PlayStation keeps reminding us why digital ownership sucks

I have content I purchased on steam 19yrs ago. Shit was built for completely different hardware but I can go install and play it right now. The physical console games I bought that year only work in consoles that have long since broken. I can go play HL2 whenever I want, to play my copy of THPS3, I have to find and buy a PS2 that still works.
Digital ownership can apparently work just fine
Sony is reminding us that Sony is a shitty company. The company that bought you amazing technology like the memory stick (tm) probably cannot be trusted.
- Don't find yourself in a false sense of security.
  Your games on Steam are just as ephemeral as any other digital content purchased online.
  
  All the physical games i ever owned went up in flames when my house burned down. I can still play games i bought on steam in 2008
  
  True, but at least at this point, Valve is not a publicly traded company. Gabe clearly understands that piracy is an availability/distribution problem.
  
  Even then in a worst case scenario due to the open platform piracy is a possibility. That's where some of the peace of mind comes from compared to purchasing of digital goods for a closed system.
  
  You’re just one heartbeat away from seeing Steam turn into an EA competitor by some billionaires son/ self made CEO
  
  Incorrect. Steam games are licensed to you. If the dev or publisher want to remove the game from Steam, it will still be in your library.
  
  Dude it’s been 20yrs. I bought a game 20yrs ago and I can still play it. The physical media that I OWN did not last that long.
  Any day it could go away. Just like my PS2 games went away when the only hardware on earth allowed to play them died.
  A quarter of a human lifetime and counting is ephemeral? You think you are going to be able to get a blue ray player in another 20yrs? You know that making one requires paying fees to Sony, right? If you want media that lasts for generations, buy paintings and sheet music.
- Agreed. Physical ownership is the shelf of old DVD and CDROM PC and XBOX classic game boxes in my basement that take up space, collect dust, will never work again, and will only be a remembrance of nostalgia for a bygone day. Plus I’ll probably never seriously want to play them again… let’s be honest. I can watch a video of someone else playing, it scratches the same itch, and saves me the trouble.
  I like digital ownership, but there needs to be protections so we can’t be screwed.
  
  I agree. It’s hard to draw lines though right. Say your country made a law that companies could not pull the sort of shit Sony is pulling here. They would have to put a timeline on it right? It’s unreasonable that they should support a 10$ digital purchase for centuries. But 10yr old content disappearing is also horseshit. So what is a good line? What expectations is it reasonable to have as a consumer?
  What can I reasonably expect when I pay a few bucks for a downloaded movie. I feel like that is what we are really debating here. To me, getting 20+ yrs of support for a game on steam seems like an insanely good deal. I never got that for physical games. I am forced to admit that digital games on steam are a better deal than any physical games I have ever bought.
  Digital ownership CAN work but you have to decide who you trust. I would never trust Sony (or other console manufacturers) to maintain my digital library over the long term. But I guess trusting valve worked out. Shit, all my old ebooks still work too, and that’s Amazon, hardly a paragon of ethics.
  The problem isn’t digital ownership, it’s the companies that are selling stuff and/or the regulatory structure that they operate in.
- I've never even owned a PlayStation but I've owned enough absolute shit made by Sony that I started boycotting them like 15 years ago. They really are a truly shit company. It always amazes me they are considered a quality brand.
  
  Word! The nastiest vendor lock in bullshit you’ve ever seen. My bitchin’ yellow Walkman aside, bad products top to bottom.
  
  What about the PS3 era of Sony made you go "ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!"
- there's been instances of issues with steam games. like paid characters and skins in games being removed after the ip owners decided it was worth more money. dead by daylight did this multiple times.
  
  Or GTA getting patched to remove music from a game you already "own".
  
  Im not arguing that all digital ownership works great for consumers. But it can work. Shitty companies will always be shitty and it doesn’t matter how you possess the goods, you bought them from shitty companies.
  As a general rule which applies to all products: if the company you are paying has to pay another company a license fee for your product to work, it’s not going to work for very long. Be it a Blu-ray Disc or a marvel skin, your vendor will stop paying their vendor as soon as they can.
  
  There's nothing about owning physical media that would prevent that.
- Shit was built for completely different hardware
  It's still PC architecture. May not be 64 bit, but there's nothing stopping a modern x86-64 processor from directly running software made for an IBM PC from the 1980s without a VM or emulation. Backwards compatibility on PC is amazing. Drivers are a different story.
  With dedicated consoles, the hardware is often bespoke and completely changes with each iteration of the console. In order to remain backwards compatible, emulation is required to recreate the previous environment so older games will run. That or they literally just stuff a miniature subsystem of the old console into the new one.
- It's not just PCs and Steam. I can still play my original Xbox games from 20+ years ago on my Series X (they predate Xbox Live, let alone the Xbox Live Store), and I can still play the digital and physical Xbox 360 and Xbox One games that I bought in those eras as well.
  Gamers (and legislators), give Sony and Nintendo way too much of a pass for shitting on backwards compatibility.
- In all fairness, PS1s and PS2s still work fine (albeit, some may need a laser replacement, and you might need an HDMI adapter) but it's not like it's impossible to play old PS games.
- Most PS2 Games don’t have copy protection. You can just run them on a PC via an emulator like PCSX2.
- Anakin Skywalker agrees: A monarchy is great if you have a really nice and competent ruler, we just had unusually bad luck with those in the past!

