Funny. The consumer didn’t make physical media worse for the last 15 years.
Manual or at least something besides the disk: Gone Price: Same as digital despite they getting more profit from digital. Disc: half the game, other half downloads. (Not always, mind you) Game: Half baked without at least two patches.
They’ve been giving less and less with physical editions to push the more profitable digital store, and then they act shocked when no one buys physical.
Shockingly, if the only difference between physical and digital is that you need to go out of your way to pick the physical, most people will just get the digital.
Still I got my Switch games in physical so I can trade with friends.
The current outrage over the shift from physical media to streaming and digital licenses is based on a massive historical misunderstanding. People treat the twentieth century as the absolute baseline for how media should work, but the era of the DVD and the cartridge was actually a historical fluke.
For thousands of years, you could not buy or own a performance. You bought a ticket to experience a play or a symphony, and the creator maintained total control over their work. John Locke argued that individuals own themselves and therefore own the labor of their bodies and minds. When a creator invests their intellect into developing software or art, it is an extension of that labor, and they possess the highest moral claim to it.
Capturing art on physical media was a technological anomaly that broke this rule and created a false sense of consumer entitlement. It birthed legal loopholes that allowed massive secondary markets to profit endlessly off a creator’s intellectual labor without compensating them beyond the very first sale. It tricked the public into confusing the ownership of a piece of plastic with the ownership of the art itself.
You do not own a creator’s code, film, or digital ecosystem, and you never did. Furthermore, modern software and digital media are not static objects like a wooden chair. They are living ecosystems that require ongoing server maintenance, security patches, and active development. Demanding perpetual, lifetime ownership of a digital service for a single upfront fee is essentially demanding forced, uncompensated ongoing labor from the development team.
The transition away from physical media is not a corporate theft of consumer rights. It is a necessary course correction back to the historical norm of the amphitheater. A digital subscription or end user license is simply a modern theater ticket. You are paying for the right to occupy the creator’s digital venue for a set period of time. The architect of the work is just finally reclaiming the moral authority to decide exactly how and when their intellectual labor is consumed.
I don’t think the Lockean argument actually gets you where you want it to go.
Locke’s labor theory of property doesn’t just say creators own the fruits of their labor. It also says they have the right to alienate that property, to sell it, transfer it, or give it away. Once that transfer occurs, ownership changes hands. That’s the entire point of property rights.
This is where your comparison to theater performances breaks down.
A performance is inherently ephemeral. Of course you only buy admission. But books, paintings, sculptures, and other tangible works have been bought and sold for centuries. When Rembrandt sold a painting, he didn’t retain the right to dictate who displayed it, resold it, or inherited it. When someone bought a book, the author retained the copyright, but they didn’t retain ownership of that physical copy.
That’s the distinction your argument glosses over.
Physical media didn’t create some bizarre loophole that tricked consumers into believing they owned art. Copyright law has always separated ownership of a copy from ownership of the intellectual property. Buying a novel never meant you owned the copyright. It meant you owned that particular copy.
The “historical anomaly” argument doesn’t really hold either. Technology creating new forms of property isn’t evidence that those forms are somehow illegitimate. Printing presses, photography, automobiles, patents, and even digital storage all changed what could be owned. Calling something a historical anomaly doesn’t make it philosophically suspect.
Where your argument has merit is with services. An MMO, cloud software, or any product that depends on ongoing servers and continuous development is fundamentally different from a finished single-player game or a movie sitting on a disc. Those genuinely require ongoing labor.
But once you start arguing that creators retain moral authority over every copy they’ve sold forever, you’ve left Locke behind. You’re no longer defending property rights, you’re defending perpetual control after the sale. That’s a very different philosophical position, and I don’t think your conclusion follows from your premise.
You make a very well-articulated point regarding Locke, and the distinction between copyright and the First Sale Doctrine is spot on for traditional media. But your argument fails because it treats executable software as functionally and legally identical to a book or a painting. It isn’t.
When Rembrandt sells a painting or a publisher sells a book, you are buying a static, physical object that you consume passively. You don’t need an End User License Agreement to read a book or look at a canvas.
Software is completely different. A game isn’t a static object; it is functional code. To even play a game, your console or PC must actively copy that code from the disc into its RAM to execute it. Because running software requires continuous replication, you must have a license from the creator to do so.
This is why the application of Locke’s alienation of property doesn’t work here. The creators never alienated or transferred ownership of the software to the consumer. They sold you a physical piece of plastic (which you own and can resell), but they explicitly retained ownership of the code, granting you a revocable license to execute it.
I’m not “defending perpetual control after the sale” as some grand philosophical stance. I’m pointing it out as the objective, legal reality of how the software industry has operated for decades.
Because consumers never owned the game, only the plastic delivery mechanism and a license to play, shifting to a digital-only marketplace isn’t a theft of property rights. It’s simply the industry cutting out the plastic middleman. You can argue it’s anti-consumer to remove the secondary market for those plastic discs, but you can’t claim it’s “immoral” for creators to shift how they deliver a license you were already operating under.
I think we’ve drifted away from your original argument.
Your original comment was making a philosophical case. It appealed to history, Locke’s labor theory, and the moral authority of creators. My response addressed those claims directly.
Your latest reply, however, isn’t really defending that philosophical position. It’s explaining how software licensing currently works under copyright law and why software is treated differently from books or paintings.
I don’t disagree with most of that. Software has long occupied a unique legal category, and EULAs have existed for decades.
But that’s a different argument from the one you originally made. We’ve shifted from “this is the morally correct understanding of ownership” to “this is the current legal framework for software.”
If your point is simply that software has historically been licensed rather than sold outright, then I don’t think we’re actually in much disagreement anymore.
You do not own a creator’s code, film, or digital ecosystem, and you never did.
Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.
Art is the common property of all mankind. Art is the human soul. The very idea that you can restrict the creativity of another human being is an affront to the human spirit. You know what is truly a modern anomaly? Copyright and all IP law. For 99% of human history, artists would laugh in your face if you suggested that a musician had some God-given right to prevent others from singing a song they just wrote.
You have no natural right to “intellectual property,” because ultimately what you mean by “intellectual property” is the temporary right to exclusive sale of a product. And that is not a natural right. It’s not a natural right like freedom of speech, or even ownership of tangible property. Copyright violation is fundamentally different from real theft because it doesn’t deprive the owner of an original. Yes, you as an artist may feel you have some innate ownership to an idea, but that is a sense of privilege and entitlement that comes from misunderstanding the history and purpose of IP law. Hell, for most of history, artists were not even considered the source of creative works. Medieval painters didn’t sign their works, because they considered God to be the real creator. Before that, the Muses got credit.
Here is what you are missing. Copyright is not an innate right. It’s a useful legal compromise, nothing more. We discovered through trial and error that providing a limited period of exclusive use of a work to an artist helps get more art made. But that’s all it is, a pragmatic compromise. Do not confuse it for a natural right like life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.
No one creates art in a vacuum. Everything is inspired and derived from works that came before it. There are no original stories. Artists are only able to create works because they’ve trained and studied on the works of countless other artists that came before them. Your work as an artist is just one tiny piece of a grand cultural tapestry. And as you were able to benefit from the commons, in turn your work will return to the commons to inspire others. A drop from the ocean. An ocean from a drop. That is the nature of art and creativity.
Whenever people make claims like “You have no natural right to intellectual property”, I’m very curious A) what is the fullest extent of the amount of IP they, as an individual, have worked to create, and B) how secure their living situation and finances are.
I find a lot of people shift their opinion after they’ve worked for years on something under genuine risk of it not doing well.
I’ve been arguing with people about this stuff for 20 years online and can count on one hand the number of other industry professionals that I have come across. As I mentioned in another comment; the tone, and tenor of these debates says far more about the type of people who like talking about video games online then it does about the state of the industry, or quality of products and services…
Most people have a very hard time grasping the reality that if they are here, talking about video games on the internet, they represent less than 1% of the consumer base. Some manage to walk right up to the line, acknowledging that “most gamers don’t care about digital-only/DRM/MTX/subscriptions”… yet somehow still come to the conclusion that their opinion and resistance is the “correct” perspective and they know better than the 99%.
It’s a perennial example of false consensus and naive realism cognitive biases.
The very idea that you can restrict the creativity of another human being is an affront to the human spirit.
Strawman. What I said is that the creator of art has full moral authority over when and how it is consumed, if at all. If you have a private sketchbook in your room right now, are we all entitled to its contents as the common property of the human race simply because it exists?
…artists would laugh in your face if you suggested that a musician had some God-given right to prevent others from singing a song they just wrote.
False equivalency. What you are describing would be a unique performance and a completely new creative expression. A fairer question would be whether some hypothetical historical musician would agree with your suggestion that if they had 10 songs written down in a journal somewhere, that the rest of humanity was entitled to read, or hear them performed at their leisure and demand.
