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 the sale. This means that a company cannot "revoke" your access at a later time. Specifically for content that is DRM locked, if they decide to sunset that service (store, DRM server, whatever), no problem! just offer DRM free (or generally lock-free copies). 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.
(Multiplayer games that require server infrastructure are a bit more complex, and I'd leave aside for now).
This should apply equally to video games, movies, books, music. Any digital content.
I saw something earlier today that showed the Sony agreement specifies you’re only licensing the games, even if you buy it on a disc. So the fine print means no one ever “buys” a game for the PS5. They are buying a license to use the game for some indefinite period of time that Sony, or some other rights holder, will determine at a later date.
This is why things really need to be DRM free from the start, and portable (have the ability to back them up, move them, etc). It’s the only way to ensure they can’t pull that kind of stuff.
> 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 worry about shenanigans where you "buy" the game from a shell company and that shell company "folds" and doesn't uphold it's promises. Same is true for a smaller, but not shell, company. If the non-DRM version isn't already created and held in trust, then it's not trustworthy.
I don't see this as "regulation". I see this as extending the same consumer protections that existed in the era of analog physical media to the digital age.
All they have to do then is say that they license you a game, and you're not buying anything, despite paying for it. They already do that with online games.
One of the unstated points of this particular article is that these rules are ones that we as a society have. If we collectively decide that this isn’t something that should be allowed, we can make it so. There are some powerful interests that don’t want it so it’s not an easy path.
It's a completely different license. A normal software license gives you the right to use version X of the software on Y computers/seats/users/... You have the original installer on the disc, you can download installers for patch releases online and save them for later, you have the activation key. At any point, you can uninstall the software and give or sell the installer and key to someone else.
What games and some software do these days is much worrse. You have a license to use their "software installation service" and their "let me run the game" service until they decide to turn them off. At any point, at their discretion, they can remove your ability to install a new copy or even run it all together.
right, but back in the 90s, the onus of maintaining a working copy of any software was on you. Now, Sony simply reaches into you home and can deny you access to software/movies you "bought".
Well, yes. Always online is a problem, but it doesn't change what one buys.
A thing that is easy to copy without destroying the original. So they invented licenses to contain the copying part.
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 subscription model on gaming. Battle Passes, Xbox Live, Game Pass, Playstation Plus, Stadia, Game Fly, and a ton of other ideas. Sony is now using the stick to directly attack ownership instead of the carrot to entice subscriptions. We'll see how this plays in the PS6, but I think they are overplaying their position, especially with how underwhelming the PS5 has been received by gamers.
I'm optimistic that the raise in PC gaming will act as a balance for the obvious greed of the consoles. It's becoming a larger and larger player in the non-mobile gaming market, and it's too big to be treated like a second class citizen anymore. The open platform prevents anyone from acting as a gatekeeper between game developers and players.
For me personally, I began losing interest in consoles the first time I had to install a console game to a hard drive. The plug and play magic just fell apart.
> I'm optimistic that the raise in PC gaming will act as a balance for the obvious greed of the consoles.
Why?
Steam has never done anything to support ownership of games, their policy completely bans transferring licenses or accounts to other people or leaving them to someone when you die. Their next CEO is someone who has only known extreme wealth their whole life and gets the job because daddy started the company, when has that been a catalyst for societal good?
GOG is the only one to have advocated a different status quo, but they have virtually no marketshare that could pressure developers and publishers to accept more equitable terms beyond eschewing DRM.
This was actually a funny question at work over lunch. A few of us have kids and like most tech guys over 30, our steam accounts have turned into collections. So I asked, who gets your steam account when you kick it. It’s difficult to think about and seems baffling to spend thousands of dollars and hours assembling a collection only for it to poof away into nothing.
I'm optimistic about PC gaming because if Steam begins acting as an evil gatekeeper then game developers can adopt other avenues to deliver the games to their players. It's an open platform. People are using Steam now because it adds value. People will stop using Steam if it subtracts value.
Is that online activation Steam or is it a third party thing? Steam allows selling games that have external DRM like that. I think they, themselves, don't do it.
Steam haven't put shenanigans like this because they have many competitors and PC users would leave them, the have built trust within the gaming community
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 already went digital no ownership for most people unfortunately. His argument that it isn't the same doesn't wash, you still can't sell them or lend them to someone else and you have to hack around Steam's DRM, which is a loophole that can be closed at any point.
You talk as if all Steam games use Steam DRM. No, it's not GOG but it's not the same category as Sony and Microsoft at all. It's starting to sound disingenuous when I see Steam lumped together with them.
I think it's a fair comparison. Steam can change their behavior to become much more user hostile at any point, and hold our triple digit steam libraries hostage.
Its not like we can sell or even lend the games from Steam that we have, not without breaking the licence terms and hacking around the DRM. Its precisely the same as what Sony is intending to enforce.
Can you sell or lend gog games, though? You can transfer the files obviously but if a steam game comes with no drm (which is pretty common for indies) you can do the same thing. GOG nicely requires everyone on their platform to do this but ultimately the devs have to want to not put in drm too.
I’m not nearly so optimistic. I think we have a generation of kids now who mostly never owned any physical media, having grown up with Netflix instead of vhs/dvd, Spotify instead of CDs, steam instead of retail games, etc.
Yes. Look at the market research. It's growing specifically fast in Asia, but there is also strong growth with North America.
Having a PC to check your email, order off amazon, and download recipes is dying. Buying a PC and using it for video games is raising. The PC hardware is getting more expensive, but the upgrade cycles are also extending. If you look at the steam hardware survey most gamers are 1-3 GPU generations behind.
