2012-01-26, 04:45 AM
Anyone could sue Nexon. There is very little faith that a ToS or click through EULA actually means anything or could hold up in a court of law. With the right lawyers you could probably take any software company to court and get a settlement, but you have to have the resources to be able to finance your campaign to begin with. I would say it is more likely that a class action would be allowed through and could really see some rewards.
What gets really tricky here is that in most of the larger free to play games out there, RMT (real money transactions) are involved, and that blurs all of the lines. Disregard the value of any sort of virtual item, that is irrelevant. What is relevant is that real money went in to a system with an expectation that a certain level of service would be provided, and there is a legitimate case for the buying of virtual goods and services from a company and instead receiving what amounts to fraud in return. (See: all of the cases of people never getting NX compensation returned for NX charges lost from a rollback. All of the people whose accounts were hacked and stripped due to server side security breaches.) In those cases, people were essentially stolen from, and in any other field, that would never be tolerated. But because some companies, and Nexon in particular, hide behind the wall of "free to play" they can get away with never have to deal with said issues.
If I were still studying law, and had billable hours to blow, I would absolutely salivate at the idea of going after a f2p company like Nexon. I am actually surprised someone hasn't done it yet. With the way they have dealt with security breaches, and the loss of in game currency and items due to negligence, if you could gather a solid case, you would almost be guaranteed a settlement.
What gets really tricky here is that in most of the larger free to play games out there, RMT (real money transactions) are involved, and that blurs all of the lines. Disregard the value of any sort of virtual item, that is irrelevant. What is relevant is that real money went in to a system with an expectation that a certain level of service would be provided, and there is a legitimate case for the buying of virtual goods and services from a company and instead receiving what amounts to fraud in return. (See: all of the cases of people never getting NX compensation returned for NX charges lost from a rollback. All of the people whose accounts were hacked and stripped due to server side security breaches.) In those cases, people were essentially stolen from, and in any other field, that would never be tolerated. But because some companies, and Nexon in particular, hide behind the wall of "free to play" they can get away with never have to deal with said issues.
If I were still studying law, and had billable hours to blow, I would absolutely salivate at the idea of going after a f2p company like Nexon. I am actually surprised someone hasn't done it yet. With the way they have dealt with security breaches, and the loss of in game currency and items due to negligence, if you could gather a solid case, you would almost be guaranteed a settlement.