Looking in search, it seems there's a Sony hate thread almost every day over the last month, and many of them are just reposts of the same thing (eg >10 submissions about Sony's decision to stop manufacturing game discs in 2028). It's also odd that these stories are attracting hundreds of comments every time; for comparison several submissions about about Xbox laying off ~5000 people have attracted less than 10 comments between them.
It's looking like astroturf at this point. I don't have any connection to Sony, direct or indirect; it's just a weird pattern on HN.
California Assembly Bill 2426 (AB 2426), effective 1 January, 2025. Expands the state's false advertising laws to explicitly ban companies from using words like "buy," "purchase," "own," or "keep" if what the customer is actually getting is a revocable digital license governed by shady T&Cs.
I don't think this type of legislation will have any kind of real world effect. Apple App store labels all their buttons with "Get". Google Play Store just prints the price on the button for paid apps/games.
In a thread about movies, it's perhaps more relevant to talk about how those two platforms handle movies.
In a browser, the top category on Google's "Movies & TV" is "New to buy or rent". The buttons on the page for a movie are labeled "$X.XX Buy" and "$X.XX Rent". In the Google TV app on my android phone, the two buttons are "Rent 4K // $X.XX" and "Buy 4K // $X.XX".
The splash images in the Apple TV app iOS say "Buy or rent it now.", and the buttons on the page for an individual movie are labeled "Buy $X.XX" and "Rent $X.XX".
Apple does the same thing as Google, the button is only labeled "Get" for free apps, for paid apps it's labeled with the price.
Paid apps largely failed as a business model though (why would a consumer take a risk on buying a paid app that they can't try before they buy) so most apps that you pay for are free apps with IAP subscriptions... which I guess makes it a little more explicit that you're renting the app, for better or worse.
Laws are great and all. But what we really need is a massive boycott. Stop buying shit manufactured or sold by Sony for a year. That alone will probably force them to backtrack every single anti consumer decision they've made recently.
You are not going to get the guy at 7-11 or the cashier at Target who just bought a PS5 for her son to boycott watching movies on it. Boycotts only work if it is demonstrably going to make their life worse if they don't. Losing access to a movie that interested you 15 years ago when you were still in high school is not one of those things.
There's a reason why they teach the prisoner's dilemma on day 1 of business school: a group which is more fragmented has less power. From the consumer perspective, this is why monopolies are bad and this is why boycotts don't work. From the slimy businessman perspective, this is why monopolies are good and boycotts are the only way consumers should be allowed to push back. Boycotts are empirically understood to be an ineffective strategy -- which, of course, is usually exactly what the people proposing them as an alternative to legislation are usually after.
For the love of god please understand 80% of people are trying to just get on day by day. They don't give a shit about any of this. They probably don't even realize it's happening. Some subset of them might be hit by this but most just don't care.
The point of a government in society is for people who give a shit to guide this kind of thing.
If you haven’t been paying attention lately, laws are only as good as they are enforced and it has become obvious that the ruling class is not going to enforce laws against themselves.
The solution here is not something most people are willing to inconvenience themselves over
Rewind a bit over 100 years and the robber barons had an iron grip over the US economy, US politics, and people who understood the mechanisms despaired at ever prying it away from them.
Then the wind shifted and, suddenly, we could and we did. It took them decades to undo that progress and decades more to reassert their grip.
Don't self-sabotage by imagining that it is impossible to achieve change through democracy. We've done it before and we can do it again.
Laws are meaningless de jure. Especially where megacorps are concerned, the de facto law (ie the only one that matters) is the text, multiplied by the enforcement mechanism, multiplied by the political will to enforce, multiplied by the 10-15 year process of the megacorps draining their legal warchests into challenges and appeals. Then, after all that, maybe… you get a change to corporate behavior.
The laws in this country are primarily written by and for large corporations. They’re not going to meaningfully practically restrain them just because something got passed.
Power in numbers is with the people. Power in votes is with whoever has the votes. Power in money is with the billionaires. Power comes in many forms and isn't fungible.
No, Money, Votes, etc has value because the general public gives it value. All billionaires could be instantly broke if the general public decided they were broke. Votes are ultimately a method of control not an inherent power unto themselves.
Societies have gotten really good at convincing people they don’t have power so it’s rarely exercised but it’s always worth remembering the difference between abstraction and the underlying reality.
In democracy, power comes from demos.
In capitalism, power comes from capital.
Demos doesn't have capital.
People never had power.
Whenever they've thought they won ... they just damaged position of someone powerful for someone even more powerful without even knowing it.
So they avoided having a "rent" button by using the technically correct "add to cart", "continue to payment" instead of "buy this game", "buy all games in cart", and just have a separate sentence in small grey text that is confusing to most people.
Clearly this law needs to be worded harsher, so the button MUST say "rent" if you are renting.
In my experience it's a pretty clear warning, but I might not be the best person to judge. The thing to remember is "buying" a revocable license is pretty different from "renting" a temporary license, and those words have pretty different connotations.
Apple was sued for having revoking access to hundreds of movies that a customer purchased. They tried to claim that "No reasonable consumer would believe' that purchased content would remain on the iTunes platform indefinitely".
They'll argue you're "buying" a license that they can revoke when they feel like it.
My feelings on the matter have been summed up by someone else more clever than me as:
If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
Then the button should say "Buy Revocable License."
Inevitably people will ask what that means. That will lead to a FAQ on the company's site somewhere, and various videos on the social media explaining it periodically with lots of comments. That will be a good thing.
Corporate marketing teams will eventually settle on something better sounding but technically legal, something like "Premier Anytime Access" for specific movies (versus "Bronze 24-hr Access"), or similar.
They will argue that, but this is unlikely to hold up in front of court even in the US.
The problem isn't it being illegal.
But they instead bank on most people not having the means (money/time) or will to sue them over this. Especially given that the actual "damages" you can effectively sue for often relatively small for most users (likely <15€ per movie, so for most account <100€ per person "per situation where you could sue").
And if there is an exception (someones losing hundreds of movies or class action law suite) settling is likely still cheaper for Sony.
This is the problem with many laws the cost of breaching them is often too small (but only IFF you are a huge company with their own lawyer department etc.).
If management would be personally liable with _mandatory prison sentences_ for the CEO/Company Owners if it seems the law was knowingly breached because penalties are cheaper then benefits (or repeated offenses etc.) things probably would look quite different.
Other approaches to counter this includes things like penalties of base+%of yearly revenue, %yearly Profite etc. The problem here is this approaches are often a mix of unfair (e.g. same revenue with large profit margin is penalized way less) and/or can be fudged/circumvented (e.g. if based on profit, but even if based on revenue it can be partially circumvented in some situations. So I think making executive personally liable might be the only way to fix this.
Selling someone a license, and then revoking it is like destruction of property. The injured party is owed a refund in the amount of the present day replacement cost.
It's the same as if someone sold you a toaster with a remote self-destruct feature, and then invoked the self-destruct. They owe you a new toaster.
- If the license terms include a section on termination, and termination is done in accordance with the license terms, it's fine legally.
- Licenses can be transferable but that doesn't make them non-terminable.
I could be wrong, though.
It's pretty crappy that we got to the point that overly simple actions (like clicking on buttons or breaking stickers on packages) can be considered accepting license terms. Is that really a "meeting of the minds"?
The problem is that we've always been buying licences, it's just that the licence used to be attached to a physical object, so transferring the licence was as easy as transferring ownership of that physical object.
It's never been legal to copy a book, film, or music album and sell the copies, for example, because the licence doesn't allow it. Hence freeware, shareware, and copyleft licences.
yes, but it was (is?) in many places legal to copy Filmes and Musik albums as backup, and iff the original is lost you can very much sell the backup alongside with the license you did buy (kinda, it gets messy practically).
It only mattered that if you sell it you lose it, i.e. you can't buy 1 sell (or gift) 10.
Similarly in analog times this where not unilaterally cancelled licenses. Which are effectively nothing more then time limited licenses where you just don't know how long. (1: un
In law areas outside of copyright this kind of license cancellation terms are often seen as predatory, fraudulent and abusive practices. And _sometimes outright illegal no matter how well you communicated what the license/contract does_ before it was acquired (in some countries).
(1: unilateral cancellable without a brach of license/contract from you side and some other special edge cases to be more precise)
Which is the crux of the problem, not that it isn't attached to physical media, but that it can be cancelled in a mostly despotic manner and you (often) can't make (relevant) backups or similar to protect the availability of the medium either.
That is false. It is legal to copy materials that you own, provided you don't redistribute the copy, like for protection against loss. A notable exception of this is the USA DMCA. If, to make a copy, you have to break a copy protection scheme, then you are violating the DMCA.
The license isn't what takes away your permission to redistribute copies; copyright law does that by default. The license is only reminding you that it's not lifting that default, not granting you that permission.
Copying is neither here or there. There is an understanding that when you buy a book, you own the physical thing.
If I sell you a toaster and then remotely cause it to self-destruct, I owe you a new toaster.
Grandparent referenced "if buying isn't owning then copying isn't stealing". I would say that "if buying isn't owning, then stealing isn't stealing".
If a toaster is offered to sale to the public which the seller can remotely destroy at any time, and not pay anyone a cent, and the law upholds that, then it's morally fine to just walk out of their store with that toaster without paying.
yes digital piracy was never stealing, but a mixture of contractual breach, copyright infringement and (illegally) causing financial damages through (illegally) causing lost sales.
Hence why you don't get tried for theft when you commit digital piracy. Which, as absurd as it might sound, sometimes (/in some cases) would be better to be tried for due to very unbalanced laws.
But also it should be pretty obvious that this isn't what people mean when they say "if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing" and a intentionally misinterpretation of statements based by nitpicking formulations is neither contributing anything meaningful nor is it appreciated (in most situations).