If you look at the total cost of ownership PC gaming is not awful compared to consoles. It's higher, but not as high as the initial price tag makes it look. There is no monthly Playstation Plus or Xbox Live subscription. These can run between $80/yr to $240/yr. PC games often have access to deeper discounts. The PC has additional utility, and modern PC components are holding exceptional resell value.
I think the effect of Twitch/YouTube can't be ignored. PC games are easier content source for streamers, and PC remains better platform for viewers for watching streams. Consoles are still quite focused on single task content consumption.
The question I'm left with: in the past, the uproar over these types of changes seemed to make companies change their mind when considering very anti-consumer decisions. Now, they just go ahead anyway.
What's different? How do we get back to how it was before? I know the current political climate is one that enables this sort of thing. There are parallels with the current movement also WRT to the employer/employee relationship.
Beyond that, there's still more at play. In tech, and specifically on this site, I see a lot more complicity and fatigue when discussing these issues. I can't help but think that also contributes. I'm not saying everyone should always be mad at everything. But it does seem like there's a generational component to this where we haven't passed down an essential feature of a hacker, namely the anti-establishment bent.
I suppose that's collateral damage of a culture tolerating lots of people rushing in to grab their bag of cash and then get out.
Companies need to earn money, so the only leverage we as customers is to NOT buy their products. Educate our kids that such practices are EVIL and to buy the products it means to support those EVIL practices. Don't be afraid to call upon moral. Kids need to understand moral from the beginning, or they will be corrupted by bad practices.
We’ve been boiled in water like frogs, or however the saying goes. Even cars these days have subscription pricing for features which is insane to me but the average consumer is accustomed to this garbage. If they tried this 20 years ago it wouldn’t fly.
Someone once said that if libraries were invented today they would be illegal and that feels more true every day.
Thats easy to do (on paper). Dont let copyright owners revoke/expire their licenses (or if its revokable mark and price it clearly). Once a product containing it is purchased, its owned till product ceases to exist (or similar).
All these music behemoths are way too powerful and they twist entire society globally to dance as they want. Not a fraction of a worry for pirates of course, just for decent paying fools.
This is the correct KYC. Plenty of apps use it besides banking. Depending on the perspective, this is either the perfect solution to a lot of digital legal problems, or the distopian solution because of the numerous ways this can and will be abused when it is expected by many vendors outside of banking.
This is a large part of why I went with a Retroid Pocket over buying a Switch 2. It’s not nearly as powerful but it’ll run Linux and most indie games I buy on GOG. It’s more work of course but knowing that the games I buy I’ll be able to play into the future on any number of devices is worth it.
If you think in terms of ownership, even then digital is not that bad. I’ve owned digital games since Xbox 360 and I can still play them to this day on my Xbox series X.
But not all of my physical games CD/DVDs are in mint condition and some have scratches.
You can play them, but the license gives you no right to transfer ownership. This feels like a huge problem to me, especially with ebooks.
I’d love to see regulation around guaranteeing consumers the ability to transfer ownership of digital goods in a similar way to the analog counterpart.
Sure, but they keep raising the price of everything. And in a world where ram and STORAGE are at a multiple premium, deleting high density discs is completely outside of reality
Unfortunately ownership on console has been down the drain for a long time. Even if you have the disc you still have mandatory downloads, patches, one-time download codes that tie the content to your account and of course DLC. What is even the point of having the disc anymore? Might as well go full digital and avoid the plastic waste.
I do own a PS4 and I have to do research every time I want to play a game. The website https://www.doesitplay.org/ is quite useful. But it's all so tiresome, it really makes me want to just check out of console gaming altogether. With full-on digital at least there won't be any ambiguity. It's not what I wanted, but all it means for me is that they won't be getting any of my money anymore.
I view the killing of physical game media as having two aspects that, while intertwined, are separate in some ways.
The first is the loss of the physical item. I like organizing carts and discs, looking at them on my shelves, reminiscing, easily putting one in a console to replay. Same with other media for me: I buy books, only read physical ones. I listen to digital music (generally downloaded from sites like Bandcamp) but for albums and artists I like the most I buy vinyl. I get that this isn't a big deal for most people, but it is something that is permanently lost when you get rid of physical media.
The second aspect is control and ownership. This is indeed intertwined with the physical aspect, since you can do things like resell a cartridge or disc and let someone easily borrow it. But control is possible with purely digital games, they just need to not be locked down with DRM. And companies like Sony want to kill physical games because it allows them to keep those DRM locks on digital-only copies so you cannot resell your games, which is connected to the second point, control.
I also agree that the issue of control is more important. How do we continue to make sure our games, that we bought, aren't just taken away from us? What happens if you lose your account with Sony/MS/Nintendo? What happens if your old console that you downloaded a game on breaks? The death of physical games is also a step on the way to subscription-only services, where you won't even be able to play something unless you are actively giving money to a company regardless of how much you gave them before.
The ways forward that I see are legislation that would do things like force companies to allow people to always download games they bought in perpetuity, regardless of account status, and if the company dies the successor company must do the same or release the game into the public domain. But given the power of large corporations and current intellectual property laws, this isn't happening anytime soon.
Practically, then, the only way I see is to either have a console that is hacked in some way, or only play games on an open platform like PC. And there you can only buy DRM-free games or, at worse, if you lose access to game in some service (e.g., Steam) you can still pirate it (which I'd feel morally fine doing if I bought it already of course, but that does bring legal risks depending on where you live).
And the later option still doesn't address the larger issue of preservation, as the OP's blog post notes: games will be made for locked-down consoles in the future and will be lost forever unless the hardware is hacked or a law demands the game's preservation.
