It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
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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.
Good regulation is good. Bad regulation is bad. Being anti-regulation is dogmatic.
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.
(iirc this was also Sony, ironically.
Fake edit, I looked it up; it was Sony that put a rootkit in its CDs, they were sued and settled out of court https://boingboing.net/2005/11/14/sony-anticustomer-te.html). Microsoft, Yahoo and Wal-Mart changed their services in such a way that music was no longer playable in 2008 (https://opensource.com/life/11/11/drm-graveyard-brief-histor...), with Yahoo even encouraging users to burn their music to CDs to keep it. In 2011 Rhapsody recommended to back up their older DRM'd RAX files to another format so they remain listenablle.
You mean the full color box thats for all practical purposes the same size and prominence as the cart you're checking out?
These are not the same situation.
You seem to have semantics you apply to the word 'buy' and think the world should align to that, it clearly does not.
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.
I was never in the "resell software" mindset, similarly to books, I don't sell those, unless I get a present that is mistargetted. No one gifts me software sadly.
Now are the constraints on licences (aka agreement), not great, not consumer friendly .. different set of questions.
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.
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.
In other words, you completely missed the point that this is about DRM and not physical vs digital.
Not true for PS5 games. Sony can push a firmware update to disable games, even if you own the disc.
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.
You can doubt that they will, but that’s just hope rather than a legal or technical guarantee.
It's not based on a legal or technical guarantee. But it's based on what Sony did in the past:
P.T. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.T._(video_game) ) was pulled from the PS store. But Sony didn't make it unplayable if it was already installed. In fact, the wikipedia article says:
> After the cancellation, PlayStation 4 consoles with P.T. installed were listed on eBay for over $1,000
But they do require certain firmware updates to play games, at least they did in the PS3 days. If you hadn't updated to that firmware (say, because you didn't want certain features you used like the OtherOS installation to be deleted) your new physical media would not play. I bought Dark Souls on a disc and could not play it on my console.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFuse> <https://free60.org/Hardware/Fusesets/#fusesets-07-11> <https://switchbrew.org/wiki/Fuses#Anti-downgrade> <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/google-gives-develop...>
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.
It's a job for piracy.
Also, regulation is not universally supported by knowledgeable consumers. Often quite the opposite, in fact.
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.
Pex plumbing is banned in Chicago as a union protectionist regulation.
The "chicken tax" regulation scheme has screwed up the US truck market for decades.
Electrical code requirements for the wiring of kitchen islands have changed drastically with very small justification within a short span of time.
To this day it is illegal to trade onion futures in Chicago due to an attempt to corner the market on onions decades ago(probably over a century can't be bothered to check).
Many European countries have draconian laws about air conditioning that are killing people this summer.
The affordable care act is written in such a way that the only way for insurers to increase their profit margin on health plans is to increase the cost they pay out to providers ("gold plating")
CAFE fuel economy standards have lead to the arms race of increased vehicle sizes for unnecessary reasons.
Cite your sources.
There are specific issues in specific places (eg heritage restrictions in Paris), a higher prevalence of shared infrastructure rather than single family homes, and a higher level of renting rather than home ownership.
And there are people on the green-left end of the political spectrum in parts of northern Europe with weird hangups about air conditioning.
But as best I can tell this claim is false; the biggest reason why air conditioning is not so widespread in Northern Europe as in the United States is that the climate simply hasn’t, until recently, required it.
I would qualify that as it hasn't required it since the invention of air conditioning.
Which also isn't strictly true; the high temperature for Paris on July 1st this year is identical to the high for the same day back in 2015[1], and there are several times since 1970 that the temperature was over 30C.
Other sources[2] indicate 1947 was just as brutal as 2019 and 2022, and the warmest night was in 1772 (27.5C)
[1] https://weatheronthisday.com/intl/paris/7/1
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Paris (standard Wikipedia reliability warning applies)
You might be the first person in history to say that
It may not have gotten the headlines of this year’s heatwave, but we were in Switzerland and Germany for a month last July. For three of those four weeks, it was stinking hot. The maximum temperatures weren’t so bad, but the nights were oppressive, and there was no letup. If that’s going to be the norm most summers, it absolutely justifies investing in air conditioning.
Source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
Hint: that's not "It's banned in Europe", that's "Landlords generally suck in any possible way"
The Danish Building code has requirements for retaining heat in the house, which is great in the cold winters, but devastating in the heart of modern summers. Combined with rules that practically require large south-facing windows to satisfy the total energy requirement limits, it gets very, very hot. And air conditioning subtracts significantly from your energy rating, making it almost impossible to include AC in a new building and satisfy the emission rating that any new building must satisfy.
The code allows only 25 hours a year where indoor temperature exceeds 28 degrees, but the validation of a building uses old temperature data, so on practice it's more hours of higher temperatures, and for houses that, even if you want to add AC later, wasnt designed for that.
Abs to add insult to injury, if you renovate an older building, you _can_ be required to bring it up to modern specs. That can be so expensive that it's cheaper to tear it down and build a new building. Because you can't do something half-good?
The building code _is_ a real problem, and changes ... well, haven't happened yet, so the buildings built today will be unlivable for as long as they stand in the new hotter summers.
I can cool down entire 70 square meters apartment with single 3.5kw split; that has worked well in the recent 40 degree heatwave. It does not even use "higher gears" to maintain the 24-25 degrees inside.
Not to mention it's usage overwhelmingly correlates with sunshine availability.
It certainly is a transitional period where each summer more and more people realize that eventually something needs to be done, "maybe a/c next year" for many years until the year of installation finally comes.
In Northern Europe it certainly is still a rare occurrence that everything gets heated so warm that the air does no longer cool during the night and you can't cool down for the next day. Yes, we do get heat waves but they don't last very long. Yes, summers are mostly getting hotter but it's still nothing like in southern Europe. We might have several weeks of 25-28C with a lot of lakes and sea to dip into.
Admittedly it can be tormenting in city apartments where you might not have a place for A/C even if you wanted to, and where you might not have enough outside walls to effectively cross-ventilate. Further, the stone and pavement in a city absorb heat like a sponge which keeps the average a few degrees warmer than greenleaf areas across the hot season.
Yet I think maybe half-ish of households (or at least detached houses) already do have A/C. Installations have been steadily creeping up in the last 25 years. But those units aren't there because of their cooling capacity (which isn't necessarily always even used). Those are air-to-air heat pumps that keep the house warm in the winter, and can be used for cooling in the summer.
I keep seeing people say this but they don’t have any evidence, seen it tons online the last few weeks even on HN. What’s the deal? One person the other day went so far as to say that multiple EU nations have banned AC, which is completely false. You can absolutely have air-conditioning in Europe. Some places have stricter rules about permanent installation, such as HVACs in older areas, but there are plenty of air-conditioning units people can just pick up and use the same day in those cases. You can get AC units in European nations. You don’t have to just roast for no reason because of the government.
Not everyone has the ability to install personal unit where they live, that's true, same way they can't install satellite dishes for example.
> Many European countries have draconian laws about air conditioning that are killing people this summer.
Needs some debunking. In fact, I think you may have been fed lies because the UK government felt the need to specifically call this out:
https://mhclgmedia.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/25/air-conditioning-r...
In short: AC in the home is legal in the UK subject to following regulations, both national and local. Councils are generally happy to tell you how to comply, in my experience with building control.
> In most cases, planning permission is not required to install it for a small home if it would not materially affect the appearance of the building from outside.
