France Threatening Blizzard with Legal Action
Posted 13 June 2012 by FluxAs we saw previously in news from Korea about Blizzard’s offices being investigated and threats of class action lawsuits, we’re now hearing similar news from from France. The original article is in French (Google translation) but since MortusMox was helpful enough to include a nice summary of it in his news tip, I’ll just quote him:
In France, the very serious “UFC Que Choisir” organization (focused on protecting consumers of all kinds of products) has received over 1500 complaints in 4 days from gamers about connect-ability issues and has asked Blizzard to have a permanent solution within 15 days and to communicate completely and transparently about problems encountered in due time.
They are also requesting that affected gamers be given damages for troubles they may have had, and, in a much broader but more official manner, are asking the DGCCRF to have a close look at online-only DRMed games and how they work, including economically. They basically feel that it’s wrong to assume that an entire nation (well, at least France) has equal internet quality and reception across its entire territory and hence, online-only seems are harmful for some (many?) consumers (which is who they’re trying to protect).
It’s interesting that in countries with functional consumer protection agencies (e.g. not the US) we’re seeing judicial pressure on Blizzard for technical issues related to Diablo III’s online-only DRM and the RMAH.
A lot of you guys were strongly opposed to that system when it was first revealed, those complaints returned sevenfold when the “rocky” launch went off, and it’s still a vexing issue for many. But if anyone argued against it on legal grounds, I didn’t see those complaints. Now that the issue has been broached, any armchair lawyers want to leap into the commenting fray?
“It has begun.”
LOL @ the French. Good luck with that.
Indeed. Good Luck. (But no “LOL @” from me. Definitively not!)
As long as the box says “internet connection required to play”, you can’t sue them for a dime because your internet connection sucks. If the problems are Blizzard/battle.net caused, you would have the right to sue them for at least a refund if the connection problems could be proven to be “unreasonable”. Good luck on that. And, tell the surrender-monkeys to shut up.
Would be cool to see someone sue them due to some statements made by Blizzard that “D3 gives the best experience online”.
This
Now now, chill down there grasshopper.
They are sueing blizzard for the numerous connection issues. One one hand they force you to be online, but fail to provide satisfacatory quality and take your money ? Please, that’s suable in any part of the world.
People would sue their ISP if that was the case, it’s just you who intentionally misinterpret everything.
And please refrain yourself from calling people monkeys.
They aren’t “suing” anyone they don’t have the legal power to do so.
All they can do is issue statements and fill a claim to public consumer protection agencies, which won’t go very far given french law and the fact that error 37 has been solved and only happened 3 days out of two weeks at peak hours.
hey, way to completely misconstrue the article! reading comprehension is important.
Here’s the thing though. The game requires online, and I have online. My connection is fine. But I still can’t play.
Why? Because Blizzard’s service is down.
That’s what’s wrong with the always-online. Its one thing to expect everyone to have high bandwidth internet, which is a stretch already, but its entirely another thing to require that and then NOT SUPPORT IT.
It’s just that in France laws are made to protect people’s interests.
DRM are what is frowned upon, and if the french politics wish to forbid this kind of practice blizzard, and some hard DRM’d games might have to rethink their economical model. I mean, RIOT is doing fine isn’t it?
Just for records, 70 M inh., with one of the wealthiest low/middle class in the world. Europe is not an option in a 2012 technological business plan…
And btw, french ISP are the best in Europe, much more developped than US or asia ones.
False. France is fifth in the world for broadband. Japan and Korea are significantly higher. When I say higher I mean faster speeds and cheaper per mbps. France has damn good internets, but Korea and Japan still blow it out of the water.
Yeah, but Japan and Korea? NOT EUROPEAN.
MUUUUUUURRRRRRR.
Wonderful!!! Draconian DRM needs to go, especially when the servers for a game that is online only are constantly going down or are a lagfest.
Fair enough. People do the right thing and I hope that it will have a real impact on Blizz next steps.
I hope the French courts win. And I hope Blizzard finally adds single-player and implements it in all territories. Right now the online-only system is the only reason I haven’t bought the game yet.
