The latest furor over Blizzard's actions surrounding the release of Warcraft 3: Reforged could be relevant to game ownership violation arguments.
There are two major issues going on with the Warcraft 3: Reforged release:
- Reforged turned out to not be anything like what was advertised and is a case of false advertising
- Blizzard has replaced original Warcraft 3 with Reforged and has forced owners of original Warcraft 3 to download Reforged to keep playing with the original graphics
Original Warcraft 3 is around 1.4 GB in size, while reforged is something like 28 or so GB in size. This means owners of the original game have to download about 27 GB of data they have no use for just to keep playing the same game. Actually, they have to throw away 27 GB of their storage drive space to keep playing the game while losing many of its features, because Reforged lacks a bunch of features that the original game has.
I think that taking away people's access to original Warcraft 3 through Battle.net and forcing them to download ~27 GB of data that is useless to them while they lose many features that original Warcraft 3 has and that aren't included in Reforged would be a case of theft, or at minimum of game ownership rights being trampled by a software publisher.
People have discovered that, for now, the original Warcraft 3 can still be downloaded and played by installing a Blizzard test realm. I wonder if Blizzard will continue to leave that avenue open.
There is also the claim of Blizzard's that any custom maps or game modes created in Warcraft 3: Reforged are the property of Blizzard. I don't think that could carry legal weight and if I owned Reforged I'd want to release something in it just so I could then release it elsewhere as well and wave it in their faces.
Interestingly, after initially refusing to offer refunds, Blizzard has caved to the demands for refunds while people talked on Blizzard's forums about related topics such as potential class-action lawsuits and how it's illegal to deny refunds in Australia. I expect Blizzard allowed refunds in the face of the undeniable evidence that the delivered Warcraft 3: Reforged product does not match the advertised one.