What I don't understand is why Sony is the one being targeted for this when this has been the case with any digital purchase for 20 years?
I don't know of a digital marketplace that works differently.
But instead all of the hate, the boycots, etc are all targeting Sony instead of focusing on actually figuring out how to improve digital purchase rights which extend beyond games (and far beyond Sony).
I know that some online hate it when you compare this situation to PC since there is choice there, but not when it comes to this. Sure you can choose which store you want to not really own things with but its the same result. Steam did this a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1g19n60/steam_now_te...
Sony announced they're not going to print more physical discs for games. So far no one else in the big three has confirmed they're doing this, so obviously the controversy goes to them
What they should do is just stay silent and stay the course. Everyone fucking knows in 10 years time physical media will be dead and all of this is water under the bridge.
I think it's because they're a huge player in the space and the PS5 appears to be the dominant player in the console space this generation. This affects so many people in their faces right now, where as the switch to "buying" movies on an online platform was more gradual as it was a new platform offering and not one that had had ownership from day one (arguably since 1994 with the PS1).
So in short, I think it's because they're the big guy making a very visible change to the broader public, instead of a new platform with a new way of doing things (how Steam was).
> What I don't understand is why Sony is the one being targeted for this when this has been the case with any digital purchase for 20 years?
Examples: literally two days ago Sony permanently removed access to over 500 movies for people who had "purchased" them, and only a couple months ago Sony announced their plan to permanently shutter physical media production for Playstation.
I agree with you that it's a systemic issue but it also doesn't surprise me that Sony is seen as the lead boogeyman. I think if you asked the average gamer what their opinion of Valve's business practices was vs. Sony you'd get a very different answer even if the legalese in the TOS is similar.
I think the difference here is that sony is in the middle of taking down their ps3 store, and while they say you'll be able to download the games for the "foreseeable future" I don't think many folks have a great deal of confidence in this being true for for that long.
Valve has spent the better part of 20 years fostering a good relations with the gaming community and pretty much every gamer has a great deal of confidence that they'll protect your purchases.
1. Grand Theft Auto VI is about to release, and it’s been widely anticipated by all sorts of normies—not just the subset of gamers who also happen to care about ownership rights. So there are a lot more eyes on the issue than usual, and Rockstar increased attention with a sudden (if expected) pricing change.
2. My sense is that heavy console and PC gamers (mostly distinct from population in 1) didn’t care so much about the specific kind of ownership when AAA games were perceived as prestige hyperstimulus, a guaranteed dopamine/adrenaline rush. This more or less isn’t true anymore (GTAVI, assuming it succeeds, could very well be the last). Some subset of youth today will never play a game more a enjoyable to them than Minecraft or Roblox.
3. There has been consistent pushback against not-owning a product that you pay for over the past twenty years, but it’s been diluted over the sector of all consumer items and is not typically targeted at video games in particular.
1. steam does not have a monopoly on distribution rights for PC games. if steam were to go bankrupt publishers could honor your keys and even other marketplaces could do it. steam themselves let you bring your own key.
2. steam has been a benevolent marketplace leader, even though DRM itself plays against customers, the rest of the stuff they pushed while leading, like game sharing, play and refund, offline playing, are pro consumer.
3. why would your knee jerk reaction to this is pointing a finger to steam, what's your endgame?
Sure they have said and claimed a lot of things, but their TOS says the same thing that Sony is arguing. Its suddenly this big shock now but no one cared before? Sure the way Sony is handling this is fumble after fumble but thats PR.
My problem is that Valve for some reason gets a free pass because "they are the good guys" when their own policy means they could do the exact same thing.
I own a lot of games on Steam, but I am not nieve to assume that there is not a chance that at some point I could loose all or some of those games. People are for some reason in a false sense of security about Steam and that is a problem. They have to be part of the conversation when it comes to digital ownership. Ignoring them means we can't actually solve the issue.
Nintendo is the only one still selling video games that you actually own. Some are those cartridges that just act as a physical key for a downloadable game, which they could still revoke if they really wanted but seems reasonable.
Arguably, piracy has never been theft as "theft" means to deprive an entity of their item/copy and downloading does not destroy the original. The usual counter-argument is that piracy deprives them of a sale, but that is not necessarily true and it doesn't really fit the meaning of "theft".
