this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2026
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does anyone know why Sony is so intent on ensuring that I never become a console gamer and give them money?
like how does this benefit them?
... For everyone one of "us" on this thread, there's 10,000 that will shrug and conform.
You and I are not the target demographic. Clearly - look at where we're having this conversation :)
Ipso facto we need to make sure that we support those that support us (Indie devs, FOSS etc). Let Sony do Sony things.
Untio the first 250 USD game hits the market and it's a choice between homelesness, starving and getting a digital product you don't own.
The smaller the customer base, the less money they rake in.
Sony's history of security breaches also doesn't give much confidence. Games like Concord and Marathon also prove nobody is too big to fail.
Games are a luxury good that need to thread a fine needle.
With roughly fifty years of back catalog to draw from, free engines, and endless other distractors, a $250 game would need to be an epoch-defining masterpiece - or have true AGI baked in - to get my attention.
Then again, I'm not the target demographic: I built my own retro console from office e-waste and play retro games, older AAA and indies.
I worked for the major streaming company when the service was launched in Japan. Sony (among others) said that streaming would never take off in Japan because Japanese consumers are too tied to physical media. This was probably 2014. It's probably been the slowest place in the world to change, but it has changed. Sony understands the consumer preference for digital media as well as anyone. They just know that resistance and opposition will fade over time.
They are a fairly adaptable company (as Japanese tech companies go), and if they get it wrong, they will pivot, but there is nothing pro-consumer about the company. They didn't put Blu-ray players in PS3s because it was good for consumers, they did it because it was good for Sony's entertainment business. And people often forget that part of the Blu-ray spec was mandatory internet connectivity so that the content licensor could revoke content licenses. We haven't "owned" physical media since DVDs.
This is the company that brought you Memory Stick after all. They've been anti-consumer ever since the Walkman was a huge success. It benefits Sony by making people buy more copies of the same thing. You might not buy any, but if the optimization is right, enough people will.
I take personal offense (on Sony's behalf). How could you possibly frame innovation and progress as anti-consumer behavior? The reality is that the industrial mega-corp is providing the services and products consumers actually want. If they didn't capitalism would be sure to punish them and they'd die an economical death. Children's entertainment is funded via their parents and neither child nor parent is choosing to buy physical media. You can't blame Sony for holding on to stock that no one wants to buy. 'Gamers' can have their emotional outburst, but things will continue as normal and they'll have forgotten about it after nap time.
This must either be sarcasm or a troll
in the short term? It doesnt benefit them at all. it may actually hurt them.
in the long term? Bandwidth is cheap. especially at the scale that companies like Sony, Steam, Microsoft, etc, use it. So sell 6 million copies of a game, 10 extra bucks of profit thanks to no physical media/boxes/shipping/etc, per game.. Thats 60 million dollars in free money.
Plus, because you no longer own anything, they no longer have to invest in storage to keep old games up and running. So as new games release, they delete old games from their servers and from your accounts, So thats less investment they have to make in infrastructure, which is again more free money for them.
I wager Sony would love the day when people pay 100 dollars for a game that gets deleted in 6 months, that they have to rebuy again at full price to play again.
Cause remember, with no physical media, you have nothing but sony's closed garden marketplace to buy games.. Which means no competition for sony, which means no incentive for sales, no lower prices (not that 70+ dollars is a low price for a game 🙄 ), no nothing but take what sony offers you, and liking it.
Oh, you wanted to play [AAA game] that you already bought and paid for? Too bad, it's shut down and gone. But you can buy the almost-identical sequel [AAA game 2] for just $90!
This will also affect history badly. Entire games will be lost to history forever.
Yeah, by the time copyright finally expires, it will be impossible to find a copy of it anymore.
You are just a guy. There are millions more that will not care and won't even know any of this ever took place. There were leaked conversations where Sony talked about their fanbase as brainless cattle, too.
Well, they are not wrong. Consumers will really put up with anything
because they HAVE to have the latest shiny, because their self worth is so low and non existent the only measure of worth they have is owning the next shiny.
some consumers... maybe even most. Certainly not all.
I'm actually grateful for the enshittification of the main stream. It's an excellent incentive to carve your own path, in some small way. Hopefully that spills over to other aspects of people's lives.
"Fuck you, I won't do what you told me" is a wonderful fuel.
because their fanbase are brainless cattle.
because gamers are brainless myopic cattle.
gamers on the whole moan and groan and whine and bitch about every misdead, but the second the new shiny comes out they are out there en-masse rewarding these companies with billions and billions and billions of dollars (a great example will be GTA6, which I almost guarantee will bring in at least 2 billion dollars within its first week)
and as long as the idiot masses keep doing that, we have no recourse and no hope.
Certainly if Gamers™ had half a spine, we wouldn't get here. Instead it's always been inch after inch being taken, Gamers™ either downplaying it or viciously complaining about it for a short while without anything tangible happening, and rinse and repeat. Miles have been taken, now Gamers™ argue about 30fps in a game that ships with super draconian DRM and no physical copies because we're already cool with DRM now.
