granted limited access to software that can be revoked at any moment.
If it is that, then it may not be called a purchase. Simple.
Turns out I was granting limited access to my money that can be revoked at any moment.
threadiverse is about to learn what tickets are🤦♀️
Please don’t cake it the threadaverse
It should be called renting (or something similar). But then, that would likely mean an expectation of a lower price tag and they wouldn’t want that. Who would rent a game for $80? Even if the rental is a decade or longer. Probably people out there that would and currently do this.
I would agree, but most leases have stipulations that restrict voiding the contract “at any moment”. You have to do something to violate the lease agreement most times so this is even worse than renting.
But then, that would likely mean an expectation of a lower price tag and they wouldn’t want that.
In other words, they want to commit fraud with impunity. Because that’s what lying about the difference between a sale and a rental is: fraud on Sony’s part.
It should just be called License. Put that there instead of the buy button. And clearly visible the minimum expiration date for the license. Reserve the buy button for actual perpetual licenses where not having access to the licensed good is a breach of contract good for money back.
Licenses are a copyright concept, but this isn’t a copyright issue. You’re buying a copy of a game, and you should own the copy after the purchase (which of course, means the company who sold it to you shouldn’t be able to revoke your access at will). That’s the part that sony is apparently not willing to do. But copyright-wise, it would be a license either way, so I don’t think it’s a good idea to confuse people with only tangentially related concepts here.
licenses are a very IT central idea.
I have to buy licenses of Windows, Acrobat, etc… It lines up with what Sony is trying to say too
licenses are a very IT central idea.
No, that’s just the implementation you’re most familiar with. Licenses are a copyright idea that IT adopted and made digital. Every physical movie and game you own also comes with a license that authorizes your retail use of it, but forbids your commercial use of it. You can’t rent your copy of Shrek out to people, nor can you charge admission to people to watch Shrek at your house, nor are you allowed to make copies of your Shrek DVD and sell them, for example.
Care to back that up? You wouldn’t need a license to do something that copyright laws already allow you to do on their own. For example, making additional copies for your own personal use is perfectly legal, if allowed depends on your local fair use or private copying exemption law (provided you do it without circumventing DRM, e.g. via the analog hole), even though of course the movie studio wouldn’t give you a license for that.
Of course, DRM is the real issue here, as due to anti-circumvention the movie industry controls who can legally make players for movies on DVD/Blu-Ray (unlike on VHS and CD).
You can’t rent your copy of Shrek out to people
That’s literally how Netflix got started.
copyright(n.) c. 1729, “the exclusive right to make and sell copies of an intellectual production,”
license(v.) c. 1400, “grant formal authorization to do what would be illegal to do without it,”
Yeah… I don’t think you are right about that…
I don’t really see what that has to do with what I said? Unless you are saying that licenses exist for other things than copyright (in response to “licenses are a copyright concept”). That’s definitely true, I oversimplified to make my point, but I’m also pretty sure that copyright licenses are the only kind of license that are relevant here in the first place.
Copyrights are a type of license not the other way around.
Copyrights are rights. A license grants others (parts of) that right. A copyright isn’t a license.
Physical media also comes with a license.
Silly consumer. The subscription is for the software’s lifetime, not yours.
🤣 Well I’m a vampire so jokes on them.
Rent. It’s rent.
if buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing.
Piracy isn’t stealing either way. It’s just copyright infringement.
Sadly, catchy slogans don’t hold up in court. Better to buy from distributors who don’t try to make that claim, like GOG - even if they won’t put Nine Sols on the store to avoid offending many gamers.
Sadly, catchy slogans don’t hold up in court.
Idk, OJ floated by on his.
No crime where’s no judge.
I’ve heard the argument that if you aren’t pirating via torrent but simply downloading a file (no seeding), there really aren’t any damages that can be claimed aside from the price of the thing you’ve pirated, hence completely not worth any action. The danger is if you’re uploading stuff you can be on the hook based on the number of downloads of that file.
No idea if that’s true, though it sounds reasonable. Thankfully, I’m in a country that could not give less of a shit about piracy… one of the few upsides here lol.
There’s a technical aspect to it too. Downloading over HTTPS covers your butt in a way that you need a good VPN for if torrenting.
I think that’s largely true in the US, at least.
What do you mean by gog offending gamers by selling nine sols? Is it because it’s the same dev as devotion? Or some other reason?
