If we're not owning it, you're not selling it, you're leasing it. Terminology on sales pages should reflect this. "Subscribe now" "purchase license" etc. should be mandated if this is the expectation. Terms like "buy" without qualification are misleading in this context, but they won't remove them from store pages because people are more likely to pay higher rates for something if they believe they are actually owning the good in perpetuity.
This is actually state law in CA. People reported Sony to California's Attorney General, who basically said they weren't going to do anything about it.
Unfortunately the law is only as useful as its enforcement.
This is the only regulation I feel is reasonable. When it comes to luxury goods like video games, it doesn’t make sense to dictate how the product is offered. But by all means insist they’re clear with what the transaction type is.
I can imagine the natural competitive wedge where GOG can say “Buy Game” but Steam has to say “Lease Game” on their buttons.
This would be case-by-case in Steam. There are some games which really do sell under "irrevocable license to play" (which, short of granting copyright privileges, is about as close as you can get to ownership for a digital product). Other games on Steam do not.
I think it would highlight the differences between publishers / studios more than store fronts.
> There are some games which really do sell under "irrevocable license to play" (which, short of granting copyright privileges, is about as close as you can get to ownership for a digital product).
They both communicate the same thing because they both start with “buy.” They communicate Ownership and collapse to the same thing to a normal consumer: implied ownership of the game. Insisting that the ownership is of the license and it says it on the button doesn’t really help, because no reasonable person thinks that a “purchased” license can be revoked for any reason or no reason at all. Why doesn’t anybody think that? Because “owning” a license implies you actually control it. But a license you can’t control at all means you own NOTHING! Not even a license. So “buy license" miscommunicates in the same way as “buy.”
Then maybe is should be forced to say: “Buy revocable license” and require the user to answer randomized multiple choice questions regarding the terms of the license that act in opposition to the purchaser. Collect metrics on wrong answers and if greater than say, 15% of people can’t determine what they are actually handing over money for, fine and require additional clarity.
Or, just flip the tables and say the historical meaning of buy implies transfer of ownership in exchange for some trade. Since the seller no longer owns the items that was sold in the transaction, they have no additional rights that are covered by other areas of the law (such as copyright). First sale applies and if the seller doesn’t provide a mechanism to facilitate that sale, the buyer is free to exercise that right in whatever way they see fit.
But licenses in general you don't just "buy", you "earn" them somehow, then also usually you pay a price for it too, but it's typically about knowing about some rules and/or norms.
And the initial comment that started this was that "Purchase license" in reference to this... software license... wasn't clear. Arguing about whether you buy a hunting license or that it's not a perfect analogy seems pedantic and irrelevant.
> Arguing about whether you buy a hunting license or that it's not a perfect analogy seems pedantic and irrelevant
It's a completely different thing, it's like comparing buying a "license" (ticket) to ride a roller coaster and taking a driving license, they're obviously different things, not exactly pedantic, imo.
It's a non-transferable lease that can be canceled at any time by the issuer.
The real problem is that most of society still thinks of games as a piece of physical media that you combine with a player that allows you to play the game. In that world you have a liscense to the software, and a physical token which is transferable and therefore valuable.
I'd argue that we need to decouple transferability and cancel ability from physical media. If this were to happen then the word "Buy" makes sense precisely the same way it used to with physical media. Of course more provision needs to be provided for live service games regarding cancel ability.
Yes, some people are trying to achieve this by arguing that physical media should stick around forever. I think the real solution is providing the same protections and rights for digital purchases as we had with physical media.
That would be a real win for consumers since we get the advantages of digital media with the ownership and transference rights of physical media.
Of course this would be a great inconvenience to those who wish to charge the same price for a temporary revocable license to the content, and they have deep lobbying pockets to fight against it.
As long as we're in copyright world, it ought to be structured as three separate parties:
1. Licensor, the company who makes the game.
2. Licensee, the person buying a digital copy of the game.
3. Safekeeper, Steam or another platform that stores the digital copy on behalf of Licensee. Similar to how depositories store securities and guarantee that they can be neither lost nor duplicated. For a separate fee perhaps.
And if you buy a license, it should either have a fixed term that is clearly communicated, or should be forever, and transferrable, not "untile we decide we don't want you to have it anymore".
Someone in past threads mentioned that many digital sales website in fact no longer use "buy" anymore, and instead deniably implicate purchases by such expressions as "Add to Cart", "Proceed to Checkout", and "Pay".
Yes, all this talk about the language used still leads us to the same frustrating outcome: customer pays for something, and at some unspecified point in the future that same thing is taken away from them. I don't care if 6 years earlier I clicked a button that said Pay vs Buy, I care that my purchase is being removed due to some backroom licensing issue.
Wonder if you could have those buttons and not give the user anything at the end, since you never said they were buying anything, only giving you money.
Very much matching my thinking on the argument the plaintiffs are making. Sony just needs to change the labels on a few buttons.
But for some reason they don't want to and are willing to go to court on the matter. As you say, using the word "Buy" is stronger than "License", but it seems a strange hill to die upon.
It's also totally illegal in many countries.. you can write whatever nonsense you want on an eula, but it will be about as useful as toilet paper in court.
Then the button becomes License and everyone knows that's the one you click to buy.
As much as I empathize with (and even support) the reasoning, I wonder if it would have a tangible effect. Is there anyone who was gonna click "buy" but not "license" (presuming they relabel the button and everything else is the same)?
I think it depends. If they are also required to allow 3rd party stores, and one of the third parties has a “buy” button while the others have “lease (lifetime)” buttons, it might sway a decent number of people.
Same thing with consoles, if one has “buy” and the other “lease”, then it might not convert everyone but could it take 5% of sales? 10%? 20%??
I don't think the general public is engaged enough to understand the difference between "license" and "buy". They will look at the button and think "This is what I click to get it" and don't understand that they are just temporarily renting the thing. To most people, "license" is a noun: something you carry in your pocket to drive. The word is already overused by media vendors to confuse people.
It should in a functioning system, people who see lease or license on a game may be more hesitant to buy it and might pick a game who differentiates itself by marketing itself as being a permanent purchase.
The point is to not mislead people. When you write "buy," you are implying that the "buy"er is obtaining a perpetual right to use the software, subject to certain rules (i.e. you can't make copies and redistribute it). "Buy" implies the buyer has an absolute right. When "buy" actually means a temporary revocable license is issued, and the buyer has no rights, that's a problem.
We won't know without A/B testing, but I suspect aesthetics mean nothing here and, for example, someone isn't going to turn down playing GTA VI if the only button between them and the game says "purchase license" as opposed to "buy".
I'd rather have my rights as a consumer protected or get something tangible for giving them up (like cheaper games) than introduce even more legalese into online shops.
I agree but that's not even enough. If you only lease the game, they will also need to tell you exactly for how long you lease it. Any reasonable person would have an issue with a lease for an indefinite time period that can be canceled at any time without refund, it doesn't sound acceptable at all.
This is the law in some places. Companies solved the problem by not using any buying verbs at all. The button you click to not-buy the app says "$3.99" or "Add to cart". When you go to the cart the next step is "Pay now" or "Continue to checkout".
I know I am in the overwhelming minority and that most people will just continue to buy Sony's stuff anyway, but I decided a few years ago when all the ownership crap came up that I am just not buying stuff that I don't own. Sony's PS4 went to my local electronics recycler and I haven't bought a Sony product since. I can't realistically do it with everything, there are some products I have to buy rather I get to own them or not. But I am not putting up with it where I can and gaming is optional -- plus GOG has served me really well since.
GOG is better, but I still really don't like buying video games that I don't own (ie can't resell). Come to think of it, I've only ever digitally purchased one game above $5, Minecraft, and even that got revoked when Microsoft bought them.
I'm keeping my ps4 as long as the hardware still runs because at least I can still buy discs for it. I have a nice collection of high-replay-value single player games. I know discs are just physical licenses at this point in time, not actual software on disc like the old school days.
But even with all this nonsense from Sony I don't think they'll cross the rubicon of terminating licenses that come on physical discs for their older consoles. If they do, I hear you can jailbreak ps4s :)
On this topic I'd like to give a big kudos to the devs at https://decomp.dev/ who are tirelessly working to decompile old video games for fun, preserving it for future generations.
IMO the better thing is to force these companies to dump this mindset that digital information is a finite resource. Sony's logic doesn't even make sense to begin with. If person A buys a game, that game does not suddenly become unavailable for person B to also buy. I mean, even copyright recognizes that it is possible for a rightsholder to own all rights to the master copy of a good but other people can own separate copies of the work without infringing on the rights of the rightsholder. Sony is just taking the maximalist view here because they want to keep the power of being able to control who and what has access to whatever they sell, for any arbitrary reason whatsoever.
> IMO the better thing is to force these companies to dump this mindset
IMO this is a strictly idealistic view in a world where only a very small vocal minority actually seems to care. The vast majority of people will continue to reward these companies with their wallets, so they have no incentive to change course.
I wonder if anyone will ever have the guts to enter the gaming console market using open source as a base. Linux support for GPUs has never been better than what it is today. I've spent the last 4 or 5 years gaming exclusively on Linux just to highlight how good it has gotten, and no I don't have to run around doing command line incantations. Linux has improved a lot, heck, even AI you have a drastically better experience working with AI on Linux than on Windows (which hearing this 10 years ago would have confused me given how many issues I had with my GPUs on Linux for YEARS).
All someone has to do is assemble a reasonable desktop that runs Linux, gives you access to GOG and Steam, and you've already got more games than most game consoles, the issue right now I suppose would be moreso hardware costs.
You would also want to make sure your Desktop Environment is fine tuned with a controller in mind.
If you can read games from discs, you'd be getting the attention of many people. The facts are that most people have always bought digital over discs but when you take that away, and it becomes clear that they could lose their games forever, everyone wants CDs back.
You're literally describing the steam machine/steam deck. Also, bazzite is an immuable distro based on silverblue that does pretty much exactly what you described.
I know there's some issues with big picture mode and Nvidia, but that's an Nvidia driver problem, not a limitation of the platform.
> I wonder if anyone will ever have the guts to enter the gaming console market using open source as a base.
It's definitely possible, but I suspect that Valve (or some other major player) must first prove the concept to be viable for a business.
e.g. The Steam Deck wasn't the first PC gaming handheld made, but it was the one that proved there was a viable market, which led to a bunch of competitors following Valve's lead.
The Steam Machine, unfortunately, botched the execution due to high pricing. If pricing had been good, I'm guessing that it too could have been the proof-of-concept needed to jump start the market.
You can stream Big Picture with tools like Sunshine/Moonlight or their forks. Works amazingly well over a LAN if you have a server somewhere and stream to something connected to the TV. I have a headless server and an NVIDIA GPU so not sure what the sibling comment is referring to about compatibility.
Unless it is subscription based online game I take that buying game is perpetual unrevocable licence. Sadly non-transferable but that is trade-off for digital.
Between this claim, ramping down disc production, and the possibility of a $999 home console,they are going to have a difficult time.
There are still so few PS5 exclusives. Even fewer with PS5 Pro support. It’s going to take a lot to gain trust and justify a PS6. No clear path to victory here with a hardware update.
I like the graphics horsepower of my PS5, but a lot of the games I play, I'm just not sure I would notice the difference between it and my old PS4. Resolution is the biggest thing, since I didn't have a PS4 Pro and it'd be limited to 1080p on my TV.
Yeah I've already decided there won't be any new Sony consoles in my household. Games are so big now I can't possibly download all my games at once so if the store goes down I lose all those games permanently and $70+ for AAA games that are really hit and miss in the "fun" category is no longer worth it to me. The PS5 was also pretty darn expensive when it came out and I can't say I've played too many PS5 exclusive games since I bought it. Most of the PS5 catalog has been indie games available on Steam or ported PS4 games... and with Sony reportedly releasing a new console next year they are clearly high on their own supply.
Never thought I'd have this opinion, but the gaming industry as is needs to crash/burn and rebuild itself. So many downright wild anti-consumer things happening in the last 10 years and studios have completely lost sight of how to keep themselves out of bankruptcy.
Gaming as a whole is a shadow of what it used to be, specifically because it has been tailored to the masses who have no real opinion on any of this other then they want to play what their friends play.
