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.

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.

• benoau

  today at 6:07 PM

  > I'm optimistic that the raise in PC gaming will act as a balance for the obvious greed of the consoles.

  Why?

  Steam has never done anything to support ownership of games, their policy completely bans transferring licenses or accounts to other people or leaving them to someone when you die. Their next CEO is someone who has only known extreme wealth their whole life and gets the job because daddy started the company, when has that been a catalyst for societal good?

  GOG is the only one to have advocated a different status quo, but they have virtually no marketshare that could pressure developers and publishers to accept more equitable terms beyond eschewing DRM.

  • hx8

    today at 6:15 PM

    I'm optimistic about PC gaming because if Steam begins acting as an evil gatekeeper then game developers can adopt other avenues to deliver the games to their players. It's an open platform. People are using Steam now because it adds value. People will stop using Steam if it subtracts value.

  • mannanj

    today at 6:15 PM

    The same reason you can be pessimistic?

    Maybe if you look for evidence to be pessimistic, you find that, and if you look for evidence to be optimistic you find that.

    I'd rather choose the more positive, hopeful perspective than the negative, downer one. What about you?

    • benoau

      today at 6:18 PM

      What evidence is there to be optimistic about?

• PaulKeeble

  today at 5:58 PM

  People still don't own their games with Steam, the main PC platform. I don't think its going under anytime soon and currently its reasonably customer friendly but as we have seen these big tech companies can turn on their customer base at any moment. GOG is about the only way to actually own the games since no DRM is applied and you can download the entire package and keep it and don't require their launcher.

  PC already went digital no ownership for most people unfortunately. His argument that it isn't the same doesn't wash, you still can't sell them or lend them to someone else and you have to hack around Steam's DRM, which is a loophole that can be closed at any point.

  • aceazzameen

    today at 6:09 PM

    You talk as if all Steam games use Steam DRM. No, it's not GOG but it's not the same category as Sony and Microsoft at all. It's starting to sound disingenuous when I see Steam lumped together with them.

    • hx8

      today at 6:12 PM

      I think it's a fair comparison. Steam can change their behavior to become much more user hostile at any point, and hold our triple digit steam libraries hostage.

      • PaulKeeble

        today at 6:18 PM

        Its not like we can sell or even lend the games from Steam that we have, not without breaking the licence terms and hacking around the DRM. Its precisely the same as what Sony is intending to enforce.

        • nemomarx

          today at 6:26 PM

          Can you sell or lend gog games, though? You can transfer the files obviously but if a steam game comes with no drm (which is pretty common for indies) you can do the same thing. GOG nicely requires everyone on their platform to do this but ultimately the devs have to want to not put in drm too.

• thfuran

  today at 5:48 PM

  I’m not nearly so optimistic. I think we have a generation of kids now who mostly never owned any physical media, having grown up with Netflix instead of vhs/dvd, Spotify instead of CDs, steam instead of retail games, etc.

  • hx8

    today at 6:12 PM

    I'm pessimistic about physical media yes. That's a legacy technology at this point.

• tayo42

  today at 5:55 PM

  Is there really a rise in PC gaming going on? Isn't that dependent on people having PCs and hardware?

Ownership as in resale-able.

Eventually someone important enough will force digital resales to become reality, changing everything to require KYC.

• Avicebron

  today at 5:34 PM

  Resale-able maybe, unable to be revoked I think is more important.

  As in you can't wake up one morning and your game is gone overnight because copyright around in-game music changed.

  • kakacik

    today at 5:57 PM

    Thats easy to do (on paper). Dont let copyright owners revoke/expire their licenses (or if its revokable mark and price it clearly). Once a product containing it is purchased, its owned till product ceases to exist (or similar).

    All these music behemoths are way too powerful and they twist entire society globally to dance as they want. Not a fraction of a worry for pirates of course, just for decent paying fools.

    Abhorable business.

    • Avicebron

      today at 6:15 PM

      Can you download and resell a digital copy of a game you purchase?

      If not, this doesn't seem to fix all of the issues it just feels like finger pointing at "evil copyright laws".

      Yeah maybe we can change those to, but what about making it so if you pay for something you can do whatever you like with it.

      Say if I buy a copy of a movie from Amazon I should be able to sell it to my friend who doesn't have an amazon account..

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.

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.

We rent time at a football field. We buy tickets to watch a single match. There are parallels here to not owning video games. I don’t really understand why one is so heinous.

Let’s say there’s a new rule implemented by the NBA that no one likes (similar to a fear of live service games changing). How is that resolved there and why can’t that solution work for video games?

I think a big thing we’re currently missing here is something like a community field or park. Why are there no open-source, community-run Diablo projects for example? If no one cares enough to do that, maybe this isn’t so big of an issue.

• xp84

  today at 6:12 PM

  1. Video games are not a spectator sport. You buy tickets for a match to pay the players to perform for you. You can buy a football and goals and play with your family until the equipment itself literally wears out (which is a very, very long time - functionally near infinite if you take care of it).

  2. Video games (especially console) don't, as a rule, receive important major updates, nor do gamers expect and demand that. This means that charging over and over again for 'access to them' every month is transparent greed, as opposed to a mobile game which has to keep being updated to keep up with iOS's yearly breaking releases, where you can argue very fairly that someone has to be paying developers to maintain those games, and the library of games to update would be too big if they had to keep updating all games written from 2008-2026 when 99% of them were no longer bringing in any sales revenue.

