CaitSeith said:
Drathnoxis said:
Saelune said:
CaitSeith basically made this topic a few days ago with that same video as their base. Not saying we cannot revive the discussion, just giving them some deserved credit.
Oh shoot, you're right! I never noticed that thread for some reason, title just didn't catch my eye.
Oh well, I figure this kind of thing bears repeating.
To be fair, I created the thread to discuss what defines a reasonable videogame consumer (I'm still pretty baffled that something so subjective is part of the law against unfair/deceptive advertisement).
To be fair, "Reasonable" is a part of many parts of the law, and its taken in a slightly more objective sense than subjective. Its an aggregate of sorts of what the average person in the same situation as the person in question would do. So, if we're talking just a general videogame player, a "Reasonable" videogame player would be your average person who plays videogames. On the flipside, say it the plaintiff were an expert on all things videogames, a "Reasonable" person would be the average person who was an expert on all things videogames. So its less "Reasonable" in the sense of what is actually reasonable, and more referring to the average person as reasonable.
In terms of advertising, this means that if the average person wouldn't believe something in a trailer to be true, then the reasonable person wouldn't believe it to be true. This only counts for more outlandish claims though, and subjective statements, and doesn't relate to objective facts stated about things [I.E: If someone said "This game will run at 1080p", no reasonable test is required; that is an objective promise about what the game will do]. This is all rooted in contract law, and is less subjective than it sounds, but yeah, to some extent is subjective, because we're talking about a subjective matter.
Overall it means you're allowed to embellish your description of your product in order to sell it - as in general this is good for society [More sales, more economic activity, more jobs, more cashflow through the economy] - but you're not allowed to outright lie about it. Videogames border the line a lot of the time, and thanks to it being a rather new medium, the law isn't 100% clear on how to deal with it. [Say, for instance, showing off gameplay from a demo version of the game, but that demo version is cut - like Bioshock Infinite did. Is that false advertising? If so, then you either can't preview your game at all before sale, or you can't make necessary development decisions and your product's quality suffers because you're locked into something you showed earlier, or talked about, but that no longer is possible to do properly within budget. Drawing the line between this, and more questionable cases like with NMS, is more difficult than it sounds, and that's something the law has a bit of trouble with].
That said, the "Reasonable" test is important. It ensures you're able to say subjective things, that consumers aren't expected to be experts in a given field, and that companies aren't punished if a consumer is an expert in a given field and "falls for" something they know to be false on purpose simply to create damages and sue a company.
At least that's how it works down here. Law is complicated though, and looking at the State's sometimes I think your law is nuts.