What I don't understand is why Sony is the one being targeted for this when this has been the case with any digital purchase for 20 years?
I don't know of a digital marketplace that works differently.
But instead all of the hate, the boycots, etc are all targeting Sony instead of focusing on actually figuring out how to improve digital purchase rights which extend beyond games (and far beyond Sony).
I know that some online hate it when you compare this situation to PC since there is choice there, but not when it comes to this. Sure you can choose which store you want to not really own things with but its the same result. Steam did this a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1g19n60/steam_now_te...
> What I don't understand is why Sony is the one being targeted for this when this has been the case with any digital purchase for 20 years?
Examples: literally two days ago Sony permanently removed access to over 500 movies for people who had "purchased" them, and only a couple months ago Sony announced their plan to permanently shutter physical media production for Playstation.
I agree with you that it's a systemic issue but it also doesn't surprise me that Sony is seen as the lead boogeyman. I think if you asked the average gamer what their opinion of Valve's business practices was vs. Sony you'd get a very different answer even if the legalese in the TOS is similar.
Lik Sang was awesome back in the day for procuring accessories like classic XBOX controller to USB adapters that weren't dodgy duct tape jobs. Hard to believe they were forced out of business by Sony two decades ago.
I maybe should have phrased that better since I do understand their announcement around disks and removing the movies is a reason why they are the current target.
I just find it hypocritical, people keep saying they are going to move to xbox or pc next gen and its like. Their policy is exactly the same. You have the same risk and not really ownership.
And I am not defending Sony, they have a long history of getting cocky with their consoles and pulling some shit. But in this particular case they are following the trend that we allowed by going all digital on PC and buying digital games on consoles.
Sony isnt going to be the one that changes this, the only way to expect change would be targeting all of them including Valve. But everyone, like this article, just seems to gloss right over that and seem to imply its only Sony that is the problem here.
On consoles in general, backing up digital media (if even possible) requires full-system exploits, thus bypassing DRM, and decrypting them also requires breaking DRM
Woah, we're not talking about cracking your games. I think every console from at least the last two generations has supported copying game files to external/removable media.
Disabling DRM is required for basic archiving if the issue is someone else having the ability to decide the thing you bought will self-destruct. Copying doesn't matter if it doesn't produce a usable backup.
If you remove the DRM, then you do actually own the thing for practical purposes. And non-ownership of things you buy is unjust, so entertaining the law here is silly.
How do you backup game files from a console, to an external drive/location that you own; and ensure the validity of that backup will still be usable on the console later?
It's not, though. Their ToS is the same. They reserve to right to deny you ownership of your games. Only Sony has been stupid enough to actually do it.
Every ToS in the world is designed to screw the signee over as much as it possibly can, so you'd need to go live in the woods if you wanted to escape it, but there is a tangible difference between how much companies actually abuse the provisions in their ToS. I don't know how you can say "Microsoft reserves the legal right to drill a hole in my skull" and "Sony is actively drilling a hole in my skull" are `exactly the same`.
To be clear, you never owned the games, you own the disk that contains the games. The right they are reserving is to revoke your legal access to the games you're licensing. They can't repossess the disk, but they can deny you the right to use what's on it. Obviously digital-only also exists, in which case you own literally nothing. All that remains is the contingent access that they legally have control over.
To be clear, when I use the phrase "deny you ownership of your games", I'm talking in Common English, not legalese. We don't actually have to normalise this. Legalese aside, the social contract for decades has been that you own your digital purchases. Now that the social contract is being violated, we certainly should be striving to enshrine it in law via regulation, which would also render any amount of ToS legalese to be worth as much as digital toilet paper.
I think you're under-appreciating the importance. It's not just pedantry. This has been true since EULAs have existed. And it's kinda insane that people think owning a disk gives them ownership of the intellectual property contained on it. You've always been given a license. The difference is that you can often transfer that license by selling the physical copy of a game whereas most digital licenses are exclusive.
The ability to deny ownership does exist these days. Sony can push an update that bricks your Playstation.
So this whole thing is actually an argument over whether games should be made available in a form that allows license transfer (which I support) or not. But it's a fair point to argue that for any actual benefit the remedy has to be applied globally, not just to Sony.
Like the other commenter said, we don't have to normalize this. A reasonable jury can and should find that Sony pushing an update to intentionally brick Playstations is criminal destruction of property, regardless of what some EULA says. And we can make it very clear in the law that that's the case, and prosecute any individuals involved.
So its fine that they force you to agree to something when you paid for it but its not fine when they do the thing you agreed too?
Instead of actually trying to fix the issue we just hope that Valve never has to do the thing they are legally allowed to do because we agreed they could.
I honestly don't care who has done what, I don't care what company is supposedly better than another company.
Overnight Valve, Microsoft, whoever could just as easily remove access to a bunch of digital purchases.
How about instead we just don't excuse any of the companies?
Of course, I am not arguing otherwise. But if your core problem is not the removal of content but what Sony is arguing right now. You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk.
Just because one has done it and the other hasn't is a technicality to me since that could change overnight.
The point that I am trying to make here is that it is insane to me that all of this is focused on Sony. And frankly I don't have a good solution here, but just arguing that one TOS is better than another because one company hasn't done the thing yet but could is not a good argument.
How many times have we seen management change, companies being bought, whatever and suddenly something really bad happens.
I am just getting really frustrated by Sony this, Sony that. Boycot sony, etc when if all we do is move to another platform with the same policies do we really expect anything to change?
We are in the most emotionally driven period of human history to date where reasoning takes a back seat. It's super frustrating but once you realize this instance isn't a one off you can start to focus on the bigger picture. I'm not saying this makes it less frustrating, but perhaps it'd help you to cast things in a new light. You're mostly talking past people who are dunking on Sony right now, because they are more interested in riding the emotional wave than actually making sense of the situation. Never mind that owning a physical disk has pretty much been dead for the better part of a decade or two anyway with day 1 patches and online activations. GIVE ME PHYSICAL DISK. To be 100% honest I think people want to put games on their shelf and look at them and any whiff of an argument is just people grasping at something, anything, rather than something based.
People did risk assessments with VMWare and we see how that turned out.
Things can change, just because you make your risk assessment doesn't mean you should ignore that there is still something in that contract that could turn on you just as easily.
Should we go back 10 years, maybe the risk would have been the same. Did Sony do any of these things then, but the policy was the same. How about 10 years from now, just because of your "risk assessment" doesn't mean that Valve is suddenly safer, just just means so far they have been safer.
I am not saying don't use Valve, but there is zero reason to believe they could not just as easily do this.
Nobody is arguing the risk values are exactly the same. The argument is that the risk posture is the same. You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value, which is an individual value judgement and thus incredibly far from an assumed fact. Some people do care about posture more than value and different people weight value differently as I'm sure your thousands of assessments have uncovered.
In any event, I think with all the data you'd see that Value has also removed games from its platform. So I'm not sure the value gap is even as wide as you seem to be implying.
>Nobody is arguing the risk values are exactly the same.
please re-read the part i quoted from the parent, where they say it's the same risk.
>You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value
i did not say "the only thing that matters" anywhere.
you, and the parent, are reading something into my comments that i have not written. the only thing i said is that the risk is not the same because sony has a pattern of behavior worth considering.
1. steam does not have a monopoly on distribution rights for PC games. if steam were to go bankrupt publishers could honor your keys and even other marketplaces could do it. steam themselves let you bring your own key.
2. steam has been a benevolent marketplace leader, even though DRM itself plays against customers, the rest of the stuff they pushed while leading, like game sharing, play and refund, offline playing, are pro consumer.
3. why would your knee jerk reaction to this is pointing a finger to steam, what's your endgame?
Sure they have said and claimed a lot of things, but their TOS says the same thing that Sony is arguing. Its suddenly this big shock now but no one cared before? Sure the way Sony is handling this is fumble after fumble but thats PR.
My problem is that Valve for some reason gets a free pass because "they are the good guys" when their own policy means they could do the exact same thing.
I own a lot of games on Steam, but I am not nieve to assume that there is not a chance that at some point I could loose all or some of those games. People are for some reason in a false sense of security about Steam and that is a problem. They have to be part of the conversation when it comes to digital ownership. Ignoring them means we can't actually solve the issue.
Valve killed the previously thriving boxed game industry two decades ago and people can't get over how much they love everything about Valve. Sony follows 20 years later (in a world where internet is faster than installing from BluRay and games are outgrowing three layer discs) and people lose their mind.
There's more noise about this than Microsoft's mass layoffs at the game companies they bought up.
Physical PC games weren't great in the 2000s. Online activated serial keys, optical disc based DRM that caused problems during both the 9x>NT and XP>Vista transitions, the only thing that made PC gaming tolerable for me was gamecopyworld. Valve (eventually) offered something better than that.
PC games can still be physical. Burn some discs or copy the files onto a USB stick and put it in a box. I think it's crazy that boutique companies like Limited Run Games completely avoid the platform when it's the only one left that isn't actively hostile to the core principles of the company. Admittedly PC does have the image of being a digital distribution only platform these days, but it's illusory and breaking that illusion is a marketing problem.
People were pretty pissed about the xbox layoffs, it's just that things move fast and this was the next thing.
I disagree with the assertion that Valve is responsible for the death of physical game copies.
First off, console games have gradually moved away from offering physical copies for years. This had the (probably deliberate) effect of killing the used game market. Earlier attempts to kill that market were driven by the proliferation of digital content that could not be resold.
Second, physical copies on the PC have not been guaranteed for a very long time. I would suggest it was actually the wide-scale proliferation of indie games that did more to kill the physical copy market than any deliberate transition from AAA studios. There are thousands of indie games out there now. Without digital copies, it would be impossible for anyone to actually purchase any of them.
And the momentum to move away from physical copies for PC gaming has been there for a very long time. No one was going to Best Buy to pick up a physical copy of minesweeper. There have been other factors as well, such as the popularization of MMORPGS which provided years of content from a single physical copy.
Really though, the idea that without Valve, the PC gaming market would still be chugging along on physical game copies just isn't realistic. It goes completely against the momentum built over the last 25 years of PC gaming.
- Sony has a track record of removing purchased media en masse, while Valve does not.
- While it could be argued that Valve runs an effective monopoly of the PC platform based on their marketshare, Valve operates on a platform with competitive options including DRM-free stores.
- Game consoles have always been more attached to physical media than PCs.
- Sony is the largest player in the market (disregarding mobile phone gaming) with more total marketshare than Valve and the PC platform. This makes them a much more visible target.
Valve doesn't randomly remove stuff I've payed for from my library. Even when the ability to purchase something goes away, people who already bought it keep access to it.
They patched CS:GO away, a game I paid retail price for, with "Counter-Strike 2" and overnight dropped support for my platform (MacOS).
Sony has never stolen a game from me, unlike Valve. The closest incident was that movie thing, which was more a failure on their part to negotiate perpetual licensing with the rightsholder.
Valve pivoting away from MacOS is a consequence of choices Apple has made for their platform, many of which made it a more hostile place for Steam to exist. This is baked into the long standing Apple model of software distribution, where API and architectural changes inevitably obsolete software with Apple usually providing only a limited time window for cross compatibility.
You can still play your purchases on an operating system that isn't actively fighting against you running them.
CS:GO is still accessible via the beta feature. Not sure if you can still play it on MacOS. I agree that that's the wrong way to do it, but at least you still have access to it in theory.
Valve was a plucky underdog against the established publishers and, while dominant today, still has reasonable competition, sony is a giant corp with a reputation and a monopoly on playstations.
> sony is a giant corp with a reputation and a monopoly on playstations.
That's like saying Volkswagen has a monopoly on Volkswagen cars.
Sony clearly does not have a monopoly on the video game industry, and a plurality of video games are cross-platform across consoles, PCs (Windows/Linux), and even MacOS.
It would be slightly more accurate to say "volkswagen has a monopoly on volkswagen cars... and all accessories and replacement parts"
But the analogy breakdown because a car is more or less a complete item you buy and use for a purpose (aside from consumables) whereas a playstation is completely useless without games to play on it.
So maybe volkswagen brand gas would be the best analogy here.