Substantially all air conditioning units affect the appearance of the building from the outside because they require a coil or vent somewhere on the exterior of the building to expel heat.
> Building regulations already require new residential buildings, including houses, flats, student accommodation, residential care homes and children's homes, to be designed to minimise overheating.
If planning permission for aircon was denied, worry not, because the building code now requires measures that will keep some new buildings to a temperature ten or twenty degrees cooler than the older buildings (planning permission for aircon likewise denied), which is quite a difference when even the newer buildings are over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
They wouldn't need to spin it like this if there weren't actually buildings where people want to install air conditioning and are prohibited from it, because if that was the case they would have said that.
> If planning permission for aircon was denied
Again, this is not part of the article because it literally says you don't need planning permission! There are regulations you must follow about the size and location but, as long as those are followed, you don't need planning permission. At most, you alert Building Control who will tell you the process and, as long as you follow it, they will sign it off.
For the avoidance of doubt: getting work signed off by your council's Building Control department is not planning permission. As long as your work follows the regulations, they will sign it off. Planning permission is ONLY needed if you want to do work outside of what building regs normally allow for residential properties.
> They wouldn't need to spin it like this if there weren't actually buildings where people want to install air conditioning and are prohibited from it
They wouldn't need to spin it like this if the media and their useful idiots like you didn't outright lie about what was actually happening.
They're referring to regulations by the local council. All of them are different. Millions of people being able to install a satellite dish is entirely compatible with any number of different people in different localities being refused because the condenser is "ugly".
> Again, this is not part of the article because it literally says you don't need planning permission!
It literally says:
> In most cases, planning permission is not required to install it for a small home if it would not materially affect the appearance of the building from outside.
Which strongly implies both that there are cases when it's required anyway and there are cases when it would "materially affect the appearance of the building from outside" since otherwise they wouldn't need to qualify it.
"Ugly" is not part of planning regs. Local council planning regs cannot override statute and they don't deviate that much. You'd know this if you lived in the UK (which you don't).
> Which strongly implies both that there are cases when it's required anyway
I explained why you might need planning permission: because your planned work sits outside of building regs.
> there are cases when it would "materially affect the appearance of the building from outside"
Yes, those are things like "it's too big" or "it's a listed building." Instead of hand-waving about things you don't understand, put some fucking effort in and show these cases that are obviously reasonable but still being blocked.
Here, let me add yet more research since you won't do it yourself: https://www.checkatrade.com/blog/expert-advice/air-condition...
A list of reasons air-conditioning might require planning permission. Are you telling me that you, Anthony, know more about building regs in the UK than:
* Residents of the UK who have to work with them when they want to building work on their home.
* Companies who work with building contractors in the UK.
* The UK Government.
The phrase "materially affect the appearance of the building" has a pretty strong implication that the aesthetic effect is regarded as undesirable.
> Yes, those are things like "it's too big" or "it's a listed building."
And what then happens in the cases where "it's too big" or "it's a listed building"?
It also includes things like "it's going on a pitched roof" or "it's too close to the property line".
> show these cases that are obviously reasonable but still being blocked.
Demanding "obviously reasonable" is the crux of the banality of evil. Many things are non-obviously reasonable.
Who needs to put the unit on a pitched roof? That's weird. Just put it on the ground. Unless you own a unit on the second floor of a building and someone else owns the yard, and then you can't.
Your link has "too close to the property line" at within a meter. That's really close, who would need to do that? Well, the UK has millions of terraced houses that directly abut the property line. Some of them don't have a yard at all (and then we're back to the roof), others have one so small that being that close to the property line may be the only available place to put it.
Are these cases "obviously reasonable"? Putting the unit on a pitched roof is still weird and ugly. It's not that hard to understand the neighbors not wanting it that close to the property line.
But there is nowhere else to put it and then July makes the building hot enough to be a danger to life. At which point a rule motivated by the aesthetics is doing something objectionable.
You can install AC in the UK. It’s not as big of a deal as you’re making it out to be.
A lot of these examples are pretty subjective or missing context...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act passed in 1958, just FYI.
There are very few laws which can say what you are allowed to do with your owned house. One of them is when it is of historical value. Then you aren’t allowed to change pretty much anything.
The rest are just landlords who want to fuck you over.
Yes, the DMCA is a great example, but corporations write those regulations and bribe government to pass them. That's not really an example of evil government as much as it is an example of evil corporations, although it does illustrate how much work is needed to limit the influence of money in politics.
It's the corporation's job to advocate for favorable regulations and the government's job to enact regulations that benefit the general public rather than special interests. Only one of them is bad at their job.
> although it does illustrate how much work is needed to limit the influence of money in politics.
It's actually the perfect example of something where "money in politics" isn't the problem. The companies that lobby for the DMCA are the media companies. They donate their share of money but by far the largest source of their influence is their ability to run sustained unfavorable coverage against politicians who cross them, which would continue to be the case even if they couldn't transfer a dime into the politician's own coffers.
Bribery is not advocacy.
> the government's job to enact regulations that benefit the general public rather than special interests.
No argument there, but so far companies and corrupt politicians have conned a large percentage of the public into accepting that it's okay and that any constraints on what a company wants to do is a terrible thing. We're currently under a very pro-bribery admin.
> The companies that lobby for the DMCA are the media companies. They donate their share of money but by far the largest source of their influence is their ability to run sustained unfavorable coverage against politicians who cross them
I'm not entirely convinced that media coverage is more influential than bribes, donations, and the revolving door. That argument also only works for the media industry and not the other countless industries which bribe government. The oil and gas industry have been getting their money's worth https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/05/10/energy-indu...
The revolving door is bribery, but now propose a solution to it that doesn't preclude every member of a politician's extended family from having a job in private industry regardless of whether that person had any say in their relative running for office.
Running issue ads pretty much the definition of advocacy.
> That argument also only works for the media industry and not the other countless industries which bribe government. The oil and gas industry have been getting their money's worth
The industries that it does work for are some of the biggest problem ones. Media consolidation is a major long-term problem that the government seems entirely incapable of redressing, and the same issue presents with tech companies. Twitter/Facebook/Google at this point have more influence over what people believe than CNN/MSNBC/Fox News.
Moreover, influence over the media is only one way that corporations influence politicians. Let's take your example. From soup to nuts, the US oil and gas industry employs more than 10 million people, and those people are concentrated in specific places. (This is also why coal in the US is dying and never coming back; employs less than 1% as many people.) The auto industry employs another 10 million Americans and has a strong preference for cheap gas.
The major alternatives to oil and gas are electric vehicles (majority of worldwide EV batteries made in China) and solar panels (made in China again). The US could make those things, but it would require significant taxpayer subsidies, since China subsidizes them too. Moreover, it will never be the same number of jobs because EVs and solar panels are simply less labor intensive. EVs are mechanically simpler and require less maintenance/repair than ICE powertrains and solar panels are essentially semiconductor manufacturing, which is not a major source of blue collar jobs.
Meanwhile the main argument against oil and gas is CO2, which is a huge international problem that countries have a poor incentive to tackle individually. So the political incentives to address it in the US are screwed regardless of whether the industry pays the politicians a cent, because the politicians don't want to lose millions of jobs and billions in tax revenue (which, despite the subsidies, the oil industry still pays on net).
More to the point, it's the media that keeps telling people that it could be fixed with campaign finance reform, even though it can't, because that's the one that privileges them as the ones who can run advocacy pieces without paying a third party to air them.
