Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

The problem is that ownership is itself a legal fiction, so it's kind of necessarily legalese. It's interchangeable with "legitimate control" in common parlance. IE if I break into your house and throw you out of it, I don't suddenly own your house. Even though I'm in possession of it, the control I have of it isn't legitimate. Ownership is the guarantee that your possession and control of something can be defended by our society's conflict resolution mechanisms, in this case that's the legal system.

While socially we might disagree with the law on the validity of licensure in this context, that changes the domain a bit. I do have ultimate control over the games I've purchased on Steam, regardless of the law's opinion, even though they're technically licensed. I back up every game I buy, away from where Steam could be able to know to delete it or even discover it. If my legal license is revoked, I still have control over the bytes. With a steam emulator I can still access most of them (and the remainder can be fixed by setting an LLM about cracking them) but this isn't legitimate in the eyes of the law. Practically speaking it doesn't matter in the slightest what the law thinks on this matter.

Now let's consider that the rhetoric here generally includes Steam's arrangement as a perpetrator of "you will own nothing". But given the above, that's a hard circle to square. In your proposed notion of ownership, ostensibly I own everything I bought on Steam. With a little bit of technical literacy (and the money for storage, which is easier said than done these days) it can be true of anybody. It's only in the eyes of the law that I don't actually own anything, and the DMCA probably has plenty to say about it.

So do we use the legal definition, or is it merely the possession of the software and means of access that constitute ownership? It's exactly this edge case which is why I insist on this pedantry. Otherwise the violation of ownership at the hands of Sony begins and ends with the fact that it's not an open platform with software freedom. I'm very amenable to making that be our standard here, of course, I think at minimum the freedom to do as you please with a personal computer is an ethical and moral directive.

Perhaps what we as a society need is that what you actually buy is a "license to download". Upon being in possession of the bytes, you own them. For as long as you maintain the integrity of those bytes, they're yours. Of course, redistributing them to other parties would constitute an IP violation, but that's not a problem to concern a storefront. If your license is revoked, what you are actually losing is the ability to download.

???

A BMW and a Volkswagen are two kinds of apples. Both get you from A to B, which was the entire goal. A Sony exclusive and any other game are not two kinds of anything. If you can't tell these apart, perhaps you should go back to elementary school.

> A Sony exclusive and any other game are not two kinds of anything.

Are they not two kinds of games?

I'm arguing that your comparison isn't the right one.

A BMW and a Volkswagen are two types of apples. They both let you drive form A to B.

A Playstation and a Nintendo Switch are two types of oranges. They both provide entertainment in the form of video games.

How you drive (and how enjoyable your drive is) from A to B, or which games you play, are specific characteristics of the hardware you chose to use to accomplish the task. Neither of those are two types of anything, as it were.

It's easy to get lost in arguments where analogies are used. They're almost always terrible and are the death of nuance and detail. Fuck car analogies, a car isn't a video game console.

Sony host a massive, massive marketplace. That's where their monopoly lies, they have end to end control over distribution of not only their games, but anyone else who chooses to publish on the platform, in addition to control over how those games are played and on what hardware.

This hands them an enourmous amount of power over the third parties that make up the majority of software sales on their store. The way they've constructed their ecosystem and services also greatly disincentivises it's users from switching. Games aren't cross-compatible, so buying in for another console means they have to either keep their console (which they could otherwise have sold) or give up their library. Even keeping both means having to choose for one online service over another. These kinds of decisions might not matter to someone over a certain socioeconomic status, but it still matters to many.

I don't think that a market of it's size should legally be allowed to exist. It's exploitative by default and I would be supportive of the EU recognizing Sony as a "Gate Keeper" under the Digital Markets Act and taking appropriate regulatory action.