alt Hacker NewsIt's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
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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.
I completely agree. This isn't about physical discs vs. digital stores. It's about ownership. When I, as a customer, pay a lot of money for something and get nothing more than a temporary right of use, then something is going seriously wrong here. And no, I don't think you can compare it to movie streaming. With streaming, I pay a monthly fee for access to the platform. I don't pay for every single movie I watch. That's a completely different deal. If Sony offered a flat-rate gaming subscription for a monthly fee (and no, PlayStation Plus isn't that), then I'd be totally fine with losing access to the games included there after canceling the sub. But if I, as a customer, am expected to shell out 70-80 bucks for a single game, I want to actually own that game - physical or digital copy regardless!
I've built up a pretty large collection of physical games over the years on two shelves behind me. And every now and then, I really enjoy playing some of those older titles. It took me almost half a year just to get a disc drive for my PS5 Pro. Half a year where I couldn't play my favorite games anymore and had a useless new console just sitting there next to me. I'm actually a bit worried about the next console generation - is it going to make my entire game collection unplayable and useless?
"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."
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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.
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.
Rent vs own is about price. If you want to own something, digital, physical, information, goods, then a vendor will charge more, sometimes a lot more, to sell you an infinite ownership vs you get limited rights.
Most everything I buy needs to fight for my money. Of course some vendor specific things, such as a specific movie, are not replaceable, but since very few things, if any, are so important to me that I won't spend elsewhere if a good is too much.
With that competition for $, vendors generally are competitive, and don't tend to have extremely high profit margins.
I prefer the limited rights, since I can try far more things that way, with finite budget. And I don't get stuck with higher prices on things I ended up not wanting/using after I got it. I can simply cancel.
I think the general disconnect is people too often assume they handed out money so should get infinite rights, while ignoring the nuances of economics/pricing.
I've been running a small game dev studio for ~20 years, and the one change I think must be made, is to ban the usage of "buy" when it comes to games. Games are licensed, not bought, and that should be crystal clear to those who are paying.
Most of the games people play runs using proprietary software and/or licenses, and often on very specific hardware, with game features that makes sense for the amount of players the game has. Requiring that people should be able to play such games if the company stops running it would completely change and limit how games are developed, and in many cases require a completely different version of the game to be co-developed in case people stop playing it. It would with 100 % certainty result in slower development, fewer games, and worse games.
I do of course think that developers should try to make games playable without the company being involved, within reason. Some games that do not have licensing issues or complicated server backends as a requirement could be made available without too much work. But for things like e.g. MMORPGs it's nearly impossible. If your ever developed bigger software systems you know how many moving parts are involved, so just imagine the difficulty of making it work on consumer machines...
I'm sad that Gabe Newell will retire one day, and Steam's benevolent dictatorship will go down the same route Sony just did.
The convenience of digital game storefronts can cut both ways. For now Steam is on our side, but there is no guarantee it will stay that way.
Geez, people have no idea how licenses work...
License is not an ownership - It's limited right to use something. Any action anyone does that isn't covered by license (in software) is called "piracy".
Games were never sold. Mediums were sold with attached licenses. And most of the licenses as early as 2000 contained something like:
"This license is personal to you and may not be assigned, sublicensed, or transferred."
The only difference today is that licenses are enforced better. They can be held on license-server and new user can be denied usage after transfering was detected.
But it doesn't matter if it's downloaded, on disc, or embedded on a spoon.
Don't make people believe they ever owned a game. They didn't. You don't own games as well. Never owned them. You rented them.
The only way to get out of it with winning hand is to side with reputable vendor that didn't cheat people out of licenses. Reason why I side with Steam is because I have my licenses intact even though they have 25 years, I know big corps that just make licenses go poof and pretended in never happened.
Ownership as in resale-able.
Eventually someone important enough will force digital resales to become reality, changing everything to require KYC.
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.
> Because PC is an open platform, people have figured this out and will continue to figure out bypasses in case things go south (which they haven't so far, thankfully
Actually not quite, as security measures keep increasing across macOS and Windows.
Before someone brings Linux into the picture, most folks don't know Tuxedo, System 76 and co exist, what matters is what is on display at Media Markt, Saturn, FNAC, Publico,....
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.
Most of us know what is it about. The problem is Sony and other companies have plenty of money for lobbying governments. What options do we have? I know it’s mostly technical forum but is there any lawyer or government representative who can help?
