I am generally not in favor of adding regulation, but this is a place where I would support it.

Anything that you BUY needs to be your property. This means you must have the ability to:

1. Transfer ownership of it (either temporarily as a loan or permanently as a sale). Digital-only doesn't preclude this: the store can have a "transfer" functionality.

2. (Within reason) use it at your discretion at any point after the sale. This means that a company cannot "revoke" your access at a later time. Specifically for content that is DRM locked, if they decide to sunset that service (store, DRM server, whatever), no problem! just offer DRM free (or generally lock-free copies). I have no problem with Sony not offering DRM free versions of games that I can still download and play with the store. But if that goes away -> you must give me a path to local ownership.

(Multiplayer games that require server infrastructure are a bit more complex, and I'd leave aside for now).

This should apply equally to video games, movies, books, music. Any digital content.

Absolutely this.

Fifteen years ago World of Warcraft was at its peak. You had 12 million people paying a monthly fee, plus buying the occasional expansion pack. No other gaming company had seen reoccurring revenue numbers like that before and it changed the industry. One aspect of this was that if you stopped paying you lost access to the game.

The industry has been looking for the next way to level up this subscription model on gaming. Battle Passes, Xbox Live, Game Pass, Playstation Plus, Stadia, Game Fly, and a ton of other ideas. Sony is now using the stick to directly attack ownership instead of the carrot to entice subscriptions. We'll see how this plays in the PS6, but I think they are overplaying their position, especially with how underwhelming the PS5 has been received by gamers.

I'm optimistic that the raise in PC gaming will act as a balance for the obvious greed of the consoles. It's becoming a larger and larger player in the non-mobile gaming market, and it's too big to be treated like a second class citizen anymore. The open platform prevents anyone from acting as a gatekeeper between game developers and players.

For me personally, I began losing interest in consoles the first time I had to install a console game to a hard drive. The plug and play magic just fell apart.

"But most people use Steam anyway, I hear you say. That's true, but you can still own your games on Steam. Very easily, in fact! Steam doesn't apply a hard DRM for games on their platform, you can bypass it and play your games offline without the launcher if you know what you're doing."

--------------

When it comes to PC games, the real peace of mind comes from cracks and piracy.

Sure, a single player game that requires an online service to start up could become unplayable if the company running that online service decides to end it without providing a patch. If that happens, somebody will crack it so the game can be run. Sure, a game could be yanked from Steam without notice, but you can always pirate it. Sure, Steam could go under, but the internet is my backup drive. I know what I've paid for.

I don't have actual legal ownership of the titles I buy, but I also have recourse if I feel I've been ripped off. That recourse may be abused by some, but game companies have no moral right to oppose it until they start respecting the rights of their paying customers. Taking away something that was paid for is theft. Ownership rights for downloaded titles is a critical stepping stone if game companies are serious about reducing piracy.

I made a hard switch from all digital to all physical (when available) after I tried to introduce old games to my kids. I found many of them were no longer downloadable.

What are the odds that PlayStation, Nintendo, Xbox servers will be around in 2040? 2050? It’s certainly not 100%. Those companies may not even exist. If there’s any dependency, there is a chance that one day you won’t have access any more.

Ownership as in resale-able.

Eventually someone important enough will force digital resales to become reality, changing everything to require KYC.

The question I'm left with: in the past, the uproar over these types of changes seemed to make companies change their mind when considering very anti-consumer decisions. Now, they just go ahead anyway.

What's different? How do we get back to how it was before? I know the current political climate is one that enables this sort of thing. There are parallels with the current movement also WRT to the employer/employee relationship.

Beyond that, there's still more at play. In tech, and specifically on this site, I see a lot more complicity and fatigue when discussing these issues. I can't help but think that also contributes. I'm not saying everyone should always be mad at everything. But it does seem like there's a generational component to this where we haven't passed down an essential feature of a hacker, namely the anti-establishment bent.

I suppose that's collateral damage of a culture tolerating lots of people rushing in to grab their bag of cash and then get out.

Maybe you think gaming/media companies are greedy and should make less money. But if you want the industry to continue in the current state, keep in mind the price of games needs to be adjusted:

  price *= (total game sales / avg player count)

I'm not arguing either way, but this is the back of the napkin math to consider, and how that would ripple across the industry, for better or worse.

This is a large part of why I went with a Retroid Pocket over buying a Switch 2. It’s not nearly as powerful but it’ll run Linux and most indie games I buy on GOG. It’s more work of course but knowing that the games I buy I’ll be able to play into the future on any number of devices is worth it.

