Ah yes the intelligent consumer who always has a choice and is never beholden to the whims of a completely dominant supply side economy.
I actually agree that physical media is better for consumers. If I buy a game, I think I should own it. I should be able to sell it, lend it to a friend, or keep playing it decades from now without worrying about a company flipping a switch. Physical media is objectively more consumer-friendly in that regard.
What I don’t agree with is the narrative that corporations had to force everyone into digital by sabotaging physical releases. That’s not how I remember it.
Steam became wildly popular because consumers embraced it almost immediately. Instant downloads, automatic updates, cloud saves, massive sales, and never having to swap discs were conveniences people overwhelmingly wanted. Publishers certainly recognized the benefits for themselves, more control, no used game market, lower distribution costs, but they didn’t invent the demand. They took advantage of a demand that consumers had already created.
In a sense, we shot ourselves in the foot. We collectively chose convenience over ownership because, at the time, it seemed like a worthwhile trade. Now we’re living with the consequences of that decision.
It’s completely fair to push for stronger ownership rights today. But I think it’s a mistake to pretend that consumers were dragged into digital kicking and screaming. For the overwhelming majority of gamers, digital won because they chose it.
Funny. The consumer didn’t make physical media worse for the last 15 years.
Manual or at least something besides the disk: Gone Price: Same as digital despite they getting more profit from digital. Disc: half the game, other half downloads. (Not always, mind you) Game: Half baked without at least two patches.
They’ve been giving less and less with physical editions to push the more profitable digital store, and then they act shocked when no one buys physical.
Shockingly, if the only difference between physical and digital is that you need to go out of your way to pick the physical, most people will just get the digital.
Still I got my Switch games in physical so I can trade with friends.
The current outrage over the shift from physical media to streaming and digital licenses is based on a massive historical misunderstanding. People treat the twentieth century as the absolute baseline for how media should work, but the era of the DVD and the cartridge was actually a historical fluke.
For thousands of years, you could not buy or own a performance. You bought a ticket to experience a play or a symphony, and the creator maintained total control over their work. John Locke argued that individuals own themselves and therefore own the labor of their bodies and minds. When a creator invests their intellect into developing software or art, it is an extension of that labor, and they possess the highest moral claim to it.
Capturing art on physical media was a technological anomaly that broke this rule and created a false sense of consumer entitlement. It birthed legal loopholes that allowed massive secondary markets to profit endlessly off a creator’s intellectual labor without compensating them beyond the very first sale. It tricked the public into confusing the ownership of a piece of plastic with the ownership of the art itself.
You do not own a creator’s code, film, or digital ecosystem, and you never did. Furthermore, modern software and digital media are not static objects like a wooden chair. They are living ecosystems that require ongoing server maintenance, security patches, and active development. Demanding perpetual, lifetime ownership of a digital service for a single upfront fee is essentially demanding forced, uncompensated ongoing labor from the development team.
The transition away from physical media is not a corporate theft of consumer rights. It is a necessary course correction back to the historical norm of the amphitheater. A digital subscription or end user license is simply a modern theater ticket. You are paying for the right to occupy the creator’s digital venue for a set period of time. The architect of the work is just finally reclaiming the moral authority to decide exactly how and when their intellectual labor is consumed.
Why is it necessary?
Your entire premise is based upon on a couple of misunderstandings.
First, on a technical note regardless if you have bought a physical disk or downloaded a digital copy you are still bound by an end user licensing agreement. The real historical difference amounts to a right to resale. There is no reason why, other than corporate greed, that we cannot resale our digital copies. Ideally this right should be restored by clarifying you own a single transferable copy of the code.
Second, I think you make some important points that deserve to be discussed. You pack a lot of information in a very small amount of space which is very impressive. I am concerned that your points may be missing some important context. Also, when you bring morality into the discussion it makes me want to climb up on a metaphorical soap box because I see things very differently from a moral perspective.
For thousands of years there was no Intellectual Property (IP). Artist copied each other as they always did and still do to this day. No ownership was needed or expected because all art and science is inherently iterative. What you accept as reality is really the modern “fluke” only existing in the last few hundred years.
On a minor point, you also seem to confuse art and science with commerce. The majority of art is never intended for commercial sale. It is actually a very small amount that is created solely for commercial sale, yet we spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing it. It is important to point out this distinction otherwise we reduce all art to monetary value when in reality that is not the reason it is created.
