Discussion summary
Discussions centered on the concept of ownership in gaming, comparing digital licenses to physical media and other entertainment forms. Participants debated whether digital games are truly owned or merely licensed, and the implications for access and transfer.
What the discussion says
- Physical media offers a sense of ownership and transferability.
- Digital games are often viewed as revocable licenses, not ownership.
- Some compare game ownership to owning a book or a sports ticket.
- Concerns about digital rights management and access longevity.
“Video games are more like books than live sports.”
“It's about whether you truly own the game or just have a license.”
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- Hacker News
- If you think in terms of ownership, even then digital is not that bad. I’ve owned digital games since Xbox 360 and I can still play them to this day on my Xbox series X.
But not all of my physical games CD/DVDs are in mint condition and some have scratches.
by me551ah - Sure, but they keep raising the price of everything. And in a world where ram and STORAGE are at a multiple premium, deleting high density discs is completely outside of reality
- I own a decent library of retro games, sized in the hundreds.
Part of my intake process is to rip my games onto a digital format. Owning the physical media, and acquiring the backup legally, gives me a strong legal foothold for creating backup discs or using emulation.
by hx8 - I think this is a big element. I’ve been feeling this a bit too. I’ve been a physical-game buyer in the past - usually saving money by buying used games.
But I’m not going to keep a collection of old consoles in my living room, so at this point it feels more likely that I will be able to actually play games further into the future if I buy digitally.
This is the opposite of what proponents of physical media heavily argue - indeed, many here are making it their only argument - but I suspect it’s how lots of ‘regular people’ that aren’t saturated in digital rights politics feel.
by jrmg - You can play them, but the license gives you no right to transfer ownership. This feels like a huge problem to me, especially with ebooks.
I’d love to see regulation around guaranteeing consumers the ability to transfer ownership of digital goods in a similar way to the analog counterpart.
by criddell - To take a different perspective than ownership as "right to re-sell" or ownership as "the right to use in perpetuity," I think there is also value in considering ownership as responsibility to maintain those rights.
When one owns property, they get benefits from it, but they also have the responsibility to maintain the property or else it wastes away. Sometimes this incurs costs you wouldn't get with leasing, and sometimes it makes ownership more expensive than renting. But still I think that responsibility is a virtue in itself. Not everything should be consumable.
by Humorist2290 - > Because PC is an open platform, people have figured this out and will continue to figure out bypasses in case things go south (which they haven't so far, thankfully
Actually not quite, as security measures keep increasing across macOS and Windows.
Before someone brings Linux into the picture, most folks don't know Tuxedo, System 76 and co exist, what matters is what is on display at Media Markt, Saturn, FNAC, Publico,....
by pjmlp - Who cares what people know about? PC is still an open platform for you to boot alternative software.
Most people don’t know how to even “acquire” software without the DRM. It’s not really anyone’s job to spread news and tell people to go learn.
If they get interested and care that much to preserve what they have, they can google and learn. Many have learnt about Linux due to the recent PS5 jailbreak for instance.
- >Everyone wants to be Netflix
This is the most perfect sentence about this situation
by jdw64 - Yep, agreed. Recurring, consistent revenue is the ultimately a common-sense business best interest. It can be extremely unfortunate for consumers as there's an unaligned incentive here.by wxw
- I'm sad that Gabe Newell will retire one day, and Steam's benevolent dictatorship will go down the same route Sony just did.
The convenience of digital game storefronts can cut both ways. For now Steam is on our side, but there is no guarantee it will stay that way.
by pprotas - This is a large part of why I went with a Retroid Pocket over buying a Switch 2. It’s not nearly as powerful but it’ll run Linux and most indie games I buy on GOG. It’s more work of course but knowing that the games I buy I’ll be able to play into the future on any number of devices is worth it.by trescenzi
- I'll second this approach. I've been using my Miyoo Mini+ quite a bit recently and the complete lack of this sort of bullshit has been very refreshing. No multi-GB game or system updates to download before you can start playing or nags to sign into online services. I can just pick it up and start playing.
I will have to look into the Retroid Pocket. Thanks for the plug.
by ethagnawl - I reckon the Switch 2 still has cartridges although not all of them actually contain the game.by dominicrose
- > If anything, video games were late compared to something like the music industry, where not owning your music has been the status quo for a while now!
My perception is that the music industry is better than other parts of the entertainment industry in this regard. I imagine what the author is thinking of is streaming, which I treat as a sort of on-demand radio. There is an understanding that it is ephemeral. A customer concerned with “owning” their music would not be confused by this and seek another avenue, which in the case of the music industry is both wider, richer and more free than those of adjacent industries.
The common dedicated formats used for distribution: the compact disc and vinyl record, do not have copy protection, which is a better situation than what movies and video games are in. Online music stores invariably deliver you music as a simple computer file, with no copy protection or platform or connectivity requirements. This is the rule rather than the exception, which is not the case when making movie or video game purchases on these types of stores.
- Ownership as in resale-able.
