Fast Jimmy wrote...
Okay, but these are for California. These guidelines don't cover the gambling laws in other countries or even in other states. Microtransactions are a whole other animal. The only way you're going to restrict digital purchases is if you can get pretty much the entire world to agree on how to regulate the internet.
Wrong. That's not the way laws work. You can't break the law in California and say "well, I also do business in New York, where this is legal. So you can't prosecute me."
Actually, you can, context depending. If you do your business in New York, and sell a product in California, Californian manufacturing standards don't necessarily apply.
A company that runs a national sweepstakes (let alone an international one) would have to abide by all local, state, national and international laws in which they operate. There doesn't need to be an agreement on international laws on microtransactions before a company has to listen.
Supreme Court has decided otherwise. Commerce supremacy clause, and all that- states aren't allowed to regulate interstate commerce. They push the envelope and try various workarounds, of course, but they're limited within the scope of Federal law.
It's one reason why California's attempts to enforce additional taxes on out-of-state businesses doing internet service within faltered several years back.
Just look at gay marriage - one state makes it legal and suddenly, companies and governments have to begin changing everything they do because of it. It doesn't take a international consensus for these changes to start affecting how business is done - it just takes one set of laws where companies are willing (of forced) to change how they do things.
You're confusing the cause and effect, however. Especially in the context of 'have to'- other states aren't recognizing gay marriage as a legal responsibility or duty- states are accepting gay marriages because voters are passing referendum or voting in representatives who are making the changes as part of a cultural shift.
Do these voters have to do it? No. Do the states, governments, and companies that choose not to have to? Not really.
If California passes a law that regulates or prohibits microtransactions tomorrow, then eituer companies like EA would have to respond, take the fines and penalites or move their operations out of that region overnight. Its the reality of being an international company in a multi-billion dollar business. Does Bioware (or EA as a whole) really wanting to wait for such a law to pass, which may make their lives terribly more complicated overnight? Or will they abstain from the practice... or at the very least, try and attempt some form of self-regulation?
Since microtransactions are interstate commerce, California passing such a law would be found unconstitutional. EA would probably be able to make more money fighting the law and getting a settlement.
There's also the cold hard numbers strategy- when an opportunity for profit is only available for a limited time before the window will be shut, maximizing the opportunity can easily be the best strategy. DLC will be sold regardless of whether EA does it or not, and so the axe of excessive regulation will exist regardless of their policy.
Since the sorts of self-regulation proposed at this point don't really protect consumers as much as player preferences from anything the compnay has control over, there's not much that self-regulation can do to prevent legislation. The only way EA can force people to not buy their products in excess would be a consumer database and tracking systems that would open them up to all sorts of other lawsuits.
You may laugh at the people who sue McDonald's because they are fat, but McDonald's isn't. They lose significant amounts of money because of it, both in terms of payouts and negative publicity.
They make considerably more, however, by continuing to sell the product rather than not selling the product. For all that they have introduced 'healthier' alternatives,
not selling their product, even with the prospective decrease in lawsuits, is still more expensive than selling it.
Costs happen.
The video game industry has been able to get away with such practices because most companies aren't worth going after. EA, however? They are a publicly traded company that is one ofnthe largest revenue and premiere names in the video game business. A lawyer who sees someone get their house repo'd because they spent three grand on microtransactions in a month is going to see nothing but dollar signs when he sees the company pocketing that money is EA. And once one suit passes, then they all start crawling out of the woodwork, which catches media attention and then often leads to regulations, laws, statutes, etc.
You assume people haven't already tried.
More to the point, there's no way for EA to win by your standard because someone who would spend themselves to bankruptcy on a luxury good is already clearly obsessive and unhealthy. We can just as easily make a hyperbole of someone who obsessively spends their money buying physical products for the same case. Not doing microtransactions doesn't resolve the issue, which is an obsessed fan rather than the DLC.
Am I saying this will happen when DA:I is released if it has microtransactions? No, I'm not.
Am I saying that if EA continues to have many of its developers use microtransactions in their AAA, $60 games, this will happen within the next thirty years? Absolutely. They'd be lucky if it didn't happen before 2025.
It's already happened, so we kinda crossed the digital property threshhold.
As far as the United States is concerned, digital property exists. You can sell it. And people can spend their own money to buy it, just like any other product. This has been true for the better part of the last decade in terms of DLC alone, even longer in the wider software market, and precedent has already been set.
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