this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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G*mers have already grown used to not owning their games. It's called Steam.
You've never owned your games. It's always been a license to play the games. It's just that now they have the ability to enforce it.
I don't think most people's sense of "ownership" of a copy of a game has anything to do with whether or not they've legally bought a license.
For most of my collection, I own a physical thing, that represents the ability to play that game, using hardware I bought, whether I bought those things today, last year, or even a decade ago. Some of my games are digital, but I still have possession of a copy I bought, and can play it whenever I want. I paid money for the right to play a game when I want, and that's a notion of ownership.
If someone can take it away from me, that isn't aligned with my notion of ownership, and also isn't worth spending money on imo. I own some GameCube games, and yes, technically that means I have a license, but they still work physically and legally. There's nothing to enforce against me.
The thing that changed is the ability to revoke that license. And that amounts to a different concept than ownership. One not worth paying for.
This is rather pedantic and obfuscates the reality and consumer rights. Don't shill for big corp with that narrative, you could argue you don't "own" a book either if we're just doing silly talk in here.
Devil's advocate: you obviously own the physical media that constitutes the book, but do you really "own" the contents of the book if you're not allowed by law to make a million copies of it and sell them?
Who gives a fucking shit about this nonsense? I just want games I paid for to work after the developer stops supporting them.
Maybe you don't, because you're a moron.
You don't, though. Or rather, you don't own its contents. It's not being pedantic, it's simply correct.
This isn't a perspective shilling for big corp. If anything, understanding that society has already sleepwalked into a post-ownership era long ago, and that technology has only just now appeared to let the logical conclusion of that come home to roost, should only increase one's unease of mass unchecked corporate ownership.
You can't buy a book, copy it, and profit from those copies because you don't own the IP. But you own the book for your personal use (and you can lend or sell it) in perpetuity, without any dependence on whoever sold it to you. That last part is no longer possible in the digital world with games that are architected specifically so that core functionality is server-side only.
Like with pirating, it was always an issue of expense. They could legally take away your disk at any time and force you to uninstall the software from your computer. It just would never be worth it to go after any specific individuals for any minor infraction of the license. Digital licensing just made them capable of doing that with the press of a button.
Nah fuck that. If we're paying for shit we're going to use it when and how we want it. Right to repair is in this same vein
It seems I'm miscommunicating. I'm being interpreted as saying, "We're already here, and this is fine actually." My point is "We've been on the setup for ages, you shouldn't be surprised this is where we are going without intervention, and we need to intervene right now".
The world hasn't slowly built up to being this bad. They've been laying the traps for a long time. We're in the late game, not the early game. There is a lot to undo.
It was not like this back in the '90s. Games you purchased were on disk/disks. You installed the game and played the fully completed game that did not require an online connection. You owned that game.
After the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 things changed. So it has not always been like this.
You were still buying a license to play the games.
But without a way to enforce it, it was (and still is) functionally identical to owning them outright. What it's legally called is irrelevant.
I guess I personally don't really care about the legal aspect, I'll make my own moral assessments on what I find reasonable to pirate etc. regardless of legality. Law only occasionally overlaps with ethics.
But on a philosophical level, a rethorical question I ask myself is; what does it really mean to "own" anything digital? I have to ponder on that for a while.
Oh that's easy. For me at least. In my analysis, the law is wrong.
Where are the assets stored. On local storage? Then I own a copy of the assets.
Where is the game logic executed? Locally? Then I own a copy of that game logic. A server? Then I own non of that logic. A hybrid of the two? Then I own a copy of what my hardware processes.
Where is the game save data stored? Locally? Again, that a copy I own. On a server? I'm licensing it.
Here's a good analogy: Monster Hunter: Processing, assets, and saves are all on individual machines. I can be cut off from the internet, and still play. I own a copy.
Diablo IV: the assets are local, processing my inputs is local, but my saves and the game logic are all processed on a server. I own a copy of the assets and input logic. Blizzard owns the rest as they process the rest.
If they want to do the whole "resources=expense" then I get to consider MY resources as expense too.
Before the internet, the concept of game ownership was much easier. Whatever the seller chose to call it, as long as I had complete control over when and where I could play the game, I owned it. I would consider any game where the ability to play it cannot be willfully taken from me by digital means to be owned by me. Nowadays, that mostly applies to cracked games or systems only. No game that requires an online connection to play would apply.
But you could trade them with your friends, so single license meant nothing. You owned the game.