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.
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.
Physical media also comes with a license.
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.
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.
No crime where’s no judge.
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.
I already only play Indies, so we’ll be safe for a while
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.
Already lost my PS4 collection for not logging in 3 years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Certainly if Gamers™ had half a spine, we wouldn’t get here. Instead it’s always been inch after inch being taken, Gamers™ either downplaying it or viciously complaining about it for a short while without anything tangible happening, and rinse and repeat. Miles have been taken, now Gamers™ argue about 30fps in a game that ships with super draconian DRM and no physical copies because we’re already cool with DRM now.
Also the bitter irony when I hear people upset by Sony’s steamification switching to PC, the most steamified platform of them all. I guess it beats waiting until 2028 when you can pull the trigger now?
I warned from the moment that steam became a market place that the end of the road was us not having physical games anymore, and not owning our games anymore, and not being able to play our games should steam ever go under.
and my god the insults I received over the years about it.
Then other DD platforms popped up, and people bought games there (myself included, fuck you direct2drive), and lost all the games and all the money when the platform died.
“but steam lets you back up your games!” the inevitable response was.
Okay.
But steam backups still require steam to unpack and run. So that does fuckall.
and with how old steam is, and with how many people use things like humble monthly and shit, who the hell can afford to store local copies of 1500-3500 games? especially when a lot of modern games are 50-150gb in size each.
Also, at least on PC, we can relatively easily acquire our games via alternative methods. Which I have had to do a few times, for games that I owned and paid for, because of stupid bullshit DRM.
You aint doing that on modern consoles. If you wanted to play console games via alternative means you either have to 1)Luckout on a jailbreak and have the right firmware for a jailbreak or 2) wait years for an Emulator and a PC that can run it.
I’m so sick of this cyberpunk hellscape bullshit where you pay everything and own nothing.
and my god the insults I received over the years about it.
Me too, me too. When I lost the internet for a mad long time and noticed my steamed games not working because the launcher was refusing to log in while offline (despite having a so-called offline mode) and questioning why a singleplayer game even requires all of this in the first place, I would then get told the problem was actually my internet provider and not the game’s or steam’s for creating this mess in the first place. Yeah, make it make sense. Incidentally I had to acquire a bunch of executables for those very same games like you did, and yep, they’d work offline as should be. Creator of service problem says piracy is a service problem, why is this not a headline already?
Then other DD platforms popped up, and people bought games there (myself included, fuck you direct2drive), and lost all the games and all the money when the platform died.
I’m getting Desura flashbacks. Lucky I downloaded everything I had when I felt the signs of it going down, but I know others weren’t as lucky. Silver lining is they’re still playable, DRM-free is nice, but like I established we’ve already moved on from that into bigger fish like “the credits reference a consulting company I don’t like.”
I’m so sick of this cyberpunk hellscape bullshit where you pay everything and own nothing.
And there’s not even any cyberware to show for it! But yeah at this point I’m focusing more on buying stuff other than games and playing my massive library of games from multiple decades. It’s just I really suck at that too.
I’m getting Desura flashbacks. Lucky I downloaded everything I had when I felt the signs of it going down, but I know others weren’t as lucky. Silver lining is they’re still playable, DRM-free is nice, but like I established we’ve already moved on from that into bigger fish like “the credits reference a consulting company I don’t like.”
with direct2drive it didnt matter if you downloaded the files, cause the installers still did a call home to direct2drive to decrypt, and that call home server died with the rest of d2d.
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.
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.
🎶🎶oh, the pirate’s life’s for me🎶🎶
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.
If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing.
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 I don’t own them, no reason to pay for them ever.
Then why do they have the word “buy” on the PS store🤨
Because you buy it. It being a limited license of course, not a game.
deleted by creator
Next time: Acquire license
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.
If I’ve already bought it I won’t even hesitate to pirate it.
Having backups of owned digital media is just good practice.
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
Its crazy how everybody got used to rental prices as high as physical copy.
Most people don’t know they are rentals
