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

#261

Post by Forgeties79 » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 3:48 AM UTC

homer456 wrote: post #236

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> being against dumb regulation that only ads unnecessary bureaucracy or stops/limits progress Does such strawman regulation even exist? Some regulation is intentionally designed to limit “progress”, where “progress” happens to have negative externalities. It’s kind of a self-legitimizing opinion. Of course anyone would be against unnecessary regulations. I think the real world is not arguing about whether a regulati…

It takes a minimum of 600 hours of training to get licensed to cut hair in California. Pex plumbing is banned in Chicago as a union protectionist regulation. The "chicken tax" regulation scheme has screwed up the US truck market for decades. Electrical code requirements for the wiring of kitchen islands have changed drastically with very small justification within a short span of time. To this day it is illegal to tr…

> Many European countries have draconian laws about air conditioning that are killing people this summer.

I keep seeing people say this but they don’t have any evidence, seen it tons online the last few weeks even on HN. What’s the deal? One person the other day went so far as to say that multiple EU nations have banned AC, which is completely false. You can absolutely have air-conditioning in Europe. Some places have stricter rules about permanent installation, such as HVACs in older areas, but there are plenty of air-conditioning units people can just pick up and use the same day in those cases. You can get AC units in European nations. You don’t have to just roast for no reason because of the government.

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

#262

Post by DonHopkins » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 3:50 AM UTC

You think you have it tough now, huh? When I was a kid I had to rewind my Apple ][ games on casette tape before returning them to the library, or I'd get a hefty fine, and it was uphill both ways!

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

#263

Post by zythyx » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 3:54 AM UTC

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #55

The question I'm left with: in the past, the uproar over these types of changes seemed to make companies change their mind when considering very anti-consumer decisions. Now, they just go ahead anyway. What's different? How do we get back to how it was before? I know the current political climate is one that enables this sort of thing. There are parallels with the current movement also WRT to the employer/employee re…

IMO Empathy. Empathy used to exist up until around 2015 in businesses where losing a customer was a really big deal, there used to be a cost in losing a customer, and a cost in gaining a customer, so empathy was the building block in helping a business build and maintain their customers. While that's still generally true for small companies, once you reach a global reach, for the most part the cost of gaining and losing a customer is FAR FAR less, so the empathy is lost too.

I also think politics is a pretty big factor in this too, as regulation was used when companies and customers had an impasse, and well, gestures everywhere look at the general global political client right now. Not much empathy going around these days...

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

#264

Post by dartharva » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 3:57 AM UTC

superkuh wrote: post #2

Video game companies still remember when they owned the arcade machines and players were required to constantly insert money into the machines to keep playing. They've been chasing that high ever since. The key to owning modern multiplayer online games is to have private servers run by human persons on their own owned computers. But except for TF2 no one has been able to (or cared enough) allow private servers alongs…

> But except for TF2 no one has been able to (or cared enough) allow private servers alongside the much much more important microtransactions

The pirate community does wherever it's possible. We had a blast in college playing Halo MCC LAN parties back when it got launched on PC - by design it needed Xbox accounts for everyone but we worked around it with Goldberg's crack and got the classic experience.

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

#265

Post by dartharva » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 3:59 AM UTC

I am surprised at all this shock the decision has garnered.

Is it shitty and consumer-hostile? Yes. Was it inevitable looking at the current trajectory of game distribution logistics? Also yes. Forced digitization should have in no way been surprising.

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

#266

Post by zythyx » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:01 AM UTC

teamonkey wrote: post #67

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #55

The question I'm left with: in the past, the uproar over these types of changes seemed to make companies change their mind when considering very anti-consumer decisions. Now, they just go ahead anyway. What's different? How do we get back to how it was before? I know the current political climate is one that enables this sort of thing. There are parallels with the current movement also WRT to the employer/employee re…

There’s indeed quite an uproar and I’m not unsympathetic to it, but only 3% of Sony’s 2025 revenue came from physical game sales. https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/corporatereport/... (page 37)

The problem with this argument is that while digital sales are 7x more, it doesn't break down the digital portion into purely games, online-DLC, or online-exclusive content.

I buy most of my games physically, but then all the DLC I buy from the PS Store because retailers don't have it. And I also buy digital games too, because the games literally don't have a disc, if it did, I would buy it physically.

I would say that my ratio of digital purchases to physical ones (by dollar amount) is 7:1. I would buy 90% of my content physically if I could, but I can't. And now with the upcoming changes, I'm going to end up buying 0% physically and 0% digitally.

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

#267

Post by danpalmer » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:10 AM UTC

It's also about competition.

Consoles are a significant investment, to only be able to buy content from one source creates monopolies. An equivalent would be if TVs were sold by Netflix or Disney, and only played content purchased from those entities. The second hand game disc market prevented those monopolies from taking prices to stratospheric highs.

I believe this is why digital distribution has seen little push-back on PC, because we have the convenience without the monopolies. Steam is huge, but Epic, Ubisoft, EA, gog.com, and others provide plenty of competition.

If consoles go digital only, from a single source, I think we'll see >$100 games quickly, we'll see subscriptions required to play be much more prevalent, and we'll see the death of consoles within a generation.

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

#268

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:12 AM UTC

alecsm wrote: post #118

feoren wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I understand his comment as being against dumb regulation that only ads unnecessary bureaucracy or stops/limits progress. But he would support a regulation for this because it's a violation against the property of the buyer.

[deleted]

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

#269

Post by Gigachad » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:14 AM UTC

PaulKeeble wrote: post #19

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…

People still don't own their games with Steam, the main PC platform. I don't think its going under anytime soon and currently its reasonably customer friendly but as we have seen these big tech companies can turn on their customer base at any moment. GOG is about the only way to actually own the games since no DRM is applied and you can download the entire package and keep it and don't require their launcher. PC alre…

Steam has gotten a free pass because they have a history of 20 years of not taking your games away. Even if something gets delisted they still allow you to download it if you already purchased.

Console manufactures have a history of shutting down the download and authentication servers after the consoles age. Sony just took away hundreds of movies consumers had purchased.

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

#270

Post by krige » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:14 AM UTC

danpalmer wrote: post #267

It's also about competition. Consoles are a significant investment, to only be able to buy content from one source creates monopolies. An equivalent would be if TVs were sold by Netflix or Disney, and only played content purchased from those entities. The second hand game disc market prevented those monopolies from taking prices to stratospheric highs. I believe this is why digital distribution has seen little push-b…

> Consoles are a significant investment, to only be able to buy content from one source creates monopolies.

It used to be that consoles were generally the cheaper alternative to a gaming PC, which was subsidized by the price of games, which in turn stimulated the second hand market as people tried to recoup their investment in games, not the system itself.

But now that it's no longer really true, and system prices keep going up for little in return, it's really the worst of all worlds: expensive systems, expensive games, no way to resell, and two of the big three are acting increasingly worse (the jury's still out on what will Nintendo do next, but their ridiculed key-on-a-card system at least allows for reselling).

And this is on top of Sony outright lying about the reality as various leaks and scraps of that indicate that physical sold very well, better than digital.