How come videogames seem completely immune to false advertising laws?

How come videogames seem completely immune to false advertising laws?

If I buy a car reported to have a 300HP engine and the engine turns out to be a 220HP one, then I can rightfully complain and get the company that sold it to me in trouble since after all the advertisements were false.

But for videogames all of this gets thrown out of the window. Right now NMS has a trailer on its steam page that is advertising features that DO NOT EXIST and aren't in the game whatsoever. Molyneux keeps conning people out of their money and there are no issues whatsoever. Ubisoft keeps giving out real time trailers that are very obviously prerendered and then significantly downgrades the games. Yet absolutely nothing happens.

Why? Why is there almost no customer protection in videogames?

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because videogames are advertised to children and they are too new to be taken seriously. did you really need to go on Sup Forums to understand that? now go do something useful with yout time, kidd

Because the vidya audience are the one of the last sanctums of gullible retards.

Stopped by to say that is incorrect.

That's an old mindset that video games are for children. Everyone knows that nowadays adults play too. Carry on.

cos money

>Why? Why is there almost no customer protection in videogames?

There was, but you faggots ruined it by turning it into a personal vendetta.

elaborate.

Because going as a lone nerd against big companies is rarely worth it.

Unless you are a particularly rich and pissed off nerd, that is.

It's the fact that no one bothers to sue and attempt to enforce it. Users can get their money back most of the time so they can never attempt to sue since they did accept money back. The last time I saw a company get nailed for false advertising in the video game industry was the developers who made alien colonial Marines. Nvidia got mailed recently for their gtx970 3.5 gb shit

GG m8

the fuck does GG have to do with this

I wish Notch would help

Sony gave a couple of shitty games to some vita owners for false advertisement about remote play.

What the fuck are you on about

Because gamers are idiots who think that corporations are their friends.

because they don't cost that much
because there are a lot of different markets that would have to agree to the same standards

probably more reasons. still bullshit though

It's still there.

Falco Girgis did it best though.

Just freak out at your backers for backing you and make it their fault for wanting updates.

youtube.com/watch?v=mRR-qRGhaRU

>Why is there almost no customer protection in videogames?

I guess that's why Steam enabled refunding? That doesn't count? Also, there's a million reviews out there so you can make an informed purchase.

Because they have you.
Because no matter what they do,you will always buy and play their game.
You can't stop and they know that.
Even if somehow/someday you do stop.
There is ton of other people that won't

because the videogame community is full of autistics retards

But MGS2 turned out better because of false advertisements.

>It's okay to have misleading and false advertising as long as someone, somewhere points it out
Nope.

SENSIBLE CHUCKLE

Serious answer, lack of good consumer protection legislation for this and movies.

The entertainment industry gets away with all kinds of crap that other industries could only dream of and it's because the whole world are a bunch of pathetic sycophants that kiss celebrity ass. And yes, devs do actually count as celebrities these days. At least, the publishers and gaming press like to act as if they are such.

Remember how shocking it was that a publication actually had the balls to call out Peter Molyneux on his bullshit after decades of it? And Peter Molyneux actually had the audacity to be indignant about the whole thing. The idea that they would actually be attacked by the press for their crap is unthinkable to these people. We see this shit time and time again with actors and musicians, people who think they are special and have the right to lecture us from up high but are above any sort of criticism by the "plebs", and now it's part of the games industry too.

Explain that to VW.

I have a question for y'all.

Let's say there's a hypothetical movie that is mostly a serious drama, although it has a handful of comedic relief. Now, let's also say that the most aired commercial for this film shows almost nothing but those funny moments.

Would this be false advertising?

What false advertisements? Everything they showed was in the final game

So like if this was the actual trailer for Harry Potter?

youtube.com/watch?v=c_ubmjE21SY

This is why there are no laws against it. You could just sue someone for stupid shit and get rich. It's entertainment, your life won't be over if the movie/game you buy turns out shit. And with the internet there is literally no excuse not to do research ahead of time and figure out exactly what you are going to get.

>Why? Why is there almost no customer protection in videogames?

I want to know why there is no common sense in videogames customer base

>steam greenlight
>preorders
>DLC
>season passes
>no demos

They only showed Snake segments making people think you play as Snake for most of it but in reality you play as Raiden.

MGS2

You know even though I had about 30 hours of fun with NMS and don't think it's the worst thing ever, in hindsight the NoMansSky twitter account being named Sean Murray should have been a red flag about the guy.
If only we'd known Murrine was a fucking thing beforehand too. What a narcissist this guy is.

Not like it's different for movies

>what does GAMErgate have to do with video games?

There's literally nothing from stopping you from not buying day one and watching gameplay footage or someone streaming it these days. Don't buy into hype and faggots who suck developer's dicks.
You gain nothing from buying it day one. Pre orders give you almost nothing in return these days and there will never be a shortage of the games. Ever.

