PlayStation keeps reminding us why digital ownership sucks
www.theverge.com
Time to buy physical games again?

I’d like to get the community’s feedback on this. I find it very disturbing that digital content purchased on a platform does not rightfully belong to the purchaser and that the content can be completely removed by the platform owners. Based on my understanding, when we purchase a show or movie or game digitally, what we’re really doing is purchasing a “license” to access the media on the platform. This is different from owning a physical copy of the same media. Years before the move to digital media, we would buy DVDs and Blu-Rays the shows and movies we want to watch, and no one seemed to question the ownership of those physical media.

Why is it that digital media purchasing and ownership isn’t the same as purchasing and owning the physical media? How did it become like this, and is there anything that can be done to convince these platforms that purchasing a digital copy of a media should be equivalent to purchasing a physical DVD or Blu-Ray disc?

P.S. I know there’s pirating and all, but that’s not the focus of my question.

  • CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1030·
    1 year ago

    Im gonna use a bad word, but NFTs would help with this issue

    True digital ownership thats censor proof is pretty legit imo

    • echo64@lemmy.worldEnglish
      222·
      1 year ago

      Nfts don’t give you ownership over anything but the nft itself. Everything else is a license system that says, “You can have this because you have an nft,” you know, the exact same system we have now but will more bullshit .

      • NekuSoul@lemmy.nekusoul.deEnglish
        101·
        1 year ago

        It’s quite amazing that these people don’t realize that they’re just reinventing DRM, but worse.

      • ryannathans@aussie.zoneEnglish
        24·
        1 year ago

        Less shit. You could actually trade your fucking games and would not be limited to one platform

        • echo64@lemmy.worldEnglish
          31·
          1 year ago

          you’re still limited to one platform, the vendor has to recognise the NFT, and vendors are only going to recognise their own NFT’s that they saw value from selling.

          there is no benefit to bullshit NFT tokens, unless you are running a ponzi scheme.

        • Chadus_Maximus@lemm.eeEnglish
          12·
          1 year ago

          Then those games would be subject to Gresham’s law LMAO. I would never trust a company that allows transfers between platforms.

            • Chadus_Maximus@lemm.eeEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              You would have a platform to trade games, and another to keep them. The trading platform will be able to undercut the holding platform due to practices such as exclusivity deals. This, in turn, will make the holding platform require a commission fee whenever a game is transferred to it.

              If you could get a game for free in the Epic store and transfer it to Steam, where does Steam get the money from?

                • Chadus_Maximus@lemm.eeEnglish
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  Will I suppose that’s where we gotta disagree then. I cannot ever imagine exclusivity deals going away. Unless we somehow manage to get a government-subsidized middleman to track and enforce parity, you’ll always have platforms attracting prospective developers with exclusivity deals. Then you don’t have to compete with pricing at all!

                  As for your last point, I believe most gamers would tell any company charging for downloads to fuck off. But I can see this actually happening in the future.

        • echo64@lemmy.worldEnglish
          61·
          1 year ago

          So? If the licence holder wanted, they could just put an option in for you to sell what you have. The nft does not matter. It is not needed and is just added bullshit

            • echo64@lemmy.worldEnglish
              82·
              1 year ago

              Force? No one said force. I am talking about something like steam letting you sell your game. They could if they wanted and it doesn’t need nfts. Nfts are just bullshit coins that serve no real purpose.

              Everything you might claim you can do with nfts, you can do today without nfts, or it’s a ponzi scheme.

              • ryannathans@aussie.zoneEnglish
                45·
                1 year ago

                NFTs are a necessary prerequisite for trading games with peers without being locked into some bullshit monopoly like steam community trading

                • echo64@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  51·
                  1 year ago

                  you’re still locked in because the licence provider has to recognise the NFT, the lock-in is with the licence provider. all the NFT is, is a ticket that says “I’m allowed”.

                  it’s the exact same thing but will added bullshit.

                  if you want a tradable token that doesn’t require lock-in, that token has to have intrinsic value. Like with a physical disk with a movie on it. there is no lock-in to a vendor system, it’s got everything it needs right there. it has intrinsic value.

                  NFT’s are a bullshit ticket that says “please give me access, you pwomised”, that you can sell if you want. but you could just do the same thing inside the vendors own system and it’s all exactly the same because the vendor has to say yes/no in the end, as the nft has no value.

                  • CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.worldEnglish
                    1·
                    1 year ago

                    Tbh, the best use case for NFTs in games is IN games. Items, weapons, skins etc would be amazing if they were x-platform and interoperable with many diff games. Imagine using Stormbreaker in Elden Ring without mods, just by importing a weapon OBJ file.

    • Gray@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      1 year ago

      Or just let us download the actual game/movie/song like the good old days.

          • helenslunch@feddit.nlEnglish
            4·
            1 year ago

            GOG is a last bastion of freedom LOL.

            If people want to screw devs by pirating games, they’re just going to do that and it’s pretty clear there’s nothing you can do about it

      • CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.worldEnglish
        37·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, thats what I did when I bought my NFT game and some NFT mp3s. They ares in my wallet and I can play/ listen forever, steam or Microsoft or epic or google or whatever can never take it away from me.

        • atocci@kbin.social
          6·
          1 year ago

          Where are the streams being hosted though, or where do you download them from? From my understanding, the biggest problem with NFTs is that the NFT itself is nothing more than a token on the blockchain that states you own something, but the files themselves are hosted elsewhere, so if the service hosting the file stops existing, you are left with a token that points to nothing.

          • CaptainSpaceman@lemmy.worldEnglish
            34·
            1 year ago

            Depends on the item, the platform its being sold on, etc, but I believe most NFTs are hosted on the IPFS platform which is censor resistant

            Some NFTs actually point to physical objects and have the digital token as a “certificate of authenticity”. Ive got a holographic skate deck from a EDM artist shipped to me, has an NFC badge on it for more goodies in the future

            The tech is pretty cool, imo, and has a lot of modern use cases.

    • SnuggleSnail@ani.socialEnglish
      31·
      1 year ago

      So… you have the full game encoded in an NFT? That sounds like a shit ton of overhead.