You got it.
Soon the game files will be on the cloud and the client on your computer is just a launcher. Then piracy will be over as well
They tried that (Google stadia), performance is crap. They need a datacenter with beefy GPUs need everyone to keep latency low, so the infrastructure costs aren’t worth it.
Unless it’s the only option and they raise the prices. Then you either play Indy games which will resist and still send you the files or if you want AAA you accept the new normal.
we don’t need to resolt to piracy just to have our digital ownership
no, but it’s morally acceptable to pirate things released by hostile corporations
I suppose, but I don’t think that piracy is the true answer, and we should instead be fighting more for digital independence instead of piracy
If I don’t own, I won’t buy. Good luck.
We’re going to need the full story here. What the heck man?? They just delete you if you’re offline for a couple years?
Yes, I had a PS4 with a few games, then I sold it and didn’t have ps for many years.
Now I got a PS5 and when I tried to login my account didn’t exist.
Sony has a policy where they can delete you account if you don’t login in 3 years.
Already lost my PS4 collection for not logging in 3 years.
Wait, seriously?! Damn, that sucks. What kept you off PSN for three years?
The fact you even have to ask that is fucking wild. It shouldn’t matter in the first fucking place.
I think they’re just curious, not implying it makes a difference
Didn’t have a PS4 any more, now I got a PS5 and found my account deleted.
How? I didn’t use it for years and it’s fine.
does anyone know why Sony is so intent on ensuring that I never become a console gamer and give them money?
like how does this benefit them?
I worked for the major streaming company when the service was launched in Japan. Sony (among others) said that streaming would never take off in Japan because Japanese consumers are too tied to physical media. This was probably 2014. It’s probably been the slowest place in the world to change, but it has changed. Sony understands the consumer preference for digital media as well as anyone. They just know that resistance and opposition will fade over time.
They are a fairly adaptable company (as Japanese tech companies go), and if they get it wrong, they will pivot, but there is nothing pro-consumer about the company. They didn’t put Blu-ray players in PS3s because it was good for consumers, they did it because it was good for Sony’s entertainment business. And people often forget that part of the Blu-ray spec was mandatory internet connectivity so that the content licensor could revoke content licenses. We haven’t “owned” physical media since DVDs.
This is the company that brought you Memory Stick after all. They’ve been anti-consumer ever since the Walkman was a huge success. It benefits Sony by making people buy more copies of the same thing. You might not buy any, but if the optimization is right, enough people will.
I take personal offense (on Sony’s behalf). How could you possibly frame innovation and progress as anti-consumer behavior? The reality is that the industrial mega-corp is providing the services and products consumers actually want. If they didn’t capitalism would be sure to punish them and they’d die an economical death. Children’s entertainment is funded via their parents and neither child nor parent is choosing to buy physical media. You can’t blame Sony for holding on to stock that no one wants to buy. ‘Gamers’ can have their emotional outburst, but things will continue as normal and they’ll have forgotten about it after nap time.
This must either be sarcasm or a troll
in the short term? It doesnt benefit them at all. it may actually hurt them.
in the long term? Bandwidth is cheap. especially at the scale that companies like Sony, Steam, Microsoft, etc, use it. So sell 6 million copies of a game, 10 extra bucks of profit thanks to no physical media/boxes/shipping/etc, per game… Thats 60 million dollars in free money.
Plus, because you no longer own anything, they no longer have to invest in storage to keep old games up and running. So as new games release, they delete old games from their servers and from your accounts, So thats less investment they have to make in infrastructure, which is again more free money for them.
I wager Sony would love the day when people pay 100 dollars for a game that gets deleted in 6 months, that they have to rebuy again at full price to play again.
Cause remember, with no physical media, you have nothing but sony’s closed garden marketplace to buy games… Which means no competition for sony, which means no incentive for sales, no lower prices (not that 70+ dollars is a low price for a game 🙄 ), no nothing but take what sony offers you, and liking it.
I wager Sony would love the day when people pay 100 dollars for a game that gets deleted in 6 months, that they have to rebuy again at full price to play again.
Oh, you wanted to play [AAA game] that you already bought and paid for? Too bad, it’s shut down and gone. But you can buy the almost-identical sequel [AAA game 2] for just $90!
This will also affect history badly. Entire games will be lost to history forever.
