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Comment by tumidpandora | Hacker News Reader

Going digital was inevitable, i'd rather focus on making digital ownership better than fight to restore discs or game codes to 3rd parties

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Exactly. This is stupid. Physical is dead, there’s no point in arguing otherwise. And you will not win. Sony never signed a contract with you saying they would keep making physical forever.

Hell they could pull an old-school Apple, stop selling the PS5, make a tiny change, call it PS6 and be done with you. They could even announce that digital games for the PS6 are also compatible with the PS5! Wow, aren’t they nice.

We need laws providing consumer rights. Nothing else will work.

People don't focus on improving digital ownership because that requires butchering the sacred cow of copyright and DRM. These are the root of the problems and no one wants to touch them.

Plenty of people want to address those problems, but politicians don't since they get bribed not to.

That's not what TFA is on about at all, it's about the monopoly Sony has on selling digital games exclusively through their store. Physical discs don't enter into it.

I am reading a translation, so I might be off base, but not being a monopoly is not a defense.

EU competition regulations are not like American antitrust laws. They do not care about monopoly, and consumer harm is mostly a second-order effect. They care about competition, and punish anticompetitive behaviour and abuse of a dominant market position. "It’s not a monopoly" and "there are alternatives" are true, but that’s not all that relevant.

It's not a monopoly in the console market. There are two other competitors all of whom have roughly equal market share. And they are all walled gardens so Sony is not doing anything differently from its competitors.

Sony's gaming business is tiny relative to iOS gaming business.

I actually feel like Nintendo's game key cards are a reasonable compromise, or at least a step in the right direction. Trade-able, lend-able, sell-able, fully offline with no need to periodically auth with a server as long as you have the game downloaded already. They also let you transfer games peer to peer so you don't even need to get it from their servers.

The issue with full digital ownership is I don't see how it can be implemented without totally killing the original owner's sales. Imagine if you could resell games on steam and undercut the developers: no-one would buy from them anymore after the initial round of sales, as there's no practical difference.

What’s happening is people are realizing how bad current rights for digital goods currently are, and are revolting at this obviously related scenario.

What people don’t realize is that physical != ownership. I remember wanting to pop The Dark Knight on Blu-ray into my ps4 for a date night… except the license on the disc expired, so I had to call WB for a new one??? Go figure.

Still, it’s fine if people react this way. If nothing else, it sends a message to lawmakers about priorities.

Why not going with both? Choice is never bad for the consumer, even if the majority or sales is digital. I usually buy both and they just lost me, I won't buy into their dystopian store

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