On: Hikaru Nakamura's Forbidden Platform

[soegaard]

> 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.

[TheRealPomax → soegaard]

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)