  > Let’s say there’s a new rule implemented by the NBA that no one likes (similar to a fear of live service games changing).

  Personally, the games where they charge for the MMO aspect (even if that comprises the entire game, e.g. WoW), I'm honestly ok with. It's a gamble to invest your time in something like that, but the alternative, where paying for a WoW client once legally obligates them to run the server without ANY rule/gameplay changes, for eternity, seems completely unfair and unsustainable. Though I think it's a moderate position to argue that if Blizzard wants to cancel WoW's servers, making the server specs open source and enabling the client to connect to community-run servers should maybe be incentivized somehow, though mandating as much seems a bit extreme.

• traverseda

  today at 6:05 PM

  With a video game it's not clear that you're purchasing a revocable license. That's why it's called "buying" a video game. If online stores were clear that you were actually leasing a game, I don't think this would be a problem.

  Publishers and storefronts need to be clear that what you're doing isn't buying, or start selling tickets (season passes) that have a clear end date, or use some other mechanism that isn't "buying".

  The fundamental problem is that it's unclear what you're buying, and the contract can change at any time. Are you buying an item, a ticket, leasing, a subscription like an MMO, etc. These are all different things, and it misleads consumers when they're conflated.

  The terms are also very one-sided, and your "purchase" can be ended by one party at will with very limited notice. Even basic consumer protection like requiring six months notice before ending your software lease would help.

  • xp84

    today at 6:15 PM

    Agree. The only way "buying" is understood in English to mean a temporary entitlement is when combined with those terms like "ticket" or "pass."

    The choice of language is deliberately made to deceive. If an auto manufacturer tried that, offering to "sell you" a car but the 3-page "Sales contract" had a clause buried in there that said "We can come to your house with 30 days' notice and just take the car back and you have no recourse besides stopping your payments" this would be ruled as grand theft auto (no pun intended) not "the terms and conditions allow it"

• Giefo6ah

  today at 6:10 PM

  You don't rent your football field from FIFA. You can, if you wish, own the field you play at.

  You may have heard of football clubs: If it's too expensive you can pool resources with your friends.

• garciansmith

  today at 6:04 PM

  Video games are far more alike to other media like books, not live sports.

>Everyone wants to be Netflix

This is the most perfect sentence about this situation

• wxw

  today at 5:36 PM

  Yep, agreed. Recurring, consistent revenue is the ultimately a common-sense business best interest. It can be extremely unfortunate for consumers as there's an unaligned incentive here.

  • kakacik

    today at 6:01 PM

    This can still be acceptable if they give HW for free. but paying up to 1k for console and then full price for games which often have their own paid loot boxes/whatever... yeah good luck no thank you,

    I can afford it trivially, but its like paying say 20 bucks for a standard bread or bottle of milk. Insulting

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.

• toast0

  today at 5:17 PM

  > 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.

  I know Sega and Namco operated some arcades, but mostly companies sold arcade machines and operators ran them. Coin boxes didn't connect to the developer except that games with good earnings sold well.

  • hx8

    today at 5:40 PM

    A per-play revenue share is not uncommon in some markets, especially for games with frequent updates or more complicated network features.

    • JoshTriplett

      today at 5:54 PM

      This is why so many machines now have accounts and global high scores.

• PaulKeeble

  today at 6:04 PM

  Even private servers doesn't quite solve the issue. Minecraft is an example where you can run the server but it requires clients to login to the microsoft account. I think you can still bypass the check on the server but clients have to be cracked or previously authorised for offline play which only lasts for a certain timeframe. So Microsoft can take away the ability to play minecraft despite the game server binary being available.

  Whereas a game like Arma 3 has its own dedicated servers and has no such login requirement so theoretically you could still play that in 50 years time, but that might still depend on Steam DRM.

  We have a lot of client side controls right now on DRM and logins which make the dedicated server only part of the problem.

• leprechaun1066

  today at 5:15 PM

  It's not just the arcade machine implementation. The owners of these companies want to go all the way and move everything to data centers so they can rent compute time, similar to the idea of the time-sharing days of the 60s.

• throwaway613746

  today at 5:57 PM

  [dead]

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 question how much of this discussion is really being driven by gamers.

Those who wanted change made it happen. There are indie games and remakes without these restrictions. Most of classic gaming preservation has been successful with its goals apart from some legal gray areas and chasing rarities.

These discussions then fixate on the cutoff year for classic gaming and whether everything beyond that is even worth saving. The conclusion is always the same. Nobody really cares about the slop.

All that remains to discuss is politics. That's always the most vocal part drowning out everyone else. Who keeps banging this drum?

There's another story about a game that died and was resurrected, Runescape. It launched with a big fanfare of version 3.0 back in 2008 and was met with total disaster. Fans were quitting, private servers of the pre-EOC update, etc. Jagex heard this and stuck a solo dev onto re-launching an instance of '2007 scape' which was basically an old backup they found and a few server instances. They incorporated features of the platform like voting, where votes require strong consent (75% in some cases) to get new features, and it's a seriously community driven game where both sides have something to gain. Now branded "old school runescape" the game has more players than the "runescape 3" that still exists today as Runescape. A win all around.

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