At current prices, consoles cannot just die fast enough. Would be very funny if Trump sanctions Sony for Xbox to close US console gap, and then everyone simply moves to PC.
Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
131–140 of 284 posts
Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 u…
>Nobody is arguing the risk values are exactly the same.
please re-read the part i quoted from the parent, where they say it's the same risk.
>You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value
i did not say "the only thing that matters" anywhere.
you, and the parent, are reading something into my comments that i have not written. the only thing i said is that the risk is not the same because sony has a pattern of behavior worth considering.
Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Valve was a plucky underdog against the established publishers and, while dominant today, still has reasonable competition, sony is a giant corp with a reputation and a monopoly on playstations.
> sony is a giant corp with a reputation and a monopoly on playstations. That's like saying Volkswagen has a monopoly on Volkswagen cars. Sony clearly does not have a monopoly on the video game industry, and a plurality of video games are cross-platform across consoles, PCs (Windows/Linux), and even MacOS.
It would be slightly more accurate to say "volkswagen has a monopoly on volkswagen cars... and all accessories and replacement parts"
But the analogy breakdown because a car is more or less a complete item you buy and use for a purpose (aside from consumables) whereas a playstation is completely useless without games to play on it.
So maybe volkswagen brand gas would be the best analogy here.
Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
#134If 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…
This is the only regulation I feel is reasonable. When it comes to luxury goods like video games, it doesn’t make sense to dictate how the product is offered. But by all means insist they’re clear with what the transaction type is. I can imagine the natural competitive wedge where GOG can say “Buy Game” but Steam has to say “Lease Game” on their buttons.
This would be case-by-case in Steam. There are some games which really do sell under "irrevocable license to play" (which, short of granting copyright privileges, is about as close as you can get to ownership for a digital product). Other games on Steam do not.
I think it would highlight the differences between publishers / studios more than store fronts.
Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
#135IMO the better thing is to force these companies to dump this mindset that digital information is a finite resource. Sony's logic doesn't even make sense to begin with. If person A buys a game, that game does not suddenly become unavailable for person B to also buy. I mean, even copyright recognizes that it is possible for a rightsholder to own all rights to the master copy of a good but other people can own separate copies of the work without infringing on the rights of the rightsholder. Sony is just taking the maximalist view here because they want to keep the power of being able to control who and what has access to whatever they sell, for any arbitrary reason whatsoever.
Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was their rationale for doing nothing?
What was their rationale for doing nothing? Carrot: Free vacations? Merch? Benefits ... Stick: Scared because taking actions against the Buy (aka you own nothing) is paramount to going in a fight with a entire industry.
Class action civil case should still be doable? And 100k small claims court cases would hurt.
Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Valve doesn't randomly remove stuff I've payed for from my library. Even when the ability to purchase something goes away, people who already bought it keep access to it.
They patched CS:GO away, a game I paid retail price for, with "Counter-Strike 2" and overnight dropped support for my platform (MacOS). Sony has never stolen a game from me, unlike Valve. The closest incident was that movie thing, which was more a failure on their part to negotiate perpetual licensing with the rightsholder.
CS:GO is still accessible via the beta feature. Not sure if you can still play it on MacOS. I agree that that's the wrong way to do it, but at least you still have access to it in theory.
Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be clear, you never owned the games, you own the disk that contains the games. The right they are reserving is to revoke your legal access to the games you're licensing. They can't repossess the disk, but they can deny you the right to use what's on it. Obviously digital-only also exists, in which case you own literally nothing. All that remains is the contingent access that they legally have control over.
> To be clear, you never owned the games To be clear, when I use the phrase "deny you ownership of your games", I'm talking in Common English, not legalese. We don't actually have to normalise this. Legalese aside, the social contract for decades has been that you own your digital purchases. Now that the social contract is being violated, we certainly should be striving to enshrine it in law via regulation, which wou…
I think you're under-appreciating the importance. It's not just pedantry. This has been true since EULAs have existed. And it's kinda insane that people think owning a disk gives them ownership of the intellectual property contained on it. You've always been given a license. The difference is that you can often transfer that license by selling the physical copy of a game whereas most digital licenses are exclusive.
The ability to deny ownership does exist these days. Sony can push an update that bricks your Playstation.
So this whole thing is actually an argument over whether games should be made available in a form that allows license transfer (which I support) or not. But it's a fair point to argue that for any actual benefit the remedy has to be applied globally, not just to Sony.
Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
#139Sony is correct here? If I buy a CD or a cassette or a record, I own the physical media but I only have a licence to the music it contains - not the ownership, and not the copyright. Whether I can play that music as a DJ at an event or on the radio, or remix it as a backing track for another song I'm creating and so on, depends on licencing laws and royalty payments. That was true well before the internet, and it's w…
If I buy a game - i.e. I am on a store page title "Game Name" not "Limited Revokable License for Game Name", and I click "buy", then I expect to own a copy of the game or the right to a copy of the game (in perpetuity), not a limited revokable license to play the game.
In the US adults are expected to read what they agree to. If they don’t, it’s generally their problem.
Re: Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
#140Sony is correct here? If I buy a CD or a cassette or a record, I own the physical media but I only have a licence to the music it contains - not the ownership, and not the copyright. Whether I can play that music as a DJ at an event or on the radio, or remix it as a backing track for another song I'm creating and so on, depends on licencing laws and royalty payments. That was true well before the internet, and it's w…
The important bit is that you can sell the CD or cassette or record.
True, but no additional rights to distribute replicas of the copyrighted music and composer works.
Note, if a band does a cover of a popular song, the original music composer rights also don't magically transfer because someone sang a slightly different version.
Sony may not be technically breaking any rules, if they disclosed the terms of the copyright are revocable... and not perpetual in the terms of sale.
Still a douche move to rip off kids, and burned a lot goodwill with consumers. =3