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#sony#game#games#buy#license#own#physical#don#steam#copy
Discussion (201 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Unfortunately the law is only as useful as its enforcement.
https://clouddosage.com/playstation-digital-game-lawsuit-son...
Carrot: Free vacations? Merch? Benefits ...
Stick: Scared because taking actions against the Buy (aka you own nothing) is paramount to going in a fight with a entire industry.
I can imagine the natural competitive wedge where GOG can say “Buy Game” but Steam has to say “Lease Game” on their buttons.
I think it would highlight the differences between publishers / studios more than store fronts.
Far from it. E.g. excludes resale.
With video games it is often for some unknown amount of time, and of course they don't tell you that.
The real problem is that most of society still thinks of games as a piece of physical media that you combine with a player that allows you to play the game. In that world you have a liscense to the software, and a physical token which is transferable and therefore valuable.
I'd argue that we need to decouple transferability and cancel ability from physical media. If this were to happen then the word "Buy" makes sense precisely the same way it used to with physical media. Of course more provision needs to be provided for live service games regarding cancel ability.
That would be a real win for consumers since we get the advantages of digital media with the ownership and transference rights of physical media.
Of course this would be a great inconvenience to those who wish to charge the same price for a temporary revocable license to the content, and they have deep lobbying pockets to fight against it.
1. Licensor, the company who makes the game.
2. Licensee, the person buying a digital copy of the game.
3. Safekeeper, Steam or another platform that stores the digital copy on behalf of Licensee. Similar to how depositories store securities and guarantee that they can be neither lost nor duplicated. For a separate fee perhaps.
But for some reason they don't want to and are willing to go to court on the matter. As you say, using the word "Buy" is stronger than "License", but it seems a strange hill to die upon.
I'm surprised the Sony team isn't freaked out about this
I'd rather have my rights as a consumer protected or get something tangible for giving them up (like cheaper games) than introduce even more legalese into online shops.
As much as I empathize with (and even support) the reasoning, I wonder if it would have a tangible effect. Is there anyone who was gonna click "buy" but not "license" (presuming they relabel the button and everything else is the same)?
Same thing with consoles, if one has “buy” and the other “lease”, then it might not convert everyone but could it take 5% of sales? 10%? 20%??
Yes, the language should be clear and precise.
Also, if the whole industry string-replaces "lease" for "buy," I doubt the effect will be much.
But even with all this nonsense from Sony I don't think they'll cross the rubicon of terminating licenses that come on physical discs for their older consoles. If they do, I hear you can jailbreak ps4s :)
IMO this is a strictly idealistic view in a world where only a very small vocal minority actually seems to care. The vast majority of people will continue to reward these companies with their wallets, so they have no incentive to change course.
In that case, any reasonable company would have no trouble being honest and not using the words “buy” and “purchase” with respect to game access.
All someone has to do is assemble a reasonable desktop that runs Linux, gives you access to GOG and Steam, and you've already got more games than most game consoles, the issue right now I suppose would be moreso hardware costs.
You would also want to make sure your Desktop Environment is fine tuned with a controller in mind.
If you can read games from discs, you'd be getting the attention of many people. The facts are that most people have always bought digital over discs but when you take that away, and it becomes clear that they could lose their games forever, everyone wants CDs back.
I know there's some issues with big picture mode and Nvidia, but that's an Nvidia driver problem, not a limitation of the platform.
It's definitely possible, but I suspect that Valve (or some other major player) must first prove the concept to be viable for a business.
e.g. The Steam Deck wasn't the first PC gaming handheld made, but it was the one that proved there was a viable market, which led to a bunch of competitors following Valve's lead.
The Steam Machine, unfortunately, botched the execution due to high pricing. If pricing had been good, I'm guessing that it too could have been the proof-of-concept needed to jump start the market.
Though one could argue that Linux GPU support is as good as it is because of Steam.
Between this claim, ramping down disc production, and the possibility of a $999 home console,they are going to have a difficult time.
There are still so few PS5 exclusives. Even fewer with PS5 Pro support. It’s going to take a lot to gain trust and justify a PS6. No clear path to victory here with a hardware update.