Yep, agreed. Recurring, consistent revenue is the ultimately a common-sense business best interest. It can be extremely unfortunate for consumers as there's an unaligned incentive here.
This can still be acceptable if they give HW for free. but paying up to 1k for console and then full price for games which often have their own paid loot boxes/whatever... yeah good luck no thank you,
I can afford it trivially, but its like paying say 20 bucks for a standard bread or bottle of milk. Insulting
the resale market for disk has been on a downtrend for years, you can sign into someone's else psn account too and share games, you are a washed up gamer, its okay I am washed up too.
Video game companies still remember when they owned the arcade machines and players were required to constantly insert money into the machines to keep playing. They've been chasing that high ever since.
The key to owning modern multiplayer online games is to have private servers run by human persons on their own owned computers. But except for TF2 no one has been able to (or cared enough) allow private servers alongside the much much more important microtransactions. This is what is killing ownership.
> Video game companies still remember when they owned the arcade machines and players were required to constantly insert money into the machines to keep playing.
I know Sega and Namco operated some arcades, but mostly companies sold arcade machines and operators ran them. Coin boxes didn't connect to the developer except that games with good earnings sold well.
This is why so many machines now have accounts and global saved progress. It provides actual value for the player, to be able to pick up their saved progress (e.g. on a rhythm game with thousands of songs on it), but it also means the arcade is beholden to the game manufacturer for an expected feature, and pays for that on an ongoing basis.
Even private servers doesn't quite solve the issue. Minecraft is an example where you can run the server but it requires clients to login to the microsoft account. I think you can still bypass the check on the server but clients have to be cracked or previously authorised for offline play which only lasts for a certain timeframe. So Microsoft can take away the ability to play minecraft despite the game server binary being available.
Whereas a game like Arma 3 has its own dedicated servers and has no such login requirement so theoretically you could still play that in 50 years time, but that might still depend on Steam DRM.
We have a lot of client side controls right now on DRM and logins which make the dedicated server only part of the problem.
With Minecraft, there isn't even a need for Microsoft to do anything. The authentication servers experience regular periods of downtime/inaccessibility, making you unable to join any server, even if you have already launched the game and have joined a server in that session before. It's extremely frustrating.
It's not just the arcade machine implementation. The owners of these companies want to go all the way and move everything to data centers so they can rent compute time, similar to the idea of the time-sharing days of the 60s.
The model for DLC that's present, carried as patch updates, but unlocked for an additional fee annoys me.
However, allow me to ignore my opinion for a moment and play the Devils Advocate for a thought experiment.
What if, cosmetics and other unlockables (which should be part of the base gameplay) were instead evaluated on other people's computers. That is, rendering client side, authentication for use also server side.
Hats / Skins / Other -- Render some 'humiliating' cosmetic if authentication fails. Circumvention would require compromise on all client devices.
Core game assets -- Levels / 'mods' that require auth a similar path, except client/server verification mismatch. Do note the license server as a possible cause.
At end of life all of those checks should be patched in a final release to fail enabled. No more auth server, archive mode releases all use.
Exactly. Let them sell games on GOG DRM-free. You buy it, it's yours as long as you back it up. No one stops you from storing it on any physical media you want. Just use an HDD.
When things on the other are presented as rent only, it's very bad.
Physical media was always one of the selling points for consoles. While PC has essentially been digital-only for a long time (with NONE of the wish list the author here wants, mind you - you can't sell or lend games to random people on Steam, besides a limited "family sharing" feature), consoles were where you go when you want to play a game and then sell it quickly if you don't like it. Physical media accounts for 50% of Switch game sales. I feel that Sony is in panic mode because they released a bunch of stinker first-party games and now they think that removing the disc drive from the PS6 will save them some money. It'll probably lose them a lot of customers.
Sony removing the disc drive from PS6 will save them a lot of money if Xbox also removes it. I wonder if they’re back channel colluding on that right now?
I’ve come to realize there are definitely people out there who have no interest in playing games, they just want to own them.
A child doesn’t think about ownership, he picks up a controller and plays a game. And when the child has grown bored of the game, one day they just never touch it again like a discarded toy, moving on to something else.
It is adults, reminded of their own feeble mortality and impermanence in the world who try to grasp at things like permanent ownership, they long for something that can’t just be torn away from them on a whim. But in life, everything is ultimately torn away from you, there is nothing you can do about it.
Some try to disguise their hoarding as “preservation”. Nobody cares. Even if you had some carefully curated museum, these old games would just be exhibits people look at for a bit with passing curiosity. Nothing more. You didn’t even make these games, why do you care so much?
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.
There's another story about a game that died and was resurrected, Runescape. It launched with a big fanfare of version 3.0 back in 2008 and was met with total disaster. Fans were quitting, private servers of the pre-EOC update, etc. Jagex heard this and stuck a solo dev onto re-launching an instance of '2007 scape' which was basically an old backup they found and a few server instances. They incorporated features of the platform like voting, where votes require strong consent (75% in some cases) to get new features, and it's a seriously community driven game where both sides have something to gain. Now branded "old school runescape" the game has more players than the "runescape 3" that still exists today as Runescape. A win all around.
I question how much of this discussion is really being driven by gamers.
Those who wanted change made it happen. There are indie games and remakes without these restrictions. Most of classic gaming preservation has been successful with its goals apart from some legal gray areas and chasing rarities.
These discussions then fixate on the cutoff year for classic gaming and whether everything beyond that is even worth saving. The conclusion is always the same. Nobody really cares about the slop.
All that remains to discuss is politics. That's always the most vocal part drowning out everyone else. Who keeps banging this drum?
