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I bet you could argue in court that the EULA is null and void, because you can't be reasonably expected to copy that link into a browser to read it
You can not, in fact, copy that link - I had to type it manually. It's relatively short and human-readable, but still...
Devil's advocate: I wouldn't accuse Sony (or friends) of intentionally making the text unselectable, that's on the Steam client.
Still, Steam probably has some clause in their developer agreement where they say that's not on them.
Yeah, I don't blame Steam, I don't expect them to foresee publishers specifying EULAs as "idk google it m8".
... actually, no, I do blame Steam, what reason is there to prevent copying EULAs? Are they protected by copyright too now?
More just indicative of the hostile posture of corporations
"Hostile posture"
I really like that phrase.
However, the companies quite legitimately use the legal means available to them and what is possible is also done. From this point of view, the blame should rather be placed on the legal situation and politics, as these are what make this legally possible in the first place.
If the agreement to play a game needs a whole website, then I say the problem is 100% on the game developer.
I'd say it's 95% on the publisher, with a large error margin on how shady the intentions of the actual developers are - HD2 is unlikely to be one of those cases.
The EULA isn't null and void, but it's pretty meaningless. Not because you can't reasonably be expected to copy that link into a browser to read it, but because there's no indication that you should or even must do that.
The EULA contains no terms, it doesn't contain any wording saying what you can or can't do. It doesn't say what your rights are. It just contains something that looks like a URL. So, you're still bound by the terms of the EULA (as much as you're bound by any EULA) but the EULA doesn't permit or forbid anything. It's effectively the same as if it were blank.
Modify your host and redirect the URL > 127.0.0.1. software without license:D
The site at the end of that URL will set a cookie. How else would such a mechanism be functional at all? A call to steams naviagtionTiming api confirming the last page load and nothing else at all? Hard to imagine a product manager agreeing to such a pointless exchange. So it cant be redirected to an ip, which I assume you mean is running its own webserver on loopback:443. It also implies the mechanism to verify allows cross site scripting, at least to that one other domain.