| JackHandy said: It should only happen if somehow a massive game-breaking bug is wreaking havoc. Otherwise, leave it alone. |
It is definitely nowhere close to illegal, like it or not.
That is, of course, because you don't own the game, you've just purchased the right to play the game for as long as the real owners let you. For example, if you buy an e-book from Amazon, they can go in and make changes to that book or even remove it from your devices. Hilariously enough, they removed Orwell's 1984 from the accounts and devices of customers. That is how the corporate world wants it to work and politicians are just paid employees of the biggest corporations so that isn't going to change.
As far as games now, it does make sense on a certain level. It's no longer a situation where they release simple code on a physical copy and forget about it. It's now usually a long-term investment because of online distribution, often with DLC to consider. Only one build is going to be supported and maintained--it would be far too expensive and time-intensive to produce patches and content for multiple branches of code. That's just not going to happen.
There is actually some physical precedent. Dungeons & Dragons changes their rule sets and says that the earlier stuff is dead and you have to buy everything over if you want new stuff. Like how Drow and Orcs are no longer "monsters" and there are no more "half" races on a unique level. Obviously they can't take your physical materials away from you but they would if they could and are now trying to turn the whole thing into another "service" based around an online subscription.
Role-playing video-games that use or mimic those systems often have the same "work in progress" philosophy but they also often support their releases for years, which people generally like, even if individual changes are sometimes less popular.
The only valid question then becomes, should customers have the right to block automatic updates and still play older, unsupported versions? You can do this on Steam. In fact, I'm one of many, many people who turn automatic updates off for Bethesda releases because updates tend to break mods and their own games. People have even made downgrade software for those that need it. Fallout 4 on my PC is an older build because their "next gen update" is a complete mess.
Which, honestly, is yet another reason why I moved to PC gaming.
Either way, everyone should have the right to disable updates and still play the unsupported version already on their device but that probably isn't going to happen on closed platforms because none of the corporate entities involved want that in the slightest since it means potentially missing out on future monetization and surrendering control of "their" code. It's likely only a thing on PC by the grace of Steam and because people would find a work-around anyway.
