You're not in favor of adding regulation, except when it comes to issues you understand and care about. All the oversight and regulation about everything you don't care and/or know about is big bad government overreach. Every government agency is a useless waste of your tax dollars, except the ones you rely on and the ones where you have friends that work there. Do I have that right?

> 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.

I'm pretty sure that Sony and others would work their way around such legislation. E.g. spin-off shell "studios" that would be the legal game sellers, and when the time comes to sunset a batch of games, these "studios" would magically go bankrupt and cease to exist.

Then the onus would again put on the commuinity to break any encryption or otherwise reverse-engineer and preserve the games so they remain playable for legal owners. And the top-level companies would still be able to salvage and own the game franchise rights, so they would still be able to harass the game preservation community.

I don't think there's any workaround to stop this kind of cheating, other than mandating that (a) all DRM-protected or service-bound content needs to be submitted to an escrow organization (Library of Congress?) in a form that can be used to reproduce it locally, and (b) all submitted content is released to the public after X years.

The KISS version of regulation would be that stores are not allowed to use the word "buy" when you don't get full ownership and must use the word "license" instead.

Also it should be marked clearly that the company can rescind the license at any moment without giving any reason why.

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.

> 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.

I worry about shenanigans where you "buy" the game from a shell company and that shell company "folds" and doesn't uphold it's promises. Same is true for a smaller, but not shell, company. If the non-DRM version isn't already created and held in trust, then it's not trustworthy.

Regulations that protect your rights are very different from those that limit them. In this case it would be the former, and no less it would be reinforcing a pretty fundamental right in our system, the right to own property.

It's really cocky of them to do this immediately after deleting everyone's purchased movies from their accounts. Nobody should have any illusions about what "buying" a game means when they can do this at will.

https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/legal/psvideocontent/

I would argue that we don't need new regulations, we need to enforce existing laws against fraud. It is fraudulent to sell something and then later disable ones access to the thing you sold them access to.

Copyright protection is regulation. Limiting it ins't increasing regulation; it's decreasing regulation.

I don't see this as "regulation". I see this as extending the same consumer protections that existed in the era of analog physical media to the digital age.

Companies will keep doing what they're doing now - they'll just use another verb than "buy" or "purchase". Which would be a small improvement, I guess...

We have this problem due to government regulation. Without it, every game would be cracked and downloadable without any restrictions on use. The server requirements would be reverse-engineered and neutered.

I bought a bunch of games on google stadia when that was a thing, and when they closed the service down i was fully refunded on all games. pretty cool

this definition is already flawed which should indicate its difficult to put good regulations in writing.

a service you pay for is not your property. and the licenses for games could be seen as a service rather than goods since they are now digital. ofc this is not nice or good, but its possible to do it to skirt ownership rules regarding 'goods'.

for PS5 the problem might be this.

you can sell a license and enable download for games but how many games can you realistically fit inside of a ps5 without some weird storage array in there... games are huge these days and wont get smaller.

for PC customers, storage is their own responsibility. for ps5 im not sure it could work the same, how extensible is the storage etc.

i would expect such things to come with a subscription, so u can access all games u want anytime while the subscription is active and install/download on demand.

the subscription cost being low vs game prices would offset the ownership problem for a lot of people.

i know many people who have subscription to platforms who do this today on PC in order to access many games they cant afford to all buy. (they buy ones maybe if they end up played a lot).

the problem now with these platforms for PC is still they only offer a selection of games, to encourage purchases (because the platforms are more independent from PC and game makers than say PS5 and sony are..)

This makes no sense. You can't force them to sell you the game. They'll just say "this is a 5-year rental" and that'll be it. The regulation can't even be retroactive

They did this in California, now online stores in California only let you rent games for an indefinite term. Exactly the same as before but the button says "rent"

> 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 could also be fixed by removing regulation.

Especially one-time purchase apps, zero control from the user and they can enforce any number of unreasonable control mechanisms over you even once you've paid for the damn thing.

Most importantly you should be able to use it even if you break all ties with the vendor.

All they have to do then is say that they license you a game, and you're not buying anything, despite paying for it. They already do that with online games.

Then it shouldn't be allowed to call it "buy" they should be forced to call it "rent".

> I am generally not in favor of adding regulation

Then let the market decide.

Has self regulation ever worked in the tech world when it comes to consumer/user rights.

i am curious - why are you not in favour of adding regulation? The point of most good regulation is to avoid consumer-hostile situations like this.

"Anything that you BUY needs to be your property."

do you own the film when you buy ticket to cinema ????

This looks like a job for NFTs

There's already a good solution to buying and owning digital media: you pay money to download files that are playable offline.

When you pay for content locked to a platform, you're not buying an asset, you're paying for a service. The platforms grow around not only providing a convenient service to the end user, but also to the content creators, who publish on them with the expectation that their content is protected by DRM. Creators are free to choose where they publish, and end users are free to choose which services they use.

I don't think it makes sense for the government to define what it means to own a digital asset or to force every service platform to become a retailer and ownership-tracker. Where there's demand for DRM-free downloads or physical media, the market will respond.

> Anything that you BUY needs to be your property.

This is obviously absurd as a universal rule. If I "buy" a night in a hotel room, I should own the hotel room? If I order a taxi, I should own the taxi? If I ride a bikeshare e-bike across town, I should own the bike?

Whether rent is appropriate or exploitative for a certain product or industry is a fair question, but to say renting should not exist as a concept at all for anything just doesn't work.