Comment by radarsat1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by radarsat1 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Lichess is a platform though, not an accessory. I think a better comparison would be, would Nike be happy if Ronaldo played in a tournament on a field owned by Adidas, in a world in which Adidas is a nonprofit company giving shoes to anyone who wants them.

The answer may very well still be "no, they would not be happy," but I bet the public reaction to being forbidden from a public tournament would be different than if he were just punished for wearing the wrong shoes one day.

That said of course a contract is a contract, and it's probably something Hikaru should have considered in taking it. He likes to push the envelope though, which is respectable in its own right. I'm happy to just watch the drama with popcorn in hand. (After all, he's doing this for content right? he's shrewd, surely considered the positives and negatives.. don't underestimate what he stands to make from content, it could very well compete with what he gets from sponsorship, for all I know.)

If we want to use sports analogies we don't have to use Nike and Adidas as stand-ins, golf is undergoing this right now, between the PGA and LIV tournaments, and members with exclusivity clauses in their contracts.

I understand PGA and LIV are both for-profit. Do either/both forbid their athletes from competing in charity/non-profit tournaments?

LIV doesn't forbid their golfers from anything, as far as I know. It's the PGA that banned LIV golfers, not the other way around. LIV golfers still compete in non-LIV, for-profit tournaments that aren't part of the PGA Tour.

Same in MMA: athletes are stuck competing either in the UFC, Bellator, etc.

LIV has moral opposition.

It'd be more like if Lichess were funded by Nazi gold or something, and the person funding it was trying to do so because they want you to forget they stole a ton of Nazi gold.

PGA isn't behaving this way for moral reasons, but it's an extra component to that situation which makes this harder to analogize.

Orange man bad

Or the 80's USFL (United States Football League). But these alternative leagues do kind of color the analogy in a way that might be slightly muddying -- I mean, come on, the PGA and NFL are the prestigious competitions in the eyes of the public. Is one of Lichess, chess24, or chess.com an assumed pretender?

It's not just Hikaru btw. Pretty much all of the chess.com sponsored streamers will specifically avoid mentioning lichess directly. I suspect it's in chess.com's default sponsorship contract.

> Lichess is a platform though, not an accessory. I think a better comparison would be, would Nike be happy if Ronaldo played in a tournament on a field owned by Adidas, in a world in which Adidas is a nonprofit company giving shoes to anyone who wants them.

I see your point. Chess played on the internet is an e-sport. So let's compare it to Fall Guys and Stumble Guys.

If a streamer is paid to advertise Stumble Guys, Kitka Games would be annoyed to see Fall Guys being played.

Those are competing games, though. In this case the game is the exact same game.

It'd be more like if you could chose to play CoolGameThatPeopleLove on for-pay servers owned by a company known for sponsoring a bunch of really good players who play exciting games and who you would _love_ to have a chance to play against, or play on community-run server with people who are great, sure, but they're just randos on the internet just like you. You can either pay and feel like you're part of the big league, even if you'll never play the big players yourself, or you can pay nothing and just play the community because you don't care about big name players.

But then a big name player who you could never hope to even accidentally play decides "fuck it, why not?" and starts streaming themselves playing on the same free server you play on! That's amazing!

But not for the sponsor: the whole reason they sponsored this person is because they were very intentionally (through their sponsor contract) made unavailable as an opponent to the world at large, effectively using them as an incentive to join the paid platform. It directly damages the paid service if that player even connects to the community service under their public, adored, identity.

(Crucially in this setting, no one "owns the game", instead they "own" part segments of the player base)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com