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.
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?
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.
> being against dumb regulation that only ads unnecessary bureaucracy or stops/limits progress
Does such strawman regulation even exist? Some regulation is intentionally designed to limit “progress”, where “progress” happens to have negative externalities.
It’s kind of a self-legitimizing opinion. Of course anyone would be against unnecessary regulations. I think the real world is not arguing about whether a regulation is necessary, but rather if the economic burden it creates is worth the positive impact it has on society, which is highly contentious, highly subjective debate.
It's definitely a bad argument worthy of some sort of label. It seems to go "you believe this thing, which I won't engage with at all, but I'll assume that because of the way you said it, you also believe all this other stuff that I disagree with".
>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.
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.
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.
No matter what they wrote in the document, the fact was always that you had the game on a disc and nothing would stop you playing it in violation of the words in the document.
The only reason for that is because the physical disc has the right of first sale attached by being physical item, and there’s no practical/acceptable mechanism to prevent transfer of the license to someone else.
Traditionally the whole industry has been fine with it as long as direct media copying was too hard for the layperson, especially since lending games around was like word of mouth advertising.
Digital platforms change a whole bunch of these things.
>nothing would stop you playing it in violation of the words in the document.
Thats not really the case. Windows Defender and other anti viruses will quarantine piracy tools (like no cd cracks, and how many cd/dvd readers are in modern computers) these days, not far from there to see them being paid to police license changes. Games are often more playable in their pirated versions. Like if you own the Fallout 3/Fallout New Vegas discs that require games for windows live you are screwed, but the digital steam versions remove that requirement.
Then you have games like Metal Fatigue, released for Windows 98, suffering memory corruption issues since Windows XP. Microsofts Compatibility Toolkit offers a fix for some of the memory issues making the game vastly more playable, but then of course, Microsoft has set an EOL date for the toolkit, the last version of it was published for Windows 10, and theres an expectation that at some point Windows 11 will not permit it to be installed any longer.
Whether you buy a disc or pay for a download, you are still at the mercy of the entire ecosystem. If you completely freeze your ecosystem and never install anything you might get by. But that presents other risks.
I just bought Kinnectimals for my toddler, and it came with a warning that it needed connectivity to some random xbox server to update, straight out of the box. Thankfully, my 360 was still able to connect to it. But network protocols might change, the OS might get a new version that bricks the connectivity (potentially for good reason, there could be a vuln) or hundreds of other things. Theres no safety or security provided to me by owning the disc.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This is just pedantry, and incorrect pedantry at that. BUY does not always mean you gain ownership. You can BUY a license or a haircut and you don't own anything.
Are consumers confused in practice by what happens when they click "Buy" on the playstation store? Does anyone really thing Buy here means they will be able to download the game onto their computer and play it there?
Fine, pass a regulation that makes online stores change the word to license or whatever. Will that relieve your sense of persecution? Or would just you find another way to cast game publishers as the conniving evil empire (market control, collusion to reduce consumer options, etc.) because they aren't giving you what you want?
Most of the World understands the difference between buying a product and buying a service.
Games (and other digital media), are sold as products, not services, mostly.
TFA is arguing this should persist and not be replaced as games as (subscription/licensed rental), services. It argues the move to digital is being used by businesses to switch to a services model under the hood, and that this should be resisted and it should remain a product model.
> Are consumers confused in practice by what happens when they click "Buy" on the playstation store?
Demonstrably, provably: yes.
> Fine, pass a regulation that makes online stores change the word to license or whatever.
Why not make the store change what they sell from being a license and making it a product as the consumer expected?
Then they can stop pretending and actually sell it as a service. What they're doing now is doing one thing (selling it as a product), while getting the benefits of the other (selling it as a service).
That's not how I read your suggestions. Your suggestion to just rename the action, which isn't helpful. You're still buying a licence, one that is nominally permanent, meaning it's a product, on the same level as a CD or whatever.
Games are overwhelmingly not sold as services these days (MMOs being the exception, + a few others). The sale of a game as a product is built into the model of 'give money, get permanent access to game'. If that access is not permanent, then you need to set a time limit there. Subscriptions usually do it per month, but you can do whatever you want, except leave the field blank.
You can pay for services and you may use the term “buy”, but it is clear you’re receiving a service, and a service in its nature is temporary.
Buy a night in a hotel, dinner in a restaurant, haircut, shoe shine. These are all services.
