Licensed not sold has been the case since Pong.

Fixed that for you.
A game is sold, just as a watch or a car is sold. What I don't have the right to do is replicate that game, or that watch or that car. All three fall under intellectual property protection. It's illegal to sell (and buy) counterfeit watches - does that mean that watches aren't sold?

No amount of temper-tantrum throwing by the industry will change that fact, and I find the community acceptance of industry claims at face value quite bizarre, to be frank. They love to use the word "license" to give people the idea that they can pull the rug from under people's feet at any time.

Well to be open to interpretation, I see these a little different. If you buy a watch you can take it apart and modify the gears, etc. if you buy a car, you can swap the engine. I think most of these EULA are written so as to remind you that the CODE does not belong to you, so that you CAN not use any part of it in your own project.

Also if the company goes out and no support for Windows Double X Facon Boss edition is offered, and you say to yourself I bought this game, they should be obligated to ensure that I can use it on a platform even if that platform did not exist when I purchased the game...this EULA keeps them from being forced to do so. I am of a different mindset whereas governments should back way the hell off of everything that they get into, and EULA basically keeps the companies from having legal action taken against them.

It makes the gaming industry regulated by the gamers instead of the governments. Always on DRM and always connected servers are far worse than the fine print in the EULA.

Indeed. And if I buy a game, I can swap out DLLs, executables and assets (at least in its installed state - obviously a sold used game remains in its original condition), unless I bundle in a DVD with patches, mods etc.

The EULA's purpose should indeed be to make it clear that you do not own rights to the code (or in the case of modding SDKs, limited rights) and that you do not have the rights to make counterfeit copies of this software. Likewise, the law forbids me from making illegal copies of a Rolex watch and giving it away to my friends or selling it on the street.

(I'll confess I've never heard of anyone making counterfeit cars, but the counterfeiting business is rampant in so many other industries, including cosmetics, clothing etc.)

Edit: Well, fuck me sideways, a quick Google search out of curiosity has revealed that counterfeit cars actually exist.

Ah, OK. You gave the impression that you were agreeing with the use of that terminology.

But no, it's not inherently a new thing, although such detail in EULAs was not commonplace until the early 90s. In fact, user agreements in the 1980s and early 1990s were a lot more balanced on the whole.

Of course it's true. When you buy a car, it's perfectly legal to fix up its engine, change the paint and then resell it. When you buy a videogame and somehow managed to change files on its DVD, it would become illegal to pass it along. Selling license doesn't necessarily mean you can't resell it - what it means is that when somebody purchases the license off you, he still needs to get the exact replica of the licensed product. Similarily, you are not legally allowed to make any changes to the executable or libraries of the software. That's not just some weird word play or whatever, there are actual differences to reselling a license and reselling a product.

Ninja'd