While I do wish there was an offline mode, I don’t believe it’s fair for any court to create a precedent where every developer of an online only game must provide one. The logic being used here in support of this notion would apply to any multiplayer online game. If this became law, it may cause a business to question whether or not if they will release their product to that market at all. Asking for anything more than a refund and an apology would be inappropriate.
Look at it in wider scale: An requirement to play singleplayer-games online only is just harassement of the customers. D3 is a game that can totally be played solo – as were its predecessors. There are even achievements especially for this playingstyle. There’s nothing but economic policy that speaks against an offline-mode. (Definitively not prevention of bots or hacks, as reality has proven already.) And that they’re asking for a closer look at DRMed games as a whole means, that the fight for the rights of the customers has finally begun – with D3 just beeing the drop that spills the water over the barrel. (The latter is a free translation of a german saying… don’t know if it is used in US/UK/Australia…)
The consumers already have the right to not purchase the game as the original poster has chosen to do.
What more rights do people want beyond the complete freedom of choice?
(and i guess the right to a refund… which is ironically probably easier to do because of the online DRM they know you haven’t made a copy of the software)
Edit: I guess they want the right to tell blizzard what content to add to the game, and which platforms it available on, and how much it retails for etc.
We once had the right to do anything we want with the things we purchased.
For example:
- reselling the game
- giving copys to our friends (, may be exclusive for germany. Dunno. It’s still a right we got ironed in law, but is nowadays hollowed out by DRM and other, corporatefriendly laws, such as…)
- reverse engineering programms, so long as no profit is gained by it (, which is neglected for a while now by not beeing allowed to bypass copy protection – unless the program won’t run without bypassing it: Law is a rather complicated thingy…)
I can’t speak for Germany, but in America you have no more rights to the use of the software than as outlined in the user agreement you are presented while installing.
If offline play, reselling, copying or reverse engineering the game are important to you, I recommend not purchasing Diablo 3 and instead purchasing Torchlight 1 or 2.
If Blizzard were deceiving us into thinking there was no internet connection required, it’d be a different story.
In Germany, or more to say in Europe, the Eula, or any other agreement you have to accept before installing the game, is invalid in any point where it contradicts established law. Only where it doesn’t contradict, it applies. (edit: The latter may be wrong… Just remembered a discussion where it was said that one contradiction would invalid the Eula as a whole, not just in the point it contradicts with the law. Am not sure at the moment, which applies… sorry…)
Ok, have looked into it a bit: In germany, Eula is only a part of the trade agreement, if it is beeing agreed to before buying the software. In addition, there has to be the ability for the customer to strike out clauses he doesn’t agree to, formulate (or not formulate) alternate clauses for the ones striken out and even bringing in clauses of his own. (In short: The ability of individual negotiations of terms.) And even if the softwarecompany adheres to that, one single clause beeing against established law would invalid the whole contract.
edit: As the Eula is usually delivered now, it is simply not binding (at least) for germans. Moreso, if Blizzard would ban your account for violating the Eula, we would have the right to sue Blizzard for it and the court would rule in our favor because that’s how the law here is…
How many complaints did France’s consumer protection agency file against Blizzard from Nov. 2004 to present regarding WoW’s online-only DRM or “server stability” issues?
This is just another example of the nanny state pushing business away instead of providing true consumer protection when it is warranted.
The obvious difference being that WoW is a strictly-multiplayer game, where being on line is an integral part of gameplay; where for D3 it’s only a way to force people on their servers so they can control the flow of the spice…err, money, and get them on the AHs.
UFC Que Choisir is a private consumer association – it’s NOT a government agency. Please inform yourself at least a little bit before talking out of your ass…
This foe is beyond any of you!
But shall we PASS….:D
I don’t really approve of the whole suing culture and whatnot, and while I don’t like the online only DRM one little bit, I get why it’s there for multiplayer (but not singleplayer, being unable to play a singleplayer mode is utterly ridiculous) it is terrible that they put such limitations in place while not having the service to back it up.