We rent time at a football field. We buy tickets to watch a single match. There are parallels here to not owning video games. I don’t really understand why one is so heinous.
Let’s say there’s a new rule implemented by the NBA that no one likes (similar to a fear of live service games changing). How is that resolved there and why can’t that solution work for video games?
I think a big thing we’re currently missing here is something like a community field or park. Why are there no open-source, community-run Diablo projects for example? If no one cares enough to do that, maybe this isn’t so big of an issue.
1. Video games are not a spectator sport. You buy tickets for a match to pay the players to perform for you. You can buy a football and goals and play with your family until the equipment itself literally wears out (which is a very, very long time - functionally near infinite if you take care of it).
2. Video games (especially console) don't, as a rule, receive important major updates, nor do gamers expect and demand that. This means that charging over and over again for 'access to them' every month is transparent greed, as opposed to a mobile game which has to keep being updated to keep up with iOS's yearly breaking releases, where you can argue very fairly that someone has to be paying developers to maintain those games, and the library of games to update would be too big if they had to keep updating all games written from 2008-2026 when 99% of them were no longer bringing in any sales revenue.
> Let’s say there’s a new rule implemented by the NBA that no one likes (similar to a fear of live service games changing).
Personally, the games where they charge for the MMO aspect (even if that comprises the entire game, e.g. WoW), I'm honestly ok with. It's a gamble to invest your time in something like that, but the alternative, where paying for a WoW client once legally obligates them to run the server without ANY rule/gameplay changes, for eternity, seems completely unfair and unsustainable. Though I think it's a moderate position to argue that if Blizzard wants to cancel WoW's servers, making the server specs open source and enabling the client to connect to community-run servers should maybe be incentivized somehow, though mandating as much seems a bit extreme.
With a video game it's not clear that you're purchasing a revocable license. That's why it's called "buying" a video game. If online stores were clear that you were actually leasing a game, I don't think this would be a problem.
Publishers and storefronts need to be clear that what you're doing isn't buying, or start selling tickets (season passes) that have a clear end date, or use some other mechanism that isn't "buying".
The fundamental problem is that it's unclear what you're buying, and the contract can change at any time. Are you buying an item, a ticket, leasing, a subscription like an MMO, etc. These are all different things, and it misleads consumers when they're conflated.
The terms are also very one-sided, and your "purchase" can be ended by one party at will with very limited notice. Even basic consumer protection like requiring six months notice before ending your software lease would help.
Sort of like how Diary Queen aren’t allowed to call their desserts “Ice Cream” because there isn’t enough dairy, we need to force retailers to start calling them game-licenses? This feels like a whole lot of a big fuss over something like that. I really feel like there must be something deeper going on.
Well the goal is to stop killing games, to make it possible for people to run their own games indefinitely. That's a lot harder than baseline consumer protections though.
Agree. The only way "buying" is understood in English to mean a temporary entitlement is when combined with those terms like "ticket" or "pass."
The choice of language is deliberately made to deceive. If an auto manufacturer tried that, offering to "sell you" a car but the 3-page "Sales contract" had a clause buried in there that said "We can come to your house with 30 days' notice and just take the car back and you have no recourse besides stopping your payments" this would be ruled as grand theft auto (no pun intended) not "the terms and conditions allow it"
There is a difference between a service and a good.
It doesnt make sense to "own" a massage just the same way it doesnt make sense to "own" spectating a game in person. The video recording of people playing a sport is a good that you can own however. This is why an online/multiplayer game is harder to separate because it straddles the line of both a service and a good, but other cases are much more clear cut. (also, a quick google does reveal multipke open source diablo projects fyi)
Back in the old days, we would be pooling resources like that to host a server for the clan. And I wonder if the reason those games are less popular has more to do with marketers being good at their job than a change in the base gameplay.
There are local clubs available but everyone wants to play on the nice FIFA field, which is the one that has to be rented.
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 the sale. This means that a company cannot "revoke" your access at a later time. Specifically for content that is DRM locked, if they decide to sunset that service (store, DRM server, whatever), no problem! just offer DRM free (or generally lock-free copies). 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.
(Multiplayer games that require server infrastructure are a bit more complex, and I'd leave aside for now).
This should apply equally to video games, movies, books, music. Any digital content.
I saw something earlier today that showed the Sony agreement specifies you’re only licensing the games, even if you buy it on a disc. So the fine print means no one ever “buys” a game for the PS5. They are buying a license to use the game for some indefinite period of time that Sony, or some other rights holder, will determine at a later date.
This is why things really need to be DRM free from the start, and portable (have the ability to back them up, move them, etc). It’s the only way to ensure they can’t pull that kind of stuff.
enforcement of legality is on the victim in the grift economy.
> 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 worry about shenanigans where you "buy" the game from a shell company and that shell company "folds" and doesn't uphold it's promises. Same is true for a smaller, but not shell, company. If the non-DRM version isn't already created and held in trust, then it's not trustworthy.
I don't see this as "regulation". I see this as extending the same consumer protections that existed in the era of analog physical media to the digital age.
All they have to do then is say that they license you a game, and you're not buying anything, despite paying for it. They already do that with online games.
That is literally what most online digital goods already do, like steam.
One of the unstated points of this particular article is that these rules are ones that we as a society have. If we collectively decide that this isn’t something that should be allowed, we can make it so. There are some powerful interests that don’t want it so it’s not an easy path.
At least that would be honest....
That is literally in any software since like 90s. You buy license.
It's a completely different license. A normal software license gives you the right to use version X of the software on Y computers/seats/users/... You have the original installer on the disc, you can download installers for patch releases online and save them for later, you have the activation key. At any point, you can uninstall the software and give or sell the installer and key to someone else.
