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[BlueSweatshirt]

So, I watch TotalBiscuit on YouTube, and as of late in his mailbox episodes he has been bringing up the whole thing about a product being "fit for purpose" and applying it to video games. Cool, I agree that it should apply.(why the hell would I not? .. anyway) "fit for purpose" in this case implying the game must function properly from a technical standpoint.(he also makes some other points about usability, but that's getting besides the point)

I've gotten thinking about this. If I were to sell my game, and there was a game breaking bug I never encountered and by extension never fixed, does that immediately entitle a user for a refund? And furthermore, if it's a wide-spread enough issue, law suit?

My hope is that it won't come to that so long as I don't display negligence in fixing the game, since it is indeed a dynamic product, but I can't help but be concerned for these kinds of liabilities.

What do you guys think?

[TaintedFork]

If someone purchases your game and finds it can't run on their setup, do you give them a refund?

I personally would assume yes, in which case, I don't see the difference.

Lawsuits... That's a bit extreme, though.

[chris_b]

I dunno if it amounts to much, but I always include some boilerplate disclaimer text in any relevant readme file:

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF
ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

[larsiusprime]

IANAL, however, we had a lawyer for our latest project and this is what we did:

We have a EULA that essentially absolves us of all responsibility for anything bad that could happen and tells the user they are assuming all the risk. This sounds like kind of a jerk move, but given the massively litigious culture many of us live in today, it's to protect you from a random drive-by lawsuit.

That being said, we then go out of our way to make things right for our customers whenever something goes wrong, even though we don't legally "have to."  So, I often give refunds if someone can't install the game for some random reason, and offer all kinds of other help whenever there's a problem. (For instance, very occasionally someone would lose a save game when importing from the demo, so we started keeping a save game database that could get them back to more or less where they were before).

Customer service takes quite a bit of time, so you have to be careful about over-promising if you've got a small staff, but generally customers really appreciate it. This is one area as an indie that you can compete brilliantly with the big boys.

So basically - make sure you release yourself from as many legal obligations as possible, because otherwise the full force of civil law can put you out of business in a day if you ever slip up and are unfortunate enough to get in some greedy lawyer's crosshairs, but then make sure you bend over backwards to offer amazing volunatry service to all your customers.

[Faceless]

Apparently, there were many irate customers recently reporting Bioware's Mass Effect 3 to the Federal Trade Commission for providing a product "not fit for purpose" (I think TotalBiscuit's videos had a pretty big role in getting the ball rolling on that ) and as far as I am aware, the FTC had this reaction...

Unless the bug in your game is something like delivering credit card details into the hands of fraudsters, deleting the C: drive, setting fire to the motherboard or something, you're not going to get chased up by lawsuits.

However, on the flip-side, as low as the risk is, there is still a risk; that's why EULA's exist (well, they actually exist to give copyright holders substantially more control over their copyrights, but that's a discussion for another day...). They protect you by basically saying the customer is an idiot, and is "doing it wrong" if anything breaks.

I can't find any examples where a lawsuit as occurred over a video-game not being fit for purpose.