Not really. I can plug a generic usb cable into my Playstation and it charges my aftermarket controller just fine. I can even use aftermarket screws or put the console in an aftermarket enclosure.
Except for the software ecosystem which is the main driver of revenue for consoles and exists largely to support the sale and distribution of products from third parties, all of which is centrally controlled by the platform holder.
Someone else in the thread made the comparison to fuel, I'll go with that. Last time I checked, there was no such thing as petroleum DRM.
Volkswagen cars aren't a platform that fosters a billion dollar marketplace of third party sellers that contribute the bulk of value delivered by the product.
> Valve killed the previously thriving boxed game industry two decades ago
Boxed PC games were practically dead by the time Valve started selling 3rd party games on their marketplace. Most game stores around me had stopped selling them or massively shrunk the shelf space for them. Xbox, Gamecube, Playstation 3, they had whole walls of the store dedicated to their stuff. PC games had a couple of shelves in the middle of the store, if even that. Sales for PC games had massively fallen between 1999 and 2005 while the rest of the game industry exploded.
The industry had shrunk over a third in five years before Valve started selling online. You can't say it was "thriving".
steam also sells drm free binaries. the steam drm is optional and the publisher or Dev can choose to go without it
of course it's better that gog requires you go without it for the customer, but I'm not sure it helps in terms of legal rights. If gog shuts down you'll need to have your games backed up and downloaded to still own them and you won't have any license to a new download or etc
I honestly keep forgetting GoG exists but fair, maybe saying there is no choice is a bit much but if you want to play a given game it may not be available there meaning your choice is to not play it or deal with this.
I think it's because they're a huge player in the space and the PS5 appears to be the dominant player in the console space this generation. This affects so many people in their faces right now, where as the switch to "buying" movies on an online platform was more gradual as it was a new platform offering and not one that had had ownership from day one (arguably since 1994 with the PS1).
So in short, I think it's because they're the big guy making a very visible change to the broader public, instead of a new platform with a new way of doing things (how Steam was).
Nintendo is the only one still selling video games that you own practically speaking, ie you own the cartridge and it has the game on it or at least has the key. Unless I'm out of the loop on that.
Sony announced they're not going to print more physical discs for games. So far no one else in the big three has confirmed they're doing this, so obviously the controversy goes to them
I think the difference here is that sony is in the middle of taking down their ps3 store, and while they say you'll be able to download the games for the "foreseeable future" I don't think many folks have a great deal of confidence in this being true for for that long.
Valve has spent the better part of 20 years fostering a good relations with the gaming community and pretty much every gamer has a great deal of confidence that they'll protect your purchases.
What they should do is just stay silent and stay the course. Everyone fucking knows in 10 years time physical media will be dead and all of this is water under the bridge.
It's nothing like democracy though, and the concept of paying (or not paying) to vote is antithetical to a democratic process. We should not confuse the two.
If I buy a CD or a cassette or a record, I own the physical media but I only have a licence to the music it contains - not the ownership, and not the copyright. Whether I can play that music as a DJ at an event or on the radio, or remix it as a backing track for another song I'm creating and so on, depends on licencing laws and royalty payments. That was true well before the internet, and it's why Wham! get a huge boost in royalties every December whenever a radio station plays Last Christmas.
A separate question is whether Sony can _revoke_ a licence and delete the game off your device again.
True, but no additional rights to distribute replicas of the copyrighted music and composer works.
Note, if a band does a cover of a popular song, the original music composer rights also don't magically transfer because someone sang a slightly different version.
Sony may not be technically breaking any rules, if they disclosed the terms of the copyright are revocable... and not perpetual in the terms of sale.
Still a douche move to rip off kids, and burned a lot goodwill with consumers. =3
I'm not a copyright lawyer, but my understanding is that you do not own a license when you buy a CD or cassette, you own a copy (strictly speaking, a "phonorecord" in US law). Copyright doesn't regulate the sorts of typical uses that the owner of a copy would engage in, so a license is not required. When you see those warnings on VHS/DVD/Blu-ray that they're licensed only for private home viewing, what they're telling you is that you don't have a license to do anything controlled by copyright such as broadcasting, publicly exhibiting, or reproducing it.
Software is significantly more complicated and gets into issues of physical permanence/transience and specific exemptions/limitations to normal copyright law (see e.g. 17 USC 117).
If I buy a game - i.e. I am on a store page title "Game Name" not "Limited Revokable License for Game Name", and I click "buy", then I expect to own a copy of the game or the right to a copy of the game (in perpetuity), not a limited revokable license to play the game.
Good point. Reading before you sign should be common sense regardless of what country you're in. And, if you don't agree with the terms, you shouldn't click "I Agree."
Yes, Sony can revoke a license. It is right in the terms of the license.
We own nothing but the right to access the game so long as the rights holder chooses to permit it. This means I could buy a game on Tuesday and the rights holder could render it unplayable on Wednesday with no recourse.
The "Buy" versus "License" question doesn't really resolve this. Sony is right in one sense that we all know we are licensing. What needs protection, probably requiring new or revised laws, is some sort of consumer right to get value out of a game license before the vendor renders it unplayable.
I might go Steam Machine route in the PS6 era, I know it's technically same on Steam, but they have at least been much better at not rug pulling, and there are easier way to circumvent things on a Linux/PC machine. Unless Sony changes their stance so that either I have full lifetime use of the game or an explicitly stated period of time (which if shorter than lifetime I'd expect to be cheaper).
I'm even willing to drop resale of individual game, if I can just sell off my account as a whole to someone else.
Valve is also pretty amenable to adding third-party games to the box as well. It's trivial to add games from GOG using Heroic and play them alongside regular Steam games.
My main "game console" is a NixOS box running Jovian, and I have made oodles of Flakes that I use to make custom non-Steam games that launch deterministically, and as far as I'm aware, Valve is perfectly fine with this (not that I particularly care if they are).
The amusing thing about all of this is that the tech that Microsoft is using to be the "good guy" in this is the same thing they were savaged for when they announced it for the Xbox One. The ability to take a physical disc and use that as your key, with each disc having a unique code embedded in it. When you would install the game it would then lock that code to your account, proving your ownership of it, and you would no longer need the disc.
To be fair to the critics, they hadn't thought out all the issues around resale and trading games with friends, but had stated they would address that, before just dropping the tech entirely. It seems like they never stopped having the discs support it, so now it's a relatively straightforward thing for them to enable.
You are buying a copy though, and would be expected to have the right to resell it. So digital stores go out of their way to "license" the copyrighted work instead of selling you a copy.
I have been thinking about this lately, and figured that another difference with classic media was the "live service" model, where games receive updates.
You can't take for granted that a copy comes with updates, so I guess that as a middle ground, publishers could license updates (and online multiplayer) & sell copies of the game. Sell your copy, fine, but if you want updates or multiplayer, you have to purchase a subscription again. This would make more sense to me, but may be difficult to communicate and implement.
I have to admit that I'm pretty impressed that GOG has managed to convince a lot of the big brand-name players, (including Sony! [1]) that a DRM-free way of distributing games can be viable. If there's no DRM then there's nothing stopping you from keeping a backup on your own that they can't take away.
This statement could do Sony in. Gamers will refuse to buy a PS6 if there's not an ironclad guarantee that they own the games they purchase, be it digital or disc form.
And since gaming is the only profit center that's holding Sony above water I see the company disappearing in a couple of years.
I foresee another "gaming winter" like we had in the 1980's. Maybe a decade from now another gaming platform will arise, most likely built around open-source software and hardware.
> Gamers will refuse to buy a PS6 if there's not an ironclad guarantee that they own the games they purchase, be it digital or disc form.
I highly doubt that. I’d say 99%, probably more, won’t care either way. People barely care on PC, and people on consoles are generally used to more abuse.
I think that this could end up true if the next Xbox really is "just a PC".
The PC gaming ecosystem is a powerful selling point, especially due to the existence of Steam, emulators, modding, etc.
Windows really needs more refinement and polish though, the current experience is mostly unacceptable for a living room PC.
A next-gen Steam Machine would likely be a better competitor to the PS6, it doesn't have the reputational baggage that Xbox and Microsoft currently has.
Microsoft gaming division i.e. the Xbox will disappear before Sony goes anywhere. Same thing goes from Nintendo every year people/analysts insist that both those companies are in trouble and will die off because of the way they do business but here they are still successful and the main reason, they’re successful is that they concentrate on gameplay in comparison to their competition.
You can BUY a license to something, but it's still a license. You don't own the actual game unless you buy the rights to it from the publisher. The rights to a game can cost millions, and only then, do you truly, ever own it.
No. I can buy a book. That gives me ownership over that copy of the book. No one is claiming it gives me the right to do things like make copies of it to distribute to others, so we can ignore that goofy argument. The fact is, I own the book.
When I buy a game disc, I own that copy of the game on it. I can give it away. I can sell it. I own that copy, in the same way I own that book. No own claims to "license" a book anymore, or at least no one who doesn't get laughed out of court.
You own that physical copy due to the physical nature of it. However, you still are limited in what you can do with it. You can't make a copy of it and sell that copy. You can't read that book aloud, and sell the recording. In certain cases, you can't even read that book for an audience. The fact that you own it has embrued certain rights to you due to the physical nature of the book.
Take away the physical medium and there is nothing physical left that you own. Therefore, you have no physical rights to it anymore. The publisher, at their sole discretion, can remove the medium of access by which you consume the book. And then you'll be left without a book.
This is exactly how the current system works, I am just explaining it to you. So don't shout at the wind.
Let me stop you right there: no one is claiming that buying a book gives you copyrights to its content. That's a strawman.
When you own a book, you own that copy of it. You can do whatever you like with that copy, short of distributing copies of it. You can sell it. You can lend it to friends. You can leave it laying around a doctor's office for a stream of people to read. Short of distributing copies of it, it's yours.
Sony claims you do not own your copy of a game, merely the right to use it until they decide otherwise. That is fundamentally different than when buying a book, or CD, or DVD.
The copy itself is incidental. It's the medium by which the performance of the license is executed through, and if some form of it requires a Sony online service to exist and to work or respond in a certain way and tied to your specific account, to gain access to the meaningful parts of the work, that's what you own. You can sell the physical copy, but you're only selling the actual material and whatever pieces exist on the disk itself. Caveat emptor.
The fact that some of the material exists in a form that is close to and within your control is irrelevant. That's like saying you own a copy of Google because some of the javascript code that runs the frontend is cached in your web browser. You don't.
"You will own nothing and be happy." better get used to that and make your peace with it
LOL fuck off with that. The Amazon link[0] to a Final Fantasy game has a "Buy Now" button, not "License Now". I'm buying a copy of a game, exactly like I'm buying a copy of a book.[1] If they want to pretend in their little "licensing" fiction, it should be federally illegal to describe buying a copy as "purchasing" or "buying".
When you lease a car, you know you're leasing a car. They have to be clear about that up front.
Arguably, piracy has never been theft as "theft" means to deprive an entity of their item/copy and downloading does not destroy the original. The usual counter-argument is that piracy deprives them of a sale, but that is not necessarily true and it doesn't really fit the meaning of "theft".
It's actually an interesting question there. Because I've been wondering if I buy something in taking ownership of it, whereas if I steal something I am still taking ownership of it without compensation. However if I'm not buying something but merely licensing it the wouldn't that mean that technically I'm not stealing it I'm only violating the terms of the license of it, which is now a civil not criminal matter.
Yeah, exactly, it's not stealing, it's just ignoring the terms of license. The same thing in spirit as e.g. different corps shitting on GPL. And should be enforced with the same eagerness (lol).
Firstly, you're not "stealing" (committing the crime of theft) by making digital copies of a work. You are infringing copyright. Even a single copy infringes copyright. To not infringe copyright, you need a license for your copying from the copyright holder.
You can still manage to infringe that license even if you went through a normal storefront and paid the copyright holder the amount they asked for. You can do that by doing things with your licensed copy that the copyright holder wrote into your license that you mustn't do. If they sold physical items, they would not be able to apply such adverse terms to your copy.
If you void your own license in that way, you no longer have that license, and so any copying/modification/distribution you're doing is back to being copyright infringement.
