[akramachamarei]

Power to say "that product you are selling is not okay with me! If the customer is willing to buy, it must be because you have deceived him. We cannot trust customers to buy games on their own, they need help from the state to do that!"

Shall I go on?

CU: I consent.

GD: I consent.

EU: Isn't there someone you forgot to ask?

"Oh, won't someone think of the gamers?"

[skotobaza]

The initiative is not about telling which games customers can and cannot buy, it's about customers getting to play a game they paid for without the fear of it becoming bricked after the publisher stops supporting it.

[akramachamarei]

This is equivalent to the government making certain kinds of contracts unlawful. It's the same kind of situation as in prostitution and illicit drug markets. The government claims that certain kinds of agreements should simply not be available to customers and sellers. This is not the government's business.

[skotobaza]

But nobody is trying to block "certain kinds of agreements". You can still make whatever games you could make before. Nothing changes in that regard.

[akramachamarei]

I think that is literally what SKG is doing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression is that game companies often create games and sell them (i.e. sell licenses), and the terms of those licenses include some degree of revocability and nonguarantees of continued function—which I don't like, btw. Nonetheless, customers buy these games, agree to these licenses, having attentatively read those terms or not.

It's a bit of inference on my part, but here's my bottom line: the conduct SKG is lobbying against is permitted by the contracts which game sellers and customers have agreed to, presumably. Otherwise, a smart instantiation of the SKG idea would be bringing class actions for breaches of contract, I guess?

So I agree, nobody is trying to block people from making games certain ways, including in this sort of Mission Impossible tape way. That would be weird and draconian to outlaw. But I don't know how to interpret SKG other than to be outlawing the sale of such revocable/spontaneously self-destructing game services, which is to say outlawing the contracting between customers and sellers to exchange money for services usable under such terms.

I think a specimen case would be useful to understand. The infamous one seems to be The Crew. Presumably SKG would seek to outlaw something about the conduct of Ubisoft there, presumably the revocation or destruction of the service. Equally presumably, the right to revocation was in the terms that everyone signed. So either, the law trumps the contract, or the contract was unlawful in the first place. This effectively forbids some kinds of contract.

Anyway, that's just my interpretation, so if I'm thinking stupid, I hope my thoughts are laid bare, and that I have not lost your patience, so that you may poke out my errors.

[skotobaza]

> my impression is that game companies often create games and sell them (i.e. sell licenses), and the terms of those licenses include some degree of revocability and nonguarantees of continued function

Yes, that's the case. But the absence of guarantees is not very specific, which opens a door for publishers to just drop support on a whim. It's not an issue with titles that have no online components, since you can just keep playing them. But a lot of games nowadays do require online connection, even singleplayer ones. So a publisher shutting down the servers for such game will render the game unplayable in any way. This is the crux, and this is what SKG is trying to solve.

> the conduct SKG is lobbying against is permitted by the contracts which game sellers and customers have agreed to, presumably

Unfortunately, publishers can change the agreements. They can promise you 10 year support for a game, and then drop support for this game one year after release (see Anthem as an example; Concord is even more obvious). This should definitely not happen.

> I don't know how to interpret SKG other than to be outlawing the sale of such revocable/spontaneously self-destructing game services

You can still sell them and deny access to the game after shutting it down, you just need to be prepared for legal actions. So no, nobody wants to outlaw the production of such games (at least nobody from the initiative talks about it in such way).

> The infamous one seems to be The Crew

Yes, it's the most popular. But there are hundreds of games like that that are already dead and cannot be played. You might think it's a very small number compared to overall number of games that have been ever released, but it will increase. Also, Ubisoft themselves told us multiple times that they don't want gamers to own the games.

> This effectively forbids some kinds of contract

It's nothing new. For instance, you cannot make a game that formats your system drive when you die in-game. Nobody is stopping you from developing such game, but you will be open to legal actions, since it can be considered malware. Even if you warn the players beforehand - it's still a malware. So the argument "they agreed to this" is not very sound. Like with real world Russian roulette - it's not OK to shoot someone just because they agreed to it.

Also contracts should not contradict the laws. But to prove if such practice contradicts the existing laws is quite hard as we can currently see.

[throwaway85825]

Real lolbertarianism has never been tried. Maybe in somalia.