IANAL, but is it illegal to have a "Buy" button that is just a disguised "Rent" button?
If not, should we change the law?
For more recent takes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48747389 - "Sony Deletes 551 Movies PlayStation Owners Paid For" (reclaimthenet.org)
636 points | 15 days ago | 304 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48730904 - "Sony erases digital content from libraries" (arstechnica.com)
184 points | 16 days ago | 76 comments
They removed ‘A Shaun The Sheep Movie: Farmageddon’. OK Sony, this is war.
I read recently that PlayStation users are moving to PC en masse, and also Xbox has been gutted by layoffs, and there's a backlash against Nintendo for the switch 2 pricing.
Is the age of the console finally coming to an end?
It's just loud Internet people. The Switch 2 is the second fastest selling game system of all time, and is keeping up with the trajectory of the first Switch, which shipped the most units of any gaming system. It'll probably get further boosts as Splatoon Raiders comes out (Splatoon is huge in Japan) and other anticipated titles.
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2026/06/switch-2s-first-ye...
I can't say I know anyone IRL who has any interest in leaving PlayStation. Nobody buys movies there and people who care about physical games are a minority...there are already Slim models without optical drives and GameStops are mostly Funko Pops because most people buy games online. It's too soon to have actual concrete data besides useless internet sentiment reporting though. And a lot of that is just vague anger about prices for all computing hardware being up...and everything else in the US.
We're also at the ending stages of the PS5 lifecycle, but before a PS6 announcement. (With an unprecedented price increase this late in the cycle.) So there's no buzz about what's next, a large base of people who already have the existing thing, and an expectation that it will cost more.
Meanwhile, the anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 is on the way, and a PC release isn't on the table anytime soon.
Consoles made sense as a product category where specialized graphics hardware was not generally available for consumer PCs.
We have this now, every PC has some kind of graphics hardware, and has for many years. Consoles have been riding on their momentum of their brands, but the technical justification for their product category hasn't existed for 15+ years now.
The main thing consoles have going for them, imo, is the standardization of hardware. It's very easy to say "Yes this game will run on my console at 60 FPS because its identical to the other consoles where it runs at 60 FPS." Differing builds and drivers are not really a concern in the console world, where-as they are in the PC world.
Some console gamers seem to think PC gaming requires hours of fiddling with settings and drivers. I think we've all had that experience on PC (cough Bethesda cough), but I doubt to the degree the console-side would have you believe. Most AAA games will self-optimize their settings to a playable state, and indie games don't tend to demand more than your standard gaming laptop can provide...but I'm sure we've all been burned some 10-odd years ago buying a Steam game that just wouldn't run on your iGPU...that experience sticks around in the brain a while
During college, before I switched to linux, the DRM packaged with Spore bricked my computer in the middle of a semester. That's what turned me off of PC gaming.
That's one thing. The other is price. Consoles can be sold at a loss, particularly early in their 10-year cycle, when early on the loss is high, but close to the end of the cycle the loss is minimal, and so they appear much cheaper.
Given recent price rises for console hardware I think they're struggling with that too though. The model doesn't work as well if the components get more expensive over time and not less?
Isn’t PS5 Pro a higher efficiency version?
Sony released the PS5 Slim earlier this cycle.
Oh, for sure! It's not getting any better with PC part prices lately either...
I've never considered that my old 360 was probably sold at a loss, knowing I'd buy LIVE and all the games they take a cut/license fee off of, but that makes complete sense to me
> It's very easy to say "Yes this game will run on my console at 60 FPS because its identical to the other consoles where it runs at 60 FPS." Differing builds and drivers are not really a concern in the console world, where-as they are in the PC world.
It used to be a selling point of console indeed, however nowadays console are separated by Pro/Non-pro, different revisions and you aren't really guaranteed on how well your game is going to run unless you watch a Youtube let's play of the game you want.