If you think in terms of ownership, even then digital is not that bad. I’ve owned digital games since Xbox 360 and I can still play them to this day on my Xbox series X.

But not all of my physical games CD/DVDs are in mint condition and some have scratches.

I want the most minimum amount of regulation that doesn’t reason much about the type of media or transport method.

Require clear communication of meaning of words like “purchase” and require software “licenses” to indicate “access for at least 5 years” or whatever.

Basically, “you don’t own this. You’re buying the right to access it for least x years” vs. “You are purchasing a key that is fully transferable and provides indefinite access to this product.”

Then let the market sort out the rest, including buyer sentiment.

this is one of the few areas i feel like a blockchain-style solution could work. Mint a token, transfer it on sale or resale to the new wallet. Validate a wallet with the key is associated with the account. Same for old-school MSFT licenses or other systems where you buy a license key.

There's probably a shortcoming I'm missing here, but it's the only genuine case I could see a blockchain having use above other technical solutions

"looking at you movie industry" - i think 'indie' movies are coming. there's a wave coming and the early signs are the likes of obsession and iron lung. all hope is not lost

I think an oft-forgotten possible major driver for the moves away from discs[1] must be scary legal warnings universally seen in paid contents during 2010s. None of currently popular platforms have those stern unrelatable messages that customers looking for relaxing contents were forced to observe. It didn't took hard data for anyone to see disc sales disappearing in sync with DRMs and tones progressively more obnoxious and harsh in the period.

Sony is likely not shutting down physical discs to tighten control over consumers, but it's more likely that they just don't see disc manufacturing as a viable business as a hardware factory that it always was. That goes beyond games or movies, and it should be discussed more often as to why they didn't take actions but to quietly watch the golden goose slaughtered.

1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/100749

At the core of this customers have a right to choose what they spin money on.

Access to an online based experience which will be discontinued in the future, that's what Roblox or Fortnite is.

When I spend money in a F2P game, I understand I don't have any rights outside of using it after the publisher ends support.

I don't want the government to tell me how to spend my money.

I do want all these gamers making noise to spend a fraction of the effort making community driven open source games.

I dream often of high quality open source games. The community would raise funds for development with an understanding of everything being released under MIT or GPL later.

FOSS is ownership.

Everything else is a temporary license to use which can be terminated without cause at any time. I just brought Marathon and it's fun.

But because Sony only sold me a license , they have a right to switch off the servers and make it useless tomorrow.

The only regulation I'd support here is a minimum service commitment at purchase. Something like " Your access to this product will terminate in June of 2029. Extensions to this service may be granted at publisher discretion."

This needs to be BIG RED PRINT when I hand over my money. Not hidden on page 15 of a service agreement.

I would argue further: it's not just about ownership only, but about control on a different level, that the industry can dictate what you can play by mass revoking the license, in order to force a next "hype" by getting rid of your independence.

I view the killing of physical game media as having two aspects that, while intertwined, are separate in some ways.

The first is the loss of the physical item. I like organizing carts and discs, looking at them on my shelves, reminiscing, easily putting one in a console to replay. Same with other media for me: I buy books, only read physical ones. I listen to digital music (generally downloaded from sites like Bandcamp) but for albums and artists I like the most I buy vinyl. I get that this isn't a big deal for most people, but it is something that is permanently lost when you get rid of physical media.

The second aspect is control and ownership. This is indeed intertwined with the physical aspect, since you can do things like resell a cartridge or disc and let someone easily borrow it. But control is possible with purely digital games, they just need to not be locked down with DRM. And companies like Sony want to kill physical games because it allows them to keep those DRM locks on digital-only copies so you cannot resell your games, which is connected to the second point, control.

I also agree that the issue of control is more important. How do we continue to make sure our games, that we bought, aren't just taken away from us? What happens if you lose your account with Sony/MS/Nintendo? What happens if your old console that you downloaded a game on breaks? The death of physical games is also a step on the way to subscription-only services, where you won't even be able to play something unless you are actively giving money to a company regardless of how much you gave them before.

The ways forward that I see are legislation that would do things like force companies to allow people to always download games they bought in perpetuity, regardless of account status, and if the company dies the successor company must do the same or release the game into the public domain. But given the power of large corporations and current intellectual property laws, this isn't happening anytime soon.

Practically, then, the only way I see is to either have a console that is hacked in some way, or only play games on an open platform like PC. And there you can only buy DRM-free games or, at worse, if you lose access to game in some service (e.g., Steam) you can still pirate it (which I'd feel morally fine doing if I bought it already of course, but that does bring legal risks depending on where you live).