Never thought I'd have this opinion, but the gaming industry as is needs to crash/burn and rebuild itself. So many downright wild anti-consumer things happening in the last 10 years and studios have completely lost sight of how to keep themselves out of bankruptcy.
Gaming as a whole is a shadow of what it used to be, specifically because it has been tailored to the masses who have no real opinion on any of this other then they want to play what their friends play.
I don't know of a digital marketplace that works differently.
But instead all of the hate, the boycots, etc are all targeting Sony instead of focusing on actually figuring out how to improve digital purchase rights which extend beyond games (and far beyond Sony).
I know that some online hate it when you compare this situation to PC since there is choice there, but not when it comes to this. Sure you can choose which store you want to not really own things with but its the same result. Steam did this a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1g19n60/steam_now_te...
Where were the boycots then.
Examples: literally two days ago Sony permanently removed access to over 500 movies for people who had "purchased" them, and only a couple months ago Sony announced their plan to permanently shutter physical media production for Playstation.
I agree with you that it's a systemic issue but it also doesn't surprise me that Sony is seen as the lead boogeyman. I think if you asked the average gamer what their opinion of Valve's business practices was vs. Sony you'd get a very different answer even if the legalese in the TOS is similar.
They're also forcing Stage Tour to include discs with their guitar bundles, even though many PS5s can't play discs.
RIP Lik Sang.
I just find it hypocritical, people keep saying they are going to move to xbox or pc next gen and its like. Their policy is exactly the same. You have the same risk and not really ownership.
And I am not defending Sony, they have a long history of getting cocky with their consoles and pulling some shit. But in this particular case they are following the trend that we allowed by going all digital on PC and buying digital games on consoles.
Sony isnt going to be the one that changes this, the only way to expect change would be targeting all of them including Valve. But everyone, like this article, just seems to gloss right over that and seem to imply its only Sony that is the problem here.
You don't, though. When I download a game on Steam or GOG, I have the files on my PC. I can back them up. I can modify them.
Yes, live service games still have an online component I don't control, but I do still control the files on my computer. I don't on a console.
Actually, I don't own any consoles for reasons of software freedom but I hear they are much more difficult to do things like back up your data, etc.
It's not, though. Their ToS is the same. They reserve to right to deny you ownership of your games. Only Sony has been stupid enough to actually do it.
Every ToS in the world is designed to screw the signee over as much as it possibly can, so you'd need to go live in the woods if you wanted to escape it, but there is a tangible difference between how much companies actually abuse the provisions in their ToS. I don't know how you can say "Microsoft reserves the legal right to drill a hole in my skull" and "Sony is actively drilling a hole in my skull" are `exactly the same`.
1. steam does not have a monopoly on distribution rights for PC games. if steam were to go bankrupt publishers could honor your keys and even other marketplaces could do it. steam themselves let you bring your own key.
2. steam has been a benevolent marketplace leader, even though DRM itself plays against customers, the rest of the stuff they pushed while leading, like game sharing, play and refund, offline playing, are pro consumer.
3. why would your knee jerk reaction to this is pointing a finger to steam, what's your endgame?
Sure they have said and claimed a lot of things, but their TOS says the same thing that Sony is arguing. Its suddenly this big shock now but no one cared before? Sure the way Sony is handling this is fumble after fumble but thats PR.
My problem is that Valve for some reason gets a free pass because "they are the good guys" when their own policy means they could do the exact same thing.
I own a lot of games on Steam, but I am not nieve to assume that there is not a chance that at some point I could loose all or some of those games. People are for some reason in a false sense of security about Steam and that is a problem. They have to be part of the conversation when it comes to digital ownership. Ignoring them means we can't actually solve the issue.
There's more noise about this than Microsoft's mass layoffs at the game companies they bought up.
PC games can still be physical. Burn some discs or copy the files onto a USB stick and put it in a box. I think it's crazy that boutique companies like Limited Run Games completely avoid the platform when it's the only one left that isn't actively hostile to the core principles of the company. Admittedly PC does have the image of being a digital distribution only platform these days, but it's illusory and breaking that illusion is a marketing problem.
People were pretty pissed about the xbox layoffs, it's just that things move fast and this was the next thing.