If we're not owning it, you're not selling it, you're leasing it. Terminology on sales pages should reflect this. "Subscribe now" "purchase license" etc. should be mandated if this is the expectation. Terms like "buy" without qualification are misleading in this context, but they won't remove them from store pages because people are more likely to pay higher rates for something if they believe they are actually owning the good in perpetuity.
It's a non-transferable lease that can be canceled at any time by the issuer.
The real problem is that most of society still thinks of games as a piece of physical media that you combine with a player that allows you to play the game. In that world you have a liscense to the software, and a physical token which is transferable and therefore valuable.
I'd argue that we need to decouple transferability and cancel ability from physical media. If this were to happen then the word "Buy" makes sense precisely the same way it used to with physical media. Of course more provision needs to be provided for live service games regarding cancel ability.
Yes, some people are trying to achieve this by arguing that physical media should stick around forever. I think the real solution is providing the same protections and rights for digital purchases as we had with physical media.
That would be a real win for consumers since we get the advantages of digital media with the ownership and transference rights of physical media.
Of course this would be a great inconvenience to those who wish to charge the same price for a temporary revocable license to the content, and they have deep lobbying pockets to fight against it.
As long as we're in copyright world, it ought to be structured as three separate parties:
1. Licensor, the company who makes the game.
2. Licensee, the person buying a digital copy of the game.
3. Safekeeper, Steam or another platform that stores the digital copy on behalf of Licensee. Similar to how depositories store securities and guarantee that they can be neither lost nor duplicated. For a separate fee perhaps.
Very much matching my thinking on the argument the plaintiffs are making. Sony just needs to change the labels on a few buttons.
But for some reason they don't want to and are willing to go to court on the matter. As you say, using the word "Buy" is stronger than "License", but it seems a strange hill to die upon.
We won't know without A/B testing, but I suspect aesthetics mean nothing here and, for example, someone isn't going to turn down playing GTA VI if the only button between them and the game says "purchase license" as opposed to "buy".
I'd rather have my rights as a consumer protected or get something tangible for giving them up (like cheaper games) than introduce even more legalese into online shops.
Someone in past threads mentioned that many digital sales website in fact no longer use "buy" anymore, and instead deniably implicate purchases by such expressions as "Add to Cart", "Proceed to Checkout", and "Pay".
Wonder if you could have those buttons and not give the user anything at the end, since you never said they were buying anything, only giving you money.
Yes, all this talk about the language used still leads us to the same frustrating outcome: customer pays for something, and at some unspecified point in the future that same thing is taken away from them. I don't care if 6 years earlier I clicked a button that said Pay vs Buy, I care that my purchase is being removed due to some backroom licensing issue.
This is the law in some places. Companies solved the problem by not using any buying verbs at all. The button you click to not-buy the app says "$3.99" or "Add to cart". When you go to the cart the next step is "Pay now" or "Continue to checkout".
I agree but that's not even enough. If you only lease the game, they will also need to tell you exactly for how long you lease it. Any reasonable person would have an issue with a lease for an indefinite time period that can be canceled at any time without refund, it doesn't sound acceptable at all.
And if you buy a license, it should either have a fixed term that is clearly communicated, or should be forever, and transferrable, not "untile we decide we don't want you to have it anymore".
On this topic I'd like to give a big kudos to the devs at https://decomp.dev/ who are tirelessly working to decompile old video games for fun, preserving it for future generations.
The amusing thing about all of this is that the tech that Microsoft is using to be the "good guy" in this is the same thing they were savaged for when they announced it for the Xbox One. The ability to take a physical disc and use that as your key, with each disc having a unique code embedded in it. When you would install the game it would then lock that code to your account, proving your ownership of it, and you would no longer need the disc.
To be fair to the critics, they hadn't thought out all the issues around resale and trading games with friends, but had stated they would address that, before just dropping the tech entirely. It seems like they never stopped having the discs support it, so now it's a relatively straightforward thing for them to enable.
These days, it feels like we can't truly own anything anymore. Sure, physical media used to break often, but these days I just don't get that satisfying feeling of actually owning something.
If I buy a CD or a cassette or a record, I own the physical media but I only have a licence to the music it contains - not the ownership, and not the copyright. Whether I can play that music as a DJ at an event or on the radio, or remix it as a backing track for another song I'm creating and so on, depends on licencing laws and royalty payments. That was true well before the internet, and it's why Wham! get a huge boost in royalties every December whenever a radio station plays Last Christmas.
A separate question is whether Sony can _revoke_ a licence and delete the game off your device again.
