The HELLDIVERS™©®³ 2 EULA is a god damn URL
My wife just got the exact same pop up while playing God of War: Ragnarok. Weirdly though, she’d been playing it for a week before they sent this.
It’s one of the “I am altering the deal, pray I do not alter it any further” license changes that are popping up as of late.
Though, that topic is way more whan “mildly” infuriating.
That URL is asking to ddos’ed
Easy fix, hit cancel.
Doesn’t refund me, let me play HELLDIVERS:.|:; 2 without accepting nor give me back the time I lost reading the EULA. Not a fix.
If you have played less than 2 hours and it is at most 14 days since you purchased it, Steam will refund you with no questions asked.
Unfortunately I’ve played for 325.4 hours more than that, so I doubt they would refund the game even with questions asked.
As far as my non-lawyerly eyes could scan the EULA itself it’s not egregious, which is why I find this mildly infuriating.
I feel like this is an attempt at EULA roofying. I think it’s a way for the user to not be notified every time they make a change to it. I’m pretty sure (don’t quote me) steam notifies you every time the EULA changes, but since the license is on their website, they can change it without changing the url and notifying the user
There’s no way it isn’t EULA roofying, I just hope Sony doesn’t start murdering American wives too…
Up at somebody at Sony had a Jira ticket to update all the eulas and it listed the URLs for each one and instead of going to the URLs and putting the content in each one of the yolas they just slap the URLs in.
Same thing with Until Dawn. Why do I need a PSN account for a single player game?
Well, at least Steam quickly issued the refund.
I fucking hate that. I bought Forza 4 and needed a Microsoft account to play single player. At least I got my money back.
At least MS account may be slightly more useful (OS, software, school, work). There is literally no reason to have PSN account except a few exclusive games on PlayStation. Even worse are smaller game devs and pubs nagging for accounts.
Of course there is no great reason offline/SP/old games should require an account to play, and out of principle “nope” should be considered. But almost every goddamn thing requires an account these days. At least we have decent password managers now…
Steam does actually tell you on the game’s page if the game requires a 3rd party account to play.
I didn’t see it when I bought it. And honestly, a refund is a better protest than not buying it.
I have read the URL in it’s entirety. It’s not an agreement. This query is invalid.
Is an EULA presented this way considered binding? That seems really exploitable, like making people click hundreds of links to get to the real EULA so they don’t actually read it.
It’s pretty ridiculous.
What happens if you go there and Sony have moved their EULA page and it just 404s? Does that mean there is no EULA at all and you can play without terms? Doubt Sony woild see it that way lol.
EULA should be displayed within the same context it is accepted.
Imagine getting a 404 or 500 error. Then archiving that on archive.org (and screenshot that dialog on steam) and accept the terms. If there’s any problem and they say you violated the EULA, point them to the terms you accepted.
Tell that to the people who just got denied the ability to sue over an Uber crash because their daughter agreed to the Uber eats eula
Technically that’s still on appeal, and tbh I do expect it to get overturned somewhere.
Or the family of the person who died at Disney and can’t sue because they did a free trial of Disney+
Disney waved their right to arbitration after backlash. Uber might just do the same, or get sued by the government for the EULA itself.
That was something Disney Lawyers claimed, but was never actually agreed/enforced.
So it doesn’t actually hold any weight until a court actually rules on it.
That was something Disney Lawyers claimed, but was never actually agreed/enforced.
Disney backed down. They still believe they have that right, and no court has ever said they didn’t, but the bad publicity was too much for them in this case. They’ll wait until there’s a case that doesn’t get that kind of publicity before they try to establish that precedent.
They can believe all they want. Unless it’s ruled and a precedent is set, the statement is false.
I hope people stop believing they have that kind of power, but decide not to do it from the goodness of their heart or bad publicity.
I should hope the actual law still has more relevance than a ToS.
Unless it’s ruled and a precedent is set, the statement is false.
They believe that the users agreed to a contract that specifies that in any dealings with Disney they’ve agreed to binding arbitration.
What’s the “false statement” there?
making people click hundreds of links to get to the real EULA
This could be turned into a game with some kind of narrative like a Choose-Your-Own-E.U.L.Adventure. Players might try to exploit it though, so there should probably be some terms they have to agree to first.
Sony: Just send them the link and they can copy that in.
Yes, I accept that that is a URL.
I bet you could argue in court that the EULA is null and void, because you can’t be reasonably expected to copy that link into a browser to read it
You can not, in fact, copy that link - I had to type it manually. It’s relatively short and human-readable, but still…
Devil’s advocate: I wouldn’t accuse Sony (or friends) of intentionally making the text unselectable, that’s on the Steam client.
If the agreement to play a game needs a whole website, then I say the problem is 100% on the game developer.
Still, Steam probably has some clause in their developer agreement where they say that’s not on them.
Yeah, I don’t blame Steam, I don’t expect them to foresee publishers specifying EULAs as “idk google it m8”.
… actually, no, I do blame Steam, what reason is there to prevent copying EULAs? Are they protected by copyright too now?
More just indicative of the hostile posture of corporations
“Hostile posture”
I really like that phrase.
Modify your host and redirect the URL > 127.0.0.1. software without license:D
The EULA isn’t null and void, but it’s pretty meaningless. Not because you can’t reasonably be expected to copy that link into a browser to read it, but because there’s no indication that you should or even must do that.
The EULA contains no terms, it doesn’t contain any wording saying what you can or can’t do. It doesn’t say what your rights are. It just contains something that looks like a URL. So, you’re still bound by the terms of the EULA (as much as you’re bound by any EULA) but the EULA doesn’t permit or forbid anything. It’s effectively the same as if it were blank.
Tangentially related: I really enjoyed the EULA of Baldur’s Gate 3:
a good lawyer could probably argue that a user isn’t bound to that eula.
heck a bad lawyer could probably too.
Are any users actually bound, ever?
Depends on how paid off the judge is in the lawsuit.
They’re bound to the EULA, but the EULA is meaningless because it’s just a URL. They’re definitely not bound by whatever’s at that URL.
This would be like having someone sign a contract when the contract was just a shopping list. Sure, they’re bound by the “contract”, but the contract doesn’t specify anything they can or can’t do.
And the URL text can be changed at any time
It could be changed at any time, it might not resolve properly, the page could be hijacked, an ad blocker could decide it’s an ad and show something else instead…
And if the page is set to no index and no robots, the only record of any change could be client side only
Why does this remind me of The Phantom Tollbooth?
Tecnically I agreed to “https://www.playstation.com/legal/op-eula”, there is nothing that tells me that I have to go the site and read it there
LOLOL