Science cannot exist without iteration. Our current system simply transfers science developed by individuals, often with public funding, to corporations. We will also see this theme in IP where corporations take their employee’s work for their benefit and even worse, non-employee’s work as well.
Every once in awhile we will hear about an artist or scientist suing and winning against a major corporation, thus reinforcing the IP propaganda that it defends the little guy. The reality is these are the exceptions not the rule. It is not surprising though, by granting such an insane right of artificial scarcity that it would be abused by capital. This reality taints all IP and not bringing it up is a disservice to the discussion.
From patent trolls to copyright scammers the reality is the little guy is the one who gets continuously screwed. So many people’s life works have been stolen from them by corporations. This realization should make anyone skeptical of these rights when they are continuously abused by corporations.
Due to these capilitistic designs the small percentage of commercial creator’s rights are usually taken by corporations. This system is highlighted by the reality seen in the record industry and the fact that very few preformers own their own works. This shows us it is about protecting corporations and not non-wealthy individuals like you or I.
Most people don’t realize that defending copyright or patents take years and hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. This system is extremely inaccessible to individuals unless they are wealthy and can hire proxies to litigate and disseminate their lies for them. This creates perverse incentives that allow corporations to take other’s rights.
The very foundation of the US was based on intellectual piracy with the founding fathers encouraging it to build American industry. This can be seen in modern day with countries like China (although I feel they are no longer borrowing as much because of their amazing innovations). Thomas Jefferson is a famous inventor who basically paid other people to do all the work, remind you of Musk much. We must recognize that we have always ignored IP when it suits us. This can be seen with AI right now.
Back to morality and IP. The concept that a creator gets to benefit from the same labour over and over again through artificially scarcity enforced by the state is pretty ridiculous honestly. It is absurd on its face and an affront to how most people earn a living. People may deserve compensation, but not an endless revenue stream.
Once again, this is rarely about the individual as corporations and the wealthy are the primary beneficiaries of these legal rights that they have spent hundreds of years lobbying the state and the court systems for.
Indeed the origin of copyright was about control and censorship and not protect individuals rights. I will admit that when it comes to IP, patents did have slightly more honest beginnings by forcing the grantee to expose how their inventions works as an actual public good. Regardless of this one benefit to the public, the patent is inherently a tool of control as well.
We can see how modern day industry has been shaped by abusing and misusing the right of patent. Creating an impossible barrier to entry, blocking competition, effectively endlessly renewing patents as seen in the pharmaceutical industry, patenting concepts others have developed because of first to file rights, patenting concepts that do not meet the the proper standards by regulatory capture, etc all show the system is broken and is merely a tool for the wealthy to manipulate the market
Capturing art on physical media is not new as evidenced by as far back as cave art and countless other examples throughout human history. Technology certainly changes the equation, but your argument that this has lead to consumer entitlement is bizarre. I suppose your trying to say by owning a copy of the movie the consumer also feels they “own” the movie itself. I won’t discount some people may believe this, but I also don’t think this is a realistic assessment of the situation.
There is a major problem when you lump code in with other creative works. I won’t spend too much time on this because it is a rather large topic. What I will say is the creator doesn’t own the code because just like math there is often an obvious way to the solution. You should never be able to own a solution under system of enforced artificial scarcity. Software patents are absolute garbage that stifle creativity.
I am glad you recognize the difference between digital goods and physical goods. I think you come to very contradictory and dystopian conclusions then I would though.
In your world no one owns anything digitally because “creator” aka the corporation needs moar money. You pay to be able to grace yourself with their amazing talent for but a brief moment.Your digital media is not yours and can be taken away at any time. Your game can charge you every time you play it, you operating system is spyware because the owner of the software wants it to be.
In my world I pay for my hardware. Keeping those zeros and ones alive is something I pay for not them. I pay for the hardware, electricity, and connection to the Internet. I pay to upgrade and maintain it. I have invested interest and a right to my property. I am not paying for an experience. I am paying for a file and once I have possession of the file it is mine to do with what I want. This is digital reality.
Your argument seems to be copyright maximalist crossed with corporate shill. I also find your argument devolves into almost a moral panic of technology. A lot of what you criticize is similar to what people said about records and photography. Interestingly these arguments are currently being used against AI. I think you may enjoy this link.