I'm not a copyright lawyer, but my understanding is that you do not own a license when you buy a CD or cassette, you own a copy (strictly speaking, a "phonorecord" in US law). Copyright doesn't regulate the sorts of typical uses that the owner of a copy would engage in, so a license is not required. When you see those warnings on VHS/DVD/Blu-ray that they're licensed only for private home viewing, what they're telling you is that you don't have a license to do anything controlled by copyright such as broadcasting, publicly exhibiting, or reproducing it.
Software is significantly more complicated and gets into issues of physical permanence/transience and specific exemptions/limitations to normal copyright law (see e.g. 17 USC 117).
Yes, Sony can revoke a license. It is right in the terms of the license.
We own nothing but the right to access the game so long as the rights holder chooses to permit it. This means I could buy a game on Tuesday and the rights holder could render it unplayable on Wednesday with no recourse.
The "Buy" versus "License" question doesn't really resolve this. Sony is right in one sense that we all know we are licensing. What needs protection, probably requiring new or revised laws, is some sort of consumer right to get value out of a game license before the vendor renders it unplayable.
I wonder if anyone will ever have the guts to enter the gaming console market using open source as a base. Linux support for GPUs has never been better than what it is today. I've spent the last 4 or 5 years gaming exclusively on Linux just to highlight how good it has gotten, and no I don't have to run around doing command line incantations. Linux has improved a lot, heck, even AI you have a drastically better experience working with AI on Linux than on Windows (which hearing this 10 years ago would have confused me given how many issues I had with my GPUs on Linux for YEARS).
All someone has to do is assemble a reasonable desktop that runs Linux, gives you access to GOG and Steam, and you've already got more games than most game consoles, the issue right now I suppose would be moreso hardware costs.
You would also want to make sure your Desktop Environment is fine tuned with a controller in mind.
If you can read games from discs, you'd be getting the attention of many people. The facts are that most people have always bought digital over discs but when you take that away, and it becomes clear that they could lose their games forever, everyone wants CDs back.
You're literally describing the steam machine/steam deck. Also, bazzite is an immuable distro based on silverblue that does pretty much exactly what you described.
I know there's some issues with big picture mode and Nvidia, but that's an Nvidia driver problem, not a limitation of the platform.
> I wonder if anyone will ever have the guts to enter the gaming console market using open source as a base.
It's definitely possible, but I suspect that Valve (or some other major player) must first prove the concept to be viable for a business.
e.g. The Steam Deck wasn't the first PC gaming handheld made, but it was the one that proved there was a viable market, which led to a bunch of competitors following Valve's lead.
The Steam Machine, unfortunately, botched the execution due to high pricing. If pricing had been good, I'm guessing that it too could have been the proof-of-concept needed to jump start the market.
This statement could do Sony in. Gamers will refuse to buy a PS6 if there's not an ironclad guarantee that they own the games they purchase, be it digital or disc form.
And since gaming is the only profit center that's holding Sony above water I see the company disappearing in a couple of years.
I foresee another "gaming winter" like we had in the 1980's. Maybe a decade from now another gaming platform will arise, most likely built around open-source software and hardware.
Microsoft gaming division i.e. the Xbox will disappear before Sony goes anywhere. Same thing goes from Nintendo every year people/analysts insist that both those companies are in trouble and will die off because of the way they do business but here they are still successful and the main reason, they’re successful is that they concentrate on gameplay in comparison to their competition.
Nintendo will be around for some time, because they focus on gameplay, not hardware specs and trillions of triangles per second.
However, there's only so many sequels of Mario Kart and Mario World you can come up with. I mean, there has to be a time when people get bored with it, doesn't there? OTOH I've been saying that for almost thirty years now (I still own a Nintendo 64).
I think that this could end up true if the next Xbox really is "just a PC".
The PC gaming ecosystem is a powerful selling point, especially due to the existence of Steam, emulators, modding, etc.
Windows really needs more refinement and polish though, the current experience is mostly unacceptable for a living room PC.
A next-gen Steam Machine would likely be a better competitor to the PS6, it doesn't have the reputational baggage that Xbox and Microsoft currently has.
After GTA6 comes out on PC, Sony should get ready for a crash that will make the PS3 launch issue look tiny. Kids these days just play Rolox or Fortnite on tablets, the gamer pipeline is gone and what ever is left of the gamers are migrating to SteamOS/PC. Older kids would much rather use Insta/Kick/etc as an IRL MMO. Teen boys are more concerned with looksmaxxing than video games.