I'm hoping someday this will go the same way as other companies trying to redefine "unlimited", "free", or "lifetime". I hope lawyers reclaim "buy", "own", and "purchase" from shitbag marketers back into contract law, where they have English meanings.
A $10m fine for mobile telcos is a rounding error. “Softer quarter due to outstanding legal and regulatory obligations…” The fines need to be a standard percentage of income or the personal assets / freedom of officers needs to be on the line if we want those punishments to change behavior.
It really should be fines plus ALL money gained through the illegal activity. If you steal a car you don't get to pawn the stereo, give back the money gained and then drive off into the sunset.
Not even "Rent". Rentals are priced by the time you rent for. If you want to rent something for 30 years, you can, and you'll keep paying for 30 years.
This is a one-time cost and you just don't know when they're going to snatch it back from you. They won't tell you. They won't even give you a notice period. They don't know themselves. They only find out when the licensor they're sublicensing from demands "too much" for ongoing licensing and they just give up and pretend they didn't sell you that and take your money.
The button would have to be "Licence, subject to unilateral revocation at any time."
If Walmart sold you a lawnmower, but you had to leave the lawnmower in their store, would you consider it your property just because they let you start it up and hear it rumble?
If you wouldn't do that for Walmart, why would you do it for Sony?
I read recently that PlayStation users are moving to PC en masse, and also Xbox has been gutted by layoffs, and there's a backlash against Nintendo for the switch 2 pricing.
Is the age of the console finally coming to an end?
It's just loud Internet people. The Switch 2 is the second fastest selling game system of all time, and is keeping up with the trajectory of the first Switch, which shipped the most units of any gaming system. It'll probably get further boosts as Splatoon Raiders comes out (Splatoon is huge in Japan) and other anticipated titles.
I can't say I know anyone IRL who has any interest in leaving PlayStation. Nobody buys movies there and people who care about physical games are a minority...there are already Slim models without optical drives and GameStops are mostly Funko Pops because most people buy games online. It's too soon to have actual concrete data besides useless internet sentiment reporting though. And a lot of that is just vague anger about prices for all computing hardware being up...and everything else in the US.
We're also at the ending stages of the PS5 lifecycle, but before a PS6 announcement. (With an unprecedented price increase this late in the cycle.) So there's no buzz about what's next, a large base of people who already have the existing thing, and an expectation that it will cost more.
Meanwhile, the anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 is on the way, and a PC release isn't on the table anytime soon.
>I can't say I know anyone IRL who has any interest in leaving PlayStation
As a counterpoint to that. Most of my 30+ year old dad gamer friends (all of us are the type to own a PC, switch and ps5 pretty much) all are considering whether this will be our last sony generation as most of us are either physical copy people or suspect the pricing will be bad without a second hand market to compete.
I don't think there is a mass exodus coming up, but a slow decline in console gaming for certain types of gamers, peaking in ps6 and digital only coming out is possible - whether that is more of a hit than the control of the market Sony will get from digital only is another question though.
For example I doubt it'll stop many playing GTA 6, but general purchases on Sony vs PC may be weighted to the latter a bit more now than previously as that physical collection part is dead now for Sony, and arguably worse than the PC market in terms of there being only one store front for digital.
Consoles made sense as a product category where specialized graphics hardware was not generally available for consumer PCs.
We have this now, every PC has some kind of graphics hardware, and has for many years. Consoles have been riding on their momentum of their brands, but the technical justification for their product category hasn't existed for 15+ years now.
The main thing consoles have going for them, imo, is the standardization of hardware. It's very easy to say "Yes this game will run on my console at 60 FPS because its identical to the other consoles where it runs at 60 FPS." Differing builds and drivers are not really a concern in the console world, where-as they are in the PC world.
Some console gamers seem to think PC gaming requires hours of fiddling with settings and drivers. I think we've all had that experience on PC (cough Bethesda cough), but I doubt to the degree the console-side would have you believe. Most AAA games will self-optimize their settings to a playable state, and indie games don't tend to demand more than your standard gaming laptop can provide...but I'm sure we've all been burned some 10-odd years ago buying a Steam game that just wouldn't run on your iGPU...that experience sticks around in the brain a while
That's one thing. The other is price. Consoles can be sold at a loss, particularly early in their 10-year cycle, when early on the loss is high, but close to the end of the cycle the loss is minimal, and so they appear much cheaper.
Given recent price rises for console hardware I think they're struggling with that too though. The model doesn't work as well if the components get more expensive over time and not less?
Oh, for sure! It's not getting any better with PC part prices lately either...
I've never considered that my old 360 was probably sold at a loss, knowing I'd buy LIVE and all the games they take a cut/license fee off of, but that makes complete sense to me
This cycle is different. Prices have increased for both Sony and Microsoft’s consoles and no higher efficiency versions have been released (ala the PS3, X360).
During college, before I switched to linux, the DRM packaged with Spore bricked my computer in the middle of a semester. That's what turned me off of PC gaming.
"Differing builds and drivers are not really a concern in the console world"
Let me tell you, as someone that repairs a TON of XBox 360s, this comment is very, VERY wrong. The GPU isn't even the same revision between the same batch runs. Did you get Xenos? Zeus? Jupiter? That determined one set of things needed for install/refurbish. Is that a Valhalla motherboard in your hands? That just limited you to a very narrow and specific set of hardware you could utilize.
Oh and performance between all of those models varied WILDLY. Silicon lottery is a fucking JOKE on the XBox 360.
> It's very easy to say "Yes this game will run on my console at 60 FPS because its identical to the other consoles where it runs at 60 FPS." Differing builds and drivers are not really a concern in the console world, where-as they are in the PC world.
It used to be a selling point of console indeed, however nowadays console are separated by Pro/Non-pro, different revisions and you aren't really guaranteed on how well your game is going to run unless you watch a Youtube let's play of the game you want.
> Consoles made sense as a product category where specialized graphics hardware was not generally available for consumer PCs.
This has almost never been true. GPUs existed, and were being used, before the N64.
Your comment also begs the question that the console consumer has transitioned to a gaming pc. They haven't. Gaming PC sales (and hardware) are at all-time lows, except for GPUs, which should probably be renamed to Model Training Units.
I would posit that what we're seeing is a reflection of a content problem, not hardware. Video games have gone the way of Hollywood, with sequels and derivatives, and an uninterested consumer base. People would rather watch a YouTube video of someone playing a video game than play a video game.
> GPUs existed, and were being used, before the N64.
Video cards existed, but 3D accelerators didn't really catch on until the 3dfx Voodoo, which came out about the same time as the N64. Even Quake II which came out a year later still offered software rendering.
> Your comment also begs the question that the console consumer has transitioned to a gaming pc. They haven't.
I'm only a single point of data, but I was a console gamer that transitioned to PC gaming, but that transition happened during the N64/PSX era. It was near the end of the PS2 cycle that I was full PC.
> Gaming PC sales (and hardware) are at all-time lows
Because prices are at all-time highs. I have a monster PC that I probably spent around $6,000 building, but with prices skyrocketing, it'd run me $10,000 to build it today. A few months ago, it would have been $11,000.
> Video games have gone the way of Hollywood, with sequels and derivatives, and an uninterested consumer base.
In the AAA world, this is true. So many gamers that only play Call of Duty, Fortnite, Minecraft, or a sports game. For CoD and the sports games, they reliably buy the latest release every year despite the lack of anything really being different.
But the Indie world is huge and full of innovation. Balatro, Stardew Valley, Disco Elysium, Slay the Spire, Cuphead, I could go on.
> People would rather watch a YouTube video of someone playing a video game than play a video game.
I don't think that's true at all. Maybe for high-level play, or if the streamer has highly entertaining commentary, but otherwise definitely not true.
>Consoles have been riding on their momentum of their brands
This is entirely wrong. Consoles have been riding consistency and ease of use. Sure, if you look just at the spec sheet consoles make no sense. But when you look at the whole experience combined with price, this is where consoles have always won. It's always been easier to hook my console up to the TV and start playing. The Steambox closes this gap with the overall experience, but still loses out on price.
If consoles continue to enshittify, this might change.
I think they still make sense for the non technical user. Having an idiomatic control makes setup far easier than on a PC and the UI for a console is designed to be used with a controller instead of a keyboard and mouse. This makes dealing with a television easier. I don't see consoles disappearing ever for those reasons.
Also isn't a huge (maybe the largest?) audience for gaming these days children playing games like Roblox and Minecraft and Fortnite etc? For whom it's parents buying the equipment, so unless you have a tech-savvy parent they're likely to just buy a console.
The largest gaming market, by about an order of magnitude, is mobile games like Candy Crush. But we should differentiate the market further because most of us probably don't want to be making Candy Crush.
I think those games are mostly played on tablets these days.
But there might be a generational change coming. Basically the entire cohort of parents in my kids’ kindergarten is much more intentional about what kinds of games they’re playing and how they’re spending their “screen time.” I see a lot more people just giving their kids retro-consoles and emulation rather than setting them loose on the kiddie grooming and dopamine receptor-frying skinner-boxes.
I suppose it’s one of the benefits of having a generation of parents who grew up with formative memories of playing video games themselves combined with a growing awareness of UI dark patterns and their long term impacts on cognitive development and well-being.
I don’t think the appeal is just to the less technically inclined masses. I’m a developer with a MacBook Pro and a Linux workstation. Proton has come a long way, but consoles just work for the most part; I never have to question whether the game will function and perform well on the console (setting aside the random buggy messes we see).
Then there’s the convenience. I don’t want to play games where I work. I want to play on my TV. I have no interest in moving my workstation into my living room. Streaming with Moonlight works well enough, but there’s still lag. Even if I wanted to move my PC to the living room, the setup isn’t as nice. The Steam Machine has HDMI CEC and can power on with a controller — all the major consoles have had that for years.
