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Comment by varenc | Hacker News Reader

Found this quote from the game industry interesting and depressing:

> Consumers receive a license to access and use a game, not an unrestricted ownership interest in the underlying work

Could the game industry just side step this legislation by moving games entirely to a subscription model, with no upfront purchase? When they stop offering the subscription, you lose access to the game. Similar to how various online SaaS businesses work.

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> Could the game industry just side step this legislation by moving games entirely to a subscription model, with no upfront purchase? When they stop offering the subscription, you lose access to the game. Similar to how various online SaaS businesses work.

Yes. With a subscription there is already an expectation that you will lose access when you stop paying. But I doubt they'd get much buy-in from gamers for that on most games.

Yes. However gamers are not businesses who operate on cost minimization (especially employee cost minimization) that made SaaS possible. The existing purely subscription games do not have the same amount of customers/players as the ones do not admit that.

So openly admitting that your game is a subscription will be quite bad marketing for your company.

That's a lie. Consumers buy a copy of the product. There's a bunch of legal fundamentals that make it so. Contracts that give one side a complete control of someone else are rarely (if ever) legal. If it were, then people could be pressured to give away their fundamental rights, one of which is the right to property.

They can try but there is a reason why they are selling what is effectively already a subscription for an unspecified length as a purchase - because the market mostly does not want subscriptions.

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