It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership • Hacker News Board

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

#491

Post by feoren » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 3:58 PM UTC

zahlman wrote: post #343

feoren wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not in favor of adding regulation, except when it comes to issues you understand and care about. All the oversight and regulation about everything you don't care and/or know about is big bad government overreach. Every government agency is a useless waste of your tax dollars, except the ones you rely on and the ones where you have friends that work there. Do I have that right?

This is an impressively uncharitable read of GP, and in my view totally uncalled for. People who "generally" oppose "regulation", in my experience, very often have very good reasons for having adopted that stance, that are rooted in examination (or at least knowledge) of several actually existing regulations. And I would hope we all agree that there are plenty of really bad regulations out there. (If not: I invite yo…

I am criticizing a common pattern of thought that I observe, including in the post I responded to. "I'm against X in general, but in this case X is warranted" is a very dangerous thought process, and I believe a good way to try to dispel it is to ask "are all the special cases just ones that you understand and affect you personally, and all the 'in general' ones that you don't?". It doesn't need to be 100% accurate to be a good challenge of the thought pattern.

Yes, there are really bad regulations out there. Some of them are well-intended but poorly thought out, but even more are regulatory capture that is enabled by the same "they're all bad anyway" attitude. Let's work on improving regulations. In my experience, the people who are "against regulation in general" are not the ones who are interested in improving the regulatory body as a whole, and in fact work directly against it.

> The entirely unfounded allegation of cronyism ("and the ones where you have friends that work there") is especially absurd

I was not accusing anyone of cronyism. I was saying that people who have friends who work at, say, USGS, probably talk about what they do and understand that they actually serve a useful function. I am challenging those people to consider the fact that perhaps agencies they've barely heard of also serve a useful function, and they would also support the existence of that agency if they had had conversations with people who work there. Cronyism has nothing to do with it, only familiarity, understanding, and a personal connection.

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

#492

Post by SideQuark » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:10 PM UTC

Rent vs own is about price. If you want to own something, digital, physical, information, goods, then a vendor will charge more, sometimes a lot more, to sell you an infinite ownership vs you get limited rights.

Most everything I buy needs to fight for my money. Of course some vendor specific things, such as a specific movie, are not replaceable, but since very few things, if any, are so important to me that I won't spend elsewhere if a good is too much.

With that competition for $, vendors generally are competitive, and don't tend to have extremely high profit margins.

I prefer the limited rights, since I can try far more things that way, with finite budget. And I don't get stuck with higher prices on things I ended up not wanting/using after I got it. I can simply cancel.

I think the general disconnect is people too often assume they handed out money so should get infinite rights, while ignoring the nuances of economics/pricing.

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

#493

Post by butlike » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 4:41 PM UTC

feoren wrote: post #103

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…

You're not in favor of adding regulation, except when it comes to issues you understand and care about. All the oversight and regulation about everything you don't care and/or know about is big bad government overreach. Every government agency is a useless waste of your tax dollars, except the ones you rely on and the ones where you have friends that work there. Do I have that right?

I didn't take their comment like that. A brain surgeon doesn't excise a leg tumor the same way as you don't comment on things outside your wheelhouse.

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

#494

Post by LordDragonfang » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

_davide_ wrote: post #349

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…

A simple law: everything the customer buys must always behave *in favor of the customer over anything else*. If the product/service contradicts this, it must be fully stated before the purchase and cannot be updated. <= This would be a sane balance.

Depending on how you (you specifically) are defining "fully stated":

1. This is very literally what already happens, it's called a EULA.

2. In practice this means you are required to personally come to the customer's house to fix bugs (or any other ridiculous edge case that wasn't "fully stated"). As much as I strongly agree the law should swing much further in the direction of the consumer, as GP points out, that only holds until it's your obligation to the customer on the line. "In favor of the customer over anything else" is not a legally viable clause.

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

#495

Post by alexruf » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

I completely agree. This isn't about physical discs vs. digital stores. It's about ownership. When I, as a customer, pay a lot of money for something and get nothing more than a temporary right of use, then something is going seriously wrong here. And no, I don't think you can compare it to movie streaming. With streaming, I pay a monthly fee for access to the platform. I don't pay for every single movie I watch. That's a completely different deal. If Sony offered a flat-rate gaming subscription for a monthly fee (and no, PlayStation Plus isn't that), then I'd be totally fine with losing access to the games included there after canceling the sub. But if I, as a customer, am expected to shell out 70-80 bucks for a single game, I want to actually own that game - physical or digital copy regardless!