What games and some software do these days is much worrse. You have a license to use their "software installation service" and their "let me run the game" service until they decide to turn them off. At any point, at their discretion, they can remove your ability to install a new copy or even run it all together.
Very different and quite recent.
right, but back in the 90s, the onus of maintaining a working copy of any software was on you. Now, Sony simply reaches into you home and can deny you access to software/movies you "bought".
These are not the same situation.
Well, yes. Always online is a problem, but it doesn't change what one buys. A thing that is easy to copy without destroying the original. So they invented licenses to contain the copying part.
i am curious - why are you not in favour of adding regulation? The point of most good regulation is to avoid consumer-hostile situations like this.
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 subscription model on gaming. Battle Passes, Xbox Live, Game Pass, Playstation Plus, Stadia, Game Fly, and a ton of other ideas. Sony is now using the stick to directly attack ownership instead of the carrot to entice subscriptions. We'll see how this plays in the PS6, but I think they are overplaying their position, especially with how underwhelming the PS5 has been received by gamers.
I'm optimistic that the raise in PC gaming will act as a balance for the obvious greed of the consoles. It's becoming a larger and larger player in the non-mobile gaming market, and it's too big to be treated like a second class citizen anymore. The open platform prevents anyone from acting as a gatekeeper between game developers and players.
For me personally, I began losing interest in consoles the first time I had to install a console game to a hard drive. The plug and play magic just fell apart.
> I'm optimistic that the raise in PC gaming will act as a balance for the obvious greed of the consoles.
Why?
Steam has never done anything to support ownership of games, their policy completely bans transferring licenses or accounts to other people or leaving them to someone when you die. Their next CEO is someone who has only known extreme wealth their whole life and gets the job because daddy started the company, when has that been a catalyst for societal good?
GOG is the only one to have advocated a different status quo, but they have virtually no marketshare that could pressure developers and publishers to accept more equitable terms beyond eschewing DRM.
This was actually a funny question at work over lunch. A few of us have kids and like most tech guys over 30, our steam accounts have turned into collections. So I asked, who gets your steam account when you kick it. It’s difficult to think about and seems baffling to spend thousands of dollars and hours assembling a collection only for it to poof away into nothing.
When we were in college, one of my friends joked that their stream library was their largest financial asset.
When stream trading was more of a thing, and we had a ramen diet, it was probably true
I'm optimistic about PC gaming because if Steam begins acting as an evil gatekeeper then game developers can adopt other avenues to deliver the games to their players. It's an open platform. People are using Steam now because it adds value. People will stop using Steam if it subtracts value.
Can't you download your game off steam and play it forever; and if it can't connect to the service, it will just let you play offline?
Sure, that loses out on the ability to transfer it to a friend, but it's better.
Some of them do, the Total War games I play the most require weekly online activation.
But that's just using what you payed for, it only very slightly overlaps with what actually owning something entails.
Is that online activation Steam or is it a third party thing? Steam allows selling games that have external DRM like that. I think they, themselves, don't do it.
That doesn't invalidate your other point.
Steam haven't put shenanigans like this because they have many competitors and PC users would leave them, the have built trust within the gaming community
The same reason you can be pessimistic?
Maybe if you look for evidence to be pessimistic, you find that, and if you look for evidence to be optimistic you find that.
I'd rather choose the more positive, hopeful perspective than the negative, downer one. What about you?
What evidence is there to be optimistic about?
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 already went digital no ownership for most people unfortunately. His argument that it isn't the same doesn't wash, you still can't sell them or lend them to someone else and you have to hack around Steam's DRM, which is a loophole that can be closed at any point.
You talk as if all Steam games use Steam DRM. No, it's not GOG but it's not the same category as Sony and Microsoft at all. It's starting to sound disingenuous when I see Steam lumped together with them.
Also the steam DRM on a lot of single player games can be removed very easily. https://github.com/atom0s/Steamless
and is a recommended step for engine modding games like skyrim.
I think it's a fair comparison. Steam can change their behavior to become much more user hostile at any point, and hold our triple digit steam libraries hostage.
Its not like we can sell or even lend the games from Steam that we have, not without breaking the licence terms and hacking around the DRM. Its precisely the same as what Sony is intending to enforce.
Can you sell or lend gog games, though? You can transfer the files obviously but if a steam game comes with no drm (which is pretty common for indies) you can do the same thing. GOG nicely requires everyone on their platform to do this but ultimately the devs have to want to not put in drm too.
Until Steam starts telling me before I buy which games have their DRM and which doesn't, they belong in the same category as Sony and Microsoft.
I’m not nearly so optimistic. I think we have a generation of kids now who mostly never owned any physical media, having grown up with Netflix instead of vhs/dvd, Spotify instead of CDs, steam instead of retail games, etc.
I'm pessimistic about physical media yes. That's a legacy technology at this point.
Is there really a rise in PC gaming going on? Isn't that dependent on people having PCs and hardware?
Yes. Look at the market research. It's growing specifically fast in Asia, but there is also strong growth with North America.
Having a PC to check your email, order off amazon, and download recipes is dying. Buying a PC and using it for video games is raising. The PC hardware is getting more expensive, but the upgrade cycles are also extending. If you look at the steam hardware survey most gamers are 1-3 GPU generations behind.
If you look at the total cost of ownership PC gaming is not awful compared to consoles. It's higher, but not as high as the initial price tag makes it look. There is no monthly Playstation Plus or Xbox Live subscription. These can run between $80/yr to $240/yr. PC games often have access to deeper discounts. The PC has additional utility, and modern PC components are holding exceptional resell value.
