@arma473 said in WELL....I guess I give up.:
@ftxcommando said in WELL....I guess I give up.:
Why did FAF not break that covenant for the 6 years it was up without Steamlink then?
GPG knew that FAF wasn't requiring Steam-linking when it told the public they could use FAF as a matchmaker for FA. So, at least for some period of time, FAF gets a free pass on that.
But who is to say that, as time progresses, FAF doesn't need to adapt? FAF wants to update the exe, make balance patches, and otherwise innovate. So it makes sense that as time goes on FAF would have to "grow up" and also innovate ways to protect against piracy.
One of the defenses that FAF is likely to bring in the event of litigation is "fair use." And, while I'm not an IP law expert, my guess is that someone relying on a defense that has to do with "fairness" (or for that matter, a lot of other defenses FAF might want to use also have to do with fairness/equity) is going to want to be able to say "we took reasonable steps to prevent piracy" not "lol we think piracy is funny, get rekt corpo scum"
The first paragraph is baseless and this was never thought true by anybody. Back during Zep Era everyone was well aware FAF could be shut down and there was nothing that could be done about it, people are still aware of it. There was never some divine right from God that would keep FAF safe from a C&D.
Let's remember Steamlink wasn't implemented to keep FAF safe from being shut down but rather to keep monetary risk from visi to a minimum. Big difference between the two and if people want to argue about keeping Steamlink to keep FAF financial risk or their personal monetary risk to a low then feel free to do so but it was never in the cards that Steamlink was going to keep FAF safe if people got serious about taking it down even back when the argument with visi about implementing it was going on.
Projects with much less total use of assets (and no profit motive just like FAF) like the KOTOR remaster mod have been hit with C&Ds and were not in anyone's capacity to fight. I heavily doubt any fair use defense would stand when FAF basically markets itself as a service that Square Enix is already providing via Steam matchmaking.
The steps to get around Steamlink were known literally day 0 of its implementation by the way because I heard all of them back when I had to argue for why we needed Steamlink back then and why it was useless as a legal defense. Back then I mostly argued for it because of the positive externalities against smurfing but with current data from onboarding case studies as well as the retention thread it can be seen that Steamlink had extreme negatives that were not foreseen at the time.