Finally, there is such a thing as criminal copyright infringement. That's when you make a significant profit from copyright infringement (for example, getting people to pay you to watch a pay-per-view event that you're illegally redistributing, or even just having adverts that make you money on a website offering unlicensed Nintendo ROMs for emulators)
I mean does it? DRM is cracked within a week or two of launch now. companies are actively removing drm from their games a few months after it comes out because of the cost of licensing it.
AI has accelerated this if anything, and especially the server side stuff. Look at the destiny 2 private servers right now recreating lost content.
Buying in this case is "buying", and is a redefined term inside the legal contract which you choose to agree to when Sony accepts your money for a license to access their published video games, and so, it does not mean buying in the mundane sense of physical goods.
I would suggest this workaround: If you don't accept society's rules about related norms, such as you having a different definition of theft froom society's, you must proactively declare -- in your mind at the minimum -- and accept without two-way agreement on behalf of everyone else whom you steal from, that theft means what you choose to define it as at any moment. Do that, then that logic is solid.
> If you don't accept society's rules about related norms, such as you having a different definition of theft froom society's
Society's "norms" around buying is that you own the thing you buy, which is why we have different words for buy, lease, rent, etc. Society's norms around theft is that you have taken something from someone else and they no longer have access to it.
Sony is the one with the different definition. They're the ones that should proactively declare it. And no, codifying it in legalese and burying it in a EULA isn't declaring it as society would expect.
To add: when Blockbuster existed, we all understood that renting a movie there was a temporary thing and buying the VHS at Best Buy was permanent. That is the expectation one has, not whatever a giant multinational decides it is.
Yes, if your transaction contract redefines very common well understood words like “buy” it honestly should be nullified in the eyes of the law. It’s an inherently deceptive practice.
Want to create new definitions for new words or phrases? Totally fine, but then Sony would need to replace the “buy” button with “blease” or “blent” or whatever they want to call this fake purchasing shit that all software has been playing at for entirely too long.
Well, in the UK under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, with goods, you're entitled to refund, a repair, or a replacement. We're not good at class actions in the UK, so it's down to the individual, but if a one time payment for a game that was physical media, isn't a 'good', what is it?
I'll post the google/ai summary, but this mostly it:
Your Main Rights by Timeframe
Within 30 Days: You have the right to reject the item and get a full refund.
After 30 Days and up to 6 Months: You must give the retailer one opportunity to repair or replace the item. If that repair or replacement fails, you are generally entitled to a full refund. The law assumes the fault was there when you bought it unless the retailer proves otherwise.
After 6 Months: You can still request a repair or replacement, but the burden is on you to prove the fault was present when you received the item. You have up to six years (five years in Scotland) to bring a claim for faulty goods in court.
After GTA6 comes out on PC, Sony should get ready for a crash that will make the PS3 launch issue look tiny. Kids these days just play Rolox or Fortnite on tablets, the gamer pipeline is gone and what ever is left of the gamers are migrating to SteamOS/PC. Older kids would much rather use Insta/Kick/etc as an IRL MMO. Teen boys are more concerned with looksmaxxing than video games.
Maybe they know this and this is one last milking of the their installbase before the big fall.
Sony will lose this. Why? Because courts can point to the fact
that in the 1990s, people bought a game, then could play it and
re-sell it freely. So the claim about Sony how people only ever
"licenced" something from them, and NOW face more restrictions
than before, simply because Sony claims so, makes no sense. That's
against established practices.
Sony should be disbanded by the court for wasting our time here.
If you ask any average gamer, "if you buy a game on Steam or on a CD from Walmart, do you operate on the understanding that you are now legally allowed to make as many copies of it as you want and sell those copies?"
The answer will unanimously be no. If they owned it, the answer would be yes. They might say they own it, but they will clearly and reasonably understand that they do not own it in legal terms, because they understand what they cannot do with it.
Some of them will understand that they can legally make copies for backups, but why would you need the law to tell you that it's legal for you to make a backup of something you own? You wouldn't.
You can buy a hard drive, but buying it does not give you the IP for all the technology that went into it. No reasonable person believes that would be the case, either. You can buy a car, but you can't then copy all the parts and start mass producing your own copies of that car. Do any of you go through the McDonalds drive thru and believe you now own the burgers, fries and all the packaging that goes with it to the extent that you can start up your own McDonalds with logo and all?
Whether it's physical or digital, even if people have contradictions in their head since they aren't lawyers, they understand enough about how things work to conclude that what they understood when they pressed the purchase button equates to not obtaining total ownership of all aspects.
It is simply true. This is so broadly understood that I don't even think you would need to use a jury. A judge could simply throw the case out at this point on that alone, if it hadn't already been settled in past legal precedent, which it has.
At current prices, consoles cannot just die fast enough. Would be very funny if Trump sanctions Sony for Xbox to close US console gap, and then everyone simply moves to PC.
> This feels like a strange reductio ad absurdum argument in reverse, where the argument isn’t disproven by reducing it: it is instead proven that merchandise and specifically software is sold as copies not as a singular entity. I’m not sure who Sony’s lawyers are trying to appeal to here, or if they just wanted to burn through a few dozen billable hours on an argument that makes no sense.
Unfortunately I think this argument has a bit more merit than you think. There is already copyright precedent that you cannot enjoy first sale rights on digital property (e.g. "a marketplace for used MP3s", or "we'll scan this book and loan it to you and we promise not to touch it until the loan expires"). Physical goods have specific legal rights that the courts have so far refused to extend to digital files[0]. In that legal environment, every digital copy of a work is fundamentally some data combined with permission to make use of copies of that data under some conditions. There are no digital copies, only digital licenses.
But that's merely an argument that third-parties don't get to copy things just because the way they're copying it emulates an act one might do with a physical copy. Where Sony goes off the rails is that they then argue that the only two options can be "a license under our chosen terms" and "complete and total copyright assignment," and then illustrate the absurdity of someone thinking they bought copyright ownership over Resident Evil (which genuinely can't be sold in parallel like this) to argue that the only way Sony can sell games digitally at all is under terms of their own choosing.
A smart judge would see through this and argue that Sony could at least have chosen terms that materially resembled the rights of someone who owned a physical copy. That is, they could have provided a service to allow someone to transfer their license to another PlayStation Network user. But at the same time, the law has a nasty habit of bowing to its best customers[1], and I would not be surprised if the judge just goes along with what Sony says (especially if the plaintiffs don't do a good job rebutting it).
[0] The reasoning for this is that there is no such thing as a digital move. On a computer, "move" is "copy and delete", and the act of making a copy is squarely in the realm of ordinary copyright protection.
[1] See also: the European Commission and California's abject refusal to require games you bought and paid for to continue to work offline.
These days, it feels like we can't truly own anything anymore. Sure, physical media used to break often, but these days I just don't get that satisfying feeling of actually owning something.
If we're not owning it, you're not selling it, you're leasing it. Terminology on sales pages should reflect this. "Subscribe now" "purchase license" etc. should be mandated if this is the expectation. Terms like "buy" without qualification are misleading in this context, but they won't remove them from store pages because people are more likely to pay higher rates for something if they believe they are actually owning the good in perpetuity.
This is actually state law in CA. People reported Sony to California's Attorney General, who basically said they weren't going to do anything about it.
Unfortunately the law is only as useful as its enforcement.
Is that true? This says it’s still pending with a hearing in Oct
https://clouddosage.com/playstation-digital-game-lawsuit-son...
What was their rationale for doing nothing?
Sony supports the media industry in CA. It would be a shame if they moved their studios elsewhere...
What was their rationale for doing nothing?
Carrot: Free vacations? Merch? Benefits ...
Stick: Scared because taking actions against the Buy (aka you own nothing) is paramount to going in a fight with a entire industry.
Class action civil case should still be doable? And 100k small claims court cases would hurt.
> Class action civil case should still be doable?
Nope, because there's a stance in EULA's footnote (with extremely small letters) that you give up your rights to class action civil case.
So you've verified this? In this specific case? Or are you just being a wise guy.
Regardless, these sorts of things have been fought before, over and over. Often, courts don't care about an EULA when wrongful action has been taken.
The jurisdiction matters too, of course.
This is the only regulation I feel is reasonable. When it comes to luxury goods like video games, it doesn’t make sense to dictate how the product is offered. But by all means insist they’re clear with what the transaction type is.
I can imagine the natural competitive wedge where GOG can say “Buy Game” but Steam has to say “Lease Game” on their buttons.
This would be case-by-case in Steam. There are some games which really do sell under "irrevocable license to play" (which, short of granting copyright privileges, is about as close as you can get to ownership for a digital product). Other games on Steam do not.
I think it would highlight the differences between publishers / studios more than store fronts.
> There are some games which really do sell under "irrevocable license to play" (which, short of granting copyright privileges, is about as close as you can get to ownership for a digital product).
Far from it. E.g. excludes resale.
For digital products, that would mean copyright privileges. Else there is no definition of "buy" that applies to GOG sales either.
> For digital products, that would mean copyright privileges.
If you sell me a (copy of a) program, I own it and need no (c) privilege to be allowed to resell it. Just like a book.
I even take issue with "Purchase license". Shouldn't it be "Lease License"? Purchase implies that it can't be revoked, no?
Depends on the details of the license, no?
Nah. Licenses can be revoked. When I buy a hunting license I don't get it forever
You don’t buy a hunting license though. You pay a fee and the government issues you a license.
That feels like a distinction without a difference. On the other hand, "buy" vs "buy license" is actually a meaningful difference.
They both communicate the same thing because they both start with “buy.” They communicate Ownership and collapse to the same thing to a normal consumer: implied ownership of the game. Insisting that the ownership is of the license and it says it on the button doesn’t really help, because no reasonable person thinks that a “purchased” license can be revoked for any reason or no reason at all. Why doesn’t anybody think that? Because “owning” a license implies you actually control it. But a license you can’t control at all means you own NOTHING! Not even a license. So “buy license" miscommunicates in the same way as “buy.”
Then maybe is should be forced to say: “Buy revocable license” and require the user to answer randomized multiple choice questions regarding the terms of the license that act in opposition to the purchaser. Collect metrics on wrong answers and if greater than say, 15% of people can’t determine what they are actually handing over money for, fine and require additional clarity.
Or, just flip the tables and say the historical meaning of buy implies transfer of ownership in exchange for some trade. Since the seller no longer owns the items that was sold in the transaction, they have no additional rights that are covered by other areas of the law (such as copyright). First sale applies and if the seller doesn’t provide a mechanism to facilitate that sale, the buyer is free to exercise that right in whatever way they see fit.
Revocable is an obscure word to normal people. It should say temporary.
It’s only temporary if they revoke it.
And the license is not perpetual. It can expire or be revoked.
Are you suggesting that "Purchase license" is somehow unclear and "Pay a fee and we will issue you a license" is clearer?
But licenses in general you don't just "buy", you "earn" them somehow, then also usually you pay a price for it too, but it's typically about knowing about some rules and/or norms.
Software licenses are bought all the time.
Sure, but that's a very different type of license compared to a hunting license, driver license or similar stuff, you know, the context.
And the initial comment that started this was that "Purchase license" in reference to this... software license... wasn't clear. Arguing about whether you buy a hunting license or that it's not a perfect analogy seems pedantic and irrelevant.
> Arguing about whether you buy a hunting license or that it's not a perfect analogy seems pedantic and irrelevant
It's a completely different thing, it's like comparing buying a "license" (ticket) to ride a roller coaster and taking a driving license, they're obviously different things, not exactly pedantic, imo.
Right but when you buy it, they tell you how long it is valid for.
With video games it is often for some unknown amount of time, and of course they don't tell you that.
True, but you do get it under clear terms, for a duration that is both obvious and well established.
A lease is a license/document/interest/contract/deed granting use rights. So lease license is not meaningful.
It's a non-transferable lease that can be canceled at any time by the issuer.
The real problem is that most of society still thinks of games as a piece of physical media that you combine with a player that allows you to play the game. In that world you have a liscense to the software, and a physical token which is transferable and therefore valuable.
I'd argue that we need to decouple transferability and cancel ability from physical media. If this were to happen then the word "Buy" makes sense precisely the same way it used to with physical media. Of course more provision needs to be provided for live service games regarding cancel ability.