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 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.
physical vs digital is a spectrum:
- a physical disc, playable as-is
- physical, with major flaws without online updates
- physical, was playable on release, now requires updates
- physical, unplayable without updates
- physical, contains only a launcher to download full game
- physical box without disc, contains download code only
- digital
It's also about competition.
Consoles are a significant investment, to only be able to buy content from one source creates monopolies. An equivalent would be if TVs were sold by Netflix or Disney, and only played content purchased from those entities. The second hand game disc market prevented those monopolies from taking prices to stratospheric highs.
I believe this is why digital distribution has seen little push-back on PC, because we have the convenience without the monopolies. Steam is huge, but Epic, Ubisoft, EA, gog.com, and others provide plenty of competition.
If consoles go digital only, from a single source, I think we'll see >$100 games quickly, we'll see subscriptions required to play be much more prevalent, and we'll see the death of consoles within a generation.
What's scary is how quickly the lack of ownership of things we used to own can become a "new normal".
Forget about explainin to the youngins. My girlfriend is 7 years younger than me and barely grasps the concept of why I'd have 20,000 mp3s on my phone that I ripped off CDs I owned. Why not just pay for a subscription? She doesn't understand the utility of anything being hers.
So I say, send me a song. And she sends a link.
It's hard to even explain to someone who doesn't know what it means to have anything that isn't rented.
I pardon to disagree, it is a physical vs digital problem, and it is our fault.
Companies started pushing digital content and we accepted it, Xbox GamePass has been a cancer (I am Xbox player) with all the games destroyed because of it.
Nobody can disagree that digital games is convenient, turn your PC/Console on and that is it, load the game, start playing something else, etc, without leaving your sofa.
We never thought about the consequences of that, look what happened with DVD, Bluray had luck coz its post-peak era happened by the time people started going back to physical disks over streaming services and the downfall of such services.
This is also related to how everything nowadays is digital, requires subscription which removes features like BMW heated seats, firmware update and what not.
Companies made us addicted to everything digital, that gives them full control, higher price for less, Amazon Prime without ADs requires a higher tier, Sygic Offline mobile app now requires higher tier to have access to features that were once part of the lower tier.
Gaming studios until recently were focused on live services over single player games, it is digital, content is behind paywall, etc and etc.
Digital DLCs over releasing a new game coz that would force physical release.
This is our fault and we might have gone past the point of no return!!
PC games are physical. I have my games right here on this thumb drive in my hand. If I sell it to you, and you plug it in, you can play my games.
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.
usual shortsightedness from bean counters, while studio do lost revenue on second hand trades they gained another player! I can't believe they think that's not a worth while trade. Games are like books, the amount of time people spent on it far outweighs their opportunity cost in earnings, and you only have such a short window to capture that audience so do it however you can, allowing piracy is a legit business strategy, let alone trading second hand games!
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.
Once you buy something (physical or digital), ownership of it should rest solely with the purchaser and no one else.
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.
>Everyone wants to be Netflix
This is the most perfect sentence about this situation
Tale as old as time. See also: Richard Stallman. Yes, we're back to arguing the fundamentals. What exactly does "owning" the hardware mean? What exactly does "owning" software that runs on that hardware mean? Only when we hit the limits of those terms will we know what we can and cannot do to it.
"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
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
I’ve always wondered what the major industry players’ theoretical price would be for offering transferable licenses, and how many people who say they want to be able to resell would pay it. It’s also interesting to me that we got all the way to 2026 and one of them officially going all-digital and we never saw price differentiation for physical copies.
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.
Most new games are worse than old games anyway
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.
if a game has a download update bigger than 1GB then the physical copy is useless
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.
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.
or, of getting rid of "intellectual property" legally so information is just shared more freely and widely
Actual digital ownership is what i hoped from NFTs.
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.
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.
> We don't want physical media, we want digital ownership rights! Don't confuse the argument!
I don't know who's "we" for the author, but I DO want physical media. I want to have the feeling when I reach to my video game disc, take it out and put it into my console. Besides DRM-free digital purchase doesn't guarantee that the thing you bought won't disappear - digital game store can you bankrupt, video game publisher might legally force its title to be removed, etc., the list goes on and on.
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.
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.
we gotta accept that "owning" a digital asset will be a thing of the past. ppl need to update their mental model and evolve.
I am surprised at all this shock the decision has garnered.
Is it shitty and consumer-hostile? Yes. Was it inevitable looking at the current trajectory of game distribution logistics? Also yes. Forced digitization should have in no way been surprising.
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.
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.
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.