The company expects you to replace the ink with their much more expensive name brand format in order to continue using the printer at all. Printers affected by this will suddenly receive notices that one or more ink cartridges are unrecognized, incompatible or non-genuine.
Although the firmware frequency varies by model, many printers were issued a January 2018 update that effectively disabled the majority of third party ink cartridges.
For Epson, new firmware updates are applied by default as part of the routine software update checks.