Yes, some people are trying to achieve this by arguing that physical media should stick around forever. I think the real solution is providing the same protections and rights for digital purchases as we had with physical media.
That would be a real win for consumers since we get the advantages of digital media with the ownership and transference rights of physical media.
Of course this would be a great inconvenience to those who wish to charge the same price for a temporary revocable license to the content, and they have deep lobbying pockets to fight against it.
As long as we're in copyright world, it ought to be structured as three separate parties:
1. Licensor, the company who makes the game.
2. Licensee, the person buying a digital copy of the game.
3. Safekeeper, Steam or another platform that stores the digital copy on behalf of Licensee. Similar to how depositories store securities and guarantee that they can be neither lost nor duplicated. For a separate fee perhaps.
Good luck. SKG got an official response from the EU that was basically "copyright law is a sacred cow, we can't change it"
And if you buy a license, it should either have a fixed term that is clearly communicated, or should be forever, and transferrable, not "untile we decide we don't want you to have it anymore".
Someone in past threads mentioned that many digital sales website in fact no longer use "buy" anymore, and instead deniably implicate purchases by such expressions as "Add to Cart", "Proceed to Checkout", and "Pay".
Yes, all this talk about the language used still leads us to the same frustrating outcome: customer pays for something, and at some unspecified point in the future that same thing is taken away from them. I don't care if 6 years earlier I clicked a button that said Pay vs Buy, I care that my purchase is being removed due to some backroom licensing issue.
Wonder if you could have those buttons and not give the user anything at the end, since you never said they were buying anything, only giving you money.
Very much matching my thinking on the argument the plaintiffs are making. Sony just needs to change the labels on a few buttons.
But for some reason they don't want to and are willing to go to court on the matter. As you say, using the word "Buy" is stronger than "License", but it seems a strange hill to die upon.
Yes. "buy" and "purchase" are redefined in the EULA
They shouldn’t be able to redefine common terms when closer terms like lease or license are available. It’s misleading.
It's also totally illegal in many countries.. you can write whatever nonsense you want on an eula, but it will be about as useful as toilet paper in court.
In which case I redefine "pay" as "torrent it with a very respectable upload ratio".
I wonder if said EULA can also help me make sense of my diceware password.
I would have spent much less money if I knew they could revoke the license at their own discretion
this would wreck a lot of the marketing efforts and probably be bad for their bottom line in the long run
I'm surprised the Sony team isn't freaked out about this
Then the button becomes License and everyone knows that's the one you click to buy.
As much as I empathize with (and even support) the reasoning, I wonder if it would have a tangible effect. Is there anyone who was gonna click "buy" but not "license" (presuming they relabel the button and everything else is the same)?
I think it depends. If they are also required to allow 3rd party stores, and one of the third parties has a “buy” button while the others have “lease (lifetime)” buttons, it might sway a decent number of people.
Same thing with consoles, if one has “buy” and the other “lease”, then it might not convert everyone but could it take 5% of sales? 10%? 20%??
I don't think the general public is engaged enough to understand the difference between "license" and "buy". They will look at the button and think "This is what I click to get it" and don't understand that they are just temporarily renting the thing. To most people, "license" is a noun: something you carry in your pocket to drive. The word is already overused by media vendors to confuse people.
It does defuse any excuses like "why do you say I can't buy games? I bought this game just now" and that can be a stepping stone to actual change.
That's assuming there's an alternative.
Yes, the language should be clear and precise.
Also, if the whole industry string-replaces "lease" for "buy," I doubt the effect will be much.
It should in a functioning system, people who see lease or license on a game may be more hesitant to buy it and might pick a game who differentiates itself by marketing itself as being a permanent purchase.
The point is to not mislead people. When you write "buy," you are implying that the "buy"er is obtaining a perpetual right to use the software, subject to certain rules (i.e. you can't make copies and redistribute it). "Buy" implies the buyer has an absolute right. When "buy" actually means a temporary revocable license is issued, and the buyer has no rights, that's a problem.
We won't know without A/B testing, but I suspect aesthetics mean nothing here and, for example, someone isn't going to turn down playing GTA VI if the only button between them and the game says "purchase license" as opposed to "buy".
I'd rather have my rights as a consumer protected or get something tangible for giving them up (like cheaper games) than introduce even more legalese into online shops.
I agree but that's not even enough. If you only lease the game, they will also need to tell you exactly for how long you lease it. Any reasonable person would have an issue with a lease for an indefinite time period that can be canceled at any time without refund, it doesn't sound acceptable at all.
This is the law in some places. Companies solved the problem by not using any buying verbs at all. The button you click to not-buy the app says "$3.99" or "Add to cart". When you go to the cart the next step is "Pay now" or "Continue to checkout".
I know I am in the overwhelming minority and that most people will just continue to buy Sony's stuff anyway, but I decided a few years ago when all the ownership crap came up that I am just not buying stuff that I don't own. Sony's PS4 went to my local electronics recycler and I haven't bought a Sony product since. I can't realistically do it with everything, there are some products I have to buy rather I get to own them or not. But I am not putting up with it where I can and gaming is optional -- plus GOG has served me really well since.
GOG is better, but I still really don't like buying video games that I don't own (ie can't resell). Come to think of it, I've only ever digitally purchased one game above $5, Minecraft, and even that got revoked when Microsoft bought them.
I'm keeping my ps4 as long as the hardware still runs because at least I can still buy discs for it. I have a nice collection of high-replay-value single player games. I know discs are just physical licenses at this point in time, not actual software on disc like the old school days.
But even with all this nonsense from Sony I don't think they'll cross the rubicon of terminating licenses that come on physical discs for their older consoles. If they do, I hear you can jailbreak ps4s :)
On this topic I'd like to give a big kudos to the devs at https://decomp.dev/ who are tirelessly working to decompile old video games for fun, preserving it for future generations.
It just says the site has been seized by the FBI.
Seems fine to me.
I don't see that, maybe it was temporary?
Oops. I forgot to switch my precognition off when testing.
IMO the better thing is to force these companies to dump this mindset that digital information is a finite resource. Sony's logic doesn't even make sense to begin with. If person A buys a game, that game does not suddenly become unavailable for person B to also buy. I mean, even copyright recognizes that it is possible for a rightsholder to own all rights to the master copy of a good but other people can own separate copies of the work without infringing on the rights of the rightsholder. Sony is just taking the maximalist view here because they want to keep the power of being able to control who and what has access to whatever they sell, for any arbitrary reason whatsoever.
> IMO the better thing is to force these companies to dump this mindset
IMO this is a strictly idealistic view in a world where only a very small vocal minority actually seems to care. The vast majority of people will continue to reward these companies with their wallets, so they have no incentive to change course.
> Sony would like you to know that any reasonable gamer would know that purchasing a game is just licensing a game, not owning it.
In that case, any reasonable company would have no trouble being honest and not using the words “buy” and “purchase” with respect to game access.
I wonder if anyone will ever have the guts to enter the gaming console market using open source as a base. Linux support for GPUs has never been better than what it is today. I've spent the last 4 or 5 years gaming exclusively on Linux just to highlight how good it has gotten, and no I don't have to run around doing command line incantations. Linux has improved a lot, heck, even AI you have a drastically better experience working with AI on Linux than on Windows (which hearing this 10 years ago would have confused me given how many issues I had with my GPUs on Linux for YEARS).
All someone has to do is assemble a reasonable desktop that runs Linux, gives you access to GOG and Steam, and you've already got more games than most game consoles, the issue right now I suppose would be moreso hardware costs.
You would also want to make sure your Desktop Environment is fine tuned with a controller in mind.
If you can read games from discs, you'd be getting the attention of many people. The facts are that most people have always bought digital over discs but when you take that away, and it becomes clear that they could lose their games forever, everyone wants CDs back.
You're literally describing the steam machine/steam deck. Also, bazzite is an immuable distro based on silverblue that does pretty much exactly what you described.
I know there's some issues with big picture mode and Nvidia, but that's an Nvidia driver problem, not a limitation of the platform.
> I wonder if anyone will ever have the guts to enter the gaming console market using open source as a base.
It's definitely possible, but I suspect that Valve (or some other major player) must first prove the concept to be viable for a business.
e.g. The Steam Deck wasn't the first PC gaming handheld made, but it was the one that proved there was a viable market, which led to a bunch of competitors following Valve's lead.
The Steam Machine, unfortunately, botched the execution due to high pricing. If pricing had been good, I'm guessing that it too could have been the proof-of-concept needed to jump start the market.
Steam says hi: https://store.steampowered.com/hardware/
Though one could argue that Linux GPU support is as good as it is because of Steam.
Like the Steam Machine? Or do you mean open hardware too?
You can stream Big Picture with tools like Sunshine/Moonlight or their forks. Works amazingly well over a LAN if you have a server somewhere and stream to something connected to the TV. I have a headless server and an NVIDIA GPU so not sure what the sibling comment is referring to about compatibility.
Is this not the Steam Machine? Provides a console-like experience with its controller and SteamOS.
Unless it is subscription based online game I take that buying game is perpetual unrevocable licence. Sadly non-transferable but that is trade-off for digital.
This is going to backfire spectacularly.
Between this claim, ramping down disc production, and the possibility of a $999 home console,they are going to have a difficult time.
There are still so few PS5 exclusives. Even fewer with PS5 Pro support. It’s going to take a lot to gain trust and justify a PS6. No clear path to victory here with a hardware update.
I like the graphics horsepower of my PS5, but a lot of the games I play, I'm just not sure I would notice the difference between it and my old PS4. Resolution is the biggest thing, since I didn't have a PS4 Pro and it'd be limited to 1080p on my TV.
Yeah I've already decided there won't be any new Sony consoles in my household. Games are so big now I can't possibly download all my games at once so if the store goes down I lose all those games permanently and $70+ for AAA games that are really hit and miss in the "fun" category is no longer worth it to me. The PS5 was also pretty darn expensive when it came out and I can't say I've played too many PS5 exclusive games since I bought it. Most of the PS5 catalog has been indie games available on Steam or ported PS4 games... and with Sony reportedly releasing a new console next year they are clearly high on their own supply.
Never thought I'd have this opinion, but the gaming industry as is needs to crash/burn and rebuild itself. So many downright wild anti-consumer things happening in the last 10 years and studios have completely lost sight of how to keep themselves out of bankruptcy.
It will be fine.
Gaming as a whole is a shadow of what it used to be, specifically because it has been tailored to the masses who have no real opinion on any of this other then they want to play what their friends play.
What I don't understand is why Sony is the one being targeted for this when this has been the case with any digital purchase for 20 years?
I don't know of a digital marketplace that works differently.
But instead all of the hate, the boycots, etc are all targeting Sony instead of focusing on actually figuring out how to improve digital purchase rights which extend beyond games (and far beyond Sony).
I know that some online hate it when you compare this situation to PC since there is choice there, but not when it comes to this. Sure you can choose which store you want to not really own things with but its the same result. Steam did this a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1g19n60/steam_now_te...
Where were the boycots then.
> What I don't understand is why Sony is the one being targeted for this when this has been the case with any digital purchase for 20 years?
Examples: literally two days ago Sony permanently removed access to over 500 movies for people who had "purchased" them, and only a couple months ago Sony announced their plan to permanently shutter physical media production for Playstation.
I agree with you that it's a systemic issue but it also doesn't surprise me that Sony is seen as the lead boogeyman. I think if you asked the average gamer what their opinion of Valve's business practices was vs. Sony you'd get a very different answer even if the legalese in the TOS is similar.
It's incoherent.
They're also forcing Stage Tour to include discs with their guitar bundles, even though many PS5s can't play discs.
Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo and more bear the blame here for this and more.
RIP Lik Sang.
Lik Sang was awesome back in the day for procuring accessories like classic XBOX controller to USB adapters that weren't dodgy duct tape jobs. Hard to believe they were forced out of business by Sony two decades ago.
I maybe should have phrased that better since I do understand their announcement around disks and removing the movies is a reason why they are the current target.
I just find it hypocritical, people keep saying they are going to move to xbox or pc next gen and its like. Their policy is exactly the same. You have the same risk and not really ownership.
And I am not defending Sony, they have a long history of getting cocky with their consoles and pulling some shit. But in this particular case they are following the trend that we allowed by going all digital on PC and buying digital games on consoles.
