if buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing.
Piracy isn’t stealing either way. It’s just copyright infringement.
Sadly, catchy slogans don’t hold up in court. Better to buy from distributors who don’t try to make that claim, like GOG - even if they won’t put Nine Sols on the store to avoid offending many gamers.
Sadly, catchy slogans don’t hold up in court.
Idk, OJ floated by on his.
No crime where’s no judge.
I’ve heard the argument that if you aren’t pirating via torrent but simply downloading a file (no seeding), there really aren’t any damages that can be claimed aside from the price of the thing you’ve pirated, hence completely not worth any action. The danger is if you’re uploading stuff you can be on the hook based on the number of downloads of that file.
No idea if that’s true, though it sounds reasonable. Thankfully, I’m in a country that could not give less of a shit about piracy… one of the few upsides here lol.
There’s a technical aspect to it too. Downloading over HTTPS covers your butt in a way that you need a good VPN for if torrenting.
I think that’s largely true in the US, at least.
What do you mean by gog offending gamers by selling nine sols? Is it because it’s the same dev as devotion? Or some other reason?
You got it.
Soon the game files will be on the cloud and the client on your computer is just a launcher. Then piracy will be over as well
They tried that (Google stadia), performance is crap. They need a datacenter with beefy GPUs need everyone to keep latency low, so the infrastructure costs aren’t worth it.
Unless it’s the only option and they raise the prices. Then you either play Indy games which will resist and still send you the files or if you want AAA you accept the new normal.
I already only play Indies, so we’ll be safe for a while
we don’t need to resolt to piracy just to have our digital ownership
no, but it’s morally acceptable to pirate things released by hostile corporations
I suppose, but I don’t think that piracy is the true answer, and we should instead be fighting more for digital independence instead of piracy
2 things can be done at the same time just like 2 things can be true at the same time
If I don’t own, I won’t buy. Good luck.
Already lost my PS4 collection for not logging in 3 years.
We’re going to need the full story here. What the heck man?? They just delete you if you’re offline for a couple years?
Yes, I had a PS4 with a few games, then I sold it and didn’t have ps for many years.
Now I got a PS5 and when I tried to login my account didn’t exist.
Sony has a policy where they can delete you account if you don’t login in 3 years.
Already lost my PS4 collection for not logging in 3 years.
Wait, seriously?! Damn, that sucks. What kept you off PSN for three years?
The fact you even have to ask that is fucking wild. It shouldn’t matter in the first fucking place.
I think they’re just curious, not implying it makes a difference
Didn’t have a PS4 any more, now I got a PS5 and found my account deleted.
How? I didn’t use it for years and it’s fine.
does anyone know why Sony is so intent on ensuring that I never become a console gamer and give them money?
like how does this benefit them?
I worked for the major streaming company when the service was launched in Japan. Sony (among others) said that streaming would never take off in Japan because Japanese consumers are too tied to physical media. This was probably 2014. It’s probably been the slowest place in the world to change, but it has changed. Sony understands the consumer preference for digital media as well as anyone. They just know that resistance and opposition will fade over time.
They are a fairly adaptable company (as Japanese tech companies go), and if they get it wrong, they will pivot, but there is nothing pro-consumer about the company. They didn’t put Blu-ray players in PS3s because it was good for consumers, they did it because it was good for Sony’s entertainment business. And people often forget that part of the Blu-ray spec was mandatory internet connectivity so that the content licensor could revoke content licenses. We haven’t “owned” physical media since DVDs.
This is the company that brought you Memory Stick after all. They’ve been anti-consumer ever since the Walkman was a huge success. It benefits Sony by making people buy more copies of the same thing. You might not buy any, but if the optimization is right, enough people will.
I take personal offense (on Sony’s behalf). How could you possibly frame innovation and progress as anti-consumer behavior? The reality is that the industrial mega-corp is providing the services and products consumers actually want. If they didn’t capitalism would be sure to punish them and they’d die an economical death. Children’s entertainment is funded via their parents and neither child nor parent is choosing to buy physical media. You can’t blame Sony for holding on to stock that no one wants to buy. ‘Gamers’ can have their emotional outburst, but things will continue as normal and they’ll have forgotten about it after nap time.
This must either be sarcasm or a troll
in the short term? It doesnt benefit them at all. it may actually hurt them.
in the long term? Bandwidth is cheap. especially at the scale that companies like Sony, Steam, Microsoft, etc, use it. So sell 6 million copies of a game, 10 extra bucks of profit thanks to no physical media/boxes/shipping/etc, per game… Thats 60 million dollars in free money.
Plus, because you no longer own anything, they no longer have to invest in storage to keep old games up and running. So as new games release, they delete old games from their servers and from your accounts, So thats less investment they have to make in infrastructure, which is again more free money for them.
