Season passes have become a staple of triple A games as DLC becomes more and more prevalent, so it isn't often that fans think of them as anything odd. Despite this, the season pass for?Fallout 4?is proving to be a lot of trouble for Bethesda and is now the center of a class action lawsuit against the video game development titan. The details of this lawsuit remain somewhat unclear, but it could well have an effect on the upcoming acquisition of Bethesda by Microsoft. That deal is set for $7.5 billion, so it's in Bethesda's best interest to get this sorted out in an amicable way.
Fallout 4?released in 2015 and was met with mostly praise. The game was applauded as an accessible entry point into the franchise that still provided enough depth for longtime fans to enjoy. Along with it, fans could purchase a season pass, a bundle that promised buyers all the DLC ever released for the game for one price. In 2019, this promise returned to bite Bethesda in the back.
Bethesda did release some standard DLC content, all of which was contained within the season pass, but it later moved on from DLC and started making what it called Creation Club content in 2017. This content was located in the same place that mods were, but was curated and often?created by Bethesda itself. In order to gain access to this content, fans would have to pay Bethesda for it regardless of whether or not they had a season pass. This came to light in 2019 and Bethesda was sued for false advertising.
This case is nothing new, but details on its proceedings have been scarce over the last year and a half. It remains to be seen whether or not this will affect Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda, but it seems likely that it wouldn't want to acquire a company currently going through a class action lawsuit. The core of the argument revolves around what is considered DLC and what isn't. Bethesda claims that Creation Club content isn't DLC, while the plaintiff claims that the name is the only thing that distinguishes the two.
What's even more bizarre is that some lawyers are saying that Bethesda made a lot of legal mistakes. In the season pass, there's no fine print explaining what a DLC is or stating that Creation Club content isn't included, and there's also no End User Agreement. Regardless of how the lawsuit plays out, it will be interesting to see how it affects the Microsoft-Bethesda acquisition.
Source: VentureBeat