Sony isnt going to be the one that changes this, the only way to expect change would be targeting all of them including Valve. But everyone, like this article, just seems to gloss right over that and seem to imply its only Sony that is the problem here.
> You have the same risk and not really ownership.
You don't, though. When I download a game on Steam or GOG, I have the files on my PC. I can back them up. I can modify them.
Yes, live service games still have an online component I don't control, but I do still control the files on my computer. I don't on a console.
Actually, I don't own any consoles for reasons of software freedom but I hear they are much more difficult to do things like back up your data, etc.
Yes, you do. When you play a digital game on Playstation you also download the files...
It may be harder like you say but the law doesn't really see it any differently PC vs Console if you want to archive/backup your digital game media.
On consoles in general, backing up digital media (if even possible) requires full-system exploits, thus bypassing DRM, and decrypting them also requires breaking DRM
Woah, we're not talking about cracking your games. I think every console from at least the last two generations has supported copying game files to external/removable media.
Disabling DRM is required for basic archiving if the issue is someone else having the ability to decide the thing you bought will self-destruct. Copying doesn't matter if it doesn't produce a usable backup.
If you remove the DRM, then you do actually own the thing for practical purposes. And non-ownership of things you buy is unjust, so entertaining the law here is silly.
How do you backup game files from a console, to an external drive/location that you own; and ensure the validity of that backup will still be usable on the console later?
By inserting storage media into the removable/external media port and copying or moving the files.
> Their policy is exactly the same.
It's not, though. Their ToS is the same. They reserve to right to deny you ownership of your games. Only Sony has been stupid enough to actually do it.
Every ToS in the world is designed to screw the signee over as much as it possibly can, so you'd need to go live in the woods if you wanted to escape it, but there is a tangible difference between how much companies actually abuse the provisions in their ToS. I don't know how you can say "Microsoft reserves the legal right to drill a hole in my skull" and "Sony is actively drilling a hole in my skull" are `exactly the same`.
To be clear, you never owned the games, you own the disk that contains the games. The right they are reserving is to revoke your legal access to the games you're licensing. They can't repossess the disk, but they can deny you the right to use what's on it. Obviously digital-only also exists, in which case you own literally nothing. All that remains is the contingent access that they legally have control over.
> To be clear, you never owned the games
To be clear, when I use the phrase "deny you ownership of your games", I'm talking in Common English, not legalese. We don't actually have to normalise this. Legalese aside, the social contract for decades has been that you own your digital purchases. Now that the social contract is being violated, we certainly should be striving to enshrine it in law via regulation, which would also render any amount of ToS legalese to be worth as much as digital toilet paper.
I think you're under-appreciating the importance. It's not just pedantry. This has been true since EULAs have existed. And it's kinda insane that people think owning a disk gives them ownership of the intellectual property contained on it. You've always been given a license. The difference is that you can often transfer that license by selling the physical copy of a game whereas most digital licenses are exclusive.
The ability to deny ownership does exist these days. Sony can push an update that bricks your Playstation.
So this whole thing is actually an argument over whether games should be made available in a form that allows license transfer (which I support) or not. But it's a fair point to argue that for any actual benefit the remedy has to be applied globally, not just to Sony.
Like the other commenter said, we don't have to normalize this. A reasonable jury can and should find that Sony pushing an update to intentionally brick Playstations is criminal destruction of property, regardless of what some EULA says. And we can make it very clear in the law that that's the case, and prosecute any individuals involved.
So its fine that they force you to agree to something when you paid for it but its not fine when they do the thing you agreed too?
Instead of actually trying to fix the issue we just hope that Valve never has to do the thing they are legally allowed to do because we agreed they could.
I honestly don't care who has done what, I don't care what company is supposedly better than another company.
Overnight Valve, Microsoft, whoever could just as easily remove access to a bunch of digital purchases.
How about instead we just don't excuse any of the companies?
I'm not sure what you propose. Generally speaking we don't get a perfect solution on the first try.
Would it be great if we could make all digital purchases better? Hell yes. Is it realistic? No.
If we can make one company/segment pay or set legal precedent that this is not okay, we're at least moving in the right direction.
> So its fine that they force you to agree to something when you paid for it but its not fine when they do the thing you agreed too?
Two things can be both "not fine" but one can still be worse than the other.
Of course, I am not arguing otherwise. But if your core problem is not the removal of content but what Sony is arguing right now. You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk.
Just because one has done it and the other hasn't is a technicality to me since that could change overnight.
The point that I am trying to make here is that it is insane to me that all of this is focused on Sony. And frankly I don't have a good solution here, but just arguing that one TOS is better than another because one company hasn't done the thing yet but could is not a good argument.
How many times have we seen management change, companies being bought, whatever and suddenly something really bad happens.
I am just getting really frustrated by Sony this, Sony that. Boycot sony, etc when if all we do is move to another platform with the same policies do we really expect anything to change?
We are in the most emotionally driven period of human history to date where reasoning takes a back seat. It's super frustrating but once you realize this instance isn't a one off you can start to focus on the bigger picture. I'm not saying this makes it less frustrating, but perhaps it'd help you to cast things in a new light. You're mostly talking past people who are dunking on Sony right now, because they are more interested in riding the emotional wave than actually making sense of the situation. Never mind that owning a physical disk has pretty much been dead for the better part of a decade or two anyway with day 1 patches and online activations. GIVE ME PHYSICAL DISK. To be 100% honest I think people want to put games on their shelf and look at them and any whiff of an argument is just people grasping at something, anything, rather than something based.
>You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk.
it's not the same overall risk though.
accurate risk assessment includes past incidents in the calculation. sony has a demonstrated pattern, valve does not.
if you choose to ignore past behavior in your risk assessments, you are doing it wrong.
People did risk assessments with VMWare and we see how that turned out.
Things can change, just because you make your risk assessment doesn't mean you should ignore that there is still something in that contract that could turn on you just as easily.
Should we go back 10 years, maybe the risk would have been the same. Did Sony do any of these things then, but the policy was the same. How about 10 years from now, just because of your "risk assessment" doesn't mean that Valve is suddenly safer, just just means so far they have been safer.
I am not saying don't use Valve, but there is zero reason to believe they could not just as easily do this.
You have clearly never negotiated a contract.
>You have clearly never negotiated a contract.
feel free to make an actual point rather than vague assumptions about my history.
when you do risk assessments, which over my career i have done thousands, you include historical data.
Nobody is arguing the risk values are exactly the same. The argument is that the risk posture is the same. You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value, which is an individual value judgement and thus incredibly far from an assumed fact. Some people do care about posture more than value and different people weight value differently as I'm sure your thousands of assessments have uncovered.
In any event, I think with all the data you'd see that Value has also removed games from its platform. So I'm not sure the value gap is even as wide as you seem to be implying.
>Nobody is arguing the risk values are exactly the same.
please re-read the part i quoted from the parent, where they say it's the same risk.
>You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value
i did not say "the only thing that matters" anywhere.
you, and the parent, are reading something into my comments that i have not written. the only thing i said is that the risk is not the same because sony has a pattern of behavior worth considering.
Nintendo still has pretty good physical. Move to them if you can imo
and much better franchise
> Where were the boycots then.
1. steam does not have a monopoly on distribution rights for PC games. if steam were to go bankrupt publishers could honor your keys and even other marketplaces could do it. steam themselves let you bring your own key.
2. steam has been a benevolent marketplace leader, even though DRM itself plays against customers, the rest of the stuff they pushed while leading, like game sharing, play and refund, offline playing, are pro consumer.
3. why would your knee jerk reaction to this is pointing a finger to steam, what's your endgame?
Why is your knee jerk reaction to defend steam?
Sure they have said and claimed a lot of things, but their TOS says the same thing that Sony is arguing. Its suddenly this big shock now but no one cared before? Sure the way Sony is handling this is fumble after fumble but thats PR.
My problem is that Valve for some reason gets a free pass because "they are the good guys" when their own policy means they could do the exact same thing.
I own a lot of games on Steam, but I am not nieve to assume that there is not a chance that at some point I could loose all or some of those games. People are for some reason in a false sense of security about Steam and that is a problem. They have to be part of the conversation when it comes to digital ownership. Ignoring them means we can't actually solve the issue.
Yeah, right XD
Valve killed the previously thriving boxed game industry two decades ago and people can't get over how much they love everything about Valve. Sony follows 20 years later (in a world where internet is faster than installing from BluRay and games are outgrowing three layer discs) and people lose their mind.
There's more noise about this than Microsoft's mass layoffs at the game companies they bought up.
Physical PC games weren't great in the 2000s. Online activated serial keys, optical disc based DRM that caused problems during both the 9x>NT and XP>Vista transitions, the only thing that made PC gaming tolerable for me was gamecopyworld. Valve (eventually) offered something better than that.
PC games can still be physical. Burn some discs or copy the files onto a USB stick and put it in a box. I think it's crazy that boutique companies like Limited Run Games completely avoid the platform when it's the only one left that isn't actively hostile to the core principles of the company. Admittedly PC does have the image of being a digital distribution only platform these days, but it's illusory and breaking that illusion is a marketing problem.
People were pretty pissed about the xbox layoffs, it's just that things move fast and this was the next thing.
I disagree with the assertion that Valve is responsible for the death of physical game copies.
First off, console games have gradually moved away from offering physical copies for years. This had the (probably deliberate) effect of killing the used game market. Earlier attempts to kill that market were driven by the proliferation of digital content that could not be resold.
Second, physical copies on the PC have not been guaranteed for a very long time. I would suggest it was actually the wide-scale proliferation of indie games that did more to kill the physical copy market than any deliberate transition from AAA studios. There are thousands of indie games out there now. Without digital copies, it would be impossible for anyone to actually purchase any of them.
And the momentum to move away from physical copies for PC gaming has been there for a very long time. No one was going to Best Buy to pick up a physical copy of minesweeper. There have been other factors as well, such as the popularization of MMORPGS which provided years of content from a single physical copy.
Really though, the idea that without Valve, the PC gaming market would still be chugging along on physical game copies just isn't realistic. It goes completely against the momentum built over the last 25 years of PC gaming.
- Sony has a track record of removing purchased media en masse, while Valve does not.
- While it could be argued that Valve runs an effective monopoly of the PC platform based on their marketshare, Valve operates on a platform with competitive options including DRM-free stores.
- Game consoles have always been more attached to physical media than PCs.
- Sony is the largest player in the market (disregarding mobile phone gaming) with more total marketshare than Valve and the PC platform. This makes them a much more visible target.
Valve doesn't randomly remove stuff I've payed for from my library. Even when the ability to purchase something goes away, people who already bought it keep access to it.
They patched CS:GO away, a game I paid retail price for, with "Counter-Strike 2" and overnight dropped support for my platform (MacOS).
Sony has never stolen a game from me, unlike Valve. The closest incident was that movie thing, which was more a failure on their part to negotiate perpetual licensing with the rightsholder.
Valve pivoting away from MacOS is a consequence of choices Apple has made for their platform, many of which made it a more hostile place for Steam to exist. This is baked into the long standing Apple model of software distribution, where API and architectural changes inevitably obsolete software with Apple usually providing only a limited time window for cross compatibility.
You can still play your purchases on an operating system that isn't actively fighting against you running them.
CS:GO is still accessible via the beta feature. Not sure if you can still play it on MacOS. I agree that that's the wrong way to do it, but at least you still have access to it in theory.
Valve was a plucky underdog against the established publishers and, while dominant today, still has reasonable competition, sony is a giant corp with a reputation and a monopoly on playstations.
> sony is a giant corp with a reputation and a monopoly on playstations.
That's like saying Volkswagen has a monopoly on Volkswagen cars.
Sony clearly does not have a monopoly on the video game industry, and a plurality of video games are cross-platform across consoles, PCs (Windows/Linux), and even MacOS.
It would be slightly more accurate to say "volkswagen has a monopoly on volkswagen cars... and all accessories and replacement parts"
But the analogy breakdown because a car is more or less a complete item you buy and use for a purpose (aside from consumables) whereas a playstation is completely useless without games to play on it.
So maybe volkswagen brand gas would be the best analogy here.
