Suit Filed Over 'Halo 3 Incompatibility' 92
Via Kotaku, a story on the CourtHouseNews site is discussing a suit filed by a CA man against Microsoft over Halo 3. "Microsoft's highly touted "Halo 3" video game, made exclusively for its Xbox 360, causes the Xbox to freeze or crash, ruining the game, according to a federal class-action complaint ... Lead plaintiff Randy Nunez says he paid $59.99 for his game. He wants class certification and damages." Given the lack of widespread note of such crashes, it's going to be hard to prove this in court I think.
Re:Might spell BIG trouble (Score:0, Insightful)
* RRoD - 1.1 billion in costs just to cover the existing 360s out there
* RRoD class action lawsuits
* Disc scratching - People are still having their 60 dollar game discs destroyed by 360s
* Disc scratching class action lawsuits - not as big as the RRoD issue but yet another hardware defect lawsuit
* 360 online billing lawsuits
* Halo 3 class action lawsuit
With Microsoft losing Xbox execs and having the majority of their first party developers abandon Microsoft to go do multiplatform development it is getting increasingly unlikely that they have either the will or ability to remain in the console market much longer. 7 billion dollars and growing in losses on the whole Xbox mess is a huge amount of money to waste even for a company that people like to pretend has unlimited amounts of cash.
Re:difficult case (Score:3, Insightful)
I think an EULA on a video game would be even worse than an EULA on software. On the latter, you need to make a copy of it for the thing to work at all. For a video game, you never make a copy at all, and require the physical copy the publisher gave you.
Wake up games industry! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't agree that Halo 3 is a halfass game at all, but it's time for game publishers and investors to wake up and realise you can't ship a buggy POS.
It doesn't happen with any other product that you can buy. If the car industry sold cars that had 3 out of the 4 seats missing and it only went half the speed advertised they would get legally hit so badly. Just because software is an abstract concept to grasp rather then a physical product doesn't mean you can rip the customer off on quality.
Good God.. slashdot is now actively feeding trolls (Score:2, Insightful)
This made me annoyed enough to actually post something!
an interesting case of consumer protection (Score:5, Insightful)
As to people talking about EULAs, they don't matter in this case. In general, EULAs are scare tactics that simply up the cost of arguing a case--they may or may not be valid in court. In this particular case, you cannot sell someone something that doesn't work--call it fraud, breach of contract, whatever. And you can't sign away that right, at least not in CA. The point of this case is probably to get access to MS testing records during discovery, which will prove whether the issue is known or not. Otherwise there's no way to verify problems beyond the one machine without insane costs. Alternatively, they could be seeking a process for return of the game (similar to a restocking fee). MS should consider that anyway, with a key deactivation, to undercut resells and provide relief for customers who have problems.
Shitty article (Score:4, Insightful)
The article states: "Bungie LLC, which makes Halo, was acquired by Microsoft in May 1991."
Completely false, the company was founded in May 1991, but only acquired by Microsoft in 2000 for the original Halo. I'd take anything this article says with a complete grain of salt.
Re:Wake up games industry! (Score:3, Insightful)
Who says the physical media is broken? Perhaps I bought a DVD where, due to a bug in the menu code, I can't navigate past chapter 10. In that case it's clearly a product worthy of recall, but if I sued the movie studio I'd be rightfully laughed out of court. Buying this broken DVD caused me no harm, and as long as I got a refund on it that's the end of that - any further action would just be needless antagonism, greed, or both.
Did they release a program that they know doesn't work? Have you looked into their bug database to ascertain the veracity of your claim? It's entirely likely that a product may be broken in ways that the manufacturer had never anticipated.
Your Soldner example perfectly illustrates my point. If I bought a copy of Gigli on DVD, I cannot seriously demand a return on account of it being a bad movie. It promised me a compelling storyline, but none existed! Shock! Gasp! Not playing correctly is one thing, but being a bad movie is not a crime, nor is being a bad game. This is one area where I think caveat emptor is perfectly justified.
I'm well aware of that. However, perhaps you ought to review your local consumer protection legislation and bylaws. Here in Canada, for example, any product or service can be refunded within 14 days, if it fails to perform as advertised or claimed, assuming that the product is in reasonably new shape. I know most parts of the USA have this, so perhaps the UK does as well.
Not to mention the fact that there's a difference between "this game sucks, give me my money back" and "this game won't even start up on my non-modified completely-stock console"!
Re:Iron Clad Defense For Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
My friend, you are missing the entirely brilliant stratagem being played out here. Dude sues Microsoft for, like, $100 because Halo crashes. He gets them to admit, on the stand, that it wasn't Halo. It was their *ahem* "utterly garbage 360 hardware". Case is dismissed.
And then the Dude goes right back to the filing office, and sues Microsoft for $100,000,000 because the XBox 360 is utter garbage. His proof? Microsoft said so. In court. Under oath!
Brilliant.
Re:Iron Clad Defense For Microsoft (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Might spell BIG trouble (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, last quarter their games division posted a profit, for the first time. So from my perspective, things are looking pretty rosy. Either way, I'm really enjoying my 360. (I also enjoy my Wii... before i get accused of fanboyism).
Re:Might spell BIG trouble (Score:3, Insightful)
Not that I'm a huge Sony fan either, but they did make a new slim design and games are still being made for it. A lot of those games would have probably been multi-platform too had the Xbox still been viable. Granted, Sony is probably keeping the PS2 alive for greedy reasons and slow PS3 uptake, but they are fulfilling a very important budget gaming market segment with the PS2 which could still be shared with Microsoft.
Instead, the Xbox is now the largest piece of electronic equipment in my house next to the refrigerator and completely irrelevant for modern gaming. It's only good for playing emulators. From what I've seen, the 360 probably won't be nearly as easy to mod... so if the cycle repeats, the 360 will be even more worthless when MS comes out with its new shiny console next generation.