Even if I accepted all that, no one else in my household could play anything while I’m working on my computer.
Things are a little weird now. If I’m going to have to go all digital, Steam Family is by far the best option of those with DRM. But, due to the astronomical cost of components, consoles are still pretty attractive.
Can you please elaborate? The recent moves I’ve seen have been announcing a shift to digital-only and another about clawing back movie purchases. Neither are appealing to me, but also aren’t related to game performance or compatibility.
That doesn't really make sense. Consoles have always occupied a different space to PCs, not least because they plug into living room TVs. Very few people are going to trade that for a (considerably more expensive) PC.
Gaming PCs also require specialized knowledge, more maintenance, etc etc. Consoles are pick up and go. I very much doubt they're dead yet.
Consoles don't have true 'generational leaps' any more either, the huge leaps forward in tech used to drive excitement/sales.
Now we get incremental improvements, cross-generation games, and backwards compatibility. And AAA game development isn't exactly doing well these days.
The thing with PCs is... they are open. Open means piracy and more importantly it means cheats.
A console is a far easier thing to defend against cheaters than a PC - absent true hardware vulnerabilities (which become more and more expensive, now that stuff like voltage glitching, clock cutting and whatnot is all known and accounted for), you are basically limited to botted input and AI-assistance based on what can be seen on the screen.
Specialized graphics hardware hasn’t been the selling point of having a console since at least 2002 with the first XBox.
The selling point of consoles is that they’re a software platform, with development incentives, standardized hardware, standardized UI conventions, and a centralized storefront to be able to conveniently and natively play stuff on your TV without fussing about.
Valve has barely started to muscle in on the platform benefits of gaming on a PlayStation or XBox, but the more they start to do so the more they end up making design trade-offs that start to look like another console.
I wouldn't be surprised if consoles got replaced by video game streaming. Not the next generation and probably not even the generation after that, but that will be most likely it.
Video game streaming requires a high quality internet connection to a nearby data center. It can work in certain places but there's always going to be places where it doesn't work, and consoles don't have that problem.
Well Sony is actively working on that problem- the plebs in these internet-starved countries won’t be playing anyway, as with no optical drive in the future ps6 users are going to be tied to PSN which isn’t available on half the planet.
Jokes aside I do agree that streaming doesn’t work reliably for all game genres and client geographies, mostly due to latency
PC is even more digital-only than Playstation. No one buys physical games on PC. The only difference is that Valve has been a very good steward over Steam. Theoretically, PC can get as enshittified as PS.
I guess there are other DRM-based purchasing platforms, and there's also DRM free ones like GOG so PC gamers have choice, but those feel niche mostly.
That backlash was nearly entirely on that other social media website that HN hates being compared to. And yet again, not representative of actual people. The xbox part may be true. I’d be extremely surprised if any PlayStation users in volume move to PC, that might be another loud opinion from that crowd due to the physical disc outrage. They would pay twice as much, have a less seamless experience, and still have worse graphics/performance.
I say this as a primarily pc gamer. It’s not for most people.
PC gaming isn't exactly in a healthy place either (at least when it comes to hardware pricing/availability). Post-Covid GPU prices were bad enough even before the AI bubble ruined everything.
Yeah. I gave up a couple of years ago after Epic broke my account and I lost my purchases irrecoverably. I have actually started playing board games with people now. This is so much better for me. And cheaper. And you can't taken them away.
Retro gaming is an increasingly popular option, too. These days I have more fun messing with Amigas, C64s, and cheap emulation handhelds than big modern games.
Retro hardware prices have been going up fairly significantly though, especially for Amiga stuff.
People age out of wanting to sit in their bedroom with a handheld and become adults who have living rooms. For home gaming there will always be demand to play games on a real sized screen.
I haven't had enough motivation to sit on my couch and game after a long day ..
But the same game, in bed, on my deck was so much nicer..
All I can now say is having a dedicated device, that's not your laptop/computer to play games is definitely a market - be it Steam machine (/custom builds), hand held gaming, or just regular consoles..
The cloud gaming echo chamber has conveniently arrived to save the day by mimicking the solution to fix the problem the same industry created. Problem, Reaction, Solution.
If cloud means AWS then probably, but I think the serious cloud gaming people are generally trying to get you connected by fiber to a data center in the same city.
Phone gaming with a USC-C display or simply cast to the TV, and Bluetooth remotes. It might not be as bad as it sounds. My phone has 12GB RAM, 256GB NVME SSD, a decent GPU and a dedicated AI chipset as well.
Sure, it won’t beat a tricked out gaming PC with some $4000 GPU in it, but it will probably be competitive with console gaming. Granted, the PS5 is 5-6 years old by now, but my phone has more power in every measure.
My “dream” everyday device is still a phone that docks with a display, keyboard and mouse, and magically transforms into a desktop OS. On the to mobile apps would allow access to the same data, but touch optimized instead.
These are basically different markets that only compete with each other because there are finite hours in the day to engage with media, not because they’re offering variations on the same thing.
It’s similar to comparing Netflix to the Criterion Streaming platform. Technically you’re doing the same thing, sitting on the couch watching a big screen, but the experience being pitched is a totally different one and the target customer doesn’t really overlap.
There was a time when regular families had desktop computers at home. The marketing was intense, the machines were expensive, and the sales numbers were real. The PC was the gateway to all of the spoils of the internet and things were booming.
Now families tend to have a collection expensive personal pocket supercomputers, instead. It's hard to justify the cost of a properly-stodgy computer when everything is online and the machines that everyone already has in their pockets are Good Enough to get things done (including entertainment).
Gaming on a phone is definitely not for me. I've been using PCs for several decades; it's possible that mobile gaming will never be my jam.
But I can accept that I'm not everyone.
I suspect that we'll have whole generations of people who manage to grow up and grow old and without ever having, or even seeking, the opportunity to spend quality time gaming on PCs.
I think that's alright. Things are allowed to change.
I'm pretty sure it's just exposure and time. Mobile is a great format for keeping yourself entertained on a subway. Desktop or console is a great format for actual games. People have more phones now because you need phones and you don't need desktops - that has nothing to do with the enjoyment you have gaming on each.
You used to be able to dial TIM on a landline phone to check the time (for free?). Then you (if you were a computer nerd) checked it on your computer, then on your phone. Because that's what was available. There was no connection between knowing the time and landline phones - people just had landline phones so it was a convenient way to deliver the service. That's how it is with mobile games now.
Remember Java and Flash applets? You could make anything you wanted as a native application, but RuneScape took off because you didn't have to install it.
The Steam Deck is basically a way to play PC games on mobile. You can imagine a world where people can just plug their smartphone into a KVM and just use it as a gaming PC. Modern phones have enough computing power to play most games being produced today since a lot of them are indie or B titles that aren’t actually that intensive. And even the intensive AAA ones, if developers were willing to optimize for it and go for lower res graphics they could do those too. And they can definitely play any game that’s more than 10 years old.
So Sony is simultaneously announcing that all purchases will be digital from now on while actively demonstrating that digital purchases aren't actually purchases. They're clearly communicating that they believe in a future where no one owns games any more.
> They're clearly communicating that they believe in a future where no one owns games any more.
They've been foreshadowing that future for years, but the gamers keep on bending right over and even squeezing the lube bottle for them. They haven't, and likely won't, be given a reason to stop marching toward that future.
Obviously media permanence is the best solution, but in the absence of that we just need laws that say that if the purchase isn’t time limited to something a reasonable user would consider a rental (48hrs? a week?) then companies that withdraw access rights need to refund in full the purchase cost.
There are services like Movies Anywhere and UltraViolet (now defunct) that store a licence when the user purchases one from an in-network licensor. Then the user can access the content via any supported platform.
The problem is that these are not legally mandated, so they can shut down (as UltraViolet did). If the ability to move the licence to another platform is mandated by law as a condition of continued copyright protection, this problem would largely disappear.
In practical terms, the logistics of many-years-later refunds would be unwieldy at best. Do the purchase records still exist? What if I no longer have that credit card or email address? How can you prove you're the heir of the deceased? What if I now live in a country where the "deletion" status is different? And how could you stop all the scammers who smelled free money?
Alternative: The gov't randomly picks 24 citizens from a pool of applicants who reasonably prove that they were harmed by the deletion. Those 24 are given legal authority to fiat-revoke all copyright protection on a "reasonable and proportional" number of the deleting corporation's currently copyrighted works. Or upstream of them, as "appropriate".
Doesn't matter. It should be up to the corporation to figure it out or else it's illegal and they get fined 300% of their total yearly revenue for each affected person.
Similarly, we should put in a law to force consumers who post bad reviews to prove they actually transacted with the business. If they can't, they have to go to every person who saw the review and personally retract it.
Can't figure out who saw it? Tough. It's up to you to figure out, or else it's illegal and they get 5000 years in prison for every view it got.
The most frustrating thing about all of this is that if I'd published a game on PlayStation and then told Sony to rip it out of people's libraries, they'd tell me to pound sand. The contracts you sign to ship games on PlayStation specifically include redownload rights. So Sony knows this is a problem, and yet for whatever reason decided NOT to secure the rights they'd need for the digital purchases to actually work like a purchase.
I know I'm not the only one here who remembers the Sony rootkit debacle in the age of CDs. One of the all-time worst companies I can think of when it comes to mistreating customers.
I we are heading towards a digital world, we need to solve the issue of how to ensure by legal means that in 800 years people will still be able to study current day media and arts.
Without laws to force companies to honor this, The only reasonable answer to this ownership issue will end up being piracy. Also, “Buying” the movie and making a copy of it for personal use shouldn’t be illegal.
> Also, “Buying” the movie and making a copy of it for personal use shouldn’t be illegal.