I think the effect of Twitch/YouTube can't be ignored. PC games are easier content source for streamers, and PC remains better platform for viewers for watching streams. Consoles are still quite focused on single task content consumption.
Hmm I see, that's interesting. Seems like the games industry it self is in a pretty bad state despite that
If you include mobile gaming, things look a lot better.
The question I'm left with: in the past, the uproar over these types of changes seemed to make companies change their mind when considering very anti-consumer decisions. Now, they just go ahead anyway.
What's different? How do we get back to how it was before? I know the current political climate is one that enables this sort of thing. There are parallels with the current movement also WRT to the employer/employee relationship.
Beyond that, there's still more at play. In tech, and specifically on this site, I see a lot more complicity and fatigue when discussing these issues. I can't help but think that also contributes. I'm not saying everyone should always be mad at everything. But it does seem like there's a generational component to this where we haven't passed down an essential feature of a hacker, namely the anti-establishment bent.
I suppose that's collateral damage of a culture tolerating lots of people rushing in to grab their bag of cash and then get out.
There’s indeed quite an uproar and I’m not unsympathetic to it, but only 3% of Sony’s 2025 revenue came from physical game sales.
https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/corporatereport/... (page 37)
Companies need to earn money, so the only leverage we as customers is to NOT buy their products. Educate our kids that such practices are EVIL and to buy the products it means to support those EVIL practices. Don't be afraid to call upon moral. Kids need to understand moral from the beginning, or they will be corrupted by bad practices.
We’ve been boiled in water like frogs, or however the saying goes. Even cars these days have subscription pricing for features which is insane to me but the average consumer is accustomed to this garbage. If they tried this 20 years ago it wouldn’t fly.
Someone once said that if libraries were invented today they would be illegal and that feels more true every day.
Ownership as in resale-able.
Eventually someone important enough will force digital resales to become reality, changing everything to require KYC.
Resale-able maybe, unable to be revoked I think is more important.
As in you can't wake up one morning and your game is gone overnight because copyright around in-game music changed.
Thats easy to do (on paper). Dont let copyright owners revoke/expire their licenses (or if its revokable mark and price it clearly). Once a product containing it is purchased, its owned till product ceases to exist (or similar).
All these music behemoths are way too powerful and they twist entire society globally to dance as they want. Not a fraction of a worry for pirates of course, just for decent paying fools.
Abhorable business.
Can you download and resell a digital copy of a game you purchase?
If not, this doesn't seem to fix all of the issues it just feels like finger pointing at "evil copyright laws".
Yeah maybe we can change those to, but what about making it so if you pay for something you can do whatever you like with it.
Say if I buy a copy of a movie from Amazon I should be able to sell it to my friend who doesn't have an amazon account..
KYC? The only context I know it from is 'Know your customer' in banking.
This is the correct KYC. Plenty of apps use it besides banking. Depending on the perspective, this is either the perfect solution to a lot of digital legal problems, or the distopian solution because of the numerous ways this can and will be abused when it is expected by many vendors outside of banking.
This is a large part of why I went with a Retroid Pocket over buying a Switch 2. It’s not nearly as powerful but it’ll run Linux and most indie games I buy on GOG. It’s more work of course but knowing that the games I buy I’ll be able to play into the future on any number of devices is worth it.
or, of getting rid of "intellectual property" legally so information is just shared more freely and widely
If you think in terms of ownership, even then digital is not that bad. I’ve owned digital games since Xbox 360 and I can still play them to this day on my Xbox series X.
But not all of my physical games CD/DVDs are in mint condition and some have scratches.
You can play them, but the license gives you no right to transfer ownership. This feels like a huge problem to me, especially with ebooks.
I’d love to see regulation around guaranteeing consumers the ability to transfer ownership of digital goods in a similar way to the analog counterpart.
Sure, but they keep raising the price of everything. And in a world where ram and STORAGE are at a multiple premium, deleting high density discs is completely outside of reality
Unfortunately ownership on console has been down the drain for a long time. Even if you have the disc you still have mandatory downloads, patches, one-time download codes that tie the content to your account and of course DLC. What is even the point of having the disc anymore? Might as well go full digital and avoid the plastic waste.
I do own a PS4 and I have to do research every time I want to play a game. The website https://www.doesitplay.org/ is quite useful. But it's all so tiresome, it really makes me want to just check out of console gaming altogether. With full-on digital at least there won't be any ambiguity. It's not what I wanted, but all it means for me is that they won't be getting any of my money anymore.
I view the killing of physical game media as having two aspects that, while intertwined, are separate in some ways.
The first is the loss of the physical item. I like organizing carts and discs, looking at them on my shelves, reminiscing, easily putting one in a console to replay. Same with other media for me: I buy books, only read physical ones. I listen to digital music (generally downloaded from sites like Bandcamp) but for albums and artists I like the most I buy vinyl. I get that this isn't a big deal for most people, but it is something that is permanently lost when you get rid of physical media.
The second aspect is control and ownership. This is indeed intertwined with the physical aspect, since you can do things like resell a cartridge or disc and let someone easily borrow it. But control is possible with purely digital games, they just need to not be locked down with DRM. And companies like Sony want to kill physical games because it allows them to keep those DRM locks on digital-only copies so you cannot resell your games, which is connected to the second point, control.
I also agree that the issue of control is more important. How do we continue to make sure our games, that we bought, aren't just taken away from us? What happens if you lose your account with Sony/MS/Nintendo? What happens if your old console that you downloaded a game on breaks? The death of physical games is also a step on the way to subscription-only services, where you won't even be able to play something unless you are actively giving money to a company regardless of how much you gave them before.