And the later option still doesn't address the larger issue of preservation, as the OP's blog post notes: games will be made for locked-down consoles in the future and will be lost forever unless the hardware is hacked or a law demands the game's preservation.

>Everyone wants to be Netflix

This is the most perfect sentence about this situation

Most new games are worse than old games anyway

I‘m wondering if there’s a better term to use than „digital games“. Those physical discs are just as digital as anything else.

I know this is a topic de jour for submitters lately, but it seems weird for hacker news, a website for and by founders who primarily offer software-as-a-service. I also think it seems weird for a website whose patrons are seemingly predominantly against private property / property ownership. At least the vocal ones seem to feel that way.

I get that HN is made up of a variety of people with a variety of opinions, and different confluences of events lead to different groups being more or less vocal at different times. So maybe this is just that in action.

the resale market for disk has been on a downtrend for years, you can sign into someone's else psn account too and share games, you are a washed up gamer, its okay I am washed up too.

or, of getting rid of "intellectual property" legally so information is just shared more freely and widely

This isn't just isn't as clearcut as people make it. A lot of it is based on a historic idea of an SNES cartridge or PS1 disk that contained the complete game, which was played locally and was entirely self-contained. It makes sense that you'd "own" that.

But we don't live in that world anymore. An extreme example is Fortnite. This is free (with paid cosmetics) but imagine if it cost $20. Do you own it? If they shut down the Fortnite servers, the game is pretty much worthless. What do you "own" exactly? Even with games like CoD that have a campaign, the game would degrade by losing online services.

Even for an offline game that's bought online, there will have been patches. If your console dies or you buy a new one, where do you download it from once the service shuts down? Or does it need to be available to download forever? If so, who hosts that?

As another example, I can probably from some old DVDs with games like GTA4 on them if I dig in boxes. I have since bought most on Steam since but ignore that. Years ago I had tried to install GTA4 on a PC and it basically didn't work. It relied on some infrastructure ("Games for Windows"?) that had since been discontinued. I think if I persisted I could've patched it to work but I just gave up. What happens then? What about when it requires an OS that no longer exists? What exactly do you "own"?

For digital TV shows and movies, this is far easier. I've never bought any of these. Years ago, you couldn't even download movies again from iTunes. If you lost it, bad luck. They reversed course on that I believe. But all these cases where the digital store lost the digital icense, which is going to happen, what did you think was going to happen?

What about DRM (for TV shows/movies as well as games)? There are DRM servers. Do these need to be maintained? By whom? You might take the purist approach of "no DRM" but that's really a losing battle.

But games are tougher for the reasons I described.

Here's something else to consider: part of the distribution model for physical media is that the media doesn't last forever (liek a digital copy does). Disks scratch, get broken, get lost, etc. Electronics in cartridges fail. SD cards fail. This degradation is built into the pricing model.

I honestly don't know what the solution is here but this just isn't as clearcut as people are making it out to be.

It is about memory. Same reason people wish to own the photographs they take.

It is the right to trigger your own neurons and synapses irrespective of your capital value.

Video game companies still remember when they owned the arcade machines and players were required to constantly insert money into the machines to keep playing. They've been chasing that high ever since.

The key to owning modern multiplayer online games is to have private servers run by human persons on their own owned computers. But except for TF2 no one has been able to (or cared enough) allow private servers alongside the much much more important microtransactions. This is what is killing ownership.

imo GameStop ruined it for everyone. Nearly all their profits are from reselling games.

Unfortunately ownership on console has been down the drain for a long time. Even if you have the disc you still have mandatory downloads, patches, one-time download codes that tie the content to your account and of course DLC. What is even the point of having the disc anymore? Might as well go full digital and avoid the plastic waste.

I do own a PS4 and I have to do research every time I want to play a game. The website https://www.doesitplay.org/ is quite useful. But it's all so tiresome, it really makes me want to just check out of console gaming altogether. With full-on digital at least there won't be any ambiguity. It's not what I wanted, but all it means for me is that they won't be getting any of my money anymore.

And "people" seemingly hated NFT so much, but the basic idea of it, like in this case, would've given sony an opportunity to cash in on every resale of the given physical disc. But, oooh the underlying forces that steer our society towards a dead end didn't like that idea.

Same applies to graphics artists. They sell a painting and if it ever changes hands it would've netted them X percent from the given transactions. But NO, that's not the way this should be handled. The elite doesn't want people to earn easily.

Digital vs physical is the same bs just from a different angle.

He has a point; it makes sense for greedy corporations to try to eliminate second sale markets. But to me this is a much more fundamental attack that is going here. I also can't help but notice the age sniffing attack vector right now, but probably these two issues are not directly related.