Unless I missed something recently, it's not illegal. You've always had the right to make backups of content that you purchased legally. It's the distribution that has been illegal.
if you cant hold it your hands, you don't own it. used dvd and bluray on ebay are cheaper anyway. another underutilized resource - the public library - mine has a huge catalog of movies you can borrow for free.
> another underutilized resource - the public library
As an indication of where things are going on this front, from the same publisher: Sony announced that games are not going to get distributed as physical copies anymore. So no new video games to be borrowed from public libraries, and even if you can borrow older games the new Playstations probably won't even have a disk tray to read them.
Whatever your stance on video games being something that is worth having in a library is, if they could get away with it that's probably their ideal end game for movies as well.
Which is a bit tricky on a Playstation. Sure you can scrounge up some Jellyfin-ish sort of thing, but most people buy on the console platform because they specifically don't want to jump through hoops.
If you bought movies on a digital platform that would later go under (could be Sony one day), what would happen to your collection? Is it transferable in any way? If not, it's already a risk no matter which platform you use.
Well I'd say these are different risks. It's either tied to the agreement Sony has with the movie provider, or with the platform itself. Either one could pull out.
This anti-consumer stuff also applies to physical Blu-rays: each BD can contain a revocation list of player keys and distributor keys, and official players are required to update their keylists from that. Every time you insert a new disc in your player, you're playing russian roulette with your existing library.
Blu-Ray key revocation does not work that way. Players with revoked keys simply can't play discs that were encrypted to disallow them.
Discs that worked with a player will continue to work, as long as the physical mechanisms are still good.
Technically, maybe, since the player authenticates with the drive, if you updated the firmware on the drive you could lockout the player. I could see windows update potentially helpfully pushing a bd-rom drive firmware update, but it's not happening on a standalone player.
It's not ideal that your existing player might not read new discs, but hopefully you use your discs soon after purchase and you could return them if you can't get a firmware update with a new key. (Of course, I'm guilty of buying discs to watch eventually; will be annoying if my keys were revoked)
Each disc contains the latest revocation list at the time of its creation. If you put in a disc with a newer revocation list, your player updates. Same thing was done on the Nintendo Wii.
As bad as this is, it’s worth noting that this is the same incident that was widely reported earlier this month. Sony has only rugpulled hundreds of purchased titles from customers once this year.
boolean bought = true;
boolean owns = false;
if (bought && owns) {
System.out.println("Purchase resulted in ownership.");
} else if (bought) {
System.out.println("Purchase did not result in ownership. You have rented.");
I've sold my PS5 several months ago. You can get a pretty gameable laptop and gog/steam prices are better. And I can install mods. Tree Sentinel Thomas Mod for example.
Interesting also that even this article doesn't mention "DRM" anywhere despite the fact that this is exactly the worst case scenario DRM critics have always warned about.
(Personally I would consider DRM okay if Sony's behavior here was illegal without a full refund.)
This has happened since the beginning of DRM. I had a roommate who bought hundreds of dollars of music from the Walmart music store because WMAs were like 59¢ instead of 99¢ from iTunes. It seems like not even a year later they shutdown the store and the certificate expired and PlaysForSure stopped playing for sure. That was around 2003.
20 years later will anyone do anything about it? Of course not.
What is going to be the event that gets laws to change? Probably not a few movies viewable only from Sony devices.
Well - I actually think the problem is not Sony being malicious here, per se, but the legislation. There has to be a guarantee as if it were a physical copy, as-is. The right to repair movement has the same cause ultimately. You purchase something, you own it, no matter what counter-legalese is tried.
The USA really needs to stop being a corporate-country. Weren't the republicans all about the people at one point in time? Now they are all about the billionaires and family dynasties pillaging what they can, with the forerunner the mad orange king pillaging the most. And starting wars he loses by default, after promising to not start wars.
If you cared enough, I do wonder if you could win in court, if you pirated a movie that you purchased on the PS5, but Sony removed. It would cost you an ungodly amount of money to defend yourself against Sony, and I don't know the exact words of the "license", but it seems like a reasonable action to take.
Its all a bit hand wavy nonsense. Own a physical copy? How long until its unplayable because either the media corrupts or the player isn't available? The only real "ownership" is the IP, everything else is just renting.
All information is ephemeral, but I don't honestly think that argument holds much weight here.
I'm currently listening to a record which was pressed before I was born, and that will outlast me. My CDs were ripped around 2000 to a drive and i've streamed then since. I've still got the CDs though, and the last time I played one it worked fine on my 1989 vintage transport.
Why wouldn't a player be available though? CD/DVD players won't just suddenly stop working. My CDs and CD players at home from the 1990s are still working completely fine.
If they do want to posit it as this, I'd personally be fine if they said "a CD will work for 100k plays before corrupting" so you'll have 100,000 credits to stream The Wizard of Oz before you need to purchase it again.
I trust the pressing on a CD or vinyl to remain readable SIGNIFICANTLY more than I trust any corporation to do literally anything, including "continue to exist".
The DVDs I got in my childhood 20 years ago still work just fine, the drives to read them are $20 or less, and ripping them to a format I can use more conveniently and backup however I want is a single button click.
Plastic discs are the optimum data distribution format. They degrade in the same time frame as a paper book, essentially lifetime, you retain legal rights like the first sale doctrine, you can easily format shift for safety and storage, and nobody can take any of that from you ever, and you can use that data however you like, as long as you aren't trying to sell bootlegs.
Books and plastic discs are infinitely better than the digital realm. The consumer rights are so much stronger and better.
The same story again?
Previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730904
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747389
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48691346
and several others.
Looking in search, it seems there's a Sony hate thread almost every day over the last month, and many of them are just reposts of the same thing (eg >10 submissions about Sony's decision to stop manufacturing game discs in 2028). It's also odd that these stories are attracting hundreds of comments every time; for comparison several submissions about about Xbox laying off ~5000 people have attracted less than 10 comments between them.
It's looking like astroturf at this point. I don't have any connection to Sony, direct or indirect; it's just a weird pattern on HN.
IANAL, but is it illegal to have a "Buy" button that is just a disguised "Rent" button?
If not, should we change the law?
California Assembly Bill 2426 (AB 2426), effective 1 January, 2025. Expands the state's false advertising laws to explicitly ban companies from using words like "buy," "purchase," "own," or "keep" if what the customer is actually getting is a revocable digital license governed by shady T&Cs.
I don't think this type of legislation will have any kind of real world effect. Apple App store labels all their buttons with "Get". Google Play Store just prints the price on the button for paid apps/games.
In a thread about movies, it's perhaps more relevant to talk about how those two platforms handle movies.
In a browser, the top category on Google's "Movies & TV" is "New to buy or rent". The buttons on the page for a movie are labeled "$X.XX Buy" and "$X.XX Rent". In the Google TV app on my android phone, the two buttons are "Rent 4K // $X.XX" and "Buy 4K // $X.XX".
The splash images in the Apple TV app iOS say "Buy or rent it now.", and the buttons on the page for an individual movie are labeled "Buy $X.XX" and "Rent $X.XX".
Apple does the same thing as Google, the button is only labeled "Get" for free apps, for paid apps it's labeled with the price.
Paid apps largely failed as a business model though (why would a consumer take a risk on buying a paid app that they can't try before they buy) so most apps that you pay for are free apps with IAP subscriptions... which I guess makes it a little more explicit that you're renting the app, for better or worse.
I think that's a great effect, they are no longer lying. I don't want to see a button that contains all the terms. What else would you want?
Yet another victim of an overspecific law.
Remember that the power is always with the people. We can enact any law we want
Laws are great and all. But what we really need is a massive boycott. Stop buying shit manufactured or sold by Sony for a year. That alone will probably force them to backtrack every single anti consumer decision they've made recently.
You are not going to get the guy at 7-11 or the cashier at Target who just bought a PS5 for her son to boycott watching movies on it. Boycotts only work if it is demonstrably going to make their life worse if they don't. Losing access to a movie that interested you 15 years ago when you were still in high school is not one of those things.
> But what we really need is a massive boycott
Is it? What’s the most effective boycott you can think of ever achieved?
Also, corporate bullshit such as this should be stigmatized.
Yup, it's wild to see corporations effectively say "kiss my ass" and then watch people line up to do it :|
There's a reason why they teach the prisoner's dilemma on day 1 of business school: a group which is more fragmented has less power. From the consumer perspective, this is why monopolies are bad and this is why boycotts don't work. From the slimy businessman perspective, this is why monopolies are good and boycotts are the only way consumers should be allowed to push back. Boycotts are empirically understood to be an ineffective strategy -- which, of course, is usually exactly what the people proposing them as an alternative to legislation are usually after.
For the love of god please understand 80% of people are trying to just get on day by day. They don't give a shit about any of this. They probably don't even realize it's happening. Some subset of them might be hit by this but most just don't care.
The point of a government in society is for people who give a shit to guide this kind of thing.
ok but who enforces the law?
If you haven’t been paying attention lately, laws are only as good as they are enforced and it has become obvious that the ruling class is not going to enforce laws against themselves.
The solution here is not something most people are willing to inconvenience themselves over
Rewind a bit over 100 years and the robber barons had an iron grip over the US economy, US politics, and people who understood the mechanisms despaired at ever prying it away from them.
Then the wind shifted and, suddenly, we could and we did. It took them decades to undo that progress and decades more to reassert their grip.
Don't self-sabotage by imagining that it is impossible to achieve change through democracy. We've done it before and we can do it again.
Laws are meaningless de jure. Especially where megacorps are concerned, the de facto law (ie the only one that matters) is the text, multiplied by the enforcement mechanism, multiplied by the political will to enforce, multiplied by the 10-15 year process of the megacorps draining their legal warchests into challenges and appeals. Then, after all that, maybe… you get a change to corporate behavior.
