I saw something earlier today that showed the Sony agreement specifies you’re only licensing the games, even if you buy it on a disc. So the fine print means no one ever “buys” a game for the PS5. They are buying a license to use the game for some indefinite period of time that Sony, or some other rights holder, will determine at a later date.

This is why things really need to be DRM free from the start, and portable (have the ability to back them up, move them, etc). It’s the only way to ensure they can’t pull that kind of stuff.

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Negitivefrags 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This has been the case for software since the very beginning. And people have been complaining about it since the beginning. See the Free Software Foundation.

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pocksuppet 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No matter what they wrote in the document, the fact was always that you had the game on a disc and nothing would stop you playing it in violation of the words in the document.

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Grombobulous 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The only reason for that is because the physical disc has the right of first sale attached by being physical item, and there’s no practical/acceptable mechanism to prevent transfer of the license to someone else.

Traditionally the whole industry has been fine with it as long as direct media copying was too hard for the layperson, especially since lending games around was like word of mouth advertising.

Digital platforms change a whole bunch of these things.

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acchow 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> and nothing would stop you playing it

Not true for PS5 games. Sony can push a firmware update to disable games, even if you own the disc.

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MYEUHD 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Is there any evidence of this?

They can delist a game from the PS store, but I doubt they would make a game unplayable if it's already installed or if you own it physically.

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fizwidget 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They said “can”, not “has”. Given that it’s a closed platform that Sony has complete control over, they certainly can do it.

You can doubt that they will, but that’s just hope rather than a legal or technical guarantee.

	▲	MYEUHD 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> You can doubt that they will, but that’s just hope rather than a legal or technical guarantee. It's not based on a legal or technical guarantee. But it's based on what Sony did in the past: P.T. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.T._(video_game) ) was pulled from the PS store. But Sony didn't make it unplayable if it was already installed. In fact, the wikipedia article says: > After the cancellation, PlayStation 4 consoles with P.T. installed were listed on eBay for over $1,000

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garciansmith 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I am not aware of a case where they disabled an already-playable game via a firmware update.

But they do require certain firmware updates to play games, at least they did in the PS3 days. If you hadn't updated to that firmware (say, because you didn't want certain features you used like the OtherOS installation to be deleted) your new physical media would not play. I bought Dark Souls on a disc and could not play it on my console.

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pocksuppet 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Not true for Blu-Ray movies, either. Just saying that's how it used to be.

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Ferret7446 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The same is true of digital downloads, insofar as both the disc and the digital download don't have DRM.

In other words, you completely missed the point that this is about DRM and not physical vs digital.

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protocolture 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>nothing would stop you playing it in violation of the words in the document.

Thats not really the case. Windows Defender and other anti viruses will quarantine piracy tools (like no cd cracks, and how many cd/dvd readers are in modern computers) these days, not far from there to see them being paid to police license changes. Games are often more playable in their pirated versions. Like if you own the Fallout 3/Fallout New Vegas discs that require games for windows live you are screwed, but the digital steam versions remove that requirement.

Then you have games like Metal Fatigue, released for Windows 98, suffering memory corruption issues since Windows XP. Microsofts Compatibility Toolkit offers a fix for some of the memory issues making the game vastly more playable, but then of course, Microsoft has set an EOL date for the toolkit, the last version of it was published for Windows 10, and theres an expectation that at some point Windows 11 will not permit it to be installed any longer.

Whether you buy a disc or pay for a download, you are still at the mercy of the entire ecosystem. If you completely freeze your ecosystem and never install anything you might get by. But that presents other risks.

I just bought Kinnectimals for my toddler, and it came with a warning that it needed connectivity to some random xbox server to update, straight out of the box. Thankfully, my 360 was still able to connect to it. But network protocols might change, the OS might get a new version that bricks the connectivity (potentially for good reason, there could be a vuln) or hundreds of other things. Theres no safety or security provided to me by owning the disc.

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oldsecondhand an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

However in the EU end users have the right to resell that license.

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cyanydeez 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

enforcement of legality is on the victim in the grift economy.