First off, console games have gradually moved away from offering physical copies for years. This had the (probably deliberate) effect of killing the used game market. Earlier attempts to kill that market were driven by the proliferation of digital content that could not be resold.
Second, physical copies on the PC have not been guaranteed for a very long time. I would suggest it was actually the wide-scale proliferation of indie games that did more to kill the physical copy market than any deliberate transition from AAA studios. There are thousands of indie games out there now. Without digital copies, it would be impossible for anyone to actually purchase any of them.
And the momentum to move away from physical copies for PC gaming has been there for a very long time. No one was going to Best Buy to pick up a physical copy of minesweeper. There have been other factors as well, such as the popularization of MMORPGS which provided years of content from a single physical copy.
Really though, the idea that without Valve, the PC gaming market would still be chugging along on physical game copies just isn't realistic. It goes completely against the momentum built over the last 25 years of PC gaming.
- While it could be argued that Valve runs an effective monopoly of the PC platform based on their marketshare, Valve operates on a platform with competitive options including DRM-free stores.
- Game consoles have always been more attached to physical media than PCs.
- Sony is the largest player in the market (disregarding mobile phone gaming) with more total marketshare than Valve and the PC platform. This makes them a much more visible target.
Sony has never stolen a game from me, unlike Valve. The closest incident was that movie thing, which was more a failure on their part to negotiate perpetual licensing with the rightsholder.
That's like saying Volkswagen has a monopoly on Volkswagen cars.
Sony clearly does not have a monopoly on the video game industry, and a plurality of video games are cross-platform across consoles, PCs (Windows/Linux), and even MacOS.
Boxed PC games were practically dead by the time Valve started selling 3rd party games on their marketplace. Most game stores around me had stopped selling them or massively shrunk the shelf space for them. Xbox, Gamecube, Playstation 3, they had whole walls of the store dedicated to their stuff. PC games had a couple of shelves in the middle of the store, if even that. Sales for PC games had massively fallen between 1999 and 2005 while the rest of the game industry exploded.
The industry had shrunk over a third in five years before Valve started selling online. You can't say it was "thriving".
People still give money to Sony for some reason, but as far as I'm concerned that's on them. Call it victim-blaming at this point, I guess.
They may not be playing in the same league as Steam, but PC folks do have the choice of GoG and itch, which both sell DRM-free binaries.
of course it's better that gog requires you go without it for the customer, but I'm not sure it helps in terms of legal rights. If gog shuts down you'll need to have your games backed up and downloaded to still own them and you won't have any license to a new download or etc
On PC, there are always other options [pirate flag emoji]. Steam (in many, but not all cases) competes with free. Sony doesn't on the PS5.
So in short, I think it's because they're the big guy making a very visible change to the broader public, instead of a new platform with a new way of doing things (how Steam was).
It doesn't make it right but I feel like the writing has been on the wall for ages.
Valve has spent the better part of 20 years fostering a good relations with the gaming community and pretty much every gamer has a great deal of confidence that they'll protect your purchases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Because they did a whole marketing stunt over it. Granted it was more than a decade ago, so probably just a remnants of old console war.
What they should do is just stay silent and stay the course. Everyone fucking knows in 10 years time physical media will be dead and all of this is water under the bridge.
If I buy a CD or a cassette or a record, I own the physical media but I only have a licence to the music it contains - not the ownership, and not the copyright. Whether I can play that music as a DJ at an event or on the radio, or remix it as a backing track for another song I'm creating and so on, depends on licencing laws and royalty payments. That was true well before the internet, and it's why Wham! get a huge boost in royalties every December whenever a radio station plays Last Christmas.
A separate question is whether Sony can _revoke_ a licence and delete the game off your device again.
Note, if a band does a cover of a popular song, the original music composer rights also don't magically transfer because someone sang a slightly different version.
Sony may not be technically breaking any rules, if they disclosed the terms of the copyright are revocable... and not perpetual in the terms of sale.
Still a douche move to rip off kids, and burned a lot goodwill with consumers. =3
Software is significantly more complicated and gets into issues of physical permanence/transience and specific exemptions/limitations to normal copyright law (see e.g. 17 USC 117).
