can they revoke the licenses to avoid having to pay the licensing fees?

There are just so many potential nightmare scenarios resulting from giving the publisher/platform holder so much direct control over what your system can play or not play.

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The_Laughing_Man

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#2  Edited By The_Laughing_Man

@spudbug said:

That with the XB One's policies, this opens the door for EA or other publishers to sunset or disable previous year entries in yearly release franchises?

We saw this generation EA shutting down online support for sports games in 2 years or less, what if with Xbox One that means all support or play of that title could be disabled in order to encourage sales of the newer titles? With them pushing "the power of the cloud" it gives all the excuse they need to yank support for single player titles after a certain amount of time..

After the news that Xbox Support stated that being banned from XBL will result in losing all of your disc and download game purchases, I don't think anything is off the table with the Xbox One.

Also, if a company goes out of business like we saw with Midway, THQ, Hudson, Irem, etc. this generation, and their digital games stop being sold (like Double Dragon XBLA, R-Type XBLA, etc) could those games suddenly disappear or become unusable on your system? The current system allows you to redownload those titles if you purchased already.

What if company X buys the rights to Double Dragon releases it a year later, for example. Can they just put in a request to shut down all activations/licenses for the previous publisher's version so that they retain the profits from players of the content?

Yet another example, a game uses licensed music or material that has a contract with an expiration over time. If they think that the costs of re-negotiating those contracts are too much for this now older, lower priced, lesser selling game, can they revoke the licenses to avoid having to pay the licensing fees?

There are just so many potential nightmare scenarios resulting from giving the publisher/platform holder so much direct control over what your system can play or not play.

We figured in the other thread they are talking about the current terms. Chances are they know NOTHING about the XboxOne stuff.

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#3  Edited By SpudBug
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Unless xbox support overlooked the very clear wording in the tweet they were replying to..

This pretty clearly states that microsoft has the ability to revoke licenses for any reason they see fit. Including publisher requests, since we have seen in this last month that EA, Ubisoft, Activision, etc interests and needs come before their own consumers.

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McGhee

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Maybe they could, but they can only fuck around with people so much before they decide to quit buying your shit.

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SpudBug

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They did come back and say that their response was about the xbox 360 policies, but it does logically follow that if you're banned, you cannot check in for the 24 hour ping to MS servers, just like now if your banned on 360, you can't just get online to watch some netflix and not play multiplayer games. You have no ability to communicate with Xbox live once banned.

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SchrodngrsFalco

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@spudbug said:

it does logically follow that if you're banned, you cannot check in for the 24 hour ping to MS servers.... You have no ability to communicate with Xbox live once banned.

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Zekhariah

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#7  Edited By Zekhariah

That would be hilarious. Sometime Origin bugs out and removes games from your account months after installation, or fails to register CD keys on initial release. Translating those issues into the console world as "whoops, looks like you can't play that game you bought after that patch" would be great.

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@spudbug said:
No Caption Provided

Unless xbox support overlooked the very clear wording in the tweet they were replying to..

This pretty clearly states that microsoft has the ability to revoke licenses for any reason they see fit. Including publisher requests, since we have seen in this last month that EA, Ubisoft, Activision, etc interests and needs come before their own consumers.

They actually already clarified from that thread that this is just for Xbox 360 games and not for Xbox One. The support guy who is running the Twitter account at the time made a mistake.

https://twitter.com/XboxSupport/status/345757973819318272

@the_laughing_man