Examples: literally two days ago Sony permanently removed access to over 500 movies for people who had "purchased" them, and only a couple months ago Sony announced their plan to permanently shutter physical media production for Playstation.

I agree with you that it's a systemic issue but it also doesn't surprise me that Sony is seen as the lead boogeyman. I think if you asked the average gamer what their opinion of Valve's business practices was vs. Sony you'd get a very different answer even if the legalese in the TOS is similar.

They're also forcing Stage Tour to include discs with their guitar bundles, even though many PS5s can't play discs.

I just find it hypocritical, people keep saying they are going to move to xbox or pc next gen and its like. Their policy is exactly the same. You have the same risk and not really ownership.

And I am not defending Sony, they have a long history of getting cocky with their consoles and pulling some shit. But in this particular case they are following the trend that we allowed by going all digital on PC and buying digital games on consoles.

Sony isnt going to be the one that changes this, the only way to expect change would be targeting all of them including Valve. But everyone, like this article, just seems to gloss right over that and seem to imply its only Sony that is the problem here.

You don't, though. When I download a game on Steam or GOG, I have the files on my PC. I can back them up. I can modify them.

Yes, live service games still have an online component I don't control, but I do still control the files on my computer. I don't on a console.

Actually, I don't own any consoles for reasons of software freedom but I hear they are much more difficult to do things like back up your data, etc.

It may be harder like you say but the law doesn't really see it any differently PC vs Console if you want to archive/backup your digital game media.

If you remove the DRM, then you do actually own the thing for practical purposes. And non-ownership of things you buy is unjust, so entertaining the law here is silly.

Don't move the goalposts.

The only thing I am conceding is that conceptually it still ownership if you own the encrypted bits but they work fine with some other hardware that has the keys to decrypt them. I can backup my games on one playstation and play them on another.

Otherwise, we agree ideologically. At the same time I'm rhetorically supporting the point at the top of the thread that this has been a problem long before Sony decided to go digital. I am copyleft and anti-drm and whatever else you can imagine. It doesn't change the fact that there's a precedent that consumers will purchase drm games that require a rootkit to run under ambiguous terms that make it clear they don't own the bytes and it's a true observation that for some reason people allow this to happen on PC but when Sony does it it's the end of the world. I think to make progress here you need to address the root of the issue legally, not attack Sony for doing what society has condoned for decades.

There are reasons to criticize Valve (gambling, microtransactions, "achievements"), but they seem to be too busy making money to want to do DRM.

Both Valve and Sony run a completely legal video game platform service. There are minor differences here and there, of course… but this is 100% a general intellectual property law problem, not an instanced technical implementation issue.

I think the argument is more precisely made by saying: on Steam, while they support DRM, the decision is up to the publisher whether or not a game will use it and at least that provides the option for consumers to speak with their wallet and play only DRM free games. On Playstation it's all or nothing, you have to reject the entire platform/ecosystem if you want to avoid DRM.

At large, the problem still remains that our society allows DRM in the first place and if people want to avoid it then they need to be principled activists.

> The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy... but it is easily removed

And it takes about 2 seconds to find the removal tools on github. So you can treat Steam's DRM as basically non-existent. This is unlike consoles, which require kernel exploits or hardware modifications to bypass.

[0] https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/drm?l=english

I'm not interesting in bickering over who's DRM is the easiest to remove XD

In the US it's not piracy to make archival backups of digital media that you own in the first place, anyway. Even so, nothing gives you the right to use the software in ways that violate the EULA (except for your rights under the DMCA to create archival copies) regardless of whether you backed up the media with or without the DRM.

To put it plainly your right to create an archival copy does not extend to a right to run the media on unsupported/licensed hardware & software. I think that's an issue that should be solved, we likely agree, but let's not pretend that the situation with Steam is somehow healthy for society whereas with Sony it's not just because the DRM is slightly easier to circumvent.

Correct, that right is innate.

> your right to create an archival copy does not extend to a right to run the media on unsupported/licensed hardware & software

It does. Not even morally, but legally. Sony litigated this and lost, but bankrupted the emulator developer in the process. Emulators and compatible hardware and software have been consistently ruled legal. It is only the bypassing of copy protection that is not.

And if you're not interested in the feasibility of asserting your rights by removing the DRM, then naturally you'll never understand why people consider Valve and Sony materially different.

The Connectix case doesn't establish a right to circumvent DRM to play games that you "own". It only provides fair use protections for emulator developers.

The Bleem case (the one where the president said the litigation bankrupt them) has to do with game screenshots in comparative advertising.