Maybe they know this and this is one last milking of the their installbase before the big fall.
Between this claim, ramping down disc production, and the possibility of a $999 home console,they are going to have a difficult time.
There are still so few PS5 exclusives. Even fewer with PS5 Pro support. It’s going to take a lot to gain trust and justify a PS6. No clear path to victory here with a hardware update.
Yeah I've already decided there won't be any new Sony consoles in my household. Games are so big now I can't possibly download all my games at once so if the store goes down I lose all those games permanently and $70+ for AAA games that are really hit and miss in the "fun" category is no longer worth it to me. The PS5 was also pretty darn expensive when it came out and I can't say I've played too many PS5 exclusive games since I bought it. Most of the PS5 catalog have been indie games available on Steam or ported PS4 games... and with Sony reportedly releasing a new console next year they are clearly high on their own supply.
Never thought I'd have this opinion, but the gaming industry as is needs to crash/burn and rebuild itself. So many downright wild anti-consumer things happening in the last 10 years and studios have completely lost sight of how to keep themselves out of bankruptcy.
Gaming as a whole is a shadow of what it used to be, specifically because it has been tailored to the masses who have no real opinion on any of this other then they want to play what their friends play.
My guy, there’s more weird and niche indie games than there’s ever been. Not too long ago, even AAA studios like EA were trying super weird stuff, like It Takes Two.
Nostalgia glasses are real, and yeah we don’t have a Good and Evil game anymore, and we’re not in an RTS renaissance; but there are a LOT of VERY good games out there, even for your particular niche - and if there’s not, then Godot and Unity make it VERY easy for you to add to the pile, like hundreds of thousands of teams before you in the last decade.
I like the graphics horsepower of my PS5, but a lot of the games I play, I'm just not sure I would notice the difference between it and my old PS4. Resolution is the biggest thing, since I didn't have a PS4 Pro and it'd be limited to 1080p on my TV.
Sony will lose this. Why? Because courts can point to the fact
that in the 1990s, people bought a game, then could play it and
re-sell it freely. So the claim about Sony how people only ever
"licenced" something from them, and NOW face more restrictions
than before, simply because Sony claims so, makes no sense. That's
against established practices.
Sony should be disbanded by the court for wasting our time here.
> This feels like a strange reductio ad absurdum argument in reverse, where the argument isn’t disproven by reducing it: it is instead proven that merchandise and specifically software is sold as copies not as a singular entity. I’m not sure who Sony’s lawyers are trying to appeal to here, or if they just wanted to burn through a few dozen billable hours on an argument that makes no sense.
Unfortunately I think this argument has a bit more merit than you think. There is already copyright precedent that you cannot enjoy first sale rights on digital property (e.g. "a marketplace for used MP3s", or "we'll scan this book and loan it to you and we promise not to touch it until the loan expires"). Physical goods have specific legal rights that the courts have so far refused to extend to digital files[0]. In that legal environment, every digital copy of a work is fundamentally some data combined with permission to make use of copies of that data under some conditions. There are no digital copies, only digital licenses.
But that's merely an argument that third-parties don't get to copy things just because the way they're copying it emulates an act one might do with a physical copy. Where Sony goes off the rails is that they then argue that the only two options can be "a license under our chosen terms" and "complete and total copyright assignment," and then illustrate the absurdity of someone thinking they bought copyright ownership over Resident Evil (which genuinely can't be sold in parallel like this) to argue that the only way Sony can sell games digitally at all is under terms of their own choosing.
A smart judge would see through this and argue that Sony could at least have chosen terms that materially resembled the rights of someone who owned a physical copy. That is, they could have provided a service to allow someone to transfer their license to another PlayStation Network user. But at the same time, the law has a nasty habit of bowing to its best customers[1], and I would not be surprised if the judge just goes along with what Sony says (especially if the plaintiffs don't do a good job rebutting it).
[0] The reasoning for this is that there is no such thing as a digital move. On a computer, "move" is "copy and delete", and the act of making a copy is squarely in the realm of ordinary copyright protection.
[1] See also: the European Commission and California's abject refusal to require games you bought and paid for to continue to work offline.
I might go Steam Machine route in the PS6 era, I know it's technically same on Steam, but they have at least been much better at not rug pulling, and there are easier way to circumvent things on a Linux/PC machine. Unless Sony changes their stance so that either I have full lifetime use of the game or an explicitly stated period of time (which if shorter than lifetime I'd expect to be cheaper).