Buying of digital services like games, films, and music is an evolution of buying dvds, cds or records. There is an expectation that you now own something. I can dig out my dad’s old records and play them and pass them onto my children.
If media companies want to sell a license that has an expiry date, that’s fine, but it has to be explicitly communicated. Consumers have to be well informed about what they’re purchasing.
The discussion is not just about online multiplayer games though, it’s about games in general. There is no good reason why buying a singleplayer offline game need be a “service”.
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.
While the majority of flats are leasehold, by far the vast majority of property in England is freehold. Only a fifth is leasehold.
While technically a leasehold has a fixed term and at the end of the lease (usually starts at 99 years) the land owner technically owns the property, in reality this scares most people so usually when someone sells the property (usually while there's still at least 80 years left on the lease) you try to extend the lease again back to 90 years. So while it is possible for the lease to run out and people lose their property, it's usually something you'd be expecting when you took over the lease (and so you'd pay a correspondingly lower price for the property). While the lease is active, there's usually an annual fee from between 100 and 10000 pounds. Obviously, the higher this is, the lower the sale price of the property is likely to be.
Personally, I wouldn't touch leasehold with a bargepole, and unless you want to live in the centre of a city there's usually plenty of freehold property available so you don't need to go down the leasehold route.
Interesting. Do the longer ones have some provision for increasing in line with inflation? AFAIK the 99 year leases are usually for a fixed amount every year, which obviously shrinks in real terms over time, but given that you'd want to renew it every 10 years or so anyway, would probably be renegotiated to a fair market rate at that time.
Personally i only purchase DRM free games, but it doesn't still change that fact that major digital storefronts use misleading terms. Maybe physical disks would maintain popularity if customers knew they'd be renting the product for unknown period time instead of owning it.
It's easy to forget that average joe doesn't understand the consequences when we're on our own bubbles.
Edit: The media outrage when Sony removed 550 movies, indicates the customers don't still understand the terms of the sale. It wouldnt make any noises if customers knew they were renting it.
As yes, the poor, ignorant average joe, who doesn't realize the game they buy on the PLAYSTATION store needs PLAYSTATION to work in order to play it. If only enough bloggers wrote enough articles to enlighten them, then they would join the mob and demand forever access to the games they play for 3 weeks then never play again.
I can still play my brother's old PlayStation games on his OG PlayStation. They cannot be revoked arbitrarily, nor their music dropped or swapped out. This a feature, and we'd feel quite cheated if that happened. In fact we still go back to old games from time to time.
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.
Rent and Subscribe would NOT be clear because they imply ongoing payment. Consumers care mostly about if they are paying money once or on an ongoing basis, not abstract things like DRM.
It is now in California, as they passed more "useless" regulation requiring digital "sales" to use different terminology than "buy", yet what people are asking for is clearly not what they want because as predicted this terminology enforcement doesn't change a thing.
Clearly, more thoughtless regulation will solve the problem this time.
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.
Consumer protection is a type of regulation, but if you can brand a rule as "Consumer protection" it will poll better than "regulation" because that's how marketing works.
Maybe, but regularly reframing regulations that people like (consumer protections, OSHA, lemon laws, etc.) as regulations will hopefully remind/reinforce that the whole "pro/anti regulations" framing is a childish mindset.
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"
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.
I remember saying the exact same thing here on HN like two weeks ago, which someone then promptly corrected me saying that Steam/Valve actually "explain" what their "Buy" means right before payment, and I think they were right, there is some greyed out text somewhere explaining you don't actually "Purchase a copy of the game" but you license it via Valve/Steam somehow, can't remember the details atm, later at the checkout process though.
It's a completely different license. A normal software license gives you the right to use version X of the software on Y computers/seats/users/... You have the original installer on the disc, you can download installers for patch releases online and save them for later, you have the activation key. At any point, you can uninstall the software and give or sell the installer and key to someone else.
What games and some software do these days is much worrse. You have a license to use their "software installation service" and their "let me run the game" service until they decide to turn them off. At any point, at their discretion, they can remove your ability to install a new copy or even run it all together.
right, but back in the 90s, the onus of maintaining a working copy of any software was on you. Now, Sony simply reaches into you home and can deny you access to software/movies you "bought".
Well, yes. Always online is a problem, but it doesn't change what one buys.
