Cheap Suit Part 2: EA Terms of Service wouldn't completely prevent a lawsuit for banning players from multiplaye​r games

In another delayed post, I wanted to add a few points as to the law that would potentially come into effect regarding EA's  ban of customers' access to mutiplayer portions of EA games based on the content of their posts in the EA online forum.
One is that, even if EA's terms of service could potentially be read to permit what EA did, the company wouldn't necessarily be off the hook. An action taken under a contract can't itself violate the law, so there might be separate consumer protection violations (e.g.: that access to multiplayer features was advertised to entice sales of the product, and so cannot be arbitrarily revoked).

Second, even under a contract-law theory, EA would potentially owe players for the value of the service they paid for and are no longer receiving, or EA could be accused of unjust enrichment (basically, the legal equivalent of unfairness) or something similar.

The problem for players is that, though they might be in the right, the amount owed to each of them individually doesn't merit the cost of a lawsuit, so EA effectively wins. A class action can address this problem, but is only available in situations where everyone affected more or less suffers the same damage, because of the same facts (called "typicality" and "commonality").

That's why, for instance, the class action against EA's broken promise to include a digital copy of BF1943 for PS3 (based on the same clear promise to everyone, of an easily calculable damage amount) presumably had a decent shot at success, and so presumably settled (or was at least rendered moot) relatively quickly by EA's renewal of the original offer.

Of course, there would still be the issue of whether the particular terms of service would prohibit class actions (which, again, probably wouldn't have been an issue in the particular facts of the BF1943 case, given that the recinded offer was one that was made to the general public, not just users who were also subscribers to the EA online services).