And probably most apropos, irrespective of whether DRM is used or not, there is no protection in the DMCA or other US code that allows you to circumvent an authentication check in order to play a game. So "just remove the steam dll load command, it's trivial" exposes you to the same level of legal liability as "ugh I have to strip the Sony DRM then crack my copy of <sony exclusive>".

If you look at what's happened recently, there are narrow regulatory exemptions, issued in 2024 and codified at 37 C.F.R. § 201.40(b)(19) that cover, among other things, restoring personal local play of lawfully acquired complete games after required authentication-server support ends. Other provisions permit preservation by eligible libraries, archives, and museums, including limited circumvention of console software. They do not establish a general personal right to jailbreak any console or decrypt any purchased game.

Very respectfully, I think you're conflating a few different things here. I very much wish the world was as you are trying to assert. But my own understanding of US law and case law and a check against Astra don't corroborate your claims.

It's not, though. Their ToS is the same. They reserve to right to deny you ownership of your games. Only Sony has been stupid enough to actually do it.

Every ToS in the world is designed to screw the signee over as much as it possibly can, so you'd need to go live in the woods if you wanted to escape it, but there is a tangible difference between how much companies actually abuse the provisions in their ToS. I don't know how you can say "Microsoft reserves the legal right to drill a hole in my skull" and "Sony is actively drilling a hole in my skull" are `exactly the same`.

To be clear, when I use the phrase "deny you ownership of your games", I'm talking in Common English, not legalese. We don't actually have to normalise this. Legalese aside, the social contract for decades has been that you own your digital purchases. Now that the social contract is being violated, we certainly should be striving to enshrine it in law via regulation, which would also render any amount of ToS legalese to be worth as much as digital toilet paper.

The ability to deny ownership does exist these days. Sony can push an update that bricks your Playstation.

So this whole thing is actually an argument over whether games should be made available in a form that allows license transfer (which I support) or not. But it's a fair point to argue that for any actual benefit the remedy has to be applied globally, not just to Sony.

Sony can add a signature to a list and your game stops launching even if it's a physical disk is the point. We should fight back legally and prevent publishers from trampling on the rights of individuals to use bits they paid money to presumptively own. If I buy a digital asset nobody should be able to take that away from me. You can stop selling it but it shouldn't be allowed to be disabled in the field. Seems like something our society could agree on and legislate 100%.

While socially we might disagree with the law on the validity of licensure in this context, that changes the domain a bit. I do have ultimate control over the games I've purchased on Steam, regardless of the law's opinion, even though they're technically licensed. I back up every game I buy, away from where Steam could be able to know to delete it or even discover it. If my legal license is revoked, I still have control over the bytes. With a steam emulator I can still access most of them (and the remainder can be fixed by setting an LLM about cracking them) but this isn't legitimate in the eyes of the law. Practically speaking it doesn't matter in the slightest what the law thinks on this matter.

Now let's consider that the rhetoric here generally includes Steam's arrangement as a perpetrator of "you will own nothing". But given the above, that's a hard circle to square. In your proposed notion of ownership, ostensibly I own everything I bought on Steam. With a little bit of technical literacy (and the money for storage, which is easier said than done these days) it can be true of anybody. It's only in the eyes of the law that I don't actually own anything, and the DMCA probably has plenty to say about it.

So do we use the legal definition, or is it merely the possession of the software and means of access that constitute ownership? It's exactly this edge case which is why I insist on this pedantry. Otherwise the violation of ownership at the hands of Sony begins and ends with the fact that it's not an open platform with software freedom. I'm very amenable to making that be our standard here, of course, I think at minimum the freedom to do as you please with a personal computer is an ethical and moral directive.

Perhaps what we as a society need is that what you actually buy is a "license to download". Upon being in possession of the bytes, you own them. For as long as you maintain the integrity of those bytes, they're yours. Of course, redistributing them to other parties would constitute an IP violation, but that's not a problem to concern a storefront. If your license is revoked, what you are actually losing is the ability to download.

Instead of actually trying to fix the issue we just hope that Valve never has to do the thing they are legally allowed to do because we agreed they could.

I honestly don't care who has done what, I don't care what company is supposedly better than another company.

Overnight Valve, Microsoft, whoever could just as easily remove access to a bunch of digital purchases.

How about instead we just don't excuse any of the companies?

Would it be great if we could make all digital purchases better? Hell yes. Is it realistic? No.

If we can make one company/segment pay or set legal precedent that this is not okay, we're at least moving in the right direction.

Two things can be both "not fine" but one can still be worse than the other.

Just because one has done it and the other hasn't is a technicality to me since that could change overnight.

The point that I am trying to make here is that it is insane to me that all of this is focused on Sony. And frankly I don't have a good solution here, but just arguing that one TOS is better than another because one company hasn't done the thing yet but could is not a good argument.