The laws in this country are primarily written by and for large corporations. They’re not going to meaningfully practically restrain them just because something got passed.
Unless you’re in, say, Ohio, where the government will simply overrule decisive mandates with years of procedural nonsense https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/03/31/ohio-republican-la...
EU Chat Control would like a word as well
Ohioans need to elect better reps then, don't they?
Power in numbers is with the people. Power in votes is with whoever has the votes. Power in money is with the billionaires. Power comes in many forms and isn't fungible.
No, Money, Votes, etc has value because the general public gives it value. All billionaires could be instantly broke if the general public decided they were broke. Votes are ultimately a method of control not an inherent power unto themselves.
Societies have gotten really good at convincing people they don’t have power so it’s rarely exercised but it’s always worth remembering the difference between abstraction and the underlying reality.
> value. All billionaires could be instantly broke if the general public decided they were broke.
Are we taking about abolishing the fiat currency system or bringing back the guillotines ?
If I stop believing that money has value, men with guns will come to my house and force me out of it and change the locks.
If they stop believing money has value, men with guns will come to their house, force them out of it and change the locks.
This isn't a voluntary system, it's a forcibly imposed one.
In democracy, power comes from demos. In capitalism, power comes from capital.
Demos doesn't have capital. People never had power. Whenever they've thought they won ... they just damaged position of someone powerful for someone even more powerful without even knowing it.
Effective after most people likely bought their movies.
Is it working/being enforced? Anecdotally I haven't seen or heard of any changes in verbiage, but I haven't been paying that much attention.
Steam/Valve follow the law: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/11/24267864/steam-buy-purch...
So they avoided having a "rent" button by using the technically correct "add to cart", "continue to payment" instead of "buy this game", "buy all games in cart", and just have a separate sentence in small grey text that is confusing to most people.
Clearly this law needs to be worded harsher, so the button MUST say "rent" if you are renting.
In my experience it's a pretty clear warning, but I might not be the best person to judge. The thing to remember is "buying" a revocable license is pretty different from "renting" a temporary license, and those words have pretty different connotations.
Apple was sued for having revoking access to hundreds of movies that a customer purchased. They tried to claim that "No reasonable consumer would believe' that purchased content would remain on the iTunes platform indefinitely".
Sadly the case was settled, see: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/apple-settles-alleg...
So basically "you should have expected to be scammed because everyone knows we are always scamming everyone"
They'll argue you're "buying" a license that they can revoke when they feel like it. My feelings on the matter have been summed up by someone else more clever than me as:
If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
Then the button should say "Buy Revocable License."
Inevitably people will ask what that means. That will lead to a FAQ on the company's site somewhere, and various videos on the social media explaining it periodically with lots of comments. That will be a good thing.
Corporate marketing teams will eventually settle on something better sounding but technically legal, something like "Premier Anytime Access" for specific movies (versus "Bronze 24-hr Access"), or similar.
They will argue that, but this is unlikely to hold up in front of court even in the US.
The problem isn't it being illegal.
But they instead bank on most people not having the means (money/time) or will to sue them over this. Especially given that the actual "damages" you can effectively sue for often relatively small for most users (likely <15€ per movie, so for most account <100€ per person "per situation where you could sue").
And if there is an exception (someones losing hundreds of movies or class action law suite) settling is likely still cheaper for Sony.
This is the problem with many laws the cost of breaching them is often too small (but only IFF you are a huge company with their own lawyer department etc.).
If management would be personally liable with _mandatory prison sentences_ for the CEO/Company Owners if it seems the law was knowingly breached because penalties are cheaper then benefits (or repeated offenses etc.) things probably would look quite different.
Other approaches to counter this includes things like penalties of base+%of yearly revenue, %yearly Profite etc. The problem here is this approaches are often a mix of unfair (e.g. same revenue with large profit margin is penalized way less) and/or can be fudged/circumvented (e.g. if based on profit, but even if based on revenue it can be partially circumvented in some situations. So I think making executive personally liable might be the only way to fix this.
Selling someone a license, and then revoking it is like destruction of property. The injured party is owed a refund in the amount of the present day replacement cost.
It's the same as if someone sold you a toaster with a remote self-destruct feature, and then invoked the self-destruct. They owe you a new toaster.
IANAL but I bet that:
- If the license terms include a section on termination, and termination is done in accordance with the license terms, it's fine legally.
- Licenses can be transferable but that doesn't make them non-terminable.
I could be wrong, though.
It's pretty crappy that we got to the point that overly simple actions (like clicking on buttons or breaking stickers on packages) can be considered accepting license terms. Is that really a "meeting of the minds"?
It could be either way. Companies love putting legally invalid terms into license agreements.
The problem is that we've always been buying licences, it's just that the licence used to be attached to a physical object, so transferring the licence was as easy as transferring ownership of that physical object.
It's never been legal to copy a book, film, or music album and sell the copies, for example, because the licence doesn't allow it. Hence freeware, shareware, and copyleft licences.
yes, but it was (is?) in many places legal to copy Filmes and Musik albums as backup, and iff the original is lost you can very much sell the backup alongside with the license you did buy (kinda, it gets messy practically).
It only mattered that if you sell it you lose it, i.e. you can't buy 1 sell (or gift) 10.
Similarly in analog times this where not unilaterally cancelled licenses. Which are effectively nothing more then time limited licenses where you just don't know how long. (1: un
In law areas outside of copyright this kind of license cancellation terms are often seen as predatory, fraudulent and abusive practices. And _sometimes outright illegal no matter how well you communicated what the license/contract does_ before it was acquired (in some countries).
(1: unilateral cancellable without a brach of license/contract from you side and some other special edge cases to be more precise)
Which is the crux of the problem, not that it isn't attached to physical media, but that it can be cancelled in a mostly despotic manner and you (often) can't make (relevant) backups or similar to protect the availability of the medium either.
That is false. It is legal to copy materials that you own, provided you don't redistribute the copy, like for protection against loss. A notable exception of this is the USA DMCA. If, to make a copy, you have to break a copy protection scheme, then you are violating the DMCA.
The license isn't what takes away your permission to redistribute copies; copyright law does that by default. The license is only reminding you that it's not lifting that default, not granting you that permission.
Copying is neither here or there. There is an understanding that when you buy a book, you own the physical thing.
If I sell you a toaster and then remotely cause it to self-destruct, I owe you a new toaster.
Grandparent referenced "if buying isn't owning then copying isn't stealing". I would say that "if buying isn't owning, then stealing isn't stealing".
If a toaster is offered to sale to the public which the seller can remotely destroy at any time, and not pay anyone a cent, and the law upholds that, then it's morally fine to just walk out of their store with that toaster without paying.
It’s not about transfer, it’s about being practically irrevocable.
"Stealing" in basically all common law jurisdictions requires intent to deprive the rightful owner of the property.
yes digital piracy was never stealing, but a mixture of contractual breach, copyright infringement and (illegally) causing financial damages through (illegally) causing lost sales.
Hence why you don't get tried for theft when you commit digital piracy. Which, as absurd as it might sound, sometimes (/in some cases) would be better to be tried for due to very unbalanced laws.
But also it should be pretty obvious that this isn't what people mean when they say "if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing" and a intentionally misinterpretation of statements based by nitpicking formulations is neither contributing anything meaningful nor is it appreciated (in most situations).
Copying something isn't stealing by any legal definition. It's copyright infringement.
I’m just collecting training data for my AI.
authentic intelligence?
automated intercept... or acquisition interface. /s
"you wouldn't copyright infringe a car" doesn't have the same ring to it
You wouldn't steal a baby
It will be quite the novel legal case the first time someone makes an unauthorized copy of a baby.
Make an unauthorized copy of a baby that grew up to be famous, so you can use their likeness and get a bonus case.
I wouldn't buy one either (it's been illegal in my country for ~150 years).
I might download one.
That's a derivative work of two parties’ IP.
Speak for yourself.
Piracy isn’t stealing because copies don’t destroy the original
The proliferation of copies economically devalues the originals.
I'm hoping someday this will go the same way as other companies trying to redefine "unlimited", "free", or "lifetime". I hope lawyers reclaim "buy", "own", and "purchase" from shitbag marketers back into contract law, where they have English meanings.
https://retailwire.com/t-mobile-att-verizon-fined-10-2m-for-...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/lawsuit-t-mobile...
At the very least, if Sony yanks your purchase, they should merely refund it in full.
A $10m fine for mobile telcos is a rounding error. “Softer quarter due to outstanding legal and regulatory obligations…” The fines need to be a standard percentage of income or the personal assets / freedom of officers needs to be on the line if we want those punishments to change behavior.
It really should be fines plus ALL money gained through the illegal activity. If you steal a car you don't get to pawn the stereo, give back the money gained and then drive off into the sunset.
Jail time (hard jail time, not that country club bullshit) for the entire C-suite and you might see some change.
> The fines need to be a standard percentage of income or the personal assets / freedom of officers needs to be on the line
This is the obvious solution to most problems but of course they're the ones writing the laws so it'd never happen in a trillion years.
Not even "Rent". Rentals are priced by the time you rent for. If you want to rent something for 30 years, you can, and you'll keep paying for 30 years.
This is a one-time cost and you just don't know when they're going to snatch it back from you. They won't tell you. They won't even give you a notice period. They don't know themselves. They only find out when the licensor they're sublicensing from demands "too much" for ongoing licensing and they just give up and pretend they didn't sell you that and take your money.
The button would have to be "Licence, subject to unilateral revocation at any time."
"we're training the public that they're 'buying' a revokable license, not the song" ~MPAA ;)
Pretty sure you could get some action from the ACCC here in Australia if you go through the process to lodge a complaint.
If Walmart sold you a lawnmower, but you had to leave the lawnmower in their store, would you consider it your property just because they let you start it up and hear it rumble?