The ways forward that I see are legislation that would do things like force companies to allow people to always download games they bought in perpetuity, regardless of account status, and if the company dies the successor company must do the same or release the game into the public domain. But given the power of large corporations and current intellectual property laws, this isn't happening anytime soon.
Practically, then, the only way I see is to either have a console that is hacked in some way, or only play games on an open platform like PC. And there you can only buy DRM-free games or, at worse, if you lose access to game in some service (e.g., Steam) you can still pirate it (which I'd feel morally fine doing if I bought it already of course, but that does bring legal risks depending on where you live).
And the later option still doesn't address the larger issue of preservation, as the OP's blog post notes: games will be made for locked-down consoles in the future and will be lost forever unless the hardware is hacked or a law demands the game's preservation.
>Everyone wants to be Netflix
This is the most perfect sentence about this situation
Yep, agreed. Recurring, consistent revenue is the ultimately a common-sense business best interest. It can be extremely unfortunate for consumers as there's an unaligned incentive here.
This can still be acceptable if they give HW for free. but paying up to 1k for console and then full price for games which often have their own paid loot boxes/whatever... yeah good luck no thank you,
I can afford it trivially, but its like paying say 20 bucks for a standard bread or bottle of milk. Insulting
Related:
Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745456
the resale market for disk has been on a downtrend for years, you can sign into someone's else psn account too and share games, you are a washed up gamer, its okay I am washed up too.
Video game companies still remember when they owned the arcade machines and players were required to constantly insert money into the machines to keep playing. They've been chasing that high ever since.
The key to owning modern multiplayer online games is to have private servers run by human persons on their own owned computers. But except for TF2 no one has been able to (or cared enough) allow private servers alongside the much much more important microtransactions. This is what is killing ownership.
> Video game companies still remember when they owned the arcade machines and players were required to constantly insert money into the machines to keep playing.
I know Sega and Namco operated some arcades, but mostly companies sold arcade machines and operators ran them. Coin boxes didn't connect to the developer except that games with good earnings sold well.
A per-play revenue share is not uncommon in some markets, especially for games with frequent updates or more complicated network features.
This is why so many machines now have accounts and global saved progress. It provides actual value for the player, to be able to pick up their saved progress (e.g. on a rhythm game with thousands of songs on it), but it also means the arcade is beholden to the game manufacturer for an expected feature, and pays for that on an ongoing basis.
Even private servers doesn't quite solve the issue. Minecraft is an example where you can run the server but it requires clients to login to the microsoft account. I think you can still bypass the check on the server but clients have to be cracked or previously authorised for offline play which only lasts for a certain timeframe. So Microsoft can take away the ability to play minecraft despite the game server binary being available.
Whereas a game like Arma 3 has its own dedicated servers and has no such login requirement so theoretically you could still play that in 50 years time, but that might still depend on Steam DRM.
We have a lot of client side controls right now on DRM and logins which make the dedicated server only part of the problem.
With Minecraft, there isn't even a need for Microsoft to do anything. The authentication servers experience regular periods of downtime/inaccessibility, making you unable to join any server, even if you have already launched the game and have joined a server in that session before. It's extremely frustrating.
It's not just the arcade machine implementation. The owners of these companies want to go all the way and move everything to data centers so they can rent compute time, similar to the idea of the time-sharing days of the 60s.
The model for DLC that's present, carried as patch updates, but unlocked for an additional fee annoys me.
However, allow me to ignore my opinion for a moment and play the Devils Advocate for a thought experiment.
What if, cosmetics and other unlockables (which should be part of the base gameplay) were instead evaluated on other people's computers. That is, rendering client side, authentication for use also server side.
Hats / Skins / Other -- Render some 'humiliating' cosmetic if authentication fails. Circumvention would require compromise on all client devices.
Core game assets -- Levels / 'mods' that require auth a similar path, except client/server verification mismatch. Do note the license server as a possible cause.
At end of life all of those checks should be patched in a final release to fail enabled. No more auth server, archive mode releases all use.
Exactly. Let them sell games on GOG DRM-free. You buy it, it's yours as long as you back it up. No one stops you from storing it on any physical media you want. Just use an HDD.
When things on the other are presented as rent only, it's very bad.
Physical media was always one of the selling points for consoles. While PC has essentially been digital-only for a long time (with NONE of the wish list the author here wants, mind you - you can't sell or lend games to random people on Steam, besides a limited "family sharing" feature), consoles were where you go when you want to play a game and then sell it quickly if you don't like it. Physical media accounts for 50% of Switch game sales. I feel that Sony is in panic mode because they released a bunch of stinker first-party games and now they think that removing the disc drive from the PS6 will save them some money. It'll probably lose them a lot of customers.
Sony removing the disc drive from PS6 will save them a lot of money if Xbox also removes it. I wonder if they’re back channel colluding on that right now?
There is no next xbox. They are killing the brand while they wait for ARM to get better
I’ve come to realize there are definitely people out there who have no interest in playing games, they just want to own them.
A child doesn’t think about ownership, he picks up a controller and plays a game. And when the child has grown bored of the game, one day they just never touch it again like a discarded toy, moving on to something else.
It is adults, reminded of their own feeble mortality and impermanence in the world who try to grasp at things like permanent ownership, they long for something that can’t just be torn away from them on a whim. But in life, everything is ultimately torn away from you, there is nothing you can do about it.
Some try to disguise their hoarding as “preservation”. Nobody cares. Even if you had some carefully curated museum, these old games would just be exhibits people look at for a bit with passing curiosity. Nothing more. You didn’t even make these games, why do you care so much?
