Comment "Unsupported platform" concept is anticompetitive (Score 1) 103
Are they stopping people that purchased the game from playing it?
With respect to Call of Duty games: Yes. Games supporting Xbox Live on the original Xbox console are no longer playable online. Games for PlayStation 2 had a trend of closing even earlier with DNAS error -103 "This software title is not in service."
And with respect to recent games: The publisher of the game Concord closed its sole server less than a month after release.
And with respect to recent games that rely on Windows security technologies: Players of Marvel Rivals on Linux and macOS got banned from the game's sole server for a century until server administrators had to reverse the bans manually. If you want more examples, I can provide them by searching DuckDuckGo for linux games ban site:slashdot.org.
Do you simply mean that paying customers have to play it on supported platforms and accounts that own the software, whereas people that stole the software can play it on unsupported platforms and accounts that do not own the software?
I suspect that grandparent means that the concept of an "unsupported platform" is itself anticompetitive. I certainly believe it is. If a paying licensee can technically make a computer program work on a particular platform, it ought not to be the publisher's privilege to arbitrarily ban said licensee for using said program on said platform.
Where do you work? What product or service do you provide?
I work for Retrotainment Games, and we sell pixel art games for about $10 to $15 on Steam* or $60 on cartridge.
* Disclaimer: A paid download on Steam or a major game console's download store is not a sale of a copy as defined in the Uniform Commercial Code.