> Consoles made sense as a product category where specialized graphics hardware was not generally available for consumer PCs.
This has almost never been true. GPUs existed, and were being used, before the N64.
Your comment also begs the question that the console consumer has transitioned to a gaming pc. They haven't. Gaming PC sales (and hardware) are at all-time lows, except for GPUs, which should probably be renamed to Model Training Units.
I would posit that what we're seeing is a reflection of a content problem, not hardware. Video games have gone the way of Hollywood, with sequels and derivatives, and an uninterested consumer base. People would rather watch a YouTube video of someone playing a video game than play a video game.
> GPUs existed, and were being used, before the N64.
Video cards existed, but 3D accelerators didn't really catch on until the 3dfx Voodoo, which came out about the same time as the N64. Even Quake II which came out a year later still offered software rendering.
> Your comment also begs the question that the console consumer has transitioned to a gaming pc. They haven't.
I'm only a single point of data, but I was a console gamer that transitioned to PC gaming, but that transition happened during the N64/PSX era. It was near the end of the PS2 cycle that I was full PC.
> Gaming PC sales (and hardware) are at all-time lows
Because prices are at all-time highs. I have a monster PC that I probably spent around $6,000 building, but with prices skyrocketing, it'd run me $10,000 to build it today. A few months ago, it would have been $11,000.
> Video games have gone the way of Hollywood, with sequels and derivatives, and an uninterested consumer base.
In the AAA world, this is true. So many gamers that only play Call of Duty, Fortnite, Minecraft, or a sports game. For CoD and the sports games, they reliably buy the latest release every year despite the lack of anything really being different.
But the Indie world is huge and full of innovation. Balatro, Stardew Valley, Disco Elysium, Slay the Spire, Cuphead, I could go on.
> People would rather watch a YouTube video of someone playing a video game than play a video game.
I don't think that's true at all. Maybe for high-level play, or if the streamer has highly entertaining commentary, but otherwise definitely not true.
What PC GPU was in mainstream consumer use before the N64?
This is incorrect.
N64 came out in the USA in September 1996.
3dfx Voodoo was released to consumers in October 1996.
I think they still make sense for the non technical user. Having an idiomatic control makes setup far easier than on a PC and the UI for a console is designed to be used with a controller instead of a keyboard and mouse. This makes dealing with a television easier. I don't see consoles disappearing ever for those reasons.
Also isn't a huge (maybe the largest?) audience for gaming these days children playing games like Roblox and Minecraft and Fortnite etc? For whom it's parents buying the equipment, so unless you have a tech-savvy parent they're likely to just buy a console.
I think those games are mostly played on tablets these days.
But there might be a generational change coming. Basically the entire cohort of parents in my kids’ kindergarten is much more intentional about what kinds of games they’re playing and how they’re spending their “screen time.” I see a lot more people just giving their kids retro-consoles and emulation rather than setting them loose on the kiddie grooming and dopamine receptor-frying skinner-boxes.
I suppose it’s one of the benefits of having a generation of parents who grew up with formative memories of playing video games themselves combined with a growing awareness of UI dark patterns and their long term impacts on cognitive development and well-being.
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I don’t think the appeal is just to the less technically inclined masses. I’m a developer with a MacBook Pro and a Linux workstation. Proton has come a long way, but consoles just work for the most part; I never have to question whether the game will function and perform well on the console (setting aside the random buggy messes we see).
Then there’s the convenience. I don’t want to play games where I work. I want to play on my TV. I have no interest in moving my workstation into my living room. Streaming with Moonlight works well enough, but there’s still lag. Even if I wanted to move my PC to the living room, the setup isn’t as nice. The Steam Machine has HDMI CEC and can power on with a controller — all the major consoles have had that for years.
Even if I accepted all that, no one else in my household could play anything while I’m working on my computer.
Things are a little weird now. If I’m going to have to go all digital, Steam Family is by far the best option of those with DRM. But, due to the astronomical cost of components, consoles are still pretty attractive.
