Eh “buy” vs “license” is a distraction. The real problem with online stores & licenses is that they charge the same amount of money for a worse product.

If I buy a game on a disc, I can play the game, then resell it and someone else can play it. Or I can lend my copy of the game to a friend. When the online store eventually goes offline, I can still play all the games I have on disc. If I lose access to my online account, I still own the game. I can just get another console and play it.

If digital purchases let you do all that, I’d be all for them. They’re more convenient and better for the environment. But Sony and friends want to take these rights away from us, without choice. And without a corresponding drop in game prices. I want the PlayStation store (and steam and Nintendo and so on) to let me remove a game from my account and give it to someone else. Let me do that and I wouldn’t have a problem with any of it. But the current online store system is too greedy.

It sounds like a pipe dream, but this is how physical copies have worked for decades. My license moves with the game disc or cartridge. Why don’t we have a digital equivalent to this?

If Sony stopped trying to push a worse product on their customers, their customers wouldn’t be mad about it.

But consumers still pay it. No one has to play video games.

I am in no way defending Sony here but I think it’s beside to the point to chastise them for selling a worse product (I mean revocable license) for the same price because consumers continue to choose to pay that price. And this is not a purchase made out of necessity or duress such as food or housing.

> Why don’t we have a digital equivalent to this?

This is the one place where NFTs make some sense. Ideally, such an ownership mechanism would be open and not tied to the lifespan of a particular publisher - something that's hard to achieve in practice without a distributed system like blockchain.