• 4 hours

    Let’s say your PS3 gets broken, where do you get a new one? You never own consoles.

  • So do not buy them. If sales fall enough, they will bring back physical media. If you keep buying no matter what they do, of course they will keep doing it.

  • Worry is something you do when you fear potential negative outcomes. His is more like falling out of a plane. You dont have to worry about the outcome because the conclusion is forgone.

    The ToS already explicitly state that you do not own the content, and now you also have no receipt or proof of ownership even of the license itself. They dont have to worry about the future of media ownership, because this is the present media ownership.

  • They will if they pirate them. Which is really the only logical way to handle this shit that the console makers are doing.

    • 2 days

      Does the introduction of media that’s downloaded from the internet and locked to a single proprietary device present extra issues here?

      I presume this will drive a lot of people away from the platform entirely, but it must be a massive headache for game preservationists

      • might be a problem if its solely an ONLINE game, or most of the content is online only.

      • I don’t believe it’s much different to crack that form of copy protection than any other. You may have to mod the console or use an emulator to play it back but I’m pretty confident it won’t phase the cracking crews. The only downside being that it takes some time, but I find myself waiting 2 years now before I buy AAA titles just to get a price I can stomach. By that time a lot of them will have good cracks and emulators available.

        • If you look deep into the switch 2 hacking scene, you’ll find the non optimistic consensus is there is a real chance it will never be cracked, hacked or emulated. The effort put into the engineering to protect it finally caught up. Unique encryption keys per console so that even if one managed to get hacked there is no immediately widespread solution like the past. Fuses that burn themselves and brick the device at any sign of tampering. No clear path or gap towards progress. They stepped up in a massive way and there’s no reason to think Sony won’t follow.

          • 12 hours

            That’s a bummer. I thought I saw a video where they got a ghostly outline of Donkey Kong working already. If one guy or a few guys hacks theirs and gets it working it’s probably enough to make an emulator though. I’m always astonished by the ability of the hacking community to overcome the measures that the corporations put in place.

            • Yeah unfortunately that was generally considered fake in the end. Basically it’s not entirely impossible but it’s harder than it’s ever been.

  • Let’s be real though, technically software has always lived and died on licensing instead of ownership.

    I remember software in the 90s having limits on how many computers you could use an application on (however rarely enforced), and making backup copies of software that you owned (like copying a CD for backup purposes) was a hard fought right when the DMCA was being implemented. But even the backup only helped so much because especially in the last 20 years tech has grown at lightning speed since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. A CD backup of Office 2003 isn’t really helpful in 2026 anyway.

    I’m not arguing this is how it should be. I’m just clarifying that technically this is how it has always been. We’ve never had full rights to do whatever we want with the software we buy. It’s why Free (as in speech, not as in beer) Open Source Software is so important, and why open hardware is so important by extension.

    The same companies that rose to dominance using an environment with weak regulation and enforcement while also maintaining that hacker attitude of “routing around bad legislation” have now been using their dominance to make an environment of tight regulation and enforcement, now that they’re at the top. They have spent endless amounts of lobbying money to get this environment to benefit them where you’re locked in via hardware and software to the companies rules on how you use your hardware and software… because the software was never really ours, and now they’re leveraging that to make our hardware not ours either.

    The only way out is through. FOSS.

    • 2 days

      I remember software in the 90s having limits on how many computers you could use an application on (however rarely enforced)

      I remember software in the '90s having “limited licenses,” but operating on the honor system. Because you could just install it on as many computers as you wanted and there wasn’t really a way for companies to stop you.

      It wasn’t until the early 2000s when I started seeing licenses verified through the Internet and actually limiting their usage.

      • It wasn’t until the early 2000s when I started seeing licenses verified through the Internet and actually limiting their usage.

        Hub, what a coincidence. That somehow started around the time the DMCA came to be and America made most countries world wide adopt a similar legislation to ban cracking drm…

      • Thanks for the clarification, I’m old and sometimes my memory is more fuzzy on those details. But yeah, it’s always been a license, and back then it felt more like ownership because of the honor system.

  • Why would they be worried? It’s plain and simple. They won’t.