A seller doesn’t get to walk in your home, hand you a check and take your couch. The same should not be allowed for digital goods. A voluntary refund should never revoke ownership rights. But we don’t actually have ownership rights any more, do we? Or any rights.
Digital ownership is probably going to happen, but it’s going to take a generation of politicians to die off. Once we get more people that understand computers and digital goods aren’t magic, there can be change.
But we don’t actually have ownership rights any more, do we?
When it comes to video games, we’ve never had ownership rights. Buying a game has always been just buying a license. The only thing that’s changed is that now publishers have a mechanism with which to enforce it.
That is absolutely untrue. Games used to be sold as a physical object containing the game files. No serial numbers to redeem, no servers, no downloads or updates. Sometimes you’d get a booklet with the game that had some codes in it that the game would ask for on startup to make making copies a little more difficult, but that was it.
You’d literally have everything you need just on the CD, disk, or cartridge. We 100% owned the game and the system it was played on, and the only way to revoke that would have been to physically break into your house and steal it.
This whole games as services thing is about 20 years old tops, and it wasn’t even remotely approaching the standard for quite a while after that.
Fuck that, when I bought Chrono Trigger for the SNES, I owned that game. I still own that game. Nintendo has not broken into my home to rescind my license to a physical cartridge that I purchased.
Sony refunded everyone who bought the game though.
A seller doesn’t get to walk in your home, hand you a check and take your couch. The same should not be allowed for digital goods. A voluntary refund should never revoke ownership rights. But we don’t actually have ownership rights any more, do we? Or any rights.
Digital ownership is probably going to happen, but it’s going to take a generation of politicians to die off. Once we get more people that understand computers and digital goods aren’t magic, there can be change.
When it comes to video games, we’ve never had ownership rights. Buying a game has always been just buying a license. The only thing that’s changed is that now publishers have a mechanism with which to enforce it.
That is absolutely untrue. Games used to be sold as a physical object containing the game files. No serial numbers to redeem, no servers, no downloads or updates. Sometimes you’d get a booklet with the game that had some codes in it that the game would ask for on startup to make making copies a little more difficult, but that was it.
You’d literally have everything you need just on the CD, disk, or cartridge. We 100% owned the game and the system it was played on, and the only way to revoke that would have been to physically break into your house and steal it.
This whole games as services thing is about 20 years old tops, and it wasn’t even remotely approaching the standard for quite a while after that.
Fuck that, when I bought Chrono Trigger for the SNES, I owned that game. I still own that game. Nintendo has not broken into my home to rescind my license to a physical cartridge that I purchased.
Legally speaking, you own the physical cartridge, but you only own a license to the software on the cartridge.
Practically speaking, no one will break into your house to control what you do with the cartridge.
I don’t see why I should pay for a license, especially when it can be revoked any time for any reason. That’s just not a valuable product
There was a physical release