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

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

#291

Post by autoexec »

nfw2 wrote: post #206
paulryanrogers wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why carry water for billion dollar companies? I can still play my brother's old PlayStation games on his OG PlayStation. They cannot be revoked arbitrarily, nor their music dropped or swapped out. This a feature, and we'd feel quite cheated if that happened. In fact we still go back to old games from time to time.

I can still play the games I bought on the nintendo switch 8 years ago. > Why carry water for billion companies? All companies at a certain scale are billion dollar companies. Also, how much money a company has is unrelated to whether they violated consumer rights or not. But, tangentially, I do generally respect entities that fund creative endeavors moreso than I respect gamers who go online to bemoan how persecuted…

> I can still play the games I bought on the nintendo switch 8 years ago.

If those were digital copies you might have chance, otherwise don't count on them to keep working for long. The carts Nintendo used were made with memory that degrades when just sitting on a shelf and people are already reporting that their DS games are failing. I've got an Atari 2600 that still works and plays games fine though. Never even had to replace the joystick, which easily beats the joycons which drift after 400 hours

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

#292

Post by Ygg2 »

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…

> Fifteen years ago World of Warcraft was at its peak.

Sixty years ago the model was you go to an arcade cabinet, and you get charged every time you died (Credit: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2026/07/03/returnal-3).

Ideally, they want cabinet in every home, you pay electricity for it, you buy overpriced Bluey skins, you buy your lives, you buy ads, and pay them every second for the pleasure, while not owning even the cabinet.

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

#293

Post by skotobaza »

NorwegianDude wrote: post #219

I've been running a small game dev studio for ~20 years, and the one change I think must be made, is to ban the usage of "buy" when it comes to games. Games are licensed, not bought, and that should be crystal clear to those who are paying. Most of the games people play runs using proprietary software and/or licenses, and often on very specific hardware, with game features that makes sense for the amount of players t…

> It would with 100 % certainty result in slower development, fewer games, and worse games

No, it won't. People used to develop games without requiring publisher's services. The issue of "it's hard to do nowadays" is self made. It's only hard because you made it this way. You can design a game that will be playable when its publisher or developer close their doors.

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

#294

Post by autoexec »

Ygg2 wrote: post #292
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…

> Fifteen years ago World of Warcraft was at its peak. Sixty years ago the model was you go to an arcade cabinet, and you get charged every time you died (Credit: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2026/07/03/returnal-3 ). Ideally, they want cabinet in every home, you pay electricity for it, you buy overpriced Bluey skins, you buy your lives, you buy ads, and pay them every second for the pleasure, while not owning e…

> the model was you go to an arcade cabinet and you get charged every time you died

Worse, some arcade games drained your health continuously while you played so no matter how good you were you'd have to keep plugging quarters into the machine.

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

#296

Post by hahahaa »

Tldr: Walled gardens suck. I can't lend you or sell you my iPhone app either. Physicsl media is cool because it offers both a unit of authenticity and ownership. Second hand games were fine as having the game when it came out was the value, like a movie vs. watching free a year later on TV.

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

#298

Post by Terr_ »

pseudocomposer wrote: post #222
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 think “when you buy a product, be it a game, a house, a car, a computer, a tractor, washer, TV, it should continue to operate without rent-seeking behavior” is the best type of straightforward, uniformly-applicable pattern of regulation one could hope for. Opposing rent-seeking is literally why we have American democracy, which paved the way for French, Brazilian, Canadian, Indian, Mexican and so many other democra…

Also: Those ownership/privacy obligations to customers should come first in bankruptcy proceedings, ahead of other debts.

IANABankrupcyLawyer, but I believe the status-quo is that various promises like "we'll open-source the server in the end" or "we'll never sell your data" can become voided in the name of making a buck to repay the landlord or business-partner.

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

#299

Post by tonyhart7 »

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…

"Anything that you BUY needs to be your property."

do you own the film when you buy ticket to cinema ????

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

#300

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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?

> You're not in favor of adding regulation, except when it comes to issues you understand and care about.

That's not really it.

The main case against regulation is that it shouldn't be used when competition would do it better, which is most of the time. The trouble in this case is that copyright is a government-granted monopoly, which means this isn't one of those times, because competition is being foreclosed by statute. It can't be the thing that saves you in the case where the government is prohibiting it.

To put it another way, the thing that would really reduce regulations is to get rid of copyright, but maybe we want to be pragmatic here and instead of demanding that it be abolished entirely, we just want the prohibition the government is imposing on the users to not be extended through an unconscionable power grab and destroy the rights of First Sale and Fair Use that have always belonged to the customer.

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