Ever wanted to take on most of the biggest publishers and developers in the video game industry? Live in Canada? Well the Consumer Law Group has a class-action lawsuit for you.
That’s the Canadian law firm proposing a class-action lawsuit against a number of the games industry’s biggest players, including (but not limited to) Sony, Microsoft, Rockstar, Take-Two, Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Roblox, Epic Games, Mojang Studios, Nintendo of America, Ubisoft and Ubisoft Montreal.
The CLG’s reason for the suit comes down to video game addiction, which it cites as a major issue impacting people today while using a 2008 identification from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which named video game addiction “as one of the main causes of students dropping out of American universities.”
The suit (spotted by former GI.Biz reporter Brendan Sinclair) if successful will be seeking compensation from the above company’s to anyone who has “purchased, played, or otherwise used a video game in which anyone of the proposed defendants have been involved in designing, developing, manufacturing, publishing, marketing, or selling.”
So basically if you’ve played or bought a game from any of the above studios, and this class-action suit goes all the way to a win, then you’ll be owed some kind of compensation.
Of course whether or not the suit actually gets that far is a whole different story. The CLG isn’t wrong to point out that games are designed in ways to make them addictive, and they’re not the first to do it.
But taking on multiple giant studios like this is a big gamble that might not pay off at all.
Source – [CLG via Brendan Sinclair on Bluesky]