Yeah, by the time copyright finally expires, it will be impossible to find a copy of it anymore.
You are just a guy. There are millions more that will not care and won’t even know any of this ever took place. There were leaked conversations where Sony talked about their fanbase as brainless cattle, too.
Well, they are not wrong. Consumers will really put up with anything
because they HAVE to have the latest shiny, because their self worth is so low and non existent the only measure of worth they have is owning the next shiny.
some consumers… maybe even most. Certainly not all.
I’m actually grateful for the enshittification of the main stream. It’s an excellent incentive to carve your own path, in some small way. Hopefully that spills over to other aspects of people’s lives.
“Fuck you, I won’t do what you told me” is a wonderful fuel.
because their fanbase are brainless cattle.
because gamers are brainless myopic cattle.
gamers on the whole moan and groan and whine and bitch about every misdead, but the second the new shiny comes out they are out there en-masse rewarding these companies with billions and billions and billions of dollars (a great example will be GTA6, which I almost guarantee will bring in at least 2 billion dollars within its first week)
and as long as the idiot masses keep doing that, we have no recourse and no hope.
You’re not wrong… but “othering” people is no way to lift them out of the muck. Causes classic back fire effect. I say present the alternative case clearly and succinctly. If still finger in ears well, wish them luck and go separate ways.
I’m purely pulling this firmly out of my ass. While I genuinely doubt they have any intention or plans at this point, I assume being able to tell investors “oh we can pull the plug and walk away from these legacy costs at any time” is a plus in someone’s column somewhere. Of course the issue is that what is possible to save money often becomes reality.
… For everyone one of “us” on this thread, there’s 10,000 that will shrug and conform.
You and I are not the target demographic. Clearly - look at where we’re having this conversation :)
Ipso facto we need to make sure that we support those that support us (Indie devs, FOSS etc). Let Sony do Sony things.
Untio the first 250 USD game hits the market and it’s a choice between homelesness, starving and getting a digital product you don’t own.
The smaller the customer base, the less money they rake in.
Sony’s history of security breaches also doesn’t give much confidence. Games like Concord and Marathon also prove nobody is too big to fail.
Games are a luxury good that need to thread a fine needle.
With roughly fifty years of back catalog to draw from, free engines, and endless other distractors, a $250 game would need to be an epoch-defining masterpiece - or have true AGI baked in - to get my attention.
Then again, I’m not the target demographic: I built my own retro console from office e-waste and play retro games, older AAA and indies.
🎶🎶oh, the pirate’s life’s for me🎶🎶
It’s a bolder than usual move for Sony to announce the end of physical media prior to a new console launch, and launch this “you don’t own the digital games you buy” campaign at the same time.
The usual easy strategy is first you end physical media sales, let people be content with the idea that they own their digital games at least so that the only thing people think about is the convenience of digital, then after you launch your new console, get everybody locked in, that’s when you launch the “Oh you don’t own these digital games btw” campaign.
The fact that they’re just doing all of this at the same time means they know they won’t lose any money over it because we’re sheep and the consumer just doesn’t care anymore
If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing.
Good thing I buy games on gog so I own them and I could copy them to a DVD if I really wanted to.
Going to court to prove they’re arseholes. Nice.
If you want to stop it, write to your representatives. EULAs do not override local laws.
Imagine how well digital games would sell if they showed up in your cart like: 1 x Revokable License for God of War $69 See Terms and Conditions* [Confirm Payment]
- Terms: we will do whatever the fuck we want. Conditions: whenever we want.
There’s a reason they say “Buy” instead of “Pay”.
It’s been going on for generations, but it’s no less dishonest for all that. Software sellers write complex EULAs for which the only valid answer is “Agree” because the store won’t take an open box back and the software won’t install unless we pretend to agree, so even us legitimate software enjoyers are pirates in our hearts. Meanwhile normies don’t even think about it that much. Fuck this whole system, but double fuck an online service that says “purchase” but will steal it back later. Fuck that.
1x temporary license to play. Duration of license unspecified.
Pretty sure in the past it was at least considered a lifetime license.
In the past it didn’t matter, because you had the whole file structure for the application when you purchased it. You either downloaded it in whole as an install file or archive, or you had it on the physical media that you purchased it on. Maybe there was a license you had to input or some other rudimentary DRM system, but you had that too. No remote access from the company, no forced additional downloads or internet connectivity, no phone home. So they could say whatever they wanted, but you actually had the product.
