Today, we're going to look at some famous times tech companies have screwed over their
customers in the pursuit of money, because who hasn't felt like they've been hosed at some point?
First up, a company that's actually beloved by quite a few people, Nintendo. Although their
business model of publishing quality first-party games that has kept them in better graces with
many gamers than, say, EA, they've been the subject of plenty of criticism for going overboard
when protecting their intellectual property. This can honestly be a whole video on its own,
but we're going to talk about a couple of their greatest hits. Back in 2020, Nintendo made headlines
for sending a cease and desist letter to the organizers of a major Super Smash Bros. Melee
tournament, alleging that they were using an unauthorized emulator to allow the tournament to
take place. While it may seem to make sense that a major game publisher wouldn't want pirated copies
of one of their smash hits going around, the problem was that the tournament was only moved
online that year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was a terrible look for Nintendo, as the
organizers were trying to keep players socially distanced for safety reasons, and Nintendo had
not, and still hasn't, provided any legal way for players to play Melee online on current hardware.
Nintendo was, of course, within its rights to do this, but you'd think a company so concerned about
piracy would try to make its own games more accessible for those who want to play them and
also allow greater exposure to folks who might be interested in buying them. This, however,
often hasn't happened, with the company not only not offering authorized ways to play older titles,
but also being very aggressive with going after fan projects that weren't made for profit and
even being heavy-handed with how they approached fan videos. In 2013, while other publishers
generally didn't have much issue with game footage being posted to YouTube, Nintendo instead
claimed ad revenue on Let's Play videos that featured their games, meaning none of that sweet
sweet YouTube money would go to the creators. Nintendo responded to that backlash by creating
a controversial creators program that gave a cut of the proceeds to these players,
but the up to 40% cut Nintendo was still taking led to yet more uproar until they finally axed
the program in 2018. But people were left wondering why Nintendo hated the idea of free
advertising so much. Let's step away from video games and talk about an anti-consumer tactic
that was so intentionally confusing that it drew an official comparison to ancient epic poetry.
Amazon doesn't seem like a company that you'd immediately think of as anti-consumer,
what, with a fast shipping and a reputation for low prices and a relatively permissive return
but the way it gets people to pay for that fast shipping has been undoubtedly shady.
In 2023, the American Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon over its use of dark patterns,
basically manipulative design tactics to deceive consumers into participating in Amazon Prime,
which as you probably know, is a subscription service where shoppers pay monthly or yearly
for faster shipping and other perks, like Luna Cloud Gaming. Prime Music? Watching rings of power
with commercials. Although signing up for Prime isn't hard, trying to cancel a subscription or
auto-renewal has been a very different story. According to the FTC, a user would have to go
through four pages, six clicks, and 15 options to finally find the button to end their membership,
unless you think this was just an innocuous case of poor design. The FTC also said Amazon
internally called this process, Iliad Flow, with the Iliad being an ancient epic poem about the
Trojan War that's over 110,000 words long. This name is a key piece of evidence in the lawsuit
that indicates Amazon made the cancellation process deliberately lengthy and confusing.
A practice also referred to as roach motelling, since you can check in, but you can never leave.
Additionally, Amazon is also accused of pelting consumers with prompts to sign up for Prime
while checking out on the site, but not clearly telling them that they were signing up for a
recurring bill. Amazon has made things more straightforward since the initial accusations
from the FTC, but it's not exactly like they can just tell the government, look, we fixed it,
and get off scot free. The lawsuit is still pending in court with the FTC hoping to make
an example out of Amazon. Finally, let's look at a company run by the kind of guy that everyone
has some sort of opinion on, Elon Musk's Tesla. Like with Nintendo, there's arguably enough to
do a full video here, but we're gonna focus on Tesla's full self-driving feature. Although FSD
was somewhat controversial from the start due to the name, after all the car doesn't actually
fully self-drive. The bigger issue was the way Tesla was happy to take customers' money for
the future without actually delivering on what was promised. Starting in 2016, hell of a year,
Tesla started taking orders for FSD, even though the future wasn't complete enough to be enabled
at that time. However, consumers were led to believe that they'd be getting usable FSD
sometime during the car's expected lifespan, especially as Tesla made the point to say that
their vehicles were already capable of running FSD from a hardware standpoint, which turned out not
to be completely true. Tesla drivers signed up for pre-orders partly because the company implied
the price might go up in the future, and Elon Musk had made statements that FSD would be fully
implemented within a few years. Unfortunately, Elon's track record of predictions surrounding FSD
and Mars, and well, many things, have been dreadfully inaccurate, leading to accusations
that he knowingly overpromised in order to sell more upgrades. Now, we're near the end of 2024,
and shocker, FSD still isn't fully implemented, as the tech is still incapable of driving the car
without the need for human intervention. Tesla's official documents even now append the word
supervised, and warn that the future may not work as expected. But this isn't even the worst part,
in our opinion. The cost of FSD rose as high as a whopping $15,000, but the company's baseline
policy is not to allow owners to transfer that feature if they upgrade to a new Tesla,
meaning that people have paid exorbitant sums for a feature that they've never been able to fully
use, but officially have to say goodbye to that money if they want to upgrade to a newer model car.
Now, to be fair, Tesla has offered opportunities to transfer FSD as special one-time amnesties,
though in reality, they've had to do this multiple times, making FSD a little bit like
the McRib of car technology. And the fact that Elon has called this program an amnesty,
makes it seem like Tesla is somehow doing customers a favor, even though they never
really gave customers what those customers paid for? We're out of time. But is there an outrageous
incident from a tech company that you'd like us to rant about? Let us know in the comments,
and you might see it in a follow-up episode. And if you'd like to learn about features and tech products that you've paid for but may not even be able to use, go watch this video next.