Eventually someone important enough will force digital resales to become reality, changing everything to require KYC.
by password4321 - KYC? The only context I know it from is 'Know your customer' in banking.by benj111
- > Eventually someone important enough will force digital resales to become reality
Honest question: why? Why would anyone important enough to hold that power actually use it to force resales to exist? Who actually has the incentives to make this happen?
- Resale-able maybe, unable to be revoked I think is more important.
As in you can't wake up one morning and your game is gone overnight because copyright around in-game music changed.
by Avicebron - I've been running a small game dev studio for ~20 years, and the one change I think must be made, is to ban the usage of "buy" when it comes to games. Games are licensed, not bought, and that should be crystal clear to those who are paying.
Most of the games people play runs using proprietary software and/or licenses, and often on very specific hardware, with game features that makes sense for the amount of players the game has. Requiring that people should be able to play such games if the company stops running it would completely change and limit how games are developed, and in many cases require a completely different version of the game to be co-developed in case people stop playing it. It would with 100 % certainty result in slower development, fewer games, and worse games.
I do of course think that developers should try to make games playable without the company being involved, within reason. Some games that do not have licensing issues or complicated server backends as a requirement could be made available without too much work. But for things like e.g. MMORPGs it's nearly impossible. If your ever developed bigger software systems you know how many moving parts are involved, so just imagine the difficulty of making it work on consumer machines...
- Changing the verbiage would be better in that it would be honest, but I still find it absolutely despicable that the very concept of owning a game basically disappeared.
Tons of games people play do NOT have notable online features outside leaderboards, cosmetics or other inconsequential mechanics.
by folkrav - > It would with 100 % certainty result in slower development, fewer games, and worse games
No, it won't. People used to develop games without requiring publisher's services. The issue of "it's hard to do nowadays" is self made. It's only hard because you made it this way. You can design a game that will be playable when its publisher or developer close their doors.
by skotobaza - You are talking about online games here which are a subset of games. And I agree they exist in the moment since they rely on external servers and other players.
Most games aren't online games though and those would realistically last forever if it wasn't for companies shutting down activation servers or download servers. There's also a problem where old games get delisted. If you want to play an old game today you can just buy the disk of ebay. Now the only way to buy a game is through the digital store which won't be selling the game forever, with no way to officially transfer copies between players.
by Gigachad - The question I'm left with: in the past, the uproar over these types of changes seemed to make companies change their mind when considering very anti-consumer decisions. Now, they just go ahead anyway.
What's different? How do we get back to how it was before? I know the current political climate is one that enables this sort of thing. There are parallels with the current movement also WRT to the employer/employee relationship.
Beyond that, there's still more at play. In tech, and specifically on this site, I see a lot more complicity and fatigue when discussing these issues. I can't help but think that also contributes. I'm not saying everyone should always be mad at everything. But it does seem like there's a generational component to this where we haven't passed down an essential feature of a hacker, namely the anti-establishment bent.
I suppose that's collateral damage of a culture tolerating lots of people rushing in to grab their bag of cash and then get out.
- There’s indeed quite an uproar and I’m not unsympathetic to it, but only 3% of Sony’s 2025 revenue came from physical game sales.
https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/corporatereport/... (page 37)
by teamonkey - Companies have realized that they can just call the bluff and the vocal minority of customers rarely matter.
The ultimate leverage a consumer has is to not by something if they don't like the terms.
- This is the result of all the "culture wars" we've had in recent years. At the beginning of it, companies hedged and pulled back if there were any sort of mass PR event due to them taking a stance in the Culture War Topic of the Day. As time went on and there was Culture War after Culture War after Culture War, either consumers got tired of tracking who was "bad" or companies realized they could get away with anything and it didn't seemingly affect their bottom line.
It's either that or companies don't really have to worry because there is essentially zero competition in the current economy with all the pro-monopoly administrations we've had for the past 16+ years.
by vinyl7 - Companies need to earn money, so the only leverage we as customers is to NOT buy their products. Educate our kids that such practices are EVIL and to buy the products it means to support those EVIL practices. Don't be afraid to call upon moral. Kids need to understand moral from the beginning, or they will be corrupted by bad practices.by markus_zhang
- IMO Empathy. Empathy used to exist up until around 2015 in businesses where losing a customer was a really big deal, there used to be a cost in losing a customer, and a cost in gaining a customer, so empathy was the building block in helping a business build and maintain their customers. While that's still generally true for small companies, once you reach a global reach, for the most part the cost of gaining and losing a customer is FAR FAR less, so the empathy is lost too.
I also think politics is a pretty big factor in this too, as regulation was used when companies and customers had an impasse, and well, gestures everywhere look at the general global political client right now. Not much empathy going around these days...
by zythyx - The uproar was around 2013 when Xbox tried to do this and Playstation made it their marketing to mock this. It's been a decade since and most people have moved digital. Physical games started getting too large to fit on disks, or they shipped with some buggy pre release version that was expected to day one update to a usable release.
Physical games as they exist today are more just license keys already. It's likely all the console makers wanted to ditch physical a while ago but put it off after the outrage over xbox.
by Gigachad