I've built up a pretty large collection of physical games over the years on two shelves behind me. And every now and then, I really enjoy playing some of those older titles. It took me almost half a year just to get a disc drive for my PS5 Pro. Half a year where I couldn't play my favorite games anymore and had a useless new console just sitting there next to me. I'm actually a bit worried about the next console generation - is it going to make my entire game collection unplayable and useless?

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

#496

Post by braiamp » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

xlii wrote: post #403

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.…

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

#497

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

feoren wrote: post #103

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…

You're not in favor of adding regulation, except when it comes to issues you understand and care about. All the oversight and regulation about everything you don't care and/or know about is big bad government overreach. Every government agency is a useless waste of your tax dollars, except the ones you rely on and the ones where you have friends that work there. Do I have that right?

Not really. The issue is that even the basic current rules are not really enforced, because digital is somehow seen as more ephemeral and thus not real ( or at least, that is how it initially started ).

We don't have to have new regulation. We just need to enforced basic existing standards. Buy means buy. Rent means rent. Lease means lease. All have their place. But this is not what is happening now. We have an ecosystem that mischaracterizes not just type the type of sale, but user's rights and obligations under it.

All that is basically fraud. We just don't call it that. We call it innovation.

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

#498

Post by paulryanrogers » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

nfw2 wrote: post #217

Telaneo wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Organize a class action then if you believe so. Fraud is illegal

Class actions are often barred by EULAs in favor of arbitration. Even if they're allowed, they are prohibitively expensive because courts aren't growing to meet demand, meaning justice is largely pay-to-play.

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

#499

Post by paulryanrogers » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 6:04 PM UTC

nfw2 wrote: post #206

paulryanrogers wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why carry water for billion dollar companies? I can still play my brother's old PlayStation games on his OG PlayStation. They cannot be revoked arbitrarily, nor their music dropped or swapped out. This a feature, and we'd feel quite cheated if that happened. In fact we still go back to old games from time to time.

I can still play the games I bought on the nintendo switch 8 years ago. > Why carry water for billion companies? All companies at a certain scale are billion dollar companies. Also, how much money a company has is unrelated to whether they violated consumer rights or not. But, tangentially, I do generally respect entities that fund creative endeavors moreso than I respect gamers who go online to bemoan how persecuted…

> I can still play the games I bought on the nintendo switch 8 years ago.

Good luck! I cannot play any of the digital Wii games I bought. And that's kind of my point. You pay the same price as a physical copy, using the same verb, and yet are actually renting for an undisclosed amount of time that may at any point be cut off.

Blockbuster never said I was 'buying' a game which they could take away at any moment. So why do we let these companies use contradictory or obtuse language at our expense?

> how much money a company has is unrelated to whether they violated consumer rights or not

Billion dollar companies are less sympathetic. As a consumer I might take a worse deal if it meant supporting a small creator whom I knew was sacrificing a lot for art.

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

#500

Post by fl4regun » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 6:43 PM UTC

rickdeckard wrote: post #377

Gravityloss wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's an accurate description of a common way of thinking, though I wouldn't call it conservative in the global sense. Another is some of the domestic manufacturing or hard tech movement people who present lofty ideals about jobs and sovereignty and so on. But there's a claim that when the surface is scratched a bit, it devolves into a want to keep their imported cheap input materials tax / toll free while int…

> I think it's an accurate description of a common way of thinking, though I wouldn't call it conservative in the global sense. It's not a common way of thinking, not in my observation. Conservative / neo-liberal narratives push strongly against any form of "bigger picture view", more explicitly against solidarity, fueling this mindset of "I only support what profits me personally", i.e. "everyone's taxes should be u…

IMO it is extremely common. It is practically the default way people think government should work when they have done no reflection on it (which is still a pretty high number of people, few people reflect that much on how government works or is structured). This is why everyone bitches about how taxes are high and doesn't even know what's in the government budget, or whether or not taxes are ACTUALLY higher than X years ago. They just know that money gets spent and its *THEIR* money so by golly are they gonna get mad when something doesn't work how they want it because it's so *obvious* how to do it right.