Sony makes bold claim about game ownership

TheCleric

Revocable software licenses are a scam.

nerdjon

What I don't understand is why Sony is the one being targeted for this when this has been the case with any digital purchase for 20 years? 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.

cratermoon

If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't theft.

captainbland

If we're not owning it, you're not selling it, you're leasing it. Terminology on sales pages should reflect this. "Subscribe now" "purchase license" etc. should be mandated if this is the expectation. Terms like "buy" without qualification are misleading in this context, but they won't remove them from store pages because people are more likely to pay higher rates for something if they believe they are actually owning the good in perpetuity.

Keyframe

Remember your wallet is your vote in all of this, no matter the size of it!

aizk

On this topic I'd like to give a big kudos to the devs at https://decomp.dev/ who are tirelessly working to decompile old video games for fun, preserving it for future generations.

strictnein

The amusing thing about all of this is that the tech that Microsoft is using to be the "good guy" in this is the same thing they were savaged for when they announced it for the Xbox One. The ability to take a physical disc and use that as your key, with each disc having a unique code embedded in it. When you would install the game it would then lock that code to your account, proving your ownership of it, and you would no longer need the disc. 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.

VCFundedGenYer

Sony is wrong. If I buy it, I own it. I can do what I want with it, I can put it in a sandwich and eat it.

ginko

13 years ago when Microsoft wanted to introduce per-user locks for bought XBone games Sony released this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA Fans were eating it up and it won them the console market lead. Times sure have changed.

jdw64

These days, it feels like we can't truly own anything anymore. Sure, physical media used to break often, but these days I just don't get that satisfying feeling of actually owning something.

DrBazza

I despise Sony and avoid them at all costs. They started with AACS and then finally lost me when they embedded Cinavia in the Playstation.

red_admiral

Sony is correct here? 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.

giancarlostoro

I wonder if anyone will ever have the guts to enter the gaming console market using open source as a base. Linux support for GPUs has never been better than what it is today. I've spent the last 4 or 5 years gaming exclusively on Linux just to highlight how good it has gotten, and no I don't have to run around doing command line incantations. Linux has improved a lot, heck, even AI you have a drastically better experience working with AI on Linux than on Windows (which hearing this 10 years ago would have confused me given how many issues I had with my GPUs on Linux for YEARS). 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.

hn_submit

This statement could do Sony in. Gamers will refuse to buy a PS6 if there's not an ironclad guarantee that they own the games they purchase, be it digital or disc form. 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.

asdaqopqkq

After GTA6 comes out on PC, Sony should get ready for a crash that will make the PS3 launch issue look tiny. Kids these days just play Rolox or Fortnite on tablets, the gamer pipeline is gone and what ever is left of the gamers are migrating to SteamOS/PC. Older kids would much rather use Insta/Kick/etc as an IRL MMO. Teen boys are more concerned with looksmaxxing than video games. Maybe they know this and this is one last milking of the their installbase before the big fall.

tetrisgm

This is going to backfire spectacularly. 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.

thataccount

Easy solution: Stop buying whatever it is that Sony is trying to sell. Watch definitions radically shift.

aleksiy123

PlayStation store not allowing returns for games that have been downloaded is the most bs policy. 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.

shevy-java

Sony will lose this. Why? Because courts can point to the fact that in the 1990s, people bought a game, then could play it and re-sell it freely. So the claim about Sony how people only ever "licenced" something from them, and NOW face more restrictions than before, simply because Sony claims so, makes no sense. That's against established practices. Sony should be disbanded by the court for wasting our time here.

kmeisthax

> This feels like a strange reductio ad absurdum argument in reverse, where the argument isn’t disproven by reducing it: it is instead proven that merchandise and specifically software is sold as copies not as a singular entity. I’m not sure who Sony’s lawyers are trying to appeal to here, or if they just wanted to burn through a few dozen billable hours on an argument that makes no sense. 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.