Technology

Make them binding and non-changing to the product purchased, only newly purchased products can get the updated EULA.

So I think I see what you're getting at, because I was thinking about it in another comment and considered that, but I think that that's probably overly-strict. There are some cases where legislation requires that a service provider act differently, and their EULA may be incompatible with that. Or where they've made a legal error in their initial EULA -- you gotta have some route to fix that. Though I suspect that it's possible to carve a smaller hole for that than is currently the case.

I have another comment where I make one suggestion to tighten up that hole a bit:

https://lemmy.today/comment/6999434

Yeah, I think that a EULA change should reasonably permit for some kind of refund. Maybe have some mechanism for deprecating the value of the service based on use – like, if you expect a typical online game to be online for 10 years and a user has used it for 5 and the service wants to change the EULA, mandate the option for a 50% refund in lieu of continued service under the new EULA or something.

That’d make games more expensive, but it’s a risk that companies could factor in when deciding on EULAs and the initial price.

That avoids the possibility of a bait-and-switch where you agree to one (acceptable) EULA, but then the vendor places you in a position of either agreeing to a new EULA or losing your money.

We already do things like that to evaluate how much an old vehicle is worth or how much life insurance is worth or something like that.

That being said, it'd also make games with an online service component more of a formal commitment than is the case today, in consumer law. As things stand, that's mostly done on the on the honor system or via publishers being concerned about loss of reputation, and...honestly, I'd say that in general, that works pretty well. Companies don't usually just immediately shut down service. But in order to do that, you'd have to have some kind of minimum concept of service that a consumer is actually expecting to get when they buy a game so that you can value how much of that service they actually received.

EDIT: Honestly, think that there's a fair argument that games like that should make money via "microsubscriptions". Like, the problem is more that people pay for an up-front game and get free bundled service rather than pay for service, so we have to come up with some kind of totally artificial value of how much the service is worth. You can't have every game have a subscription as things stand...I mean, game publishers are not gonna take subscription fees of 50 cents each month for a game, because the transaction costs will kill them, though that might well otherwise be perfectly profitable and a viable way to make money. Hmm. Maybe someone like Steam could aggregate subscription fees from all users on Steam, then dole out the subscription to the game services that a given user subscribes to.