A thing that is easy to copy without destroying the original. So they invented licenses to contain the copying part.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
It’s steam, not stream. Normally, I’d assume it’s a simple typo, but I got worried when you wrote it twice. Fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me… you can't get fooled again.
Haha. I actually back up my steam collection via torrents of GoG releases.
Now, I can to some extent automate the rip-out of steam integration, there are solutions. And thus not rely on torrents. But why would I if it's the same thing in the end, and torrents are that much simpler.
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.
Is that online activation Steam or is it a third party thing? Steam allows selling games that have external DRM like that. I think they, themselves, don't do it.
Steamworks, the integration library for games to interact with Steam features, has an optional DRM component. It's not a particularly impressive one, so it's more about stopping people copy/pasting their steamapps folder than stopping dedicated pirates, hence why so many publishers use alternative solutions.
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
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.
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.
It's always listed in the same spot on all the store page for games. Now why they haven't allowed us to filter games by DRM (like they have f2p) is another question. I'd love if they allowed this and published stats because I like most people assume I'm in the majority and would love to see that you're cutting off access to X% of your market if you include rootkits/aggressive drm.
I think it's a fair comparison. Steam can change their behavior to become much more user hostile at any point, and hold our triple digit steam libraries hostage.
Its not like we can sell or even lend the games from Steam that we have, not without breaking the licence terms and hacking around the DRM. Its precisely the same as what Sony is intending to enforce.
Can you sell or lend gog games, though? You can transfer the files obviously but if a steam game comes with no drm (which is pretty common for indies) you can do the same thing. GOG nicely requires everyone on their platform to do this but ultimately the devs have to want to not put in drm too.
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.
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.
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.
I think the effect of Twitch/YouTube can't be ignored. PC games are easier content source for streamers, and PC remains better platform for viewers for watching streams. Consoles are still quite focused on single task content consumption.
For the kinds of games where DRM free matters, where they don't have a prominent online/multiplayer side or the equivalent of playing the game 'from the disc', is the console subscription really an issue? I don't have a console myself, but from when I've looked into it there's a bunch of mainly free to play games where that subscription isn't needed as both the publisher and Sony/MS get their money from purchases.
1. An Xbox Live/Playstation Plus is required for any online multiplayer functionality.
2. DRM Free still matters with multiplayer games. Minecraft is a perfect example, where you can run your own client/server and play with people, and there really doesn't need to be any other middle man involved.
3. With how good home internet is now, it's not a big deal to host game servers from your home on an old computer. Running big central servers really only matters if you care about matchmaking or games with a lot of simultaneous players.
"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."
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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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
This is why so many machines now have accounts and global saved progress. It provides actual value for the player, to be able to pick up their saved progress (e.g. on a rhythm game with thousands of songs on it), but it also means the arcade is beholden to the game manufacturer for an expected feature, and pays for that on an ongoing basis.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, but first sale doctrine on physical goods means that I can take my Playstation game, which only works on Playstations, and sell it to.a friend after I'm done playing it, or pick up a copy 5-10 years after the game was originally published for cheap from a second hand store like Goodwill. People do understand that, and are understandably pissed off that those same rights don't transfer to the digital realm. If I paid $60 for a copy of GTA IV when it was new but now I can buy a copy for $5 from the used bin, why shouldn't that be true for GTA VI in 15 years after it comes out?
I am understandably pissed that Apple no longer makes small 5-inch iphones because I like them. But other consumers like the bigger phones, so Apple discontinued the mini line.
Is Apple doing me an injustice by not selling me the good that I want?
Is this a question of rights or consumer preferences?
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.
Well the goal is to stop killing games, to make it possible for people to run their own games indefinitely. That's a lot harder than baseline consumer protections though.
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"
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)
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.
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.
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?
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.
> being against dumb regulation that only ads unnecessary bureaucracy or stops/limits progress
Does such strawman regulation even exist? Some regulation is intentionally designed to limit “progress”, where “progress” happens to have negative externalities.
It’s kind of a self-legitimizing opinion. Of course anyone would be against unnecessary regulations. I think the real world is not arguing about whether a regulation is necessary, but rather if the economic burden it creates is worth the positive impact it has on society, which is highly contentious, highly subjective debate.
Dumb regulation being subjective
Subjective being subjective
The word subjective is not itself subjective. People understand the definition of the word subjective.
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.
Mean spirited sure, ad hominem, no. It's satirizing the argument, not personal traits unrelated to the argument
It's definitely a bad argument worthy of some sort of label. It seems to go "you believe this thing, which I won't engage with at all, but I'll assume that because of the way you said it, you also believe all this other stuff that I disagree with".