>thinking people will associate GG with gamergate instead of good game

Adults who plays videogames are losers that can't even make 75K/year (and will never get to that in their lifetime). Adults are already a minority among gamers, and those who aren't losers are insignificant number-wise and won't bother with law suits over 60$.

The thing most people don't realize is that unlike other industries, videogames industry can't harm the consumers physically or mentally, so it's way harder for people to bother with it, and that is before you even take the demographics into account. It's like trying to sue a person who didn't pay the 60$ you borrowed him.

Fair question and it's probably because model gamers love to bitch and buy instead of actually doing something about it. It's like people that spend an entire year bitching about an upcoming summer blockbuster and then still go watch it and make it successful anyway. Like no you complete retards you don't have to watch the movie then vlog about how shitty it is, they don't care once they have your money.

I stopped going to the movies a long time ago, since 3D is a thing

I really despise console fanboys of any kind who think if they support something and it makes a ton of money that somehow wins them something.

Similarly, you should stop paying attention to AAA video games and the retards playing them

literally no excuse not to do research ahead of time and figure out exactly what you are going to get

Wut?

If I had bought nu males lie based on all the promotional Ad's and conferences where the main gay told me this is going to be in the game -- would that not constitute as "researching ahead"?

Granted I could wait until the reviews embargo lifts or leak, but I digress.

Funnily enough, according to an old Wikipedia page of the film Drive says that a woman sued the distributor for false advertising for making the movie seem like it was Fast and Furious. That section has been removed as of the current Wikipedia page, so I'm not sure if it was legit or not.

this is exactly the kind of shit companies want though

shift the blame to customers and keep getting away with their bullshit

>this isn't anything like you promised!
>OH WELL WHY DIDN'T YOU READ REVIEWS OR MAKE AN INFORMED PURCHASE HUH

Because video games are art and one cannot criticize art without having their own tastes criticized by those around them.

Probably because the box of the actual game fully discloses to you exactly what it is, if you ignore that it's your fault for being a stupid consumer.

what the fuck does gamergate have to do with customer protection in videogames

gamergate (last time i checked) was entirely about videogame """journalists""" being pure garbage

>would that not constitute as "researching ahead"?
Nope because you only got it from the guy trying to sell you it. Obviously he is going to make it sound great but in reality it will probably suck. You should always have a healthy dose of skepticism when someone tries to sell you something.

>what does gamergate have to do with customer protection
Stop trying to shoehorn in your meme war

>literally no excuse not to do research ahead of time and figure out exactly what you are going to get

No. Fuck you.

We have laws about deceptive advertising and they apply to the entertainment industry the same as everyone else.

Caveat emptor is not the law of the land. We tried it for centuries, it doesn't work.

cars are a lot more expensive then games
no one will drag you to court for $60

The new Spongebob movie mainly had it's advertising show off the lame 3DCG climax despite being mostly 2D because today's movegoing retards seem to have a hateboner for 2D animation so they needed to advertise only with the 3D to attract the walmart sharting masses. It was false advertising because the real product was too good for it's audience.

Can I be FUCKING real for a second?

This community is fucking atrocious right now. You're all acting like a bunch of whiny, entitled little babies.

A tiny team of people made an entire universe for you to explore. They made it for YOU, and they're going to wake up tomorrow morning and see that instead of enjoying it, this community of "fans" picked out the 3 or 4 things that weren't perfect and are using that to fucking riot.

Guess what? The game was never going to be perfect. It was never going to live up to your hype. It was never going to be everything you'd ever want in a game.

What it WAS going to be was an impossibly big universe filled with mysteries and weird shit. I just played it for 2 hours and it was exactly that. What more do you want?

Is it buggy? Sure. Is it repetitive? Maybe. Is the inventory system imperfect and the multiplayer feature questionable and the structure unclear? Sure, fine.

But holy shit what do these people OWE YOU?

How fucking entitled do you have to be to explore an infinite universe in a spaceship and then say "yeah but..."

We should all be fucking weeping in our chairs right now at the sheer size and scale of the achievement. We should be showering the people behind this thing with the praise they deserve for pulling off one of the most inspiring games in recent memory.

Hello Games doesn't owe you the world. Yet they gave you 18 QUINTILLION of them.

If you have the fucking audacity to complain about it then you don't deserve it and you were never fans in the first place.

But user, don' ya know gamergrate is satan?

It needs to be pointed out that consumer protection varies from country to country. In Europe and Scandinavia they're much better at protecting the consumer - but the laws haven't aged well since the digital era began, which leaves a huge grey area for the gaming industry.

