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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

#361

Post by yason »

reichstein wrote: post #356
pseudocomposer wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not that I don't agree, but lawyers will then ask you to define "buy" in such a way that it is distinguishable from a perpetual lease with a cancellation clause _to buyers_, without also disallowing a lot of actually useful leasing agreements. The thing is, you never did _buy_ that Steam game. And you never bought the software on the TV, which you did buy the hardware of, you bought a software lease along with t…

> It's not that I don't agree, but lawyers will then ask you to define "buy" in such a way that

One fundamental thing would be to make it illegal to lawyer redefinitions of common words. If the sales of a game uses the word "buy" it should not be legal to redefine "buy" in that context to actually mean lump-sum lease or something.

I'm pretty sure the game studios wouldn't like me to buy their games if I were to amend the terms of sale with a clause in fine print that the term "pay" means "setting up a temporary IOU for which I reserve the right to have it resolved into nothing at my discretion". So, I'll pay later if I decide pay, maybe never. That's effectively what their "buy" means.

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

#362

Post by Telaneo »

deadbabe wrote: post #238
Telaneo wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Focus on enjoying games now, in the time when they are relevant. No matter how hard you try, all those games will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. I've enjoyed games that came out 20 years before I actually played them. Many games I enjoy are years old by the time I play them. I wanted to play The Crew. Doing that officially is literally impossible now. Maybe I'll get to play it if the pirates can do their…

Most books are lost in time. The ones that survive are just popular enough to stay in circulation. Like you will most likely always have some kind of access to something like GTA 6 in some way. Only obscure titles get truly lost. They are obscure for a reason.

> Most books are lost in time.

And that's a bad thing.

> Only obscure titles get truly lost.

We can do better.

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

#363

Post by AnthonyMouse »

scott_w wrote: post #342
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 i…

> the condenser is "ugly". "Ugly" is not part of planning regs. Local council planning regs cannot override statute and they don't deviate that much. You'd know this if you lived in the UK (which you don't). > Which strongly implies both that there are cases when it's required anyway I explained why you might need planning permission: because your planned work sits outside of building regs. > there are cases when it…

> "Ugly" is not part of planning regs.

The phrase "materially affect the appearance of the building" has a pretty strong implication that the aesthetic effect is regarded as undesirable.

> Yes, those are things like "it's too big" or "it's a listed building."

And what then happens in the cases where "it's too big" or "it's a listed building"?

It also includes things like "it's going on a pitched roof" or "it's too close to the property line".

> show these cases that are obviously reasonable but still being blocked.

Demanding "obviously reasonable" is the crux of the banality of evil. Many things are non-obviously reasonable.

Who needs to put the unit on a pitched roof? That's weird. Just put it on the ground. Unless you own a unit on the second floor of a building and someone else owns the yard, and then you can't.

Your link has "too close to the property line" at within a meter. That's really close, who would need to do that? Well, the UK has millions of terraced houses that directly abut the property line. Some of them don't have a yard at all (and then we're back to the roof), others have one so small that being that close to the property line may be the only available place to put it.

Are these cases "obviously reasonable"? Putting the unit on a pitched roof is still weird and ugly. It's not that hard to understand the neighbors not wanting it that close to the property line.

But there is nowhere else to put it and then July makes the building hot enough to be a danger to life. At which point a rule motivated by the aesthetics is doing something objectionable.

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

#364

Post by LazyGooze »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #19
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…

People still don't own their games with Steam, the main PC platform. I don't think its going under anytime soon and currently its reasonably customer friendly but as we have seen these big tech companies can turn on their customer base at any moment. GOG is about the only way to actually own the games since no DRM is applied and you can download the entire package and keep it and don't require their launcher. PC alre…

the catch was that steam used to have, or maybe it still has, crazy discount prices, i would be mad to lose access to a 15 year old game that costed me 80$, but i wouldnt be that mad if the game costed 10$...

Still, steam didnt prevent you from accessing games, the game publisher did, like "the crew" case happend.

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

#365

Post by Telaneo »

meh2frdf wrote: post #321
Telaneo wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That agreement can be filled with unfair terms, and often is. I'd call that fraud.

But the issue is those terms are laid out in the agreement, and you willingly agreed to those terms, so what are arguing for is to welch on the deal you accepted? In terms in consumer protection, at least in UK and Europe (not saying not elsewhere, just don't know much), there is an amount of regulation that tries to help consumers not get screwed in the legalese of these agreements, and some basic protections that c…

> so what are arguing for is to welch on the deal you accepted?

