Jumpin said:
I would say corporations are a risk that the democratic system needs to address more readily. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Nintendo services (mostly), but governments need to regulate these sorts of companies better. There is no way regulation should allow Nintendo to change the rules of how users can access all your content. Not on Switch 1 hardware, at least. Speaking for myself, I spent 8 years buying digital content understanding the rules; and then they changed them, so now I can’t play any of my games I share with my family members online ever again. Not without investing a lot more money to get duplicates. And that’s just one example. Perhaps just as big, but one I don’t complain about because it didn’t bite me in the ass, was Nintendo shutting down access to VC and WiiWare downloads. That shouldn’t be legal. Those games should still be available for download, even if the storefront itself is gone. And the Minecraft example is part of an enormous problem with digital gaming right now, the inability to move assets around from account to account, whether it is content or currency. If I have an account, there should be a feature to allow to transfer money to another account. Granted, by adding that in it will increase the operational expenses of the services, which will increase prices, but it might be negligible depending on the volume of transactions (and it might require a third party service specialized in this to prevent money laundering) - and the benefits IMO outweigh the cons for most consumers. But I guess that’s a whole different discussion - other people are much more concerned about price levels than I am. If you own a digital asset, there should be a service to allow transfer. |
I do that all the time with online banking as well as billions of others. There are no operational expenses, it just needs to be implemented. Currency should be able to move between accounts. Digital content as well, but they don't want you to do that. First sale doctrine circumvented.
This will only get more of an issue as time moves on:
"When a Steam account holder dies, their Steam account, including all games and in-game purchases, is not transferable. Valve, the company that owns Steam, explicitly states that accounts and their contents cannot be inherited, passed down via a will, or merged with another account. This means the games and any other digital assets associated with the deceased account become effectively lost"
Apparently there already is a mechanism for transferring coins at least:
Bot WC said: I see. Just to set expectation, digital code is not transferable but what we can do here is to transfer the content directly to the Minecraft game through Gifting process.
You said: The content being the coins?
Bot WC said: That's correct. However, since it's through the game process then you need to contact Minecraft support for it.
But they claim only Minecraft (which is Microsoft as well of course) can do it.
It's moving somewhat, got a reply this morning:
Thank you for providing that information. To ensure your ticket is handled properly I will be escalating this to a specialist. This may result in a slight delay in a response from our team. Please refrain from submitting additional tickets since this may increase your wait time. If you do have additional information or questions you would like to provide, please let us know by replying to this email.
Thank you for your patience, we look forward to assisting with your request.
Got to call in the specialist for this 'unique' problem. /sarcasm