You have no natural right to “intellectual property,” because ultimately what you mean by “intellectual property” is…
Another false equivalency. You are confusing private property and personal property. Intellectual property (which would be a form of private property) does not exist; all ideas which benefit humanity should be shared freely. What we are discussing is the capitalization of intellectual labor, and the moral authority over all labor belongs to the individual who executed said labor. The knowledge required to write a song, or make a clay pot has utility to humanity and should be shared freely. If I use that knowledge to actually MAKE a clay pot you are not entitled to its use simply because you also exist.
It’s a useful legal compromise, nothing more. We discovered through trial and error that providing a limited period of exclusive use of a work to an artist helps get more art made.
I disagree 100%. Copyright should have only ever been used to prevent anyone other than a living creator from profiting off a unique creative work. This is why we have fair-use, and time bound public domain exceptions. Fundamentally I disagree with capitalism and commerce more broadly, but that is outside the scope of this conversation. As long as we are operating under those models, then copyright should protect commercial use of original works until the original creator is dead, then the work should enter the public domain.
One last question looking at you profile: do you have all your woodworking plans available for free online?
Well said. I only take issue with your assertion that it is a useful legal compromise. It being useful is entirely dependent upon who you are.
For someone who partakes in the shared cultural tapestry it could come to be that the legal compromise ends up an oppressive force.
For instance, if you went to clubs in your youth, that music became part of your shared culture. When you are older you will struggle to revisit that same shared culture by those using intellectual property legalities to paywall your soul.
When you are older you will struggle to revisit that same shared culture by those using intellectual property legalities to paywall your soul.
Again, you are fully entitled and within you legal right to sing those songs to your heart’s content to relive the glory days; that does not mean that you are entitled to a high fidelity recording of the original work in perpetuity simply because you paid to listen to it once at a club…
Your entire premise is based upon on a couple of misunderstandings.
First, on a technical note regardless if you have bought a physical disk or downloaded a digital copy you are still bound by an end user licensing agreement. The real historical difference amounts to a right to resale. There is no reason why, other than corporate greed, that we cannot resale our digital copies. Ideally this right should be restored by clarifying you own a single transferable copy of the code.
Second, I think you make some important points that deserve to be discussed. You pack a lot of information in a very small amount of space which is very impressive. I am concerned that your points may be missing some important context. Also, when you bring morality into the discussion it makes me want to climb up on a metaphorical soap box because I see things very differently from a moral perspective.
For thousands of years there was no Intellectual Property (IP). Artist copied each other as they always did and still do to this day. No ownership was needed or expected because all art and science is inherently iterative. What you accept as reality is really the modern “fluke” only existing in the last few hundred years.
On a minor point, you also seem to confuse art and science with commerce. The majority of art is never intended for commercial sale. It is actually a very small amount that is created solely for commercial sale, yet we spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing it. It is important to point out this distinction otherwise we reduce all art to monetary value when in reality that is not the reason it is created.
Science cannot exist without iteration. Our current system simply transfers science developed by individuals, often with public funding, to corporations. We will also see this theme in IP where corporations take their employee’s work for their benefit and even worse, non-employee’s work as well.
Every once in awhile we will hear about an artist or scientist suing and winning against a major corporation, thus reinforcing the IP propaganda that it defends the little guy. The reality is these are the exceptions not the rule. It is not surprising though, by granting such an insane right of artificial scarcity that it would be abused by capital. This reality taints all IP and not bringing it up is a disservice to the discussion.
From patent trolls to copyright scammers the reality is the little guy is the one who gets continuously screwed. So many people’s life works have been stolen from them by corporations. This realization should make anyone skeptical of these rights when they are continuously abused by corporations.
Due to these capilitistic designs the small percentage of commercial creator’s rights are usually taken by corporations. This system is highlighted by the reality seen in the record industry and the fact that very few preformers own their own works. This shows us it is about protecting corporations and not non-wealthy individuals like you or I.
Most people don’t realize that defending copyright or patents take years and hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. This system is extremely inaccessible to individuals unless they are wealthy and can hire proxies to litigate and disseminate their lies for them. This creates perverse incentives that allow corporations to take other’s rights.
The very foundation of the US was based on intellectual piracy with the founding fathers encouraging it to build American industry. This can be seen in modern day with countries like China (although I feel they are no longer borrowing as much because of their amazing innovations). Thomas Jefferson is a famous inventor who basically paid other people to do all the work, remind you of Musk much. We must recognize that we have always ignored IP when it suits us. This can be seen with AI right now.
Back to morality and IP. The concept that a creator gets to benefit from the same labour over and over again through artificially scarcity enforced by the state is pretty ridiculous honestly. It is absurd on its face and an affront to how most people earn a living. People may deserve compensation, but not an endless revenue stream.
Once again, this is rarely about the individual as corporations and the wealthy are the primary beneficiaries of these legal rights that they have spent hundreds of years lobbying the state and the court systems for.
Indeed the origin of copyright was about control and censorship and not protect individuals rights. I will admit that when it comes to IP, patents did have slightly more honest beginnings by forcing the grantee to expose how their inventions works as an actual public good. Regardless of this one benefit to the public, the patent is inherently a tool of control as well.
We can see how modern day industry has been shaped by abusing and misusing the right of patent. Creating an impossible barrier to entry, blocking competition, effectively endlessly renewing patents as seen in the pharmaceutical industry, patenting concepts others have developed because of first to file rights, patenting concepts that do not meet the the proper standards by regulatory capture, etc all show the system is broken and is merely a tool for the wealthy to manipulate the market
Capturing art on physical media is not new as evidenced by as far back as cave art and countless other examples throughout human history. Technology certainly changes the equation, but your argument that this has lead to consumer entitlement is bizarre. I suppose your trying to say by owning a copy of the movie the consumer also feels they “own” the movie itself. I won’t discount some people may believe this, but I also don’t think this is a realistic assessment of the situation.
There is a major problem when you lump code in with other creative works. I won’t spend too much time on this because it is a rather large topic. What I will say is the creator doesn’t own the code because just like math there is often an obvious way to the solution. You should never be able to own a solution under system of enforced artificial scarcity. Software patents are absolute garbage that stifle creativity.
I am glad you recognize the difference between digital goods and physical goods. I think you come to very contradictory and dystopian conclusions then I would though.
In your world no one owns anything digitally because “creator” aka the corporation needs moar money. You pay to be able to grace yourself with their amazing talent for but a brief moment.Your digital media is not yours and can be taken away at any time. Your game can charge you every time you play it, you operating system is spyware because the owner of the software wants it to be.
In my world I pay for my hardware. Keeping those zeros and ones alive is something I pay for not them. I pay for the hardware, electricity, and connection to the Internet. I pay to upgrade and maintain it. I have invested interest and a right to my property. I am not paying for an experience. I am paying for a file and once I have possession of the file it is mine to do with what I want. This is digital reality.
Your argument seems to be copyright maximalist crossed with corporate shill. I also find your argument devolves into almost a moral panic of technology. A lot of what you criticize is similar to what people said about records and photography. Interestingly these arguments are currently being used against AI. I think you may enjoy this link.
Equating labor to copying ones and zeros is pretty comical. The reason an artist is paid is they perform. Insane copyright laws have lead to bizarre situations like car mechanics in England getting sued for listen to music while they work on cars because customers might hear it and they don’t have the performance rights.
I will leave you with this conundrum.
There is only one way to truly protect your art. Never share it with anyone. There is only one way to prove your work is truly original. Be raised by wolves never interacting with humans and produce great works of art without using any frame of reference other than the ones you invented yourself in a vacuum. Only then is your art truly original and protected.
Not sure if you are joking or not.
Do you have a compelling moral counterargument?
Stories being owned is not how things always where, not by a long shot.
Bards, actors, and other performers would re-tell them, adding their own twists and artistic choices.
Paintings and books have been being sold for centuries, which in effect, are treated the same way DVD’s are.
The corporate capture of art and , and the monopoly of ideas are newer than you let on.
Remember: the original intent of copyright was to protect the SCIENCES and ARTS, not the copyright holder.
You mention bards adding their own twists. That actually proves my point. The audience didn’t “own” the bard’s unique performance or get to take it home; they just experienced the bard’s specific intellectual labor for the evening. A video game or software platform isn’t a public myth; it’s a highly specific, unique execution of labor.
Furthermore, you’re right that books and paintings have been sold for centuries, but those are static objects. When a painting is sold, the artist’s work is done. Modern digital ecosystems are living things that require active servers, database management, and ongoing engineering. If you demand perpetual ownership for a single $60 payment, who is morally obligated to provide the uncompensated labor to keep those servers running for the next twenty years?
Maybe stop treating private server owners like criminals, and get back to releasing server binaries like we used to?
The original developers of these games aren’t the only ones capable of hosting them.
I cut my teeth hosting by hosting game servers for me and my friends, and now work in the tech industry using those skills to pay rent.
