It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership

https://popcar.bearblog.dev/its-about-ownership/

by popcar2 • 17 days ago

704 527 17 days ago

popcar.bearblog.dev

superkuh2• 17 days ago

Video game companies still remember when they owned the arcade machines and players were required to constantly insert money into the machines to keep playing. They've been chasing that high ever since.

The key to owning modern multiplayer online games is to have private servers run by human persons on their own owned computers. But except for TF2 no one has been able to (or cared enough) allow private servers alongside the much much more important microtransactions. This is what is killing ownership.

leprechaun1066• 17 days ago

It's not just the arcade machine implementation. The owners of these companies want to go all the way and move everything to data centers so they can rent compute time, similar to the idea of the time-sharing days of the 60s.

toast0• 17 days ago

Video game companies still remember when they owned the arcade machines and players were required to constantly insert money into the machines to keep playing.

I know Sega and Namco operated some arcades, but mostly companies sold arcade machines and operators ran them. Coin boxes didn't connect to the developer except that games with good earnings sold well.

hx811• 17 days ago

A per-play revenue share is not uncommon in some markets, especially for games with frequent updates or more complicated network features.

PaulKeeble3• 17 days ago

Even private servers doesn't quite solve the issue. Minecraft is an example where you can run the server but it requires clients to login to the microsoft account. I think you can still bypass the check on the server but clients have to be cracked or previously authorised for offline play which only lasts for a certain timeframe. So Microsoft can take away the ability to play minecraft despite the game server binary being available.

Whereas a game like Arma 3 has its own dedicated servers and has no such login requirement so theoretically you could still play that in 50 years time, but that might still depend on Steam DRM.

We have a lot of client side controls right now on DRM and logins which make the dedicated server only part of the problem.

hofrogs• 17 days ago

With Minecraft, there isn't even a need for Microsoft to do anything. The authentication servers experience regular periods of downtime/inaccessibility, making you unable to join any server, even if you have already launched the game and have joined a server in that session before. It's extremely frustrating.

superkuh2• 17 days ago

With Microsoft "Minecraft", sure. But not that actual Minecraft game. Microsoft is an exception, a bad one, and they added this after they bought the popular game. It is not in any way intrinsic to the Minecraft game experience.

mjevans• 17 days ago

The model for DLC that's present, carried as patch updates, but unlocked for an additional fee annoys me.

However, allow me to ignore my opinion for a moment and play the Devils Advocate for a thought experiment.

What if, cosmetics and other unlockables (which should be part of the base gameplay) were instead evaluated on other people's computers. That is, rendering client side, authentication for use also server side.

Hats / Skins / Other -- Render some 'humiliating' cosmetic if authentication fails. Circumvention would require compromise on all client devices.

Core game assets -- Levels / 'mods' that require auth a similar path, except client/server verification mismatch. Do note the license server as a possible cause.

At end of life all of those checks should be patched in a final release to fail enabled. No more auth server, archive mode releases all use.

dartharva2• 17 days ago

But except for TF2 no one has been able to (or cared enough) allow private servers alongside the much much more important microtransactions

The pirate community does wherever it's possible. We had a blast in college playing Halo MCC LAN parties back when it got launched on PC - by design it needed Xbox accounts for everyone but we worked around it with Goldberg's crack and got the classic experience.

jdw64• 17 days ago

Everyone wants to be Netflix

This is the most perfect sentence about this situation

wxw• 17 days ago

Yep, agreed. Recurring, consistent revenue is the ultimately a common-sense business best interest. It can be extremely unfortunate for consumers as there's an unaligned incentive here.

kakacik2• 17 days ago

This can still be acceptable if they give HW for free. but paying up to 1k for console and then full price for games which often have their own paid loot boxes/whatever... yeah good luck no thank you,

I can afford it trivially, but its like paying say 20 bucks for a standard bread or bottle of milk. Insulting

afroboy• 17 days ago

I mean making something and selling the same thing millions times is good business model too, this is how Microsoft become rich. The problem is the model that chase infinite growth which is impossible to achieve and can't coexist with normal business models.

trescenzi• 17 days ago

This is a large part of why I went with a Retroid Pocket over buying a Switch 2. It’s not nearly as powerful but it’ll run Linux and most indie games I buy on GOG. It’s more work of course but knowing that the games I buy I’ll be able to play into the future on any number of devices is worth it.

ethagnawl2• 17 days ago

I'll second this approach. I've been using my Miyoo Mini+ quite a bit recently and the complete lack of this sort of bullshit has been very refreshing. No multi-GB game or system updates to download before you can start playing or nags to sign into online services. I can just pick it up and start playing.

I will have to look into the Retroid Pocket. Thanks for the plug.

dominicrose2• 17 days ago

I reckon the Switch 2 still has cartridges although not all of them actually contain the game.

password43213• 17 days ago

Ownership as in resale-able.

Eventually someone important enough will force digital resales to become reality, changing everything to require KYC.

Avicebron2• 17 days ago

Resale-able maybe, unable to be revoked I think is more important.

As in you can't wake up one morning and your game is gone overnight because copyright around in-game music changed.

kakacik2• 17 days ago

Thats easy to do (on paper). Dont let copyright owners revoke/expire their licenses (or if its revokable mark and price it clearly). Once a product containing it is purchased, its owned till product ceases to exist (or similar).

All these music behemoths are way too powerful and they twist entire society globally to dance as they want. Not a fraction of a worry for pirates of course, just for decent paying fools.

Abhorable business.

benj111• 17 days ago

KYC? The only context I know it from is 'Know your customer' in banking.

eks391• 17 days ago

This is the correct KYC. Plenty of apps use it besides banking. Depending on the perspective, this is either the perfect solution to a lot of digital legal problems, or the distopian solution because of the numerous ways this can and will be abused when it is expected by many vendors outside of banking.

password43213• 17 days ago

If digital games are basically equivalent to a currency, in comes the regulations.

scared_together2• 17 days ago

Eventually someone important enough will force digital resales to become reality

Honest question: why? Why would anyone important enough to hold that power actually use it to force resales to exist? Who actually has the incentives to make this happen?

password43213• 16 days ago

Some kid will grow up after not getting access to their parent's collection.

ojr• 17 days ago

the resale market for disk has been on a downtrend for years, you can sign into someone's else psn account too and share games, you are a washed up gamer, its okay I am washed up too.

me551ah• 17 days ago

If you think in terms of ownership, even then digital is not that bad. I’ve owned digital games since Xbox 360 and I can still play them to this day on my Xbox series X.

But not all of my physical games CD/DVDs are in mint condition and some have scratches.

criddell2• 17 days ago

You can play them, but the license gives you no right to transfer ownership. This feels like a huge problem to me, especially with ebooks.

I’d love to see regulation around guaranteeing consumers the ability to transfer ownership of digital goods in a similar way to the analog counterpart.

downrightmike2• 17 days ago

Sure, but they keep raising the price of everything. And in a world where ram and STORAGE are at a multiple premium, deleting high density discs is completely outside of reality

jrmg2• 17 days ago

they keep raising the price of everything

Games are much cheaper in real terms (even in terms of percentage of wages/income, if you don’t believe that’s kept up with inflation generally) than they’ve ever been.

Humorist2290• 17 days ago

To take a different perspective than ownership as "right to re-sell" or ownership as "the right to use in perpetuity," I think there is also value in considering ownership as responsibility to maintain those rights.

When one owns property, they get benefits from it, but they also have the responsibility to maintain the property or else it wastes away. Sometimes this incurs costs you wouldn't get with leasing, and sometimes it makes ownership more expensive than renting. But still I think that responsibility is a virtue in itself. Not everything should be consumable.

jrmg2• 17 days ago

I think this is a big element. I’ve been feeling this a bit too. I’ve been a physical-game buyer in the past - usually saving money by buying used games.

But I’m not going to keep a collection of old consoles in my living room, so at this point it feels more likely that I will be able to actually play games further into the future if I buy digitally.

This is the opposite of what proponents of physical media heavily argue - indeed, many here are making it their only argument - but I suspect it’s how lots of ‘regular people’ that aren’t saturated in digital rights politics feel.

Departed74053• 9 days ago

You just need to keep the discs,not the console. if it's not retro-compatible then you aren't going to be able to play on the console because of architecte differenczs.

But the PS5 can play PS4 games, early PS3 could play PS2 games and so on. And Xbox is entirely retro-compatible because they used the same architecture.

hx811• 16 days ago

I own a decent library of retro games, sized in the hundreds.

Part of my intake process is to rip my games onto a digital format. Owning the physical media, and acquiring the backup legally, gives me a strong legal foothold for creating backup discs or using emulation.

hx811• 17 days ago

Absolutely this.

Fifteen years ago World of Warcraft was at its peak. You had 12 million people paying a monthly fee, plus buying the occasional expansion pack. No other gaming company had seen reoccurring revenue numbers like that before and it changed the industry. One aspect of this was that if you stopped paying you lost access to the game.

The industry has been looking for the next way to level up this subscription model on gaming. Battle Passes, Xbox Live, Game Pass, Playstation Plus, Stadia, Game Fly, and a ton of other ideas. Sony is now using the stick to directly attack ownership instead of the carrot to entice subscriptions. We'll see how this plays in the PS6, but I think they are overplaying their position, especially with how underwhelming the PS5 has been received by gamers.

I'm optimistic that the raise in PC gaming will act as a balance for the obvious greed of the consoles. It's becoming a larger and larger player in the non-mobile gaming market, and it's too big to be treated like a second class citizen anymore. The open platform prevents anyone from acting as a gatekeeper between game developers and players.

For me personally, I began losing interest in consoles the first time I had to install a console game to a hard drive. The plug and play magic just fell apart.

thfuran3• 17 days ago

I’m not nearly so optimistic. I think we have a generation of kids now who mostly never owned any physical media, having grown up with Netflix instead of vhs/dvd, Spotify instead of CDs, steam instead of retail games, etc.

hx811• 17 days ago

I'm pessimistic about physical media yes. That's a legacy technology at this point.

Hoodedcrow4• 17 days ago

I see nothing wrong with abandoning physical media - as storage got larger and internet faster, being limited by clunky disks has become kinda pointless unless you're specifically into collecting. I see nothing wrong with moving on from them as long as it's towards local DRMless files.

tayo422• 17 days ago

Is there really a rise in PC gaming going on? Isn't that dependent on people having PCs and hardware?

hx811• 17 days ago

Yes. Look at the market research. It's growing specifically fast in Asia, but there is also strong growth with North America.

Having a PC to check your email, order off amazon, and download recipes is dying. Buying a PC and using it for video games is raising. The PC hardware is getting more expensive, but the upgrade cycles are also extending. If you look at the steam hardware survey most gamers are 1-3 GPU generations behind.

If you look at the total cost of ownership PC gaming is not awful compared to consoles. It's higher, but not as high as the initial price tag makes it look. There is no monthly Playstation Plus or Xbox Live subscription. These can run between $80/yr to $240/yr. PC games often have access to deeper discounts. The PC has additional utility, and modern PC components are holding exceptional resell value.

PaulKeeble3• 17 days ago

People still don't own their games with Steam, the main PC platform. I don't think its going under anytime soon and currently its reasonably customer friendly but as we have seen these big tech companies can turn on their customer base at any moment. GOG is about the only way to actually own the games since no DRM is applied and you can download the entire package and keep it and don't require their launcher.

PC already went digital no ownership for most people unfortunately. His argument that it isn't the same doesn't wash, you still can't sell them or lend them to someone else and you have to hack around Steam's DRM, which is a loophole that can be closed at any point.

aceazzameen• 17 days ago

You talk as if all Steam games use Steam DRM. No, it's not GOG but it's not the same category as Sony and Microsoft at all. It's starting to sound disingenuous when I see Steam lumped together with them.