We own nothing but the right to access the game so long as the rights holder chooses to permit it. This means I could buy a game on Tuesday and the rights holder could render it unplayable on Wednesday with no recourse.
The "Buy" versus "License" question doesn't really resolve this. Sony is right in one sense that we all know we are licensing. What needs protection, probably requiring new or revised laws, is some sort of consumer right to get value out of a game license before the vendor renders it unplayable.
You might think, like, you've had some eureka moment, but it's all corporate BS.
If I'm not buying a thing, but instead a limited license to a thing, then I don't care about buying that thing anymore and I'll just take it.
I doubt I'll be alone and with Denuvo being regularly defeated on release day, I'm not too worried about availability.
I'm even willing to drop resale of individual game, if I can just sell off my account as a whole to someone else.
My main "game console" is a NixOS box running Jovian, and I have made oodles of Flakes that I use to make custom non-Steam games that launch deterministically, and as far as I'm aware, Valve is perfectly fine with this (not that I particularly care if they are).
To be fair to the critics, they hadn't thought out all the issues around resale and trading games with friends, but had stated they would address that, before just dropping the tech entirely. It seems like they never stopped having the discs support it, so now it's a relatively straightforward thing for them to enable.
That is completely separate from the question of whether you are buying your copy to permanently use, or just renting it temporary.
Conflating the two concepts is either sophistry, or stupidity.
[1] https://www.gog.com/en/game/god_of_war
When I buy a game disc, I own that copy of the game on it. I can give it away. I can sell it. I own that copy, in the same way I own that book. No own claims to "license" a book anymore, or at least no one who doesn't get laughed out of court.
Take away the physical medium and there is nothing physical left that you own. Therefore, you have no physical rights to it anymore. The publisher, at their sole discretion, can remove the medium of access by which you consume the book. And then you'll be left without a book.
This is exactly how the current system works, I am just explaining it to you. So don't shout at the wind.
And since gaming is the only profit center that's holding Sony above water I see the company disappearing in a couple of years.
I foresee another "gaming winter" like we had in the 1980's. Maybe a decade from now another gaming platform will arise, most likely built around open-source software and hardware.
There was that infamous picture of the Steam Group, something like, “Never Buy CoD XYZ”. Half of the group members were playing it.
I highly doubt that. I’d say 99%, probably more, won’t care either way. People barely care on PC, and people on consoles are generally used to more abuse.
The PC gaming ecosystem is a powerful selling point, especially due to the existence of Steam, emulators, modding, etc.
Windows really needs more refinement and polish though, the current experience is mostly unacceptable for a living room PC.
A next-gen Steam Machine would likely be a better competitor to the PS6, it doesn't have the reputational baggage that Xbox and Microsoft currently has.
When you lease a car, you know you're leasing a car. They have to be clear about that up front.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/FINAL-FANTASY-VII-REMAKE-INTERGRADE-N...
[1] In before the idiotic strawman "so you think you own Final Fantasy?". No. I think I own my copy, not the copyright to distribute it.
also interesting, in california vendors are required to say "you are buying a license" unless you can download the media you are purchasing.
I don't know if that game qualifies.
for kindle books, amazon says:
"By placing your order, you're purchasing a license to the content and you agree to the Kindle Store Terms of Use."
but some books actually could say "buy" like this one:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DMZC4VPQ
Because when you "purchase a license" you can actually download the book in epub/pdf format
(this specific book, not all books)
There doesn't seem to be a way to determine kindle books that you can download in epub/pdf before you "license" them.
Fans were eating it up and it won them the console market lead. Times sure have changed.
Firstly, you're not "stealing" (committing the crime of theft) by making digital copies of a work. You are infringing copyright. Even a single copy infringes copyright. To not infringe copyright, you need a license for your copying from the copyright holder.
You can still manage to infringe that license even if you went through a normal storefront and paid the copyright holder the amount they asked for. You can do that by doing things with your licensed copy that the copyright holder wrote into your license that you mustn't do. If they sold physical items, they would not be able to apply such adverse terms to your copy.
If you void your own license in that way, you no longer have that license, and so any copying/modification/distribution you're doing is back to being copyright infringement.
