March 27, 2009: The Entertainment Consumers Association’s (ECA) president and founder (Hal Halpin) talks to Ars Technica, announcing a new membership benefit: 10% games purchases with Amazon. Hal comments: “If you buy three games or so a year through Amazon, your ECA membership is basically free.” Membership is a very reasonable $20 a year.
Almost immediately, new members are confused. The discount and Hal’s quote seem to imply that the discount codes can be used multiple times. However, initial codes seem to be one-use-only. This is shrugged off by ECA administrators as a technical glitch.
It takes a few weeks to get this glitch working and when it does, it has the restriction of generating a new Amazon code for each discounted game. This forces members wanting to buy multiple games to avoid any group orders and forces Amazon to ship all games individually. It’s not a big deal, but is a bit inconvenient.
May 17, 2009: The generated Amazon codes stop working. The ECA responds, saying that the “initial batch of one-time use codes has been depleted and will be replenished as soon as the new batch from Amazon comes in.” New codes are available and working 10 days later. The admins mention that they are working with Amazon to attempt to get unique per-member codes that can be used for all purchases.
July 1, 2009: The codes stop working once more. 10 days later, new codes are available, but these codes can only be used once. 5 days later, multiple codes are up and working again.
August 19, 2009: The codes run out again. The admins mention that this is due to the increasing popularity of the discount. New codes are up and working within a week this time.
September 11, 2009: Hal Halpin writes an article in Game Informer magazine, ending it with a generic code that can be used to get a free year’s ECA membership. This code gets posted to many forums and sites online, as it is usable by anyone. With the lure of the Amazon discount being a huge perk of membership, many new members predictably flock to the ECA and sign up for free.
Within 2 days, the codes have been used up. The next few weeks are a bit of mayhem in terms of getting codes to work. Some people are lucky, others are not. Code batches get exhausted quickly and members are only able to generate one code per day at most.
October 10, 2009: The Amazon codes disappear from the ECA site. The ECA admins say that this is at Amazon’s behest and that new codes will appear when they get them from Amazon.
October 28, 2009: The Amazon partnership and promotion is “no longer available.” New members, many of whom signed up solely for the Amazon discount, are a bit miffed. Forum moderators begin locking down and deleting new threads about the Amazon discount.
December 2, 2009: Today. Members become aware of several things simultaneously. First, an option that existed on the accounts page that allowed a member to set their auto-renew status for next year’s membership disappeared.
Second, the terms of ECA membership cancellation changed. Previously, members were given a phone number to call if they wished to cancel. The new terms dictated that members needed to send a piece of postal mail in order to cancel.
The forums (and other blogs and sites that pick up the story) explode with comments and criticisms. A moderator answers some questions thusly:
Was there a button for auto-renewing?
Yes, for some browsers, but it wasn’t intended to be there, wasn’t a working option and was removed as soon as we became aware
Why can’t we terminate via email?
Because the org has grown too large to handle the volume and requiring a mailed piece separates those who are serious from those who are lazy or finicky – joining and leaving repeatedly – and it gives us written documentation, a paper trail to reconcile against
Later in the day, Hal Halpin releases a statement that seems to place the blame on members who exploited the Amazon codes to such a degree (even going as far as to repeatedly join, leave, and rejoin the ECA) that these changes were the only way to quickly and easily prevent these exploits from happening.
I don’t want to pass too much judgment here. I’ve already written a lot of words and there are certainly arguments to be made for both sides. But as someone who has followed this story from this morning, I can say that the response I’ve seen from the ECA (both their forum moderators and Hal’s statement) have seemed at times smug and at others condescending, going as far as to treat all of their members like criminals. On the other side of the coin, many of the ECA critics have shown themselves to be immature and vindictive. It’s hard to get reasonable people to discuss anything on the Internet, but the ECA certainly didn’t make it easy.
Changing terms of service without notification, requiring postal mail for cancellation of an auto-renewing membership, and promoting a benefit that was often dysfunctional are all things that can hurt the credibility of any organization, let alone a pro-consumer one.