Developers who gatekeep server binaries aren’t just doing a disservice to players, but to the future generation of IT workers, and those who will depend on them.
Furthermore, for many games, these are tacked on features to an already competent single player that doesn’t need online support.
This argument falls apart for anything that isn’t live service, which is basically everything I play…
You are conflating predatory always online DRM with actual live-service architecture. You are entirely right that tacking forced online requirements onto a single-player game is a terrible product choice, but it doesn’t change the underlying reality of ownership.
If a classical painter decides to hang their masterpiece in a pitch-black room, or a sculptor insists their work only be viewed through frosted glass, it makes for a miserable audience experience. But it is undeniably their right to do so. The creator always dictates the terms of engagement. Even if you are playing a completely offline game, you still do not own the code. You only bought a license to execute it. Feel free to go look at the EULA from ANY video game you’ve EVER purchased; you never owned the game, only a license.
Furthermore, demanding that developers just release server binaries treats backend architecture as if it is public property. Backend infrastructure is full of proprietary code, licensed third-party middleware, and security architecture that a studio cannot legally or safely hand over to the public. When a developer chooses to release server tools, that is a generous decision they made regarding their own intellectual labor. You do not have a moral or legal right to demand the keys to a developer’s proprietary backend just because you want to host it yourself. Whether it is a live-service giant or an offline indie game, the creator still gets to choose how their work is distributed.
So… We should go backwards instead of forward?
For thousands of years back you could trade people for cows, owning your life is a massive historical misunderstanding.
You could own the Mona Lisa. You could own the original Dante’s inferno. For thousands of years there wasn’t the technology to have a copy of the Iliad, then there was and you could have a copy that wasn’t man-made, the press was born. You couldn’t have a copy of a painting without a massive spending on a replica, then in 1600 in Japan with wooden blocks they mass distributed art of Hokusai. You couldn’t own music until you could. You couldn’t own performances until you could.
Those were never moral or logical reasons not to, the technology just didn’t exists. Now the technology does exist and you say that because it didn’t before, then it’s a fluke?
For most of human history people died at early ages, we should go back to that and ditch all antibiotics I guess then, if “history” is the bar you’re measuring “moral”.
Also, guess what, the architect of the work was never in control of their art nor had the “moral authority” of how their work is consumed. Do you really thing that Homer personally went and trained everyone who wanted to interpret the Iliad? Your whole argument is based in something that didn’t even existed in the first place with tons of examples of the contrary that the only thing I can think is that you’re trolling or severely brainwashed.
They sold a product, not an “experience”. Without massive access and preservation of art in all forms civilization couldn’t even begin to grow as fast as it did in the last thousand years.
And before anything else, the mere concept of “owning” is the single most important part of capitalism, if they want to play the “owning” game then we should all be able to play the game. Also historically “owning” didn’t exist. We should course correct to the one true way of tribadism and nomads. I guess.
You are making a massive leap in logic by equating the development of human rights and medicine with the legal mechanics of creative ownership. No one is arguing we should go back to the dark ages just for the sake of tradition. The point is that the fundamental nature of intellectual labor did not change just because we invented a way to print it on plastic.
You claim that we could not own music or performances until the technology existed, and then suddenly we could. But that is legally and factually false. Even after the printing press was invented, or the phonograph, or the Hokusai woodblocks, the consumer still did not own the art. You owned the paper. You owned the wax cylinder. You owned the block of wood. The rights to the creation itself always remained with the creator or their publisher. You are still confusing the physical container with the intellectual labor itself.
But the biggest hole in your argument is that you are still completely ignoring the reality of the medium. You bring up Homer and the Iliad. The Iliad is an ancient oral tradition and a piece of public domain folklore. It is a completely irrelevant comparison to the modern reality of proprietary software and closed digital ecosystems. You’re comparing living, breathing digital infrastructure to static objects. The Mona Lisa, Dante’s Inferno, and woodblock prints. Those are static, finished products. Once Dante finished writing, his labor was done. You can read his book for a century and it requires zero additional effort from him.
Modern software and video games are not static objects. They require active, daily labor to function. They need continuous server hosting, security patches, database management, and network infrastructure. Hokusai did not have to pay a monthly server bill to keep his woodblock visible in your house.
If you buy a copy of a modern digital service and demand the right to own and access it forever for a single upfront fee, you are demanding that the developers provide uncompensated labor and pay for your server access out of their own pockets for the rest of your life.
You can champion the preservation of art all you want, and on that front, almost everyone agrees with you. Archives and historians need legal pathways to preserve digital history. But archival preservation is not the same thing as consumer entitlement. You bought a license to access a digital venue. You did not buy the right to force engineers to work for you for free in perpetuity.
What do you mean with “engineers works for free in perpetuity”?
When you buy a painting, a book, or a horseshoe, the creator’s labor ends the second you buy it. The object just sits there, existing on its own. Software doesn’t do that.
Because of the reality of how technology works, code doesn’t just sit in a vacuum forever. Operating systems update, hardware architectures change, server protocols shift, and security certificates expire. If software is left completely alone, it eventually breaks (a concept known in IT as “software rot”).
To keep a game, especially a modern one, functional and playable for a decade or more, engineers have to actively maintain it. They have to patch it for new operating systems, migrate server infrastructure, and update APIs.
So, when someone pays a one-time fee of $60 and demands that their software remain perfectly functional until the end of time, they aren’t just demanding ownership of a static object. They are demanding that a team of engineers continuously update, patch, and maintain the infrastructure for that code indefinitely, without ever being paid for that ongoing labor.
That is what “engineers to work for you for free in perpetuity” means. Pretending that software is a static object like a book ignores the reality that demanding permanent functionality from code requires perpetual, unpaid maintenance from its creators.
What the hell are you talking about. John Nintendo himself didn’t had to pay anyone to make Mupen64. I assure you that Michael Sony didn’t had to pay to his engineer so Bloodborne could be played outside a PS4.
No one. Absolutely no one is asking that Sony or any other company release patches forever and that I could play Crash Bash in a PS5 or boicot. My PS4 broke years ago, I dumped my Bloodborne copy and play it again on my PC. Sony didn’t had to pay anyone a single cent for that to happen.
I’m really curious of who are you listening that made you think that the issue with killing physical media is “I want support forever”…
That is literally the argument. That if a developer or publisher decides to stop publishing a digital title that your license is no longer usable…
Why is it necessary?
The opinions of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau are not absolutel nor ubiquitous. They may have said things that are no longer, or never were accurate and almost certainly should never be held to be inviolate/permanent.
While I don’t necessarily agree with your POV here, I can at least say it’s more interesting than people realize to look at the growth of the VHS player and how this ownership debacle played out in the video world when it first came around. There were big lawsuits around whether people were allowed to record a movie or show, and then play it in a living room of 4-5 people.
Also the patrons of the people and organizations that produced these works have often been owned by those who funded them, stop kidding yourself
You’re absolutely right that Locke isn’t gospel, so let’s strip the 17th century philosophy away entirely and look at the modern reality. You don’t need Locke to tell you that server hosting, database management, and daily security patching require ongoing human labor and cost money every single month.
You also make a great point about historical patrons owning the art they funded. In modern digital media, the publisher or the studio IS that patron. They funded the millions of dollars to build it, so as you pointed out, they own it. The consumer paying a $60 entry fee isn’t the patron; they are just buying a ticket to access the patron’s digital venue.
If you demand perpetual, lifetime ownership of a digital service for a single upfront payment, you are demanding that the patron provide uncompensated server space and engineering labor for you for the rest of time. That isn’t consumer rights; that’s just entitlement.
The fact that you bought a ticket to watch a movie in a movie theater does not entitle you to watch that movie whenever and however often you want.
I need to preface that I don’t know how to say this any better and I’m also short on time so I’m going to ask your forgiveness for my bluntness and any offence this may come across as. I promise you im not attacking you and you are just going to have to accept it. Again my apologies but here we go…
Your logic is screwed up and I’m having a hard time trying to sort out where your flawed logic is, so I’m gonna need some grace and more self reflection from you than is probably expected, I hope you can accomodate my shortcomings in this.
It’s not an attack, you seem to make a well thought out argument, which is more than I usually see. Credit to you and I do respect you for it.
All work created by a creator CAN be owned by someone else.
A horseshoe is no different from movie on DVD or SD card from an ownership standpoint.
I disagree that recording performances is a technological anomaly. Because it requires entirely too narrow a perspective.
The only different between someone writing a book describing a play and a recording is the medium used to record it. That medium is a physical thing.
We can’t literally record thoughts, not in any meaningful or useful ways at the moment but we ARE close to that. There is a research experiment where they recorded someone’s brain activity while they dreamt and were able to play that recording back to some degree of success.
In a hobbesian sense (as you described it, I’m not claiming mastery on the mans philosophy just trying to meet you where you are) you cannot own someones thoughts that use used to make a creation, whether it be a performance or a recording of the performance. The only difference between a horseshoe and a performance of a okay or music, is that not many people cared to bottle up the performance of a blacksmith making the horseshoe. Until YouTube.