Finally, there is such a thing as criminal copyright infringement. That's when you make a significant profit from copyright infringement (for example, getting people to pay you to watch a pay-per-view event that you're illegally redistributing, or even just having adverts that make you money on a website offering unlicensed Nintendo ROMs for emulators)
Go ahead and copy/distribute the game client, even reverse-engineer the server and launch a private instance.
You still don’t have the content.
AI has accelerated this if anything, and especially the server side stuff. Look at the destiny 2 private servers right now recreating lost content.
Buying in this case is "buying", and is a redefined term inside the legal contract which you choose to agree to when Sony accepts your money for a license to access their published video games, and so, it does not mean buying in the mundane sense of physical goods.
I would suggest this workaround: If you don't accept society's rules about related norms, such as you having a different definition of theft froom society's, you must proactively declare -- in your mind at the minimum -- and accept without two-way agreement on behalf of everyone else whom you steal from, that theft means what you choose to define it as at any moment. Do that, then that logic is solid.
> If you don't accept society's rules about related norms, such as you having a different definition of theft froom society's
Society's "norms" around buying is that you own the thing you buy, which is why we have different words for buy, lease, rent, etc. Society's norms around theft is that you have taken something from someone else and they no longer have access to it.
Sony is the one with the different definition. They're the ones that should proactively declare it. And no, codifying it in legalese and burying it in a EULA isn't declaring it as society would expect.
To add: when Blockbuster existed, we all understood that renting a movie there was a temporary thing and buying the VHS at Best Buy was permanent. That is the expectation one has, not whatever a giant multinational decides it is.
Want to create new definitions for new words or phrases? Totally fine, but then Sony would need to replace the “buy” button with “blease” or “blent” or whatever they want to call this fake purchasing shit that all software has been playing at for entirely too long.
Or just be honest and call it leasing.
I'll post the google/ai summary, but this mostly it:
Your Main Rights by Timeframe Within 30 Days: You have the right to reject the item and get a full refund.
After 30 Days and up to 6 Months: You must give the retailer one opportunity to repair or replace the item. If that repair or replacement fails, you are generally entitled to a full refund. The law assumes the fault was there when you bought it unless the retailer proves otherwise.
After 6 Months: You can still request a repair or replacement, but the burden is on you to prove the fault was present when you received the item. You have up to six years (five years in Scotland) to bring a claim for faulty goods in court.
Tell me more about this nonexistent contract I have with Sony.
Sony should be disbanded by the court for wasting our time here.
If there's no technical reason to fuck with the product I have already purchased access to, don't fuck with the product I have already received.
In a world where steam allows instant returns with under 2 hours play time.
I have a few games now on ps where I barely played or found out the controls were terrible and have no way to return.
Unfortunately I think this argument has a bit more merit than you think. There is already copyright precedent that you cannot enjoy first sale rights on digital property (e.g. "a marketplace for used MP3s", or "we'll scan this book and loan it to you and we promise not to touch it until the loan expires"). Physical goods have specific legal rights that the courts have so far refused to extend to digital files[0]. In that legal environment, every digital copy of a work is fundamentally some data combined with permission to make use of copies of that data under some conditions. There are no digital copies, only digital licenses.
But that's merely an argument that third-parties don't get to copy things just because the way they're copying it emulates an act one might do with a physical copy. Where Sony goes off the rails is that they then argue that the only two options can be "a license under our chosen terms" and "complete and total copyright assignment," and then illustrate the absurdity of someone thinking they bought copyright ownership over Resident Evil (which genuinely can't be sold in parallel like this) to argue that the only way Sony can sell games digitally at all is under terms of their own choosing.
A smart judge would see through this and argue that Sony could at least have chosen terms that materially resembled the rights of someone who owned a physical copy. That is, they could have provided a service to allow someone to transfer their license to another PlayStation Network user. But at the same time, the law has a nasty habit of bowing to its best customers[1], and I would not be surprised if the judge just goes along with what Sony says (especially if the plaintiffs don't do a good job rebutting it).
[0] The reasoning for this is that there is no such thing as a digital move. On a computer, "move" is "copy and delete", and the act of making a copy is squarely in the realm of ordinary copyright protection.
[1] See also: the European Commission and California's abject refusal to require games you bought and paid for to continue to work offline.