If you wouldn't do that for Walmart, why would you do it for Sony?
Unrelated, but that is such an unfortunate acronym.. There's no way the people who perpetuated it didn't know what they were doing
I propose, let's see..
Definitely Isn’t Legal Doctrine, Obviously
or.. Based Only On Basic Speculation
perhaps Consult Official Counsel, Kindly
or more succinct, This Isn’t Trained Solicitor Advice
For more recent takes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747389 - "Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For" (reclaimthenet.org)
636 points | 15 days ago | 304 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730904 - "Sony erases digital content from libraries" (arstechnica.com)
184 points | 16 days ago | 76 comments
I read recently that PlayStation users are moving to PC en masse, and also Xbox has been gutted by layoffs, and there's a backlash against Nintendo for the switch 2 pricing.
Is the age of the console finally coming to an end?
It's just loud Internet people. The Switch 2 is the second fastest selling game system of all time, and is keeping up with the trajectory of the first Switch, which shipped the most units of any gaming system. It'll probably get further boosts as Splatoon Raiders comes out (Splatoon is huge in Japan) and other anticipated titles.
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2026/06/switch-2s-first-ye...
I can't say I know anyone IRL who has any interest in leaving PlayStation. Nobody buys movies there and people who care about physical games are a minority...there are already Slim models without optical drives and GameStops are mostly Funko Pops because most people buy games online. It's too soon to have actual concrete data besides useless internet sentiment reporting though. And a lot of that is just vague anger about prices for all computing hardware being up...and everything else in the US.
We're also at the ending stages of the PS5 lifecycle, but before a PS6 announcement. (With an unprecedented price increase this late in the cycle.) So there's no buzz about what's next, a large base of people who already have the existing thing, and an expectation that it will cost more.
Meanwhile, the anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 is on the way, and a PC release isn't on the table anytime soon.
>I can't say I know anyone IRL who has any interest in leaving PlayStation
As a counterpoint to that. Most of my 30+ year old dad gamer friends (all of us are the type to own a PC, switch and ps5 pretty much) all are considering whether this will be our last sony generation as most of us are either physical copy people or suspect the pricing will be bad without a second hand market to compete.
I don't think there is a mass exodus coming up, but a slow decline in console gaming for certain types of gamers, peaking in ps6 and digital only coming out is possible - whether that is more of a hit than the control of the market Sony will get from digital only is another question though.
For example I doubt it'll stop many playing GTA 6, but general purchases on Sony vs PC may be weighted to the latter a bit more now than previously as that physical collection part is dead now for Sony, and arguably worse than the PC market in terms of there being only one store front for digital.
Consoles made sense as a product category where specialized graphics hardware was not generally available for consumer PCs.
We have this now, every PC has some kind of graphics hardware, and has for many years. Consoles have been riding on their momentum of their brands, but the technical justification for their product category hasn't existed for 15+ years now.
The main thing consoles have going for them, imo, is the standardization of hardware. It's very easy to say "Yes this game will run on my console at 60 FPS because its identical to the other consoles where it runs at 60 FPS." Differing builds and drivers are not really a concern in the console world, where-as they are in the PC world.
Some console gamers seem to think PC gaming requires hours of fiddling with settings and drivers. I think we've all had that experience on PC (cough Bethesda cough), but I doubt to the degree the console-side would have you believe. Most AAA games will self-optimize their settings to a playable state, and indie games don't tend to demand more than your standard gaming laptop can provide...but I'm sure we've all been burned some 10-odd years ago buying a Steam game that just wouldn't run on your iGPU...that experience sticks around in the brain a while
That's one thing. The other is price. Consoles can be sold at a loss, particularly early in their 10-year cycle, when early on the loss is high, but close to the end of the cycle the loss is minimal, and so they appear much cheaper.
Given recent price rises for console hardware I think they're struggling with that too though. The model doesn't work as well if the components get more expensive over time and not less?
Oh, for sure! It's not getting any better with PC part prices lately either...
I've never considered that my old 360 was probably sold at a loss, knowing I'd buy LIVE and all the games they take a cut/license fee off of, but that makes complete sense to me
This cycle is different. Prices have increased for both Sony and Microsoft’s consoles and no higher efficiency versions have been released (ala the PS3, X360).
Sony released the PS5 Slim earlier this cycle.
Isn’t PS5 Pro a higher efficiency version?
This is also why Steam hardware matters.
If something runs on a Steam Deck, you can be sure it will run on your >= Steam Deck-equivalent device.
During college, before I switched to linux, the DRM packaged with Spore bricked my computer in the middle of a semester. That's what turned me off of PC gaming.
"Differing builds and drivers are not really a concern in the console world"
Let me tell you, as someone that repairs a TON of XBox 360s, this comment is very, VERY wrong. The GPU isn't even the same revision between the same batch runs. Did you get Xenos? Zeus? Jupiter? That determined one set of things needed for install/refurbish. Is that a Valhalla motherboard in your hands? That just limited you to a very narrow and specific set of hardware you could utilize.
Oh and performance between all of those models varied WILDLY. Silicon lottery is a fucking JOKE on the XBox 360.
> It's very easy to say "Yes this game will run on my console at 60 FPS because its identical to the other consoles where it runs at 60 FPS." Differing builds and drivers are not really a concern in the console world, where-as they are in the PC world.
It used to be a selling point of console indeed, however nowadays console are separated by Pro/Non-pro, different revisions and you aren't really guaranteed on how well your game is going to run unless you watch a Youtube let's play of the game you want.
> Consoles made sense as a product category where specialized graphics hardware was not generally available for consumer PCs.
This has almost never been true. GPUs existed, and were being used, before the N64.
Your comment also begs the question that the console consumer has transitioned to a gaming pc. They haven't. Gaming PC sales (and hardware) are at all-time lows, except for GPUs, which should probably be renamed to Model Training Units.
I would posit that what we're seeing is a reflection of a content problem, not hardware. Video games have gone the way of Hollywood, with sequels and derivatives, and an uninterested consumer base. People would rather watch a YouTube video of someone playing a video game than play a video game.
> GPUs existed, and were being used, before the N64.
Video cards existed, but 3D accelerators didn't really catch on until the 3dfx Voodoo, which came out about the same time as the N64. Even Quake II which came out a year later still offered software rendering.
> Your comment also begs the question that the console consumer has transitioned to a gaming pc. They haven't.
I'm only a single point of data, but I was a console gamer that transitioned to PC gaming, but that transition happened during the N64/PSX era. It was near the end of the PS2 cycle that I was full PC.
> Gaming PC sales (and hardware) are at all-time lows
Because prices are at all-time highs. I have a monster PC that I probably spent around $6,000 building, but with prices skyrocketing, it'd run me $10,000 to build it today. A few months ago, it would have been $11,000.
> Video games have gone the way of Hollywood, with sequels and derivatives, and an uninterested consumer base.
In the AAA world, this is true. So many gamers that only play Call of Duty, Fortnite, Minecraft, or a sports game. For CoD and the sports games, they reliably buy the latest release every year despite the lack of anything really being different.
But the Indie world is huge and full of innovation. Balatro, Stardew Valley, Disco Elysium, Slay the Spire, Cuphead, I could go on.
> People would rather watch a YouTube video of someone playing a video game than play a video game.
I don't think that's true at all. Maybe for high-level play, or if the streamer has highly entertaining commentary, but otherwise definitely not true.
What PC GPU was in mainstream consumer use before the N64?
The 3dfx Voodoo1 was very mainstream (and market-defining, even). It predates the N64.
This is incorrect.
N64 came out in the USA in September 1996.
3dfx Voodoo was released to consumers in October 1996.
Oh noes!
>Consoles have been riding on their momentum of their brands
This is entirely wrong. Consoles have been riding consistency and ease of use. Sure, if you look just at the spec sheet consoles make no sense. But when you look at the whole experience combined with price, this is where consoles have always won. It's always been easier to hook my console up to the TV and start playing. The Steambox closes this gap with the overall experience, but still loses out on price.
If consoles continue to enshittify, this might change.
I think they still make sense for the non technical user. Having an idiomatic control makes setup far easier than on a PC and the UI for a console is designed to be used with a controller instead of a keyboard and mouse. This makes dealing with a television easier. I don't see consoles disappearing ever for those reasons.
Also isn't a huge (maybe the largest?) audience for gaming these days children playing games like Roblox and Minecraft and Fortnite etc? For whom it's parents buying the equipment, so unless you have a tech-savvy parent they're likely to just buy a console.
The largest gaming market, by about an order of magnitude, is mobile games like Candy Crush. But we should differentiate the market further because most of us probably don't want to be making Candy Crush.
I think those games are mostly played on tablets these days.
But there might be a generational change coming. Basically the entire cohort of parents in my kids’ kindergarten is much more intentional about what kinds of games they’re playing and how they’re spending their “screen time.” I see a lot more people just giving their kids retro-consoles and emulation rather than setting them loose on the kiddie grooming and dopamine receptor-frying skinner-boxes.
I suppose it’s one of the benefits of having a generation of parents who grew up with formative memories of playing video games themselves combined with a growing awareness of UI dark patterns and their long term impacts on cognitive development and well-being.
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I don’t think the appeal is just to the less technically inclined masses. I’m a developer with a MacBook Pro and a Linux workstation. Proton has come a long way, but consoles just work for the most part; I never have to question whether the game will function and perform well on the console (setting aside the random buggy messes we see).
Then there’s the convenience. I don’t want to play games where I work. I want to play on my TV. I have no interest in moving my workstation into my living room. Streaming with Moonlight works well enough, but there’s still lag. Even if I wanted to move my PC to the living room, the setup isn’t as nice. The Steam Machine has HDMI CEC and can power on with a controller — all the major consoles have had that for years.