Equating labor to copying ones and zeros is pretty comical. The reason an artist is paid is they perform. Insane copyright laws have lead to bizarre situations like car mechanics in England getting sued for listen to music while they work on cars because customers might hear it and they don’t have the performance rights.
I will leave you with this conundrum.
There is only one way to truly protect your art. Never share it with anyone. There is only one way to prove your work is truly original. Be raised by wolves never interacting with humans and produce great works of art without using any frame of reference other than the ones you invented yourself in a vacuum. Only then is your art truly original and protected.
I don’t think the Lockean argument actually gets you where you want it to go.
Locke’s labor theory of property doesn’t just say creators own the fruits of their labor. It also says they have the right to alienate that property, to sell it, transfer it, or give it away. Once that transfer occurs, ownership changes hands. That’s the entire point of property rights.
This is where your comparison to theater performances breaks down.
A performance is inherently ephemeral. Of course you only buy admission. But books, paintings, sculptures, and other tangible works have been bought and sold for centuries. When Rembrandt sold a painting, he didn’t retain the right to dictate who displayed it, resold it, or inherited it. When someone bought a book, the author retained the copyright, but they didn’t retain ownership of that physical copy.
That’s the distinction your argument glosses over.
Physical media didn’t create some bizarre loophole that tricked consumers into believing they owned art. Copyright law has always separated ownership of a copy from ownership of the intellectual property. Buying a novel never meant you owned the copyright. It meant you owned that particular copy.
The “historical anomaly” argument doesn’t really hold either. Technology creating new forms of property isn’t evidence that those forms are somehow illegitimate. Printing presses, photography, automobiles, patents, and even digital storage all changed what could be owned. Calling something a historical anomaly doesn’t make it philosophically suspect.
Where your argument has merit is with services. An MMO, cloud software, or any product that depends on ongoing servers and continuous development is fundamentally different from a finished single-player game or a movie sitting on a disc. Those genuinely require ongoing labor.
But once you start arguing that creators retain moral authority over every copy they’ve sold forever, you’ve left Locke behind. You’re no longer defending property rights, you’re defending perpetual control after the sale. That’s a very different philosophical position, and I don’t think your conclusion follows from your premise.
You do not own a creator’s code, film, or digital ecosystem, and you never did.
Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.
Art is the common property of all mankind. Art is the human soul. The very idea that you can restrict the creativity of another human being is an affront to the human spirit. You know what is truly a modern anomaly? Copyright and all IP law. For 99% of human history, artists would laugh in your face if you suggested that a musician had some God-given right to prevent others from singing a song they just wrote.
You have no natural right to “intellectual property,” because ultimately what you mean by “intellectual property” is the temporary right to exclusive sale of a product. And that is not a natural right. It’s not a natural right like freedom of speech, or even ownership of tangible property. Copyright violation is fundamentally different from real theft because it doesn’t deprive the owner of an original. Yes, you as an artist may feel you have some innate ownership to an idea, but that is a sense of privilege and entitlement that comes from misunderstanding the history and purpose of IP law. Hell, for most of history, artists were not even considered the source of creative works. Medieval painters didn’t sign their works, because they considered God to be the real creator. Before that, the Muses got credit.
Here is what you are missing. Copyright is not an innate right. It’s a useful legal compromise, nothing more. We discovered through trial and error that providing a limited period of exclusive use of a work to an artist helps get more art made. But that’s all it is, a pragmatic compromise. Do not confuse it for a natural right like life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.
No one creates art in a vacuum. Everything is inspired and derived from works that came before it. There are no original stories. Artists are only able to create works because they’ve trained and studied on the works of countless other artists that came before them. Your work as an artist is just one tiny piece of a grand cultural tapestry. And as you were able to benefit from the commons, in turn your work will return to the commons to inspire others. A drop from the ocean. An ocean from a drop. That is the nature of art and creativity.
So… We should go backwards instead of forward?
For thousands of years back you could trade people for cows, owning your life is a massive historical misunderstanding.
You could own the Mona Lisa. You could own the original Dante’s inferno. For thousands of years there wasn’t the technology to have a copy of the Iliad, then there was and you could have a copy that wasn’t man-made, the press was born. You couldn’t have a copy of a painting without a massive spending on a replica, then in 1600 in Japan with wooden blocks they mass distributed art of Hokusai. You couldn’t own music until you could. You couldn’t own performances until you could.
