I grew up in a fairly large city of around a million people or more in the metropolitan area. I went to school in another metropolitan area with multiple millions of people. When I started working, I continued in that major metropolitan area. Because there were so many people living there, a lot of available options for food, entertainment, etc. emerged to serve that population. I had gotten used having these options - a wide variety of ethnic foods, a broad variety of entertainment options, and so on. I didn't constantly engage with those options while I was living there, but I did on occasion and the knowledge they were there and the ability to partake whenever I so chose was reassuring.

When I moved to a small town (population less than 50,000) out of necessity, suddenly living there felt incredibly stifling due to the lack of options. I used to be able to get food in the style I had grown up eating, and now I couldn't because there weren't any of those restaurants in the city. I used to be able to choose from many movie theaters in the area and see what I wanted to see, and now the only choice was a single theater in town that had only one movie on four screens. The options used to be there and they suddenly weren't. Life felt extremely restricted.

Similarly, when emotionally invested players hear about fan games, mods, and other expansion content for their chosen franchises, their minds automatically catalog these as available options. Then, when they are inevitably taken down due to IP law violations, it feels like these options are being taken away by bad actors. It triggers the loss aversion centers in our brains, which results in feeling stifling and restricting to these players, despite never/rarely actually engaging with the options in the first place. The simple act of removing something they might have engaged with causes those feelings.

I honestly don't think that this is something we can expect people to change externally. They're always going to feel some form of loss when they think an option they used to have has been taken from them. I do think that it would be helpful for people to understand the purpose of IP law - protecting creators and their creations from bad actors who would take their work without compensation - but there's also the restriction of creatives who would build on that in some way. It's easy to see the big companies protecting their IP and feeling bad about it, but such law exists to protect people like Robert Kearns who invented the intermittent windshield wipers for cars, tried to sell them to the auto industry, then the auto industry refused and stole his idea anyway. He specifically refused settlement in order to set a precedent to protect other inventors like him in the future.

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