Whereas to actually make a dent in the part of the problem related to money being used to pay for attention, you need something more like antitrust so that you don't have megacorps like Comcast NBCUniversal, Google and Facebook in control of what such a large proportion of the public believes. Which is exactly what the media corporations don't want, so they redirect blame onto something else.
Individual people are diverse and creative. The behavior of large organizations differs because that individual behavior is getting merged into an aggregate. The choices of any given individual are diluted to such an extent that the organizations then behave stochastically in response to incentives, and therefore the same as one another when they're operating under the same set of incentives.
Which corporation would you propose to shut down? It would have to be all of them, and then the ones that replace them again. And the government itself, since it too is a bureaucratic organization that will engage in regulatory capture to expropriate more funding/power.
You cannot prevent the incentive to seize power, which comes from human nature. What you need is a system which is structurally resilient against its concentration/centralization.
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.
It’s not like this is some special case. People make the exact same arguments against John Deere, Tesla, Apple etc. And it’s a major reason many understand we should favor local (or local-capable/open-weight) AI/LLMs. I think “for any product whose support is discontinued, with more than X users, either open source all relevant software and hardware schematics, or provide a binary that will work on the hardware in perpetuity without DRM checks, based on industry” is a miniscule request in the face of any of these industries. I’d say, for instance, weights for discontinued Claude and OpenAI versions would fit. And it’s exactly the type of problem (functioning) democracies are meant for.
IANABankrupcyLawyer, but I believe the status-quo is that various promises like "we'll open-source the server in the end" or "we'll never sell your data" can become voided in the name of making a buck to repay the landlord or business-partner.
For example, imagine an MMO, where the buyer says: "I want the trademark and the copyright to all textures and 3D models, but I am not buying the copyright to the source code because I'm going to make a sequel."
1. This is very literally what already happens, it's called a EULA.
2. In practice this means you are required to personally come to the customer's house to fix bugs (or any other ridiculous edge case that wasn't "fully stated"). As much as I strongly agree the law should swing much further in the direction of the consumer, as GP points out, that only holds until it's your obligation to the customer on the line. "In favor of the customer over anything else" is not a legally viable clause.
> "In favor of the customer over anything else" is not a legally viable clause. I'm sure that legislators could put the principle down in a much clearer way. What's lacking is the will.
That's precisely the problem here. You're "sure" that a problem you don't actually fully understand is trivially solved in a simple manner, when the reality is that this sort of thing is incredibly complicated, and there's a multitude of reasons and competing interests that have resulted in the current equilibrium.
This is the sort of change that requires a country's laws to have to be rewritten from the ground-up, because it invalidates so many assumptions. It's the sort of thing you typically need a constitutional amendment (or at least, a novel interpretation of the existing text) for.
So, yeah, they're lacking the political will for that.
The thing is, you never did _buy_ that Steam game. And you never bought the software on the TV, which you did buy the hardware of, you bought a software lease along with the hardware.
The latter case I can see something to do about - define the software and its functionality as an "essential component" of the hardware, and require companies to not break essential components of hardware they sell. They can stop offering online services, but the rest of the device should keep working.
For pure software leases, I don't see a good way to not have them be whatever the contract say they are, not without reclassifying them as something else than a copyrighted work. (But then "sellers" should be very clear what you're "buying".)
I'm fine with companies leasing software. I don't like it, and I much prefer buying, but that's fine. That is what software subscriptions are, the terms and conditions are clear.
"Buying" something where access can be revoked at any time, for any reason, needs to become illegal.
One fundamental thing would be to make it illegal to lawyer redefinitions of common words. If the sales of a game uses the word "buy" it should not be legal to redefine "buy" in that context to actually mean lump-sum lease or something.
I'm pretty sure the game studios wouldn't like me to buy their games if I were to amend the terms of sale with a clause in fine print that the term "pay" means "setting up a temporary IOU for which I reserve the right to have it resolved into nothing at my discretion". So, I'll pay later if I decide pay, maybe never. That's effectively what their "buy" means.
Your post made me go on a thought exercise: imagine a world where you could either own or lease software products. Game developers could decide whether their customers can actually buy the product (which involves ownership) or just the traditional licensing/leasing, which is the prevailing model today.
How would ownership actually work? What does ownership of digital goods mean? Can they even be owned? You get 1 copy of the bytes? How is this enforced? What's to stop you from just selling it multiple times?
If you can't resell it, then what do you actually own? The right to use the product in perpetuity? But that's just another form of lease, no?
Am I getting bogged down in semantics?
Perpetual lease is not a valid concept. I mean it is, just like perpetual employment is - we call it serfdom or slavery.
Iy serves no legitimate purpose. It’s just a workaround.
If you cannot define meaning of “Buy” then you cannot govern at all.
Why would they ask me? I'm a nobody.
Now, I'm sure some disciplined software lobbyist have spent a very long time and can answer such questions in legslese that protects the customers. Let's find them.
It's really not. Opposing rent-seeking in a general sense isn't what motivated the American revolution; and the King of England in the 18th century wasn't primarily a rent-seeker. The royal family did and does own a great deal of land in Britain which they collect rents on, but this is true of a lot of the historic and current British nobility; and the institution of the British monarchy was and is doing a lot of other things socially that just have no relationship to rent-seeking one way or the other. Ruling monarchs aren't "rent-seekers" where their citizens are "products", except insofar as any government of any group of people is; and I think that's way too reductive a way to explain why societies and governments work the way they do.
Rent-seeking is a temptation that all sorts of people under all sorts of political and economic systems are prone to. Democracy is no particular guard against it, because people who benefit from rent-seeking in some particular set of circumstances can vote too.
This isn't to say that rent-seeking is good, but it's also a pretty hard thing to regulate. It's really hard to codify in law which economic activities are rent-seeking and which ones are people buying a product or service that someone else thinks is a bad deal for them.
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_and_the_United_States_...
That doesn't justify allowing it for almost a century. The US was comparable to the rest of the West, in this regard. The final abolition of slavery in Britain wasn't until 1833.
This is why I love Hacker News; I feel you genuinely believe this - that designing and enforcing the law around digital property rights is the easy, straightforward, and the priority/important law :).
(I don't disagree! I'm a computer geek too, this stuff is important and visible to me as well. But let's have awareness of a) the actual complications around crafting and implementing laws around something so massively complex and constantly changing, and b) where the actual priorities for vast majority of people in the world may be:)
b) yes, there are more important regulations to take into account. But governments also deal with hundreds of proposals. I can want proper digital ownership and still care about building more housing, creating stronger labor protections, and overhaulijg urban development.
I think the apple sympathizers are a great case on some of the hypocrisy, actually. Seeing people condemn the DMA definitely shows some people will play favorites when push comes to shove.
It is an ideology based in short-term self interest. It is the way toddlers think about the world before growing up.
Laws should help to create a well functioning society where everybody can participate and benefit from it in a fair system. Regulations are part of a functional society.
Digital ownership is not different from anything else. Regulate it correctly or the most powerful people will just take away everything from you.
Another is some of the domestic manufacturing or hard tech movement people who present lofty ideals about jobs and sovereignty and so on. But there's a claim that when the surface is scratched a bit, it devolves into a want to keep their imported cheap input materials tax / toll free while introducing taxes and tolls to their foreign competitors' end products. I mean who would pay for domestic materials, they're much more expensive, there'd be no margin!
It's not a common way of thinking, not in my observation.
Conservative / neo-liberal narratives push strongly against any form of "bigger picture view", more explicitly against solidarity, fueling this mindset of "I only support what profits me personally", i.e. "everyone's taxes should be used for roads (because I have a car), public transport is a waste of money (everyone should buy a car)".