Those were never moral or logical reasons not to, the technology just didn’t exists. Now the technology does exist and you say that because it didn’t before, then it’s a fluke?
For most of human history people died at early ages, we should go back to that and ditch all antibiotics I guess then, if “history” is the bar you’re measuring “moral”.
Also, guess what, the architect of the work was never in control of their art nor had the “moral authority” of how their work is consumed. Do you really thing that Homer personally went and trained everyone who wanted to interpret the Iliad? Your whole argument is based in something that didn’t even existed in the first place with tons of examples of the contrary that the only thing I can think is that you’re trolling or severely brainwashed.
They sold a product, not an “experience”. Without massive access and preservation of art in all forms civilization couldn’t even begin to grow as fast as it did in the last thousand years.
And before anything else, the mere concept of “owning” is the single most important part of capitalism, if they want to play the “owning” game then we should all be able to play the game. Also historically “owning” didn’t exist. We should course correct to the one true way of tribadism and nomads. I guess.
Not sure if you are joking or not.
While I don’t necessarily agree with your POV here, I can at least say it’s more interesting than people realize to look at the growth of the VHS player and how this ownership debacle played out in the video world when it first came around. There were big lawsuits around whether people were allowed to record a movie or show, and then play it in a living room of 4-5 people.
The opinions of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau are not absolutel nor ubiquitous. They may have said things that are no longer, or never were accurate and almost certainly should never be held to be inviolate/permanent.
I choose to crush corporations until they are so small they are easily drowned by pissing on them.
Garbage take.
I don’t buy AAA games. Because paying for a code and waiting four hours for the rest of the game to download is bullshit.
My biggest gaming spending spree in the last five years has been on itch, and I can make my own physical copies of those
Of course the “former Valve writer” is Chet Faliszek. The dude never shuts up.
If GOG just hired one full time intern to go ahead and bake Proton into their platform so they could have Linux support that isn’t completely broken, I’d probably start getting more games on their platform again.
Edit: Oh, looks like it’s on the way. Maybe I’d better start wishlisting.
I mean, I’m fully okay with settling for Heroic as my launcher until GOG gets it official.
I feel like everyone in this thread is ignoring the literal headline.
The point being made is that the consumer chose these rights-infringing, privacy-corrupting, ownership-destroying choices.
Then OF COURSE companies weaponised it.
The issue is that your average Joe doesn’t think for a damn second in his life, and picks up whatever is put down.
Yeah, arguments that blank percent of people are morally good are insane since… Most people dont really think about long term morals of their decisions day to day if ever. Most people just live and do by convenience without asking if it is morally good but simply believing the self to be.
It needs to be convenient to do good things for people to do them and the convenient option for a long time has been giving up ownership rights.
Yeah … Morality is subjective… If the majority of a given population does a thing, that thing is moral within that population.
Ironically enough the topic of whether or not morality is ‘subjective’ is also inherently up for interpretation. There’s literally a whole philosophical field of study for this.
That being said, I’ll counter this sentiment by saying that the things we find to be ‘moral’ as a species are more often than not the things that help our species prosper (i.e. taboos for murder, theft, bullying, sexual violence, etc.). Sure, there may be a certain degree of variation within the moral frameworks of a culture, but you’ll be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t have that baseline of enforcing against most forms of explicit harm which can come about against members of that society. If that weren’t the case then we would have gone extinct a long time ago.
You’re confusing biological utility with objective truth.
Sure, human societies share baselines against murder and theft because societies without them collapse. But that’s just evolutionary pragmatism. A behavior that keeps a species alive isn’t a cosmic moral law; it’s just a survival mechanism. If a beehive kills off its drones to survive the winter, it’s not being “moral”, it’s just trying not to die.
Even your premise that the prosperity of our species is inherently “good”, relies on our own subjective bias that we prefer being alive. The universe itself doesn’t care.
But let’s apply your own standard back to the actual topic: video games.
If your baseline for objective morality is “things that help our species prosper,” then a corporation shifting to digital-only game licenses has absolutely zero impact on human survival. By your own logic, it’s completely amoral.
If you still want to argue that going digital-only is “immoral,” you have to abandon your evolutionary argument and admit you’re just projecting a subjective cultural preference onto a consumer inconvenience.