Gigachad5• 17 days ago

Steam has gotten a free pass because they have a history of 20 years of not taking your games away. Even if something gets delisted they still allow you to download it if you already purchased.

Console manufactures have a history of shutting down the download and authentication servers after the consoles age. Sony just took away hundreds of movies consumers had purchased.

LazyGooze• 17 days ago

the catch was that steam used to have, or maybe it still has, crazy discount prices, i would be mad to lose access to a 15 year old game that costed me 80$, but i wouldnt be that mad if the game costed 10$...

Still, steam didnt prevent you from accessing games, the game publisher did, like "the crew" case happend.

benoau7• 17 days ago

I'm optimistic that the raise in PC gaming will act as a balance for the obvious greed of the consoles.

Why?

Steam has never done anything to support ownership of games, their policy completely bans transferring licenses or accounts to other people or leaving them to someone when you die. Their next CEO is someone who has only known extreme wealth their whole life and gets the job because daddy started the company, when has that been a catalyst for societal good?

GOG is the only one to have advocated a different status quo, but they have virtually no marketshare that could pressure developers and publishers to accept more equitable terms beyond eschewing DRM.

hx811• 17 days ago

I'm optimistic about PC gaming because if Steam begins acting as an evil gatekeeper then game developers can adopt other avenues to deliver the games to their players. It's an open platform. People are using Steam now because it adds value. People will stop using Steam if it subtracts value.

mannanj• 17 days ago

The same reason you can be pessimistic?

Maybe if you look for evidence to be pessimistic, you find that, and if you look for evidence to be optimistic you find that.

I'd rather choose the more positive, hopeful perspective than the negative, downer one. What about you?

RHSeeger3• 17 days ago

Can't you download your game off steam and play it forever; and if it can't connect to the service, it will just let you play offline?

Sure, that loses out on the ability to transfer it to a friend, but it's better.

kelvinjps10• 17 days ago

Steam haven't put shenanigans like this because they have many competitors and PC users would leave them, the have built trust within the gaming community

matthewfcarlson2• 17 days ago

This was actually a funny question at work over lunch. A few of us have kids and like most tech guys over 30, our steam accounts have turned into collections. So I asked, who gets your steam account when you kick it. It’s difficult to think about and seems baffling to spend thousands of dollars and hours assembling a collection only for it to poof away into nothing.

HDBaseT• 17 days ago

To play devils advocate, Steam has one of the most generous sharing functionality on all digital media. Steam Families.

The whole "we prohibit transferring accounts from dead people" is likely just a catchall to prevent liability and responsibility when people say "oh my brother cheated on my account" or "my brother said XYZ on Steam forums".

willdr• 17 days ago

Unfortunately the AI bubble means we are witnessing the death of PC gaming. Watch the GamersNexus video, The Collapse of Personal Computing: https://youtu.be/zyQwAhppWj8

Costs are driving manufacturers out of business. Essential components for PCs are becoming out of reach for the average consumer.

You will own nothing and be happy.

Gigachad5• 17 days ago

GamersNexus is an entertainment channel rather than informative. He likes to talk about conspiracies with no real foundation.

AI demand price hikes are affecting everything including consoles, and the hardware for game streaming. It's an everything price increase rather than just PC. nVidia isn't secretly hoarding GPUs to make you rent them from streaming platforms, they simply make more money selling them to AI companies instead.

hx811• 17 days ago

I would recommend looking at a wide variety of sources of information. Some YouTube channels, GamersNexus being one, focus heavily on spinning a gloomy narrative. By wide variety of information channels, I don't mean a different YouTube channel.

1. Q1-26 wasn't the worst performing YoY quarter for new PC sales since Covid.

2. The biggest sector hit was the low end computers. That's not usually what we are talking about with pc gaming.

3. Costs go up on PC gaming, but the costs are going up for consoles too.

4. New memory fabs are going to start coming online in 2027 and 2028. This is a short term crunch.

5. The whole interviewing someone in their living room about their bad professional experience and representing it as journalism feels icky to me.

eloisant• 17 days ago

This is true for consoles as well. Console prices are increasing, I think this is the first time I witness that. Console prices used to go down until the next generation comes out.

Ygg2• 17 days ago

Fifteen years ago World of Warcraft was at its peak.

Sixty years ago the model was you go to an arcade cabinet, and you get charged every time you died (Credit: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2026/07/03/returnal-3).

Ideally, they want cabinet in every home, you pay electricity for it, you buy overpriced Bluey skins, you buy your lives, you buy ads, and pay them every second for the pleasure, while not owning even the cabinet.

autoexec6• 17 days ago

the model was you go to an arcade cabinet and you get charged every time you died

Worse, some arcade games drained your health continuously while you played so no matter how good you were you'd have to keep plugging quarters into the machine.

Telaneo15• 16 days ago

Heck, even 60 years ago, you could still buy that arcade cabinet! Sure, it costs a fortune, but it was at least possible.

Elzair• 16 days ago

I think you mean 50 years ago. 60 years ago you were largely limited to SPACEWAR! and Tennis for 2.

Schlagbohrer6• 17 days ago

One thing we can say for certain from 30+ years of history is that gamers will never hold to a boycott, and will always put up with worse and worse treatment from the companies.

pitched7• 17 days ago

We rent time at a football field. We buy tickets to watch a single match. There are parallels here to not owning video games. I don’t really understand why one is so heinous.

Let’s say there’s a new rule implemented by the NBA that no one likes (similar to a fear of live service games changing). How is that resolved there and why can’t that solution work for video games?

I think a big thing we’re currently missing here is something like a community field or park. Why are there no open-source, community-run Diablo projects for example? If no one cares enough to do that, maybe this isn’t so big of an issue.

garciansmith3• 17 days ago

Video games are far more alike to other media like books, not live sports.

pitched7• 17 days ago

For single-player games, those are definitely media. For multiplayer games, that feels a lot closer to a sport.

krzyk4• 17 days ago

Video games ar software, this has only digital form.

And AFAIR all software is sold as a license since way back.

traverseda2• 17 days ago

With a video game it's not clear that you're purchasing a revocable license. That's why it's called "buying" a video game. If online stores were clear that you were actually leasing a game, I don't think this would be a problem.

Publishers and storefronts need to be clear that what you're doing isn't buying, or start selling tickets (season passes) that have a clear end date, or use some other mechanism that isn't "buying".

The fundamental problem is that it's unclear what you're buying, and the contract can change at any time. Are you buying an item, a ticket, leasing, a subscription like an MMO, etc. These are all different things, and it misleads consumers when they're conflated.

The terms are also very one-sided, and your "purchase" can be ended by one party at will with very limited notice. Even basic consumer protection like requiring six months notice before ending your software lease would help.

xp842• 17 days ago

Agree. The only way "buying" is understood in English to mean a temporary entitlement is when combined with those terms like "ticket" or "pass."

The choice of language is deliberately made to deceive. If an auto manufacturer tried that, offering to "sell you" a car but the 3-page "Sales contract" had a clause buried in there that said "We can come to your house with 30 days' notice and just take the car back and you have no recourse besides stopping your payments" this would be ruled as grand theft auto (no pun intended) not "the terms and conditions allow it"

pitched7• 17 days ago

Sort of like how Diary Queen aren’t allowed to call their desserts “Ice Cream” because there isn’t enough dairy, we need to force retailers to start calling them game-licenses? This feels like a whole lot of a big fuss over something like that. I really feel like there must be something deeper going on.

nfw221• 17 days ago

If someone goes to the playstation store to buy a playstation game, you don't think it's clear that they can only play the game on playstation? I think consumers understand what they are buying even if they don't think in terms like revocable licenses and drm. They aren't ignorant just because they don't care about these abstract issues that don't affect their lives at all, practically speaking.

Giefo6ah• 17 days ago

You don't rent your football field from FIFA. You can, if you wish, own the field you play at.

You may have heard of football clubs: If it's too expensive you can pool resources with your friends.

pitched7• 17 days ago

Back in the old days, we would be pooling resources like that to host a server for the clan. And I wonder if the reason those games are less popular has more to do with marketers being good at their job than a change in the base gameplay.

There are local clubs available but everyone wants to play on the nice FIFA field, which is the one that has to be rented.

xp842• 17 days ago

1. Video games are not a spectator sport. You buy tickets for a match to pay the players to perform for you. You can buy a football and goals and play with your family until the equipment itself literally wears out (which is a very, very long time - functionally near infinite if you take care of it).

2. Video games (especially console) don't, as a rule, receive important major updates, nor do gamers expect and demand that. This means that charging over and over again for 'access to them' every month is transparent greed, as opposed to a mobile game which has to keep being updated to keep up with iOS's yearly breaking releases, where you can argue very fairly that someone has to be paying developers to maintain those games, and the library of games to update would be too big if they had to keep updating all games written from 2008-2026 when 99% of them were no longer bringing in any sales revenue.

Let’s say there’s a new rule implemented by the NBA that no one likes (similar to a fear of live service games changing).

Personally, the games where they charge for the MMO aspect (even if that comprises the entire game, e.g. WoW), I'm honestly ok with. It's a gamble to invest your time in something like that, but the alternative, where paying for a WoW client once legally obligates them to run the server without ANY rule/gameplay changes, for eternity, seems completely unfair and unsustainable. Though I think it's a moderate position to argue that if Blizzard wants to cancel WoW's servers, making the server specs open source and enabling the client to connect to community-run servers should maybe be incentivized somehow, though mandating as much seems a bit extreme.

pitched7• 17 days ago

It sounds like your opinion is that status quo is ok when: there is a spectator mode, it’s on a mobile device, there is multiplayer.

I still don’t quite understand in which cases the status quo is not ok though.

chacham15• 17 days ago

There is a difference between a service and a good.

It doesnt make sense to "own" a massage just the same way it doesnt make sense to "own" spectating a game in person. The video recording of people playing a sport is a good that you can own however. This is why an online/multiplayer game is harder to separate because it straddles the line of both a service and a good, but other cases are much more clear cut. (also, a quick google does reveal multipke open source diablo projects fyi)

calvinmorrison• 17 days ago

There's another story about a game that died and was resurrected, Runescape. It launched with a big fanfare of version 3.0 back in 2008 and was met with total disaster. Fans were quitting, private servers of the pre-EOC update, etc. Jagex heard this and stuck a solo dev onto re-launching an instance of '2007 scape' which was basically an old backup they found and a few server instances. They incorporated features of the platform like voting, where votes require strong consent (75% in some cases) to get new features, and it's a seriously community driven game where both sides have something to gain. Now branded "old school runescape" the game has more players than the "runescape 3" that still exists today as Runescape. A win all around.

jbombadil• 17 days ago

I am generally not in favor of adding regulation, but this is a place where I would support it.

Anything that you BUY needs to be your property. This means you must have the ability to:

1. Transfer ownership of it (either temporarily as a loan or permanently as a sale). Digital-only doesn't preclude this: the store can have a "transfer" functionality.

2. (Within reason) use it at your discretion at any point after the sale. This means that a company cannot "revoke" your access at a later time. Specifically for content that is DRM locked, if they decide to sunset that service (store, DRM server, whatever), no problem! just offer DRM free (or generally lock-free copies). I have no problem with Sony not offering DRM free versions of games that I can still download and play with the store. But if that goes away -> you must give me a path to local ownership.

(Multiplayer games that require server infrastructure are a bit more complex, and I'd leave aside for now).

This should apply equally to video games, movies, books, music. Any digital content.

hx811• 17 days ago

I don't see this as "regulation". I see this as extending the same consumer protections that existed in the era of analog physical media to the digital age.

