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.
Ah yes the intelligent consumer who always has a choice and is never beholden to the whims of a completely dominant supply side economy.
I choose to crush corporations until they are so small they are easily drowned by pissing on them.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
Slop. I don’t know anyone who’s ever bought digital when physical was available.
Of course the “former Valve writer” is Chet Faliszek. The dude never shuts up.
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.
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.
A free market requires a perfectly informed consumer. That’s impossible before you begin to consider how marketing is dishonest
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.
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.
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.
Doesn’t most of the physical media still require downloads to actually play anyway? I don’t own a console but it seems like every time I’m at one of my friends who do and they’re putting a new game in they have to wait on it to install/update or whatever. Maybe it’s just the big AAA ones.
Only if you have an internet connection active. Otherwise, I believe it’s just insert disc and play, IIRC.
When all options are rigged, it’s pretty rude to blame “the consumer”
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.
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.
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!
“Former” and “writer”
Sure. So there’s no reason he might not got paid by Sony to say this, right? Or yet alone have any professional knowledge on distribution of games.
Edit: check is wiki. He’s a sorry ass grifter. Putting up valve before his name to make his sorry points more credible. Trying to squeeze out his valve history even though majority of his career was spend on not being able to cope with indie studio workload and then shifting to riot games for monies. Now he’s making TikTok videos talking about valve like it’s his majority of experience. Also he was opposing Stop Killing Games. https://preservetube.com/watch?v=qr6I2BiU238
Try get your games pressed onto disc and boxed. Shit’s difficult as fuck and Sony hasn’t done anything to streamline the process and make it easier and cheaper. Even if you have the money as an indie dev you will basically be forced to go through a publisher and forgo a significant chunk of your margin to get a physical release and the margins are already a quite ways smaller than digital for physical releases. Hence why indie games rarely see a physical release on PlayStation. Sure only a minority of people buy physical but so do a minority of music consumers buy vinyl. Yet vinyl is thriving. Sony is the gatekeeper they hold the keys to turn physical games into a successful niche segment of the market like what vinyl is to music but they purposefully decided not to.
“We gave you two options previously, making one prohibitively expensive unnecessarily, and you didn’t pick that one as we planned. We respect your decision.”
I don’t mind digital if i can own it, store it wherever i want and installing it without internet
