[JTBooth]

What level of justification do you think should be required to skip consumer preference and go with a law?

In the case of seatbelts I think the case is quite strong. Even beyond consumer preference, there's a burden on public healthcare, and a cost in safety to others (if you get knocked out of your seat you could lose control of the vehicle, belt keeps you by the wheel). Parents can injure their kids by not using seatbelts.

I don't see any of that in games. As a consumer and as a bystander I don't really know whether I want the marginal dollar of game development spent on long term support or on performance improvements or something else. It certainly varies game to game. For big AAA games that depend on mtx, but could be played entirely offline, the studios have a legitimate interest in making playing them offline hard!

I'd also note that having any laws at all about how games work is going to make it more expensive to develop games, purely because you'll make people check if they're following the laws. Imagine a teenager shipping their first game, or a small studio deciding whether to release a hackathon project, or a small team at a big company spinning out a mini game into a standalone. I dread "no, don't launch that, I don't know if breaking the mid battle save system counts as reasonably playable"

[thereddaikon]

That's a good question and I haven't thought long enough and deeply enough on this issue to have a fully formed opinion of it. I do think our current copyright system in the west is generally broken and over emphasizes short term business profits over the long term benefit of cultural works. But as to what level game publishers should be forced to make games available I can't say.

As far as how regulations work, I am generally in favor of reworking incentive structures to make companies want to behave in a prescribed manner rather than just outright banning deviant behavior. If something is illegal but still beneficial, they will find ways to dodge regulations and factor fines into cost projections. You have to make it worth their while to do as you want.