Also the bitter irony when I hear people upset by Sony's steamification switching to PC, the most steamified platform of them all. I guess it beats waiting until 2028 when you can pull the trigger now?
I warned from the moment that steam became a market place that the end of the road was us not having physical games anymore, and not owning our games anymore, and not being able to play our games should steam ever go under.
and my god the insults I received over the years about it.
Then other DD platforms popped up, and people bought games there (myself included, fuck you direct2drive), and lost all the games and all the money when the platform died.
"but steam lets you back up your games!" the inevitable response was.
Okay.
But steam backups still require steam to unpack and run. So that does fuckall.
and with how old steam is, and with how many people use things like humble monthly and shit, who the hell can afford to store local copies of 1500-3500 games? especially when a lot of modern games are 50-150gb in size each.
Also, at least on PC, we can relatively easily acquire our games via alternative methods. Which I have had to do a few times, for games that I owned and paid for, because of stupid bullshit DRM.
You aint doing that on modern consoles. If you wanted to play console games via alternative means you either have to 1)Luckout on a jailbreak and have the right firmware for a jailbreak or 2) wait years for an Emulator and a PC that can run it.
I'm so sick of this cyberpunk hellscape bullshit where you pay everything and own nothing.
Me too, me too. When I lost the internet for a mad long time and noticed my steamed games not working because the launcher was refusing to log in while offline (despite having a so-called offline mode) and questioning why a singleplayer game even requires all of this in the first place, I would then get told the problem was actually my internet provider and not the game's or steam's for creating this mess in the first place. Yeah, make it make sense. Incidentally I had to acquire a bunch of executables for those very same games like you did, and yep, they'd work offline as should be. Creator of service problem says piracy is a service problem, why is this not a headline already?
I'm getting Desura flashbacks. Lucky I downloaded everything I had when I felt the signs of it going down, but I know others weren't as lucky. Silver lining is they're still playable, DRM-free is nice, but like I established we've already moved on from that into bigger fish like "the credits reference a consulting company I don't like."
And there's not even any cyberware to show for it! But yeah at this point I'm focusing more on buying stuff other than games and playing my massive library of games from multiple decades. It's just I really suck at that too.
with direct2drive it didnt matter if you downloaded the files, cause the installers still did a call home to direct2drive to decrypt, and that call home server died with the rest of d2d.
I just want to push back on this being a 'gamers' problem. We've basically hit the point with technofeudalism where we can all collectively moan and groan, but still be effectively locked in.
How do you feel about google or apple... but you must have an acceptable(to the bank) phone in order to set up MFA for your bank account, and you might need to have one for your work or school accounts. How do you feel about linkedin... it's managed to insert itself into the hiring process for many places and if you don't participate, then a company will overlook you because you don't exist. How do you feel about twitter... but the US government almost exclusively drops breaking news there first, if not on the shittier versions.
For the wants instead of needs, the dynamic changes a bit, but the enshittification and perverted "ownership" is coming for us all: TVs, printers, dishwashers, cars, etc. All these things are 'optional'... but your Quality of Life will be reduced if you give them up and you will either be spending your precious time and energy doing something that used to be easier; or giving up on some of the social and cultural fabric by eschewing the shows/movies/games that others around you are enjoying and want to talk about.
Considering this only a 'gamers' problem and that only 'gamers' are the mindless cattle is missing the bigger picture.
Another aspect is the difference between Publisher and Developer and Platform.
Sony/Playstation is the platform and they get to do shitty things. So can the publisher. The Developer doesn't get to make those decisions most of the time. Sometimes we can avoid the bad actors, but not always. The next book in your favorite series has just been released, but it's not going to be printed, it's only released on Amazon as an E-book. The author isn't happy, but their contract says the publisher gets to decide where and how to publish and the publisher gets more money from e-books and expects the audience for the book will not revolt. Same with music. This new album is only available on spotify; no physical CDs, and the artist didn't have a say because they weren't big enough to fight back.
Sure, piracy solves some of those access issues (insert Gabe Newell quote), but it robs the artists of their cut because the publishers or platforms are being assholes, which will prevent future content that people like. Do you punish the artist, and remove their ability to make more stuff you want because some monolithic company has locked themselves in the process?
I won't buy GTA6, or the next Call of Duty or FIFA, because those are not games I'm interested in; but there are other franchises that I would like to enjoy the future. I want to fight back and orgs like Stop Killing Games or the EFF, FULU, Repair.org and more are all helping push back.
We do have hope, and if we understand this isn't a single-slice-of-the-consumer problem, we can band together.
You're not wrong... but "othering" people is no way to lift them out of the muck. Causes classic back fire effect. I say present the alternative case clearly and succinctly. If still finger in ears well, wish them luck and go separate ways.
I'm purely pulling this firmly out of my ass. While I genuinely doubt they have any intention or plans at this point, I assume being able to tell investors "oh we can pull the plug and walk away from these legacy costs at any time" is a plus in someone's column somewhere. Of course the issue is that what is possible to save money often becomes reality.