Were they able to correlate the downward trend in new hardware sales to the bad PR? Maybe they realized that if they erode trust with the consumer they can’t convince them to buy these disc less digital only consoles.
When they announced the removal of content, people outside of my normal tech bubble noticed and reached out to me about it so I think at least personally it had an effect.
The space is negligible and selling something to customers without a license that permits you to serve them until the end of time should constitute fraud.
No, buy means you own it. If they mean license, they should put that on the button instead of “buy.”
I don’t think anyone expects them to leave it on their servers forever, but there should be a way for customers to move those purchased products to another system (like a personal computer) for backup.
It’s not nebulous. You cannot own digital entertainment unless it is on physical media. You are buying a license to be able to view it whenever you want, as long as they have it available, and don’t change their terms of service. They say in their terms of service that they can change it whenever they want. There’s nothing we can do about it except not buy it in the first place. Their asses are covered quite well with that 60 page document they make you accept. They had a team of high powered lawyers write that thing, knowing that most people will never read it. They conditioned people to accepting the ToS without reading it by pushing ToS acceptance on meaningless things in the early days of software. Everyone became accustomed to just clicking okay, but now it actually does matter, and we still just click okay.
Even when you own the medium that’s true, it’s just much harder to enforce. As media has gotten more and more capable of being widely shared, the licenses have clamped down harder and harder. From books, to home videos, to video games.
When you buy digital media, whether physical or digital, you are buying a license to be able to view it whenever you want. You do not own the media. You don’t own the rights to that game just because you have a physical copy of it, you don’t have access to the source code, and it is still riddled with DRM. The same applies to movies and music as well.
At the end of the day, whether a piece of media is stored on a Blu-ray/DVD or an HDD/SSD makes little difference. If all ownership means to you is being able to access the media you’ve purchased a license to consume regardless of its online status, then archive it. Your SSD or HDD is as much a physical media as a Blu-ray disk.
There’s a huge difference though with physical media. Yeah, you don’t own the movie, but you own the DVD that it’s stored on. They’re not going to come into your house and take the DVD back. Once you have it, it’s yours forever. When you “buy” something hosted on a corporate server, you can lose it if they don’t want to host it anymore, as evidenced by this Sony thing, or if they go out of business.
That would be okay if I could like have my own copy hosted by myself or stored. Like a DVD or BluRay. But it’s not the case.
I feel like they shouldn’t be legally allowed to call it a buy but an indefinite rent or some other naming if you cannot store your copy or ensure I will be able to access it always.
Unfortunately there is a path set and unless some new European laws or equivalent come up… They will eventually simply stop doing physical stuff. Or nearly stop.
Like for games for example I do not expect after this generation for example more physical games… They did this mix this year to tempt people to get the cheaper digital version and start getting used to digital to simply cut the roots and next sell you just digital, they will say something “this way you can keep your existing games” or similar to convince you, which is good but stops all second hand, the store cuts of the physical, etc. And they will sell nee improved versions or similar of some games for tHe next gen. Next will continue the subscriptions and so on…
The media the same with the subscriptIons and digital owning stuff…
I feel the future is bleak. Piracy will still be there but… who knows with lobbying and similar if stuff gets worse too.
Piracy was never stealing. Piracy is copyright infringement, and copyright is completely broken since they keep extending it to avoid media moving into the public domain.
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