I wager Sony would love the day when people pay 100 dollars for a game that gets deleted in 6 months, that they have to rebuy again at full price to play again.
Cause remember, with no physical media, you have nothing but sony’s closed garden marketplace to buy games… Which means no competition for sony, which means no incentive for sales, no lower prices (not that 70+ dollars is a low price for a game 🙄 ), no nothing but take what sony offers you, and liking it.
I wager Sony would love the day when people pay 100 dollars for a game that gets deleted in 6 months, that they have to rebuy again at full price to play again.
Oh, you wanted to play [AAA game] that you already bought and paid for? Too bad, it’s shut down and gone. But you can buy the almost-identical sequel [AAA game 2] for just $90!
This will also affect history badly. Entire games will be lost to history forever.
Yeah, by the time copyright finally expires, it will be impossible to find a copy of it anymore.
You are just a guy. There are millions more that will not care and won’t even know any of this ever took place. There were leaked conversations where Sony talked about their fanbase as brainless cattle, too.
because their fanbase are brainless cattle.
because gamers are brainless myopic cattle.
gamers on the whole moan and groan and whine and bitch about every misdead, but the second the new shiny comes out they are out there en-masse rewarding these companies with billions and billions and billions of dollars (a great example will be GTA6, which I almost guarantee will bring in at least 2 billion dollars within its first week)
and as long as the idiot masses keep doing that, we have no recourse and no hope.
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Certainly if Gamers™ had half a spine, we wouldn’t get here. Instead it’s always been inch after inch being taken, Gamers™ either downplaying it or viciously complaining about it for a short while without anything tangible happening, and rinse and repeat. Miles have been taken, now Gamers™ argue about 30fps in a game that ships with super draconian DRM and no physical copies because we’re already cool with DRM now.
Also the bitter irony when I hear people upset by Sony’s steamification switching to PC, the most steamified platform of them all. I guess it beats waiting until 2028 when you can pull the trigger now?
I warned from the moment that steam became a market place that the end of the road was us not having physical games anymore, and not owning our games anymore, and not being able to play our games should steam ever go under.
and my god the insults I received over the years about it.
Then other DD platforms popped up, and people bought games there (myself included, fuck you direct2drive), and lost all the games and all the money when the platform died.
“but steam lets you back up your games!” the inevitable response was.
Okay.
But steam backups still require steam to unpack and run. So that does fuckall.
and with how old steam is, and with how many people use things like humble monthly and shit, who the hell can afford to store local copies of 1500-3500 games? especially when a lot of modern games are 50-150gb in size each.
Also, at least on PC, we can relatively easily acquire our games via alternative methods. Which I have had to do a few times, for games that I owned and paid for, because of stupid bullshit DRM.
You aint doing that on modern consoles. If you wanted to play console games via alternative means you either have to 1)Luckout on a jailbreak and have the right firmware for a jailbreak or 2) wait years for an Emulator and a PC that can run it.
I’m so sick of this cyberpunk hellscape bullshit where you pay everything and own nothing.
and my god the insults I received over the years about it.
Me too, me too. When I lost the internet for a mad long time and noticed my steamed games not working because the launcher was refusing to log in while offline (despite having a so-called offline mode) and questioning why a singleplayer game even requires all of this in the first place, I would then get told the problem was actually my internet provider and not the game’s or steam’s for creating this mess in the first place. Yeah, make it make sense. Incidentally I had to acquire a bunch of executables for those very same games like you did, and yep, they’d work offline as should be. Creator of service problem says piracy is a service problem, why is this not a headline already?
Then other DD platforms popped up, and people bought games there (myself included, fuck you direct2drive), and lost all the games and all the money when the platform died.
I’m getting Desura flashbacks. Lucky I downloaded everything I had when I felt the signs of it going down, but I know others weren’t as lucky. Silver lining is they’re still playable, DRM-free is nice, but like I established we’ve already moved on from that into bigger fish like “the credits reference a consulting company I don’t like.”
I’m so sick of this cyberpunk hellscape bullshit where you pay everything and own nothing.
And there’s not even any cyberware to show for it! But yeah at this point I’m focusing more on buying stuff other than games and playing my massive library of games from multiple decades. It’s just I really suck at that too.
I’m getting Desura flashbacks. Lucky I downloaded everything I had when I felt the signs of it going down, but I know others weren’t as lucky. Silver lining is they’re still playable, DRM-free is nice, but like I established we’ve already moved on from that into bigger fish like “the credits reference a consulting company I don’t like.”
with direct2drive it didnt matter if you downloaded the files, cause the installers still did a call home to direct2drive to decrypt, and that call home server died with the rest of d2d.