We need to stop calling it digital "ownership"! You don't get to own anything as a customer on these platforms, because rights that can be taken away on a whim are no rights at all.
- If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
  
  It never was
  
  Arr-men to that!
- In the case of pc platforms like GOG, and itchio, if you get a drm free version of a title, theres nothing the company can do to both stop you from storing it on an external storage (or multiple) if you wanted. They wouldnt be able to revoke it if its a single player game.
  
  Works for a lot of Steam games too.
  
  Technically, you still don't own it. You have a licence that they can revoke at will. They just can't enforce it.
- because rights that can be taken away on a whim are no rights at all
  They're rights to temporary access. A contacted temporary right.
  I agree with your main point that it's not ownership though.
  
  What you're talking about is being allowed to use something or being tolerated, that's different from having a right. A temporary right is a real right for a specified time frame, but here it would just be "until I decide you don't".

Remember the time when Sony invented rootkits to make their drm stronger? Pepridge farm remembers.
- Remember when Sony made you use a proprietary mini SD card for your handheld instead of just allowing the format that was already in place and widely adopted?
  
  PSVITA COULD HAVE WON THE HANDHELD WARS IF NOT FOR THIS /copium
  I’m still salty
  
  Remember when Sony stopped us all from having easy access to high density compact disc storage by slapping obnoxiously large fees onto blueray decoding licensing that they still maintain today? Or how about that whole… betamax… actually I’ll just leave that one to history.
  
  I'm not sure I've ever seen a mini SD card. To me it seems that consumer electronics went from regular SD straight to micro SD, skipping the mini SD step. What was it used for? Phones?
  
  Ironically, it was adopted by everyone except Sony, which had Memory Stick, yet didn't use it for the Vita.
  Well, at least, the Vita cards were big enough to download all the great Vita exclusives such as... uh...
  
  Was that the memorystick pro duo, which actually beat even many early UHS-I SD cards at write and read speeds?
  
  No but I remember the old school playstation memory cards that plugged into the front of the console that were required to save your games on. I still have one with PS2 saves for GTA San Andreas and Gran Turismo 3 & 4 and stuff

Playstation keeps reminding us that digital ownership is not ownership.
- Obligatory if buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing
- Yep. Rental is the more accurate term.
- Yeah. Digital ownership is very convenient. Sony's model is loanership or something
  
  It's all loanership, no matter which platform.
- "You will own nothing and be happy"
  Except they forgot the "be happy" part.
  
  That's because they don't care about that part. Others being happy doesn't buy them a private jet. Selling the illusion of ownership very much does.
- In this case. But if you owned the keys to a room in a public accessible vault, you could properly own and have access to it.
  Since its public, not even Sony could take it away.

It should be illegal to take back / away a digital purchase because of a rights change or any other reason. Sure, maybe I lose the ability to download again if the company goes out of business, but other than that, my media, my fucking property. And not in a distribution sense. Like it was a physical copy. It's not like they're allowed to enter my home and steal my blu-rays.
- They're not offering true purchases, they're offering one time payment leases - and they should be forced to market them as such if they're not willing to guarantee perpetual access.

Points at the Jolly Roger.
- And it's a heave-ho-hi-ho, comin' down the way
  "Stealin'" films and movies and all the other games
  And it's a ho-hey-hi-hey, corpos bar your doors
  When you see the Jolly Roger on Francisco's mighty shores!
  
  OoO this would be fun to try to do the whole song...
  
  I miss Armored Core Masters of the Arena. I will not under any terms, ever touch AC5 because of exactly this fucking bullshit brainwashing nonsense. It was perhaps the best video game I've ever played and that's not a short list. I quit them and I'd only give exceptions to Sauerbraten these days and, well, I just don't do it anyway cuz I now prefer board games because it's like playing games with real people. I'm not good socially and need the means to practice, in all honesty.
  So yeah, fuck Sony, and fuck PS. I refuse to even pirate their nonsense. I have zero interest in anything that isn't FOSS.
- 🏴‍☠️

The ps5 and Switch will probably be my last consoles. I will just find ways yo mod the Switch when support dies for it to keep games on the go, and when psn is cut for ps5 that will be it. PC will be my way forward. I won't put up with this "pay for internet twice and still not own your games" stuff after these generations.
- I modded my switch once they started the online subscription. It's a really great jailbreak experience. Got ability to export saves too.