Fargren• 17 days ago

Customer protection absolutely is regulation. Saying otherwise is a No True Scotsman.

Good regulation is good. Bad regulation is bad. Being anti-regulation is dogmatic.

RHSeeger3• 17 days ago

I have no problem with Sony not offering DRM free versions of games that I can still download and play with the store. But if that goes away -> you must give me a path to local ownership.

I worry about shenanigans where you "buy" the game from a shell company and that shell company "folds" and doesn't uphold it's promises. Same is true for a smaller, but not shell, company. If the non-DRM version isn't already created and held in trust, then it's not trustworthy.

maccard• 17 days ago

This is absolutely what the SKG movement would have fast tracked - combined with all the Hollywood accounting that comes with it.

autoexec6• 17 days ago

We should require companies to submit a DRM-free version of their product to the US copyright office in order to get copyright protection. If the company goes under, or the copyright term expires, the US Copyright office should then provide those files to the people free of charge.

account428• 16 days ago

"Current copyright holder is ultimately liable for making all buyers whole." Problem solved.

oldsecondhand2• 15 days ago

Yep, putting a DRM free version in escrow should be a legal requirement.

sph• 17 days ago

All they have to do then is say that they license you a game, and you're not buying anything, despite paying for it. They already do that with online games.

eszed• 17 days ago

At least that would be honest....

jvuygbbkuurx• 17 days ago

That is literally what most online digital goods already do, like steam.

krzyk4• 17 days ago

That is literally in any software since like 90s. You buy license.

matthewfcarlson2• 17 days ago

One of the unstated points of this particular article is that these rules are ones that we as a society have. If we collectively decide that this isn’t something that should be allowed, we can make it so. There are some powerful interests that don’t want it so it’s not an easy path.

meh2frdf9• 17 days ago

You are 'buying' some thing, a licence that grant you some permissions (aka rights). That licence has some constraints, you don't like them, then don't buy the licence. It's literally how it works, you just don't seem to grasp that.

Now are the constraints on licences (aka agreement), not great, not consumer friendly .. different set of questions.

eldaisfish2• 17 days ago

i am curious - why are you not in favour of adding regulation? The point of most good regulation is to avoid consumer-hostile situations like this.

al_borland• 17 days ago

I saw something earlier today that showed the Sony agreement specifies you’re only licensing the games, even if you buy it on a disc. So the fine print means no one ever “buys” a game for the PS5. They are buying a license to use the game for some indefinite period of time that Sony, or some other rights holder, will determine at a later date.

This is why things really need to be DRM free from the start, and portable (have the ability to back them up, move them, etc). It’s the only way to ensure they can’t pull that kind of stuff.

cyanydeez• 17 days ago

enforcement of legality is on the victim in the grift economy.

Negitivefrags• 17 days ago

This has been the case for software since the very beginning. And people have been complaining about it since the beginning. See the Free Software Foundation.

gnopgnip• 17 days ago

A license doesn’t have to be for an indefinite time period. It can be irrevocable

NDlurker• 17 days ago

This looks like a job for NFTs

Cthulhu_6• 16 days ago

Nah, licenses are already a thing - just because you have a license (or an NFT) does not guarantee you can do the thing that the license applies to.

It's a job for piracy.

shapefrog2• 16 days ago

Need to smear some A1 on those NFTs to get the job done properly.

atoav• 17 days ago

Then it shouldn't be allowed to call it "buy" they should be forced to call it "rent".

feoren2• 17 days ago

You're not in favor of adding regulation, except when it comes to issues you understand and care about. All the oversight and regulation about everything you don't care and/or know about is big bad government overreach. Every government agency is a useless waste of your tax dollars, except the ones you rely on and the ones where you have friends that work there. Do I have that right?

vanviegen2• 17 days ago

Though your point may have some value, your comment comes across as meanspirited and ad hominem.

Also, regulation is not universally supported by knowledgeable consumers. Often quite the opposite, in fact.

alecsm• 17 days ago

I understand his comment as being against dumb regulation that only ads unnecessary bureaucracy or stops/limits progress. But he would support a regulation for this because it's a violation against the property of the buyer.

protocolture2• 17 days ago

All the oversight and regulation about everything you don't care and/or know about is big bad government overreach.

I can literally list all the stupid regulation that needs to be removed from my industry. A lot of it is incredibly boneheaded. There's exactly 1 thing I do like, and it was extremely situational and set down in the 90s to avoid a very specific potential failure, and could easily be repealed without issue right now.

I presume, based on the experience in an industry I am very familiar with, that at least 60% of the regulation put on other industries is likewise counter productive and boneheaded. And every now and then when I do a deep dive somewhere I tend to confirm that.

pseudocomposer• 17 days ago

I think “when you buy a product, be it a game, a house, a car, a computer, a tractor, washer, TV, it should continue to operate without rent-seeking behavior” is the best type of straightforward, uniformly-applicable pattern of regulation one could hope for. Opposing rent-seeking is literally why we have American democracy, which paved the way for French, Brazilian, Canadian, Indian, Mexican and so many other democracies. Kings were the ultimate rent-seekers: every citizen was the product.

It’s not like this is some special case. People make the exact same arguments against John Deere, Tesla, Apple etc. And it’s a major reason many understand we should favor local (or local-capable/open-weight) AI/LLMs. I think “for any product whose support is discontinued, with more than X users, either open source all relevant software and hardware schematics, or provide a binary that will work on the hardware in perpetuity without DRM checks, based on industry” is a miniscule request in the face of any of these industries. I’d say, for instance, weights for discontinued Claude and OpenAI versions would fit. And it’s exactly the type of problem (functioning) democracies are meant for.

user3939382• 17 days ago

You’re making an equally nebulous point, as if all govt regulation is good and overreach doesn’t exist by definition or something.

Frieren• 17 days ago

You did a summary of conservative ideology. All laws should be abolished so I can do whatever I want, but laws should regulate everything I do not like and the punishment should be harsh.

It is an ideology based in short-term self interest. It is the way toddlers think about the world before growing up.

Laws should help to create a well functioning society where everybody can participate and benefit from it in a fair system. Regulations are part of a functional society.

Digital ownership is not different from anything else. Regulate it correctly or the most powerful people will just take away everything from you.

AnthonyMouse9• 17 days ago

You're not in favor of adding regulation, except when it comes to issues you understand and care about.

That's not really it.

The main case against regulation is that it shouldn't be used when competition would do it better, which is most of the time. The trouble in this case is that copyright is a government-granted monopoly, which means this isn't one of those times, because competition is being foreclosed by statute. It can't be the thing that saves you in the case where the government is prohibiting it.

To put it another way, the thing that would really reduce regulations is to get rid of copyright, but maybe we want to be pragmatic here and instead of demanding that it be abolished entirely, we just want the prohibition the government is imposing on the users to not be extended through an unconscionable power grab and destroy the rights of First Sale and Fair Use that have always belonged to the customer.

zahlman5• 17 days ago

This is an impressively uncharitable read of GP, and in my view totally uncalled for.

People who "generally" oppose "regulation", in my experience, very often have very good reasons for having adopted that stance, that are rooted in examination (or at least knowledge) of several actually existing regulations. And I would hope we all agree that there are plenty of really bad regulations out there. (If not: I invite you to check out the book https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp... , and consider how this legal state of affairs could come about.)

The entirely unfounded allegation of cronyism ("and the ones where you have friends that work there") is especially absurd. Where the guidelines say

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

this is the exact mechanism for "trampling curiousity" I imagine the site staff have in mind. Why would anyone who can offer you an alternative point of view, want to participate in an environment where responses read like this?

_heimdall2• 17 days ago

I can't speak for the GP obviously, but lumping together all regulation is a mistake. This would be a situation of having regulation protect our rights rather than limit them. That's a huge distinction and the former isn't particularly common today, more often than not if someone is raising concerns over a new regulation its because the regulation is limiting their rights.

NikolaNovak3• 16 days ago

Yes; and to make it extremely politically explosive, I do enjoy observing American politics and seeing each side (there are, brilliantly, two, because there ARE only two sides to every story and they neatly correlate with each other 100%:) massively enlarge the government, apply massive new restrictive regulations, but one side claims they don't do that because of somewhat specific types of massive government regulations and enlargements they do :)

At its best, a government law/regulation/policy is people saying "Ouch, that hurt, let's not do THAT again!", or "Oooh, I like this, this is good for us, let's do more of THAT please!".

At its worst, its self-preserving bureaucracy run rampant.

Any oversimplifying platitude like "I'm against big government!" or "I'm against government regulation!" so tremendously lacks specifics as to be worse than worthless.

And this is an extremely complicated issue which a tiny minority of people care about that'd be ridiculously over-complicated to implement with huge difficulty in tracking and enforcing! But because where we are, it resonates with us, and we on Hacker News feel it's an obvious and easy policy to apply :). You know, unlike the minor issues of war and peace and hunger and poverty and economics and minority rights et cetera :)

100 internet points and tip of a hat to you sir :)

pc86• 16 days ago

You seem to be arguing that government regulation, on its face, is default-good while the GP seems to be arguing that it is default-bad. I bet if you actually engage with the argument in good faith instead of dismissing your imaginary strawman there could be a good conversation! But no the GP disagrees with you, so is therefore a complete moron, so no discussion will be had I suppose.

In Comments
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butlike• 16 days ago

I didn't take their comment like that. A brain surgeon doesn't excise a leg tumor the same way as you don't comment on things outside your wheelhouse.

iugtmkbdfil834• 16 days ago

Not really. The issue is that even the basic current rules are not really enforced, because digital is somehow seen as more ephemeral and thus not real ( or at least, that is how it initially started ).

We don't have to have new regulation. We just need to enforced basic existing standards. Buy means buy. Rent means rent. Lease means lease. All have their place. But this is not what is happening now. We have an ecosystem that mischaracterizes not just type the type of sale, but user's rights and obligations under it.

All that is basically fraud. We just don't call it that. We call it innovation.

matheusmoreira2• 16 days ago

He's right though. There's no reason to add even more annoying laws. Just get rid of the existing ones that are causing the problem. Getting rid of just the DMCA's anti-circumvention nonsense would probably be sufficient to take care of this problem. Game stops working? You can make it work.

bshanks• 15 days ago

If someone had said, "I am generally not opposed to regulation, but this is a place where I don't support it.", you could have replied to it in a similar fashion, but reversed.

nfw221• 17 days ago

Anything that you BUY needs to be your property.

This is obviously absurd as a universal rule. If I "buy" a night in a hotel room, I should own the hotel room? If I order a taxi, I should own the taxi? If I ride a bikeshare e-bike across town, I should own the bike?

Whether rent is appropriate or exploitative for a certain product or industry is a fair question, but to say renting should not exist as a concept at all for anything just doesn't work.

Groxx• 17 days ago

Digital sales overwhelmingly use "buy" as the term in their UI, not "rent". Rental is a separate thing, and I don't think roughly anyone is saying rentals should not exist in any form.

MyMemoryfails2• 17 days ago

I think you misunderstood, the major issue is that companies are actually "renting", it's just at 100k words long terms of services where they redefine "purchase" as rental.

California has actually done something about this, you can longer claim that customers are "buying" when they're actually just renting.

If i claimed i sell a house for 500K but the in terms of sale redefine sale as rent the house for 500K and i can claim the property back anytime, that'd be crime yet it's somehow legal with digital goods.

wsve5• 17 days ago

All your examples make clear to the customer that their access is temporary and conditional on their continued and ongoing payment, and that ownership of the good/service is retained by the seller.

