Disc is a manifestation of right. Without this they will screw people without them even noticing
I'm interested to understand the self-denial and mental gymnastics you're using to make the claim: physically owning something that cannot be taken away from you is just pretending that you physically own something that cannot be taken away from you.
The wedding ring on my finger cannot be taken away from me by the person who made it. It's mine. I can wear it for the next 50 years or I can throw it to a river. Those are my rights as the owner of the physical medium.
There's no pretending happening here.
What if the full game isn’t on the disc? How are you going to play it in five years when the servers are gone and you can’t download the rest.
What if the game isn’t on the disc at all? What if it’s basically a magic unlock code and then the whole thing gets downloaded. Like Nintendo’s game key cards.
No one can ever take away your right to stick your disc into the console. And it will always do whatever it did if you did that when the console was not connected to the Internet.
Today you can’t always play the game in that situation. Which means that having the thing in your hand already isn’t good enough.
Digital download makes that fact obvious. People think discs are still in PS1/2 days where they're always enough. Thats gone.
> What if the game isn’t on the disc at all? What if it’s essentially an unlock key and the entire game must be downloaded, like Nintendo’s game-key cards?
That is precisely the issue being debated. People object to games ceasing to be self-contained products and becoming revocable permissions—dependent on a publisher’s servers and continued cooperation. Physical media matters because it can, in principle, preserve a game as something its owner can use repeatedly without requesting permission each time.
Downloads themselves aren’t the problem. I love the extreme convenience of buying a game and playing it within hours without leaving home. It's crazy to me that we can do that today, when just 30 years ago my friend and I were ripping demo discs off of the front of PC Zone magazine. But that model remains acceptable only while platforms such as Steam, reinforced by consumer protections such as those in Australia, preserve a reasonable expectation of continued access to what people have purchased.
What you’re describing is a form of generational amnesia—or shifting-baseline syndrome. If you grow up with ownership steadily being replaced by conditional access, conditional access begins to feel like the natural and inevitable meaning of ownership. It isn’t.
That's a pretty big assumption. Back in the day I bought a GameCube and decent game collection. I tried it a few months ago and the optical drive is dead, so now my games are just expensive coasters. I could buy another one in the second hand market, but given their age it will also die sooner or later.
That is the problem with proprietary console media, once the hardware inevitably dies, the media itself is useless.
This is definitely a good reason to give up on consumer rights... the hardware might die. No point having rights if things can break anyway, right? /s
Closed platforms like consoles are at the mercy of their manufacturers. If you want consumer rights, stick to open platforms like the PC.