I'm even willing to drop resale of individual game, if I can just sell off my account as a whole to someone else.
Valve is also pretty amenable to adding third-party games to the box as well. It's trivial to add games from GOG using Heroic and play them alongside regular Steam games.
My main "game console" is a NixOS box running Jovian, and I have made oodles of Flakes that I use to make custom non-Steam games that launch deterministically, and as far as I'm aware, Valve is perfectly fine with this (not that I particularly care if they are).
At current prices, consoles cannot just die fast enough. Would be very funny if Trump sanctions Sony for Xbox to close US console gap, and then everyone simply moves to PC.
IMO the better thing is to force these companies to dump this mindset that digital information is a finite resource. Sony's logic doesn't even make sense to begin with. If person A buys a game, that game does not suddenly become unavailable for person B to also buy. I mean, even copyright recognizes that it is possible for a rightsholder to own all rights to the master copy of a good but other people can own separate copies of the work without infringing on the rights of the rightsholder. Sony is just taking the maximalist view here because they want to keep the power of being able to control who and what has access to whatever they sell, for any arbitrary reason whatsoever.
> IMO the better thing is to force these companies to dump this mindset
IMO this is a strictly idealistic view in a world where only a very small vocal minority actually seems to care. The vast majority of people will continue to reward these companies with their wallets, so they have no incentive to change course.
How is this idealistic? This is how digital information and copyright (if it is to apply to digital information) needs to work. It is absolutely absurd that I can buy something from you, but you can then turn around and say "well actually you just leased a license from me" and you then can break into my digital home and steel (ahem, "repossess") the digital copy for yourself without my consent. My logic is quite simple: if something would be nonsensical if applied to physical goods, then it is even more nonsensical for digital ones.
Obviously the general populous won't care about this, but it is something we should be striving for, as digital information is infinite once it has been transmitted over the internet.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 45.1 ms ] threadI don't know of a digital marketplace that works differently.
But instead all of the hate, the boycots, etc are all targeting Sony instead of focusing on actually figuring out how to improve digital purchase rights which extend beyond games (and far beyond Sony).
I know that some online hate it when you compare this situation to PC since there is choice there, but not when it comes to this. Sure you can choose which store you want to not really own things with but its the same result. Steam did this a year ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1g19n60/steam_now_te...
Where were the boycots then.
What they should do is just stay silent and stay the course. Everyone fucking knows in 10 years time physical media will be dead and all of this is water under the bridge.
So in short, I think it's because they're the big guy making a very visible change to the broader public, instead of a new platform with a new way of doing things (how Steam was).
Examples: literally two days ago Sony permanently removed access to over 500 movies for people who had "purchased" them, and only a couple months ago Sony announced their plan to permanently shutter physical media production for Playstation.
I agree with you that it's a systemic issue but it also doesn't surprise me that Sony is seen as the lead boogeyman. I think if you asked the average gamer what their opinion of Valve's business practices was vs. Sony you'd get a very different answer even if the legalese in the TOS is similar.
RIP Lik Sang.
It doesn't make it right but I feel like the writing has been on the wall for ages.
Valve has spent the better part of 20 years fostering a good relations with the gaming community and pretty much every gamer has a great deal of confidence that they'll protect your purchases.
2. My sense is that heavy console and PC gamers (mostly distinct from population in 1) didn’t care so much about the specific kind of ownership when AAA games were perceived as prestige hyperstimulus, a guaranteed dopamine/adrenaline rush. This more or less isn’t true anymore (GTAVI, assuming it succeeds, could very well be the last). Some subset of youth today will never play a game more a enjoyable to them than Minecraft or Roblox.
3. There has been consistent pushback against not-owning a product that you pay for over the past twenty years, but it’s been diluted over the sector of all consumer items and is not typically targeted at video games in particular.
Because they did a whole marketing stunt over it. Granted it was more than a decade ago, so probably just a remnants of old console war.
1. steam does not have a monopoly on distribution rights for PC games. if steam were to go bankrupt publishers could honor your keys and even other marketplaces could do it. steam themselves let you bring your own key.
2. steam has been a benevolent marketplace leader, even though DRM itself plays against customers, the rest of the stuff they pushed while leading, like game sharing, play and refund, offline playing, are pro consumer.