How many times have we seen management change, companies being bought, whatever and suddenly something really bad happens.

I am just getting really frustrated by Sony this, Sony that. Boycot sony, etc when if all we do is move to another platform with the same policies do we really expect anything to change?

it's not the same overall risk though.

accurate risk assessment includes past incidents in the calculation. sony has a demonstrated pattern, valve does not.

if you choose to ignore past behavior in your risk assessments, you are doing it wrong.

Things can change, just because you make your risk assessment doesn't mean you should ignore that there is still something in that contract that could turn on you just as easily.

Should we go back 10 years, maybe the risk would have been the same. Did Sony do any of these things then, but the policy was the same. How about 10 years from now, just because of your "risk assessment" doesn't mean that Valve is suddenly safer, just just means so far they have been safer.

I am not saying don't use Valve, but there is zero reason to believe they could not just as easily do this.

feel free to make an actual point rather than vague assumptions about my history.

when you do risk assessments, which over my career i have done thousands, you include historical data.

In any event, I think with all the data you'd see that Value has also removed games from its platform. So I'm not sure the value gap is even as wide as you seem to be implying.

please re-read the part i quoted from the parent, where they say it's the same risk.

>You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value

i did not say "the only thing that matters" anywhere.

you, and the parent, are reading something into my comments that i have not written. the only thing i said is that the risk is not the same because sony has a pattern of behavior worth considering.

RIP Lik Sang.

All the big console manufacturers sued them. Said it was about modchips (and maybe it really was). Sony bore the most guilt.

The gaming industry is a little less wonderful these past 20 years.

2. My sense is that heavy console and PC gamers (mostly distinct from population in 1) didn’t care so much about the specific kind of ownership when AAA games were perceived as prestige hyperstimulus, a guaranteed dopamine/adrenaline rush. This more or less isn’t true anymore (GTAVI, assuming it succeeds, could very well be the last). Some subset of youth today will never play a game more a enjoyable to them than Minecraft or Roblox.

3. There has been consistent pushback against not-owning a product that you pay for over the past twenty years, but it’s been diluted over the sector of all consumer items and is not typically targeted at video games in particular.

There's more noise about this than Microsoft's mass layoffs at the game companies they bought up.

- While it could be argued that Valve runs an effective monopoly of the PC platform based on their marketshare, Valve operates on a platform with competitive options including DRM-free stores.

- Game consoles have always been more attached to physical media than PCs.

- Sony is the largest player in the market (disregarding mobile phone gaming) with more total marketshare than Valve and the PC platform. This makes them a much more visible target.

That's like saying Volkswagen has a monopoly on Volkswagen cars.

Sony clearly does not have a monopoly on the video game industry, and a plurality of video games are cross-platform across consoles, PCs (Windows/Linux), and even MacOS.

But the analogy breakdown because a car is more or less a complete item you buy and use for a purpose (aside from consumables) whereas a playstation is completely useless without games to play on it.

So maybe volkswagen brand gas would be the best analogy here.

Oh, looks like cars and consoles aren't that different after all.

Someone else in the thread made the comparison to fuel, I'll go with that. Last time I checked, there was no such thing as petroleum DRM.

I'm getting a tad lost, though. The point of the sub-thread is that Sony does not have a monopoly over the video game industry. They get to choose which games are allowed on their platform and under what terms. Consoles and Cars both have proprietary components and open interfaces. A console and car have different purposes. And the average consumer has broad discretion to use cars and consoles from whatever manufacturer they wish to.

Until you actually buy one.

Obviously there are levels of wealth where this is all irrelevant, either because buying every console is a relatively minor expense or because you can't afford any console whatsoever, but for the people in the middle where you can more or less afford a console, once you buy into one, you're now kinda stuck with it.

Sony host a massive, massive marketplace. That's where their monopoly lies, they have end to end control over distribution of not only their games, but anyone else who chooses to publish on the platform, in addition to control over how those games are played and on what hardware.

This hands them an enourmous amount of power over the third parties that make up the majority of software sales on their store. The way they've constructed their ecosystem and services also greatly disincentivises it's users from switching. Games aren't cross-compatible, so buying in for another console means they have to either keep their console (which they could otherwise have sold) or give up their library. Even keeping both means having to choose for one online service over another. These kinds of decisions might not matter to someone over a certain socioeconomic status, but it still matters to many.

I don't think that a market of it's size should legally be allowed to exist. It's exploitative by default and I would be supportive of the EU recognizing Sony as a "Gate Keeper" under the Digital Markets Act and taking appropriate regulatory action.

One can dream.