I stand corrected.
>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.
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.
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.
No matter what they wrote in the document, the fact was always that you had the game on a disc and nothing would stop you playing it in violation of the words in the document.
> and nothing would stop you playing it
Not true for PS5 games. Sony can push a firmware update to disable games, even if you own the disc.
Is there any evidence of this?
They can delist a game from the PS store, but I doubt they would make a game unplayable if it's already installed or if you own it physically.
They said “can”, not “has”. Given that it’s a closed platform that Sony has complete control over, they certainly can do it.
You can doubt that they will, but that’s just hope rather than a legal or technical guarantee.
Not true for Blu-Ray movies, either. Just saying that's how it used to be.
The only reason for that is because the physical disc has the right of first sale attached by being physical item, and there’s no practical/acceptable mechanism to prevent transfer of the license to someone else.
Traditionally the whole industry has been fine with it as long as direct media copying was too hard for the layperson, especially since lending games around was like word of mouth advertising.
Digital platforms change a whole bunch of these things.
>nothing would stop you playing it in violation of the words in the document.
Thats not really the case. Windows Defender and other anti viruses will quarantine piracy tools (like no cd cracks, and how many cd/dvd readers are in modern computers) these days, not far from there to see them being paid to police license changes. Games are often more playable in their pirated versions. Like if you own the Fallout 3/Fallout New Vegas discs that require games for windows live you are screwed, but the digital steam versions remove that requirement.
Then you have games like Metal Fatigue, released for Windows 98, suffering memory corruption issues since Windows XP. Microsofts Compatibility Toolkit offers a fix for some of the memory issues making the game vastly more playable, but then of course, Microsoft has set an EOL date for the toolkit, the last version of it was published for Windows 10, and theres an expectation that at some point Windows 11 will not permit it to be installed any longer.
Whether you buy a disc or pay for a download, you are still at the mercy of the entire ecosystem. If you completely freeze your ecosystem and never install anything you might get by. But that presents other risks.
I just bought Kinnectimals for my toddler, and it came with a warning that it needed connectivity to some random xbox server to update, straight out of the box. Thankfully, my 360 was still able to connect to it. But network protocols might change, the OS might get a new version that bricks the connectivity (potentially for good reason, there could be a vuln) or hundreds of other things. Theres no safety or security provided to me by owning the disc.
The same is true of digital downloads, insofar as both the disc and the digital download don't have DRM.
In other words, you completely missed the point that this is about DRM and not physical vs digital.
enforcement of legality is on the victim in the grift economy.
> 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.
This is absolutely what the SKG movement would have fast tracked - combined with all the Hollywood accounting that comes with it.
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.
Copyright protection is regulation. Limiting it ins't increasing regulation; it's decreasing regulation.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
This is just pedantry, and incorrect pedantry at that. BUY does not always mean you gain ownership. You can BUY a license or a haircut and you don't own anything.
Are consumers confused in practice by what happens when they click "Buy" on the playstation store? Does anyone really thing Buy here means they will be able to download the game onto their computer and play it there?
Fine, pass a regulation that makes online stores change the word to license or whatever. Will that relieve your sense of persecution? Or would just you find another way to cast game publishers as the conniving evil empire (market control, collusion to reduce consumer options, etc.) because they aren't giving you what you want?
Most of the World understands the difference between buying a product and buying a service.
Games (and other digital media), are sold as products, not services, mostly.
TFA is arguing this should persist and not be replaced as games as (subscription/licensed rental), services. It argues the move to digital is being used by businesses to switch to a services model under the hood, and that this should be resisted and it should remain a product model.
> Are consumers confused in practice by what happens when they click "Buy" on the playstation store?
Demonstrably, provably: yes.
> Fine, pass a regulation that makes online stores change the word to license or whatever.
Why not make the store change what they sell from being a license and making it a product as the consumer expected?
An online server is a service. People don't lose access to offline games, generally speaking.
> Why not make the store change what they sell from being a license and making it a product as the consumer expected?
Because we have a free market not a command economy? Publishers can sell whatever they want
Then they can stop pretending and actually sell it as a service. What they're doing now is doing one thing (selling it as a product), while getting the benefits of the other (selling it as a service).
That is what I suggested. The other poster said what you are suggesting shouldn't be allowed, not me.
