Posted this on the Rockstar site and I meant it. Not that I think it will do much good.
The new update steals music from users who legally purchased the game while the license was still active. This is not okay nor is it legal. There is no law that forces or even allows any company to retroactively steal music from customers who legally purchased it while the copyright license was still active.
Putting up a new copy of the game online so that new customers don't get the expired songs music is how this should have been handled, but they had no right to remove the songs from copies that were legally purchased by the end user while the license was still active. I can't believe they would be this lazy because that's exactly what this is. They did not have to do this, there is no license in existence that would require it.
It's no different than if they illegally hacked your X-box to remove access to the songs from the hard copy of the game or if a music company hacked your computer to erase some MP3 files that you bought and downloaded because the publisher lost the license for some of the songs.
This was illegal for Rockstar to do, there is no licensing law or ELUA agreement that forced or even permitted them to do this. This move was entirely on them and I expect they will have a class action lawsuit on them for it in the near future.
Regardless of what they would like to believe, no ELUA makes it legal for them to do this. The enforcability of many ELUA elements is already questionable, but this is actual theft and I do not believe that the ELUA or ToS agreements will protect them in this case.
On top of that, they actually downgraded the resolution so there is no more 1080p the highest resoluiton is 1680 x 1050. There are also no options for 16:9 resolutions anymore. Oddly there are some 16:10 options, but nothing for the standard PC monitor resolution.
I've requested a refund from Steam about this, and encourage others to do the same. This isn't the game I paid for anymore, it's a crappy mobile port that should have been a separate purchase.
I get that they can't sell the PC edition anymore because of licensing issues, but they never should have replaced the full PC version with this and they know it. This should have been a separate purchase and the original should have been removed from the servers and left unaltered by those who previously purchased it and already had it installed.
There is no excuse for this and we should all put in to get a refund of the game over this to both Valve and Rockstar. We may never get the game we paid for back, but if enough of us make enough noise about this we can make sure they aren't dumb enough to pull this in the future because it was motivated by nothing but pure laziness. As I previously said, there is no license agreement that would require this and no legal justification for it EULA or not.
I really hope some lawyer decides to make his or her career with a class action over this because a lawsuit is completely justified here.
I've already played GTA V, I had a lot of fun with it and I was really looking forward to it on PC. I have serious doubts I'll be buying it again for PC now, and I'm not the only one. This was an incredibly stupid move and it would be in Rockstar's best interest to learn from it and not pull this kind of thing again.
Rockstar did this, but Valve needs to make sure publishers understand that this is unacceptable as well. It's not all on Rockstar's head because Steam enabled it. They are at the least accomplices in this. Because of this, I'm also wary of buying games on Steam in the future and I now have legitimate reason to be concerned with the titles I have already purchased form them. This is not a standard we as consumers can put up with. There has to be a line drawn here and publishers need to know that this sort of behavior is not going to fly. EULA agreements are already on shaky legal ground and have questionable enforcement they aren't going to be a very good shield against legal action against this sort of behavior. Rockstar stands to be in the crosshairs of a very bad and very public legal battle over this and there's no way it's good publicity. This needs issue needs to be fixed and assurances need to be made that this sort of thing won't happen in the future. Otherwise I can seriously see this as being bad for the company both in terms of publicity and legality.
There is no way to spin this to make it okay and no licensing agreement is going to make this acceptable. Rockstar is going to lose customers and trust over this mess if they don't do something to fix it, or at least assure consumers that it won't be happening in the future. I don't think they're going to want to be the ones who put this to the test, there's no way this is going to be good for Rockstar now or in the future on any level.
