This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
how a business wants to run itself shouldn't be legislated unless it's in the general publics best interests, and videogames are not in the public interests.
if Sony doesn't want to sell physical media anymore, then don't buy it. convince your friends to not buy it. don't buy games that have multiplatform online play with PlayStation.
Would be funny if Sony ends up providing the push needed to get Stop Killing Games passed.
The issue is not physical yes/physical no. The issue is that if a company decides to take a game you bought from you, they can do it.
What we should be legislating is a law so if a company delists and removes from your account a game, they should refund you the price you paid.
Adjusted for inflation. Some games may be years old.
No.
It should just be illegal.
If Nintendo decided to make your original SNES Earthbound cartridge now worth $$$$s suddenly stop working and just had to pay you the inflation adjusted cost you bought it for, they’d still be ripping you off.
Here’s what I want to do :
Make it illegal for a company owning an IP to do any action that hampers product functionality of any kind, even if “ceasing” action causes a hamper to that functionality.
The only CAVEAT that should be allowed is a game having a MODE that the company supports in which they provide an “official” e-sports competition circuit server you can connect to if you want to compete in an official capacity.
They should be able to sell you the game, and if it is centered around multi-player gameplay, it should work at a basic level with open community-hosted networked gaming support.
Additionally, any company that owns a game should be required to submit a source code version of it to the government to act as a “patent” to the game’s source code and copyright. No submission? No valid piracy case can be pursued.
Owner company goes out of business?
Company loses game patent / copyright and the game’s source becomes publicly freely available.
New company buys the IP and fails to support all functionality originally in the game from the original owner company?
Game code is publicly released and you lose the ability to pursue piracy cases.
If you don’t do something this comprehensive, the real problem is - what if a company goes out of business or sells to some other entity?
Corporations do this already in many industries in order to shirk responsibilities to repair issues or do recalls of broken products.
They do it with digital movies, they do it with John Deere hardware, they’ll do it with anything they are not fully required to do that they can weasel out of… so make the barrier to entry to even have ACCESS to the consumer market such that even doing nothing means the company risks losing ownership and enforceable copyright.
Where was this when PC games stopped selling Physical Discs
Meh I love having a physical disc but digital-only is fine as long as DRM doesn’t prevent it from truly being yours and it doesn’t require an internet connection. Physical discs can be made to not work too.
For whateber reason sony could remove a game from the store thrn you lose something you biy forever.
That’s true. A physical disc could also come with a requirement to contact a server in order to work and that server could be shutdown one day. I’m not saying physical media isn’t better. I strongly prefer it and hope that it sticks around. I just don’t think that’s the root of the issue.
The root of the issue is companies will do anything to make more profit although they are already profitable by stripping people choice
100% with you on that one.
That's all folks! No more physical media for any of us because this guy doesn't mind digital only
I prefer physical media. My point is that getting Sony to keep it alive doesn’t fix the real issue.
