
EA's Tetris games will no longer be playable on iPhones and iPads - danso
https://gizmodo.com/you-soon-wont-be-able-to-play-eas-official-tetris-game-1841155666
======
favorited
The article's update provides the reason:

> Last year, The Tetris Company, Inc. and N3TWORK announced a multi-year
> agreement where N3TWORK will be the exclusive developer and publisher of new
> Tetris® games for mobile devices worldwide, excluding China. EA’s
> announcement that it will retire its Tetris®, Tetris® Premium and Tetris®
> Blitz games as of April 21 is a result of this agreement.

Kind of surprising they don't have recourse to rebrand/retool the game.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
TTC somehow got a court ruling saying that their copyright on Tetris covers
the actual game mechanics [1], so that might be legally risky.

[1]
[https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2012/06/tetris...](https://www.loeb.com/en/insights/publications/2012/06/tetris-
holding-llc-v-xio-interactive-inc)

~~~
michaelbrave
strange I didn't think you could copyright mechanics...

~~~
simonlc
You can't. The whole case rests on trade dress, a form of trademark. They
clearly know what they are doing in court, with past episodes being on
Nintendo's side in the past. Xio also had a terrible defense, and imo their
expert witness falling flat. The evidence presented was also skewed imho, it
drives me nuts every time I think about it.

I should note that it is possible to patent game mechanics, and there are
various patents owned by them, and also other developers of Tetris games. None
of these cover the core mechanics of Tetris however.

~~~
tinus_hn
Any parent on Tetris would have long expired, Tetris was published in 1984.

------
russellbeattie
I can't believe it's taken N3TWORK over six months to produce a bare-bones
replacement game. It doesn't even support multi-touch, so you can't move and
rotate at the same time.

I'll admit, I honestly have no idea what it takes to develop, test and launch
a top-tier game for mobiles, but we're talking about Tetris. And this
particular version is as minimal as it gets.

I love Tetris, so I really hope they add some cleaner skins without the odd
faux 3D effect and fix the controls before their battle royale version comes
out.

~~~
simonlc
Their battle royale game is already available in the NZ region. The version
that was just released is just a stripped down version of Tetris Royale to
fill the void EA's game made. The controls absolutely need to be fixed, but in
the end, I just thing touch controls are bad in general, even the EA app was
not enjoyable to me.

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JKCalhoun
Pay for the Real Thing, they told me.

Eschew the clones, your pay supports the game, they said.

~~~
msla
People say "You Get What You Pay For".

One of these days, they'll realize that isn't always a good thing.

~~~
rgoulter
I'm not quite sure I understand your point.

The people who paid for the game on the App Store won't end up with what they
paid for.

~~~
msla
You paid for a game which can be taken from you.

That's what you got.

------
armitron
This has happened before with other IOS games (Monkey Island comes to mind)
and is the main reason I never buy anything from the App Store. A number of
titles never got updates for 64bit either (lost treasures of infocom) or when
they did asked you to pay again (GoodReader 3) so I said fuck you to that
whole ecosystem a long time ago.

I use my iOS devices to read books I side-load (libgen and Calibre), read
comics and listen to music I download from private trackers and to browse the
web.

~~~
printango
I find it's helpful to treat app store purchases as a convenient way to
temporarily get access to something. I don't mind paying a few bucks here and
there for a game - you just have to assume you're renting it.

------
re
I get why they would do this if they have online services that they're
shutting down, but it seems like the games ought to easily have offline modes
(from the screenshots for Tetris Premium, I don't see any obvious online
features). Even if they're losing the license, it doesn't seem like they
should have to force the app to check in with a server, or push an update to
kill the games, especially if the user paid for it.

From one user review:

> Hadn’t played for quite a while, so was surprised when they announced that
> after April 2020 the game wouldn’t be "available to play". Turns out they
> wrecked it a while back by making it so you can’t play offline (why? - for
> years it worked fine offline).

------
orbitingpluto
Run Spectrum Holobyte's Tetris Classic in DOSBox.

~~~
technofiend
Available here as abandonware:

[https://www.myabandonware.com/game/tetris-
classic-1j3](https://www.myabandonware.com/game/tetris-classic-1j3)

------
BrandiATMuhkuh
I'm surprised this is possible. I was expecting as soon as an app is installed
on a device (android, iOS, etc.) No-one can tamper with it (except via
update). I guess that means Apple could, if they wanted, delete apps from
people's devices!

~~~
jonhohle
The problem is that it’s not just Tetris, but probably backed by a service
which provides various in game features. Since they won’t be able to sell the
game or collect in app purchase revenue, they’ve likely decided to shut down
the servers.

