The chicanery of Penguin Cretins

The chicanery of Penguin Cretins

Valve maintains its signature silence as wayward developers code-swap games on Steam, leaving users frustrated and confused

This story starts with a game in Steam’s Early Access being completely replaced by a different game, but it opens a lot of questions about the nature of ownership and fair dealing in an age of digital delivery, automatic updates, and games as a service. When it’s commonplace for games to change after they’ve already been paid for, where is the line? Aside from the preservation question, how do you allow games to grow and improve while stopping bad faith consumer-exploiting changes?

Frankly, I expected this to be more of a problem - ads were being patched into high-profile games over a decade ago. I can only assume that nobody’s wanted to risk triggering consumer rights investigations and legislation here, so the steps taken have been pretty small.