Not really. I can plug a generic usb cable into my Playstation and it charges my aftermarket controller just fine. I can even use aftermarket screws or put the console in an aftermarket enclosure.
Where can I buy an aftermarket optical drive and motherboard?
Probably the same place you can buy an aftermarket CAN board and controller for your Volkswagen.
Oh, looks like cars and consoles aren't that different after all.
Except for the software ecosystem which is the main driver of revenue for consoles and exists largely to support the sale and distribution of products from third parties, all of which is centrally controlled by the platform holder.
Someone else in the thread made the comparison to fuel, I'll go with that. Last time I checked, there was no such thing as petroleum DRM.
Volkswagen cars aren't a platform that fosters a billion dollar marketplace of third party sellers that contribute the bulk of value delivered by the product.
If I want to move from point A to point B, I can choose from BMW, Audi or any cheaper Chinese brand.
But I cannot play 'Astro Bot' on another platform.
You can't get the Volkswagen engine sound or drive experience in a BMW, though.
Remember? Moving from point A to point B.
> Valve killed the previously thriving boxed game industry two decades ago
Boxed PC games were practically dead by the time Valve started selling 3rd party games on their marketplace. Most game stores around me had stopped selling them or massively shrunk the shelf space for them. Xbox, Gamecube, Playstation 3, they had whole walls of the store dedicated to their stuff. PC games had a couple of shelves in the middle of the store, if even that. Sales for PC games had massively fallen between 1999 and 2005 while the rest of the game industry exploded.
The industry had shrunk over a third in five years before Valve started selling online. You can't say it was "thriving".
The PC has thriving piracy scene. So for any game worth playing there were lawful backups available on specialized sites. In a way it is different.
Sony has a very long corporate tradition of fucking over their customers. Valve does not.
People still give money to Sony for some reason, but as far as I'm concerned that's on them. Call it victim-blaming at this point, I guess.
> when you compare this situation to PC since there is choice there, but not when it comes to this
They may not be playing in the same league as Steam, but PC folks do have the choice of GoG and itch, which both sell DRM-free binaries.
steam also sells drm free binaries. the steam drm is optional and the publisher or Dev can choose to go without it
of course it's better that gog requires you go without it for the customer, but I'm not sure it helps in terms of legal rights. If gog shuts down you'll need to have your games backed up and downloaded to still own them and you won't have any license to a new download or etc
I honestly keep forgetting GoG exists but fair, maybe saying there is no choice is a bit much but if you want to play a given game it may not be available there meaning your choice is to not play it or deal with this.
> it may not be available there meaning your choice is to not play it or deal with this.
On PC, there are always other options [pirate flag emoji]. Steam (in many, but not all cases) competes with free. Sony doesn't on the PS5.
I think it's because they're a huge player in the space and the PS5 appears to be the dominant player in the console space this generation. This affects so many people in their faces right now, where as the switch to "buying" movies on an online platform was more gradual as it was a new platform offering and not one that had had ownership from day one (arguably since 1994 with the PS1).
So in short, I think it's because they're the big guy making a very visible change to the broader public, instead of a new platform with a new way of doing things (how Steam was).
Nintendo is the only one still selling video games that you own practically speaking, ie you own the cartridge and it has the game on it or at least has the key. Unless I'm out of the loop on that.
Even disc-based games in boxes have mostly required online connectivity to download most game files for a long time.
It doesn't make it right but I feel like the writing has been on the wall for ages.
When You rootkit people, it tends to be unforgettable..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Sony announced they're not going to print more physical discs for games. So far no one else in the big three has confirmed they're doing this, so obviously the controversy goes to them
I think the difference here is that sony is in the middle of taking down their ps3 store, and while they say you'll be able to download the games for the "foreseeable future" I don't think many folks have a great deal of confidence in this being true for for that long.
Valve has spent the better part of 20 years fostering a good relations with the gaming community and pretty much every gamer has a great deal of confidence that they'll protect your purchases.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA
Because they did a whole marketing stunt over it. Granted it was more than a decade ago, so probably just a remnants of old console war.
Sony is just handling this stupidly.
What they should do is just stay silent and stay the course. Everyone fucking knows in 10 years time physical media will be dead and all of this is water under the bridge.
Remember your wallet is your vote in all of this, no matter the size of it!
I think I'll vote with my VPN protected piracy.
If I'm not buying a thing, but instead a limited license to a thing, then I don't care about buying that thing anymore and I'll just take it.
I doubt I'll be alone and with Denuvo being regularly defeated on release day, I'm not too worried about availability.
The whales have votes orders of magnitude larger than mine.
It's nothing like democracy though, and the concept of paying (or not paying) to vote is antithetical to a democratic process. We should not confuse the two.
Revocable software licenses are a scam.
If buying isn't owning, then pirating isn't stealing.
Pirating is basically unlicensed use.
Sony is correct here?
If I buy a CD or a cassette or a record, I own the physical media but I only have a licence to the music it contains - not the ownership, and not the copyright. Whether I can play that music as a DJ at an event or on the radio, or remix it as a backing track for another song I'm creating and so on, depends on licencing laws and royalty payments. That was true well before the internet, and it's why Wham! get a huge boost in royalties every December whenever a radio station plays Last Christmas.
A separate question is whether Sony can _revoke_ a licence and delete the game off your device again.
The important bit is that you can sell the CD or cassette or record.
Yes. Not just practically speaking, but legally, you own the disc.
True, but no additional rights to distribute replicas of the copyrighted music and composer works.
Note, if a band does a cover of a popular song, the original music composer rights also don't magically transfer because someone sang a slightly different version.
Sony may not be technically breaking any rules, if they disclosed the terms of the copyright are revocable... and not perpetual in the terms of sale.
Still a douche move to rip off kids, and burned a lot goodwill with consumers. =3
I'm not a copyright lawyer, but my understanding is that you do not own a license when you buy a CD or cassette, you own a copy (strictly speaking, a "phonorecord" in US law). Copyright doesn't regulate the sorts of typical uses that the owner of a copy would engage in, so a license is not required. When you see those warnings on VHS/DVD/Blu-ray that they're licensed only for private home viewing, what they're telling you is that you don't have a license to do anything controlled by copyright such as broadcasting, publicly exhibiting, or reproducing it.
Software is significantly more complicated and gets into issues of physical permanence/transience and specific exemptions/limitations to normal copyright law (see e.g. 17 USC 117).
If I buy a game - i.e. I am on a store page title "Game Name" not "Limited Revokable License for Game Name", and I click "buy", then I expect to own a copy of the game or the right to a copy of the game (in perpetuity), not a limited revokable license to play the game.
In the US adults are expected to read what they agree to. If they don’t, it’s generally their problem.
In the rest of the civilized world adults are expected to have common sense and be truthful when it comes to formal transactions.
Good point. Reading before you sign should be common sense regardless of what country you're in. And, if you don't agree with the terms, you shouldn't click "I Agree."
Yes, Sony can revoke a license. It is right in the terms of the license.
We own nothing but the right to access the game so long as the rights holder chooses to permit it. This means I could buy a game on Tuesday and the rights holder could render it unplayable on Wednesday with no recourse.
The "Buy" versus "License" question doesn't really resolve this. Sony is right in one sense that we all know we are licensing. What needs protection, probably requiring new or revised laws, is some sort of consumer right to get value out of a game license before the vendor renders it unplayable.
The difference is that no license holder can force you to give them back. You. Actually. Own. Them.
You might think, like, you've had some eureka moment, but it's all corporate BS.
I might go Steam Machine route in the PS6 era, I know it's technically same on Steam, but they have at least been much better at not rug pulling, and there are easier way to circumvent things on a Linux/PC machine. Unless Sony changes their stance so that either I have full lifetime use of the game or an explicitly stated period of time (which if shorter than lifetime I'd expect to be cheaper).
I'm even willing to drop resale of individual game, if I can just sell off my account as a whole to someone else.
Valve is also pretty amenable to adding third-party games to the box as well. It's trivial to add games from GOG using Heroic and play them alongside regular Steam games.
My main "game console" is a NixOS box running Jovian, and I have made oodles of Flakes that I use to make custom non-Steam games that launch deterministically, and as far as I'm aware, Valve is perfectly fine with this (not that I particularly care if they are).
The amusing thing about all of this is that the tech that Microsoft is using to be the "good guy" in this is the same thing they were savaged for when they announced it for the Xbox One. The ability to take a physical disc and use that as your key, with each disc having a unique code embedded in it. When you would install the game it would then lock that code to your account, proving your ownership of it, and you would no longer need the disc.
To be fair to the critics, they hadn't thought out all the issues around resale and trading games with friends, but had stated they would address that, before just dropping the tech entirely. It seems like they never stopped having the discs support it, so now it's a relatively straightforward thing for them to enable.
Yes, when you pay to use a copy of copyrighted work, you're not owning the work in the sense of obtaining the right to redistribute.
That is completely separate from the question of whether you are buying your copy to permanently use, or just renting it temporary.
Conflating the two concepts is either sophistry, or stupidity.
You are buying a copy though, and would be expected to have the right to resell it. So digital stores go out of their way to "license" the copyrighted work instead of selling you a copy.
I have been thinking about this lately, and figured that another difference with classic media was the "live service" model, where games receive updates.
You can't take for granted that a copy comes with updates, so I guess that as a middle ground, publishers could license updates (and online multiplayer) & sell copies of the game. Sell your copy, fine, but if you want updates or multiplayer, you have to purchase a subscription again. This would make more sense to me, but may be difficult to communicate and implement.
I have to admit that I'm pretty impressed that GOG has managed to convince a lot of the big brand-name players, (including Sony! [1]) that a DRM-free way of distributing games can be viable. If there's no DRM then there's nothing stopping you from keeping a backup on your own that they can't take away.
[1] https://www.gog.com/en/game/god_of_war
This statement could do Sony in. Gamers will refuse to buy a PS6 if there's not an ironclad guarantee that they own the games they purchase, be it digital or disc form.
And since gaming is the only profit center that's holding Sony above water I see the company disappearing in a couple of years.
I foresee another "gaming winter" like we had in the 1980's. Maybe a decade from now another gaming platform will arise, most likely built around open-source software and hardware.
When have gamers held firm in a boycott situation? A lot of tough talk that crumbles when a new hat is released.
There was that infamous picture of the Steam Group, something like, “Never Buy CoD XYZ”. Half of the group members were playing it.
> Gamers will refuse to buy a PS6 if there's not an ironclad guarantee that they own the games they purchase, be it digital or disc form.
I highly doubt that. I’d say 99%, probably more, won’t care either way. People barely care on PC, and people on consoles are generally used to more abuse.
Let's wait for the PS6 release and we'll see who's right.
I think that this could end up true if the next Xbox really is "just a PC".
The PC gaming ecosystem is a powerful selling point, especially due to the existence of Steam, emulators, modding, etc.
Windows really needs more refinement and polish though, the current experience is mostly unacceptable for a living room PC.
A next-gen Steam Machine would likely be a better competitor to the PS6, it doesn't have the reputational baggage that Xbox and Microsoft currently has.
Microsoft gaming division i.e. the Xbox will disappear before Sony goes anywhere. Same thing goes from Nintendo every year people/analysts insist that both those companies are in trouble and will die off because of the way they do business but here they are still successful and the main reason, they’re successful is that they concentrate on gameplay in comparison to their competition.
They've convinced me. They've convinced me to never buy any of their products.
Don’t worry. You can’t “buy” them anyway!
Easy solution: Stop buying whatever it is that Sony is trying to sell. Watch definitions radically shift.
I find it hard to believe that anyone would think that they put "BUY" and then expect that they redefine what buy means.
You can BUY a license to something, but it's still a license. You don't own the actual game unless you buy the rights to it from the publisher. The rights to a game can cost millions, and only then, do you truly, ever own it.
No. I can buy a book. That gives me ownership over that copy of the book. No one is claiming it gives me the right to do things like make copies of it to distribute to others, so we can ignore that goofy argument. The fact is, I own the book.
When I buy a game disc, I own that copy of the game on it. I can give it away. I can sell it. I own that copy, in the same way I own that book. No own claims to "license" a book anymore, or at least no one who doesn't get laughed out of court.
