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Comment by sudobash1 | Hacker News Reader

Discs do matter in one way. I don't think I have ever seen a digital "purchase" of any significance which I could resell or gift at a later time. Some "in game" things are resellable, but only within the game's ecosystem. All digital games, music, movies, ebooks, audio books, etc are not (AFAIK).

So if I get tired of my DVD movie collection, I could sell it or give it to my kids. If I ever decide I'm too old for the retro game cartridges I have, they could go to future grandkids. But my GOG games or Bandcamp music is stuck with me forever (legally speaking). Nobody would know if I "gave" them to my kids, but there certainly is no way to resell them.

Now this is still a rights issue, but physical media makes this easy (outside of keys/DRM as you point out) You always have the right to hand on a physical object.

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Sure, but the context of the article is the recent kerfuffle over Sony deciding not to continue producing disc copies of games. It would not be difficult for them to keep producing disc games but still restrict them in the same way as digital games (e.g. requiring you to authenticate to the PlayStation servers with an account the first time you put the disc in, and then refusing to allow that copy of the game to work for any other account in the future). That might sound extremely, because it is, but let's keep in mind this is a company that made the CDs people bought install rootkits to try to avoid letting people burn copies.

The point that I read the parent commenter as making is that if the loud outcry in favor of discs go so loud that they were forced to spend effort with continued manufacturing of physical discs, it seems like a pretty reasonable assumption they might try to do something like what I described, because at least they get some of what they're trying to go for with the digital-only strategy even if it's not all of it. Focusing on the discs themselves is a distraction from the actual issue.

It’s trivial to sell media or software on a disc such that the disc itself is not equivalent to a license to use the media or software on it. I don’t know of video games do this yet, but this was the case for a prominent PC operating system for decades.

Even if it has the full game they can EULA out if it. There are no laws saying they can’t.

Discs are accidental theater. They didn’t start out that way but that’s what they’ve become.

Spore had that feature that allowed max 3 installs from disc.

So disc or not doesn't really matter.

I believe there are games sold today where what’s on the disc is not enough to play it. There is a mandatory

A disc is not sufficient. It does not give you the rights you think.

I remember this was true of MMORPGs in the 00s. Not saying that justifies the state of things of course.

It’s somewhat fair for multiplayer only games. Preservationists want the right to stand up their own server and that would be nice, but I get it.

However for games with a real single player component, or ONLY a single player component, there’s no excuse other than they can.

A disc alone isn't sufficient for reselling without anti-online-DRM policies, but a disc is basically necessary to allow reselling still.

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