You’re confusing biological utility with objective truth.
Confusing them? No. We simply have different standards for what qualifies as objective truth. For me, if your truth gets you harmed or worse, it’s wrong. Simple as that. I am acutely aware that there isn’t any universal moral standard when it comes to existence at large, but for my own and humanity’s purposes, those which help us get by better than others are the “truer” ones.
Even your premise that the prosperity of our species is inherently “good”, relies on our own subjective bias that we prefer being alive. The universe itself doesn’t care.
As with what I just stated, it doesn’t matter whether the universe itself cares or not. The universe can frankly do whatever the hell it wants (as it certainly does); reality to me and many others is that which I can sense and experience in my lifetime, and that’s all it ever will be. For any reasonable person’s purposes, the universe’s (as a personification) stake in their lives shouldn’t hold any stake in what they do or do not do. And that especially goes for their morality. Nihilism is equivalent to just being mindless and inert matter on a biological level, and that’s honestly just sad given what humanity and its qualifiers have been able to achieve.
If your baseline for objective morality is “things that help our species prosper,” then a corporation shifting to digital-only game licenses has absolutely zero impact on human survival. By your own logic, it’s completely amoral.
Wrong. As with any complex systems we’ve been able to create in our societies, this will certainly be up for debate, but you’ll have to concede that not being able to own the things you purchase (as humans have done and have been able to do for the majority, if not the entirety of our existence) sets a frankly awful precedent for what these corporations and governments will feel they are entitled to do. To pretend it has always been like this is or it’s inevitable is fatalism, which like nihilism, is sad, and frankly pathetic. I pity that mentality.
If you still want to argue that going digital-only is “immoral,” you have to abandon your evolutionary argument and admit you’re just projecting a subjective cultural preference onto a consumer inconvenience.
And what are these “consumer inconveniences”? Because by your logic, the universe shouldn’t care about that either, considering that it’s a human construct and therefore abstracted from the “objective features” of reality. This is the main problem with your mentality. If morality doesn’t matter, then nothing does. And if nothing matters, then this topic is redundant. It’s nothing more than a spending of entropy.
Think what you want to think, believe what you want to believe. But if you’re seriously following the route of nihilism as if it will lead to some sort of peace of mind, I’ve got some bad news for you: it’s just going to make you feel worse. And with that, I’ve got a funny, albeit facetious image relevant to this conversation that I’ve been looking for an excuse to use somewhere. So here it is. Don’t take it too seriously. (Or do, I’m not your dad.)
You are attempting to mask a highly subjective, culturally specific worldview as an objective universal truth. Your entire argument rests on a foundation of ethnocentrism and philosophical contradictions, projecting your modern consumer habits onto the entirety of the human race.
You claim you are not confusing biological utility with objective truth, but then immediately define your standard for truth as: “for me, if your truth gets you harmed or worse, it’s wrong.” That is not objective truth. That is utilitarian pragmatism. Gravity is an objective truth; if you jump off a cliff, it will pull you down whether it harms you or not. Reality does not bend to accommodate human comfort, preference, or survival.
By declaring that reality is only what you can “sense and experience in my lifetime,” you have completely abandoned objectivity. You are arguing for a self-serving, subjective moral framework while simultaneously trying to enforce it as a universal law for all of “humanity.”
The most glaring flaw in your argument is your claim that owning purchased things is something humans have done “for the majority, if not the entirety of our existence.” This is profoundly ethnocentric and historically illiterate.
You are taking a highly specific, modern, Western capitalist paradigm, the individual commodification and perpetual ownership of goods, and projecting it backward across all of human history and across all global cultures. For the vast majority of human existence, property was often communal, tied to land stewardship, or dictated by complex systems of patronage and social hierarchy. The idea that an individual has an inherent, natural, almost biological right to permanently own the intangible intellectual labor of another human being for a one-time transaction is a recent cultural anomaly.
When you claim that changing a software licensing model sets an “awful precedent” for humanity, you aren’t defending humanity. You are aggressively defending the modern Western consumer culture you happen to live in, mistaking your local economic norms for the laws of nature.
Finally, you are completely misusing the concept of nihilism to dismiss a legally and structurally accurate argument. Pointing out that a shift from physical to digital software distribution has zero impact on biological human survival is not “nihilism.” It is basic perspective.
