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What? Australian consumer law has a limitation on 2 years or reasonable lifetime. Games don’t last forever and get obsoleted by newer operating systems. Sure I

What? Australian consumer law has a limitation on 2 years or reasonable lifetime. Games don’t last forever and get obsoleted by newer operating systems. Sure I can run wine/VMware but I can also keep my 100 year old washing machine running with regular repairs which isn’t fixing the issue of deprecation or end of life.

arcticbull 7y ago
Sure but as long as it runs on the latest version of Windows then does it matter? And based on other posters comments they updated it in 2017 to support windows 10.
Dylan16807 7y ago
> Games don’t last forever and get obsoleted by newer operating systems. That doesn't excuse it now failing to run on Windows 7.
- Bnshsysjab 7y ago
  If the bug was time based but not related to anti piracy would this even make the news? What about disc rot? Or n64 not working because nobody uses RCA anymore?
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    If it was just a time-based bug you could alter the clock or use software to fake it. Look, already exists: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/run_as_date.html https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/run_as_date.html Disc rot won't affect anyone that made a backup, and anyone that didn't could find an iso I'm sure. An N64 still works the way it always did, just like if you installed this game on windows 7.
  - codebje 7y ago
    There's a pretty vast difference between an N64 being less widely useful because it's hard to source an RCA display (hint: you can buy an RCA to HDMI adaptor cheaply) and N64s including a remote "kill switch" that one day gets flipped, destroying all N64s immediately. Disney has sabotaged people's property by using (allowing a third party to use) a kill switch, and that shouldn't be acceptable. If a washing machine called home and checked that it's okay to run each time it was connected to power anew, and one day all of a particular model of washing machine was remotely told to stop working, I'm sure that would make the news.
  - boomlinde 7y ago
    The N64 isn't somehow broken because "nobody uses RCA anymore". That's like saying your outfit is broken because nobody wears bell-bottom jeans anymore. If you want to play N64, RCA monitors are still readily available, as are converters. Nothing stops you from using them other than plain disinterest. As for disc rot, I truly believe that if you sell discs with copy protection so that the consumers can't reasonably back them up, they should be eligible for replacements when the discs eventually break after normal use. This, on the other hand, is first of all not a bug; it's the copy protection working as designed. Whoever decided to use a subscription based copy protection system must have known that they'd either have to pay for it for a very long time or eventually fuck legitimate buyers over. It's deliberate and calculated. That it's related to anti-piracy doesn't factor into it. It's not pirates who are suffering from this, which is what critics have been saying about SecuROM for the last decade. Now, can you argue for the idea that using SecuROM is comparable to adopting an industry standard for video transmission that has proven to be so popular that it's still widely in use now, some 50 years after its invention, without the foresight to instead adopt standards that didn't yet exist?
    - tremon 7y ago
      Now, can you argue for the idea that using SecuROM is comparable to adopting an industry standard for video transmission No, you can't, because the presence of SecuROM is completely orthogonal to the game features that customers are willing to pay for. This is a feature the publisher insisted on, not something the customer asked for. Moreover, mitigations for the scenario you suggest do exist: you can buy convertors, even high-quality upscalers to convert 70s-era video signals to HDMI signals a modern TV can accept. "Convertors" that mitigate the damage of SecuROM are illegal, again because the publishers insisted on that.
      - boomlinde 7y ago
        > No, you can't, because the presence of SecuROM is completely orthogonal to the game features that customers are willing to pay for. Yes, you can argue for it. That doesn't necessarily mean that the conclusion is right or even that the reasoning is sound. The point of arguing is to find out that it is, if it is. In this case, I was asking the poster I responded to to present his case because I have presented a case for the opposite conclusion, that these are not comparable situations. > Moreover, mitigations for the scenario you suggest do exist I think you may be getting my argument mixed up with some other argument, because I did not suggest that scenario, and I clearly argue for why I believe that it's an invalid comparison on the basis that a mitigation isn't even necessary in most cases since most TVs have a composite input and you can still buy new TVs that have composite inputs.
shakna 7y ago
> Australian consumer law has a limitation on 2 years or reasonable lifetime. It's a bit more nuanced than that. The limitation comes from when the consumer could reasonably have become aware of the fault, not from when the purchase was made. So in the case of SecuROM, that clock has only just started ticking.

arcticbull 7y ago

Sure but as long as it runs on the latest version of Windows then does it matter? And based on other posters comments they updated it in 2017 to support windows 10.