If there's DRM involved, then you're renting, not buying. Take that into account when considering how to spend money.

Counterpoint: digital ownership — true ownership when you have the actual files — is amazing. It’s the media panacea we’ve wanted for years. Storage is cheap, content is boundless, and if you curate your own collection you can usually get it anywhere you want.
- It isn't vulnerable to physical degradation.
  
  Back the fuck up! If you only have one copy, you have none.
  
  Yeah, I'm at the point where I view all storage as temporary, just on different time scales. Storing anything indefinitely requires ongoing maintenance to replace degraded media with fresh media.
  
  Yeah, lots of newbies fall victim to this. Nobody wants to believe hard drives fail, until their hard drive is dead and they’ve lost all their data.
  I believe there’s a saying along the lines of “nobody wants to build earthquake-proof houses before the first earthquake.”
  
  Yea but literally nothing is. The best thing you could do is have multiple backups in multiple locations.
  
  Unless you use mdiscs. Those still degrade, but it'll take centuries.
- Too bad it's not applicable to defective-by-design appliances like the PlayStation 5.

After the spyware disclosure and consent form on launch of Horizon Zero Dawn, I ceased getting anything Sony.
But the recent discontinuation of service shows us the ethic of piracy is (and always was) one-sided. Sony takes what it pleases, and no one is going to enforce otherwise.
We are justified in taking whatever action is necessary to ensure our own survival and fair benefit including violent terrorism so long as the state's agencies are not going legislate or adjudicate fairly but in the favor of plutocrats and corporations.
The whole point of the social contract is equal treatment and preventing the bloodshed of natural disagreement resolution (typically intergenerational family feuds)
Sony can appreciate we just want our shows and tunes and games with little hassle, and not revenge for being a traitor to the peace.
Sony will totally download a bear.

What the hell they talking about? Digital ownership is amazing. I can stream all my content from my server and keep it forever as long as I backup regularly. What sucks is buying shit digitally because then you don't own it at all
- Yeah they’re not talking about ownership here. They’re talking about custodial “ownership”. Like when you buy bitcoin and keep in on an exchange - you down actually own it.
  Some people think if you buy a movie from Sony or any other online only marketplace you actually own it….
  
  It's a "permanent" rental, Until something like this happens.
- I think "licensing" is the correct word here, instead of "ownership".
  The users in question don't "own" anything, they merely "license" it.

After this I'm getting an external drive and backing my gog library, since it and itch io are the last bastions of ownership (shame I can only pay in USD on itch).
- Thanks for the tip
- Steam can be too, fyi

Not sure why anyone at this point is stoked to own a Playstation. Literally all of their games are going to be on PC, GTA6 will eventually be on PC, not to mention all of the cross platform games on PS5 that are, you guessed it, also on PC.
Between digital storefronts removing content you paid for and the price tag on all new releases, it just doesn't make sense to engage with this new generation of "you don't actually own your games now".
- Because it costs like a quarter of an equivalent gaming PC, and there's actually an option for physical disc ownership unlike PC.
  
  Honestly, buying a disc for a new game and selling it a month later is still the cheapest way to play new things without being constrained by a subscription's library. PC is excellent for old/indie stuff going cheap, but discs are awesome.
  
  "But consoles suck compared to PCs of the same price!"
  ~People who built their PCs before bitcoin was popular
- Lots of reasons to enjoy having a Playstation. Having a full PC setup is expensive when you factor in more than just the case build. It's nice to have something you can boot up and get right into. Everyone acts like their system is superior but the superior system is whatever one best suits your needs. I personally would absolutely love a PS5 varient that didn't require internet and just let me play my single player games in peace.
  
  I think the big cost savings on PC come from a lack of subscription fees. Plus a huge variety of storefronts to choose from so prices tend to be low. Games get cheap fast if you wait a little bit.
  It's pretty easy to match console performance with a budget PC, but it definitely isn't as easy. I can't wait until I can pause/resume games on my desktop like I can on the Steam Deck. Huge quality of life feature.

- Just remember, any game that requires patches will not be able to get patches after the switch loses support from Nintendo
  So you own the physical cartridge but the patches that were (in some cases) required to make the game work will be unable to be downloaded in the future
  This is why I support modding consoles, that way I can continue to have a fully functional console long into the future
  
  On the switch, the titles that require the day one update to function is generally a lot lower than the other platforms.
  Its the reason why when a game leaks in advance, piracy can play it, because the cart dump is usually the complete functional game