-> It's a vertical word-view, where others are seen either above you (appease them) or below you (disregard them, they should appease you)
--
Liberal citizens still (try to) build on a sense of solidarity, of common investments for the "greater good" of a just (future) society, i.e. "I do have a car, but a stronger public transport system is a benefit to me and my peers"
-> It's a horizontal world-view, where others are seen equal to you and people are much more willing to stand up for each other and unite their voice for a cause.
--
I'm aware that this is not that visible in US, because there are only two major parties here, which both try to please the maximum of the middle spectrum. So both follow a rather conservative narrative and tend to pay lip-service only.
In countries with more than two major political parties it's more visible because the "center-left" democratic party is also threatened by competition from the "left", not just from the "center-right"/"right" party, so they need to acknowledge that citizens raise DEMANDS to them and are willing to walk away if they are not met.
That's not really it.
The main case against regulation is that it shouldn't be used when competition would do it better, which is most of the time. The trouble in this case is that copyright is a government-granted monopoly, which means this isn't one of those times, because competition is being foreclosed by statute. It can't be the thing that saves you in the case where the government is prohibiting it.
To put it another way, the thing that would really reduce regulations is to get rid of copyright, but maybe we want to be pragmatic here and instead of demanding that it be abolished entirely, we just want the prohibition the government is imposing on the users to not be extended through an unconscionable power grab and destroy the rights of First Sale and Fair Use that have always belonged to the customer.
Microsoft may have a monopoly on Minecraft, but they still have competition from other games (Roblox, Fortnite) and other forms of entertainment (social media, youtube, books, IRL friends).
To me, the problem is more one of the terms of the deal changing; if a person brought minecraft with a 'mojang' account and loses their purchase when those accounts disappear in favour of 'microsoft' accounts, for example.
Which is not at all the same thing, not least because software has a network effect. It's like saying that a company having a monopoly on cars is fine because you can walk or take the bus.
If your claim was actually true then copyright would have no purpose since "granting a monopoly" is its mechanism of operation.
> To me, the problem is more one of the terms of the deal changing; if a person brought minecraft with a 'mojang' account and loses their purchase when those accounts disappear in favour of 'microsoft' accounts, for example.
How does that help you when the next game comes out, requiring a "Microsoft" account from the first day? The problem is inherently that you can't get the game from anyone -- even a used copy from an existing customer -- without subjecting yourself to the requirement you reject, or de facto being stripped of your rights under First Sale.
Healthcare in the US is a great example because the government is so thoroughly captured by the industry. There is no reason competition wouldn't be effective for non-emergency care, if it was allowed to operate. You need an MRI, every provider publishes their prices, you pick the one which is the right combination of affordable and a convenient distance from where you live. Naturally the existing regulations make that impossible -- the tax code has major incentives for employer-provided insurance rather than the employer paying you money and you choosing your plan or paying out of pocket, the insurance is given the incentive to inflate rather than control costs because their profit is capped by law at a specific percentage of claims (so more and bigger claims means more profit instead of less), the AMA lobbies to have the government limit the number of medical residency slots and sustain a doctor shortage, etc.
Notice that food is another market where "squeezing customers dry there literally kills people" but it has nothing like the same problems because it has much more competition.
People who "generally" oppose "regulation", in my experience, very often have very good reasons for having adopted that stance, that are rooted in examination (or at least knowledge) of several actually existing regulations. And I would hope we all agree that there are plenty of really bad regulations out there. (If not: I invite you to check out the book https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp... , and consider how this legal state of affairs could come about.)
The entirely unfounded allegation of cronyism ("and the ones where you have friends that work there") is especially absurd. Where the guidelines say
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
this is the exact mechanism for "trampling curiousity" I imagine the site staff have in mind. Why would anyone who can offer you an alternative point of view, want to participate in an environment where responses read like this?
Yes, there are really bad regulations out there. Some of them are well-intended but poorly thought out, but even more are regulatory capture that is enabled by the same "they're all bad anyway" attitude. Let's work on improving regulations. In my experience, the people who are "against regulation in general" are not the ones who are interested in improving the regulatory body as a whole, and in fact work directly against it.
> The entirely unfounded allegation of cronyism ("and the ones where you have friends that work there") is especially absurd
I was not accusing anyone of cronyism. I was saying that people who have friends who work at, say, USGS, probably talk about what they do and understand that they actually serve a useful function. I am challenging those people to consider the fact that perhaps agencies they've barely heard of also serve a useful function, and they would also support the existence of that agency if they had had conversations with people who work there. Cronyism has nothing to do with it, only familiarity, understanding, and a personal connection.
Your comment trying to defend yourself is also full of fallacies and emotional manipulation. Don't do that either.
At its best, a government law/regulation/policy is people saying "Ouch, that hurt, let's not do THAT again!", or "Oooh, I like this, this is good for us, let's do more of THAT please!".
At its worst, its self-preserving bureaucracy run rampant.
Any oversimplifying platitude like "I'm against big government!" or "I'm against government regulation!" so tremendously lacks specifics as to be worse than worthless.
And this is an extremely complicated issue which a tiny minority of people care about that'd be ridiculously over-complicated to implement with huge difficulty in tracking and enforcing! But because where we are, it resonates with us, and we on Hacker News feel it's an obvious and easy policy to apply :). You know, unlike the minor issues of war and peace and hunger and poverty and economics and minority rights et cetera :)
100 internet points and tip of a hat to you sir :)
The complexity and realism of some particular regulation aside, I honestly don't understand dismissing other people's opinions on the grounds that not a lot of people care about them. Should people not have an opinion because lots of other people don't share it? Or should those opinions just not be expressed?
Everybody's got their own personal interests and values. It's natural to express and even vouch for them. If they aren't shared by enough other people, they probably won't make it to the top in a democracy. That's how it works and it's fine. But I don't get the idea that someone shouldn't express an opinion about X because lots of other people don't care about X.
And it works both ways - people are allowed to care about something, express that, and others are allowed to not care about it, and express that :)
(in this case, as I mentioned in sibling comment, I care about the same cause as well:).
> In Comments
> Be kind. Don't be snarky.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says
> Please don't post shallow dismissals
The GP did indeed seem to be arguing it's default-bad (though I note you didn't go off at them for this). The reply has said nothing about it being default-good: only that it's not necessarily default-bad. You're assuming a black-and-white binary & by extension you're seeing arguments that weren't made.
There's nothing bad faith about the commenters post & assuming the role of a moderator in a discussion you're inventing phantom arguments in isn't doing you any favours.
We don't have to have new regulation. We just need to enforced basic existing standards. Buy means buy. Rent means rent. Lease means lease. All have their place. But this is not what is happening now. We have an ecosystem that mischaracterizes not just type the type of sale, but user's rights and obligations under it.
All that is basically fraud. We just don't call it that. We call it innovation.
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.
(Not universally, but in many cases.)
Too many still think in the old days of buying physical goods, you 'buy' a tin of beans, they are now in all sense my beans.
I'm all for helping people distinguish, when something is a straight forward property transaction, or an agreement based on permisions, constraints and obligations ... a license.
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?
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.
People who aren't overly-online forum denizens only care about this issue insofar as it affects them, and the only way it affects people in the real world is when they lose access to online games when the server shuts down. Offline games don't get access revoked in practice.
What if you lost or otherwise destroyed/damaged the record, should you still have access through some other means or be forced to buy it again?
That's definitely a perk of digital media.
