Quote Originally Posted by Ciaran
I´m no lawyer, much less for Britain law, but that might as well be accomodation. I have no idea what precisely might be covered by warranty (bugs, by the way, might, under certain circumstances, like causing crashes), but I´m rather sure that not liking the content is not.
Well the basic and fundemental test in English Law is whether the product or service provided satisfied the reasonable expectations of the consumer.

What is a reasonable expectation is a judgement based upon the way the product or service was described by the vendor prior to the contract of sale and what 'any reasonable person' would expect from a product or service of that type.

Thus if one paid to go and see a film called 'Arthur: The true story of King Arthur.' and 30 minutes into the film it was apparent that it was a pile of dog's turd and not historically accurate at all you could quite reasonably walk out and demand your money back. The cinema might refuse to give you a refund, in which case it would be up to a court to decide if your objections to the content of the film were justified, but for the most part a cinema will simply pay out, unless you decide to sit through the entire film before complaining.

As far as restaurants are concerned I've actually witnessed a family on a table next to us in a 'Little Chef' eat and entire meal and then flatly refuse to pay the bill because they did not enjoy the it. Personally, I thought it was a damned cheek but they got away with it. The manager wanted them to leave their names and addresses so that he could follow up their complaints but they refused and just walked out.

Getting back to computer software, it seems to me that any reasonable person buying a peice of software would expect it to be fully functional and capable of being used for whatever purpose it was purchased. So far every CA game I've purchased has been capable of being played, but I've certainly bought others which were not, the most notorious being Napoleon 1813 and Lords of the Realm 3.

Usually, there is no problem in the UK if you decide to take these games back to the shop for a refund. Most Uk gaming stores operate a 'no questions asked refund policy' and HMV even offered a full refund on my Blizzard: Burning Crusade Collectors Editions despite the fact that it had been signed by several lying Blizzard employee's.

Returning bug ridden software is probably the best solution to poor software quality. If software houses begin to get a poor reputation for returns with their distribution agents then eventually their credibility will suffer. Blizzard definately damaged their reputation with UK distributors over the BC collectors edition, not least becuase they left them unable to fulfill their legal obligations to their customers under UK consumer law and triggered an investagation into unfair trading practices by both the Uk and European offices of fair trading. Blizzard basically dropped their distributors in the doodah's and left them to it which won't be forgotten in a hurry. HMV's European Customer Service Manager was absolutely livid about the situation she was left to deal with thanks to their intransigence and stupidity.