Sony makes bold claim about game ownership • Hacker News Board

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#121

Post by tokai » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

Boxxed wrote: post #26

captainbland wrote: post #11

If we're not owning it, you're not selling it, you're leasing it. Terminology on sales pages should reflect this. "Subscribe now" "purchase license" etc. should be mandated if this is the expectation. Terms like "buy" without qualification are misleading in this context, but they won't remove them from store pages because people are more likely to pay higher rates for something if they believe they are actually ownin…

I even take issue with "Purchase license". Shouldn't it be "Lease License"? Purchase implies that it can't be revoked, no?

A lease is a license/document/interest/contract/deed granting use rights. So lease license is not meaningful.

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#122

Post by dspillett » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 5:05 PM UTC

> Sony would like you to know that any reasonable gamer would know that purchasing a game is just licensing a game, not owning it.

In that case, any reasonable company would have no trouble being honest and not using the words “buy” and “purchase” with respect to game access.

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#123

Post by nerdjon » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

john_strinlai wrote: post #112

nerdjon wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, I am not arguing otherwise. But if your core problem is not the removal of content but what Sony is arguing right now. You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk. Just because one has done it and the other hasn't is a technicality to me since that could change overnight. The point that I am trying to make here is that it is insane to…

> You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk. it's not the same overall risk though. accurate risk assessment includes past incidents in the calculation. sony has a demonstrated pattern, valve does not. if you choose to ignore past behavior in your risk assessments, you are doing it wrong.

People did risk assessments with VMWare and we see how that turned out.

Things can change, just because you make your risk assessment doesn't mean you should ignore that there is still something in that contract that could turn on you just as easily.

Should we go back 10 years, maybe the risk would have been the same. Did Sony do any of these things then, but the policy was the same. How about 10 years from now, just because of your "risk assessment" doesn't mean that Valve is suddenly safer, just just means so far they have been safer.

I am not saying don't use Valve, but there is zero reason to believe they could not just as easily do this.

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#124

Post by didibus » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

I might go Steam Machine route in the PS6 era, I know it's technically same on Steam, but they have at least been much better at not rug pulling, and there are easier way to circumvent things on a Linux/PC machine. Unless Sony changes their stance so that either I have full lifetime use of the game or an explicitly stated period of time (which if shorter than lifetime I'd expect to be cheaper).

I'm even willing to drop resale of individual game, if I can just sell off my account as a whole to someone else.

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#125

Post by john_strinlai » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 5:09 PM UTC

nerdjon wrote: post #123

john_strinlai wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk. it's not the same overall risk though. accurate risk assessment includes past incidents in the calculation. sony has a demonstrated pattern, valve does not. if you choose to ignore past behavior in your risk assessments, you are doing it wrong.

People did risk assessments with VMWare and we see how that turned out. Things can change, just because you make your risk assessment doesn't mean you should ignore that there is still something in that contract that could turn on you just as easily. Should we go back 10 years, maybe the risk would have been the same. Did Sony do any of these things then, but the policy was the same. How about 10 years from now, just…

[dead]

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#126

Post by ActorNightly » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

tetrisgm wrote: post #92

This is going to backfire spectacularly. Between this claim, ramping down disc production, and the possibility of a $999 home console,they are going to have a difficult time. There are still so few PS5 exclusives. Even fewer with PS5 Pro support. It’s going to take a lot to gain trust and justify a PS6. No clear path to victory here with a hardware update.

It will be fine.

Gaming as a whole is a shadow of what it used to be, specifically because it has been tailored to the masses who have no real opinion on any of this other then they want to play what their friends play.

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#127

Post by hightrix » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

Keyframe wrote: post #22

Remember your wallet is your vote in all of this, no matter the size of it!

I think I'll vote with my VPN protected piracy.

If I'm not buying a thing, but instead a limited license to a thing, then I don't care about buying that thing anymore and I'll just take it.

I doubt I'll be alone and with Denuvo being regularly defeated on release day, I'm not too worried about availability.

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#128

Post by josefritzishere » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 5:12 PM UTC

Sony is trying to redefine "buy" so that they can steal. This is awful. I'll never trust them again.

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#129

Post by dcow » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 5:13 PM UTC

john_strinlai wrote: post #120

dcow wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> You have clearly never negotiated a contract. feel free to make an actual point rather than vague assumptions about my history. when you do risk assessments, which over my career i have done thousands, you include historical data.

Nobody is arguing the risk values are exactly the same. The argument is that the risk posture is the same. You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value, which is an individual value judgement and thus incredibly far from an assumed fact. Some people do care about posture more than value and different people weight value differently as I'm sure your thousands of assessments have uncovered.

In any event, I think with all the data you'd see that Value has also removed games from its platform. So I'm not sure the value gap is even as wide as you seem to be implying.

Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

#130

Post by stetrain » Thu, Sep 03, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

simpaticoder wrote: post #110

captainbland wrote: post #11

If we're not owning it, you're not selling it, you're leasing it. Terminology on sales pages should reflect this. "Subscribe now" "purchase license" etc. should be mandated if this is the expectation. Terms like "buy" without qualification are misleading in this context, but they won't remove them from store pages because people are more likely to pay higher rates for something if they believe they are actually ownin…

It's a non-transferable lease that can be canceled at any time by the issuer. The real problem is that most of society still thinks of games as a piece of physical media that you combine with a player that allows you to play the game. In that world you have a liscense to the software, and a physical token which is transferable and therefore valuable. I'd argue that we need to decouple transferability and cancel abili…

Yes, some people are trying to achieve this by arguing that physical media should stick around forever. I think the real solution is providing the same protections and rights for digital purchases as we had with physical media.

That would be a real win for consumers since we get the advantages of digital media with the ownership and transference rights of physical media.

Of course this would be a great inconvenience to those who wish to charge the same price for a temporary revocable license to the content, and they have deep lobbying pockets to fight against it.