Living in Australia, I’m forced to connect to the US servers which results in 250ms AT BEST but frequently 400+ which really is unplayable. Yet there is zero support for Australian consumers as far as improving connectability is concerned – even though Starcraft II managed to have both a single player offline mode AND servers in Singapore.
Diablo III is a great game and I love it, but they have made SO MANY mistakes that other Blizzard games do not – which is simply unforgivable. Being outclassed by another company is one thing, making your own new titles worse than your past ones isn’t.
” requesting that affected gamers be given damages for troubles they may have had,”
which would be what exactly ?
I agree, I don’t see any damages here. Once Blizzard pulls out that amount of hours the average person plays the game, the amount of hours the people in the 10% are playing, and their statistically-probably-not-that-bad uptime statistics (and how they have improved dramatically since the first day), this should go away.
You forget: RMAH is going online on the 16th in Europe. In this 4 hours there may have been this one drop, that gains the customer 15€ on his account/paypal. And if he’s only able to play 10 hours a week due to work or such and the server is regularly down at he time one can play, then it summs up to quite a degree. Or if the player is selfemployed and the stress of supressing his anger is enough to decrease his efficiency of his work, then he may have quit a financial loss to deal with. (Also: Wednesday was the first time for Europe, when the server was up and running, when Blizz said it did. Usually, if they’d announced a two hours serverdown, we had to deal with six hours or more – hopefully up to now.)
Indeed! Not being able to play Diablo 3 when it’s down as cost me a serious amount of money. You see, my religion dictates that I must burn everything around me when I can’t do something I want to do.
And nobody can argue against religion.
Also, nobody can discriminate my religion just because it’s not mainstream. I have the same rights.
*rofl*
Good one
Nice, you just pull the 4 hour figure out of nowhere, present it as fact, and use it to trivialize the entire topic. Your ridiculous childlike overuse of smileys is just distracting enough to make the absurdity of your argument a little less obvious.
I don’t live in Europe so I don’t have firsthand experience with the connectivity issues they have faced since launch but in theory I think French consumers are well within their rights to demand a functional product and compensation for the time they’ve lost trying to get the currently broken product to work.
Most importantly, though, is that Activision-Blizzard pays an army of lawyers and executives around the world. While companies here in the US can generally get away with selling broken merchandise and running with the money it’s not like they weren’t aware of the wildly varying (often higher) standards and oversight in other nations. They chose to market and sell their product in those countries anyway knowing the risk they were taking. If that decision combined with their inability to make their product functional comes back to bite them the blame will be entirely their own.
no, what’s ridiculous and absurd is the whole lawsuit
let’s say its not 4 hours
let’s say its 40
so what ?
even if the server is down for 2 weeks straight, that still leaves 50 weeks to play the game
even if the servers are down every other week that still leaves you 26 weeks to play the game
if this were an mmo with a monthly fee then they would have a case
but its NOT, there is only a ONE TIME FEE
so these people aren’t losing a thing
even if they only play every other week for the next 6 months its still cheaper than going to the movies
trivial complaint is trivial
whiny children are whiny
Well, it will be the judge’s job to appreciate if the service offered by Blizzard is conform to what Blizzard announced when it sold the game (this is what the people contest !), furthermore the judge will appreciate if the “conditions of use/user agreement” of the game are OK with consumer legislation.
None of that is relevant. Selling a game that requires constant internet connectivity to play and then failing to keep the game servers stable is clearly an issue and depending on France’s consumer law may be grounds for legal action. Blizzard knew what their responsibilities were under French law when they decided to sell and market the game there. If they don’t meet those obligations then they should rightfully have action taken against them.
Also, I love the logic behind your argument. If you purchase a new vehicle and it’s so poorly built that it spends every other week in the shop for repairs would you be perfectly okay with the situation? I mean, you can still drive your car 26 weeks out of the year and you only paid a one time fee for it, after all. And buying a car was cheaper than purchasing a private jet! It would be a trivial thing to whine about, wouldn’t it?
The issue here isn’t that Blizzard made the game online-only. That’s perfectly legal. Te problem is that they sold an online-only game, then didn’t have the infrastructure to back it up. The complaints are that the game doesn’t work because of Blizzard, not because of end-user issues.