>OH WELL WHY DIDN'T YOU READ REVIEWS OR MAKE AN INFORMED PURCHASE HUH
Why didn't you? We are talking about entertainment products and not potentially life threatening products like food or vehicles. If you buy food that has nuts and you are allergic but it said there was no nuts then that is something you should be able to sue for. Maybe if they blatantly say there is multiplayer but there isn't that makes more sense but even then you should just be able to get a refund not fucking millions of dollars from a lawsuit.

Video "gamers" have no standards, it's the whole reason this predatory AAA horseshit is allowed to continue. Hype a game for years with false promises, make all your profit in the initial surge of pre-orders before people realize how awful the game is, and laugh all the way to the bank as you do it again and again and again. I pray for a day when people finally see through this obvious pattern, but I don't think that day is ever going to come.

look up the lawsuit against mass effect 3. developers are not responsible for footage of things that did not get implemented so long as they can show that some effort was put towrds developing this feature. This can include concept paperwork as effort.

Literally this. It's why I'm never pre-ordering any game ever again no matter what fancy bonuses get attached. It's nuts how susceptible to hype and how willing people throw themselves into empty hype machines only to be disappointed time after time. Modern era hype marketing needs to be die or at least be scaled back significantly and people need to wake the fuck up already about why it's not at all a good thing. Sick of seeing retarded people say how hyped they are for something and then bitching when it turns out to be unfounded only to repeat the cycle

But that's the practical solution, but it doesn't mean things should be like that.
You could extrapolate that to every single buyable thing in the world.

Like, yes, you shouldn't get scammed if you're careful about what you buy and get hyped for, but it still doesn't matter they should be able to get away with these kind of scams.

>Caveat emptor is not the law of the land.
I never said it was, I was talking about entertainment. Entertainment isn't life threatening so it doesn't really matter if it was a false advertisement. I think you should be able to get a refund but nobody should go to prison for that or have to pay a fine. There is such thing as the Eighth Amendment.

I'm just wait till things are out on Netflix, too fucking over priced too see stuff in movies.

Can I be FUCKING real for a second?

This community is fucking atrocious right now. You're all acting like a bunch of whiny, entitled little babies.

A tiny team of people made an entire universe for you to explore. They made it for YOU, and they're going to wake up tomorrow morning and see that instead of enjoying it, this community of "fans" picked out the 3 or 4 things that weren't perfect and are using that to fucking riot.

Guess what? The game was never going to be perfect. It was never going to live up to your hype. It was never going to be everything you'd ever want in a game.

What it WAS going to be was an impossibly big universe filled with mysteries and weird shit. I just played it for 2 hours and it was exactly that. What more do you want?

Is it buggy? Sure. Is it repetitive? Maybe. Is the inventory system imperfect and the multiplayer feature questionable and the structure unclear? Sure, fine.

But holy shit what do these people OWE YOU?

How fucking entitled do you have to be to explore an infinite universe in a spaceship and then say "yeah but..."

We should all be fucking weeping in our chairs right now at the sheer size and scale of the achievement. We should be showering the people behind this thing with the praise they deserve for pulling off one of the most inspiring games in recent memory.

Hello Games doesn't owe you the world. Yet they gave you 18 QUINTILLION of them.

If you have the fucking audacity to complain about it then you don't deserve it and you were never fans in the first place.

...

No I read on Kotaku that it wasn't about the integrity of their journalist but simply harassment towards women!!

>too new
>1950s

yeah okay

>projection

>You could extrapolate that to every single buyable thing in the world.
But I'm not, like I said if a product falsely states there are no nuts in it only to have nuts in the product that should not be allowed because people can die from allergies to nuts.

>22
>makes 80k
>plays games

Quit projecting your failed life.

>the laws haven't aged well since the digital era began, which leaves a huge grey area for the gaming industry

This is a myth that the games industry is desperately trying to push.

Many courts from many countries have ruled on this and their findings are pretty much always that digital goods are no different from physical goods as far as the law is concerned and using trick words like "subscription" and "service" doesn't change a damn thing.

>Why is there almost no customer protection in videogames?
You're a fucking retard mate. They're $60 entertainment products. There's nothing to protect you from. It's not a house or a car. There's nothing to protect you from.

>There is no giant end of game surprise.
>it's a never ending cycle of "procedural" generate BS
>the ride never ends

it's why I've stopped paying attention to console games for a while now and just stick to handheld. It's way harder to do this with handheld games and really nobody tries and thus it's kind of where the real games still end up instead of the overhyped interactive movies that define modern console gaming.

Still doesn't work.

Going back into the car example, remember the whole thing with Volkswagen over their cars? Well, the changes to these cars weren't life-threatening either. Nobody is going to get killed because the car isn't as powerful as advertised (the opposite in fact) or the car having worse mileage than advertised. These are not lifethreatening. And still Volkswagen copped a gigantic fine and we will be hearing about this for a long time.

