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Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

So its fine that they force you to agree to something when you paid for it but its not fine when they do the thing you agreed too?

Instead of actually trying to fix the issue we just hope that Valve never has to do the thing they are legally allowed to do because we agreed they could.

I honestly don't care who has done what, I don't care what company is supposedly better than another company.

Overnight Valve, Microsoft, whoever could just as easily remove access to a bunch of digital purchases.

How about instead we just don't excuse any of the companies?

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I'm not sure what you propose. Generally speaking we don't get a perfect solution on the first try.

Would it be great if we could make all digital purchases better? Hell yes. Is it realistic? No.

If we can make one company/segment pay or set legal precedent that this is not okay, we're at least moving in the right direction.

> So its fine that they force you to agree to something when you paid for it but its not fine when they do the thing you agreed too?

Two things can be both "not fine" but one can still be worse than the other.

Of course, I am not arguing otherwise. But if your core problem is not the removal of content but what Sony is arguing right now. You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk.

Just because one has done it and the other hasn't is a technicality to me since that could change overnight.

The point that I am trying to make here is that it is insane to me that all of this is focused on Sony. And frankly I don't have a good solution here, but just arguing that one TOS is better than another because one company hasn't done the thing yet but could is not a good argument.

How many times have we seen management change, companies being bought, whatever and suddenly something really bad happens.

I am just getting really frustrated by Sony this, Sony that. Boycot sony, etc when if all we do is move to another platform with the same policies do we really expect anything to change?

We are in the most emotionally driven period of human history to date where reasoning takes a back seat. It's super frustrating but once you realize this instance isn't a one off you can start to focus on the bigger picture. I'm not saying this makes it less frustrating, but perhaps it'd help you to cast things in a new light. You're mostly talking past people who are dunking on Sony right now, because they are more interested in riding the emotional wave than actually making sense of the situation. Never mind that owning a physical disk has pretty much been dead for the better part of a decade or two anyway with day 1 patches and online activations. GIVE ME PHYSICAL DISK. To be 100% honest I think people want to put games on their shelf and look at them and any whiff of an argument is just people grasping at something, anything, rather than something based.

>You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk.

it's not the same overall risk though.

accurate risk assessment includes past incidents in the calculation. sony has a demonstrated pattern, valve does not.

if you choose to ignore past behavior in your risk assessments, you are doing it wrong.

People did risk assessments with VMWare and we see how that turned out.

Things can change, just because you make your risk assessment doesn't mean you should ignore that there is still something in that contract that could turn on you just as easily.

Should we go back 10 years, maybe the risk would have been the same. Did Sony do any of these things then, but the policy was the same. How about 10 years from now, just because of your "risk assessment" doesn't mean that Valve is suddenly safer, just just means so far they have been safer.

I am not saying don't use Valve, but there is zero reason to believe they could not just as easily do this.

20 years ago Sony was including viruses on their music CDs. They have a very long history of poor behavior.

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