Companies try to make it illegal to have physical copies. This is very similar to those who oppose the right-to-repair movement. They don't want you to control anything - they want to control everything. By not producing physical copies, they force you into their control. Now I am not the target audience, because these companies do not get any money from me anyway, but after the digital-only dictatorship I would be even less inclined to give them any MORE money now. Because I would support this new mafia scheme and that goes against my ethics - even though this is hypothetical as they already don't get me money anyway. I think it is time to forbid certain practices by companies. They should be REQUIRED to yield physical copies too. What the format is, how, and so forth is secondary, though they also may not abuse this for driving up outrageous prices either.

As hard as it is to admit, the used market hurts developers the most. If I buy a game and then resell it to a friend for more money than what the game store would offer, but less than what they'd pay at retail. The actual developer of the game sees no profit. It's a win-win for the gamers, not so much for the developers.

Digital assets don't degrade like an appliance or a used car might, so the used market really cuts into the profits of game companies.

I don't believe the solution to this is to go all digital and cut off access to physical media entirely. What we need are stronger digital economies that can grow organically with a community.

Digital media needs the backing of cryptocurrency to remain viable. We need digital assets and economies that either grow or shrink in value based on demand. Rather than fake digital currencies that have no value outside of the world they're used in, we need real cryptocurrencies that are traded on open markets like stocks to bolster the digital economy and make the economics of building fun, lasting games a reality.

I'm tired of spending money on digital points for games that have no real value. Everything should be a cryptocurrency at this point.

Related:

Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745456

Exactly. Let them sell games on GOG DRM-free. You buy it, it's yours as long as you back it up. No one stops you from storing it on any physical media you want. Just use an HDD.

When things on the other are presented as rent only, it's very bad.

Physical media was always one of the selling points for consoles. While PC has essentially been digital-only for a long time (with NONE of the wish list the author here wants, mind you - you can't sell or lend games to random people on Steam, besides a limited "family sharing" feature), consoles were where you go when you want to play a game and then sell it quickly if you don't like it. Physical media accounts for 50% of Switch game sales. I feel that Sony is in panic mode because they released a bunch of stinker first-party games and now they think that removing the disc drive from the PS6 will save them some money. It'll probably lose them a lot of customers.

There's another story about a game that died and was resurrected, Runescape. It launched with a big fanfare of version 3.0 back in 2008 and was met with total disaster. Fans were quitting, private servers of the pre-EOC update, etc. Jagex heard this and stuck a solo dev onto re-launching an instance of '2007 scape' which was basically an old backup they found and a few server instances. They incorporated features of the platform like voting, where votes require strong consent (75% in some cases) to get new features, and it's a seriously community driven game where both sides have something to gain. Now branded "old school runescape" the game has more players than the "runescape 3" that still exists today as Runescape. A win all around.

I question how much of this discussion is really being driven by gamers.

Those who wanted change made it happen. There are indie games and remakes without these restrictions. Most of classic gaming preservation has been successful with its goals apart from some legal gray areas and chasing rarities.

These discussions then fixate on the cutoff year for classic gaming and whether everything beyond that is even worth saving. The conclusion is always the same. Nobody really cares about the slop.

All that remains to discuss is politics. That's always the most vocal part drowning out everyone else. Who keeps banging this drum?

I’ve come to realize there are definitely people out there who have no interest in playing games, they just want to own them.

A child doesn’t think about ownership, he picks up a controller and plays a game. And when the child has grown bored of the game, one day they just never touch it again like a discarded toy, moving on to something else.

It is adults, reminded of their own feeble mortality and impermanence in the world who try to grasp at things like permanent ownership, they long for something that can’t just be torn away from them on a whim. But in life, everything is ultimately torn away from you, there is nothing you can do about it.

Some try to disguise their hoarding as “preservation”. Nobody cares. Even if you had some carefully curated museum, these old games would just be exhibits people look at for a bit with passing curiosity. Nothing more. You didn’t even make these games, why do you care so much?

Focus on enjoying games now, in the time when they are relevant. No matter how hard you try, all those games will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.

We rent time at a football field. We buy tickets to watch a single match. There are parallels here to not owning video games. I don’t really understand why one is so heinous.

Let’s say there’s a new rule implemented by the NBA that no one likes (similar to a fear of live service games changing). How is that resolved there and why can’t that solution work for video games?

I think a big thing we’re currently missing here is something like a community field or park. Why are there no open-source, community-run Diablo projects for example? If no one cares enough to do that, maybe this isn’t so big of an issue.