But I cannot play 'Astro Bot' on another platform.

Are they not two kinds of games?

I'm arguing that your comparison isn't the right one.

A BMW and a Volkswagen are two types of apples. They both let you drive form A to B.

A Playstation and a Nintendo Switch are two types of oranges. They both provide entertainment in the form of video games.

How you drive (and how enjoyable your drive is) from A to B, or which games you play, are specific characteristics of the hardware you chose to use to accomplish the task. Neither of those are two types of anything, as it were.

People still give money to Sony for some reason, but as far as I'm concerned that's on them. Call it victim-blaming at this point, I guess.

First off, console games have gradually moved away from offering physical copies for years. This had the (probably deliberate) effect of killing the used game market. Earlier attempts to kill that market were driven by the proliferation of digital content that could not be resold.

Second, physical copies on the PC have not been guaranteed for a very long time. I would suggest it was actually the wide-scale proliferation of indie games that did more to kill the physical copy market than any deliberate transition from AAA studios. There are thousands of indie games out there now. Without digital copies, it would be impossible for anyone to actually purchase any of them.

And the momentum to move away from physical copies for PC gaming has been there for a very long time. No one was going to Best Buy to pick up a physical copy of minesweeper. There have been other factors as well, such as the popularization of MMORPGS which provided years of content from a single physical copy.

Really though, the idea that without Valve, the PC gaming market would still be chugging along on physical game copies just isn't realistic. It goes completely against the momentum built over the last 25 years of PC gaming.

Sony has never stolen a game from me, unlike Valve. The closest incident was that movie thing, which was more a failure on their part to negotiate perpetual licensing with the rightsholder.

You can still play your purchases on an operating system that isn't actively fighting against you running them.

PC games can still be physical. Burn some discs or copy the files onto a USB stick and put it in a box. I think it's crazy that boutique companies like Limited Run Games completely avoid the platform when it's the only one left that isn't actively hostile to the core principles of the company. Admittedly PC does have the image of being a digital distribution only platform these days, but it's illusory and breaking that illusion is a marketing problem.

People were pretty pissed about the xbox layoffs, it's just that things move fast and this was the next thing.

Boxed PC games were practically dead by the time Valve started selling 3rd party games on their marketplace. Most game stores around me had stopped selling them or massively shrunk the shelf space for them. Xbox, Gamecube, Playstation 3, they had whole walls of the store dedicated to their stuff. PC games had a couple of shelves in the middle of the store, if even that. Sales for PC games had massively fallen between 1999 and 2005 while the rest of the game industry exploded.

The industry had shrunk over a third in five years before Valve started selling online. You can't say it was "thriving".

Valve has spent the better part of 20 years fostering a good relations with the gaming community and pretty much every gamer has a great deal of confidence that they'll protect your purchases.

So in short, I think it's because they're the big guy making a very visible change to the broader public, instead of a new platform with a new way of doing things (how Steam was).

They may not be playing in the same league as Steam, but PC folks do have the choice of GoG and itch, which both sell DRM-free binaries.

of course it's better that gog requires you go without it for the customer, but I'm not sure it helps in terms of legal rights. If gog shuts down you'll need to have your games backed up and downloaded to still own them and you won't have any license to a new download or etc

On PC, there are always other options [pirate flag emoji]. Steam (in many, but not all cases) competes with free. Sony doesn't on the PS5.

It doesn't make it right but I feel like the writing has been on the wall for ages.

What they should do is just stay silent and stay the course. Everyone fucking knows in 10 years time physical media will be dead and all of this is water under the bridge.

Because they did a whole marketing stunt over it. Granted it was more than a decade ago, so probably just a remnants of old console war.

1. steam does not have a monopoly on distribution rights for PC games. if steam were to go bankrupt publishers could honor your keys and even other marketplaces could do it. steam themselves let you bring your own key.

2. steam has been a benevolent marketplace leader, even though DRM itself plays against customers, the rest of the stuff they pushed while leading, like game sharing, play and refund, offline playing, are pro consumer.

3. why would your knee jerk reaction to this is pointing a finger to steam, what's your endgame?

Sure they have said and claimed a lot of things, but their TOS says the same thing that Sony is arguing. Its suddenly this big shock now but no one cared before? Sure the way Sony is handling this is fumble after fumble but thats PR.

My problem is that Valve for some reason gets a free pass because "they are the good guys" when their own policy means they could do the exact same thing.

I own a lot of games on Steam, but I am not nieve to assume that there is not a chance that at some point I could loose all or some of those games. People are for some reason in a false sense of security about Steam and that is a problem. They have to be part of the conversation when it comes to digital ownership. Ignoring them means we can't actually solve the issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...