It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership • Hacker News Board

Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership

#191

Post by fizwidget » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 10:38 PM UTC

MYEUHD wrote: post #180

acchow wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and nothing would stop you playing it Not true for PS5 games. Sony can push a firmware update to disable games, even if you own the disc.

Is there any evidence of this? They can delist a game from the PS store, but I doubt they would make a game unplayable if it's already installed or if you own it physically.

They said “can”, not “has”. Given that it’s a closed platform that Sony has complete control over, they certainly can do it.

You can doubt that they will, but that’s just hope rather than a legal or technical guarantee.

Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership

#192

Post by protocolture » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 10:38 PM UTC

feoren wrote: post #103

jbombadil wrote: post #39

I am generally not in favor of adding regulation, but this is a place where I would support it. Anything that you BUY needs to be your property. This means you must have the ability to: 1. Transfer ownership of it (either temporarily as a loan or permanently as a sale). Digital-only doesn't preclude this: the store can have a "transfer" functionality. 2. (Within reason) use it at your discretion at any point after th…

You're not in favor of adding regulation, except when it comes to issues you understand and care about. All the oversight and regulation about everything you don't care and/or know about is big bad government overreach. Every government agency is a useless waste of your tax dollars, except the ones you rely on and the ones where you have friends that work there. Do I have that right?

>All the oversight and regulation about everything you don't care and/or know about is big bad government overreach.

I can literally list all the stupid regulation that needs to be removed from my industry. A lot of it is incredibly boneheaded. There's exactly 1 thing I do like, and it was extremely situational and set down in the 90s to avoid a very specific potential failure, and could easily be repealed without issue right now.

I presume, based on the experience in an industry I am very familiar with, that at least 60% of the regulation put on other industries is likewise counter productive and boneheaded. And every now and then when I do a deep dive somewhere I tend to confirm that.

Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership

#193

Post by pocksuppet » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 10:38 PM UTC

acchow wrote: post #168

pocksuppet wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter what they wrote in the document, the fact was always that you had the game on a disc and nothing would stop you playing it in violation of the words in the document.

> and nothing would stop you playing it Not true for PS5 games. Sony can push a firmware update to disable games, even if you own the disc.

Not true for Blu-Ray movies, either. Just saying that's how it used to be.

Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership

#194

Post by kybernetikos » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 10:39 PM UTC

nfw2 wrote: post #114

vanviegen wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though your point may have some value, your comment comes across as meanspirited and ad hominem. Also, regulation is not universally supported by knowledgeable consumers. Often quite the opposite, in fact.

Mean spirited sure, ad hominem, no. It's satirizing the argument, not personal traits unrelated to the argument

It's definitely a bad argument worthy of some sort of label. It seems to go "you believe this thing, which I won't engage with at all, but I'll assume that because of the way you said it, you also believe all this other stuff that I disagree with".

Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership

#195

Post by willdr » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 10:43 PM UTC

hx8 wrote: post #10

Absolutely this. Fifteen years ago World of Warcraft was at its peak. You had 12 million people paying a monthly fee, plus buying the occasional expansion pack. No other gaming company had seen reoccurring revenue numbers like that before and it changed the industry. One aspect of this was that if you stopped paying you lost access to the game. The industry has been looking for the next way to level up this subscript…

Unfortunately the AI bubble means we are witnessing the death of PC gaming. Watch the GamersNexus video, The Collapse of Personal Computing: https://youtu.be/zyQwAhppWj8

Costs are driving manufacturers out of business. Essential components for PCs are becoming out of reach for the average consumer.

You will own nothing and be happy.

Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership

#196

Post by greycol » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 10:46 PM UTC

Uvix wrote: post #71

aceazzameen wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You talk as if all Steam games use Steam DRM. No, it's not GOG but it's not the same category as Sony and Microsoft at all. It's starting to sound disingenuous when I see Steam lumped together with them.

Until Steam starts telling me before I buy which games have their DRM and which doesn't, they belong in the same category as Sony and Microsoft.

It's always listed in the same spot on all the store page for games. Now why they haven't allowed us to filter games by DRM (like they have f2p) is another question. I'd love if they allowed this and published stats because I like most people assume I'm in the majority and would love to see that you're cutting off access to X% of your market if you include rootkits/aggressive drm.

Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership

#197

Post by protocolture » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 10:47 PM UTC

pocksuppet wrote: post #131

Negitivefrags wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been the case for software since the very beginning. And people have been complaining about it since the beginning. See the Free Software Foundation.