I just want to push back on this being a ‘gamers’ problem. We’ve basically hit the point with technofeudalism where we can all collectively moan and groan, but still be effectively locked in.
How do you feel about google or apple… but you must have an acceptable(to the bank) phone in order to set up MFA for your bank account, and you might need to have one for your work or school accounts. How do you feel about linkedin… it’s managed to insert itself into the hiring process for many places and if you don’t participate, then a company will overlook you because you don’t exist. How do you feel about twitter… but the US government almost exclusively drops breaking news there first, if not on the shittier versions.
For the wants instead of needs, the dynamic changes a bit, but the enshittification and perverted “ownership” is coming for us all: TVs, printers, dishwashers, cars, etc. All these things are ‘optional’… but your Quality of Life will be reduced if you give them up and you will either be spending your precious time and energy doing something that used to be easier; or giving up on some of the social and cultural fabric by eschewing the shows/movies/games that others around you are enjoying and want to talk about.
Considering this only a ‘gamers’ problem and that only ‘gamers’ are the mindless cattle is missing the bigger picture.
Another aspect is the difference between Publisher and Developer and Platform.
Sony/Playstation is the platform and they get to do shitty things. So can the publisher. The Developer doesn’t get to make those decisions most of the time. Sometimes we can avoid the bad actors, but not always. The next book in your favorite series has just been released, but it’s not going to be printed, it’s only released on Amazon as an E-book. The author isn’t happy, but their contract says the publisher gets to decide where and how to publish and the publisher gets more money from e-books and expects the audience for the book will not revolt. Same with music. This new album is only available on spotify; no physical CDs, and the artist didn’t have a say because they weren’t big enough to fight back.
Sure, piracy solves some of those access issues (insert Gabe Newell quote), but it robs the artists of their cut because the publishers or platforms are being assholes, which will prevent future content that people like. Do you punish the artist, and remove their ability to make more stuff you want because some monolithic company has locked themselves in the process?
I won’t buy GTA6, or the next Call of Duty or FIFA, because those are not games I’m interested in; but there are other franchises that I would like to enjoy the future. I want to fight back and orgs like Stop Killing Games or the EFF, FULU, Repair.org and more are all helping push back.
We do have hope, and if we understand this isn’t a single-slice-of-the-consumer problem, we can band together.
I’m purely pulling this firmly out of my ass. While I genuinely doubt they have any intention or plans at this point, I assume being able to tell investors “oh we can pull the plug and walk away from these legacy costs at any time” is a plus in someone’s column somewhere. Of course the issue is that what is possible to save money often becomes reality.
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Untio the first 250 USD game hits the market and it’s a choice between homelesness, starving and getting a digital product you don’t own.
The smaller the customer base, the less money they rake in.
Sony’s history of security breaches also doesn’t give much confidence. Games like Concord and Marathon also prove nobody is too big to fail.
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🎶🎶oh, the pirate’s life’s for me🎶🎶
If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing.
Good thing I buy games on gog so I own them and I could copy them to a DVD if I really wanted to.
Imagine how well digital games would sell if they showed up in your cart like: 1 x Revokable License for God of War $69 See Terms and Conditions* [Confirm Payment]
- Terms: we will do whatever the fuck we want. Conditions: whenever we want.
There’s a reason they say “Buy” instead of “Pay”.
It’s been going on for generations, but it’s no less dishonest for all that. Software sellers write complex EULAs for which the only valid answer is “Agree” because the store won’t take an open box back and the software won’t install unless we pretend to agree, so even us legitimate software enjoyers are pirates in our hearts. Meanwhile normies don’t even think about it that much. Fuck this whole system, but double fuck an online service that says “purchase” but will steal it back later. Fuck that.
1x temporary license to play. Duration of license unspecified.
Pretty sure in the past it was at least considered a lifetime license.
*Lifetime for the time the product/service is alive
If they end the thing, they can just pretend they did a rewrite and invalidate the current version/not develop it any further and maybe offer a migration discount (lol).
I’d prefer the model of “Buy version X for at least x years of feature updates and Y days of security updates”.In the past it didn’t matter, because you had the whole file structure for the application when you purchased it. You either downloaded it in whole as an install file or archive, or you had it on the physical media that you purchased it on. Maybe there was a license you had to input or some other rudimentary DRM system, but you had that too. No remote access from the company, no forced additional downloads or internet connectivity, no phone home. So they could say whatever they wanted, but you actually had the product.
Now with media files that only play with proprietary tools that phone home, or applications that phone home, your computers are backdoored. And if you have a system that’s backdoored, it’s not really yours, it’s just something you can access for now. That’s what your Kindle is: a backdoored computer with an e-ink screen and proprietary software that can open proprietary files that other software isn’t supposed to be able to open. Which is why no one should buy one.
