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Comment by Hokusai | Hacker News Reader

> We may also close long-term inactive accounts to maintain our database.

How many kilobytes takes too store ownership data? I can just imagine that tracking data is thousands of times bigger.

> The crazy thing about this is that it’s perfectly legal for video game companies to delete your account regardless of whether you’ve spend zero or a thousand dollars on their games

It's a shame that we are going to fight for our digital rights because currently we have almost none because justice does not understand technology.

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On the other hand two weeks ago I tried to delete my GOG account which was a very annoying and unnecessarily complicated process.

Companies just like to decide what is 'good for us', which ends up being what is good for their own metrics.

In a world where malicious parties might break into your (say) GOG account and try to delete it, there are "non-evil" reasons for GOG to make account deletion somewhat difficult.

Is it unnecessarily complicated though? I feel like while “stop paying more” should be an easy process, “permanently lose access to a thing I already paid for” should be difficult in order to guard against unexpected things, since it is a potentially irreversible event with negative monetary consequences for the user.

Exactly. I found out that I can't remove games from my Steam account even if I want to. I can only hide them.

I figure that's intentional so people can't change their mind about games they've removed and give grief to Steam support. It also helps prevent accidental removal, or malicious removal (e.g. you're still logged in and your kid is upset with you and tries to remove your favorite Steam games from your account).

Steam seems to have a "remove from account" option. Does that not work? Does it depend on where you live maybe?

I have a feeling that "it's perfectly legal" doesn't work in every country.

> It's a shame that we are going to fight for our digital rights because currently we have almost none because justice does not understand technology.

Reminds me of NFTs and people here arguing against what they don't understand.

NFTs aren't complicated. People understand them.

NFTs wouldn't help here. I can have NFTs for the games on my steam account but if steam bans me who is honoring my NFT to provide me access to the game? No one. It's about as good as a paper receipt for a company you didn't purchase the item from.

If steam gave you the NFT it would be prove that you actually bought the game.

Steam could ofcourse still refuse to honor the purchase.

I can already do that with receipts, so it doesn't really solve anything for this purpose.

Maybe it would help in scenarios where receipts don't make as much sense (international online transactions perhaps?), but all parties involved still have to agree that the NFT means something.

The only way I could see NFTs being useful for proof of ownership is if the specific society you're part of has enforcement or regulation that recognizes them as legal contracts of ownership. Unlike cryptocurrency, they don't really provide that until you imbue them with it through a trust mechanism outside of the token itself.

You have the right not to pay money to companies that won't give you the guarantee of ownership and access that you want.

But if the lack of that guarantee is right there in the company's terms of service, and you pay them money anyway, you don't have the right to insist that they change the terms you signed up to when you paid them just because you don't like the consequences.

> You have the right not to pay money to companies that won't give you the guarantee of ownership and access that you want.

I have way more rights than that. Or if not I will fight to get them. I do not want to depend on the good will of corporations. I want fair laws that control their behavior like we have with physical goods.

> I have way more rights than that. Or if not I will fight to get them.

So let me get this straight: companies are offering a recreational product, games, on terms you don't like. But instead of not paying them money, so they will be forced to either change their business model or go out of business, you want to get the government involved? For games?

> I do not want to depend on the good will of corporations.

Good luck with that. Your ability to post on this website depends on the good will of a corporation. Your ability to buy groceries and other necessities depends on the good will of corporations. I could go on and on.

> For games?

No, for money.

These actions are always dismissed on the basis that they're not selling something important. But setting aside the question of whether that's valid, they are selling in exchange for something important.

> These actions are always dismissed on the basis that they're not selling something important.

No, it's on the basis that the buyer knew the terms perfectly well before the sale, and bought the thing anyway. The fact that it's a game that was bought just makes it even more unreasonable for the buyer to want to retroactively change the terms of the sale.

I can see why that argument might work for a laissez-faire libertarian, but we have innumerable laws on what is contractable. That this should be singled out specifically as something which shouldn't have any such protections seems in my experience to be attributable to the fact that people don't consider games important.

Besides which, I challenge your claim that the buyer knew the terms perfectly well. The terms are often dozens of pages long and written in dense legalese, with clearly little belief or intention that the buyer will read them, and arguably specifically to dissuade the buyer from reading them.

But it's reasonable for the same corporations to "update" their Terms and Conditions under your feet while your only recourse against is to completely severe the relationship? Which party has the power in this relationship? Why do you consider the "terms of sale" to be the only important aspect of contract relationships?

Are you also against regulations on food sales? Why can't a corporation just sell whatever bad and spoiled food they have and let customers decide by themselves if they want to be food poisoned or not? We do have rights to protect us, customers, in unbalanced power relationships.

Personal/individual responsibility only goes so far. If you like to be stomped by more powerful entities than you because you don't like governments, good luck. Just remind yourself you have never experienced a world where you don't have safeguards provided by your government to keep your life somewhat safe and somewhat more fair.

How would this work in more "classical" software where I only get presented with the EULA after purchasing it, downloading it, and launching the installer? Money was already exchanged. How could any contract made after that be enforceable? Wouldn't that mean you're obligated to retroactively give away rights you aquired through the purchase minutes before?

> you want to get the government involved? For games?