Owning the horseshoe doesn’t give you rights to the performance of its creation, neither does owning a copy of the recording of the performance grant you ownership of the horseshoe.
There are different things at play from start to finish. And they are treated differently. I don’t think anyone is making the same arguments that you are claiming and refuting, and that’s why I think there is a flaw in your arguments logic.
Owning a game on a disc or cartridge is not equivalent to owning the right to a performance. It doesn’t give you ownership of anything other than what you purchased. In this case that we are discussing owning a game IS owning the code that exists on the physical medium, be it a hardrive, a paper printout, a disc. Ownership of that specific copy of that specific code is what ownership of a digital creation is. It’s an ordered number of 1s and 0s. It’s a copy of a pattern that is absolutely useless to anyone who can’t read binary on the medium purchases. Ownership does not require usability, but it MUST provide a product that is tangible, regardless of its usability to the owner.
Im not understanding why you are using the examples of right to a performance the way you are using them and I think what I’ve written here should be enough to explain what I understand about the situation. My ability to communicate my thoughts clearly and precisely to you, anyone else reading this and also to myself are perhaps insufficient, but that doesn’t automatically invalidate my understanding just because I can’t explain it well, or that I’ve made errors in my attempt to communicate them in this medium
I see what you’re getting at, but your argument is built on an illusion of ownership that has never actually existed in the video game space.
You claimed that “owning a game IS owning the code… Ownership of that specific copy of that specific code.” That is fundamentally false. In the software industry, end-users have never owned the code, the pattern of 1s and 0s, or the game itself. You only ever purchased a non-exclusive, revocable license to execute that software.
The physical disc or cartridge was never the game, it was just a plastic delivery vehicle that doubled as a physical DRM key. The First Sale Doctrine gave you the right to resell that piece of plastic, but it never gave you ownership of the intellectual property printed on it. EULAs have made this explicit since the 1980s.
If you acknowledge that gamers only ever purchased a license to play, then the shift to digital-only isn’t some grand moral failing or a theft of consumer rights. It is strictly a logistical shift in distribution. The transaction hasn’t changed, you are still just buying a license to execute code. The only difference is that studios are delivering that license over a network instead of burning it onto a piece of plastic.
You can certainly argue that losing the ability to trade in used plastic discs is inconvenient or annoying. But calling an operational shift in supply chain logistics “immoral” is applying heavy ethical weight to a simple reality: you can’t lose ownership rights you never possessed in the first place.
It absolutely did give me ownership of the software on everysingle NES game I bought. NO ONE can tell me I don’t own that plastic and can use it in anyway I want so long as I do not distribute copies or derivatives works of it. But I can create and make as many copies of it as I want as long as I keep them to myself and I can make whatever changes I want to it assuming I have the skillset to do so. They do not have to provide me any assistance, nor am I entitled to assistance to do these things, but as the owner I certainly can do these things
Owning something doesn’t mean there aren’t conditions, but I absolutely own those 1s and 0s on that piece of plastic. No one can delete them or take them or prevent me from using them in anyway.
This ISNT a 1980s thing either. Copying what’s on my Plastic NES cartridges is no different than is no different than forging a copy of the Mona Lisa if I owned it. Distributing that copy in any way is currently prohibited, but I can paint it as long as I don’t try to claim it’s the original.
Owning a NES cartridge might also give me a limited license to certain things but I OWN that copy of 1s and 0s even if I can’t copy it and sell it or give them away. I didn’t sign a EULA when I bought Chrono trigger. YOU may have, but I didn’t
This is no different than owning a house
You are confusing physical possession with intellectual ownership. You absolutely own the plastic cartridge, the silicon board, and the physical state of the ROM chip. Because it is an offline, physical object, no one can remotely delete it. But you do not own the code, and you never did.
Under copyright law, ownership of a copyright is strictly separate from ownership of the material object the work is stored on. You own the material object. Nintendo and Square own the 1s and 0s.
You claim you never agreed to a EULA for Chrono Trigger. You didn’t have to click an “Accept” button on a screen because the 1990s operated on shrink-wrap licenses. If you look at the back of the original Chrono Trigger box and inside the manual, the publishers explicitly laid out the terms of your limited license to use their intellectual property. The law didn’t require your signature; breaking the shrink-wrap seal on the box or booting up the cartridge was legally recognized as accepting those terms of use.
Your house metaphor actually proves this point perfectly. If you buy a house, you own the wood, the drywall, and the land. But you do not own the architect’s copyrighted blueprints. You can paint the walls inside your house, but you cannot legally take the architect’s design and build an identical replica of that house on another lot.
You possess a physical artifact that grants you perpetual, offline access to execute a licensed piece of software. That is a great feature of the physical media era, and it is exactly why no one can take it away from you. But claiming you own the actual 1s and 0s because you hold the plastic is like claiming you own a novel’s copyright because you bought a hardcover at the bookstore.
Ah yes the intelligent consumer who always has a choice and is never beholden to the whims of a completely dominant supply side economy.
Of course the “former Valve writer” is Chet Faliszek. The dude never shuts up.
So consumers were given the choice between physical media that you made artificially expensive and overly inconvenient or digital media that you made practically free and ultra convenient. That’s called the illusion of choice. But now you can blame your victims when you abuse them because they brought this on themselves.
It s more nuanced. 80% of buy are digital. Some industries it s worse. Like music and movie. But thoses industry value their “hardcore” consumer and will never shelve their physical release, who also append to be better quality than digital release. Contrary to video game where its litteraly the same product. Nobody has an issue with valve being fully digital cause they can’t lock down other store. What sont does is unprecdent and I pray for their downfall.
Physical media is no more expensive or inconvenient than it ever was. It’s just that you’re now comparing it to downloads, which bear no manufacturing cost and don’t require you to physically go to a store or have the media shipped to you. These are exactly the reasons that consumers prefer downloads.
Up until the Wii era you could just insert the disc in the console and start playing immediately, it was much more convenient than waiting an hour for a game to download and install. You didn’t need to manage disk space as well. Or login before playing. The industry destroyed the convenience. Now only Switch has an option to start playing from cartridge.
As far as I know, no one has produced technology to make disc streaming faster. You can blame console design for this, but even if an indie dev simulated this situation with a 50GB game containing compressed textures placed on a Blu-ray, he’d have the same design problem - loading things off that disc takes a long time, and installation is a far better user experience.
The Wii gets away with it because texture sizes back then were much smaller. If you can point to technical demonstrations of how the same process could’ve been achieved on modern games with much larger textures, I’d be interested to hear it.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think we ever got to see a dual disk drive console, at least not in production (exempting gaming PCs). Perhaps in a parallel universe on board storage became cost prohibitive and games came on two simultaneously inserted optical disks, one with the game code and the other with texture packs and art. Nothing that interesting could exist in today’s climate.
Cartridges, same as Switch 2. And high res textures and audio as separate download if needed. Flash memory was getting cheap until AI, 64GB usb 3 drive is still around 10 bucks at retail, so probably 3 bulk, and even cheaper for Sony.
Spinning media will never be as fast, of course, unless every drive comes with a 50GB cache to just load everything once and never seek randomly.
I just wanna say this is my opinion.
98% of the shit we deal with. Not just game shit, but everything…all boils down to these folks with power being utter rotten puss filled cunts.
Like honestly. Fuck disc. I hate em. I love digital. But fuck me. Let it be mine. Let me mod it (without cheating in it) let me play it on any console I want. Let it be my $80 of the game to do with as I want.
Like stop being such assholes. Why do these folks gotta turn into hateful cunts cause they got money or they made a game or media or whatever the fuck.
Consumers wouldn’t be as pissed if they weren’t being fisted constantly.
Baby, you keep giving them the money they use to fist you.
True, but ain’t that a bit unfair for you to say? Do you not play games? Or watch stuff?
Isn’t this a “you complain yet you live in a society.” Or whatever.
I also grew up playing games. I won’t stop. And yes, while getting fisted, I’ll complain. You wouldn’t tell someone not to scream when getting attacked.
No it’s not unfair. What I said was factual. People aren’t willing to give up their comforts in order to make real, meaningful change. It’s one of those truths that gets argued against anytime it’s said with people unwilling to admit it to themselves.
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I mean i quit playing games in 2020ish because im sick of getting ripped the fuck off. I don’t watch tv or movies, either, anymore because it’s all sequels and garbage.
Join me and let these industries suffer.
Good for you. And I mean that.
I don’t buy enough games to really be impacted. Bf6 and Helldivers have been the most recent. I also use bf6 and HD to play with my best friend who is 4 states away.
But like I said…I literally was playing bf1 and titanfall all the way to bf6 with no other games bought. I don’t got a lot of time. I play 1 or 2 games a year and be content with that.
But really good for you. More power to you. I’ll try to fight it in another way.