Apps may be able to delete apps remotely (I believe their mobile device
management tools allow companies to push policies like that[0]), but to my
knowledge has never done so. Amazon has pulled books back from people’s
Kindles and many platforms have removed content from being redownloadable.

0 -
[https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicemanagement/r...](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicemanagement/remove_an_app)

------
Causality1
How hilariously dystopian. You can expect this behavior to get worse and worse
until we have decent digital consumer rights laws.

~~~
simonlc
Tetris is preparing our children for a lifetime of virtual labour.

------
zarriak
This same thing also happened with tetrisfriends.com. It sucks because they
took all of the game modes that you could play for free and then are willing
to sell them back to you in Tetris 99.

Also I don't really follow any Tetris forums or anything so I don't know how
people reacted when it shut down but I was amazed it shut down since they sold
mtx skins and I assume that they didn't transfer any of it to Tetris 99.

~~~
simonlc
Tetris Friends shut down because the company that runs it (Tetris Online,
Inc.) shut down. They had a fairly big library of games that was delisted from
various platforms.

------
sneak
Why is Apple taking 30% if not to prevent app developers from remotely
disabling offline software that has already been purchased? How is that not a
malware update?

~~~
jakobegger
Surprisingly, Apple doesn't care a bit when developers fuck you.

One app that I bought on the app store for 60€ just refused to start one day
if I didn't buy an additional annual subscription.

When I complained to Apple, they just told me to contact the developer.

They take 30%, but they don't care one bit if what they sold you actually
works.

~~~
mrweasel
I tried to find an iOS habit tracker the other day, but eventually failed
because I can’t tell what the actual cost will be, it’s all In-App-Purchase at
this point.

Now add that you can’t even be sure that apps you “purchased” will continue to
be available.

The app store model is broken, there’s also zero chance that I will buy
anything from any app store anymore. I’ll download free apps that solves a
problem, like buying a bus ticket, but that’s about it.

Apple does give a crap about the quality of their app store, as long as
there’s no porn and you both directly steal, they simply do not care.

~~~
jakobegger
I think a big problem is that Apple puts all the maintenance effort on
developers. On iOS, developers have to update apps at least once a year to
make sure they keep working.

On the Mac, as on Windows, you could just keep using an old app for years. It
didn't matter if the developer bothered to update their app for the latest OS,
you could generally just keep using apps that you bought years ago.

------
Aeolun
This is crazy. All the star wars games that were previously licensed by one
company or another can still be played. Why is Tetris different?

~~~
missosoup
_In August 2008, Apple Inc. removed Tris, a version of Tetris from its online
App Store. The software author had written a tetromino game for the iPhone iOS
without authorization from The Tetris Company.[12] In March 2009, The Tetris
Company sued BioSocia, operator of the Omgpop gaming portal[13][14] because
one of its multiplayer games, Blockles, was too similar to Tetris. By
September 2009, Omgpop removed the game from the website and replaced it with
an alternate that the developers created, based on Puyo Puyo.

In May 2010, lawyers representing The Tetris Company sent Google a Digital
Millennium Copyright Act Violation Notice regarding Tetris clones available
for Android.[15] Google responded by removing the 35 games listed in the
notice as it was legally obliged to do, even though, according to one
developer, the games contained no references to Tetris.[16][17][18]

In February 2011, The Tetris Company continued to make copyright claims
against independently developed Tetris clones, most notably against Tetrada on
the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. The developer, Mario Karagiannis, rejected
the claims of copyright infringement on the grounds that copyright does not
cover gameplay design, but still removed the game, citing lack of resources to
fight what he called "bullying".[19][20]

A US District Court judge ruled in June 2012, that the Tetris clone Mino from
Xio Interactive infringed on the Tetris Company's copyrights by replicating
elements such as the playfield dimensions and the shapes of the blocks.[21]_

Why is this still going on in 2020? Is the copyright on a falling blocks game
concept never going to expire? This is a poster child case for why current
copyright law is harmful to everyone.

~~~
tedunangst
Presumably the copyright will expire sometime around 2079.

~~~
missosoup
Under mickey mouse act, there's no reason to believe it will ever expire.

Whole thing is rotten to the core. Megarich proponents arguing that copyright
in its current form encourages competition is about as laughable as megarich
proponents arguing for trickle down economics.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act)

~~~
uep
Current expectations are that copyright _won 't_ be extended again.

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-
says-i...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/hollywood-says-its-not-
planning-another-copyright-extension-push/)