Even if I accepted all that, no one else in my household could play anything while I’m working on my computer.
Things are a little weird now. If I’m going to have to go all digital, Steam Family is by far the best option of those with DRM. But, due to the astronomical cost of components, consoles are still pretty attractive.
> I never have to question whether the game will function and perform well on the console
Thanks to recent moves by Sony, this is no longer the case!
Can you please elaborate? The recent moves I’ve seen have been announcing a shift to digital-only and another about clawing back movie purchases. Neither are appealing to me, but also aren’t related to game performance or compatibility.
That doesn't really make sense. Consoles have always occupied a different space to PCs, not least because they plug into living room TVs. Very few people are going to trade that for a (considerably more expensive) PC.
Gaming PCs also require specialized knowledge, more maintenance, etc etc. Consoles are pick up and go. I very much doubt they're dead yet.
Consoles don't have true 'generational leaps' any more either, the huge leaps forward in tech used to drive excitement/sales.
Now we get incremental improvements, cross-generation games, and backwards compatibility. And AAA game development isn't exactly doing well these days.
Another appeal of consoles is being able to sit on a couch and play. Most PC chairs are not as comfortable.
The thing with PCs is... they are open. Open means piracy and more importantly it means cheats.
A console is a far easier thing to defend against cheaters than a PC - absent true hardware vulnerabilities (which become more and more expensive, now that stuff like voltage glitching, clock cutting and whatnot is all known and accounted for), you are basically limited to botted input and AI-assistance based on what can be seen on the screen.
Specialized graphics hardware hasn’t been the selling point of having a console since at least 2002 with the first XBox.
The selling point of consoles is that they’re a software platform, with development incentives, standardized hardware, standardized UI conventions, and a centralized storefront to be able to conveniently and natively play stuff on your TV without fussing about.
Valve has barely started to muscle in on the platform benefits of gaming on a PlayStation or XBox, but the more they start to do so the more they end up making design trade-offs that start to look like another console.
To be fair had RAM prices not screwed up the steam machine consoles would have been dooms earlier. They are about to enter a slow decline before death
Consoles are suffering from the RAM price crisis just as much as PCs.
Nintendo will always exist, which I'm mostly okay with
> PlayStation users are moving to PC en masse
Source? Is that reddit?
It simply doesn't make sense.
HNers continue to never know that they are in their own bubble. The same reason why Linux on the Desktop is an ongoing meme.
I wouldn't be surprised if consoles got replaced by video game streaming. Not the next generation and probably not even the generation after that, but that will be most likely it.
Video game streaming requires a high quality internet connection to a nearby data center. It can work in certain places but there's always going to be places where it doesn't work, and consoles don't have that problem.
Well Sony is actively working on that problem- the plebs in these internet-starved countries won’t be playing anyway, as with no optical drive in the future ps6 users are going to be tied to PSN which isn’t available on half the planet.
Jokes aside I do agree that streaming doesn’t work reliably for all game genres and client geographies, mostly due to latency
> PlayStation users are moving to PC en masse
PC is even more digital-only than Playstation. No one buys physical games on PC. The only difference is that Valve has been a very good steward over Steam. Theoretically, PC can get as enshittified as PS.
I guess there are other DRM-based purchasing platforms, and there's also DRM free ones like GOG so PC gamers have choice, but those feel niche mostly.
That backlash was nearly entirely on that other social media website that HN hates being compared to. And yet again, not representative of actual people. The xbox part may be true. I’d be extremely surprised if any PlayStation users in volume move to PC, that might be another loud opinion from that crowd due to the physical disc outrage. They would pay twice as much, have a less seamless experience, and still have worse graphics/performance.
I say this as a primarily pc gamer. It’s not for most people.
PC gaming isn't exactly in a healthy place either (at least when it comes to hardware pricing/availability). Post-Covid GPU prices were bad enough even before the AI bubble ruined everything.
Yeah. I gave up a couple of years ago after Epic broke my account and I lost my purchases irrecoverably. I have actually started playing board games with people now. This is so much better for me. And cheaper. And you can't taken them away.
Retro gaming is an increasingly popular option, too. These days I have more fun messing with Amigas, C64s, and cheap emulation handhelds than big modern games.
Retro hardware prices have been going up fairly significantly though, especially for Amiga stuff.
People age out of wanting to sit in their bedroom with a handheld and become adults who have living rooms. For home gaming there will always be demand to play games on a real sized screen.
I think the steam deck proved otherwise too..
I haven't had enough motivation to sit on my couch and game after a long day ..
But the same game, in bed, on my deck was so much nicer..
All I can now say is having a dedicated device, that's not your laptop/computer to play games is definitely a market - be it Steam machine (/custom builds), hand held gaming, or just regular consoles..
Yeah so get a PC and install some games
I would say the future is cloud gaming.
What is that, like stadia?
The cloud gaming echo chamber has conveniently arrived to save the day by mimicking the solution to fix the problem the same industry created. Problem, Reaction, Solution.
Its ok for some thing but the lag is simply too much for popular genres of games.
If cloud means AWS then probably, but I think the serious cloud gaming people are generally trying to get you connected by fiber to a data center in the same city.
Sadly, the future might be phone gaming. The mobile gaming market is as big as the console and PC markets combined.
Phone gaming with a USC-C display or simply cast to the TV, and Bluetooth remotes. It might not be as bad as it sounds. My phone has 12GB RAM, 256GB NVME SSD, a decent GPU and a dedicated AI chipset as well.
Sure, it won’t beat a tricked out gaming PC with some $4000 GPU in it, but it will probably be competitive with console gaming. Granted, the PS5 is 5-6 years old by now, but my phone has more power in every measure.
My “dream” everyday device is still a phone that docks with a display, keyboard and mouse, and magically transforms into a desktop OS. On the to mobile apps would allow access to the same data, but touch optimized instead.
That's a Nintendo Switch. The general purpose docking OS was what Win8 was supposed to be but it was flubbed horribly.
These are basically different markets that only compete with each other because there are finite hours in the day to engage with media, not because they’re offering variations on the same thing.
It’s similar to comparing Netflix to the Criterion Streaming platform. Technically you’re doing the same thing, sitting on the couch watching a big screen, but the experience being pitched is a totally different one and the target customer doesn’t really overlap.
They compete for finite dollars, too.
There was a time when regular families had desktop computers at home. The marketing was intense, the machines were expensive, and the sales numbers were real. The PC was the gateway to all of the spoils of the internet and things were booming.
Now families tend to have a collection expensive personal pocket supercomputers, instead. It's hard to justify the cost of a properly-stodgy computer when everything is online and the machines that everyone already has in their pockets are Good Enough to get things done (including entertainment).
I suspect people who've gotten any depth into both desktop and mobile gaming don't think they're even remotely substitutes.
Gaming on a phone is definitely not for me. I've been using PCs for several decades; it's possible that mobile gaming will never be my jam.
But I can accept that I'm not everyone.
I suspect that we'll have whole generations of people who manage to grow up and grow old and without ever having, or even seeking, the opportunity to spend quality time gaming on PCs.
I think that's alright. Things are allowed to change.
I'm pretty sure it's just exposure and time. Mobile is a great format for keeping yourself entertained on a subway. Desktop or console is a great format for actual games. People have more phones now because you need phones and you don't need desktops - that has nothing to do with the enjoyment you have gaming on each.
You used to be able to dial TIM on a landline phone to check the time (for free?). Then you (if you were a computer nerd) checked it on your computer, then on your phone. Because that's what was available. There was no connection between knowing the time and landline phones - people just had landline phones so it was a convenient way to deliver the service. That's how it is with mobile games now.
Remember Java and Flash applets? You could make anything you wanted as a native application, but RuneScape took off because you didn't have to install it.
The Steam Deck is basically a way to play PC games on mobile. You can imagine a world where people can just plug their smartphone into a KVM and just use it as a gaming PC. Modern phones have enough computing power to play most games being produced today since a lot of them are indie or B titles that aren’t actually that intensive. And even the intensive AAA ones, if developers were willing to optimize for it and go for lower res graphics they could do those too. And they can definitely play any game that’s more than 10 years old.
I was thinking more about competition with suppliers than consumers.
If you are a games studio and have resources for three projects this year, do your investors want to see a phone, PC, or console game?
Sadly, I agree with you. I don't like it, but it seems pretty clear.
Recent and very related:
Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation (797 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745456
So Sony is simultaneously announcing that all purchases will be digital from now on while actively demonstrating that digital purchases aren't actually purchases. They're clearly communicating that they believe in a future where no one owns games any more.
> They're clearly communicating that they believe in a future where no one owns games any more.
They've been foreshadowing that future for years, but the gamers keep on bending right over and even squeezing the lube bottle for them. They haven't, and likely won't, be given a reason to stop marching toward that future.
They removed ‘A Shaun The Sheep Movie: Farmageddon’. OK Sony, this is war.
So the only "buy" option one has now is to torrent the movie? At least no one is going to delete the mp4 file.
The problem with torrents is that they naturally die when people lose interest.
Obviously media permanence is the best solution, but in the absence of that we just need laws that say that if the purchase isn’t time limited to something a reasonable user would consider a rental (48hrs? a week?) then companies that withdraw access rights need to refund in full the purchase cost.
There are services like Movies Anywhere and UltraViolet (now defunct) that store a licence when the user purchases one from an in-network licensor. Then the user can access the content via any supported platform.
The problem is that these are not legally mandated, so they can shut down (as UltraViolet did). If the ability to move the licence to another platform is mandated by law as a condition of continued copyright protection, this problem would largely disappear.
Let's add inflation to that. Or charge interest for the loan.
People owning their own media was always a pain to these companies. They tried to make disposable DVDs at one point!
What a fun balance sheet that will create. Seems easier to just exit the business.
> need to refund in full the purchase cost.