That's not how I read your suggestions. Your suggestion to just rename the action, which isn't helpful. You're still buying a licence, one that is nominally permanent, meaning it's a product, on the same level as a CD or whatever.
Games are overwhelmingly not sold as services these days (MMOs being the exception, + a few others). The sale of a game as a product is built into the model of 'give money, get permanent access to game'. If that access is not permanent, then you need to set a time limit there. Subscriptions usually do it per month, but you can do whatever you want, except leave the field blank.
> Publishers can sell whatever they want.
Indeed. They just can't commit fraud or false advertising.
Using the word "Buy" to mean buy a license, then having an agreement where the details of the license are explained isn't fraud lol
That agreement can be filled with unfair terms, and often is. I'd call that fraud.
You can pay for services and you may use the term “buy”, but it is clear you’re receiving a service, and a service in its nature is temporary.
Buy a night in a hotel, dinner in a restaurant, haircut, shoe shine. These are all services.
Buying of digital services like games, films, and music is an evolution of buying dvds, cds or records. There is an expectation that you now own something. I can dig out my dad’s old records and play them and pass them onto my children.
If media companies want to sell a license that has an expiry date, that’s fine, but it has to be explicitly communicated. Consumers have to be well informed about what they’re purchasing.
Access to an online server is clearly a service, hence the word "server"
The discussion is not just about online multiplayer games though, it’s about games in general. There is no good reason why buying a singleplayer offline game need be a “service”.
These days, they mostly don't. California passed a law that required clarity (good), and now most things accurately say "license" instead of "buy."
(Not universally, but in many cases.)
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.
>i claimed i sell a house for 500K but the in terms of sale redefine sale as rent the house for 500K
Ironically this is almost how it works in England: https://homemove.com/content/what-is-leasehold-property-comp...
"almost" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here...
While the majority of flats are leasehold, by far the vast majority of property in England is freehold. Only a fifth is leasehold.
While technically a leasehold has a fixed term and at the end of the lease (usually starts at 99 years) the land owner technically owns the property, in reality this scares most people so usually when someone sells the property (usually while there's still at least 80 years left on the lease) you try to extend the lease again back to 90 years. So while it is possible for the lease to run out and people lose their property, it's usually something you'd be expecting when you took over the lease (and so you'd pay a correspondingly lower price for the property). While the lease is active, there's usually an annual fee from between 100 and 10000 pounds. Obviously, the higher this is, the lower the sale price of the property is likely to be.
Personally, I wouldn't touch leasehold with a bargepole, and unless you want to live in the centre of a city there's usually plenty of freehold property available so you don't need to go down the leasehold route.
Lots of leaseholds now start at 999 years.
It’s a weird system. The previous and current governments have been looking to modernise it.
Interesting. Do the longer ones have some provision for increasing in line with inflation? AFAIK the 99 year leases are usually for a fixed amount every year, which obviously shrinks in real terms over time, but given that you'd want to renew it every 10 years or so anyway, would probably be renegotiated to a fair market rate at that time.
players have options. they are welcome to wait for releases on GOG.
Personally i only purchase DRM free games, but it doesn't still change that fact that major digital storefronts use misleading terms. Maybe physical disks would maintain popularity if customers knew they'd be renting the product for unknown period time instead of owning it.
It's easy to forget that average joe doesn't understand the consequences when we're on our own bubbles.
Edit: The media outrage when Sony removed 550 movies, indicates the customers don't still understand the terms of the sale. It wouldnt make any noises if customers knew they were renting it.
As yes, the poor, ignorant average joe, who doesn't realize the game they buy on the PLAYSTATION store needs PLAYSTATION to work in order to play it. If only enough bloggers wrote enough articles to enlighten them, then they would join the mob and demand forever access to the games they play for 3 weeks then never play again.
Why carry water for billion dollar companies?
I can still play my brother's old PlayStation games on his OG PlayStation. They cannot be revoked arbitrarily, nor their music dropped or swapped out. This a feature, and we'd feel quite cheated if that happened. In fact we still go back to old games from time to time.
Even if I only read a book once after buying it, it shouldn't turn into a rock just because I never intend to read it again.
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.
Rent and Subscribe would NOT be clear because they imply ongoing payment. Consumers care mostly about if they are paying money once or on an ongoing basis, not abstract things like DRM.
