You've illustrated exactly why Sony is getting rid of physical media.
Money.
Money.
I can see this happening with games more after the death of physical media. Create artificial scarcity with limited time windows and charge top dollar for old games because there will be literally no way to get them besides on their digital store terms.
Either that or eventually we'll have to get some antitrust stuff happening to open these things up, though Epic's App Store lawsuit does not give me much hope in that direction.
This is already under threat due to the Star Wars AI videos being released on Youtube, seemingly without constraint as of yet.
The videos are not Hollywood quality [0], however they circumvent rules Disney can't easily break like using the likeness of any actor at any age in any circumstance.
These fan made videos get lots of views. Even if they were all removed from YouTube, this will be a difficult thing to stop.
I believe a generally accepted "good" or even "great" unofficial, Star Wars film built without sets or actors using AI is inevitable. And that this will be true for any popular franchise.
The natural corollary to this arc is into games, where using AI to code most or all of a AAA-competitive title would be considered inevitable.
I suspect Disney and Sony have at least someone pointing at this outcome.
[0] I suppose idealized Hollywood quality. They are better than some films.
> [0] I suppose idealized Hollywood quality. They are better than some films.
Not only that, but Disney has diluted the the average quality of Star Wars by a huge amount over the past decade. It used to be a big deal culturally every time something official came out in theaters or on TV. Nowadays, there has been enough stuff that even the hardcore fans don't enjoy (even if not everyone agrees on exactly which ones are the worst, overall very few people like everything).
It's a lot easier to make something set in the Star Wars universe that's a realistic level of quality (and potentially competitive with whatever happens to the current iteration of shows/movies) when the bar has also been lowered towards what the current level of AI tooling can produce.
Obviously it's gotten harder over the years, but PS4 and PS5 jailbreaks do exist so that means there's a vector for dumping games that were only ever distributed digitally (at least ones released up to the point where the jailbreaks got patched, as the stores will refused to serve new content until you update your system).
All that said, I think my main argument with respect to emulation and root access was less about individuals having that access, and more that so long as someone gains that access even through extraordinary measures, the games can be dumped and distributed, at which point true ownership becomes possible (even if it takes a while for them to become playable on emulation or hacked hardware).
There is diminishing importance of ownership as time passes though because there is less and less desire to own such assets as they get older and newer titles come out.
There are exceptions to the rule, but I'd imagine less than 1% of the population cares about owning/emulating PS3 or even PS4 games at this point.
So yes, there is an eventual vector for "ownership" (though illicit, at least in this hypothetical) but I doubt that moves the needle much if at all.
On the other hand, the fact that people have spent enough time to write down which entries have this bug and which don't (and potentially even which stadiums have it and don't in the entries that do have the bug, since it's apparently not consistent across them) does lead credence to the idea that the library is pretty widely distributed.
I saw a screenshot of something like this recently with the pre-orders of GTA VI.
They apparently "ran out of digital copies..." of something that doesn't exist yet.
But yeah, it's a trend that will sadly probably happen.
Our collective desire to play GTA 6 will outweigh our desire to "stick it to the man".