Isn’t this literally victim-shaming? It’s not just game companies doing it, after all. What’s the alternative, to go live alone in the wilderness and not participate in society at all??
You can have change or your can have comfort.
That’s why I love gog, and it’s the only store that gets my gaming money. The games are mine, as long as I keep a backup of the installer. I can do with them what I want.
I see why the newest AAA games are a must have for younger gamers, but as an older one I now have the patience to simply wait until it releases on gog if I actually have the urge to play it.
Digital is fantastic, I miss the boxes and handbooks and feelies, but I don’t miss the discs.
Other stores have DRM free games too. For example Cyberpunk 2077 is DRM free on Steam. DRM, for the most part, is forced by publishers rather than stores.
You can do that with Steam games too. The ones without DRM.
And it’s the developer that chooses if they want DRM.
Well can you see beforehand which game uses Steam DRM? And I still need the client installed to download anything, and even then I only archive the actual game, not any dependency.
The steam store itself doesn’t show if a game uses Steam-DRM (which is a buncha bullshit if you ask me) but the PCGamingWiki usually has that information.
feelies
You are sufficiently old. Good job.
I always wanted Wishbringer SO BAD because it came with that damn rock.
Hell yeah. Love GOG.
But for me, while I love old games, I need my new shit lol.
Like bf6 has been a gem for me. Some bugs and bullshit, but I do like it. Which, call me stupid for this but bf6 and modern battle/war games are a bit of therapy for me. I joined the Marines, got to last week of basic training, came back from team(?) Week and was told to get my shit on the front deck or whatever. Ended up I had hep c. Paperwork fell through and it wasn’t caught till I was almost done
And grant you, I wanted to “fight for America and the people in it” since I was like 7. I was 20 just outta h.s. It tore my world apart. Had to do meds and all that. Pills and injection.
Anyways. Games like battlefield or even the more serious ones like Insurgency helped me use some of the stuff I learned on my own over the years and stuff in basic to not feel like it was all a huge waste of my life.
Tl"dr I enjoy modern fps games because they help me deal with my trauma in life.
99% of games will never release on GoG no matter how old they get though, because once they’re on GoG they’re essentially free.
GoG is great, but GoG is fundamentally never going to be a competitive storefront. It will always be niche and missing most games people want to buy.
Also people don’t seem to realize but you can “back up” digital Xbox and (I believe) PS5 games too. Download them, transfer them to an external HDD or 10 if you want, and then at any stage you can plug them back in to your console, transfer them over to the internal drive, and they work. Even without internet. It just has to be on your console that is marked as “home console”.
once they’re on GoG they’re essentially free.
Unlike all the ones on Steam that never get pirated? Steam DRM is so easy to bypass it may as well not exist. Also, unlike GoG, you can add your pirated game to Steam and play multiplayer.
There’s no way Steam don’t know this is happening which means there’s no way it’s not intended (especially given Gaben’s stance on piracy).
There’s a huge difference between no drm and “easily” bypassed drm.
transfer them over to the internal drive, and they work. Even without internet.
That might work for some games, but there’s an increasing number of games requiring you to establish some sort of connection to the internet even for single player or mostly single player games (Lego Horizon for instance).
Try to transfer one of those and load it up on a new console without an internet connection.
Sure, your “home console” might work for some games for now. But in 10-15 years when Sony is trying to sell you the PS8, they’re going to be cutting off service to the PS5. What happens when you have to take that device in for maintenance and they need to do a factory reset? You need to log in again to activate it, except now it’s a brick that might only be able to play a few games on physical media. Anything downloaded/backed up would likely require that specific account.
By that time I’d be more worried about finding a working PS5 than their auth servers being taken down. That’s also assuming that they have completely removed backwards compatibility, which in an x86 world is highly unlikely.
The fact is that to preserve games forever, digital distribution is actually much better. These consoles will be emulated at some stage, and they won’t be playing physical games.
More games release on GOG when customers show there’s money to be made there. If you make it important to you that your games are DRM-free and spend more money on GOG than Steam, you help tip those scales. It’s not fundamental. If DRM is poison for making money, then fewer games will employ it.
But the games people want to buy on steam aren’t on GoG, and there’s no Steam vs GoG sales charts for people to point publishers to and say “look! Look how much money we will spend if you go drm free on GoG!”.
Also there’s just no denying it, and even trying is disingenuous - a game like GTA 6 releasing on GoG without DRM would sell significantly less than it would on a platform with DRM. It’s just the truth. It would be on torrents and every download site the minute it’s released, and millions and millions and millions of people who were going to buy it would get it for free instead.
In the terrible state that the video game industry is in for developers, releasing a big AAA game DRM-free would be the last game they ever release.
Last I looked into it video game piracy actually had a net benefit on sales. Any advantage DRM has from a sales point of view is null after about 3 months post launch anyway. It can and does kill small indie devs but any big boy in the industry, piracy usually benefits sales.
Piracy never has a benefit on sales. Where are you getting that from?
Don’t be so sure. Apparently they publishers don’t make hard numbers publicly available anymore so there’s no good data but there was a survey of denuvo games.
A Denuvo-protected game cracked in the first week after release can expect to make about 20 percent less revenue than if the DRM had remained in place, according to the study, while a crack six weeks after a game’s release only costs an estimated 5 percent of theoretical total revenue. After 12 weeks, new sales are so negligible that “developers could eventually remove unpopular DRM schemes with minimal losses (and possible gains from strongly DRM-averse consumers)
Unfortunately that still doesn’t answer the question but until publishers post honest numbers we’ll never have the proper metrics to measure the actual impact piracy has. But in the day freeware like Doom basically relied entirely on piracy for sales so it’s not an out of pocket take that piracy could benefit sales. It is an old take though. I’m old.
Edit - Also found this which looks at how piracy can help outside of direct sale conversions: https://jier.org/index.php/journal/article/view/3453/2764
Plenty of the games people want to buy are on GOG. Definitely not all of them, but you can find GOTY winners like Clair Obscur and Baldur’s Gate 3, games that should have won more awards like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and The Alters, awesome indie games like Mina the Hollower and Escape from Ever After, plus the old stuff that GOG restores like Dino Crisis and Alpha Protocol that had pent-up demand. There’s no chart to compare sales, but developers talk, and they know their own sales data. Firms like Circana buy sales data and then sell the analysis back to help companies figure out what will help them make more money, including where people are buying video games.
Also there’s just no denying it, and even trying is disingenuous - a game like GTA 6 releasing on GoG without DRM would sell significantly less than it would in a platform with DRM. It’s just the truth.
That’s easy to claim and impossible to prove. Baldur’s Gate 3 released day 1 without DRM and still went on to sell over 20M copies; how many people do you think pirated it? Millions and millions? There are some people who are always going to pirate, but I think most prefer the experience of just buying the damn thing and getting better service out of it, not the least of which is quick and easy patching. We also now live in a world where Denuvo is fully broken open. There’s no difference in one’s ability to pirate once the game has been cracked at all. Piracy is going to happen one way or another, and GTA6 is basically guaranteed to make more money than any other video game that came before it.
In the terrible state that the video game industry is in for developers, releasing a big AAA game DRM-free would be the last game they ever release.
This is demonstrably false, given the AAA games that release on GOG all the time.
given the AAA games that release on GOG all the time.
Why could you only name like 3 then? Which 2026 AAA games have released on GOG?
Which GOG release bankrupted a company by way of piracy?
Yep, that’s absolutely it and it doesn’t matter how it’s handled the will always be assholes. So we should go back to public measures.
Let it be my
$80$59,99 of the game to do with as I want.Never forget, never forgive.
Nintendo 64 games cost like $60-$80 back in the late 90s.
They were also complicated circuit boards with full color manuals and box graphics, none of which is in digital nor the overhead of the creation thereof.
And they could not be patched later, so the testing was absolutely bonkers.
and today they sell like 10x as many copies.
The big blockbusters do. Most games don’t make back their development cost.
Yeah fair it is arbitrary, but the line in the sand must be drawn somewhere. So coming from PC platform and 59,99 being the agreed upon number for probably decade or more is a good enough arbitrary point to use as a line in the sand.
There shouldn’t be an arbitrary “line in the sand” for games. Just like there shouldn’t be for any other product. Because products are not all the same. Some games might take an hour to beat and others have endless replayability and it shouldn’t be expected that these all cost the same.
No, there most definitely should, there should be a line or set point for everything. A point from which onward one no longer accepts any further abuse.
Yes sure we can have discussion on where that line stands with gaming, like “no preorders” or “no p2w”, but there most definitely should be one or even multiple different ones and that should be upheld or else we do get current climate of AAA games riddled with mtx, psychological manipulation, getting more expensive yearly, no longer any long term guarantees either, while gameplay, story and performance quality dropping as well.
Without a set point or line, corporations wil keep on pushing the boundaries every single year as we keep allowing it.
A point from which onward one no longer accepts any further abuse.