You own that physical copy due to the physical nature of it. However, you still are limited in what you can do with it. You can't make a copy of it and sell that copy. You can't read that book aloud, and sell the recording. In certain cases, you can't even read that book for an audience. The fact that you own it has embrued certain rights to you due to the physical nature of the book.
Take away the physical medium and there is nothing physical left that you own. Therefore, you have no physical rights to it anymore. The publisher, at their sole discretion, can remove the medium of access by which you consume the book. And then you'll be left without a book.
This is exactly how the current system works, I am just explaining it to you. So don't shout at the wind.
Let me stop you right there: no one is claiming that buying a book gives you copyrights to its content. That's a strawman.
When you own a book, you own that copy of it. You can do whatever you like with that copy, short of distributing copies of it. You can sell it. You can lend it to friends. You can leave it laying around a doctor's office for a stream of people to read. Short of distributing copies of it, it's yours.
Sony claims you do not own your copy of a game, merely the right to use it until they decide otherwise. That is fundamentally different than when buying a book, or CD, or DVD.
The copy itself is incidental. It's the medium by which the performance of the license is executed through, and if some form of it requires a Sony online service to exist and to work or respond in a certain way and tied to your specific account, to gain access to the meaningful parts of the work, that's what you own. You can sell the physical copy, but you're only selling the actual material and whatever pieces exist on the disk itself. Caveat emptor.
The fact that some of the material exists in a form that is close to and within your control is irrelevant. That's like saying you own a copy of Google because some of the javascript code that runs the frontend is cached in your web browser. You don't.
"You will own nothing and be happy." better get used to that and make your peace with it
LOL fuck off with that. The Amazon link[0] to a Final Fantasy game has a "Buy Now" button, not "License Now". I'm buying a copy of a game, exactly like I'm buying a copy of a book.[1] If they want to pretend in their little "licensing" fiction, it should be federally illegal to describe buying a copy as "purchasing" or "buying".
When you lease a car, you know you're leasing a car. They have to be clear about that up front.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/FINAL-FANTASY-VII-REMAKE-INTERGRADE-N...
[1] In before the idiotic strawman "so you think you own Final Fantasy?". No. I think I own my copy, not the copyright to distribute it.
What's interesting is that the item you linked says "game key card" and "90 GB - Full game download via internet required"
also interesting, in california vendors are required to say "you are buying a license" unless you can download the media you are purchasing.
I don't know if that game qualifies.
for kindle books, amazon says:
"By placing your order, you're purchasing a license to the content and you agree to the Kindle Store Terms of Use."
but some books actually could say "buy" like this one:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DMZC4VPQ
Because when you "purchase a license" you can actually download the book in epub/pdf format
(this specific book, not all books)
There doesn't seem to be a way to determine kindle books that you can download in epub/pdf before you "license" them.
Every time someone pulls this it makes stealing more interesting and exciting for me.
13 years ago when Microsoft wanted to introduce per-user locks for bought XBone games Sony released this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA
Fans were eating it up and it won them the console market lead. Times sure have changed.
If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't theft.
Arguably, piracy has never been theft as "theft" means to deprive an entity of their item/copy and downloading does not destroy the original. The usual counter-argument is that piracy deprives them of a sale, but that is not necessarily true and it doesn't really fit the meaning of "theft".
It's actually an interesting question there. Because I've been wondering if I buy something in taking ownership of it, whereas if I steal something I am still taking ownership of it without compensation. However if I'm not buying something but merely licensing it the wouldn't that mean that technically I'm not stealing it I'm only violating the terms of the license of it, which is now a civil not criminal matter.
Yeah, exactly, it's not stealing, it's just ignoring the terms of license. The same thing in spirit as e.g. different corps shitting on GPL. And should be enforced with the same eagerness (lol).
That's not really how copyright law works.
Firstly, you're not "stealing" (committing the crime of theft) by making digital copies of a work. You are infringing copyright. Even a single copy infringes copyright. To not infringe copyright, you need a license for your copying from the copyright holder.
You can still manage to infringe that license even if you went through a normal storefront and paid the copyright holder the amount they asked for. You can do that by doing things with your licensed copy that the copyright holder wrote into your license that you mustn't do. If they sold physical items, they would not be able to apply such adverse terms to your copy.
If you void your own license in that way, you no longer have that license, and so any copying/modification/distribution you're doing is back to being copyright infringement.
Finally, there is such a thing as criminal copyright infringement. That's when you make a significant profit from copyright infringement (for example, getting people to pay you to watch a pay-per-view event that you're illegally redistributing, or even just having adverts that make you money on a website offering unlicensed Nintendo ROMs for emulators)
Don’t worry, DRM eliminates the possibility of piracy since the content is gated behind an account.
Go ahead and copy/distribute the game client, even reverse-engineer the server and launch a private instance.
You still don’t have the content.
I mean does it? DRM is cracked within a week or two of launch now. companies are actively removing drm from their games a few months after it comes out because of the cost of licensing it.
AI has accelerated this if anything, and especially the server side stuff. Look at the destiny 2 private servers right now recreating lost content.
In my view this is faulty logic --
Buying in this case is "buying", and is a redefined term inside the legal contract which you choose to agree to when Sony accepts your money for a license to access their published video games, and so, it does not mean buying in the mundane sense of physical goods.
I would suggest this workaround: If you don't accept society's rules about related norms, such as you having a different definition of theft froom society's, you must proactively declare -- in your mind at the minimum -- and accept without two-way agreement on behalf of everyone else whom you steal from, that theft means what you choose to define it as at any moment. Do that, then that logic is solid.
Redefining common words is the issue here.
> If you don't accept society's rules about related norms, such as you having a different definition of theft froom society's
Society's "norms" around buying is that you own the thing you buy, which is why we have different words for buy, lease, rent, etc. Society's norms around theft is that you have taken something from someone else and they no longer have access to it.
Sony is the one with the different definition. They're the ones that should proactively declare it. And no, codifying it in legalese and burying it in a EULA isn't declaring it as society would expect.
To add: when Blockbuster existed, we all understood that renting a movie there was a temporary thing and buying the VHS at Best Buy was permanent. That is the expectation one has, not whatever a giant multinational decides it is.
Yes, if your transaction contract redefines very common well understood words like “buy” it honestly should be nullified in the eyes of the law. It’s an inherently deceptive practice.
Want to create new definitions for new words or phrases? Totally fine, but then Sony would need to replace the “buy” button with “blease” or “blent” or whatever they want to call this fake purchasing shit that all software has been playing at for entirely too long.
Or just be honest and call it leasing.
Well, in the UK under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, with goods, you're entitled to refund, a repair, or a replacement. We're not good at class actions in the UK, so it's down to the individual, but if a one time payment for a game that was physical media, isn't a 'good', what is it?
I'll post the google/ai summary, but this mostly it:
Your Main Rights by Timeframe Within 30 Days: You have the right to reject the item and get a full refund.
After 30 Days and up to 6 Months: You must give the retailer one opportunity to repair or replace the item. If that repair or replacement fails, you are generally entitled to a full refund. The law assumes the fault was there when you bought it unless the retailer proves otherwise.
After 6 Months: You can still request a repair or replacement, but the burden is on you to prove the fault was present when you received the item. You have up to six years (five years in Scotland) to bring a claim for faulty goods in court.
> the legal contract which you choose to agree to when Sony accepts your money for a license
Tell me more about this nonexistent contract I have with Sony.
After GTA6 comes out on PC, Sony should get ready for a crash that will make the PS3 launch issue look tiny. Kids these days just play Rolox or Fortnite on tablets, the gamer pipeline is gone and what ever is left of the gamers are migrating to SteamOS/PC. Older kids would much rather use Insta/Kick/etc as an IRL MMO. Teen boys are more concerned with looksmaxxing than video games. Maybe they know this and this is one last milking of the their installbase before the big fall.
Sony will lose this. Why? Because courts can point to the fact that in the 1990s, people bought a game, then could play it and re-sell it freely. So the claim about Sony how people only ever "licenced" something from them, and NOW face more restrictions than before, simply because Sony claims so, makes no sense. That's against established practices.
Sony should be disbanded by the court for wasting our time here.
This is not a bold claim, this is just how it is.
If you ask any average gamer, "if you buy a game on Steam or on a CD from Walmart, do you operate on the understanding that you are now legally allowed to make as many copies of it as you want and sell those copies?"
The answer will unanimously be no. If they owned it, the answer would be yes. They might say they own it, but they will clearly and reasonably understand that they do not own it in legal terms, because they understand what they cannot do with it.
Some of them will understand that they can legally make copies for backups, but why would you need the law to tell you that it's legal for you to make a backup of something you own? You wouldn't.
You can buy a hard drive, but buying it does not give you the IP for all the technology that went into it. No reasonable person believes that would be the case, either. You can buy a car, but you can't then copy all the parts and start mass producing your own copies of that car. Do any of you go through the McDonalds drive thru and believe you now own the burgers, fries and all the packaging that goes with it to the extent that you can start up your own McDonalds with logo and all?
Whether it's physical or digital, even if people have contradictions in their head since they aren't lawyers, they understand enough about how things work to conclude that what they understood when they pressed the purchase button equates to not obtaining total ownership of all aspects.
It is simply true. This is so broadly understood that I don't even think you would need to use a jury. A judge could simply throw the case out at this point on that alone, if it hadn't already been settled in past legal precedent, which it has.
Sony is wrong. If I buy it, I own it. I can do what I want with it, I can put it in a sandwich and eat it.
I despise Sony and avoid them at all costs. They started with AACS and then finally lost me when they embedded Cinavia in the Playstation.
Sony decided to go with "You will own nothing and be happy"
At current prices, consoles cannot just die fast enough. Would be very funny if Trump sanctions Sony for Xbox to close US console gap, and then everyone simply moves to PC.
Proposed new rule:
If there's no technical reason to fuck with the product I have already purchased access to, don't fuck with the product I have already received.
PlayStation store not allowing returns for games that have been downloaded is the most bs policy.
In a world where steam allows instant returns with under 2 hours play time.
I have a few games now on ps where I barely played or found out the controls were terrible and have no way to return.
If buying isn’t owning, then pirating isn’t stealing
Sony is trying to redefine "buy" so that they can steal. This is awful. I'll never trust them again.
> This feels like a strange reductio ad absurdum argument in reverse, where the argument isn’t disproven by reducing it: it is instead proven that merchandise and specifically software is sold as copies not as a singular entity. I’m not sure who Sony’s lawyers are trying to appeal to here, or if they just wanted to burn through a few dozen billable hours on an argument that makes no sense.
Unfortunately I think this argument has a bit more merit than you think. There is already copyright precedent that you cannot enjoy first sale rights on digital property (e.g. "a marketplace for used MP3s", or "we'll scan this book and loan it to you and we promise not to touch it until the loan expires"). Physical goods have specific legal rights that the courts have so far refused to extend to digital files[0]. In that legal environment, every digital copy of a work is fundamentally some data combined with permission to make use of copies of that data under some conditions. There are no digital copies, only digital licenses.
But that's merely an argument that third-parties don't get to copy things just because the way they're copying it emulates an act one might do with a physical copy. Where Sony goes off the rails is that they then argue that the only two options can be "a license under our chosen terms" and "complete and total copyright assignment," and then illustrate the absurdity of someone thinking they bought copyright ownership over Resident Evil (which genuinely can't be sold in parallel like this) to argue that the only way Sony can sell games digitally at all is under terms of their own choosing.
A smart judge would see through this and argue that Sony could at least have chosen terms that materially resembled the rights of someone who owned a physical copy. That is, they could have provided a service to allow someone to transfer their license to another PlayStation Network user. But at the same time, the law has a nasty habit of bowing to its best customers[1], and I would not be surprised if the judge just goes along with what Sony says (especially if the plaintiffs don't do a good job rebutting it).
[0] The reasoning for this is that there is no such thing as a digital move. On a computer, "move" is "copy and delete", and the act of making a copy is squarely in the realm of ordinary copyright protection.
[1] See also: the European Commission and California's abject refusal to require games you bought and paid for to continue to work offline.
These days, it feels like we can't truly own anything anymore. Sure, physical media used to break often, but these days I just don't get that satisfying feeling of actually owning something.