And for the record, I'm not against digital media. There are a ton of benefits. I think there just needs to be better communication of the expectations between producer and consumers. Reading this thread and seeing that California requires the use of "License" instead of "Buy" is a good example of emphasising the difference between paying for digital media and physical media.
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?
Because we have a free market not a command economy? Publishers can sell whatever they want
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.
Your suggestions are either:
- make publishers distribute goods without anti-piracy protection
- make buyers pay for games on an ongoing basis rather than just once
Publishers and buyers are generally happy with the current exchange as is even if you aren't. Digital games sales are increasing rapidly ever year while physical sales are declining. Why do you get to be the gaming czar?
They don't have to provide a DRM-free version on day 1 if they don't want to. But they do have to provide for a way to use the game after end of support. Doing anything else is unreasonable.
Indeed. They just can't commit fraud or false advertising.
Those EULAs often get overturned because the language is often more of a scare tactic against suing them than it is an actual legally binding position.
In terms in consumer protection, at least in UK and Europe (not saying not elsewhere, just don't know much), there is an amount of regulation that tries to help consumers not get screwed in the legalese of these agreements, and some basic protections that can't override.
I'm arguing unfair terms shouldn't be upheld, or really in the agreement in the first place. This is on paper how it should work in Europe, but we (apparently) haven't quite figured that out yet.
When you bought a VHS of a movie, you purchased the video cassette hardware, but also a license which was bundled with that object.
That license explicitly had some constraints on it, such as not broadcasting the IP in a public setting, even calling out specific locations like oil rigs.
Distinguishing between products and service, isn't great, as neither are well defined, and end up back in the same debates.
At the end of the day words have to mean something. It is not pedantry to simply discuss what a word or phrase means. There are false advertising laws for a reason.
To that end, I would argue you've never bought a haircut, you've paid for a service.
The issue at hand here is exactly that the word "buy" is used when discussing the appropriation of a licence for content that in practical terms, is still controlled by someone else.
Maybe there are technical reasons for this to be the case, but then maybe the word "buy" should not be used in this instance.
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.
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.
Sony also keeps records, but good luck redownloading your PSP game. Or your PS3 game for that matter. But at least in that case, if you already have it downloaded, you can still play your game. Sony couldn't come down from above and turn your game into a rock.
The Crew for PS4 on the other hand. You can (probably?) still redownload that, but that doesn't actually do you any good. Ubisoft did come down from above and turn that into a rock (there is no good reason to make a single-player gamemode online-only).
For now, Sony has no issues with people redownloading PS3 games. Or PSP games onto a Vita - not sure if you can still download onto an original PSP. They'll probably jump on the Amazon revoke-download train eventually, though.
Well that's bad and also shouldn't happen. They should not be able to come down from heaven and turn your books into rocks.
> If you hold onto your Kindle devices for too long instead of replacing them with a newer model, you can't access your old books that aren't already downloaded until you buy a new device.
This is functionally the same as the situation on consoles. You can play the game, but only if you've already downloaded it and kept it around. Not ideal, but at least it's possible to keep it around.
> For now, Sony has no issues with people redownloading PS3 games. Or PSP games onto a Vita
Not for long.[1]
> not sure if you can still download onto an original PSP
You can't.[2]
[1] https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/an-update-on-playsta...
[2] https://www.techspot.com/news/90316-psp-store-officially-clo...
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.
> Why carry water for billion companies?
All companies at a certain scale are billion dollar companies. Also, how much money a company has is unrelated to whether they violated consumer rights or not. But, tangentially, I do generally respect entities that fund creative endeavors moreso than I respect gamers who go online to bemoan how persecuted they are
If those were digital copies you might have chance, otherwise don't count on them to keep working for long. The carts Nintendo used were made with memory that degrades when just sitting on a shelf and people are already reporting that their DS games are failing. I've got an Atari 2600 that still works and plays games fine though. Never even had to replace the joystick, which easily beats the joycons which drift after 400 hours
Good luck! I cannot play any of the digital Wii games I bought. And that's kind of my point. You pay the same price as a physical copy, using the same verb, and yet are actually renting for an undisclosed amount of time that may at any point be cut off.
Blockbuster never said I was 'buying' a game which they could take away at any moment. So why do we let these companies use contradictory or obtuse language at our expense?
> how much money a company has is unrelated to whether they violated consumer rights or not
Billion dollar companies are less sympathetic. As a consumer I might take a worse deal if it meant supporting a small creator whom I knew was sacrificing a lot for art.
do you see how you and people who buy skins have something in common? you are writing about this, you will PAY for people to NOTICE that you support indie game developers. okay, and 13 year olds will pay for people to notice their cool skins. there are many ways to monetize, you are telling us that you would be monetize in the same category of monetization as freemium games, so are they really so bad? is ownership really important, or does it really belong to the same "noticing" category of monetization?
Ironically this is almost how it works in England: https://homemove.com/content/what-is-leasehold-property-comp...
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.
It’s a weird system. The previous and current governments have been looking to modernise it.
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.
Clearly, more thoughtless regulation will solve the problem this time.
California AB 2426 is a very deliberate and well considered bill, because it does exactly what it was designed to do: feign consumer protections, while leaving easy loopholes for those companies the bill protects. Those legislators who signed it did not have consumer protections in mind. Gavin Newsom is not interested in rocking the boat of corporate power, and neither are the lobbyists who pushed for that bill.
Don't blame "regulations". Blame, and vote out, the authors and signers, because they clearly do not have your interests in mind.
Yes, exactly. Video game distributors should be forced to choose a pricing model: "Sell", or "Rent". No more "License, until we or the DRM service decides to revoke access for any reason/we go out of business/the DRM service goes out of business".
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.
In all your examples you are buying a service, isn't it obvious? the counterpart of "products" in the phrase "products and services". And yes, you are buying the right of being entitled to receive it. Ideally, you should be able to sell and transfer that right, or gift it to someone else. And if the service is eventually cancelled before being delivered, a full refund for the price should be issued.
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.
Not really. As long as it's clear that everything is a rental, consumers are free to go along or not.
Physical media offering near-permanent storage is also relatively new. 8-tracks, cassettes, and even CDs would wear out over time. Yes, I could hold a cassette in my hand, but I also knew it would wear out over time and I'd have to buy another one - and I did.
We need to change our language around buying something so it's clear that it's not permanent ownership, unless it really is. I suspect we would see services/media start to come to market that offer true ownership if the demand was there.
do you own the film when you buy ticket to cinema ????
As for resale, interesting you bring up tickets as scalping / reselling them is a major issue, which is also hostile to consumers as they can pay multiples of the original selling price for high profile concerts and events, which has led to legislation and / or industry rules that prevent resale or at least prevent it through 3rd party services so that they can manage the resale price (and take their share a second time).
Now change "attend the cinema" with "play a videogame" in those phrases. We should be able to freely exchange games between us. I should be able to sell them to you. The medium (digital, physical) is irrelevant.
no, because you already play it
You should not be able to read a book or watch a DVD movie and afterwards give it to a sibling or friend, or leave it on a bench on the street for someone else to pick up?
I don't care if the medium is physical or digital, we should be able to, and OUGHT to do those things.
This could also be fixed by removing regulation.
I'm pretty sure that Sony and others would work their way around such legislation. E.g. spin-off shell "studios" that would be the legal game sellers, and when the time comes to sunset a batch of games, these "studios" would magically go bankrupt and cease to exist.