On the other hand, "buying a game" is given the guise of ownership, despite true ownership still being retained by the seller, obscured by the fact you're making a one-time payment. It'd be reasonable if the terminology used was "rent" or "subscribe" to a game with a periodic payment, but that's not what's advertised.

It is deceiving, unnecessary, and anti-consumer.

LocalH• 17 days ago

Words like "buy" "own" and "purchase" have a specific connotation. These licenses upend that.

I am part of the Rock Band video game community. That scene is covered in the use of "buy" "own" "purchase" terminology. Now, granted, Harmonix went above and beyond when it came to ensure they had solid licenses, so even though today they've been delisting DLC because their original license to distribute the songs to new customers has begun lapsing, they also went way above and beyond to ensure that people who bought content in the Rock Band 1 days would still be able to play them across the whole same-console library, so much so that anyone who bought RB1/2/3 content on either Xbox 360 or PS3 were able to also play those songs on Rock Band 4 on Xbone and PS4. I think there might have been a small fee in some instances, like when exporting disc content to newer games, but outside of that they went far beyond what most companies do when handling licensing (and this is music licensing, one of the most notoriously hairy forms of licensing that one can do).

These licenses are also re-downloadable by anyone who "bought" them, at least until the platforms entirely shut down the legacy console access for re-download of content that was paid for. Fortunately, we as a community also have all of it preserved without the DRM in preparation for the day when you can no longer even re-download content you paid for. There are also tools that let you copy the content files directly from your console (where possible with or without mods) and convert or decrypt them yourself.

j1elo4• 17 days ago

What is becoming absurd is the inability of so many people to extrapolate the most obvious conclusions instead of reaching the most obtuse and unhelpful ones, which arguably takes more effort to do.

In all your examples you are buying a service, isn't it obvious? the counterpart of "products" in the phrase "products and services". And yes, you are buying the right of being entitled to receive it. Ideally, you should be able to sell and transfer that right, or gift it to someone else. And if the service is eventually cancelled before being delivered, a full refund for the price should be issued.

fasterik• 17 days ago

There's already a good solution to buying and owning digital media: you pay money to download files that are playable offline.

When you pay for content locked to a platform, you're not buying an asset, you're paying for a service. The platforms grow around not only providing a convenient service to the end user, but also to the content creators, who publish on them with the expectation that their content is protected by DRM. Creators are free to choose where they publish, and end users are free to choose which services they use.

I don't think it makes sense for the government to define what it means to own a digital asset or to force every service platform to become a retailer and ownership-tracker. Where there's demand for DRM-free downloads or physical media, the market will respond.

pocksuppet4• 17 days ago

They did this in California, now online stores in California only let you rent games for an indefinite term. Exactly the same as before but the button says "rent"

tikhonj• 17 days ago

Which online stores? I don't see that in Steam.

ForHackernews2• 17 days ago

Good. At least they're honest about what you're paying for.

AlienRobot• 17 days ago

That's good, since you are renting them.

zulban• 17 days ago

You're implying that's the same but it's obviously better. Nothing wrong with renting when you're told you're renting.

dlcarrier• 17 days ago

amelius• 17 days ago

Most importantly you should be able to use it even if you break all ties with the vendor.

CommanderData• 17 days ago

Has self regulation ever worked in the tech world when it comes to consumer/user rights.

Cthulhu_6• 16 days ago

Yes, up until it didn't.

limagnolia2• 17 days ago

I would argue that we don't need new regulations, we need to enforce existing laws against fraud. It is fraudulent to sell something and then later disable ones access to the thing you sold them access to.

an0malous• 17 days ago

Exactly, this is just application of property rights and enforcing existing consumer protection rights. You can’t tell someone they’re “buying” something if they don’t own it. Imagine someone doing that with house rentals or car leases, it would obviously be considered fraud.

thfuran3• 17 days ago

I would argue that it is likely fraudulent to sell with the intent to later reappropriate but separately illegal to actually do so. It’s some manner of theft or destruction of property.

zahlman5• 17 days ago

Which is exactly why Sony claims not to "sell" you the game but only to license it.

Obscurity4340• 17 days ago

Especially one-time purchase apps, zero control from the user and they can enforce any number of unreasonable control mechanisms over you even once you've paid for the damn thing.

tonyhart73• 17 days ago

"Anything that you BUY needs to be your property."

do you own the film when you buy ticket to cinema ????

meh2frdf9• 17 days ago

Yeah the OP doesn't understand licensing, seems to only think of purchase in terms of physical goods, and is trying to poorly apply their reasoning based on that.

hsbauauvhabzb3• 17 days ago

No but you don’t expect the cinema to stop the movie half way through without giving you a refund, and would expect that you could legally resell a purchased ticket to your friend if you can’t attend the screening.

j1elo4• 17 days ago

The film is going to be projected anyways. You are buying the right to be present in the room when that happens. You can transfer that right (give the ticket to someone else), even sell it. Before the projection happens, the company might want to close and cancel that projection, in which case you are left without the chance to attend and exercise your purchased service; in that case, the company would (should) refund your full money.

Now change "attend the cinema" with "play a videogame" in those phrases. We should be able to freely exchange games between us. I should be able to sell them to you. The medium (digital, physical) is irrelevant.

jdboyd• 17 days ago

I am generally not in favor of adding regulation, but this is a place where I would support it. Anything that you BUY needs to be your property.

This could also be fixed by removing regulation.

kombookcha• 17 days ago

It's really cocky of them to do this immediately after deleting everyone's purchased movies from their accounts. Nobody should have any illusions about what "buying" a game means when they can do this at will.

https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/legal/psvideocontent/

m0002• 17 days ago

I have no problem with Sony not offering DRM free versions of games that I can still download and play with the store. But if that goes away -> you must give me a path to local ownership.

I'm pretty sure that Sony and others would work their way around such legislation. E.g. spin-off shell "studios" that would be the legal game sellers, and when the time comes to sunset a batch of games, these "studios" would magically go bankrupt and cease to exist.

Then the onus would again put on the commuinity to break any encryption or otherwise reverse-engineer and preserve the games so they remain playable for legal owners. And the top-level companies would still be able to salvage and own the game franchise rights, so they would still be able to harass the game preservation community.

I don't think there's any workaround to stop this kind of cheating, other than mandating that (a) all DRM-protected or service-bound content needs to be submitted to an escrow organization (Library of Congress?) in a form that can be used to reproduce it locally, and (b) all submitted content is released to the public after X years.

Schlagbohrer6• 17 days ago

Loopholes like this can be closed with government regulation.

account428• 17 days ago

Government-mandated source code escrow is certainly a reasonable requirement for copyright protection but you could also just legislate that "licensing" a work for resale also means being ultimately liable to make third party buyers whole if they have not received a local copy before - at the threat of loosing copyright protection for the work entirely.

matheusmoreira2• 16 days ago

Surely judges would not be fooled by these completely transparent shenanigans?

saidnooneever• 17 days ago

this definition is already flawed which should indicate its difficult to put good regulations in writing.

a service you pay for is not your property. and the licenses for games could be seen as a service rather than goods since they are now digital. ofc this is not nice or good, but its possible to do it to skirt ownership rules regarding 'goods'.

for PS5 the problem might be this.

you can sell a license and enable download for games but how many games can you realistically fit inside of a ps5 without some weird storage array in there... games are huge these days and wont get smaller.

for PC customers, storage is their own responsibility. for ps5 im not sure it could work the same, how extensible is the storage etc.

i would expect such things to come with a subscription, so u can access all games u want anytime while the subscription is active and install/download on demand.

the subscription cost being low vs game prices would offset the ownership problem for a lot of people.

i know many people who have subscription to platforms who do this today on PC in order to access many games they cant afford to all buy. (they buy ones maybe if they end up played a lot).

the problem now with these platforms for PC is still they only offer a selection of games, to encourage purchases (because the platforms are more independent from PC and game makers than say PS5 and sony are..)

beenBoutIT• 16 days ago

Looking through a shelf of well organized CDs, game disks or movie disks will always be far more satisfying than typing letters into a search box and wading through large numbers of titles on a TV or monitor.

gblargg• 17 days ago

We have this problem due to government regulation. Without it, every game would be cracked and downloadable without any restrictions on use. The server requirements would be reverse-engineered and neutered.

_heimdall2• 17 days ago

Regulations that protect your rights are very different from those that limit them. In this case it would be the former, and no less it would be reinforcing a pretty fundamental right in our system, the right to own property.

silvestrov• 17 days ago

The KISS version of regulation would be that stores are not allowed to use the word "buy" when you don't get full ownership and must use the word "license" instead.

Also it should be marked clearly that the company can rescind the license at any moment without giving any reason why.

Cthulhu_6• 16 days ago

I'm sure in the various services' Ts&Cs they explain that what you buy is a license to the game, not the game itself.

throw109202• 16 days ago

I would love to see something like the Nutrition Facts label that states IN BLACK AND WHITE ALL CAPS THAT THE COMPANY CAN (NOT) RESCIND THE LICENSE AT ANY TIME. If the fact is very blatantly shown on the marketing/packaging instead of being relegated to tiny fine print, buyers will pay a lot more attention.

CodesInChaos• 16 days ago

That would be pointless, since a consumer always buys a license, not the software itself.

norome• 17 days ago

I bought a bunch of games on google stadia when that was a thing, and when they closed the service down i was fully refunded on all games. pretty cool

abustamam• 17 days ago

While I agree it is pretty cool, I think they probably did that to avoid a class action lawsuit.

But that does also beg the question, if we do eventually regulate this better, do you own streamed products? IE with Google stadia (and I think Amazon Luna) you buy a game but the game data is streamed to your device. If they shut the service down (like Stadia did) then what happens to your game collection?

It's a hypothetical, but interesting to think about nonetheless

akimbostrawman• 16 days ago

pretty cool

Is it? It's the bare minimum and if you replace games with anything else it might not look so "pretty cool" anymore.

My hairdresser forcefully bleached/uncut my hair but pretty cool that i got my money back.

Ford forcefully impounded my car without my consent but pretty cool that i got my money back

Realtor kicked me out of my house but pretty cool that i got my money back

mdemare• 16 days ago

Companies will keep doing what they're doing now - they'll just use another verb than "buy" or "purchase". Which would be a small improvement, I guess...

shapefrog2• 16 days ago

I am generally not in favor of adding regulation

Then let the market decide.

flyingshelf• 16 days ago

This makes no sense. You can't force them to sell you the game. They'll just say "this is a 5-year rental" and that'll be it. The regulation can't even be retroactive

matwood3• 16 days ago

They'll just say "this is a 5-year rental" and that'll be it.

And that's ok since everyone will understand the deal going in. Consumers can decide if it's worth paying the price for a 5 year rental or not.

sublinear2• 17 days ago

I question how much of this discussion is really being driven by gamers.

Those who wanted change made it happen. There are indie games and remakes without these restrictions. Most of classic gaming preservation has been successful with its goals apart from some legal gray areas and chasing rarities.

These discussions then fixate on the cutoff year for classic gaming and whether everything beyond that is even worth saving. The conclusion is always the same. Nobody really cares about the slop.

All that remains to discuss is politics. That's always the most vocal part drowning out everyone else. Who keeps banging this drum?

pitched7• 17 days ago

This is the exact kind of cause that triggers the social media algorithms. Part nostalgia, part underdog battle, and no problematic elements.

garciansmith3• 17 days ago

I view the killing of physical game media as having two aspects that, while intertwined, are separate in some ways.

The first is the loss of the physical item. I like organizing carts and discs, looking at them on my shelves, reminiscing, easily putting one in a console to replay. Same with other media for me: I buy books, only read physical ones. I listen to digital music (generally downloaded from sites like Bandcamp) but for albums and artists I like the most I buy vinyl. I get that this isn't a big deal for most people, but it is something that is permanently lost when you get rid of physical media.