A higher price does not mean abuse. It very well could just mean its a higher quality game with more content.
or else we do get current climate of AAA games riddled with mtx, psychological manipulation, getting more expensive yearly, no longer any long term guarantees either, while gameplay, story and performance quality dropping as well.
How does a low price stop that from happening? If anything it’s the opposite.
I wouldn’t really use 60$ as a low price, but that’s beside the point.
Your missing the trees for the forest. It’s not the low price, but setting a line which one does not cross.
Not having that line and constantly accepting every subsequent new mechanic to extract more profit from us has resulted in the current state of AAA gaming industry.
As i said we can discuss where that line runs, 60$ is just my own personal line, but that line, not specifically price, should exist and should not be crossed. Id agree with the “no pre-orders” as well as games should be only bought after independent thrid party reviews have gone out. Just that this line doesn’t fit into current context, this one fits better under a post of a releasing of a new highly anticipated game.
Though where would you draw the line?
I’d pay $150 for a great finished game. They don’t make that anymore, and you can’t make anything good and sell it for $60. So I’m not sure what you people want?! You want these companies to spend 3 billion making a game, making it perfect, and charging only $60 for it. Insane. No wonder why gamers get treated like entitled complainers.
Dude, really. Therer are uncountable numbers of good indy games way below 60. So it is possible to produce good games sven below that price point.
What i want is AAA games to stop implementing predatory tactics to squeeze out as much cash from consumers as possible while making games even more expensive. Once they do that we can start discussing price again.
You’re aware of the concept of inflation, no?
Are you aware of how much gaming has increased in popularity? Already this should cover the difference inflation makes over the years. When we add in profit form micro transactions and the only reason left to increase prices is greed.
My business has increased in popularity, too. I’m raising prices.
As is you’re right, I’m still not going to buy.
Are you saying that gaming increasing in popularity is a reason for companies to decrease the price? I’m not sure you know how this works.
I’m saying that inflammation cant be used as a good justification for increased prices when the profit has increased significantly.
Especially if it’s done by the biggest companies who are the main drivers of everything wrong with gaming.
The perceived value back then was not having to pluck down 25c every time you played at the arcade. So even if the price was high it seemed cheap in the long run.
Editt : reading it again I’ve missed my point by a decade, this applies mostly to the late 80s
Indeed… and I never understood the stand against prices set by publishers, developers, artists, or people… for monetary support calculated for the human time, work, and effort done for a mirracle to share and support in hope…
If the game is honestly updated with effort and hard work I will pay $80.
I clean air bnbs, houses, condos, and all that for a living. I don’t do shit for less than $100.
I get folks gotta eat. But if you want my money for your product, it better be that good dick shit. It better be high quality and ducking finished. Not this “oh here’s we got updates coming, the game is has a roadmap.”
Like motherfucker the game can’t drive it doesn’t need a road map, it’s need to be finished.
Wanna release the unfinished version? $20. But give me user support, working graphics, good multi if it’s that game, all the bells and whistles and I’ll pay $80 if you show me you goddamn actually care for the thing you are making.
Show me the love for your product/art/work and I will gladly give you money to support you for doing something you care about. And I mean even the ceos. Have some goddamn integrity and humility for fucking once.
Sorry to rant.
No need to apologize for ranting, rant on.
It was $50 before that and as high as $90 before that. $60 is kind of arbitrary, honestly.
Yeah, but it suffices as a line in the sand. We could probably use horse armor as well, but that’s even more arbitrary and there are few publisher who have managed to keep mtx based market under control and run a free successful game for years, ex POE.
$60 in 2007 is a bit under $100 now in terms of purchasing power. Games have essentially gone down in price.
Yes, but that’s just finding justifications for publisher who use every possible opportunity to screw us over at every opportunity while delivering shittier products every year.
No need to run free PR for them, corpos have whole departments for that. Fuck em, use the same mentality corpos use towards us, show them no mercy or forgiveness. Treat corpos with the contempt they deserve. We are the ones who have to exert the counter force, not just accept whatever they throw at us.
Why would you ever buy anything from a corporation like that?! They aren’t selling you food. This is pathetic. Gamers are pathetic.
We shouldn’t, that’s the point. Most, probably all AAA companies should crash and burn.
Microsoft is fulfilling that by buying half of them up. They’ve been incapable of not killing off studios they buy.
On console, digital only means the only market is them. That’s why this is happening, and it’s the real issue. The ownership thing is an issue too, but that’s been dead for a while, even with physical disks. Very few games worked with only the disk install and no internet, so the disk doesn’t let you play without their support anyway.
I’ve been PC only for a long time now, so I’m fine with digital only. On PC we have some choice of marketplace. Sure, (I’m probably going to get flammed for pointing this out) Valve has used their market dominance to force price parity, but it’s still better than consoles. Console players are about to get fucked, and they’re probably going to turn around and thank them for it.
There’s nothing wrong with getting fisted.
No, I love fisting. But with consent.
Because people with money have the time and patience to arrange an eloquent argument to legislators.
Easy, and correct, to say “But a lot of those guys are bought and paid for.” They are, but they also need to convince the gullible representatives; the ones that want to think they’re doing the right thing, and will vote yes anytime a bill has “For Children” in the name.
But senators aren’t convinced by “Like stop being such assholes.” They need a mature, well-arranged argument that demonstrates unfairness and harm. SKG showed when it’s well-described, it can have effects.
I feel like everyone in this thread is ignoring the literal headline.
The point being made is that the consumer chose these rights-infringing, privacy-corrupting, ownership-destroying choices.
Then OF COURSE companies weaponised it.
The issue is that your average Joe doesn’t think for a damn second in his life, and picks up whatever is put down.
Yeah, arguments that blank percent of people are morally good are insane since… Most people dont really think about long term morals of their decisions day to day if ever. Most people just live and do by convenience without asking if it is morally good but simply believing the self to be.
It needs to be convenient to do good things for people to do them and the convenient option for a long time has been giving up ownership rights.
Yeah … Morality is subjective… If the majority of a given population does a thing, that thing is moral within that population.
Ironically enough the topic of whether or not morality is ‘subjective’ is also inherently up for interpretation. There’s literally a whole philosophical field of study for this.
That being said, I’ll counter this sentiment by saying that the things we find to be ‘moral’ as a species are more often than not the things that help our species prosper (i.e. taboos for murder, theft, bullying, sexual violence, etc.). Sure, there may be a certain degree of variation within the moral frameworks of a culture, but you’ll be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t have that baseline of enforcing against most forms of explicit harm which can come about against members of that society. If that weren’t the case then we would have gone extinct a long time ago.
You’re confusing biological utility with objective truth.
Sure, human societies share baselines against murder and theft because societies without them collapse. But that’s just evolutionary pragmatism. A behavior that keeps a species alive isn’t a cosmic moral law; it’s just a survival mechanism. If a beehive kills off its drones to survive the winter, it’s not being “moral”, it’s just trying not to die.
Even your premise that the prosperity of our species is inherently “good”, relies on our own subjective bias that we prefer being alive. The universe itself doesn’t care.
But let’s apply your own standard back to the actual topic: video games.
If your baseline for objective morality is “things that help our species prosper,” then a corporation shifting to digital-only game licenses has absolutely zero impact on human survival. By your own logic, it’s completely amoral.
If you still want to argue that going digital-only is “immoral,” you have to abandon your evolutionary argument and admit you’re just projecting a subjective cultural preference onto a consumer inconvenience.
You’re confusing biological utility with objective truth.
Confusing them? No. We simply have different standards for what qualifies as objective truth. For me, if your truth gets you harmed or worse, it’s wrong. Simple as that. I am acutely aware that there isn’t any universal moral standard when it comes to existence at large, but for my own and humanity’s purposes, those which help us get by better than others are the “truer” ones.
Even your premise that the prosperity of our species is inherently “good”, relies on our own subjective bias that we prefer being alive. The universe itself doesn’t care.
As with what I just stated, it doesn’t matter whether the universe itself cares or not. The universe can frankly do whatever the hell it wants (as it certainly does); reality to me and many others is that which I can sense and experience in my lifetime, and that’s all it ever will be. For any reasonable person’s purposes, the universe’s (as a personification) stake in their lives shouldn’t hold any stake in what they do or do not do. And that especially goes for their morality. Nihilism is equivalent to just being mindless and inert matter on a biological level, and that’s honestly just sad given what humanity and its qualifiers have been able to achieve.
If your baseline for objective morality is “things that help our species prosper,” then a corporation shifting to digital-only game licenses has absolutely zero impact on human survival. By your own logic, it’s completely amoral.
Wrong. As with any complex systems we’ve been able to create in our societies, this will certainly be up for debate, but you’ll have to concede that not being able to own the things you purchase (as humans have done and have been able to do for the majority, if not the entirety of our existence) sets a frankly awful precedent for what these corporations and governments will feel they are entitled to do. To pretend it has always been like this is or it’s inevitable is fatalism, which like nihilism, is sad, and frankly pathetic. I pity that mentality.