Acknowledging that the universe does not care about End-User License Agreements does not mean “nothing matters.” It simply means that your inconvenience over a corporate software transition is not a cosmic moral tragedy. You can find profound meaning in human achievement, art, and philosophy without holding onto the delusion that you are morally entitled to permanently own the digital labor of a development team.
You are perfectly entitled to your subjective preference for physical media. But stop pretending your consumer inconveniences are objective moral imperatives for the human species.
Woah there, ethnocentrism is quite the claim pal. Especially when you have absolutely nothing to back it up with aside from my own personal opinions (which I certainly never claimed to be entirely objective despite what you seem to be asserting).
Now admittedly, I am defining objective truth through my own interpretative lens. However, you’re not exactly an angel yourself in that regard, which is precisely why I’m doing it in the first place.
To make my point clear, I’ll give a couple examples of what you yourself had written earlier:
- Even your premise that the prosperity of our species is inherently “good”, relies on our own subjective bias that we prefer being alive. The universe itself doesn’t care.
Despite my own opinions on the matter of whether the universe “cares” or not, this is an inherently subjective assertion. There’s no way to prove such a metaphysical claim.
- If your baseline for objective morality is “things that help our species prosper,” then a corporation shifting to digital-only game licenses has absolutely zero impact on human survival. By your own logic, it’s completely amoral.
Again, blatantly subjective. On what grounds is the shift to digital-only media not harmful? And even if you were to back it up, it would still be subjective regardless. There’s nothing materially concrete about any of your potential evidence. I realize I’m somewhat undermining my point here, but for the sake of demonstrating the folly of your handwaving of any viewpoint aside from your own with accusations of “ethnocentrism”, “philosophical contradictions”, “historical illiteracy”, etc., I’ll let it slide.
On that topic (of historical illiteracy) my point wasn’t that people could own goods for the majority of human existence and that was that. No, my point was that there has never been a system quite like this where consumers have been sold media under the impression of obtaining ownership when that isn’t the case at all. You can make all the claims you want about the past, but specifically regarding media it’s never been like this. You wouldn’t see digital enshittification happening in 10 000 BCE.
You’re also being bizarrely presumptuous of my understanding of property and how it’s been understood in the cultural zeitgeist. I’m inclined to believe you’re being disingenuous but for the sake of charity I’ll permit you the benefit of the doubt. I’m well aware that the concept of guaranteed individual rights (particularly from liberalism), especially with regards to property, are a very recent development in relation to human existence. My viewpoint comes from my own disgust with corporate entities dicking over people who by no means deserve it under any rational perspective regarding our current laws and establishments.
Additionally (and I know you know this), human society has never been so cut and dry as property having been strictly communal for the entirety of our existence until, say, 20 millennia ago. Obviously we’ve been in anarchistic societies for quite a long time as a species, but it’s not like you couldn’t own anything. That’s just ridiculous, even without modern liberal beliefs. Barter systems have been a thing for essentially forever (trading labour for labour by way of abstract ideals, far from a “recent cultural anomaly”), and aside from very select and overall arbitrary differences, humans in the Stone Age were essentially identical to ourselves now, ideas and all, however early in development said ideas were. This isn’t Plato’s Cave.
When you claim that … changing a software licensing model sets an “awful precedent” … you aren’t defending humanity. You are aggressively defending the modern Western consumer culture you happen to live in, mistaking your local economic norms for the laws of nature.
Forgive me, but I find this part in particular kind of funny if not really strange. First of all, it’s not as simple as “changing a licensing model”, and since I know that and I know you know that, I’m not even going to bother addressing that. What really gets me is this idea that I’m mistaking my culture for the “laws of nature”.
Says who? You? Because I certainly didn’t say anything to even suggest that. I’m certainly not “aggressively” defending it either, that’s quite a silly term to use for a dumb back-and-forth on the internet. I’m well aware there’s a difference between reality and culture (clearly).
It seems you’re mistaking my consideration of contemporary society and its innate relevance as a treatment of its doctrines as dogma. Which really couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m not a cult member of “Western society” as you seem to be weirdly painting me as. I merely believe that if people can reasonably come to expect one thing from society, and they get none of that as was promised, it’s hypocritical and thereby wrong. Now you can make all the claims you want about it being a “cultural concept”, but that’s theory, not reality. Theory doesn’t improve anything on its own, especially when applied so pretentiously.