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.
There's another story about a game that died and was resurrected, Runescape. It launched with a big fanfare of version 3.0 back in 2008 and was met with total disaster. Fans were quitting, private servers of the pre-EOC update, etc. Jagex heard this and stuck a solo dev onto re-launching an instance of '2007 scape' which was basically an old backup they found and a few server instances. They incorporated features of the platform like voting, where votes require strong consent (75% in some cases) to get new features, and it's a seriously community driven game where both sides have something to gain. Now branded "old school runescape" the game has more players than the "runescape 3" that still exists today as Runescape. A win all around.
I question how much of this discussion is really being driven by gamers.
Those who wanted change made it happen. There are indie games and remakes without these restrictions. Most of classic gaming preservation has been successful with its goals apart from some legal gray areas and chasing rarities.
These discussions then fixate on the cutoff year for classic gaming and whether everything beyond that is even worth saving. The conclusion is always the same. Nobody really cares about the slop.
All that remains to discuss is politics. That's always the most vocal part drowning out everyone else. Who keeps banging this drum?
This is the exact kind of cause that triggers the social media algorithms. Part nostalgia, part underdog battle, and no problematic elements.
We rent time at a football field. We buy tickets to watch a single match. There are parallels here to not owning video games. I don’t really understand why one is so heinous.
Let’s say there’s a new rule implemented by the NBA that no one likes (similar to a fear of live service games changing). How is that resolved there and why can’t that solution work for video games?
I think a big thing we’re currently missing here is something like a community field or park. Why are there no open-source, community-run Diablo projects for example? If no one cares enough to do that, maybe this isn’t so big of an issue.
1. Video games are not a spectator sport. You buy tickets for a match to pay the players to perform for you. You can buy a football and goals and play with your family until the equipment itself literally wears out (which is a very, very long time - functionally near infinite if you take care of it).
2. Video games (especially console) don't, as a rule, receive important major updates, nor do gamers expect and demand that. This means that charging over and over again for 'access to them' every month is transparent greed, as opposed to a mobile game which has to keep being updated to keep up with iOS's yearly breaking releases, where you can argue very fairly that someone has to be paying developers to maintain those games, and the library of games to update would be too big if they had to keep updating all games written from 2008-2026 when 99% of them were no longer bringing in any sales revenue.
> Let’s say there’s a new rule implemented by the NBA that no one likes (similar to a fear of live service games changing).
Personally, the games where they charge for the MMO aspect (even if that comprises the entire game, e.g. WoW), I'm honestly ok with. It's a gamble to invest your time in something like that, but the alternative, where paying for a WoW client once legally obligates them to run the server without ANY rule/gameplay changes, for eternity, seems completely unfair and unsustainable. Though I think it's a moderate position to argue that if Blizzard wants to cancel WoW's servers, making the server specs open source and enabling the client to connect to community-run servers should maybe be incentivized somehow, though mandating as much seems a bit extreme.
It sounds like your opinion is that status quo is ok when: there is a spectator mode, it’s on a mobile device, there is multiplayer.
I still don’t quite understand in which cases the status quo is not ok though.
With a video game it's not clear that you're purchasing a revocable license. That's why it's called "buying" a video game. If online stores were clear that you were actually leasing a game, I don't think this would be a problem.
Publishers and storefronts need to be clear that what you're doing isn't buying, or start selling tickets (season passes) that have a clear end date, or use some other mechanism that isn't "buying".
The fundamental problem is that it's unclear what you're buying, and the contract can change at any time. Are you buying an item, a ticket, leasing, a subscription like an MMO, etc. These are all different things, and it misleads consumers when they're conflated.
The terms are also very one-sided, and your "purchase" can be ended by one party at will with very limited notice. Even basic consumer protection like requiring six months notice before ending your software lease would help.
Sort of like how Diary Queen aren’t allowed to call their desserts “Ice Cream” because there isn’t enough dairy, we need to force retailers to start calling them game-licenses? This feels like a whole lot of a big fuss over something like that. I really feel like there must be something deeper going on.
Well the goal is to stop killing games, to make it possible for people to run their own games indefinitely. That's a lot harder than baseline consumer protections though.
Agree. The only way "buying" is understood in English to mean a temporary entitlement is when combined with those terms like "ticket" or "pass."
The choice of language is deliberately made to deceive. If an auto manufacturer tried that, offering to "sell you" a car but the 3-page "Sales contract" had a clause buried in there that said "We can come to your house with 30 days' notice and just take the car back and you have no recourse besides stopping your payments" this would be ruled as grand theft auto (no pun intended) not "the terms and conditions allow it"
There is a difference between a service and a good.
It doesnt make sense to "own" a massage just the same way it doesnt make sense to "own" spectating a game in person. The video recording of people playing a sport is a good that you can own however. This is why an online/multiplayer game is harder to separate because it straddles the line of both a service and a good, but other cases are much more clear cut. (also, a quick google does reveal multipke open source diablo projects fyi)
You don't rent your football field from FIFA. You can, if you wish, own the field you play at.
You may have heard of football clubs: If it's too expensive you can pool resources with your friends.
Back in the old days, we would be pooling resources like that to host a server for the clan. And I wonder if the reason those games are less popular has more to do with marketers being good at their job than a change in the base gameplay.
There are local clubs available but everyone wants to play on the nice FIFA field, which is the one that has to be rented.
Video games are far more alike to other media like books, not live sports.
Video games ar software, this has only digital form.
And AFAIR all software is sold as a license since way back.
For single-player games, those are definitely media. For multiplayer games, that feels a lot closer to a sport.