Dylan16807 7y ago

> Games don’t last forever and get obsoleted by newer operating systems. That doesn't excuse it now failing to run on Windows 7.

Bnshsysjab 7y ago
If the bug was time based but not related to anti piracy would this even make the news? What about disc rot? Or n64 not working because nobody uses RCA anymore?
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  If it was just a time-based bug you could alter the clock or use software to fake it. Look, already exists: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/run_as_date.html https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/run_as_date.html Disc rot won't affect anyone that made a backup, and anyone that didn't could find an iso I'm sure. An N64 still works the way it always did, just like if you installed this game on windows 7.
- codebje 7y ago
  There's a pretty vast difference between an N64 being less widely useful because it's hard to source an RCA display (hint: you can buy an RCA to HDMI adaptor cheaply) and N64s including a remote "kill switch" that one day gets flipped, destroying all N64s immediately. Disney has sabotaged people's property by using (allowing a third party to use) a kill switch, and that shouldn't be acceptable. If a washing machine called home and checked that it's okay to run each time it was connected to power anew, and one day all of a particular model of washing machine was remotely told to stop working, I'm sure that would make the news.
- boomlinde 7y ago
  The N64 isn't somehow broken because "nobody uses RCA anymore". That's like saying your outfit is broken because nobody wears bell-bottom jeans anymore. If you want to play N64, RCA monitors are still readily available, as are converters. Nothing stops you from using them other than plain disinterest. As for disc rot, I truly believe that if you sell discs with copy protection so that the consumers can't reasonably back them up, they should be eligible for replacements when the discs eventually break after normal use. This, on the other hand, is first of all not a bug; it's the copy protection working as designed. Whoever decided to use a subscription based copy protection system must have known that they'd either have to pay for it for a very long time or eventually fuck legitimate buyers over. It's deliberate and calculated. That it's related to anti-piracy doesn't factor into it. It's not pirates who are suffering from this, which is what critics have been saying about SecuROM for the last decade. Now, can you argue for the idea that using SecuROM is comparable to adopting an industry standard for video transmission that has proven to be so popular that it's still widely in use now, some 50 years after its invention, without the foresight to instead adopt standards that didn't yet exist?
  - tremon 7y ago
    Now, can you argue for the idea that using SecuROM is comparable to adopting an industry standard for video transmission No, you can't, because the presence of SecuROM is completely orthogonal to the game features that customers are willing to pay for. This is a feature the publisher insisted on, not something the customer asked for. Moreover, mitigations for the scenario you suggest do exist: you can buy convertors, even high-quality upscalers to convert 70s-era video signals to HDMI signals a modern TV can accept. "Convertors" that mitigate the damage of SecuROM are illegal, again because the publishers insisted on that.
    - boomlinde 7y ago
      > No, you can't, because the presence of SecuROM is completely orthogonal to the game features that customers are willing to pay for. Yes, you can argue for it. That doesn't necessarily mean that the conclusion is right or even that the reasoning is sound. The point of arguing is to find out that it is, if it is. In this case, I was asking the poster I responded to to present his case because I have presented a case for the opposite conclusion, that these are not comparable situations. > Moreover, mitigations for the scenario you suggest do exist I think you may be getting my argument mixed up with some other argument, because I did not suggest that scenario, and I clearly argue for why I believe that it's an invalid comparison on the basis that a mitigation isn't even necessary in most cases since most TVs have a composite input and you can still buy new TVs that have composite inputs.

shakna 7y ago

> Australian consumer law has a limitation on 2 years or reasonable lifetime. It's a bit more nuanced than that. The limitation comes from when the consumer could reasonably have become aware of the fault, not from when the purchase was made. So in the case of SecuROM, that clock has only just started ticking.