Then the onus would again put on the commuinity to break any encryption or otherwise reverse-engineer and preserve the games so they remain playable for legal owners. And the top-level companies would still be able to salvage and own the game franchise rights, so they would still be able to harass the game preservation community.
I don't think there's any workaround to stop this kind of cheating, other than mandating that (a) all DRM-protected or service-bound content needs to be submitted to an escrow organization (Library of Congress?) in a form that can be used to reproduce it locally, and (b) all submitted content is released to the public after X years.
The best way to not have loopholes is to put some effort in not creating them in the first place, not patching them later.
I have news for you, in a democracy in which bribery is illegal, these loopholes can be closed by politicans who actually want to.
a service you pay for is not your property. and the licenses for games could be seen as a service rather than goods since they are now digital. ofc this is not nice or good, but its possible to do it to skirt ownership rules regarding 'goods'.
for PS5 the problem might be this.
you can sell a license and enable download for games but how many games can you realistically fit inside of a ps5 without some weird storage array in there... games are huge these days and wont get smaller.
for PC customers, storage is their own responsibility. for ps5 im not sure it could work the same, how extensible is the storage etc.
i would expect such things to come with a subscription, so u can access all games u want anytime while the subscription is active and install/download on demand.
the subscription cost being low vs game prices would offset the ownership problem for a lot of people.
i know many people who have subscription to platforms who do this today on PC in order to access many games they cant afford to all buy. (they buy ones maybe if they end up played a lot).
the problem now with these platforms for PC is still they only offer a selection of games, to encourage purchases (because the platforms are more independent from PC and game makers than say PS5 and sony are..)
Also it should be marked clearly that the company can rescind the license at any moment without giving any reason why.
But that does also beg the question, if we do eventually regulate this better, do you own streamed products? IE with Google stadia (and I think Amazon Luna) you buy a game but the game data is streamed to your device. If they shut the service down (like Stadia did) then what happens to your game collection?
It's a hypothetical, but interesting to think about nonetheless
Is it? It's the bare minimum and if you replace games with anything else it might not look so "pretty cool" anymore.
My hairdresser forcefully bleached/uncut my hair but pretty cool that i got my money back.
Ford forcefully impounded my car without my consent but pretty cool that i got my money back
Realtor kicked me out of my house but pretty cool that i got my money back
Then let the market decide.
And that's ok since everyone will understand the deal going in. Consumers can decide if it's worth paying the price for a 5 year rental or not.
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.
Also, ownership can be a side effect for even those who don't care, just because they're used to not paying for things. For example, when I got Minecraft for free as a little kid, it was because nobody would buy it for me, while in hindsight this also meant no account that could potentially be lost when transition to Microsoft accounts began.
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.
Game developers simply have to stop pushing the minimum specs up for releases over the next few years.
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.
This is false. Free-to-Play titles like Fortnite don't require a subscription to play online.
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.
and is a recommended step for engine modding games like skyrim.
Console manufactures have a history of shutting down the download and authentication servers after the consoles age. Sony just took away hundreds of movies consumers had purchased.
Still, steam didnt prevent you from accessing games, the game publisher did, like "the crew" case happend.
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.
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?
Sure, that loses out on the ability to transfer it to a friend, but it's better.
But that's just using what you payed for, it only very slightly overlaps with what actually owning something entails.
That doesn't invalidate your other point.
When stream trading was more of a thing, and we had a ramen diet, it was probably true
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.
> The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services.
The whole "we prohibit transferring accounts from dead people" is likely just a catchall to prevent liability and responsibility when people say "oh my brother cheated on my account" or "my brother said XYZ on Steam forums".
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.
AI demand price hikes are affecting everything including consoles, and the hardware for game streaming. It's an everything price increase rather than just PC. nVidia isn't secretly hoarding GPUs to make you rent them from streaming platforms, they simply make more money selling them to AI companies instead.
As user I don't care if it is a cartel or just "more profitable", but if this situation destroys companies that makes business from consoles or pc-gaming. Then it will be the colapse of the industry. First will be the hardware, once the hardware is gone, will be the software...
1. Q1-26 wasn't the worst performing YoY quarter for new PC sales since Covid.
2. The biggest sector hit was the low end computers. That's not usually what we are talking about with pc gaming.
3. Costs go up on PC gaming, but the costs are going up for consoles too.
4. New memory fabs are going to start coming online in 2027 and 2028. This is a short term crunch.
5. The whole interviewing someone in their living room about their bad professional experience and representing it as journalism feels icky to me.
Sixty years ago the model was you go to an arcade cabinet, and you get charged every time you died (Credit: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2026/07/03/returnal-3).
Ideally, they want cabinet in every home, you pay electricity for it, you buy overpriced Bluey skins, you buy your lives, you buy ads, and pay them every second for the pleasure, while not owning even the cabinet.
Worse, some arcade games drained your health continuously while you played so no matter how good you were you'd have to keep plugging quarters into the machine.
--------------
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.
I still have nocds for some of the old GTA and Warcraft games. Pretty sure you can't play the originals any other way now with all the "definitive" and "reforged" editions having taken their place.
It's basically impossible to find any game that isn't on GOG that is not shared as a repack. You don't get the installer, you don't get the original media, you have to trust that the repack is not filled with malware. (and also the repack process somewhat confuses wine/lutris. More than once i couldn't make the repack run on my linux box, but if i managed to find the genuine install medium.. or if i ended up buying the game on sale, then no problem)
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.
Someone once said that if libraries were invented today they would be illegal and that feels more true every day.
https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/corporatereport/... (page 37)
I buy most of my games physically, but then all the DLC I buy from the PS Store because retailers don't have it. And I also buy digital games too, because the games literally don't have a disc, if it did, I would buy it physically.
I would say that my ratio of digital purchases to physical ones (by dollar amount) is 7:1. I would buy 90% of my content physically if I could, but I can't. And now with the upcoming changes, I'm going to end up buying 0% physically and 0% digitally.
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.
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.
The ultimate leverage a consumer has is to not by something if they don't like the terms.
I also think politics is a pretty big factor in this too, as regulation was used when companies and customers had an impasse, and well, gestures everywhere look at the general global political client right now. Not much empathy going around these days...
Physical games as they exist today are more just license keys already. It's likely all the console makers wanted to ditch physical a while ago but put it off after the outrage over xbox.
It's either that or companies don't really have to worry because there is essentially zero competition in the current economy with all the pro-monopoly administrations we've had for the past 16+ years.
Most of the games people play runs using proprietary software and/or licenses, and often on very specific hardware, with game features that makes sense for the amount of players the game has. Requiring that people should be able to play such games if the company stops running it would completely change and limit how games are developed, and in many cases require a completely different version of the game to be co-developed in case people stop playing it. It would with 100 % certainty result in slower development, fewer games, and worse games.
I do of course think that developers should try to make games playable without the company being involved, within reason. Some games that do not have licensing issues or complicated server backends as a requirement could be made available without too much work. But for things like e.g. MMORPGs it's nearly impossible. If your ever developed bigger software systems you know how many moving parts are involved, so just imagine the difficulty of making it work on consumer machines...
Tons of games people play do NOT have notable online features outside leaderboards, cosmetics or other inconsequential mechanics.
Most games aren't online games though and those would realistically last forever if it wasn't for companies shutting down activation servers or download servers. There's also a problem where old games get delisted. If you want to play an old game today you can just buy the disk of ebay. Now the only way to buy a game is through the digital store which won't be selling the game forever, with no way to officially transfer copies between players.
