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.

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.

Related:

Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745456

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.

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.

or, of getting rid of "intellectual property" legally so information is just shared more freely and widely

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.

I’ve come to realize there are definitely people out there who have no interest in playing games, they just want to own them.

A child doesn’t think about ownership, he picks up a controller and plays a game. And when the child has grown bored of the game, one day they just never touch it again like a discarded toy, moving on to something else.

It is adults, reminded of their own feeble mortality and impermanence in the world who try to grasp at things like permanent ownership, they long for something that can’t just be torn away from them on a whim. But in life, everything is ultimately torn away from you, there is nothing you can do about it.

Some try to disguise their hoarding as “preservation”. Nobody cares. Even if you had some carefully curated museum, these old games would just be exhibits people look at for a bit with passing curiosity. Nothing more. You didn’t even make these games, why do you care so much?

Focus on enjoying games now, in the time when they are relevant. No matter how hard you try, all those games will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.

>Everyone wants to be Netflix

This is the most perfect sentence about this situation

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.

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.

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.

Physical media was always one of the selling points for consoles. While PC has essentially been digital-only for a long time (with NONE of the wish list the author here wants, mind you - you can't sell or lend games to random people on Steam, besides a limited "family sharing" feature), consoles were where you go when you want to play a game and then sell it quickly if you don't like it. Physical media accounts for 50% of Switch game sales. I feel that Sony is in panic mode because they released a bunch of stinker first-party games and now they think that removing the disc drive from the PS6 will save them some money. It'll probably lose them a lot of customers.

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.

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?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

The model for DLC that's present, carried as patch updates, but unlocked for an additional fee annoys me.

However, allow me to ignore my opinion for a moment and play the Devils Advocate for a thought experiment.

What if, cosmetics and other unlockables (which should be part of the base gameplay) were instead evaluated on other people's computers. That is, rendering client side, authentication for use also server side.

Hats / Skins / Other -- Render some 'humiliating' cosmetic if authentication fails. Circumvention would require compromise on all client devices.

Core game assets -- Levels / 'mods' that require auth a similar path, except client/server verification mismatch. Do note the license server as a possible cause.

At end of life all of those checks should be patched in a final release to fail enabled. No more auth server, archive mode releases all use.

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.

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.

There is a difference between a service and a good.

It doesnt make sense to "own" a massage just the same way it doesnt make sense to "own" spectating a game in person. The video recording of people playing a sport is a good that you can own however. This is why an online/multiplayer game is harder to separate because it straddles the line of both a service and a good, but other cases are much more clear cut. (also, a quick google does reveal multipke open source diablo projects fyi)

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.

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