Yeah, I know. Like I said, occasionally someone goes “I WILL SUE FUNCOM” and that’s the perfect moment to explain how fuсked they really are.

Thing is, Funcom didn’t come up with this slimy shіt and neither did Tencent, as far as I can tell. I don’t know which game made popular microtransactions with soft currency, but it’s the standard now, precisely because it turns illegal into merely sleazy.

That said, every time someone says they will sue Funcom, I keep hoping that they will actually follow through. Customer rights won’t protect themselves magically. Every time we got some laws to protect our rights, it was because people got fed up and started challenging all the bullshіt in the court of law.

As things stand right now, the beatings will continue until the morale improves. If we want change, we need to make it happen, which means dealing with the perpetrators of this consumer hostile practices as if they were the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. :wink:

Yes, but no. The difference between the DLCs and the shіtty FOMO monetization we see here is that the ownership of the DLCs is authenticated by the game store for your platform, so Funcom didn’t need to develop the back end for it. But the platform’s game store wasn’t FOMO enough for Funcent, so they had to develop an in-house one.

As soon as you have an in-house store, you have to handle all of that shіt yourself: authentication, credential caching (if any), entitlements, all that technical stuff that I alluded to earlier but didn’t want to bore people with.

It’s not impossible to make your stuff accessible offline when you maintain your own in-game store. In fact, it’s trivial, as long as you don’t care about the possibility of slightly-more-savvy-than-average players going into some file on their drive and convincing your game that they owned everything in the store :stuck_out_tongue:

Since most studios do care about that, they will require some kind of proof of ownership, which is where phoning home comes into play. Again, this is not an insurmountable problem. There are ways to make things available offline and, for example, periodically check in with the mothership when you’re online to verify that everything is above board.

By now, anyone who knows Funcom even a little bit will have spotted the problem with that idea: it takes more effort than just requiring you to be online all the time. We all know Funcom’s attitude towards investing effort in the game: had Funcom existed in Ancient Greece, they would have solved the squaring the circle problem by cutting corners off the square until it looked circular enough.

Long story short, you don’t have offline access to the stuff you spent money on because Funcom can’t be arsed to implement something a bit more complex than the easiest solution for it. :man_shrugging:

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