It is now in California, as they passed more "useless" regulation requiring digital "sales" to use different terminology than "buy", yet what people are asking for is clearly not what they want because as predicted this terminology enforcement doesn't change a thing.
Clearly, more thoughtless regulation will solve the problem this time.
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.
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.
Consumer protection is a type of regulation, but if you can brand a rule as "Consumer protection" it will poll better than "regulation" because that's how marketing works.
Maybe, but regularly reframing regulations that people like (consumer protections, OSHA, lemon laws, etc.) as regulations will hopefully remind/reinforce that the whole "pro/anti regulations" framing is a childish mindset.
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"
Which online stores? I don't see that in Steam.
That's good, since you are renting them.
Good. At least they're honest about what you're paying for.
Most importantly you should be able to use it even if you break all ties with the vendor.
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.
That is literally what most online digital goods already do, like steam.
Sure, but UI needs to reflect that too. I just opened Steam to verify - it definitely says 'Buy {game_name} - Add to Cart'
I remember saying the exact same thing here on HN like two weeks ago, which someone then promptly corrected me saying that Steam/Valve actually "explain" what their "Buy" means right before payment, and I think they were right, there is some greyed out text somewhere explaining you don't actually "Purchase a copy of the game" but you license it via Valve/Steam somehow, can't remember the details atm, later at the checkout process though.
That is literally in any software since like 90s. You buy license.
It's a completely different license. A normal software license gives you the right to use version X of the software on Y computers/seats/users/... You have the original installer on the disc, you can download installers for patch releases online and save them for later, you have the activation key. At any point, you can uninstall the software and give or sell the installer and key to someone else.
What games and some software do these days is much worrse. You have a license to use their "software installation service" and their "let me run the game" service until they decide to turn them off. At any point, at their discretion, they can remove your ability to install a new copy or even run it all together.
Very different and quite recent.
right, but back in the 90s, the onus of maintaining a working copy of any software was on you. Now, Sony simply reaches into you home and can deny you access to software/movies you "bought".
These are not the same situation.
Well, yes. Always online is a problem, but it doesn't change what one buys. A thing that is easy to copy without destroying the original. So they invented licenses to contain the copying part.
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.
At least that would be honest....
It should just say "Rent" instead of "Buy"
Has self regulation ever worked in the tech world when it comes to consumer/user rights.
This looks like a job for NFTs
Then it shouldn't be allowed to call it "buy" they should be forced to call it "rent".
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
When we were in college, one of my friends joked that their stream library was their largest financial asset.
When stream trading was more of a thing, and we had a ramen diet, it was probably true
It’s steam, not stream. Normally, I’d assume it’s a simple typo, but I got worried when you wrote it twice. Fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me… you can't get fooled again.
Haha. I actually back up my steam collection via torrents of GoG releases.
Now, I can to some extent automate the rip-out of steam integration, there are solutions. And thus not rely on torrents. But why would I if it's the same thing in the end, and torrents are that much simpler.
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.
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.
Some of them do, the Total War games I play the most require weekly online activation.
But that's just using what you payed for, it only very slightly overlaps with what actually owning something entails.
Is that online activation Steam or is it a third party thing? Steam allows selling games that have external DRM like that. I think they, themselves, don't do it.
That doesn't invalidate your other point.
Steamworks, the integration library for games to interact with Steam features, has an optional DRM component. It's not a particularly impressive one, so it's more about stopping people copy/pasting their steamapps folder than stopping dedicated pirates, hence why so many publishers use alternative solutions.
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
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?
What evidence is there to be optimistic about?
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.
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.
Until Steam starts telling me before I buy which games have their DRM and which doesn't, they belong in the same category as Sony and Microsoft.
It's always listed in the same spot on all the store page for games. Now why they haven't allowed us to filter games by DRM (like they have f2p) is another question. I'd love if they allowed this and published stats because I like most people assume I'm in the majority and would love to see that you're cutting off access to X% of your market if you include rootkits/aggressive drm.
I think it's a fair comparison. Steam can change their behavior to become much more user hostile at any point, and hold our triple digit steam libraries hostage.
Its not like we can sell or even lend the games from Steam that we have, not without breaking the licence terms and hacking around the DRM. Its precisely the same as what Sony is intending to enforce.
Can you sell or lend gog games, though? You can transfer the files obviously but if a steam game comes with no drm (which is pretty common for indies) you can do the same thing. GOG nicely requires everyone on their platform to do this but ultimately the devs have to want to not put in drm too.