Anyway, because your arguments are inherently broken by means of your assertion of the “subjectivity of my beliefs”, while you literally assert your subjective beliefs at the same time as reality, your entire point is just futile. You can’t deny the importance of a culture and its influence on the world while at the same time asserting your own beliefs as the singular truth. That’s nothing short of hypocrisy.
A free market requires a perfectly informed consumer. That’s impossible before you begin to consider how marketing is dishonest
I gotta disagree. The only requirement is that the consumer doesn’t blindly trust companies when buying things more expensive than bread.
It should be common sense to check what they actually get when they buy something that 1. Isn’t tangible and 2. Is expected to last. But people don’t, not because they’re not perfectly informed, but because they lack basic critical thinking.
Time isn’t an issue either. It takes 10 minutes, one time, to figure out what stores give you actual ownership and which don’t, in the case of gaming.
So consumers were given the choice between physical media that you made artificially expensive and overly inconvenient or digital media that you made practically free and ultra convenient. That’s called the illusion of choice. But now you can blame your victims when you abuse them because they brought this on themselves.
It s more nuanced. 80% of buy are digital. Some industries it s worse. Like music and movie. But thoses industry value their “hardcore” consumer and will never shelve their physical release, who also append to be better quality than digital release. Contrary to video game where its litteraly the same product. Nobody has an issue with valve being fully digital cause they can’t lock down other store. What sont does is unprecdent and I pray for their downfall.
Physical media is no more expensive or inconvenient than it ever was. It’s just that you’re now comparing it to downloads, which bear no manufacturing cost and don’t require you to physically go to a store or have the media shipped to you. These are exactly the reasons that consumers prefer downloads.
Up until the Wii era you could just insert the disc in the console and start playing immediately, it was much more convenient than waiting an hour for a game to download and install. You didn’t need to manage disk space as well. Or login before playing. The industry destroyed the convenience. Now only Switch has an option to start playing from cartridge.
As far as I know, no one has produced technology to make disc streaming faster. You can blame console design for this, but even if an indie dev simulated this situation with a 50GB game containing compressed textures placed on a Blu-ray, he’d have the same design problem - loading things off that disc takes a long time, and installation is a far better user experience.
The Wii gets away with it because texture sizes back then were much smaller. If you can point to technical demonstrations of how the same process could’ve been achieved on modern games with much larger textures, I’d be interested to hear it.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think we ever got to see a dual disk drive console, at least not in production (exempting gaming PCs). Perhaps in a parallel universe on board storage became cost prohibitive and games came on two simultaneously inserted optical disks, one with the game code and the other with texture packs and art. Nothing that interesting could exist in today’s climate.
Cartridges, same as Switch 2. And high res textures and audio as separate download if needed. Flash memory was getting cheap until AI, 64GB usb 3 drive is still around 10 bucks at retail, so probably 3 bulk, and even cheaper for Sony.
Spinning media will never be as fast, of course, unless every drive comes with a 50GB cache to just load everything once and never seek randomly.
Doesn’t most of the physical media still require downloads to actually play anyway? I don’t own a console but it seems like every time I’m at one of my friends who do and they’re putting a new game in they have to wait on it to install/update or whatever. Maybe it’s just the big AAA ones.
Only if you have an internet connection active. Otherwise, I believe it’s just insert disc and play, IIRC.
When all options are rigged, it’s pretty rude to blame “the consumer”
I just wanted to add that it’s also really stupid to claim that “consumers chose thing” because companies did it since they found it more profitable. Companies do many things people don’t actively want (or even dislike) for profit.
That is absolutely not true. Companies chose cloud-streamed gaming. But because no one saw it as useful, it didn’t catch on and Stadia ended up shuttering their services. Companies chose 3D TVs, but consumers didn’t. We are seeing the “choice of AI” in home computing, and it’s remarkable how long they have attempted to extend the effort of “forcing consumers to choose it”, but to their credit, there are at least some home AI afficionados that somehow love Windows 11 Copilot.
I can assume you were not part of the digital games zeitgeist, but I can assure you, a great many (perhaps non-vocal) gamers were, and were very much for it.