No, it won't. People used to develop games without requiring publisher's services. The issue of "it's hard to do nowadays" is self made. It's only hard because you made it this way. You can design a game that will be playable when its publisher or developer close their doors.
Eventually someone important enough will force digital resales to become reality, changing everything to require KYC.
As in you can't wake up one morning and your game is gone overnight because copyright around in-game music changed.
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.
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..
Honest question: why? Why would anyone important enough to hold that power actually use it to force resales to exist? Who actually has the incentives to make this happen?
My perception is that the music industry is better than other parts of the entertainment industry in this regard. I imagine what the author is thinking of is streaming, which I treat as a sort of on-demand radio. There is an understanding that it is ephemeral. A customer concerned with “owning” their music would not be confused by this and seek another avenue, which in the case of the music industry is both wider, richer and more free than those of adjacent industries.
The common dedicated formats used for distribution: the compact disc and vinyl record, do not have copy protection, which is a better situation than what movies and video games are in. Online music stores invariably deliver you music as a simple computer file, with no copy protection or platform or connectivity requirements. This is the rule rather than the exception, which is not the case when making movie or video game purchases on these types of stores.
I will have to look into the Retroid Pocket. Thanks for the plug.
The convenience of digital game storefronts can cut both ways. For now Steam is on our side, but there is no guarantee it will stay that way.
This is the most perfect sentence about this situation
I can afford it trivially, but its like paying say 20 bucks for a standard bread or bottle of milk. Insulting
Actually not quite, as security measures keep increasing across macOS and Windows.
Before someone brings Linux into the picture, most folks don't know Tuxedo, System 76 and co exist, what matters is what is on display at Media Markt, Saturn, FNAC, Publico,....
Most people don’t know how to even “acquire” software without the DRM. It’s not really anyone’s job to spread news and tell people to go learn.
If they get interested and care that much to preserve what they have, they can google and learn. Many have learnt about Linux due to the recent PS5 jailbreak for instance.
But not all of my physical games CD/DVDs are in mint condition and some have scratches.
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.
Games are much cheaper in real terms (even in terms of percentage of wages/income, if you don’t believe that’s kept up with inflation generally) than they’ve ever been.
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.
But I’m not going to keep a collection of old consoles in my living room, so at this point it feels more likely that I will be able to actually play games further into the future if I buy digitally.
This is the opposite of what proponents of physical media heavily argue - indeed, many here are making it their only argument - but I suspect it’s how lots of ‘regular people’ that aren’t saturated in digital rights politics feel.
But the PS5 can play PS4 games, early PS3 could play PS2 games and so on. And Xbox is entirely retro-compatible because they used the same architecture.
Part of my intake process is to rip my games onto a digital format. Owning the physical media, and acquiring the backup legally, gives me a strong legal foothold for creating backup discs or using emulation.
I've built up a pretty large collection of physical games over the years on two shelves behind me. And every now and then, I really enjoy playing some of those older titles. It took me almost half a year just to get a disc drive for my PS5 Pro. Half a year where I couldn't play my favorite games anymore and had a useless new console just sitting there next to me. I'm actually a bit worried about the next console generation - is it going to make my entire game collection unplayable and useless?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The pirate community does wherever it's possible. We had a blast in college playing Halo MCC LAN parties back when it got launched on PC - by design it needed Xbox accounts for everyone but we worked around it with Goldberg's crack and got the classic experience.
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.
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 not the case in digital format. Talking about pipe dreams about companies/government forcing companies to somehow allow digital key or more precisely accounts associated with keys to be maintained forever (or at least for the next 100 years) is a pipe dream. Physicam games are a way to ensure you still own your games.[1]
[1] A lot of caveats to what I said, mainly due to the fact that gaming consoles are now Internet-connected so the console-maker could technically revoke access to any game at any time if you connect it to the internet. Still, it would be a huge huge breach of trust, and as such very unlikely.
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.
Also a step towards surveillance. All of your engagement will be tracked and sold to advertisers or used to re/train some LLM. All in the service of _enhancing your experience_, of course.
License is not an ownership - It's limited right to use something. Any action anyone does that isn't covered by license (in software) is called "piracy".
Games were never sold. Mediums were sold with attached licenses. And most of the licenses as early as 2000 contained something like:
"This license is personal to you and may not be assigned, sublicensed, or transferred."
The only difference today is that licenses are enforced better. They can be held on license-server and new user can be denied usage after transfering was detected.
But it doesn't matter if it's downloaded, on disc, or embedded on a spoon.
Don't make people believe they ever owned a game. They didn't. You don't own games as well. Never owned them. You rented them.
The only way to get out of it with winning hand is to side with reputable vendor that didn't cheat people out of licenses. Reason why I side with Steam is because I have my licenses intact even though they have 25 years, I know big corps that just make licenses go poof and pretended in never happened.
Not true unfortunately. See: Vernor v. Autodesk; which was first ruled in favor of first-sale doctrine but later reversed by a federal court. There haven't been cases for video game discs specifically but I don't see a reason who it wouldn't be the same as this software, since they also explicitly mention you're being sold a license, not ownership.
It's just that for the longest time people didn't have to think about them, because if you had a license to consume a game/movie/album and also had a copy of it on physical media it was basically impossible for the media owner to take it away from you. But when everything is digital only, doing exactly that is easy as pie.
This feels like how sometimes laws from the 1800s are used to convict people of computer-related crimes. Maybe that was always possible, but it still seems unfair.
It isn't even about legality (because laws usually don't regulate how one can interact with entity they have no legal ties to) but only about litigation risk.
There are no legal or moral obligations requiring valid license. Only interested organizations are brainwashing people into thinking otherwise.
But I don't think licenses are the problem. It's quite obvious. You have 100 works of art (music, graphics, code and text). You want to make money. If you sell it - you lose all the rights. You can give it out but then there's no profit.
The only way to not transfer ownership and give away for free is exact middle ground called the license.
Basically one would by a CD-ROM containing a licensed copy of a game, and would then be the owner of the CD-ROM but only a licensee for the game. Selling/trading the CD-ROM would transfer the licensee status to the new CD-ROM owner.
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.
Most everything I buy needs to fight for my money. Of course some vendor specific things, such as a specific movie, are not replaceable, but since very few things, if any, are so important to me that I won't spend elsewhere if a good is too much.
With that competition for $, vendors generally are competitive, and don't tend to have extremely high profit margins.
I prefer the limited rights, since I can try far more things that way, with finite budget. And I don't get stuck with higher prices on things I ended up not wanting/using after I got it. I can simply cancel.
I think the general disconnect is people too often assume they handed out money so should get infinite rights, while ignoring the nuances of economics/pricing.
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.
Consoles are a significant investment, to only be able to buy content from one source creates monopolies. An equivalent would be if TVs were sold by Netflix or Disney, and only played content purchased from those entities. The second hand game disc market prevented those monopolies from taking prices to stratospheric highs.
I believe this is why digital distribution has seen little push-back on PC, because we have the convenience without the monopolies. Steam is huge, but Epic, Ubisoft, EA, gog.com, and others provide plenty of competition.
If consoles go digital only, from a single source, I think we'll see >$100 games quickly, we'll see subscriptions required to play be much more prevalent, and we'll see the death of consoles within a generation.
It used to be that consoles were generally the cheaper alternative to a gaming PC, which was subsidized by the price of games, which in turn stimulated the second hand market as people tried to recoup their investment in games, not the system itself.
But now that it's no longer really true, and system prices keep going up for little in return, it's really the worst of all worlds: expensive systems, expensive games, no way to resell, and two of the big three are acting increasingly worse (the jury's still out on what will Nintendo do next, but their ridiculed key-on-a-card system at least allows for reselling).