You should stop buying that shit then.
Also isn’t the kindle fine if you just download offline files? Its been a very long time since I used one though.
I do happen to agree that one should not buy a Kindle. There are alternatives, and good ones.
But also a Kindle, a locked down computer that is illegal to make work properly, shouldn’t exist.
The problem is that in so many of these specialized computers, every major device available is rights violating, or under powered. It is damn hard too “choose” your way out of an economy as an individual.
It’s a bolder than usual move for Sony to announce the end of physical media prior to a new console launch, and launch this “you don’t own the digital games you buy” campaign at the same time.
The usual easy strategy is first you end physical media sales, let people be content with the idea that they own their digital games at least so that the only thing people think about is the convenience of digital, then after you launch your new console, get everybody locked in, that’s when you launch the “Oh you don’t own these digital games btw” campaign.
The fact that they’re just doing all of this at the same time means they know they won’t lose any money over it because we’re sheep and the consumer just doesn’t care anymore
Their consumers don’t care perhaps. The people that do care were probably not using PlayStations in the first place.
Going to court to prove they’re arseholes. Nice.
If you want to stop it, write to your representatives. EULAs do not override local laws.
If I don’t own them, no reason to pay for them ever.
If I’ve already bought it I won’t even hesitate to pirate it.
Having backups of owned digital media is just good practice.
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Because you buy it. It being a limited license of course, not a game.
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Next time: Acquire license
um yeah, that’s not hard to prove, you can check my torrent history
you still own them more than a psn store enjoyer owns their games
Its crazy how everybody got used to rental prices as high as physical copy.
Most people don’t know they are rentals
I don’t need to read the article to know that they’re making the same argument as Amazon and Apple. When you “buy” a show on one of the streaming platforms, you aren’t actually buying anything except an extended rental.
Then the button should say “rent” and not “buy”
Consumer protections are for the weak. /s
Digital music for purchase as well.
Not quite true anymore, publishers have pretty much given up on DRM for purchased music :)
Neither Apple’s iTunes store nor amazon’s store (although to be fair, I haven’t used amazon, so I’m not 100 % sure about them) use DRM on purchased music, so you can just take the music files and use them in any way you want. In my personal opinion though, rather than use the iTunes store or amazon, I’d recommend you to try the qobuz store, which is DRM-free and is the only one I know of (ignoring bandcamp, which doesn’t get music from regular distributors) that provides lossless audio.
Bandcamp lets you download .mp3 which are DRM free. They probably are tagged in the info but its just a text field
MP3 is a horrible non-free (well, not anymore, because the patents expired; but still), outdated format. bandcamp also lets you download as FLAC, which is none of that and lossless.
edit: it feels this comment came off a bit aggressively, so I just wanted to say that wasn’t my intention 😅
FLAC does not work with alot of devices
Then transcode it to whatever other format you need yourself. Point is, the thing being sold ought to be the highest quality possible.
AAC-LC though works just about anywhere, and AFAIK is also patent free by now.
Which ones don’t support it? It’s a very old format at this point. Every Android device in existence can work with it for example.
HDtracs also sells some stuff losslessly. Though one thing I’ve noticed I’ve noticed on both Qobuz and HDtracs is tha, in addition to only having some stuff losslessly, the availability of lossless varies by region. The same album might be sold lossless in one region and only lossy in another region.
Didn’t know about them before, thanks for sharing!
The same album might be sold lossless in one region and only lossy in another region.
That’s weird, since as far as I can tell, qobuz doesn’t offer lossy downloads at all (I’ve heard they used to, but stopped. Maybe there are some regions where they’re still offering it?)
Hmm, maybe I was misremembering. On second thought I think it was actually 7digital I was thinking of that did the regional lossless, I forgot about that one. For example, the same album on Swedish and American stores:
This led to a lot of good discussion around various places to buy digital music. My comment wasn’t so much drm focused as it was about licenses being removed. I’ve encountered that on Qobuz actually. Not many, but a few items are no longer available to be downloaded. I have already downloaded the files when I purchased the music, so that’s certainly something different than a movie or game that can’t be downloaded and used as such. That’s all, just the fact that the license can still be removed.
Ah, didn’t expect you to already know qobuz 🙃
But yeah, that’s definitely a problem. I remember them sending the email where they announced this could happen now (although weirdly enough, they never sent an email for when purchased items were taken down any time after that again), and had it happen a few times as well. Luckily, I’ve also saved everything locally, so I haven’t lost anything. Still annoying. Also sometimes, an album that’s suddenly gone just seems to reappear a few months later, as if they were just reorganizing their library, but really, I have no idea what’s going on.
That’s good to hear some items have returned. I also wonder about things like relistings, if items have or will get moved around. Good discussion!