That doesn't really make sense. Consoles have always occupied a different space to PCs, not least because they plug into living room TVs. Very few people are going to trade that for a (considerably more expensive) PC.
Gaming PCs also require specialized knowledge, more maintenance, etc etc. Consoles are pick up and go. I very much doubt they're dead yet.
Consoles don't have true 'generational leaps' any more either, the huge leaps forward in tech used to drive excitement/sales.
Now we get incremental improvements, cross-generation games, and backwards compatibility. And AAA game development isn't exactly doing well these days.
[dead]
The thing with PCs is... they are open. Open means piracy and more importantly it means cheats.
A console is a far easier thing to defend against cheaters than a PC - absent true hardware vulnerabilities (which become more and more expensive, now that stuff like voltage glitching, clock cutting and whatnot is all known and accounted for), you are basically limited to botted input and AI-assistance based on what can be seen on the screen.
Specialized graphics hardware hasn’t been the selling point of having a console since at least 2002 with the first XBox.
The selling point of consoles is that they’re a software platform, with development incentives, standardized hardware, standardized UI conventions, and a centralized storefront to be able to conveniently and natively play stuff on your TV without fussing about.
Valve has barely started to muscle in on the platform benefits of gaming on a PlayStation or XBox, but the more they start to do so the more they end up making design trade-offs that start to look like another console.
To be fair had RAM prices not screwed up the steam machine consoles would have been dooms earlier. They are about to enter a slow decline before death
Consoles are suffering from the AI capitalism crisis (it's not a RAM crisis, it's a large-scale misallocation of resources by central planners) just as much as PCs.
Nintendo will always exist, which I'm mostly okay with
I wouldn't be surprised if consoles got replaced by video game streaming. Not the next generation and probably not even the generation after that, but that will be most likely it.
Video game streaming requires a high quality internet connection to a nearby data center. It can work in certain places but there's always going to be places where it doesn't work, and consoles don't have that problem.
That backlash was nearly entirely on that other social media website that HN hates being compared to. And yet again, not representative of actual people. The xbox part may be true. I’d be extremely surprised if any PlayStation users in volume move to PC, that might be another loud opinion from that crowd due to the physical disc outrage. They would pay twice as much, have a less seamless experience, and still have worse graphics/performance.
I say this as a primarily pc gamer. It’s not for most people.
PC gaming isn't exactly in a healthy place either (at least when it comes to hardware pricing/availability). Post-Covid GPU prices were bad enough even before the AI bubble ruined everything.
Yeah. I gave up a couple of years ago after Epic broke my account and I lost my purchases irrecoverably. I have actually started playing board games with people now. This is so much better for me. And cheaper. And you can't taken them away.
Retro gaming is an increasingly popular option, too. These days I have more fun messing with Amigas, C64s, and cheap emulation handhelds than big modern games.
Retro hardware prices have been going up fairly significantly though, especially for Amiga stuff.
I would say the future is cloud gaming.
Its ok for some thing but the lag is simply too much for popular genres of games.
The cloud gaming echo chamber has conveniently arrived to save the day by mimicking the solution to fix the problem the same industry created. Problem, Reaction, Solution.
Sadly, I agree with you. I don't like it, but it seems pretty clear.
Sadly, the future might be phone gaming. The mobile gaming market is as big as the console and PC markets combined.
Phone gaming with a USC-C display or simply cast to the TV, and Bluetooth remotes. It might not be as bad as it sounds. My phone has 12GB RAM, 256GB NVME SSD, a decent GPU and a dedicated AI chipset as well.
Sure, it won’t beat a tricked out gaming PC with some $4000 GPU in it, but it will probably be competitive with console gaming. Granted, the PS5 is 5-6 years old by now, but my phone has more power in every measure.