And this is on top of Sony outright lying about the reality as various leaks and scraps of that indicate that physical sold very well, better than digital.
price *= (total game sales / avg player count)
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.
The playstore is a bit more dynamic than real stores with physical disks which means it's easier to get lower prices for some games.
On complaint I have is that storage is extremely expensive, but I can't blame that on Sony.
Companies started pushing digital content and we accepted it, Xbox GamePass has been a cancer (I am Xbox player) with all the games destroyed because of it.
Nobody can disagree that digital games is convenient, turn your PC/Console on and that is it, load the game, start playing something else, etc, without leaving your sofa.
We never thought about the consequences of that, look what happened with DVD, Bluray had luck coz its post-peak era happened by the time people started going back to physical disks over streaming services and the downfall of such services.
This is also related to how everything nowadays is digital, requires subscription which removes features like BMW heated seats, firmware update and what not.
Companies made us addicted to everything digital, that gives them full control, higher price for less, Amazon Prime without ADs requires a higher tier, Sygic Offline mobile app now requires higher tier to have access to features that were once part of the lower tier.
Gaming studios until recently were focused on live services over single player games, it is digital, content is behind paywall, etc and etc.
Digital DLCs over releasing a new game coz that would force physical release.
This is our fault and we might have gone past the point of no return!!
The things you don't own are because they require an online service to work. No matter what you do, short of removing the dependency, aka "cracking", it will only work as long as the online service allows it to work.
Any feature of.a consoles with OTA software updates are in that category. Even if you own the hardware, you don't _control_ the software.
When things on the other are presented as rent only, it's very bad.
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.
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?
I don't know who's "we" for the author, but I DO want physical media. I want to have the feeling when I reach to my video game disc, take it out and put it into my console. Besides DRM-free digital purchase doesn't guarantee that the thing you bought won't disappear - digital game store can you bankrupt, video game publisher might legally force its title to be removed, etc., the list goes on and on.
Forget about explainin to the youngins. My girlfriend is 7 years younger than me and barely grasps the concept of why I'd have 20,000 mp3s on my phone that I ripped off CDs I owned. Why not just pay for a subscription? She doesn't understand the utility of anything being hers.
So I say, send me a song. And she sends a link.
It's hard to even explain to someone who doesn't know what it means to have anything that isn't rented.
How can someone who has never owned anything of value in their lives understand what it means to have something that isn't rented?
The one thing I learned when I was young was never buy anything on credit. I was up to about $20k of debt when I dropped out of college. I cut up my credit card and I paid it off and did not buy anything on credit again until my late 30s when I bought a house and the first car I ever owned that I didn't pay cash for (which I quickly paid off).
There were long periods in my life where I lived on staple foods like rice, worked 12-16 hours a day, and spent half my income on rent. I also spent 12 years backpacking when I got myself into a situation where I could write software remotely, and I realized that This is completely normal in the world. Living within your means is normal. Living hand to mouth and saving a little is normal. No one had it as good as the boomers in America, ever. No one will again. Being able to buy anything on credit is a wild abberation that cannot last. But I live like my grandparents. Frugally.
I've only ever owned 2 pairs of shoes, 4 pairs of jeans, 8 shirts and 8 pairs of underwear. I replace them when they wear out. I also own a house now, mostly paid off, and have about half a million dollars in the bank. Does that make me rich? I don't feel like it. Every day I go out of my way to earn and save instead of spending.
Make money and save it. Don't buy shit you don't need. Don't rent anything you don't have to, and don't fall for the credit trap. When you buy things, fix them instead of replacing them. Don't sell anything.
And don't look at what other people have and wish it was yours. I'm not religious, but there's a reason that covetousness and sloth are cousins in the list of ways you can ruin your own soul.
If you refuse to use credit, and you live well under whatever your income is, you will be able to afford things of value once you pay off the mistake of taking on debt in the first place.
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
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.
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.
Is it shitty and consumer-hostile? Yes. Was it inevitable looking at the current trajectory of game distribution logistics? Also yes. Forced digitization should have in no way been surprising.
- a physical disc, playable as-is
- physical, with major flaws without online updates
- physical, was playable on release, now requires updates
- physical, unplayable without updates
- physical, contains only a launcher to download full game
- physical box without disc, contains download code only
- digital
Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
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.
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.
Unfortunately, terms can change. Publisher can promise 10-year support for the game and then drop it after 1 year. So when we purchase the game, we don't know what will happen in the future.
I've enjoyed games that came out 20 years before I actually played them. Many games I enjoy are years old by the time I play them. I wanted to play The Crew. Doing that officially is literally impossible now. Maybe I'll get to play it if the pirates can do their magic.
Somebody needs to preserve these games so that people like me can play and enjoy them in their own time. I'd like other people to share in that same joy.
Would you write this comment, if you were speaking of books instead of games? It comes of as incredibly thoughtless to think of games as nothing more than discarded toys, when they are complete creative experiences filled with artistic value. Games are worthy of preservation for the same reasons books are. It's a shame people like you haven't realised that.
Like you will most likely always have some kind of access to something like GTA 6 in some way. Only obscure titles get truly lost. They are obscure for a reason.
And that's a bad thing.
> Only obscure titles get truly lost.
We can do better.
They can be obscure for many reasons, only one of which are it's quality as a piece of art.
There was an album, "Begin", released by a group of session musicians calling themselves The Millennium. Released in 1968, it was a borderline experimental sunshine pop rock in the vein of Sgt. Peppers and Pet Sounds, with songwriting and production in the same ballpark. It completely flopped, having landed a bit too late, and made virtually zero impact on music history. It only started to get rediscovered by the public after some CD releases in the early 90s, but that mostly got it out of total obscurity into being an extremely deep cut.
But it's fantastic and in spite of it being out of it's time when it released in terms of genre, did a lot of cool experimental stuff that makes it sound shockingly modern. It's seen some greater recognition in recent years, but we're in literally another century. I found out about it through a Spotify recommendation and based on searches, so did a lot of other people. When it got recommended to me in the late 2010s the play count for most of the songs was in the low thousands, but it's gotten a bit higher now.
The album didn't get re-issued because of it's quality, but because CDs were booming and labels were looking for any old junk. There was also a resurgence of interest in baroque pop in that era. If the circumstances weren't just right, it would never have been re-issued, it'd likely have continued to be completely forgotten and I wouldn't have ended up listening to it and loving it.
It is the right to trigger your own neurons and synapses irrespective of your capital value.
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.
Liking the Everything as a Subscription model when you get to be the rentier but not when you don't seems perfectly apropos.
This submission is explicitly asking for a discussion against SaaS. This isn't "weird for HN" nor has there been a "variety of opinions" since around 2016.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It was a royal pain in the ass!
You had to inset the disk every time you wanted to play game. The disks got scratched, destroyed, or rearranged by the wife.
Steam has saved me from all of that. Plus I can share my whole library with my family members.
Sure I might lose access to them all when I die, but 20 years from now who is going to care?
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.
And AFAIR all software is sold as a license since way back.
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.
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"
Is Apple doing me an injustice by not selling me the good that I want?
Is this a question of rights or consumer preferences?
You may have heard of football clubs: If it's too expensive you can pool resources with your friends.
There are local clubs available but everyone wants to play on the nice FIFA field, which is the one that has to be rented.
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.
I still don’t quite understand in which cases the status quo is not ok though.
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)