Also the steam DRM on a lot of single player games can be removed very easily. https://github.com/atom0s/Steamless
and is a recommended step for engine modding games like skyrim.
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.
I'm pessimistic about physical media yes. That's a legacy technology at this point.
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.
Is there really a rise in PC gaming going on? Isn't that dependent on people having PCs and hardware?
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.
I think the effect of Twitch/YouTube can't be ignored. PC games are easier content source for streamers, and PC remains better platform for viewers for watching streams. Consoles are still quite focused on single task content consumption.
For the kinds of games where DRM free matters, where they don't have a prominent online/multiplayer side or the equivalent of playing the game 'from the disc', is the console subscription really an issue? I don't have a console myself, but from when I've looked into it there's a bunch of mainly free to play games where that subscription isn't needed as both the publisher and Sony/MS get their money from purchases.
1. An Xbox Live/Playstation Plus is required for any online multiplayer functionality.
2. DRM Free still matters with multiplayer games. Minecraft is a perfect example, where you can run your own client/server and play with people, and there really doesn't need to be any other middle man involved.
3. With how good home internet is now, it's not a big deal to host game servers from your home on an old computer. Running big central servers really only matters if you care about matchmaking or games with a lot of simultaneous players.
> 1. An Xbox Live/Playstation Plus is required for any online multiplayer functionality.
This is false. Free-to-Play titles like Fortnite don't require a subscription to play online.
Hmm I see, that's interesting. Seems like the games industry it self is in a pretty bad state despite that
If you include mobile gaming, things look a lot better.
"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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
Ownership as in resale-able.
Eventually someone important enough will force digital resales to become reality, changing everything to require KYC.
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.
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.
Can you download and resell a digital copy of a game you purchase?
If not, this doesn't seem to fix all of the issues it just feels like finger pointing at "evil copyright laws".
Yeah maybe we can change those to, but what about making it so if you pay for something you can do whatever you like with it.
Say if I buy a copy of a movie from Amazon I should be able to sell it to my friend who doesn't have an amazon account..
KYC? The only context I know it from is 'Know your customer' in banking.
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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
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
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.
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.
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.
Most new games are worse than old games anyway
I‘m wondering if there’s a better term to use than „digital games“. Those physical discs are just as digital as anything else.
>Everyone wants to be Netflix
This is the most perfect sentence about this situation
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
or, of getting rid of "intellectual property" legally so information is just shared more freely and widely
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.
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.
> 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.
A per-play revenue share is not uncommon in some markets, especially for games with frequent updates or more complicated network features.
This is why so many machines now have accounts and global saved progress. It provides actual value for the player, to be able to pick up their saved progress (e.g. on a rhythm game with thousands of songs on it), but it also means the arcade is beholden to the game manufacturer for an expected feature, and pays for that on an ongoing basis.
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.
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.
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.
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.
imo GameStop ruined it for everyone. Nearly all their profits are from reselling games.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
Related:
Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745456
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.
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.
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?
There is no next xbox. They are killing the brand while they wait for ARM to get better
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.
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?
This is the exact kind of cause that triggers the social media algorithms. Part nostalgia, part underdog battle, and no problematic elements.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, but first sale doctrine on physical goods means that I can take my Playstation game, which only works on Playstations, and sell it to.a friend after I'm done playing it, or pick up a copy 5-10 years after the game was originally published for cheap from a second hand store like Goodwill. People do understand that, and are understandably pissed off that those same rights don't transfer to the digital realm. If I paid $60 for a copy of GTA IV when it was new but now I can buy a copy for $5 from the used bin, why shouldn't that be true for GTA VI in 15 years after it comes out?
I am understandably pissed that Apple no longer makes small 5-inch iphones because I like them. But other consumers like the bigger phones, so Apple discontinued the mini line.
Is Apple doing me an injustice by not selling me the good that I want?
Is this a question of rights or consumer preferences?
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.
Well the goal is to stop killing games, to make it possible for people to run their own games indefinitely. That's a lot harder than baseline consumer protections though.
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"
There is no perfect word. Ticket and pass imply a fixed duration lease, not an indefinite one. Membership implies continual payments.
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)
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.
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.
Video games are far more alike to other media like books, not live sports.
Video games ar software, this has only digital form.
And AFAIR all software is sold as a license since way back.
For single-player games, those are definitely media. For multiplayer games, that feels a lot closer to a sport.