Technology

Turns out I was granting limited access to my money that can be revoked at any moment.

It should be called renting (or something similar). But then, that would likely mean an expectation of a lower price tag and they wouldn’t want that. Who would rent a game for $80? Even if the rental is a decade or longer. Probably people out there that would and currently do this.

Piracy isn't stealing either way. It's just copyright infringement.

Soon the game files will be on the cloud and the client on your computer is just a launcher. Then piracy will be over as well

Sadly, catchy slogans don't hold up in court. Better to buy from distributors who don't try to make that claim, like GOG - even if they won't put Nine Sols on the store to avoid offending many gamers.

If you buy a CD with software and it gets shipped to your house, you own the disc, not the software. It's always been this way, we are just now living in a world where the technology exists to take the software away from you after you paid.

... 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.

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.

in the short term? It doesnt benefit them at all. it may actually hurt them.

in the long term? Bandwidth is cheap. especially at the scale that companies like Sony, Steam, Microsoft, etc, use it. So sell 6 million copies of a game, 10 extra bucks of profit thanks to no physical media/boxes/shipping/etc, per game.. Thats 60 million dollars in free money.

Plus, because you no longer own anything, they no longer have to invest in storage to keep old games up and running. So as new games release, they delete old games from their servers and from your accounts, So thats less investment they have to make in infrastructure, which is again more free money for them.

I wager Sony would love the day when people pay 100 dollars for a game that gets deleted in 6 months, that they have to rebuy again at full price to play again.

Cause remember, with no physical media, you have nothing but sony's closed garden marketplace to buy games.. Which means no competition for sony, which means no incentive for sales, no lower prices (not that 70+ dollars is a low price for a game 🙄 ), no nothing but take what sony offers you, and liking it.

I’m so old school I still prefer OpenTTD and OpenRCT2

you still own them more than a psn store enjoyer owns their games