It’s a perpetual license for your copy of the game. That’s why it’s a license because otherwise you would be buying the game, not just a copy.
It’s just like buying music on CD. You’re only buying a licensed copy.
The big question with this stuff is what would happen if Bungie or any other ‘live-service’ game company were taken to court over their licensing. Bungie has no subscription, everything is a one time purchase and there is no expiration date for the software license sold. In theory they should get destroyed in court but ehhh… capitalism so who knows.
Here’s a great video from the guy that started Stop Killing Games that explains it better than me.
What makes it much more fucked up than music is that it’s not a license to any particular copy of the game, it’s only a license to whatever the publisher says the game is at any given time.
They could replace the entire game with a My Little Pony gardening sim and they’d be completely within their rights. It’s broken.
My Little Pony gardening sim
that would be an improvement for some.
In some ways it indicates the world needs to come up with more terms to describe owning something. If I own a copy of Mistborne, the book, that doesn’t mean I could produce a Mistborne movie. I’m only permitted to read the works of another person, not make my own off it.
That licensure arrangement has existed a long time, while the word “own” has been in use for both cases.
Zahille7@lemmy.world 6 days ago
And the purchase I made for the game was basically rendered pointless when they went F2P, there was no thought or talk of that license having an expiration date until the “content vault” happened.
And then the “vault” itself being an entire legal loophole just so they could delete the entire game people paid money for. People say the data still exists somewhere and it would be too much work to update it all to the new engine, but that’s just cope. It doesn’t exist anymore; they had to use third-party evidence, which is inadmissible, in their big court case, which tells me that it doesn’t exist anymore.
What a goddamn shitshow.