I'll take the bait. > I think the bulk of this is kind of a silly semantic argument > "After all, I didn't click 'Rent now'. I paid 60 bucks and clicked a but

I'll take the bait. > I think the bulk of this is kind of a silly semantic argument > "After all, I didn't click 'Rent now'. I paid 60 bucks and clicked a button that said 'Buy'" > With all the Terms of Service, you rarely actually "own" a piece of software. If all the "Buy" buttons were replaced with "Lease License" buttons - would everyone suddenly stop complain？ I doubt it That's not what the campaign is pushing for, the campaign is pushing for not allowing such things in the terms of service in the first place, within reason. The simplest way we can explain it is if you're paying for a subscription (i.e. MMOs) then the current behavior is fine. If you're paying a one-time fee for a game that depends on server somewhere to even play the game, then the publishers would be required to make end-of-life plans so the server isn't required to continue playing, even if in a limited state. I.e. all the single player games that require online connections because publishers are pushing for single-player microtransactions now. The campaign aims to stop publishers from adding unnecessary dependencies that can shut down the games. This would stop for example publishers from killing a game when releasing a sequel to the same game, forcing users to repurchase what is essentially the same game. The Crew is a good example of this (and what started the campaign in the first place), other examples are sports games and other games like CoD that get yearly releases and services for older versions get killed arbitrarily. > They have the right to distribute it the way they see fit. The law and society decides that, game publishers want to of course control things end-to-end and rent-seek instead of sell, because having an eternal source of revenue is much more profitable for them, those have been established by the rest of society to be predatory. No consumer should be happy that adobe does subscriptions only, no consumer should be happy that apple controls their ecosystem end-to-end to the point that they get a cut of all monetary transactions in their system. Gamers already see similar behavior with Sony and Nintendo on the hardware side, and EA, Warner, Ubisoft, Activision, etc. are pushing things further on the software side. This campaign is meant to be a push-back from such behavior. There used to be a time where charging money for horse armor was a scandal, we'll never go back to those times, but most gamers agree that gaming has gone too far in nickel-and-diming the consumer, so this a pushback to at least not have publishers kill games because of their greed. The law already restricts software sales in many ways, there's many cases of mass-refunds because software is sold with deceptive practices, or when they do anti-competitive shit like forced bundling or market dominance abuse.