Now with media files that only play with proprietary tools that phone home, or applications that phone home, your computers are backdoored. And if you have a system that’s backdoored, it’s not really yours, it’s just something you can access for now. That’s what your Kindle is: a backdoored computer with an e-ink screen and proprietary software that can open proprietary files that other software isn’t supposed to be able to open. Which is why no one should buy one.
You should stop buying that shit then.
Also isn’t the kindle fine if you just download offline files? Its been a very long time since I used one though.
I do happen to agree that one should not buy a Kindle. There are alternatives, and good ones.
But also a Kindle, a locked down computer that is illegal to make work properly, shouldn’t exist.
The problem is that in so many of these specialized computers, every major device available is rights violating, or under powered. It is damn hard too “choose” your way out of an economy as an individual.
um yeah, that’s not hard to prove, you can check my torrent history
you still own them more than a psn store enjoyer owns their games
If I don’t own them, no reason to pay for them ever.
I don’t need to read the article to know that they’re making the same argument as Amazon and Apple. When you “buy” a show on one of the streaming platforms, you aren’t actually buying anything except an extended rental.
Then the button should say “rent” and not “buy”
Consumer protections are for the weak. /s
Digital music for purchase as well.
Not quite true anymore, publishers have pretty much given up on DRM for purchased music :)
Neither Apple’s iTunes store nor amazon’s store (although to be fair, I haven’t used amazon, so I’m not 100 % sure about them) use DRM on purchased music, so you can just take the music files and use them in any way you want. In my personal opinion though, rather than use the iTunes store or amazon, I’d recommend you to try the qobuz store, which is DRM-free and is the only one I know of (ignoring bandcamp, which doesn’t get music from regular distributors) that provides lossless audio.
Bandcamp lets you download .mp3 which are DRM free. They probably are tagged in the info but its just a text field
MP3 is a horrible non-free (well, not anymore, because the patents expired; but still), outdated format. bandcamp also lets you download as FLAC, which is none of that and lossless.
edit: it feels this comment came off a bit aggressively, so I just wanted to say that wasn’t my intention 😅
FLAC does not work with alot of devices
Then transcode it to whatever other format you need yourself. Point is, the thing being sold ought to be the highest quality possible.
AAC-LC though works just about anywhere, and AFAIK is also patent free by now.
HDtracs also sells some stuff losslessly. Though one thing I’ve noticed I’ve noticed on both Qobuz and HDtracs is tha, in addition to only having some stuff losslessly, the availability of lossless varies by region. The same album might be sold lossless in one region and only lossy in another region.
Didn’t know about them before, thanks for sharing!
The same album might be sold lossless in one region and only lossy in another region.
That’s weird, since as far as I can tell, qobuz doesn’t offer lossy downloads at all (I’ve heard they used to, but stopped. Maybe there are some regions where they’re still offering it?)
Hmm, maybe I was misremembering. On second thought I think it was actually 7digital I was thinking of that did the regional lossless, I forgot about that one. For example, the same album on Swedish and American stores:
This led to a lot of good discussion around various places to buy digital music. My comment wasn’t so much drm focused as it was about licenses being removed. I’ve encountered that on Qobuz actually. Not many, but a few items are no longer available to be downloaded. I have already downloaded the files when I purchased the music, so that’s certainly something different than a movie or game that can’t be downloaded and used as such. That’s all, just the fact that the license can still be removed.
Ah, didn’t expect you to already know qobuz 🙃
But yeah, that’s definitely a problem. I remember them sending the email where they announced this could happen now (although weirdly enough, they never sent an email for when purchased items were taken down any time after that again), and had it happen a few times as well. Luckily, I’ve also saved everything locally, so I haven’t lost anything. Still annoying. Also sometimes, an album that’s suddenly gone just seems to reappear a few months later, as if they were just reorganizing their library, but really, I have no idea what’s going on.
That’s good to hear some items have returned. I also wonder about things like relistings, if items have or will get moved around. Good discussion!
Like when you purchase books for 2 weeks at the library. Simple!
Its crazy how everybody got used to rental prices as high as physical copy.
Most people don’t know they are rentals
at this point, i have quite bleak view on anyone buying anything from sony. those people are effectively supporting this shit, which may spread elsewhere.
