Ensuring Consumer Protection in the Purchase of Video Games

This article examines the quality characteristics of video games as goods and considers the possibility of applying legal rules to the video-game sector, including in cases where defects in video games are identified. The article identifies and analyzes the quality characteristics of a video game that a consumer expects to receive when purchasing it. The development of civil circulation requires a reconsideration and expansion of the range of relations to which rules on the quality of goods and remedies may apply, particularly in the field of video games. The aim of this study is to develop an understanding of the quality characteristics and defects of video games in consumer relations, as well as of consumer protection, on the basis of an analysis of doctrinal approaches and the formulation of the Author’s own position. The article examines the current state of scholarly debate concerning the legal nature of video games. Relying on structural-functional and formal legal methods, as well as on the methods of systemic analysis, the Author concludes that a video game constitutes goods in the broad sense, since it has economic value and satisfies consumers’ non-property interests. Such goods possess specific quality characteristics. The quality characteristics of a video game include interactivity, ease of use of the interface, digital form, external circumstances affecting the quality characteristics of the video game, including access to the video game, audiovisual representation, immersiveness, and narrative structure. Where defects are identified in these characteristics, the consumer is generally entitled to rely on remedies, the application of which is determined by the specific nature of video games. The article proposes a new approach to the legal qualification of the quality characteristics of a video game as goods, based, among other things, on Russian legal doctrine. It should also be taken into account that relations concerning video games are shaped by interaction between consumers and video-game rights holders through the functionality of a specialized online platform. The article further demonstrates the need to regulate issues relating to the status and degree of participation of such a specialized online platform in relations between consumers and video-game rights holders.

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