The second aspect is control and ownership. This is indeed intertwined with the physical aspect, since you can do things like resell a cartridge or disc and let someone easily borrow it. But control is possible with purely digital games, they just need to not be locked down with DRM. And companies like Sony want to kill physical games because it allows them to keep those DRM locks on digital-only copies so you cannot resell your games, which is connected to the second point, control.

I also agree that the issue of control is more important. How do we continue to make sure our games, that we bought, aren't just taken away from us? What happens if you lose your account with Sony/MS/Nintendo? What happens if your old console that you downloaded a game on breaks? The death of physical games is also a step on the way to subscription-only services, where you won't even be able to play something unless you are actively giving money to a company regardless of how much you gave them before.

The ways forward that I see are legislation that would do things like force companies to allow people to always download games they bought in perpetuity, regardless of account status, and if the company dies the successor company must do the same or release the game into the public domain. But given the power of large corporations and current intellectual property laws, this isn't happening anytime soon.

Practically, then, the only way I see is to either have a console that is hacked in some way, or only play games on an open platform like PC. And there you can only buy DRM-free games or, at worse, if you lose access to game in some service (e.g., Steam) you can still pirate it (which I'd feel morally fine doing if I bought it already of course, but that does bring legal risks depending on where you live).

And the later option still doesn't address the larger issue of preservation, as the OP's blog post notes: games will be made for locked-down consoles in the future and will be lost forever unless the hardware is hacked or a law demands the game's preservation.

ethagnawl2• 17 days ago

The death of physical games is also a step on the way to subscription-only services, where you won't even be able to play something unless you are actively giving money to a company regardless of how much you gave them before.

Also a step towards surveillance. All of your engagement will be tracked and sold to advertisers or used to re/train some LLM. All in the service of _enhancing your experience_, of course.

phendrenad2• 17 days ago

Physical media was always one of the selling points for consoles. While PC has essentially been digital-only for a long time (with NONE of the wish list the author here wants, mind you - you can't sell or lend games to random people on Steam, besides a limited "family sharing" feature), consoles were where you go when you want to play a game and then sell it quickly if you don't like it. Physical media accounts for 50% of Switch game sales. I feel that Sony is in panic mode because they released a bunch of stinker first-party games and now they think that removing the disc drive from the PS6 will save them some money. It'll probably lose them a lot of customers.

pitched7• 17 days ago

Sony removing the disc drive from PS6 will save them a lot of money if Xbox also removes it. I wonder if they’re back channel colluding on that right now?

downrightmike2• 17 days ago

There is no next xbox. They are killing the brand while they wait for ARM to get better

mattgreenrocks• 17 days ago

The question I'm left with: in the past, the uproar over these types of changes seemed to make companies change their mind when considering very anti-consumer decisions. Now, they just go ahead anyway.

What's different? How do we get back to how it was before? I know the current political climate is one that enables this sort of thing. There are parallels with the current movement also WRT to the employer/employee relationship.

Beyond that, there's still more at play. In tech, and specifically on this site, I see a lot more complicity and fatigue when discussing these issues. I can't help but think that also contributes. I'm not saying everyone should always be mad at everything. But it does seem like there's a generational component to this where we haven't passed down an essential feature of a hacker, namely the anti-establishment bent.

I suppose that's collateral damage of a culture tolerating lots of people rushing in to grab their bag of cash and then get out.

Nicholas_C• 17 days ago

We’ve been boiled in water like frogs, or however the saying goes. Even cars these days have subscription pricing for features which is insane to me but the average consumer is accustomed to this garbage. If they tried this 20 years ago it wouldn’t fly.

Someone once said that if libraries were invented today they would be illegal and that feels more true every day.

teamonkey• 17 days ago

There’s indeed quite an uproar and I’m not unsympathetic to it, but only 3% of Sony’s 2025 revenue came from physical game sales.

https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/corporatereport/... (page 37)

zythyx2• 17 days ago

The problem with this argument is that while digital sales are 7x more, it doesn't break down the digital portion into purely games, online-DLC, or online-exclusive content.

I buy most of my games physically, but then all the DLC I buy from the PS Store because retailers don't have it. And I also buy digital games too, because the games literally don't have a disc, if it did, I would buy it physically.

I would say that my ratio of digital purchases to physical ones (by dollar amount) is 7:1. I would buy 90% of my content physically if I could, but I can't. And now with the upcoming changes, I'm going to end up buying 0% physically and 0% digitally.

markus_zhang2• 17 days ago

Companies need to earn money, so the only leverage we as customers is to NOT buy their products. Educate our kids that such practices are EVIL and to buy the products it means to support those EVIL practices. Don't be afraid to call upon moral. Kids need to understand moral from the beginning, or they will be corrupted by bad practices.

hsbauauvhabzb3• 17 days ago

Telling kids that they can’t play the game they can’t stop thinking about because all their friends play and talk about it constantly because the company is EVIL and because of morals works so, so well.

bluefirebrand• 17 days ago

What's different

I think what's different is that there aren't any/many dissenting companies building products without the bullshit.

In the past if consumers didn't like something they could shift their business to another company that wasn't doing that thing. Companies had to compete

I don't think I see much actual competition among companies anymore. They're all just trying to build as much lock-in as they can. For example, I think HP printers don't compete with Brother printers really, they just keep trying to milk HP customers more instead of winning new business.

Barrin92• 17 days ago

What's different? How do we get back to how it was before?

Elect people who regulate business and break up closed platforms. That's what different. Happened to TV too. In the early 1980s TV programming was regulated. Program-length commercials were banned, host-selling was banned, etc. Then Reagan put Mark Fowler in charge of the FCC who thought TVs are "toasters with pictures" and the free market should handle it and you got modern ad-infested, anti-consumer TV.

Gaming hardly was ever subject to any rules to begin with because it grew up after that shift. There's no great mystery, you hand your society over to unaccountable megacorporations and the market and you get exactly what anyone on the street would have told you would happen.

s1artibartfast• 17 days ago

Companies have realized that they can just call the bluff and the vocal minority of customers rarely matter.

The ultimate leverage a consumer has is to not by something if they don't like the terms.

zythyx2• 17 days ago

IMO Empathy. Empathy used to exist up until around 2015 in businesses where losing a customer was a really big deal, there used to be a cost in losing a customer, and a cost in gaining a customer, so empathy was the building block in helping a business build and maintain their customers. While that's still generally true for small companies, once you reach a global reach, for the most part the cost of gaining and losing a customer is FAR FAR less, so the empathy is lost too.

I also think politics is a pretty big factor in this too, as regulation was used when companies and customers had an impasse, and well, gestures everywhere look at the general global political client right now. Not much empathy going around these days...

postexitus• 17 days ago

You are naive. Nothing to do with empathy. Everything is cash - warm little cash. No what's lost is - people stopped voting with their wallets. When someone did something atrocious, people stopped buying it. Now - first of all, half of the consumers don't care if PS5 titles are on disc already. And they will not stop when they stop putting things on discs. So why would Sony stop?

Gigachad5• 17 days ago

The uproar was around 2013 when Xbox tried to do this and Playstation made it their marketing to mock this. It's been a decade since and most people have moved digital. Physical games started getting too large to fit on disks, or they shipped with some buggy pre release version that was expected to day one update to a usable release.

Physical games as they exist today are more just license keys already. It's likely all the console makers wanted to ditch physical a while ago but put it off after the outrage over xbox.

vinyl7• 16 days ago

This is the result of all the "culture wars" we've had in recent years. At the beginning of it, companies hedged and pulled back if there were any sort of mass PR event due to them taking a stance in the Culture War Topic of the Day. As time went on and there was Culture War after Culture War after Culture War, either consumers got tired of tracking who was "bad" or companies realized they could get away with anything and it didn't seemingly affect their bottom line.

It's either that or companies don't really have to worry because there is essentially zero competition in the current economy with all the pro-monopoly administrations we've had for the past 16+ years.

shmerl• 17 days ago

Exactly. Let them sell games on GOG DRM-free. You buy it, it's yours as long as you back it up. No one stops you from storing it on any physical media you want. Just use an HDD.

When things on the other are presented as rent only, it's very bad.

erelong• 17 days ago

or, of getting rid of "intellectual property" legally so information is just shared more freely and widely

deadbabe2• 17 days ago

I’ve come to realize there are definitely people out there who have no interest in playing games, they just want to own them.

A child doesn’t think about ownership, he picks up a controller and plays a game. And when the child has grown bored of the game, one day they just never touch it again like a discarded toy, moving on to something else.

It is adults, reminded of their own feeble mortality and impermanence in the world who try to grasp at things like permanent ownership, they long for something that can’t just be torn away from them on a whim. But in life, everything is ultimately torn away from you, there is nothing you can do about it.

Some try to disguise their hoarding as “preservation”. Nobody cares. Even if you had some carefully curated museum, these old games would just be exhibits people look at for a bit with passing curiosity. Nothing more. You didn’t even make these games, why do you care so much?

Focus on enjoying games now, in the time when they are relevant. No matter how hard you try, all those games will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.

nfw221• 17 days ago

The vast majority of consumers don't care or think about this at all. It's a loud and tiny minority who imagine this great injustice will lead to some groundswell of rallied consumer support if they just write more blog posts about it.

In reality, if people get continual access to a digital game, the hypothetical case where they might lose access to it isn't all that troubling. And even if the license was specifically a year-term rental or something, most people wouldn't flinch because they go on with their lives after finishing a game.

It's also so convenient to ignore all the reasons the current system is the way it is.

1. Digital goods are just bits and free to copy and distribute online. Publishers use DRM because piracy is otherwise prevent, and they have a right to protect their IP.

2. Publishers can distribute the content that they develop however they see fit. Gamers who didn't make the game aren't owed something by right. Don't purchase the game if the license terms aren't amenable to you. It's a game, not a vital good.

3. Disk drives are a pointless pain-in-the-ass to manufacture if most people don't want them anyway.

skotobaza4• 17 days ago

Don't purchase the game if the license terms aren't amenable to you

Unfortunately, terms can change. Publisher can promise 10-year support for the game and then drop it after 1 year. So when we purchase the game, we don't know what will happen in the future.

Telaneo15• 17 days ago

Focus on enjoying games now, in the time when they are relevant. No matter how hard you try, all those games will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.

I've enjoyed games that came out 20 years before I actually played them. Many games I enjoy are years old by the time I play them. I wanted to play The Crew. Doing that officially is literally impossible now. Maybe I'll get to play it if the pirates can do their magic.

Somebody needs to preserve these games so that people like me can play and enjoy them in their own time. I'd like other people to share in that same joy.

Would you write this comment, if you were speaking of books instead of games? It comes of as incredibly thoughtless to think of games as nothing more than discarded toys, when they are complete creative experiences filled with artistic value. Games are worthy of preservation for the same reasons books are. It's a shame people like you haven't realised that.

deadbabe2• 17 days ago

Most books are lost in time. The ones that survive are just popular enough to stay in circulation.

Like you will most likely always have some kind of access to something like GTA 6 in some way. Only obscure titles get truly lost. They are obscure for a reason.

skotobaza4• 17 days ago

I'm in the same boat with the sibling comment. I currently play games that have been released 20+ years ago. In 20 years I want to be able to play the games that are being released now. That's what preservation is, not hoarding. Should I just stop playing older games because I wouldn't be able to play newer ones in some years? This seems entirely unreasonable to me. I can read books that have been written hundreds of years ago, I can watch movies that have been made 100 years ago. The same should be with video games. And it used to be this way.

