I entered into an agreement with a car manufacturer to be able to sell their cars in the UK. After I had people place orders (and pay) for a bunch of them the manufacturer decided that they were no longer supplying cars to the UK. Forcing me to issue my customers with refunds.
Fraud exists because you were driving the car for a while with your normal drivers license and everything was perfectly fine, but now (for example) Elon says you have to get a specialized additional Tesla certification license from Tesla, but only offers it to countries whose names start with vowels because he was on a ketamine bender one night.
It’s a retroactive, unilateral change to a contract, which is generally considered legally questionable at the very least. And - you guessed it - possibly fraud.
There is a big difference between cancelling an order and taking away a product that you have been using.
I don’t agree with Sony’s actions as everyone should be able to buy the game but this is Sony cancelling an order as the game isn’t even out yet on PC.
It’s now a pattern and practice, though. HD2 could have been a fluke. But this now indicates that they’re probably going to do something similar with all of their current-gen games. THAT is the point people are becoming furious with.
That was obvious though. There was articles last week saying that Ghost of Tsushima wouldn’t remove the PSN requirement. It is also listed above the buy button (although that could be recent).
It was pretty clear from their response to HD2 that they would try again. Sure they shouldn’t have been selling preorders in countries that don’t have PSN access but it isn’t really surprising that they are enforcing it here.
I’m not but what’s funny is that EA, Ubisoft and Rockstar require an account to play their single player games and even their awful launchers which Sony isn’t doing and no one cares. Suddenly Sony does the same thing and everyone is furious about it.
Maybe it’s time for everyone to start review bombing these publishers too.
You should look up what the word "fraud" means in a legal context.
You would have an incredibly, overwhelmingly difficult tike attempting to prove that in court at this moment.
Fraud requires intentional deception and requires you to have lost something. This is a proactive action to prevent misunderstanding and from you purchasing something that won't work, and refunds your purchase. The loss, and the intent, are both missing.
It sounds to me like you are talking about what Steam is doing, with the geolocking and refunds (not fraud), while the other person is talking about what Sony is doing, with adding PSN requirements after the fact (maybe fraud?).