Comment by wang_li
2 days ago
I would say that it can be pretty simple to solve these problems. If a software company is going to implement a license server or a time limited certificate into a piece of software that will prevent the software from working, then they should be mandated to keep all customer payments in escrow and within 5 minutes of the software becoming unusable by the users, the money has to be returned, with interest and adjusted for inflation.
So every week when World of Warcraft goes down for maintenance for a couple of hours. Blizzard should have to forfeit all of the subscribers money, since it is unusable for more than 5 minutes?
If a server runs for 30 years, and then shuts down. It should have to return 30 years of revenue, plus interest?
> So every week when World of Warcraft goes down for maintenance for a couple of hours. Blizzard should have to forfeit all of the subscribers money, since it is unusable for more than 5 minutes?
Yes. That's exactly what I wrote.
Yeah so simple, every gaming company basically has to operate without money.
The online component is a tough sell, but for anything with single player it should be as simple as allow the binary to still run / download?
Or they can sell a product that doesn't have artificial and arbitrary self destruct dates.