ChrisArchitect• 17 days ago

Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745456

HiPhish• 17 days ago

Unfortunately ownership on console has been down the drain for a long time. Even if you have the disc you still have mandatory downloads, patches, one-time download codes that tie the content to your account and of course DLC. What is even the point of having the disc anymore? Might as well go full digital and avoid the plastic waste.

I do own a PS4 and I have to do research every time I want to play a game. The website https://www.doesitplay.org/ is quite useful. But it's all so tiresome, it really makes me want to just check out of console gaming altogether. With full-on digital at least there won't be any ambiguity. It's not what I wanted, but all it means for me is that they won't be getting any of my money anymore.

numpad02• 17 days ago

I think an oft-forgotten possible major driver for the moves away from discs[1] must be scary legal warnings universally seen in paid contents during 2010s. None of currently popular platforms have those stern unrelatable messages that customers looking for relaxing contents were forced to observe. It didn't took hard data for anyone to see disc sales disappearing in sync with DRMs and tones progressively more obnoxious and harsh in the period.

Sony is likely not shutting down physical discs to tighten control over consumers, but it's more likely that they just don't see disc manufacturing as a viable business as a hardware factory that it always was. That goes beyond games or movies, and it should be discussed more often as to why they didn't take actions but to quietly watch the golden goose slaughtered.

1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/100749

Waterluvian• 17 days ago

I want the most minimum amount of regulation that doesn’t reason much about the type of media or transport method.

Require clear communication of meaning of words like “purchase” and require software “licenses” to indicate “access for at least 5 years” or whatever.

Basically, “you don’t own this. You’re buying the right to access it for least x years” vs. “You are purchasing a key that is fully transferable and provides indefinite access to this product.”

Then let the market sort out the rest, including buyer sentiment.

lofaszvanitt2• 17 days ago

And "people" seemingly hated NFT so much, but the basic idea of it, like in this case, would've given sony an opportunity to cash in on every resale of the given physical disc. But, oooh the underlying forces that steer our society towards a dead end didn't like that idea.

Same applies to graphics artists. They sell a painting and if it ever changes hands it would've netted them X percent from the given transactions. But NO, that's not the way this should be handled. The elite doesn't want people to earn easily.

Digital vs physical is the same bs just from a different angle.

Macha2• 17 days ago

I mean of course. If the person who sold you something is able to enforce terms on it, that's not ownership. The prospective NFT-sellers in your example are on the side of Sony, not the customers.

Not to mention all the other failures of NFTs at achieving the goal. The NFT can't know that you've handed over the physical object, or copied/screenshotted the PNG or whatever. It can't enforce that a transfer of the object is paired with a transfer of the NFT - you'd need a contract for that. And once you have a contract, what good does the NFT do for you?

lofaszvanitt2• 14 days ago

It could be woven into existing - and crumbling - legal systems.

y1n0• 17 days ago

I know this is a topic de jour for submitters lately, but it seems weird for hacker news, a website for and by founders who primarily offer software-as-a-service. I also think it seems weird for a website whose patrons are seemingly predominantly against private property / property ownership. At least the vocal ones seem to feel that way.

I get that HN is made up of a variety of people with a variety of opinions, and different confluences of events lead to different groups being more or less vocal at different times. So maybe this is just that in action.

abeyer• 17 days ago

a website for and by founders who primarily offer software-as-a-service

Liking the Everything as a Subscription model when you get to be the rentier but not when you don't seems perfectly apropos.

sublinear2• 17 days ago

Most of HN has rarely had anything but hateful comments for SaaS business models. The majority of people commenting are never interested in the business side of anything unless they see a chance to wedge their politics in.

This submission is explicitly asking for a discussion against SaaS. This isn't "weird for HN" nor has there been a "variety of opinions" since around 2016.

beloch2• 17 days ago

"But most people use Steam anyway, I hear you say. That's true, but you can still own your games on Steam. Very easily, in fact! Steam doesn't apply a hard DRM for games on their platform, you can bypass it and play your games offline without the launcher if you know what you're doing."

--------------

When it comes to PC games, the real peace of mind comes from cracks and piracy.

Sure, a single player game that requires an online service to start up could become unplayable if the company running that online service decides to end it without providing a patch. If that happens, somebody will crack it so the game can be run. Sure, a game could be yanked from Steam without notice, but you can always pirate it. Sure, Steam could go under, but the internet is my backup drive. I know what I've paid for.

I don't have actual legal ownership of the titles I buy, but I also have recourse if I feel I've been ripped off. That recourse may be abused by some, but game companies have no moral right to oppose it until they start respecting the rights of their paying customers. Taking away something that was paid for is theft. Ownership rights for downloaded titles is a critical stepping stone if game companies are serious about reducing piracy.

tjpnz• 17 days ago

When it comes to PC games, the real peace of mind comes from cracks and piracy.

I still have nocds for some of the old GTA and Warcraft games. Pretty sure you can't play the originals any other way now with all the "definitive" and "reforged" editions having taken their place.

beloch2• 17 days ago

You might be able to mount an image of the original CD and let it detect that, depending on how schmancy their copy protection scheme is. To be fair though, I used nocd mods back when some of these games were released just so I wouldn't have to keep swapping CD's.

monegator• 17 days ago

And then you have repacks.

It's basically impossible to find any game that isn't on GOG that is not shared as a repack. You don't get the installer, you don't get the original media, you have to trust that the repack is not filled with malware. (and also the repack process somewhat confuses wine/lutris. More than once i couldn't make the repack run on my linux box, but if i managed to find the genuine install medium.. or if i ended up buying the game on sale, then no problem)

sciencejerk8• 17 days ago

Are repacks just binaries?

user_of_the_wek• 17 days ago

I‘m wondering if there’s a better term to use than „digital games“. Those physical discs are just as digital as anything else.

incompatible2• 17 days ago

Yeah, I was going to say that. Somebody has to pedantically state that it's a pretty silly terminology.

cubefox2• 17 days ago

Maybe "virtual" games. Or simply "non-pysical" games.

jcft2• 17 days ago

And the "digital" versions rely on physics just as much as the versions on discs or cartridges. However, it's abundantly clear what is meant here so there is no need to clarify the language...

cush• 17 days ago

imo GameStop ruined it for everyone. Nearly all their profits are from reselling games.

jwpapi• 17 days ago

Most new games are worse than old games anyway

sodafountan• 17 days ago

As hard as it is to admit, the used market hurts developers the most. If I buy a game and then resell it to a friend for more money than what the game store would offer, but less than what they'd pay at retail. The actual developer of the game sees no profit. It's a win-win for the gamers, not so much for the developers.

Digital assets don't degrade like an appliance or a used car might, so the used market really cuts into the profits of game companies.

I don't believe the solution to this is to go all digital and cut off access to physical media entirely. What we need are stronger digital economies that can grow organically with a community.

Digital media needs the backing of cryptocurrency to remain viable. We need digital assets and economies that either grow or shrink in value based on demand. Rather than fake digital currencies that have no value outside of the world they're used in, we need real cryptocurrencies that are traded on open markets like stocks to bolster the digital economy and make the economics of building fun, lasting games a reality.

I'm tired of spending money on digital points for games that have no real value. Everything should be a cryptocurrency at this point.

shevy-java• 17 days ago

He has a point; it makes sense for greedy corporations to try to eliminate second sale markets. But to me this is a much more fundamental attack that is going here. I also can't help but notice the age sniffing attack vector right now, but probably these two issues are not directly related.

Companies try to make it illegal to have physical copies. This is very similar to those who oppose the right-to-repair movement. They don't want you to control anything - they want to control everything. By not producing physical copies, they force you into their control. Now I am not the target audience, because these companies do not get any money from me anyway, but after the digital-only dictatorship I would be even less inclined to give them any MORE money now. Because I would support this new mafia scheme and that goes against my ethics - even though this is hypothetical as they already don't get me money anyway. I think it is time to forbid certain practices by companies. They should be REQUIRED to yield physical copies too. What the format is, how, and so forth is secondary, though they also may not abuse this for driving up outrageous prices either.

stevefan19992• 17 days ago

That's corpo-technofeudalism, it is unfortunately on the rise. They want to get rid of your control and opinion and strip your freedom away, forever enslaved to their system and pay rents In some sense it is comparable to religions but under different corpo-warbanner

stevefan19992• 17 days ago

I would argue further: it's not just about ownership only, but about control on a different level, that the industry can dictate what you can play by mass revoking the license, in order to force a next "hype" by getting rid of your independence.

999900000999• 17 days ago

At the core of this customers have a right to choose what they spin money on.

Access to an online based experience which will be discontinued in the future, that's what Roblox or Fortnite is.

When I spend money in a F2P game, I understand I don't have any rights outside of using it after the publisher ends support.

I don't want the government to tell me how to spend my money.

I do want all these gamers making noise to spend a fraction of the effort making community driven open source games.

I dream often of high quality open source games. The community would raise funds for development with an understanding of everything being released under MIT or GPL later.

FOSS is ownership.

Everything else is a temporary license to use which can be terminated without cause at any time. I just brought Marathon and it's fun.

But because Sony only sold me a license , they have a right to switch off the servers and make it useless tomorrow.

The only regulation I'd support here is a minimum service commitment at purchase. Something like " Your access to this product will terminate in June of 2029. Extensions to this service may be granted at publisher discretion."

This needs to be BIG RED PRINT when I hand over my money. Not hidden on page 15 of a service agreement.

kasince2k• 17 days ago

"looking at you movie industry" - i think 'indie' movies are coming. there's a wave coming and the early signs are the likes of obsession and iron lung. all hope is not lost

avaer• 17 days ago

Maybe you think gaming/media companies are greedy and should make less money. But if you want the industry to continue in the current state, keep in mind the price of games needs to be adjusted:

  price *= (total game sales / avg player count)

If there's a million sales but only 10 thousand people playing at a time, the price of the game needs to be multiplied by ~100x, because these copies can be shared, and the sales would be divided by 100x if the copies can be efficiently shared. The modern internet would make this buttery smooth to do (companies that make this easy will pop up overnight).

I'm not arguing either way, but this is the back of the napkin math to consider, and how that would ripple across the industry, for better or worse.

sciencejerk8• 17 days ago

The kinds of buyers who purchase pre-owned "used" games often CANNOT or WILL NOT shell out $70-100 for a new game. Social peer pressures might impact this (hey poor kid, do you really wanna lose your friends?)

dominicrose2• 17 days ago

The equivalent of a "used" game now is a game that was release more than a year ago and is on sale or at least has a price tag cheaper than it used to be.

The playstore is a bit more dynamic than real stores with physical disks which means it's easier to get lower prices for some games.

On complaint I have is that storage is extremely expensive, but I can't blame that on Sony.

brador• 17 days ago

It is about memory. Same reason people wish to own the photographs they take.

It is the right to trigger your own neurons and synapses irrespective of your capital value.

jmyeet• 17 days ago

This isn't just isn't as clearcut as people make it. A lot of it is based on a historic idea of an SNES cartridge or PS1 disk that contained the complete game, which was played locally and was entirely self-contained. It makes sense that you'd "own" that.

But we don't live in that world anymore. An extreme example is Fortnite. This is free (with paid cosmetics) but imagine if it cost $20. Do you own it? If they shut down the Fortnite servers, the game is pretty much worthless. What do you "own" exactly? Even with games like CoD that have a campaign, the game would degrade by losing online services.

Even for an offline game that's bought online, there will have been patches. If your console dies or you buy a new one, where do you download it from once the service shuts down? Or does it need to be available to download forever? If so, who hosts that?