My “dream” everyday device is still a phone that docks with a display, keyboard and mouse, and magically transforms into a desktop OS. On the to mobile apps would allow access to the same data, but touch optimized instead.
These are basically different markets that only compete with each other because there are finite hours in the day to engage with media, not because they’re offering variations on the same thing.
It’s similar to comparing Netflix to the Criterion Streaming platform. Technically you’re doing the same thing, sitting on the couch watching a big screen, but the experience being pitched is a totally different one and the target customer doesn’t really overlap.
People age out of wanting to sit in their bedroom with a handheld and become adults who have living rooms. For home gaming there will always be demand to play games on a real sized screen.
I think the steam deck proved otherwise too..
I haven't had enough motivation to sit on my couch and game after a long day ..
But the same game, in bed, on my deck was so much nicer..
All I can now say is having a dedicated device, that's not your laptop/computer to play games is definitely a market - be it Steam machine (/custom builds), hand held gaming, or just regular consoles..
Yeah so get a PC and install some games
Obviously media permanence is the best solution, but in the absence of that we just need laws that say that if the purchase isn’t time limited to something a reasonable user would consider a rental (48hrs? a week?) then companies that withdraw access rights need to refund in full the purchase cost.
Let's add inflation to that. Or charge interest for the loan.
The most frustrating thing about all of this is that if I'd published a game on PlayStation and then told Sony to rip it out of people's libraries, they'd tell me to pound sand. The contracts you sign to ship games on PlayStation specifically include redownload rights. So Sony knows this is a problem, and yet for whatever reason decided NOT to secure the rights they'd need for the digital purchases to actually work like a purchase.
This is nothing new and the reason I went from being the biggest media collector to collecting nothing now.
To put it in perspective, I bought Get Him to the Greek on Prime video shortly after it came out.
A month later, the "exclusive broadcast rights" changed, and I was no longer able to access it.
Once its deleted it becomes a indefinite p(irate) license.
Its all a bit hand wavy nonsense. Own a physical copy? How long until its unplayable because either the media corrupts or the player isn't available? The only real "ownership" is the IP, everything else is just renting.
All information is ephemeral, but I don't honestly think that argument holds much weight here.
I'm currently listening to a record which was pressed before I was born, and that will outlast me. My CDs were ripped around 2000 to a drive and i've streamed then since. I've still got the CDs though, and the last time I played one it worked fine on my 1989 vintage transport.
I think i'm good.
own a physical copy, rip it into a digital format. legal and works pretty well to keep up with the times
As bad as this is, it’s worth noting that this is the same incident that was widely reported earlier this month. Sony has only rugpulled hundreds of purchased titles from customers once this year.
So far.
But their timing was amazing, doing it just days before they announced that they were ending releases of games on physical media.
If they offered refunds this would still be terrible.
They don't even offer refunds.
Hopefully most of these folks that have been scammed know how to sail the high seas.
if you cant hold it your hands, you don't own it. used dvd and bluray on ebay are cheaper anyway. another underutilized resource - the public library - mine has a huge catalog of movies you can borrow for free.
> another underutilized resource - the public library
As an indication of where things are going on this front, from the same publisher: Sony announced that games are not going to get distributed as physical copies anymore. So no new video games to be borrowed from public libraries, and even if you can borrow older games the new Playstations probably won't even have a disk tray to read them.
Whatever your stance on video games being something that is worth having in a library is, if they could get away with it that's probably their ideal end game for movies as well.
Sadly mine has awful, inconvenient hours because it became the local fight club for teenagers.
Depending on your library, you might be able to stream the same movies online for free. Check their web site.
If you can hold it in your hands you still might not necessarily own it. Remember DivX? (The medium, not the codec).
Isnt there an issue with "Buy" and different countries marketing laws? Ie it implies "Hold" or "TemporaryKeep".
