Wouldn't a ruling in effect mean that this particular bit of sleaze is not allowed, even if it's in the contract?
If the law changes here, it would be more likely to be because the EU changed or "clarified" the law, rather than because an EU court ruled on it - I mean, that could happen, but Civil Law (in the sense, as opposed to Common Law, not as opposed to Criminal Law, sorry I didn't make up the terms) which is the approach the EU uses (and virtually all current EU countries, Britain was the exception) is somewhat less bound by judicial precedent than Common Law is.
There's no ruling. Just somebody expressing an opinion.
Yup. What is interesting here is the direction of travel more than the individual statement. This opinion seems to be becoming increasingly popular/common, even with politicians. I can't help but think that's partly because lawmakers are increasingly of an age when they played games, or maybe even still do, so don't see games as much as a weird thing for kids/losers as they did in earlier eras.
I'm inclined to see that as a hollow ruling when contemporary game companies claim that you're not buying the game -instead, you're buying a license to use the game.
I think you're failing to understand how legal systems work on a pretty basic level here.
If the EU legislates that buying a game is owning a game, and/or if a significant body of judicial precedence for that position built up in EU courts (not currently the case, it's a more mixed picture), then that would be the position, and game companies would have to decide how they interacted with that. It would not be a "hollow ruling" in the way it might be a single US Common Law court, where a judge is simply going to be overridden by some jurisdiction-shopped East Texas appeal judge or the obviously extremely pro-corporation-biased current makeup of the US Supreme Court. What game companies would do, we don't know. But the EU is too big a market to ignore, and this isn't actually that bad of a problem! Companies will kick and scream and shout but the real result of multiple such ruling or EU legislation to that effect would probably not be huge. All would likely mean is if GaaS/MMO/always-online-type games shut down voluntarily, they had to publish some software that could be used to make them work, or they had to put out a final patch turning the game into a single-player game (both of which have absolutely been done by companies before!).
There'd be a couple of years of transition. Some shirty US publisher would no doubt refuse to publish some really dodgy GaaS game in the EU very publicly, and people would act like they cared even though six months later the game was dead anyway. Then eighteen months after that, this would just be the new "business as usual".
I should note we're already seeing companies having to behave different in the EU to the US or Japan. For example, in the US/Japan/most-of-the-world, Nintendo can brick - and I do mean brick - your Switch 2 if they even think you're pirating games on it or otherwise modifying software. In the EU, they can cut you off from the Nintendo network, and maybe you can never download anything officially again (which is still pretty bad), but they cannot brick your Switch 2 (that would be very bad and they'd get sued and lose immediately, probably have to pay out the full cost of the machine + everyone's court costs), and their EULAs in these regions reflects this difference.
Is it it stopping or slowing Nintendo in the EU though? Nah. It's cost of doing business and it's not a high cost. Nor would this be in the longer-term, again no matter how much game publishers scream and kick about it.