As another example, I can probably from some old DVDs with games like GTA4 on them if I dig in boxes. I have since bought most on Steam since but ignore that. Years ago I had tried to install GTA4 on a PC and it basically didn't work. It relied on some infrastructure ("Games for Windows"?) that had since been discontinued. I think if I persisted I could've patched it to work but I just gave up. What happens then? What about when it requires an OS that no longer exists? What exactly do you "own"?

For digital TV shows and movies, this is far easier. I've never bought any of these. Years ago, you couldn't even download movies again from iTunes. If you lost it, bad luck. They reversed course on that I believe. But all these cases where the digital store lost the digital icense, which is going to happen, what did you think was going to happen?

What about DRM (for TV shows/movies as well as games)? There are DRM servers. Do these need to be maintained? By whom? You might take the purist approach of "no DRM" but that's really a losing battle.

But games are tougher for the reasons I described.

Here's something else to consider: part of the distribution model for physical media is that the media doesn't last forever (liek a digital copy does). Disks scratch, get broken, get lost, etc. Electronics in cartridges fail. SD cards fail. This degradation is built into the pricing model.

I honestly don't know what the solution is here but this just isn't as clearcut as people are making it out to be.

Telaneo15• 17 days ago

An extreme example is Fortnite. This is free (with paid cosmetics) but imagine if it cost $20. Do you own it?

You should.

If they shut down the Fortnite servers, the game is pretty much worthless. What do you "own" exactly?

You should also own a copy of the server software so you can host your own Fortnite lobby.

Even for an offline game that's bought online, there will have been patches. If your console dies or you buy a new one, where do you download it from once the service shuts down?

The real-world solution for this is 'jailbreak your console and download the game from the web'. There could also be sanctioned backup solutions which negate that issue. So long as the user is given a chance to back up and thus keep the game, you don't need a download server to be maintained.

Years ago I had tried to install GTA4 on a PC and it basically didn't work. It relied on some infrastructure ("Games for Windows"?) that had since been discontinued. I think if I persisted I could've patched it to work but I just gave up.

The real world solution are patches made by people who care, and those usually work. The better solution would be that that connectivity doesn't break the whole game. If it's just for the online half of a game, it should degrade gracefully.

What about when it requires an OS that no longer exists?

VMs exist.

What about DRM (for TV shows/movies as well as games)? There are DRM servers. Do these need to be maintained?

Provide a DRM-free copy if you shut down the servers.

You might take the purist approach of "no DRM" but that's really a losing battle.

A battle worth fighting [pirate flag emoji].

part of the distribution model for physical media is that the media doesn't last forever (liek a digital copy does). Disks scratch, get broken, get lost, etc. Electronics in cartridges fail. SD cards fail.

Is this a significant part of the model? How many resales were they expecting per 1000 normal sales? It can't be many. This to me seems like it could be rounded down to 0.

cyclonereef• 17 days ago

this is one of the few areas i feel like a blockchain-style solution could work. Mint a token, transfer it on sale or resale to the new wallet. Validate a wallet with the key is associated with the account. Same for old-school MSFT licenses or other systems where you buy a license key.

There's probably a shortcoming I'm missing here, but it's the only genuine case I could see a blockchain having use above other technical solutions

pizzathyme• 17 days ago

I made a hard switch from all digital to all physical (when available) after I tried to introduce old games to my kids. I found many of them were no longer downloadable.

What are the odds that PlayStation, Nintendo, Xbox servers will be around in 2040? 2050? It’s certainly not 100%. Those companies may not even exist. If there’s any dependency, there is a chance that one day you won’t have access any more.

BatFastard• 17 days ago

Does anyone here remember owning games on disk?

It was a royal pain in the ass!

You had to inset the disk every time you wanted to play game. The disks got scratched, destroyed, or rearranged by the wife.

Steam has saved me from all of that. Plus I can share my whole library with my family members.

Sure I might lose access to them all when I die, but 20 years from now who is going to care?

xboxnolifes• 17 days ago

I support the ability to copy the data from the disk and store it digitally, which should resolve all of those concerns.

skotobaza4• 17 days ago

I care about having access to my games 20 years from now. I've been playing more older games for the past few years (most of them were released 20+ years ago). And I want to be able to play games that are being released now and that I have missed because I was playing older games. It's a normal expectation.

NorwegianDude• 17 days ago

I've been running a small game dev studio for ~20 years, and the one change I think must be made, is to ban the usage of "buy" when it comes to games. Games are licensed, not bought, and that should be crystal clear to those who are paying.

Most of the games people play runs using proprietary software and/or licenses, and often on very specific hardware, with game features that makes sense for the amount of players the game has. Requiring that people should be able to play such games if the company stops running it would completely change and limit how games are developed, and in many cases require a completely different version of the game to be co-developed in case people stop playing it. It would with 100 % certainty result in slower development, fewer games, and worse games.

I do of course think that developers should try to make games playable without the company being involved, within reason. Some games that do not have licensing issues or complicated server backends as a requirement could be made available without too much work. But for things like e.g. MMORPGs it's nearly impossible. If your ever developed bigger software systems you know how many moving parts are involved, so just imagine the difficulty of making it work on consumer machines...

folkrav• 17 days ago

Changing the verbiage would be better in that it would be honest, but I still find it absolutely despicable that the very concept of owning a game basically disappeared.

Tons of games people play do NOT have notable online features outside leaderboards, cosmetics or other inconsequential mechanics.

Gigachad5• 17 days ago

You are talking about online games here which are a subset of games. And I agree they exist in the moment since they rely on external servers and other players.

Most games aren't online games though and those would realistically last forever if it wasn't for companies shutting down activation servers or download servers. There's also a problem where old games get delisted. If you want to play an old game today you can just buy the disk of ebay. Now the only way to buy a game is through the digital store which won't be selling the game forever, with no way to officially transfer copies between players.

skotobaza4• 17 days ago

It would with 100 % certainty result in slower development, fewer games, and worse games

No, it won't. People used to develop games without requiring publisher's services. The issue of "it's hard to do nowadays" is self made. It's only hard because you made it this way. You can design a game that will be playable when its publisher or developer close their doors.

nlawalker• 17 days ago

I’ve always wondered what the major industry players’ theoretical price would be for offering transferable licenses, and how many people who say they want to be able to resell would pay it. It’s also interesting to me that we got all the way to 2026 and one of them officially going all-digital and we never saw price differentiation for physical copies.

h4kunamata• 17 days ago

I pardon to disagree, it is a physical vs digital problem, and it is our fault.

Companies started pushing digital content and we accepted it, Xbox GamePass has been a cancer (I am Xbox player) with all the games destroyed because of it.

Nobody can disagree that digital games is convenient, turn your PC/Console on and that is it, load the game, start playing something else, etc, without leaving your sofa.

We never thought about the consequences of that, look what happened with DVD, Bluray had luck coz its post-peak era happened by the time people started going back to physical disks over streaming services and the downfall of such services.

This is also related to how everything nowadays is digital, requires subscription which removes features like BMW heated seats, firmware update and what not.

Companies made us addicted to everything digital, that gives them full control, higher price for less, Amazon Prime without ADs requires a higher tier, Sygic Offline mobile app now requires higher tier to have access to features that were once part of the lower tier.

Gaming studios until recently were focused on live services over single player games, it is digital, content is behind paywall, etc and etc.

Digital DLCs over releasing a new game coz that would force physical release.

This is our fault and we might have gone past the point of no return!!

reichstein3• 16 days ago

The distinction is not physical vs (entirely) digital. If you buy games at GOG, you get entirely non-physical products, but you own and control those bits. You can download the game and keep playing it as long as you can provide it with a suitable runtime environment

The things you don't own are because they require an online service to work. No matter what you do, short of removing the dependency, aka "cracking", it will only work as long as the online service allows it to work.

Any feature of.a consoles with OTA software updates are in that category. Even if you own the hardware, you don't _control_ the software.

xiaodai• 17 days ago

we gotta accept that "owning" a digital asset will be a thing of the past. ppl need to update their mental model and evolve.

DonHopkins• 17 days ago

You think you have it tough now, huh? When I was a kid I had to rewind my Apple ][ games on casette tape before returning them to the library, or I'd get a hefty fine, and it was uphill both ways!

dartharva2• 17 days ago

I am surprised at all this shock the decision has garnered.

Is it shitty and consumer-hostile? Yes. Was it inevitable looking at the current trajectory of game distribution logistics? Also yes. Forced digitization should have in no way been surprising.

danpalmer• 17 days ago

It's also about competition.

Consoles are a significant investment, to only be able to buy content from one source creates monopolies. An equivalent would be if TVs were sold by Netflix or Disney, and only played content purchased from those entities. The second hand game disc market prevented those monopolies from taking prices to stratospheric highs.

I believe this is why digital distribution has seen little push-back on PC, because we have the convenience without the monopolies. Steam is huge, but Epic, Ubisoft, EA, gog.com, and others provide plenty of competition.

If consoles go digital only, from a single source, I think we'll see >$100 games quickly, we'll see subscriptions required to play be much more prevalent, and we'll see the death of consoles within a generation.

krige• 17 days ago

Consoles are a significant investment, to only be able to buy content from one source creates monopolies.

It used to be that consoles were generally the cheaper alternative to a gaming PC, which was subsidized by the price of games, which in turn stimulated the second hand market as people tried to recoup their investment in games, not the system itself.

But now that it's no longer really true, and system prices keep going up for little in return, it's really the worst of all worlds: expensive systems, expensive games, no way to resell, and two of the big three are acting increasingly worse (the jury's still out on what will Nintendo do next, but their ridiculed key-on-a-card system at least allows for reselling).

And this is on top of Sony outright lying about the reality as various leaks and scraps of that indicate that physical sold very well, better than digital.

sciencejerk8• 17 days ago

Never heard of Nintendo's patent for digitally signing and transferring game ownersbip. Thanks for sharing. Hope it gets implemented!

alliao• 17 days ago

usual shortsightedness from bean counters, while studio do lost revenue on second hand trades they gained another player! I can't believe they think that's not a worth while trade. Games are like books, the amount of time people spent on it far outweighs their opportunity cost in earnings, and you only have such a short window to capture that audience so do it however you can, allowing piracy is a legit business strategy, let alone trading second hand games!

pjmlp2• 17 days ago

Because PC is an open platform, people have figured this out and will continue to figure out bypasses in case things go south (which they haven't so far, thankfully

Actually not quite, as security measures keep increasing across macOS and Windows.

Before someone brings Linux into the picture, most folks don't know Tuxedo, System 76 and co exist, what matters is what is on display at Media Markt, Saturn, FNAC, Publico,....

360MustangScope• 17 days ago

Who cares what people know about? PC is still an open platform for you to boot alternative software.

Most people don’t know how to even “acquire” software without the DRM. It’s not really anyone’s job to spread news and tell people to go learn.

If they get interested and care that much to preserve what they have, they can google and learn. Many have learnt about Linux due to the recent PS5 jailbreak for instance.

Schlagbohrer6• 17 days ago

I agree with you because this incentive to learn has motivated so many young people in the past to learn how their computers work. The incentive of jailbreaking games or being able to get software for free should push people to learn these things and free themselves from walled gardens.

pjmlp2• 16 days ago

Still is the magic word here.