Life-threatening seems like an aggravating circumstance rather than a barrier. False advertising is false advertising. If you say your car is safer than it really is then it's certainly worse than selling a game that isn't anything like it was promised, but in both cases you were lying to get a profit, and both should be punished.

Anyone who doesn't fall for lies in advertising and journalism is referred to as "gamers" as a pajorative in order to marginalize them. That way the publishers can de-legitimize their complaints, and continue to shovel the menure down the customers throats.

The biggest flaw you have with your entitled tirade is this:

You have to LEGALLY prove wrong doing, and even then you have to convince a judge and pay all the fucking money to get it going. 99% of consumers can't afford to do that, so they're at the mercy of the business cuz they have bills and shit.

These threads are such a great reminder that 90% of this board's inhabitants are entitled kids with too much time living off other people's dime. Whining on the Internet is meaningless. Protesting and boycotting doesn't work either. You either create something and have the strength of character not to sell out, or you take the money and run.

>but muh justice!

There is no justice. It's just us.

No one's going to bother with "consumer protections" for a $59.99 luxury item.

You have only yourself to blame for being enough of a gullible ignoramus that you swallow the hype and buy it at or near launch without doing some homework.

For the same reason we're sold half products for full price.

As this user points out vidya despite being a billionaire industry it's not taken seriously so it has not real customer rights.

If i ever sold a truck that advertises 4 tons of capacity and breaks at 3500, even though there was no life threatening something, IS a very illegal practice

Or how about a GFX card that advertises as 4gb of ram and it's 3.5gb in the actual product?

Why is everybody on this thread such a corporatist dick sucker? Is this whole website composed of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" now?

Then why are you here?

Of course we're entitled. That's what the consumer is, entitled. They pay, and they get what they want. If they don't like it, for whatever reason, they get to return it. And that's why false advertising is illegal, that's why Steam was forced to have a refund policy.

It's not being a dick sucker, faggot, it's accepting responsibility for your poor choices.

That's because cars are fucking expensive, if you say a car gets 50 miles to the gallon but really only gets 25 that is a big ass difference. Like i said you should be able to get a refund but that is where it should end. Video games are cheap even consoles are cheap. I just used life threatening as an example not the only possibility.

You also have to realize that video games and movies are a form of free expression and the advertisements for them are also arguably free expression.

Don't talk about corporatism when you blindly shell out money for a product and then complain about it after the fact.

The corporation then has your money, and all you can do is cry uselessly about it on Sup Forums.

You have to consider, if you go to court and try to sue, not only will you be up against the best lawyers in the world, they'll just pull out a top of the line computer and render the game that way, or show a development build and pull out an old document saying "things are subject to change".

Underrated post.

That's what we do on with any other industry. If someone sells a broken sound bar - or a soundbar which are missing the features advertised they would be fined hard by the consumer council - at least where i'm from. You can even complain about something and they'll consider if they will pursue whatever you are complaining about - if they're breaking the "marketing act".

It's not uncommon here the "consumer is right" mentality. For instance you get 2 years of warranty on products - and if a manufacturer fault happens you can return the product; if you get it repaired you get further 2 years of warranty.

There has been many cases with mobile phones not having the battery-life as claimed which has been in favor of the consumer.

BUT it's important to note that it's not like a huge lawsuit were consumers makes a fortune. They get their money back or whatever - and the company get's fined or asked to change practise.

So consumer protection is really individually from country to country.

Sorry for the poor english guys - i still love you though

I'm not, I don't even think about corporations when I talk about this. The guy in OP is indie anyway.

becuase Sup Forums is shills central
just see any "buy this shit just released now" or "fuck pirate scums denuvo ftw!" thread

No just contrarian idiots that like to start random arguments. If that means pretending to side with game companies to bait other users that's what they'll do. Once I learned what false flagging was a lot of the crazy ass shit this community said or rather why they said it started to make more sense

The biggest and best form of consumer protection is a properly informed buyer, and for big, famous projects like this, the Internet generally has all the information you could want on it and then some.

/thread

Honestly, if returns were implement in a major way, publishers and developers would get shit on so hard they'd have to fix their shit and not ride on hype and lies to sell games.

By returns, I mean in retail stores and digital store fronts. It's amazing these places don't allow returns when they allow returns on almost all other products.

Yeah because it's not like people have lives to get to, or that advertisement goes out of its to mislead buyers or use the press to do so. Shit like this is why le free market will fix it is a bunch of bull.

Oh well, you tried, gold star.

They did promise more than just some huge galaxy, if all that was promised was a walking simulator of universal scale, people wouldn't complain.

>get faulty graphic card
>get a replacement one 1 week before warranty expires
shit happening with phones too
>get phone
>not even half-warranty in , start getting problems
second phone from same store , same problems , lesson , fuck mediamark