3. why would your knee jerk reaction to this is pointing a finger to steam, what's your endgame?
Sure they have said and claimed a lot of things, but their TOS says the same thing that Sony is arguing. Its suddenly this big shock now but no one cared before? Sure the way Sony is handling this is fumble after fumble but thats PR.
My problem is that Valve for some reason gets a free pass because "they are the good guys" when their own policy means they could do the exact same thing.
I own a lot of games on Steam, but I am not nieve to assume that there is not a chance that at some point I could loose all or some of those games. People are for some reason in a false sense of security about Steam and that is a problem. They have to be part of the conversation when it comes to digital ownership. Ignoring them means we can't actually solve the issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
The real problem is that most of society still thinks of games as a piece of physical media that you combine with a player that allows you to play the game. In that world you have a liscense to the software, and a physical token which is transferable and therefore valuable.
I'd argue that we need to decouple transferability and cancel ability from physical media. If this were to happen then the word "Buy" makes sense precisely the same way it used to with physical media. Of course more provision needs to be provided for live service games regarding cancel ability.
That would be a real win for consumers since we get the advantages of digital media with the ownership and transference rights of physical media.
Of course this would be a great inconvenience to those who wish to charge the same price for a temporary revocable license to the content, and they have deep lobbying pockets to fight against it.
1. Licensor, the company who makes the game.
2. Licensee, the person buying a digital copy of the game.
3. Safekeeper, Steam or another platform that stores the digital copy on behalf of Licensee. Similar to how depositories store securities and guarantee that they can be neither lost nor duplicated. For a separate fee perhaps.
But for some reason they don't want to and are willing to go to court on the matter. As you say, using the word "Buy" is stronger than "License", but it seems a strange hill to die upon.
I'd rather have my rights as a consumer protected or get something tangible for giving them up (like cheaper games) than introduce even more legalese into online shops.
I'm surprised the Sony team isn't freaked out about this
late 90s and early 00s - even while growing up in the 3rd world - you bought or pirated a software license.
so we've never really purchased or bought software.
If I'm not buying a thing, but instead a limited license to a thing, then I don't care about buying that thing anymore and I'll just take it.
I doubt I'll be alone and with Denuvo being regularly defeated on release day, I'm not too worried about availability.
To be fair to the critics, they hadn't thought out all the issues around resale and trading games with friends, but had stated they would address that, before just dropping the tech entirely. It seems like they never stopped having the discs support it, so now it's a relatively straightforward thing for them to enable.
Fans were eating it up and it won them the console market lead. Times sure have changed.
If I buy a CD or a cassette or a record, I own the physical media but I only have a licence to the music it contains - not the ownership, and not the copyright. Whether I can play that music as a DJ at an event or on the radio, or remix it as a backing track for another song I'm creating and so on, depends on licencing laws and royalty payments. That was true well before the internet, and it's why Wham! get a huge boost in royalties every December whenever a radio station plays Last Christmas.
A separate question is whether Sony can _revoke_ a licence and delete the game off your device again.
Software is significantly more complicated and gets into issues of physical permanence/transience and specific exemptions/limitations to normal copyright law (see e.g. 17 USC 117).
We own nothing but the right to access the game so long as the rights holder chooses to permit it. This means I could buy a game on Tuesday and the rights holder could render it unplayable on Wednesday with no recourse.
The "Buy" versus "License" question doesn't really resolve this. Sony is right in one sense that we all know we are licensing. What needs protection, probably requiring new or revised laws, is some sort of consumer right to get value out of a game license before the vendor renders it unplayable.
Making the game unplayable on Wednesday might not impress a judge.
All someone has to do is assemble a reasonable desktop that runs Linux, gives you access to GOG and Steam, and you've already got more games than most game consoles, the issue right now I suppose would be moreso hardware costs.
You would also want to make sure your Desktop Environment is fine tuned with a controller in mind.
If you can read games from discs, you'd be getting the attention of many people. The facts are that most people have always bought digital over discs but when you take that away, and it becomes clear that they could lose their games forever, everyone wants CDs back.
I know there's some issues with big picture mode and Nvidia, but that's an Nvidia driver problem, not a limitation of the platform.
Though one could argue that Linux GPU support is as good as it is because of Steam.
It's definitely possible, but I suspect that Valve (or some other major player) must first prove the concept to be viable for a business.
e.g. The Steam Deck wasn't the first PC gaming handheld made, but it was the one that proved there was a viable market, which led to a bunch of competitors following Valve's lead.
