> Their policy is exactly the same.

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`.

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ux266478 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

To be clear, you never owned the games, you own the disk that contains the games. The right they are reserving is to revoke your legal access to the games you're licensing. They can't repossess the disk, but they can deny you the right to use what's on it. Obviously digital-only also exists, in which case you own literally nothing. All that remains is the contingent access that they legally have control over.

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applfanboysbgon 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> To be clear, you never owned the games

To be clear, when I use the phrase "deny you ownership of your games", I'm talking in Common English, not legalese. We don't actually have to normalise this. Legalese aside, the social contract for decades has been that you own your digital purchases. Now that the social contract is being violated, we certainly should be striving to enshrine it in law via regulation, which would also render any amount of ToS legalese to be worth as much as digital toilet paper.

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dcow 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I think you're under-appreciating the importance. It's not just pedantry. This has been true since EULAs have existed. And it's kinda insane that people think owning a disk gives them ownership of the intellectual property contained on it. You've always been given a license. The difference is that you can often transfer that license by selling the physical copy of a game whereas most digital licenses are exclusive.

The ability to deny ownership does exist these days. Sony can push an update that bricks your Playstation.

So this whole thing is actually an argument over whether games should be made available in a form that allows license transfer (which I support) or not. But it's a fair point to argue that for any actual benefit the remedy has to be applied globally, not just to Sony.

	▲	ndriscoll 6 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Like the other commenter said, we don't have to normalize this. A reasonable jury can and should find that Sony pushing an update to intentionally brick Playstations is criminal destruction of property, regardless of what some EULA says. And we can make it very clear in the law that that's the case, and prosecute any individuals involved.

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nerdjon 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So its fine that they force you to agree to something when you paid for it but its not fine when they do the thing you agreed too?

Instead of actually trying to fix the issue we just hope that Valve never has to do the thing they are legally allowed to do because we agreed they could.

I honestly don't care who has done what, I don't care what company is supposedly better than another company.

Overnight Valve, Microsoft, whoever could just as easily remove access to a bunch of digital purchases.

How about instead we just don't excuse any of the companies?

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Draiken 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not sure what you propose. Generally speaking we don't get a perfect solution on the first try.

Would it be great if we could make all digital purchases better? Hell yes. Is it realistic? No.

If we can make one company/segment pay or set legal precedent that this is not okay, we're at least moving in the right direction.

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

[deleted]

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dataflow 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> So its fine that they force you to agree to something when you paid for it but its not fine when they do the thing you agreed too?

Two things can be both "not fine" but one can still be worse than the other.

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nerdjon 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Of course, I am not arguing otherwise. But if your core problem is not the removal of content but what Sony is arguing right now. You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk.

Just because one has done it and the other hasn't is a technicality to me since that could change overnight.

The point that I am trying to make here is that it is insane to me that all of this is focused on Sony. And frankly I don't have a good solution here, but just arguing that one TOS is better than another because one company hasn't done the thing yet but could is not a good argument.

How many times have we seen management change, companies being bought, whatever and suddenly something really bad happens.

I am just getting really frustrated by Sony this, Sony that. Boycot sony, etc when if all we do is move to another platform with the same policies do we really expect anything to change?

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dcow 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We are in the most emotionally driven period of human history to date where reasoning takes a back seat. It's super frustrating but once you realize this instance isn't a one off you can start to focus on the bigger picture. I'm not saying this makes it less frustrating, but perhaps it'd help you to cast things in a new light. You're mostly talking past people who are dunking on Sony right now, because they are more interested in riding the emotional wave than actually making sense of the situation. Never mind that owning a physical disk has pretty much been dead for the better part of a decade or two anyway with day 1 patches and online activations. GIVE ME PHYSICAL DISK. To be 100% honest I think people want to put games on their shelf and look at them and any whiff of an argument is just people grasping at something, anything, rather than something based.

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john_strinlai 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk.

it's not the same overall risk though.

accurate risk assessment includes past incidents in the calculation. sony has a demonstrated pattern, valve does not.

if you choose to ignore past behavior in your risk assessments, you are doing it wrong.

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nerdjon 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

People did risk assessments with VMWare and we see how that turned out.

Things can change, just because you make your risk assessment doesn't mean you should ignore that there is still something in that contract that could turn on you just as easily.

Should we go back 10 years, maybe the risk would have been the same. Did Sony do any of these things then, but the policy was the same. How about 10 years from now, just because of your "risk assessment" doesn't mean that Valve is suddenly safer, just just means so far they have been safer.

I am not saying don't use Valve, but there is zero reason to believe they could not just as easily do this.

	▲	john_strinlai 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

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dcow 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You have clearly never negotiated a contract.

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john_strinlai 2 hours ago | parent [-]

>You have clearly never negotiated a contract.

feel free to make an actual point rather than vague assumptions about my history.

when you do risk assessments, which over my career i have done thousands, you include historical data.

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dcow 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Nobody is arguing the risk values are exactly the same. The argument is that the risk posture is the same. You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value, which is an individual value judgement and thus incredibly far from an assumed fact. Some people do care about posture more than value and different people weight value differently as I'm sure your thousands of assessments have uncovered.

In any event, I think with all the data you'd see that Value has also removed games from its platform. So I'm not sure the value gap is even as wide as you seem to be implying.

	▲	john_strinlai 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>Nobody is arguing the risk values are exactly the same. please re-read the part i quoted from the parent, where they say it's the same risk. >You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value i did not say "the only thing that matters" anywhere. you, and the parent, are reading something into my comments that i have not written. the only thing i said is that the risk is not the same because sony has a pattern of behavior worth considering.