No matter what they wrote in the document, the fact was always that you had the game on a disc and nothing would stop you playing it in violation of the words in the document.

>nothing would stop you playing it in violation of the words in the document.

Thats not really the case. Windows Defender and other anti viruses will quarantine piracy tools (like no cd cracks, and how many cd/dvd readers are in modern computers) these days, not far from there to see them being paid to police license changes. Games are often more playable in their pirated versions. Like if you own the Fallout 3/Fallout New Vegas discs that require games for windows live you are screwed, but the digital steam versions remove that requirement.

Then you have games like Metal Fatigue, released for Windows 98, suffering memory corruption issues since Windows XP. Microsofts Compatibility Toolkit offers a fix for some of the memory issues making the game vastly more playable, but then of course, Microsoft has set an EOL date for the toolkit, the last version of it was published for Windows 10, and theres an expectation that at some point Windows 11 will not permit it to be installed any longer.

Whether you buy a disc or pay for a download, you are still at the mercy of the entire ecosystem. If you completely freeze your ecosystem and never install anything you might get by. But that presents other risks.

I just bought Kinnectimals for my toddler, and it came with a warning that it needed connectivity to some random xbox server to update, straight out of the box. Thankfully, my 360 was still able to connect to it. But network protocols might change, the OS might get a new version that bricks the connectivity (potentially for good reason, there could be a vuln) or hundreds of other things. Theres no safety or security provided to me by owning the disc.

Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership

#198

Post by nfw2 » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 10:48 PM UTC

Telaneo wrote: post #181

nfw2 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not make the store change what they sell from being a license and making it a product as the consumer expected? Because we have a free market not a command economy? Publishers can sell whatever they want

Then they can stop pretending and actually sell it as a service. What they're doing now is doing one thing (selling it as a product), while getting the benefits of the other (selling it as a service).

That is what I suggested. The other poster said what you are suggesting shouldn't be allowed, not me.

Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership

#199

Post by nfw2 » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 10:49 PM UTC

paulryanrogers wrote: post #184

nfw2 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not make the store change what they sell from being a license and making it a product as the consumer expected? Because we have a free market not a command economy? Publishers can sell whatever they want

> Publishers can sell whatever they want. Indeed. They just can't commit fraud or false advertising.

Using the word "Buy" to mean buy a license, then having an agreement where the details of the license are explained isn't fraud lol

Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership

#200

Post by Telaneo » Sun, Jul 05, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

jmyeet wrote: post #182

This isn't just isn't as clearcut as people make it. A lot of it is based on a historic idea of an SNES cartridge or PS1 disk that contained the complete game, which was played locally and was entirely self-contained. It makes sense that you'd "own" that. But we don't live in that world anymore. An extreme example is Fortnite. This is free (with paid cosmetics) but imagine if it cost $20. Do you own it? If they shut…

> An extreme example is Fortnite. This is free (with paid cosmetics) but imagine if it cost $20. Do you own it?

You should.

> If they shut down the Fortnite servers, the game is pretty much worthless. What do you "own" exactly?

You should also own a copy of the server software so you can host your own Fortnite lobby.

> Even for an offline game that's bought online, there will have been patches. If your console dies or you buy a new one, where do you download it from once the service shuts down?

The real-world solution for this is 'jailbreak your console and download the game from the web'. There could also be sanctioned backup solutions which negate that issue. So long as the user is given a chance to back up and thus keep the game, you don't need a download server to be maintained.

> Years ago I had tried to install GTA4 on a PC and it basically didn't work. It relied on some infrastructure ("Games for Windows"?) that had since been discontinued. I think if I persisted I could've patched it to work but I just gave up.

The real world solution are patches made by people who care, and those usually work. The better solution would be that that connectivity doesn't break the whole game. If it's just for the online half of a game, it should degrade gracefully.

> What about when it requires an OS that no longer exists?

VMs exist.

> What about DRM (for TV shows/movies as well as games)? There are DRM servers. Do these need to be maintained?

Provide a DRM-free copy if you shut down the servers.

> You might take the purist approach of "no DRM" but that's really a losing battle.

A battle worth fighting [pirate flag emoji].

> part of the distribution model for physical media is that the media doesn't last forever (liek a digital copy does). Disks scratch, get broken, get lost, etc. Electronics in cartridges fail. SD cards fail.

Is this a significant part of the model? How many resales were they expecting per 1000 normal sales? It can't be many. This to me seems like it could be rounded down to 0.