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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

#401

Post by silvestrov »

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…

The KISS version of regulation would be that stores are not allowed to use the word "buy" when you don't get full ownership and must use the word "license" instead.

Also it should be marked clearly that the company can rescind the license at any moment without giving any reason why.

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

#402

Post by Uvix »

Telaneo wrote: post #233
Uvix wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon may not be going away tomorrow, but they have form for disallowing redownloads of old ebook purchases. If you dared to buy ebooks from them pre-Kindle, you can't access them anymore. If you hold onto your Kindle devices for too long instead of replacing them with a newer model, you can't access your old books that aren't already downloaded until you buy a new device. For now, Sony has no issues with people red…

> but they have form for disallowing redownloads of old ebook purchases. If you dared to buy ebooks from them pre-Kindle, you can't access them anymore. Well that's bad and also shouldn't happen. They should not be able to come down from heaven and turn your books into rocks. > If you hold onto your Kindle devices for too long instead of replacing them with a newer model, you can't access your old books that aren't a…

Per your link, Sony will soon be disallowing new purchases, but has not set a date for disallowing downloads of existing purchases.

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

#403

Post by xlii »

Geez, people have no idea how licenses work...

License is not an ownership - It's limited right to use something. Any action anyone does that isn't covered by license (in software) is called "piracy".

Games were never sold. Mediums were sold with attached licenses. And most of the licenses as early as 2000 contained something like:

    "This license is personal to you and may not be assigned, sublicensed, or transferred."
Selling game with such license was just as big of a "violation" as straight copying and giving it out (not having right to do something doesn't equal to crime though, even if some companies, coughMicrosoftcough, want you to think otherwise).

The only difference today is that licenses are enforced better. They can be held on license-server and new user can be denied usage after transfering was detected.

But it doesn't matter if it's downloaded, on disc, or embedded on a spoon.

Don't make people believe they ever owned a game. They didn't. You don't own games as well. Never owned them. You rented them.

The only way to get out of it with winning hand is to side with reputable vendor that didn't cheat people out of licenses. Reason why I side with Steam is because I have my licenses intact even though they have 25 years, I know big corps that just make licenses go poof and pretended in never happened.

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

#404

Post by account42 »

rplnt wrote: post #319
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> climate simply hasn’t, until recently, required it. I would qualify that as it hasn't required it since the invention of air conditioning. Which also isn't strictly true; the high temperature for Paris on July 1st this year is identical to the high for the same day back in 2015[1], and there are several times since 1970 that the temperature was over 30C. Other sources[2] indicate 1947 was just as brutal as 2019 and…

Outside air temperature isn't an issue. It's not like people drop dead the moment it hits 40. The problem is that after a few days of that everything is heated up through and you have no place to escape it. That's new and hasn't been happening before.

But "somewhat longer heatwave" isn't as scary sounding as "HOTTEST EVER RECORDED TEMPERATURE IN $LOCALE!!!!!!" which is why all the scaremongers keep screaming the latter.

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

#405

Post by norome »

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 bought a bunch of games on google stadia when that was a thing, and when they closed the service down i was fully refunded on all games. pretty cool

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

#406

Post by ludicrousdispla »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #388
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…

Slave owners, such as all of the so-called founding fathers, were as much rent seekers as any king

not all of them, as 15 of the 56 signers of the Declaration did not own slaves.

>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_and_the_United_States_...

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

#407

Post by spauldo »

zahlman wrote: post #346
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 genuinely can't understand why this comment was downvoted.

Because a lot of people aren't libertarians?

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

#409

Post by account42 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #339
autoexec wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 actua…

Corporations aren't wild animals that just happen to have an anti-social nature. They are fictional entities / groups and people and are allowed to do whatever we want to allow them. It's perfectly valid to say that corporations that keep pushing for anti-society legislation get shut down entirely instead of having the government and voters have to continually resist them. We don't allow individuals to do whatever they want to further their own interests either and lock up or even execute the worst misbehavers.

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

#410

Post by Schlagbohrer »

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…

One thing we can say for certain from 30+ years of history is that gamers will never hold to a boycott, and will always put up with worse and worse treatment from the companies.
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