Thing is that most games on physical media aren't much good in the long run either for the very same reasons. Even the single player ones have a myriad of little bits and bobs of online connectivity nowadays. I expect 95% of them to break once their servers go down. Most of them for super stupid reasons..some version mismatch here, a weird timeout in the launcher there. And being on closed systems,.there will be no way to patch them by the community on consoles.
The only games I expect to still work are Nintendo games. That's not because they are the good guys but because their understanding of this whole internet thing is so laughably bad.
- Nintendo had games breaking at parts because of interrupted services, even games that are single-player or playable offline.
  Some examples :
  Fire Emblem : Shadow Dragon has a shop that connects to the internet and is the only place where you can get an item required for a specific class promotion. I shit you not, the only reason it needs access to a long dead server is to check the current date, because the shop's content depends on the day of the month.
  Similarly, Metroid Prime 3 and Metroid Prime Trilogy had an "online" component... Some of the in-game rewards could only be obtained by spending "friend credits". What happened is you earned a credit, you couldn't spend it yourself, you had to send it to a friend and have them do the same for you. This was the only way the games used the online service. Bonus, they rereleased Trilogy on Wii U, long after the server shutdown, and did not do anything to let you go around that.
  And also on the Wii U, Mario Vs Donkey Kong Tipping Stars had a level designer. You could unlock parts for the designer with stars, earned by playing levels... Shared on miiverse. They shut down Miiverse, even before the end of the console's (short) life, and they even kept selling the game after that, with only a short message to warn "not all functionalities" were available. The truth is that without the miiverse stars you could barely unlock anything for the designer, so it was basically useless even for offline.
- Most of the "physical" media games are just launchers to download a copy anyway. Modern gaming outside of GOG or places that allow you download DRM free, fully offline functional games (at least for single player) are the only thing I would consider when thinking about whether you "own" the media. But the most popular methods for getting games through Xbox, Playstation, or PC (Steam, Epic, etc.) you only "own" it as long as the company continues to allow it.
  I mean, even like 10 years ago when I bought a PS4 for Christmas for our kids, it was a pretty fucking disappointing Christmas Day because opening the console you have to update before you can use it, and none of the discs we bought were actually playable without gigs of downloads. I don't think anyone got to play anything until like 9pm that day.

I own 4 PS5 games, all are physical, all were bought used and I can sell them on if I want. This November I opted not to renew PS plus.
It amazes me this is still possible but I'm not complaining.

In addition, remember how Sony bought OnLive then shut it down? Fuckers.
- OnLive was a decade ahead of its time, and it worked decently.
  Problems were nobody really expected it to last and prior wanted to be able to keep their games off the service shut down.
  I think their biggest mistake though was targeting gaming. Imagine if instead they offered enterprise software rental.
  Say your business needs to use ArcGIS, but just for one little project. Pay 200 bucks to rent the software for a few hours, make a deliverable, and that's it.
  Or what if you want to do a quick Photoshop project? Pay 10 bucks for an hour of time workout having to download anything or buy a $1000 software package (CS was a purchased product back then), then email yourself the final image.
  It also would have been great for anti-piracy purposes for some software, since the client only ever gets an AV stream.
- Yeah sometimes companies buy competition not to absorb them but to destroy them.

Sony had been at the top for the past ten years so they now feel emboldened to think they will get away with predatory monopolistic behaviour. Just like Microsoft after Xbox360 era when the console had proved more popular than PS3. So now, Microsoft with its Gamepass is seemingly retaking the lead.

Sounds like class action baby
- Nah, they have a clause in their EULA which allows this, it's ridiculous. Piracy is the only solution.
  
  Just because they write it into their EULA it doesn't make it legal.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
Affected users who may have spent years building a robust digital library were suddenly left without access to content they had bought through no fault of their own.
Even though downloading and accessing digital content is often easier than trudging to a retail store to buy a physical copy of a game, you’re putting your faith in the platform holders to maintain their digital storefronts, the content on those storefronts, and their account systems so that your access keeps working.
The recent closure of Nintendo’s Wii U and 3DS eShops was a stark reminder that companies have the power to decide when you can buy digital content.
While you can still redownload Wii U and 3DS games that you’ve purchased, it seems inevitable that Nintendo will stop letting you do that one day.
And Sony isn’t offering any compensation for titles you’ve already bought or a way to transfer those purchases to another store.
The PlayStation account bans were as swift as they were unexpected, and while resolution for most arrived within a few hours, Sony still hasn’t shared any public communication about what happened or why users should continue to trust the platform.
The original article contains 525 words, the summary contains 194 words. Saved 63%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

"ownership" lol
In the current stage of late capitalism we do not actually own anything, we cannot question the sanctity of "Capital" and we are already monitored in many ways 24/7

Playstation plus price increase, taking bought media away, banning accounts for no reason. What's next for Sony?

DVDs are also digital though. I cannot really imagine analog video games
- DVDs are still a physical medium, provided that the game is actually on them and it's not just a glorified download code.
- Whack-a-Mole
- I think Pong (or some variant) was analog. Then there were the games played on oscilliscopes.