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Comment by skotobaza | Hacker News Reader

> The cost per hour of games is already incredibly low compared to most other paid forms of entertainment.

How is this relevant? I still want to be able to play older games 10 years from now. The cost does not matter. I would even pay more money for the guarantee that the game will be always playable.

> How is it not entitled to insist that these super attractive prices should be even lower still?

Nobody suggests to lower the prices... Do you even understand what SKG is about?

> Why should games be different from a movie ticket or a streaming subscription?

Because you can buy movies on physical media and watch them whenever you want. With games that have online component that's not always the case anymore.

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>How is this relevant? I still want to be able to play older games 10 years from now. The cost does not matter. I would even pay more money for the guarantee that the game will be always playable.

You can already do that! Contact the rightsholders and negotiate with them. It'll probably be relatively cheap to buy an EOL game.

>Nobody suggests to lower the prices... Do you even understand what SKG is about?

I'm not misunderstanding anything, you are failing to consider basic economics.

Making the product last longer is effectively indistinguishable from making it cheaper in the context of the EU.

But I do get why a bunch of people seem to dismiss SKG as "childish". I didn't start from that point of view, but the commenters here certainly have me convinced with their tunnel-vision.

> Contact the rightsholders and negotiate with them

We tried that. That didn't work.

> Making the product last longer

Once again, nobody is asking that. So you are misunderstanding SKG.

> tunnel-vision

That is very ironic and indeed dismissive.

>We tried that. That didn't work.

Ah yes, because businesses just love to turn down free money.

>Once again, nobody is asking that. So you are misunderstanding SKG.

If SKG really does not want games to remain playable after EOL, they're certainly piss-poor communicators. I thought the whole point was to "stop killing games", i.e. make them last longer.

> because businesses just love to turn down free money

Unfortunately, yes. Example - try getting publishing rights to No One Lives Forever franchise (GOG already tried that). It's not rare for publishers to sit on their IPs without doing anything with them. And it's not exclusive to videogames as well.

> make them last longer

You can look at it differently. "Last longer" can mean "getting support from the publisher for longer period of time". Nobody demands this. Or it can mean "have an EOL plan", but then it's a weird way to phrase that. But yes, this meaning is the one that SKG uses.

I also want to add that proposing people to buy an IP from a company (or pay it to keep supporting it) is very disingenuous and even borderline trolling. That's not how it works even remotely. Companies do not "negotiate" with consumers about it. So even bringing this up shows the amount of dismissiveness and bad faith that SKG "deniers" bring to the discussion. Utterly baffling...

Is it really disingenuous to point out "haha, well obviously you guys simply aren't willing to put up enough cash to make this attractive for the rightsholders"?

I think it is simply the truth of the matter. The financial incentives don't line up, the rightsholders are not keeping you from playing games just because they're evil.

But I think you missed why I brought this up, I did so only because you specifically claimed that financial incentives are irrelevant in your earlier comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48582196

I was referencing the comment which proposed to buy out the rights to the game. This is absurd (and hence disingenuous), because again it's not how it works in real life, and it's not just with games. You cannot just approach a company willy-nilly as a consumer and politely ask them to sell their IP to you - that includes games, movies, books etc. They are not going to respond to it unless you are another big company.

Regarding my comment, I already replied right there that I'm willing to pay more money for the games if it means they are preserved. You again misunderstand (probably on purpose) what it's all about...

Gaming industry is not poor (although they like to tell you that). They rack billions on exploitative mechanics like lootboxes, gachas and live services, but don't want to keep their games alive even though it would cost them a fraction of what they earn to do so. This confirms that this is not about money, at least not in the way you are trying to portrait it. Also remember that gaming companies love to evade taxes. Yeah, they are (totally not evil) entities who act with pure goodwill towards their consumers...

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