The government is already involved, I cannot copy the games from my friend because the government does not allow me to do it. The government protects Ubisoft from me hacking them, or from paying in a fraudulent way.

The government is fully involved in all the steps, I just want that my interests are represented in that involvement.

> Good luck with that.

I do not live in the USA.

> I cannot copy the games from my friend because the government does not allow me to do it.

No, you can't do it because the seller of the game does not allow you to do it. There is no law requiring sellers to lock down their games with DRM or other forms of restriction.

> I do not live in the USA.

So what? Are you saying you can magically get access to this website without Y Combinator's cooperation and goodwill because you're not in the USA? Are you saying you can magically ensure that you can buy groceries without a corporation providing them to you because you're not in the USA?

> No, you can't do it because the seller of the game does not allow you to do it. There is no law requiring sellers to lock down their games with DRM or other forms of restriction.

DRM is usually bypassed within hours or days of the game release. After that it is still illegal to copy the game from your friend.

> No, you can't do it because the seller of the game does not allow you to do it.

What are you talking about? The game doesn't have the ability to allow or disallow anything. It's just data on an information medium. You can bypass any protections put in place by the developers unless you need to violate the laws of physics in order to do that. Last time I checked, there was no such thing as an uncrackable game.

There is instead a law requiring me not to do that. There are laws, which are enforced by the entity with a monopoly on violence (-- the government). The game developer can only point the government at the people breaking the law. Whichever way you look at it, the government is still involved. ANYTHING related to property has the government involved. Because the concept of property is something guaranteed by.. you guessed it.. the government.

I really don’t understand libertarians. You hate the idea of a government having any power that could theoretically/historically be used to oppress you, but when corporations do it, it should be celebrated.

Thank God it was IRS LLC that put me in their private prison for not paying my Land Ownership Subscription instead of the government.

> So let me get this straight: companies are offering a recreational product, games, on terms you don't like. But instead of not paying them money, so they will be forced to either change their business model or go out of business, you want to get the government involved? For games?

No, for digital rights, not necessarily only games. Also, games cost money, money is my time on Earth being converted into cash through my labour, I deserve to have my only real resource (time) protected from being taken from me due to shitty business practices. A ToS/ToU/T&C isn't a higher law than national laws just because I clicked "I accept" and I hope that my government will get involved to protect me from more powerful entities than a single individual can take on, doesn't matter if it's games or any other digital goods, it costs money, I get protections.

Or you can live in this cyberpunk-ish hellhole where corporations can dictate what is legal or not and your only power is to choose to not buy from them, I much prefer my government and the society that supports it to be dictate what these corporations can do rather than the goodwill of a for-profit corporation.

It's all checks and balances, goodwill isn't really compatible with the morality of chasing profits so we need something else to imbue morality in this system (aka, a government), you liking it or not.

> So let me get this straight: companies are offering a recreational product, games, on terms you don't like. [...] you want to get the government involved? For games?

That's an absurd argument, just because it's "games" it does not invalidate the argument here. Would you not raise the same concern if Apple/Google closed your account tomorrow and you lost access to all of your movies? They also count as "recreation".

Or one day, Microsoft/Apple deem your account to be causing abuse and terminate it. Your Windows license/macOS data is bound to it, and your computer is suddenly unusable because logging in returns an error. You're bound by a EULA and they're fully within their right to do this, you're just licensing the software. Would you still think "I will just not pay them money and go to someone else"?

What the large print giveth, the small print may not taketh away. If the large print says "Buy", the small print may not alter that to "License for a limited time that may be ended whenever we feel like it." The small print may clarify what the large print says, but direct contradiction is a form of false advertising.

I just now checked Ubisoft's website and clicked on a random game. Yes, there is a big "BUY" button, but once I click it, I get a page that asks me what length of time I want to purchase a subscription for. So it's quite clear, at least for that one game, that what you are buying is a subscription to something, not a product that you get ownership of indefinitely.

The game sellers, if someone did actually try to make the "false advertising" argument, would probably argue that it's common knowledge that "buying" a game from their online store does not mean you get indefinite ownership. It would be an interesting case if anyone ever did try it.

I also have the right to petition my local congress critters to crack down on whatever hairbrained schemes publishers are pulling like cutting off access to something I bought to save a kilobyte in a postgres database somewhere.

> you don't have the right to insist that they change the terms you signed up to

Oddly enough, publishers DO have the right to change ToS and frequently do, and "your silence is considered consent".

This reminds me quite a bit of the gift card nonsense where you'd be charged for not using a gift card, for using it, using it too soon, letting it get too old, etc. Now the rules around gift cards are extremely strict because it was abused by merchants. It sounds like we need something similar for digital items - if you yank my ownership, you owe me back my money and in whatever currency I paid you in, not your store funny money.

> you don't have the right to insist that they change the terms you signed up to when you paid them just because you don't like the consequences

Oh please. Virtually nobody reads that stuff. Chances are the handful of people who cared enough to read won't actually understand it. Are consumers supposed to consult lawyers before they spend money on products now? Even if you read, understand and agree to the deal, they can just change the terms later and there's nothing anyone can do.

I don't even want to stop paying them. I want them to stop their obnoxious bullshit so I don't feel like I'm a dumbass for trying to support creators every single time.

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