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

#331

Post by skotobaza » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 7:09 AM UTC

nfw2 wrote: post #128

deadbabe wrote: post #86

I’ve come to realize there are definitely people out there who have no interest in playing games, they just want to own them. A child doesn’t think about ownership, he picks up a controller and plays a game. And when the child has grown bored of the game, one day they just never touch it again like a discarded toy, moving on to something else. It is adults, reminded of their own feeble mortality and impermanence in t…

The vast majority of consumers don't care or think about this at all. It's a loud and tiny minority who imagine this great injustice will lead to some groundswell of rallied consumer support if they just write more blog posts about it. In reality, if people get continual access to a digital game, the hypothetical case where they might lose access to it isn't all that troubling. And even if the license was specificall…

> Don't purchase the game if the license terms aren't amenable to you

Unfortunately, terms can change. Publisher can promise 10-year support for the game and then drop it after 1 year. So when we purchase the game, we don't know what will happen in the future.

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

#332

Post by Hoodedcrow » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 7:14 AM UTC

seff wrote: post #76

matthewfcarlson wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was actually a funny question at work over lunch. A few of us have kids and like most tech guys over 30, our steam accounts have turned into collections. So I asked, who gets your steam account when you kick it. It’s difficult to think about and seems baffling to spend thousands of dollars and hours assembling a collection only for it to poof away into nothing.

When we were in college, one of my friends joked that their stream library was their largest financial asset. When stream trading was more of a thing, and we had a ramen diet, it was probably true

Lol, relatable. For me it's not the library (because I have backups of that), but the in-game items. And not even for their monetary worth (which is relatively low), but for sentimental value (the stats counted on them).

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

#333

Post by Hoodedcrow » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 7:15 AM UTC

sciencejerk wrote: post #314

hx8 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm optimistic about PC gaming because if Steam begins acting as an evil gatekeeper then game developers can adopt other avenues to deliver the games to their players. It's an open platform. People are using Steam now because it adds value. People will stop using Steam if it subtracts value.

I'm optimistic that devs empowered by LLMs and local LLM will fight back and create new platforms if gatekeeping gets too out of hand

Why would anyone use slop alternatives though? I don't think people wouldn't be creating non-slop ones.

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

#334

Post by AnthonyMouse » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 7:18 AM UTC

mobelkh wrote: post #317

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 sta…

I wouldn't say competition is "most of the time", any market that saturates just turns to shit, incumbents can kill off any upstart competition while squeezing customers dry, not to mention fields that should have a baseline (e.i. healthcare), because squeezing customers dry there literally kills people

You're describing uncompetitive markets. That's what happens when the incumbents capture the government to pass regulations that inhibit competition. It's one of the biggest problems caused by regulations.

Healthcare in the US is a great example because the government is so thoroughly captured by the industry. There is no reason competition wouldn't be effective for non-emergency care, if it was allowed to operate. You need an MRI, every provider publishes their prices, you pick the one which is the right combination of affordable and a convenient distance from where you live. Naturally the existing regulations make that impossible -- the tax code has major incentives for employer-provided insurance rather than the employer paying you money and you choosing your plan or paying out of pocket, the insurance is given the incentive to inflate rather than control costs because their profit is capped by law at a specific percentage of claims (so more and bigger claims means more profit instead of less), the AMA lobbies to have the government limit the number of medical residency slots and sustain a doctor shortage, etc.

Notice that food is another market where "squeezing customers dry there literally kills people" but it has nothing like the same problems because it has much more competition.

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

#335

Post by sciencejerk » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 7:20 AM UTC

krige wrote: post #270

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 k…

Never heard of Nintendo's patent for digitally signing and transferring game ownersbip. Thanks for sharing. Hope it gets implemented!

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

#336

Post by Hoodedcrow » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 7:23 AM UTC

thfuran wrote: post #14

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…

I’m not nearly so optimistic. I think we have a generation of kids now who mostly never owned any physical media, having grown up with Netflix instead of vhs/dvd, Spotify instead of CDs, steam instead of retail games, etc.

I see nothing wrong with abandoning physical media - as storage got larger and internet faster, being limited by clunky disks has become kinda pointless unless you're specifically into collecting. I see nothing wrong with moving on from them as long as it's towards local DRMless files.

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

#337

Post by mastermage » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 7:25 AM UTC

rgmerk wrote: post #249

homer456 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Cite your sources. There are specific issues in specific places (eg heritage restrictions in Paris), a higher prevalence of shared infrastructure rather than single family homes, and a higher level of renting rather than home ownership. And there are people on the green-left end of the political spectrum in parts…

German here: you are not allowed to install anything thats visible from the outside without the owners aproval (70% of people Rent in Germany) or even the aproval of the Apartment Owner Association (Imagine HOA but for Apartments and every bit as dumb)

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

#338

Post by AnthonyMouse » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 7:26 AM UTC

scott_w wrote: post #323

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading that sort of thing is kind of amusing, e.g.: > In most cases, planning permission is not required to install it for a small home if it would not materially affect the appearance of the building from outside . Substantially all air conditioning units affect the appearance of the building from the outside because they require a coil or vent somewhere on the exterior of the building to expel heat. > Building reg…

You're completely misreading regulations. "Materially affect" does not cover things like "puts a unit outside" because otherwise putting a satellite does would "materially affect the appearance of the building from outside," yet millions of people get Sky TV. > If planning permission for aircon was denied Again, this is not part of the article because it literally says you don't need planning permission! There are re…

> "Materially affect" does not cover things like "puts a unit outside" because otherwise putting a satellite does would "materially affect the appearance of the building from outside," yet millions of people get Sky TV.

They're referring to regulations by the local council. All of them are different. Millions of people being able to install a satellite dish is entirely compatible with any number of different people in different localities being refused because the condenser is "ugly".

> Again, this is not part of the article because it literally says you don't need planning permission!

It literally says:

> In most cases, planning permission is not required to install it for a small home if it would not materially affect the appearance of the building from outside.

Which strongly implies both that there are cases when it's required anyway and there are cases when it would "materially affect the appearance of the building from outside" since otherwise they wouldn't need to qualify it.

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

#339

Post by AnthonyMouse » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 7:29 AM UTC

autoexec wrote: post #285

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…

> Does such strawman regulation even exist? Yes, the DMCA is a great example, but corporations write those regulations and bribe government to pass them. That's not really an example of evil government as much as it is an example of evil corporations, although it does illustrate how much work is needed to limit the influence of money in politics.

> That's not really an example of evil government as much as it is an example of evil corporations

It's the corporation's job to advocate for favorable regulations and the government's job to enact regulations that benefit the general public rather than special interests. Only one of them is bad at their job.

> although it does illustrate how much work is needed to limit the influence of money in politics.

It's actually the perfect example of something where "money in politics" isn't the problem. The companies that lobby for the DMCA are the media companies. They donate their share of money but by far the largest source of their influence is their ability to run sustained unfavorable coverage against politicians who cross them, which would continue to be the case even if they couldn't transfer a dime into the politician's own coffers.

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

#340

Post by sciencejerk » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 7:31 AM UTC

avaer wrote: post #157

Maybe you think gaming/media companies are greedy and should make less money. But if you want the industry to continue in the current state, keep in mind the price of games needs to be adjusted: price *= (total game sales / avg player count) If there's a million sales but only 10 thousand people playing at a time, the price of the game needs to be multiplied by ~100x, because these copies can be shared, and the sales…

The kinds of buyers who purchase pre-owned "used" games often CANNOT or WILL NOT shell out $70-100 for a new game. Social peer pressures might impact this (hey poor kid, do you really wanna lose your friends?)