I feel like one shouldn’t conflate liking something with choosing something. You definitely have a point that consumers can stop things. If enough consumers dislike something enough, it will likely fail. Like you point out though, it was still companies that made the choice to go for cloud gaming. They were just wrong about it being profitable as far as I can tell.
I was part of it and I love digital games (gimme drm free), still doesn’t mean I actually chose things to go this way!
An interesting example is brought up by Andreas Malm in his book “Fossil Capital”. He explains how consumers didn’t chose for the manufacturing of electronics and lots of other things to move to China. Companies moved their manufacturing there because it was cheaper and would increase their profits. Now the choice for many consumers is basically to buy Chinese-made or not buy at all. I know since I actually tried a few years ago!
Fuck Valve.
This is also not what people are choosing. This has been chosen for them. These mental gymnastics these capilitistic fucks always use to justify this garbage are just propaganda.
While consumers may value the ease of use of digital platforms this doesn’t mean they want to give up their rights of resale or have their game pulled at a later date because of some licensing bullshit. Digital is fine if our rights are still protected, but they aren’t.
“Former” and “writer”
Sure. So there’s no reason he might not got paid by Sony to say this, right? Or yet alone have any professional knowledge on distribution of games.
Edit: check is wiki. He’s a sorry ass grifter. Putting up valve before his name to make his sorry points more credible. Trying to squeeze out his valve history even though majority of his career was spend on not being able to cope with indie studio workload and then shifting to riot games for monies. Now he’s making TikTok videos talking about valve like it’s his majority of experience. Also he was opposing Stop Killing Games. https://preservetube.com/watch?v=qr6I2BiU238
What we want is DRM-free games, not your bullshit
Fucking morons
Can we stop spreading the propaganda for them? Sony lied about digital sales by including digital-only games in their figures.
Every game with a physical release, according to their developers, makes most of their sales on disc. It’s literally always a 70/30 split every single time (give or take 10%). I cannot find any evidence of a game that sold more in its digital form than physical
The guy who’s saying this is a controversian, he’s trying to get clicks to his TikTok. He was also opposing stop killing games. He’s not even working in valve more than a decade. So he’s irrelevant but he does make sure to say ex-valve before his title.
I do not even have a tiktok. Who are you talking about?
I’m talking about the guy who’s saying those stuff, chet Faliszek. not you lol.
Ok, I didn’t think you were. I was saying you don’t need to be influenced by some guy to come to the conclusion that if all publishers, studios, their devs, (and their leakers, apparently), all agree on something, it’s most likely true
deleted by creator
- releases digital-only game
- “hmm, 0 physical copies sold… looks like people prefer digital”
Where can I learn more about this. Frankly, I will not just take your word for it on such a bold claim.
That’s fair, but it’s ubiquitous. Search Twitter and Bluesky for official game studio and personal developer accounts. They almost always post about their sales soon after a launch. I don’t have any on hand, sorry. I do remember suckerpunch and insomniac doing so all the time.
My claim would be very easily disproven if it wasn’t true
Data from Insomniac Games, leaked last year
The article you linked makes me think it isn’t quite that easy to find proof.
I believe you, and im sure it’s because I’ve lost passion for just about everything at this point, but if the disk doesnt hold the game what really is the point anymore. If we bought the entire game on hard drive and the console had a hot swappable port so we used them like cartridges that would be great. I shouldn’t need internet access to play a game by myself. But with the current fuckery, the disc just holds part of the game right, and you have to download the rest of the game when you put it in the console.
You can also use that license thatvomes on that disc and transfer it and sell it or trade it to someone else if you choose.
That choice is being taken away.
Ah that makes sense. I wonder if there are people who create accounts for each game they digitally purchase. Then sell the sign in creds when they are done playing. Talk about a giant pain in the ass that would be
Sony and Microsoft’s Xbox will ban you immediately for this but because Steam is a lot more consumer friendly people do sell whole accounts with a game or two tied to them. There’s a site (that’s kind of shady ish so look out for that) that I have used called G2A that you can buy whole steam accounts with games on.
I think that some of those codes are stolen though or something of that nature but steam doesn’t do anything about it but that is 100% speculation on my part. I thought I heard a dev of a game say something like that one time though that they’d rather you pirate it than buy it off G2A.
Edit: thinking about it more I don’t think its stolen its just the simple fact that you can “trade” or “sell” the entire game that way by selling the whole account tied to it and the game developers don’t like that.