If you still want to argue that going digital-only is “immoral,” you have to abandon your evolutionary argument and admit you’re just projecting a subjective cultural preference onto a consumer inconvenience.
And what are these “consumer inconveniences”? Because by your logic, the universe shouldn’t care about that either, considering that it’s a human construct and therefore abstracted from the “objective features” of reality. This is the main problem with your mentality. If morality doesn’t matter, then nothing does. And if nothing matters, then this topic is redundant. It’s nothing more than a spending of entropy.
Think what you want to think, believe what you want to believe. But if you’re seriously following the route of nihilism as if it will lead to some sort of peace of mind, I’ve got some bad news for you: it’s just going to make you feel worse. And with that, I’ve got a funny, albeit facetious image relevant to this conversation that I’ve been looking for an excuse to use somewhere. So here it is. Don’t take it too seriously. (Or do, I’m not your dad.)
You are attempting to mask a highly subjective, culturally specific worldview as an objective universal truth. Your entire argument rests on a foundation of ethnocentrism and philosophical contradictions, projecting your modern consumer habits onto the entirety of the human race.
You claim you are not confusing biological utility with objective truth, but then immediately define your standard for truth as: “for me, if your truth gets you harmed or worse, it’s wrong.” That is not objective truth. That is utilitarian pragmatism. Gravity is an objective truth; if you jump off a cliff, it will pull you down whether it harms you or not. Reality does not bend to accommodate human comfort, preference, or survival.
By declaring that reality is only what you can “sense and experience in my lifetime,” you have completely abandoned objectivity. You are arguing for a self-serving, subjective moral framework while simultaneously trying to enforce it as a universal law for all of “humanity.”
The most glaring flaw in your argument is your claim that owning purchased things is something humans have done “for the majority, if not the entirety of our existence.” This is profoundly ethnocentric and historically illiterate.
You are taking a highly specific, modern, Western capitalist paradigm, the individual commodification and perpetual ownership of goods, and projecting it backward across all of human history and across all global cultures. For the vast majority of human existence, property was often communal, tied to land stewardship, or dictated by complex systems of patronage and social hierarchy. The idea that an individual has an inherent, natural, almost biological right to permanently own the intangible intellectual labor of another human being for a one-time transaction is a recent cultural anomaly.
When you claim that changing a software licensing model sets an “awful precedent” for humanity, you aren’t defending humanity. You are aggressively defending the modern Western consumer culture you happen to live in, mistaking your local economic norms for the laws of nature.
Finally, you are completely misusing the concept of nihilism to dismiss a legally and structurally accurate argument. Pointing out that a shift from physical to digital software distribution has zero impact on biological human survival is not “nihilism.” It is basic perspective.
Acknowledging that the universe does not care about End-User License Agreements does not mean “nothing matters.” It simply means that your inconvenience over a corporate software transition is not a cosmic moral tragedy. You can find profound meaning in human achievement, art, and philosophy without holding onto the delusion that you are morally entitled to permanently own the digital labor of a development team.
You are perfectly entitled to your subjective preference for physical media. But stop pretending your consumer inconveniences are objective moral imperatives for the human species.
Woah there, ethnocentrism is quite the claim pal. Especially when you have absolutely nothing to back it up with aside from my own personal opinions (which I certainly never claimed to be entirely objective despite what you seem to be asserting).
Now admittedly, I am defining objective truth through my own interpretative lens. However, you’re not exactly an angel yourself in that regard, which is precisely why I’m doing it in the first place.
To make my point clear, I’ll give a couple examples of what you yourself had written earlier:
- Even your premise that the prosperity of our species is inherently “good”, relies on our own subjective bias that we prefer being alive. The universe itself doesn’t care.
Despite my own opinions on the matter of whether the universe “cares” or not, this is an inherently subjective assertion. There’s no way to prove such a metaphysical claim.
- If your baseline for objective morality is “things that help our species prosper,” then a corporation shifting to digital-only game licenses has absolutely zero impact on human survival. By your own logic, it’s completely amoral.
Again, blatantly subjective. On what grounds is the shift to digital-only media not harmful? And even if you were to back it up, it would still be subjective regardless. There’s nothing materially concrete about any of your potential evidence. I realize I’m somewhat undermining my point here, but for the sake of demonstrating the folly of your handwaving of any viewpoint aside from your own with accusations of “ethnocentrism”, “philosophical contradictions”, “historical illiteracy”, etc., I’ll let it slide.
On that topic (of historical illiteracy) my point wasn’t that people could own goods for the majority of human existence and that was that. No, my point was that there has never been a system quite like this where consumers have been sold media under the impression of obtaining ownership when that isn’t the case at all. You can make all the claims you want about the past, but specifically regarding media it’s never been like this. You wouldn’t see digital enshittification happening in 10 000 BCE.
You’re also being bizarrely presumptuous of my understanding of property and how it’s been understood in the cultural zeitgeist. I’m inclined to believe you’re being disingenuous but for the sake of charity I’ll permit you the benefit of the doubt. I’m well aware that the concept of guaranteed individual rights (particularly from liberalism), especially with regards to property, are a very recent development in relation to human existence. My viewpoint comes from my own disgust with corporate entities dicking over people who by no means deserve it under any rational perspective regarding our current laws and establishments.
Additionally (and I know you know this), human society has never been so cut and dry as property having been strictly communal for the entirety of our existence until, say, 20 millennia ago. Obviously we’ve been in anarchistic societies for quite a long time as a species, but it’s not like you couldn’t own anything. That’s just ridiculous, even without modern liberal beliefs. Barter systems have been a thing for essentially forever (trading labour for labour by way of abstract ideals, far from a “recent cultural anomaly”), and aside from very select and overall arbitrary differences, humans in the Stone Age were essentially identical to ourselves now, ideas and all, however early in development said ideas were. This isn’t Plato’s Cave.
When you claim that … changing a software licensing model sets an “awful precedent” … you aren’t defending humanity. You are aggressively defending the modern Western consumer culture you happen to live in, mistaking your local economic norms for the laws of nature.
Forgive me, but I find this part in particular kind of funny if not really strange. First of all, it’s not as simple as “changing a licensing model”, and since I know that and I know you know that, I’m not even going to bother addressing that. What really gets me is this idea that I’m mistaking my culture for the “laws of nature”.
Says who? You? Because I certainly didn’t say anything to even suggest that. I’m certainly not “aggressively” defending it either, that’s quite a silly term to use for a dumb back-and-forth on the internet. I’m well aware there’s a difference between reality and culture (clearly).
It seems you’re mistaking my consideration of contemporary society and its innate relevance as a treatment of its doctrines as dogma. Which really couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m not a cult member of “Western society” as you seem to be weirdly painting me as. I merely believe that if people can reasonably come to expect one thing from society, and they get none of that as was promised, it’s hypocritical and thereby wrong. Now you can make all the claims you want about it being a “cultural concept”, but that’s theory, not reality. Theory doesn’t improve anything on its own, especially when applied so pretentiously.
Anyway, because your arguments are inherently broken by means of your assertion of the “subjectivity of my beliefs”, while you literally assert your subjective beliefs at the same time as reality, your entire point is just futile. You can’t deny the importance of a culture and its influence on the world while at the same time asserting your own beliefs as the singular truth. That’s nothing short of hypocrisy.
A free market requires a perfectly informed consumer. That’s impossible before you begin to consider how marketing is dishonest
I gotta disagree. The only requirement is that the consumer doesn’t blindly trust companies when buying things more expensive than bread.
It should be common sense to check what they actually get when they buy something that 1. Isn’t tangible and 2. Is expected to last. But people don’t, not because they’re not perfectly informed, but because they lack basic critical thinking.
Time isn’t an issue either. It takes 10 minutes, one time, to figure out what stores give you actual ownership and which don’t, in the case of gaming.
When all options are rigged, it’s pretty rude to blame “the consumer”
I actually agree that physical media is better for consumers. If I buy a game, I think I should own it. I should be able to sell it, lend it to a friend, or keep playing it decades from now without worrying about a company flipping a switch. Physical media is objectively more consumer-friendly in that regard.
What I don’t agree with is the narrative that corporations had to force everyone into digital by sabotaging physical releases. That’s not how I remember it.
Steam became wildly popular because consumers embraced it almost immediately. Instant downloads, automatic updates, cloud saves, massive sales, and never having to swap discs were conveniences people overwhelmingly wanted. Publishers certainly recognized the benefits for themselves, more control, no used game market, lower distribution costs, but they didn’t invent the demand. They took advantage of a demand that consumers had already created.
In a sense, we shot ourselves in the foot. We collectively chose convenience over ownership because, at the time, it seemed like a worthwhile trade. Now we’re living with the consequences of that decision.
It’s completely fair to push for stronger ownership rights today. But I think it’s a mistake to pretend that consumers were dragged into digital kicking and screaming. For the overwhelming majority of gamers, digital won because they chose it.