The Steam Machine, unfortunately, botched the execution due to high pricing. If pricing had been good, I'm guessing that it too could have been the proof-of-concept needed to jump start the market.
And since gaming is the only profit center that's holding Sony above water I see the company disappearing in a couple of years.
I foresee another "gaming winter" like we had in the 1980's. Maybe a decade from now another gaming platform will arise, most likely built around open-source software and hardware.
However, there's only so many sequels of Mario Kart and Mario World you can come up with. I mean, there has to be a time when people get bored with it, doesn't there? OTOH I've been saying that for almost thirty years now (I still own a Nintendo 64).
The PC gaming ecosystem is a powerful selling point, especially due to the existence of Steam, emulators, modding, etc.
Windows really needs more refinement and polish though, the current experience is mostly unacceptable for a living room PC.
A next-gen Steam Machine would likely be a better competitor to the PS6, it doesn't have the reputational baggage that Xbox and Microsoft currently has.
Between this claim, ramping down disc production, and the possibility of a $999 home console,they are going to have a difficult time.
There are still so few PS5 exclusives. Even fewer with PS5 Pro support. It’s going to take a lot to gain trust and justify a PS6. No clear path to victory here with a hardware update.
Never thought I'd have this opinion, but the gaming industry as is needs to crash/burn and rebuild itself. So many downright wild anti-consumer things happening in the last 10 years and studios have completely lost sight of how to keep themselves out of bankruptcy.
Gaming as a whole is a shadow of what it used to be, specifically because it has been tailored to the masses who have no real opinion on any of this other then they want to play what their friends play.
Nostalgia glasses are real, and yeah we don’t have a Good and Evil game anymore, and we’re not in an RTS renaissance; but there are a LOT of VERY good games out there, even for your particular niche - and if there’s not, then Godot and Unity make it VERY easy for you to add to the pile, like hundreds of thousands of teams before you in the last decade.
In a world where steam allows instant returns with under 2 hours play time.
I have a few games now on ps where I barely played or found out the controls were terrible and have no way to return.
Sony should be disbanded by the court for wasting our time here.
Unfortunately I think this argument has a bit more merit than you think. There is already copyright precedent that you cannot enjoy first sale rights on digital property (e.g. "a marketplace for used MP3s", or "we'll scan this book and loan it to you and we promise not to touch it until the loan expires"). Physical goods have specific legal rights that the courts have so far refused to extend to digital files[0]. In that legal environment, every digital copy of a work is fundamentally some data combined with permission to make use of copies of that data under some conditions. There are no digital copies, only digital licenses.
But that's merely an argument that third-parties don't get to copy things just because the way they're copying it emulates an act one might do with a physical copy. Where Sony goes off the rails is that they then argue that the only two options can be "a license under our chosen terms" and "complete and total copyright assignment," and then illustrate the absurdity of someone thinking they bought copyright ownership over Resident Evil (which genuinely can't be sold in parallel like this) to argue that the only way Sony can sell games digitally at all is under terms of their own choosing.
A smart judge would see through this and argue that Sony could at least have chosen terms that materially resembled the rights of someone who owned a physical copy. That is, they could have provided a service to allow someone to transfer their license to another PlayStation Network user. But at the same time, the law has a nasty habit of bowing to its best customers[1], and I would not be surprised if the judge just goes along with what Sony says (especially if the plaintiffs don't do a good job rebutting it).
[0] The reasoning for this is that there is no such thing as a digital move. On a computer, "move" is "copy and delete", and the act of making a copy is squarely in the realm of ordinary copyright protection.
[1] See also: the European Commission and California's abject refusal to require games you bought and paid for to continue to work offline.
In that case, any reasonable company would have no trouble being honest and not using the words “buy” and “purchase” with respect to game access.
I'm even willing to drop resale of individual game, if I can just sell off my account as a whole to someone else.
My main "game console" is a NixOS box running Jovian, and I have made oodles of Flakes that I use to make custom non-Steam games that launch deterministically, and as far as I'm aware, Valve is perfectly fine with this (not that I particularly care if they are).
IMO this is a strictly idealistic view in a world where only a very small vocal minority actually seems to care. The vast majority of people will continue to reward these companies with their wallets, so they have no incentive to change course.
Obviously the general populous won't care about this, but it is something we should be striving for, as digital information is infinite once it has been transmitted over the internet.
Hence idealistic