In practical terms, the logistics of many-years-later refunds would be unwieldy at best. Do the purchase records still exist? What if I no longer have that credit card or email address? How can you prove you're the heir of the deceased? What if I now live in a country where the "deletion" status is different? And how could you stop all the scammers who smelled free money?
Alternative: The gov't randomly picks 24 citizens from a pool of applicants who reasonably prove that they were harmed by the deletion. Those 24 are given legal authority to fiat-revoke all copyright protection on a "reasonable and proportional" number of the deleting corporation's currently copyrighted works. Or upstream of them, as "appropriate".
Doesn't matter. It should be up to the corporation to figure it out or else it's illegal and they get fined 300% of their total yearly revenue for each affected person.
Boom! Big and tough enforcement, I like it.
Similarly, we should put in a law to force consumers who post bad reviews to prove they actually transacted with the business. If they can't, they have to go to every person who saw the review and personally retract it.
Can't figure out who saw it? Tough. It's up to you to figure out, or else it's illegal and they get 5000 years in prison for every view it got.
The most frustrating thing about all of this is that if I'd published a game on PlayStation and then told Sony to rip it out of people's libraries, they'd tell me to pound sand. The contracts you sign to ship games on PlayStation specifically include redownload rights. So Sony knows this is a problem, and yet for whatever reason decided NOT to secure the rights they'd need for the digital purchases to actually work like a purchase.
This is nothing new and the reason I went from being the biggest media collector to collecting nothing now.
To put it in perspective, I bought Get Him to the Greek on Prime video shortly after it came out.
A month later, the "exclusive broadcast rights" changed, and I was no longer able to access it.
I know I'm not the only one here who remembers the Sony rootkit debacle in the age of CDs. One of the all-time worst companies I can think of when it comes to mistreating customers.
I we are heading towards a digital world, we need to solve the issue of how to ensure by legal means that in 800 years people will still be able to study current day media and arts.
Without laws to force companies to honor this, The only reasonable answer to this ownership issue will end up being piracy. Also, “Buying” the movie and making a copy of it for personal use shouldn’t be illegal.
> Also, “Buying” the movie and making a copy of it for personal use shouldn’t be illegal.
Unless I missed something recently, it's not illegal. You've always had the right to make backups of content that you purchased legally. It's the distribution that has been illegal.
physical media forever and always <3
If they offered refunds this would still be terrible.
They don't even offer refunds.
Previous discussions:
Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For (294 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747389
Sony erases digital content from libraries (74 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730904
if you cant hold it your hands, you don't own it. used dvd and bluray on ebay are cheaper anyway. another underutilized resource - the public library - mine has a huge catalog of movies you can borrow for free.
> another underutilized resource - the public library
As an indication of where things are going on this front, from the same publisher: Sony announced that games are not going to get distributed as physical copies anymore. So no new video games to be borrowed from public libraries, and even if you can borrow older games the new Playstations probably won't even have a disk tray to read them.
Whatever your stance on video games being something that is worth having in a library is, if they could get away with it that's probably their ideal end game for movies as well.
Time for libraries to start carrying hard drives full of pirated copies, I guess.
Sadly mine has awful, inconvenient hours because it became the local fight club for teenagers.
Depending on your library, you might be able to stream the same movies online for free. Check their web site.
If you can hold it in your hands you still might not necessarily own it. Remember DivX? (The medium, not the codec).
Remember Meraki?
Hopefully most of these folks that have been scammed know how to sail the high seas.
Which is a bit tricky on a Playstation. Sure you can scrounge up some Jellyfin-ish sort of thing, but most people buy on the console platform because they specifically don't want to jump through hoops.
Once its deleted it becomes a indefinite p(irate) license.
If you bought movies on a digital platform that would later go under (could be Sony one day), what would happen to your collection? Is it transferable in any way? If not, it's already a risk no matter which platform you use.
that's the point. you don't "buy" movies from digital platforms. you merely rent them, regardless of what the button said
Well I'd say these are different risks. It's either tied to the agreement Sony has with the movie provider, or with the platform itself. Either one could pull out.
Isnt there an issue with "Buy" and different countries marketing laws? Ie it implies "Hold" or "TemporaryKeep".
Guess it will be an upswing of BlueRay movies. Already happening with LPs and CDs
This anti-consumer stuff also applies to physical Blu-rays: each BD can contain a revocation list of player keys and distributor keys, and official players are required to update their keylists from that. Every time you insert a new disc in your player, you're playing russian roulette with your existing library.
Blu-Ray key revocation does not work that way. Players with revoked keys simply can't play discs that were encrypted to disallow them.
Discs that worked with a player will continue to work, as long as the physical mechanisms are still good.
Technically, maybe, since the player authenticates with the drive, if you updated the firmware on the drive you could lockout the player. I could see windows update potentially helpfully pushing a bd-rom drive firmware update, but it's not happening on a standalone player.
It's not ideal that your existing player might not read new discs, but hopefully you use your discs soon after purchase and you could return them if you can't get a firmware update with a new key. (Of course, I'm guilty of buying discs to watch eventually; will be annoying if my keys were revoked)
How does that work if my player is offline? A dedicated BluRay player has no reason to connect to the internet.
Each disc contains the latest revocation list at the time of its creation. If you put in a disc with a newer revocation list, your player updates. Same thing was done on the Nintendo Wii.
As bad as this is, it’s worth noting that this is the same incident that was widely reported earlier this month. Sony has only rugpulled hundreds of purchased titles from customers once this year.
So far.
But their timing was amazing, doing it just days before they announced that they were ending releases of games on physical media.
I've sold my PS5 several months ago. You can get a pretty gameable laptop and gog/steam prices are better. And I can install mods. Tree Sentinel Thomas Mod for example.
Everyone of these stories makes a great case for piracy. Torrents or illegal online streaming sites.
It truly does
I guess they want the masses to start sailing the high seas again
Interesting also that even this article doesn't mention "DRM" anywhere despite the fact that this is exactly the worst case scenario DRM critics have always warned about.
(Personally I would consider DRM okay if Sony's behavior here was illegal without a full refund.)
This has happened since the beginning of DRM. I had a roommate who bought hundreds of dollars of music from the Walmart music store because WMAs were like 59¢ instead of 99¢ from iTunes. It seems like not even a year later they shutdown the store and the certificate expired and PlaysForSure stopped playing for sure. That was around 2003.
20 years later will anyone do anything about it? Of course not.
What is going to be the event that gets laws to change? Probably not a few movies viewable only from Sony devices.
Well - I actually think the problem is not Sony being malicious here, per se, but the legislation. There has to be a guarantee as if it were a physical copy, as-is. The right to repair movement has the same cause ultimately. You purchase something, you own it, no matter what counter-legalese is tried.
The USA really needs to stop being a corporate-country. Weren't the republicans all about the people at one point in time? Now they are all about the billionaires and family dynasties pillaging what they can, with the forerunner the mad orange king pillaging the most. And starting wars he loses by default, after promising to not start wars.
I don't think they were ever all about the people.
when do you recall them being about the people? it's gotta be before Bush so maybe I just didn't grow up with it
And yet Sony wonders why people pirate their movies. In this case here the owners who had their movies stolen should be able to steal them back.
If you cared enough, I do wonder if you could win in court, if you pirated a movie that you purchased on the PS5, but Sony removed. It would cost you an ungodly amount of money to defend yourself against Sony, and I don't know the exact words of the "license", but it seems like a reasonable action to take.
It'd be a case where the spirit of the law clashes with the letter of the law.
Sony's lawyers would argue about how things are, while your defense has to argue about how things should be.
Which way it goes likely depends on how sympathetic the judge is rather than actual arguments being made.
I wonder if their use of a "buy" button would potentially weaken their case regardless of the language they put in the EULA.
Sony's recent movies aren't even worth pirating
Madame Web anyone
My daughter went to watch that and walked out. To compare, she managed to make it through Cats.
Jesus. That might be the most succinctly brutal movie review I've ever seen. quietly scratches Madam Web off the to-do list
Into and Beyond the Spiderverse are flawless movies.
The first one was 8 years ago, in the pre-Covid world.
Its all a bit hand wavy nonsense. Own a physical copy? How long until its unplayable because either the media corrupts or the player isn't available? The only real "ownership" is the IP, everything else is just renting.
All information is ephemeral, but I don't honestly think that argument holds much weight here.
I'm currently listening to a record which was pressed before I was born, and that will outlast me. My CDs were ripped around 2000 to a drive and i've streamed then since. I've still got the CDs though, and the last time I played one it worked fine on my 1989 vintage transport.
I think i'm good.
Why wouldn't a player be available though? CD/DVD players won't just suddenly stop working. My CDs and CD players at home from the 1990s are still working completely fine.
If they do want to posit it as this, I'd personally be fine if they said "a CD will work for 100k plays before corrupting" so you'll have 100,000 credits to stream The Wizard of Oz before you need to purchase it again.
But they need to say that upfront.
I trust the pressing on a CD or vinyl to remain readable SIGNIFICANTLY more than I trust any corporation to do literally anything, including "continue to exist".
A laser-engraved QR code can store 3KB, enough for an entire ebook. The file format isn't the problem here.
own a physical copy, rip it into a digital format. legal and works pretty well to keep up with the times
The DVDs I got in my childhood 20 years ago still work just fine, the drives to read them are $20 or less, and ripping them to a format I can use more conveniently and backup however I want is a single button click.
Plastic discs are the optimum data distribution format. They degrade in the same time frame as a paper book, essentially lifetime, you retain legal rights like the first sale doctrine, you can easily format shift for safety and storage, and nobody can take any of that from you ever, and you can use that data however you like, as long as you aren't trying to sell bootlegs.
Books and plastic discs are infinitely better than the digital realm. The consumer rights are so much stronger and better.