The problem isn’t with digital. The problem is with digital licenses and rights.
Exactly. And geo restrictions.
Which stems from licensing and rights
Discs are just as digital as internet data piped through fiber optics. It’s a deceitful term which doesn’t cover the true change: perpetual license vs time limited license.
I like that discs aren’t tied to an online account, so anyone in possession of it can use it to play the game. The company can’t take away access like they can banning your online account.
You can resell or trade a disc though. Or at least have been able to up until now I bet they start tying those to specific accounts now while they still make them until 2028.
This intentionally misses the point.
It’s physical and digital distribution.
While that is a shift that happened, it’s not the distribution method people actually have problems with, even if they sometimes misattribute it. The problem, which you see mentioned most of the time, is ownership.
Compare how people feel about Sony vs. GOG, which will just let you download DRM-free installer files. Both are distributed via the Internet, but people feel very different about them, right?
Physical discs aren’t DRM free though - the disc is the DRM.
Of course people like DRM free digital games, because it means they can get them for free.
It is however transferable and resellable legally. Digital only versions, even DRM free are not.
In my opinion, this has been one of the only things about consoles that has been a plus side compared to PC. Now that is gone and I can’t imagine why anyone would stay except out of a lack of finances to move to PC.
Also, nope. If people only liked digital DRM free games because you could pirate them GOG wouldn’t exist and it would have been out of business years ago. You are believing corporate propaganda with that lie.
I like DRM free because games with DRM usually run like shit or at least noticably worse compared to DRM free.
Also, you ever had a day off work to game during a Steam or PlayStation outage? I was able to play all of my GOG games with zero problem. I don’t even know if GOG has ever gone down before, because it doesn’t matter to let me play my games. Same thing with SOME physical PlayStation games usually single player. Could play that during outages too.
Technically no, they’re not supposed to be re-sold. Says so on box and disc.
DRM free means there’s no digital rights management, meaning there’s no ownership restrictions essentially.
GoG was also, reading between the lines, recently going to be closed. It was basically given to one of the founders of CDPR. Why would CDPR do that if it was making any sort of profit?
I think the not allowed to be resold and saying so on the box must depend on your country. In mine it is allowed and doesn’t say you can’t on the box just that you have to abide by Sony terms of service and all that which they’ve said before doesn’t prohibit you reselling the discs.
I know what DRM is but DRM free games are still restricted in that I can’t trade or sell it however if gog ever banned me since I already have the offline installers backed up I could still continue to enjoy my games and they can’t ever take them away short of suing me or something.
Sony already said before you can sell and trade disc games (which is why they are going after them now)
Also GOG has an annual revenue of around $250 million. I think they (CDPR) just wanted to focus more on being a game publisher instead of running a competing storefront against steam.
It sounds logical. However, by that definition, game boxes with download codes would be physical as well… Yet Sony isn’t killing those.
To me it’s clear that it’s not about the method of distribution or the way data is processed, it’s about their business model in general.
The game is still downloaded from a server via codes in a box. The distribution of the game is still digital.
How about we ship a box with both a digital download code and a disc? Would you classify it as digital?
I’d classify the digital copy as digital, and the disc as physical if it has the game on it.
This is pretty straight forward man. Did you download the game from a server? Digital. Did you play it or install it from a physical medium? Physical.
Did you play it or install it from a physical medium? Physical.
So you agree that it’s related to the medium then. Not to the distribution.
As you mention, a distributed box without a disc counts as digital. A distributed box with a disc counts as physical.
If GOG just hired one full time intern to go ahead and bake Proton into their platform so they could have Linux support that isn’t completely broken, I’d probably start getting more games on their platform again.
Edit: Oh, looks like it’s on the way. Maybe I’d better start wishlisting.
I mean, I’m fully okay with settling for Heroic as my launcher until GOG gets it official.
Can we stop spreading the propaganda for them? Sony lied about digital sales by including digital-only games in their figures.
Every game with a physical release, according to their developers, makes most of their sales on disc. It’s literally always a 70/30 split every single time (give or take 10%). I cannot find any evidence of a game that sold more in its digital form than physical
Where can I learn more about this. Frankly, I will not just take your word for it on such a bold claim.
That’s fair, but it’s ubiquitous. Search Twitter and Bluesky for official game studio and personal developer accounts. They almost always post about their sales soon after a launch. I don’t have any on hand, sorry. I do remember suckerpunch and insomniac doing so all the time.
My claim would be very easily disproven if it wasn’t true
Data from Insomniac Games, leaked last year
The article you linked makes me think it isn’t quite that easy to find proof.
- releases digital-only game
- “hmm, 0 physical copies sold… looks like people prefer digital”
I believe you, and im sure it’s because I’ve lost passion for just about everything at this point, but if the disk doesnt hold the game what really is the point anymore. If we bought the entire game on hard drive and the console had a hot swappable port so we used them like cartridges that would be great. I shouldn’t need internet access to play a game by myself. But with the current fuckery, the disc just holds part of the game right, and you have to download the rest of the game when you put it in the console.
You can also use that license thatvomes on that disc and transfer it and sell it or trade it to someone else if you choose.
That choice is being taken away.
Ah that makes sense. I wonder if there are people who create accounts for each game they digitally purchase. Then sell the sign in creds when they are done playing. Talk about a giant pain in the ass that would be
Sony and Microsoft’s Xbox will ban you immediately for this but because Steam is a lot more consumer friendly people do sell whole accounts with a game or two tied to them. There’s a site (that’s kind of shady ish so look out for that) that I have used called G2A that you can buy whole steam accounts with games on.
I think that some of those codes are stolen though or something of that nature but steam doesn’t do anything about it but that is 100% speculation on my part. I thought I heard a dev of a game say something like that one time though that they’d rather you pirate it than buy it off G2A.
Edit: thinking about it more I don’t think its stolen its just the simple fact that you can “trade” or “sell” the entire game that way by selling the whole account tied to it and the game developers don’t like that.
Reasons game developers don’t like steam keys from sites like G2A are:
- Exploiting regional price differences.
- Splitting keys out of bundles.
- Scamming game developers for free keys (claiming they want to promote the game with a giveaway).
- Keys bought with stolen cards (that get chargebacked causing direct loss).
The last reason could apply to reselling steam accounts as well.
Thank you for this I was wondering what the deal was with that. So some of them are stolen.
That really sucks. I’ll probably avoid them going forward
What nonsense. What matters isn’t whether we use physical disks or not. And it’s all digital anyway, you don’t get many games on vinyl these days. The real issue is whether you own the games you buy. As GOG is proving, game ownership is something that publishers can easily offer, regardless of the delivery mechanism. If Sony would step up and do the same, killing physical discs wouldn’t be a problem. It’s a trust issue.
GOG doesn’t give you ownership of the game the way physical media does though. Unless they’ve added a feature to sell your used games?
Hard drives are physical you can even put it on tape or break out the floppies. No drm is the real winner and true ownership
No drm is the real winner and true ownership
Wish more people understood this, rather than fetishizing hardware.
Good point, I’m guessing it probably falls short of physical media in that way. As I understand it, they let you download an install file for the games you purchase, which you can save and use offline. I doubt that publishers would put effort into enabling a second hand games market
That is true, you can download and keep the install files wherever you wish. You could burn it onto a CD if you want to have it like in the old days.
What we want is DRM-free games, not your bullshit
Fucking morons
I choose to crush corporations until they are so small they are easily drowned by pissing on them.
I just wanted to add that it’s also really stupid to claim that “consumers chose thing” because companies did it since they found it more profitable. Companies do many things people don’t actively want (or even dislike) for profit.
An interesting example is brought up by Andreas Malm in his book “Fossil Capital”. He explains how consumers didn’t chose for the manufacturing of electronics and lots of other things to move to China. Companies moved their manufacturing there because it was cheaper and would increase their profits. Now the choice for many consumers is basically to buy Chinese-made or not buy at all. I know since I actually tried a few years ago!
That is absolutely not true. Companies chose cloud-streamed gaming. But because no one saw it as useful, it didn’t catch on and Stadia ended up shuttering their services. Companies chose 3D TVs, but consumers didn’t. We are seeing the “choice of AI” in home computing, and it’s remarkable how long they have attempted to extend the effort of “forcing consumers to choose it”, but to their credit, there are at least some home AI afficionados that somehow love Windows 11 Copilot.
I can assume you were not part of the digital games zeitgeist, but I can assure you, a great many (perhaps non-vocal) gamers were, and were very much for it.
I feel like one shouldn’t conflate liking something with choosing something. You definitely have a point that consumers can stop things. If enough consumers dislike something enough, it will likely fail. Like you point out though, it was still companies that made the choice to go for cloud gaming. They were just wrong about it being profitable as far as I can tell.
I was part of it and I love digital games (gimme drm free), still doesn’t mean I actually chose things to go this way!