I'm arguing unfair terms shouldn't be upheld, or really in the agreement in the first place. This is on paper how it should work in Europe, but we (apparently) haven't quite figured that out yet.

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

#366

Post by pprotas »

I'm sad that Gabe Newell will retire one day, and Steam's benevolent dictatorship will go down the same route Sony just did.

The convenience of digital game storefronts can cut both ways. For now Steam is on our side, but there is no guarantee it will stay that way.

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

#367

Post by m000 »

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…

> I have no problem with Sony not offering DRM free versions of games that I can still download and play with the store. But if that goes away -> you must give me a path to local ownership.

I'm pretty sure that Sony and others would work their way around such legislation. E.g. spin-off shell "studios" that would be the legal game sellers, and when the time comes to sunset a batch of games, these "studios" would magically go bankrupt and cease to exist.

Then the onus would again put on the commuinity to break any encryption or otherwise reverse-engineer and preserve the games so they remain playable for legal owners. And the top-level companies would still be able to salvage and own the game franchise rights, so they would still be able to harass the game preservation community.

I don't think there's any workaround to stop this kind of cheating, other than mandating that (a) all DRM-protected or service-bound content needs to be submitted to an escrow organization (Library of Congress?) in a form that can be used to reproduce it locally, and (b) all submitted content is released to the public after X years.

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

#368

Post by yason »

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…

> biggest reason why air conditioning is not so widespread in Northern Europe as in the United States

It certainly is a transitional period where each summer more and more people realize that eventually something needs to be done, "maybe a/c next year" for many years until the year of installation finally comes.

In Northern Europe it certainly is still a rare occurrence that everything gets heated so warm that the air does no longer cool during the night and you can't cool down for the next day. Yes, we do get heat waves but they don't last very long. Yes, summers are mostly getting hotter but it's still nothing like in southern Europe. We might have several weeks of 25-28C with a lot of lakes and sea to dip into.

Admittedly it can be tormenting in city apartments where you might not have a place for A/C even if you wanted to, and where you might not have enough outside walls to effectively cross-ventilate. Further, the stone and pavement in a city absorb heat like a sponge which keeps the average a few degrees warmer than greenleaf areas across the hot season.

Yet I think maybe half-ish of households (or at least detached houses) already do have A/C. Installations have been steadily creeping up in the last 25 years. But those units aren't there because of their cooling capacity (which isn't necessarily always even used). Those are air-to-air heat pumps that keep the house warm in the winter, and can be used for cooling in the summer.

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

#369

Post by beloch »

tjpnz wrote: post #253
beloch wrote: post #115

"But most people use Steam anyway, I hear you say. That's true, but you can still own your games on Steam. Very easily, in fact! Steam doesn't apply a hard DRM for games on their platform, you can bypass it and play your games offline without the launcher if you know what you're doing." -------------- When it comes to PC games, the real peace of mind comes from cracks and piracy. Sure, a single player game that requi…

>When it comes to PC games, the real peace of mind comes from cracks and piracy. I still have nocds for some of the old GTA and Warcraft games. Pretty sure you can't play the originals any other way now with all the "definitive" and "reforged" editions having taken their place.

You might be able to mount an image of the original CD and let it detect that, depending on how schmancy their copy protection scheme is. To be fair though, I used nocd mods back when some of these games were released just so I wouldn't have to keep swapping CD's.

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

#370

Post by pprotas »

noduerme wrote: post #310

What's scary is how quickly the lack of ownership of things we used to own can become a "new normal". Forget about explainin to the youngins. My girlfriend is 7 years younger than me and barely grasps the concept of why I'd have 20,000 mp3s on my phone that I ripped off CDs I owned. Why not just pay for a subscription? She doesn't understand the utility of anything being hers . So I say, send me a song. And she sends…

What do we "regular folk" really own in our lives? Our houses are rented or loaned (via mortgage), the car is paid off in installments, everything is a subscription or license. Many people I know purchase their clothes and electronics through buy-now-pay-later services and stream all media they watch. We lend our time and effort to our employer if we are salaried, as we don't get paid at the end of the day but at the end of the month.

How can someone who has never owned anything of value in their lives understand what it means to have something that isn't rented?

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