Departed74053• 9 days ago

If ownership is reserved for the elite (essentially what you are saying here) then it's not a right, it's just a glitch in the system.

tupacshakur• 17 days ago

deleted

TyrianPurple• 17 days ago

Once you buy something (physical or digital), ownership of it should rest solely with the purchaser and no one else.

hahahaa2• 17 days ago

How does that work with SaaS though? Or are you saying to ban SaaS.

duckmysick• 17 days ago

If the SaaS provider goes down or decides to discontinue a product, then yeah, ideally I should be able to install it somewhere and self-host it. It might not be easy but should be doable. If I want to modify it to fix a bug, I should do so - or take it to a third-party software shop/consultancy. The same way I can take my car or my fridge to a repair shop after the warranty runs out.

istoleabread• 16 days ago

The difference is you're buying games vs licensing software. There should be a clear difference between buying and licensing softwares/games and should be told upfront.

meh2frdf9• 17 days ago

Should according to you, as it serves you best that way. Not how the world works, and for sound economic reasons.

hahahaa2• 17 days ago

Tldr: Walled gardens suck. I can't lend you or sell you my iPhone app either. Physicsl media is cool because it offers both a unit of authenticity and ownership. Second hand games were fine as having the game when it came out was the value, like a movie vs. watching free a year later on TV.

underdeserver• 17 days ago

PC games are physical. I have my games right here on this thumb drive in my hand. If I sell it to you, and you plug it in, you can play my games.

noduerme2• 17 days ago

What's scary is how quickly the lack of ownership of things we used to own can become a "new normal".

Forget about explainin to the youngins. My girlfriend is 7 years younger than me and barely grasps the concept of why I'd have 20,000 mp3s on my phone that I ripped off CDs I owned. Why not just pay for a subscription? She doesn't understand the utility of anything being hers.

So I say, send me a song. And she sends a link.

It's hard to even explain to someone who doesn't know what it means to have anything that isn't rented.

pprotas2• 17 days ago

What do we "regular folk" really own in our lives? Our houses are rented or loaned (via mortgage), the car is paid off in installments, everything is a subscription or license. Many people I know purchase their clothes and electronics through buy-now-pay-later services and stream all media they watch. We lend our time and effort to our employer if we are salaried, as we don't get paid at the end of the day but at the end of the month.

How can someone who has never owned anything of value in their lives understand what it means to have something that isn't rented?

noduerme2• 16 days ago

That is just such a defeatist attitude. It reminds me of the classic Gen X complaint when I was growing up (we're the first generation to have a lower living standard and worse job prospects than our parents) but we didn't just give up. I'm regular folk. I waited tables and drove taxis for years and coded in my spare time. I started somewhere between 5 to 10 failed companies depending on what counts as a "company".

The one thing I learned when I was young was never buy anything on credit. I was up to about $20k of debt when I dropped out of college. I cut up my credit card and I paid it off and did not buy anything on credit again until my late 30s when I bought a house and the first car I ever owned that I didn't pay cash for (which I quickly paid off).

There were long periods in my life where I lived on staple foods like rice, worked 12-16 hours a day, and spent half my income on rent. I also spent 12 years backpacking when I got myself into a situation where I could write software remotely, and I realized that This is completely normal in the world. Living within your means is normal. Living hand to mouth and saving a little is normal. No one had it as good as the boomers in America, ever. No one will again. Being able to buy anything on credit is a wild abberation that cannot last. But I live like my grandparents. Frugally.

I've only ever owned 2 pairs of shoes, 4 pairs of jeans, 8 shirts and 8 pairs of underwear. I replace them when they wear out. I also own a house now, mostly paid off, and have about half a million dollars in the bank. Does that make me rich? I don't feel like it. Every day I go out of my way to earn and save instead of spending.

Make money and save it. Don't buy shit you don't need. Don't rent anything you don't have to, and don't fall for the credit trap. When you buy things, fix them instead of replacing them. Don't sell anything.

And don't look at what other people have and wish it was yours. I'm not religious, but there's a reason that covetousness and sloth are cousins in the list of ways you can ruin your own soul.

If you refuse to use credit, and you live well under whatever your income is, you will be able to afford things of value once you pay off the mistake of taking on debt in the first place.

pprotas2• 17 days ago

I'm sad that Gabe Newell will retire one day, and Steam's benevolent dictatorship will go down the same route Sony just did.

The convenience of digital game storefronts can cut both ways. For now Steam is on our side, but there is no guarantee it will stay that way.

nalekberov• 17 days ago

We don't want physical media, we want digital ownership rights! Don't confuse the argument!

I don't know who's "we" for the author, but I DO want physical media. I want to have the feeling when I reach to my video game disc, take it out and put it into my console. Besides DRM-free digital purchase doesn't guarantee that the thing you bought won't disappear - digital game store can you bankrupt, video game publisher might legally force its title to be removed, etc., the list goes on and on.

xlii2• 17 days ago

Geez, people have no idea how licenses work...

License is not an ownership - It's limited right to use something. Any action anyone does that isn't covered by license (in software) is called "piracy".

Games were never sold. Mediums were sold with attached licenses. And most of the licenses as early as 2000 contained something like:

    "This license is personal to you and may not be assigned, sublicensed, or transferred."

Selling game with such license was just as big of a "violation" as straight copying and giving it out (not having right to do something doesn't equal to crime though, even if some companies, coughMicrosoftcough, want you to think otherwise).

The only difference today is that licenses are enforced better. They can be held on license-server and new user can be denied usage after transfering was detected.

But it doesn't matter if it's downloaded, on disc, or embedded on a spoon.

Don't make people believe they ever owned a game. They didn't. You don't own games as well. Never owned them. You rented them.

The only way to get out of it with winning hand is to side with reputable vendor that didn't cheat people out of licenses. Reason why I side with Steam is because I have my licenses intact even though they have 25 years, I know big corps that just make licenses go poof and pretended in never happened.

jscd• 16 days ago

I mean yes, you never “owned” the IP, but this doesn’t change anything. You also never owned any movie on a DVD, song on a vinyl, or text in a book. Software is a strange beast in the world of copyright law, but, at least in my lay understanding, video game discs still have had protection under the first-sale doctrine, which means you were always allowed to resell, rent, give away, or destroy your copy. Ownership of the medium is still something.

aexer0e• 16 days ago

video game discs still have had protection under the first-sale doctrine

Not true unfortunately. See: Vernor v. Autodesk; which was first ruled in favor of first-sale doctrine but later reversed by a federal court. There haven't been cases for video game discs specifically but I don't see a reason who it wouldn't be the same as this software, since they also explicitly mention you're being sold a license, not ownership.

mb_thd• 16 days ago

I don't think people not understanding licenses are the problem. Licenses are.

It's just that for the longest time people didn't have to think about them, because if you had a license to consume a game/movie/album and also had a copy of it on physical media it was basically impossible for the media owner to take it away from you. But when everything is digital only, doing exactly that is easy as pie.

This feels like how sometimes laws from the 1800s are used to convict people of computer-related crimes. Maybe that was always possible, but it still seems unfair.

xlii2• 16 days ago

I'll emphasize that using something without a legal base isn't a crime.

It isn't even about legality (because laws usually don't regulate how one can interact with entity they have no legal ties to) but only about litigation risk.

There are no legal or moral obligations requiring valid license. Only interested organizations are brainwashing people into thinking otherwise.

But I don't think licenses are the problem. It's quite obvious. You have 100 works of art (music, graphics, code and text). You want to make money. If you sell it - you lose all the rights. You can give it out but then there's no profit.

The only way to not transfer ownership and give away for free is exact middle ground called the license.

ggirelli• 16 days ago

For most games sold on physical media I was under the strong impression that selling/trading the physical media would automatically transfer the license, as the licensee was the owner of the physical media.

Basically one would by a CD-ROM containing a licensed copy of a game, and would then be the owner of the CD-ROM but only a licensee for the game. Selling/trading the CD-ROM would transfer the licensee status to the new CD-ROM owner.

sim04ful• 17 days ago

Actual digital ownership is what i hoped from NFTs.

cabirum• 16 days ago

physical vs digital is a spectrum:

- a physical disc, playable as-is

- physical, with major flaws without online updates

- physical, was playable on release, now requires updates

- physical, unplayable without updates

- physical, contains only a launcher to download full game

- physical box without disc, contains download code only

- digital

__natty__• 16 days ago

Most of us know what is it about. The problem is Sony and other companies have plenty of money for lobbying governments. What options do we have? I know it’s mostly technical forum but is there any lawyer or government representative who can help?

dmvjs• 16 days ago

if a game has a download update bigger than 1GB then the physical copy is useless

1970-01-01• 16 days ago

Tale as old as time. See also: Richard Stallman. Yes, we're back to arguing the fundamentals. What exactly does "owning" the hardware mean? What exactly does "owning" software that runs on that hardware mean? Only when we hit the limits of those terms will we know what we can and cannot do to it.

SideQuark• 16 days ago

Rent vs own is about price. If you want to own something, digital, physical, information, goods, then a vendor will charge more, sometimes a lot more, to sell you an infinite ownership vs you get limited rights.

Most everything I buy needs to fight for my money. Of course some vendor specific things, such as a specific movie, are not replaceable, but since very few things, if any, are so important to me that I won't spend elsewhere if a good is too much.

With that competition for $, vendors generally are competitive, and don't tend to have extremely high profit margins.

I prefer the limited rights, since I can try far more things that way, with finite budget. And I don't get stuck with higher prices on things I ended up not wanting/using after I got it. I can simply cancel.

I think the general disconnect is people too often assume they handed out money so should get infinite rights, while ignoring the nuances of economics/pricing.

alexruf• 16 days ago

I completely agree. This isn't about physical discs vs. digital stores. It's about ownership. When I, as a customer, pay a lot of money for something and get nothing more than a temporary right of use, then something is going seriously wrong here. And no, I don't think you can compare it to movie streaming. With streaming, I pay a monthly fee for access to the platform. I don't pay for every single movie I watch. That's a completely different deal. If Sony offered a flat-rate gaming subscription for a monthly fee (and no, PlayStation Plus isn't that), then I'd be totally fine with losing access to the games included there after canceling the sub. But if I, as a customer, am expected to shell out 70-80 bucks for a single game, I want to actually own that game - physical or digital copy regardless!

I've built up a pretty large collection of physical games over the years on two shelves behind me. And every now and then, I really enjoy playing some of those older titles. It took me almost half a year just to get a disc drive for my PS5 Pro. Half a year where I couldn't play my favorite games anymore and had a useless new console just sitting there next to me. I'm actually a bit worried about the next console generation - is it going to make my entire game collection unplayable and useless?

Mr_Minderbinder• 16 days ago

If anything, video games were late compared to something like the music industry, where not owning your music has been the status quo for a while now!

My perception is that the music industry is better than other parts of the entertainment industry in this regard. I imagine what the author is thinking of is streaming, which I treat as a sort of on-demand radio. There is an understanding that it is ephemeral. A customer concerned with “owning” their music would not be confused by this and seek another avenue, which in the case of the music industry is both wider, richer and more free than those of adjacent industries.

The common dedicated formats used for distribution: the compact disc and vinyl record, do not have copy protection, which is a better situation than what movies and video games are in. Online music stores invariably deliver you music as a simple computer file, with no copy protection or platform or connectivity requirements. This is the rule rather than the exception, which is not the case when making movie or video game purchases on these types of stores.

Departed74053• 9 days ago

I don't get this article. Physical medium are by design control-free. You will be forever be to watch any movie you buy in a DVD or Blu-Ray format.

That's not the case in digital format. Talking about pipe dreams about companies/government forcing companies to somehow allow digital key or more precisely accounts associated with keys to be maintained forever (or at least for the next 100 years) is a pipe dream. Physicam games are a way to ensure you still own your games.[1]

[1] A lot of caveats to what I said, mainly due to the fact that gaming consoles are now Internet-connected so the console-maker could technically revoke access to any game at any time if you connect it to the internet. Still, it would be a huge huge breach of trust, and as such very unlikely.

It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership

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