Guess it will be an upswing of BlueRay movies. Already happening with LPs and CDs
This anti-consumer stuff also applies to physical Blu-rays: each BD can contain a revocation list of player keys and distributor keys, and official players are required to update their keylists from that. Every time you insert a new disc in your player, you're playing russian roulette with your existing library.
Blu-Ray key revocation does not work that way. Players with revoked keys simply can't play discs that were encrypted to disallow them.
Discs that worked with a player will continue to work, as long as the physical mechanisms are still good.
Technically, maybe, since the player authenticates with the drive, if you updated the firmware on the drive you could lockout the player. I could see windows update potentially helpfully pushing a bd-rom drive firmware update, but it's not happening on a standalone player.
It's not ideal that your existing player might not read new discs, but hopefully you use your discs soon after purchase and you could return them if you can't get a firmware update with a new key. (Of course, I'm guilty of buying discs to watch eventually; will be annoying if my keys were revoked)
How does that work if my player is offline? A dedicated BluRay player has no reason to connect to the internet.
I've sold my PS5 several months ago. You can get a pretty gameable laptop and gog/steam prices are better. And I can install mods. Tree Sentinel Thomas Mod for example.
Everyone of these stories makes a great case for piracy. Torrents or illegal online streaming sites.
I guess they want the masses to start sailing the high seas again
Interesting also that even this article doesn't mention "DRM" anywhere despite the fact that this is exactly the worst case scenario DRM critics have always warned about.
(Personally I would consider DRM okay if Sony's behavior here was illegal without a full refund.)
This has happened since the beginning of DRM. I had a roommate who bought hundreds of dollars of music from the Walmart music store because WMAs were like 59¢ instead of 99¢ from iTunes. It seems like not even a year later they shutdown the store and the certificate expired and PlaysForSure stopped playing for sure. That was around 2003.
20 years later will anyone do anything about it? Of course not.
What is going to be the event that gets laws to change? Probably not a few movies viewable only from Sony devices.
Well - I actually think the problem is not Sony being malicious here, per se, but the legislation. There has to be a guarantee as if it were a physical copy, as-is. The right to repair movement has the same cause ultimately. You purchase something, you own it, no matter what counter-legalese is tried.
The USA really needs to stop being a corporate-country. Weren't the republicans all about the people at one point in time? Now they are all about the billionaires and family dynasties pillaging what they can, with the forerunner the mad orange king pillaging the most. And starting wars he loses by default, after promising to not start wars.
And yet Sony wonders why people pirate their movies. In this case here the owners who had their movies stolen should be able to steal them back.
If you cared enough, I do wonder if you could win in court, if you pirated a movie that you purchased on the PS5, but Sony removed. It would cost you an ungodly amount of money to defend yourself against Sony, and I don't know the exact words of the "license", but it seems like a reasonable action to take.
Sony's recent movies aren't even worth pirating
Madame Web anyone
My daughter went to watch that and walked out. To compare, she managed to make it through Cats.
Jesus. That might be the most succinctly brutal movie review I've ever seen. quietly scratches Madam Web off the to-do list
Into and Beyond the Spiderverse are flawless movies.
The first one was 8 years ago, in the pre-Covid world.
[flagged]
California Assembly Bill 2426 (AB 2426), effective 1 January, 2025. Expands the state's false advertising laws to explicitly ban companies from using words like "buy," "purchase," "own," or "keep" if what the customer is actually getting is a revocable digital license governed by shady T&Cs.
Remember that the power is always with the people. We can enact any law we want
Is it working/being enforced? Anecdotally I haven't seen or heard of any changes in verbiage, but I haven't been paying that much attention.
Steam/Valve follow the law: https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/11/24267864/steam-buy-purch...
Apple was sued for having revoking access to hundreds of movies that a customer purchased. They tried to claim that "No reasonable consumer would believe' that purchased content would remain on the iTunes platform indefinitely".
Sadly the case was settled, see: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/apple-settles-alleg...
They'll argue you're "buying" a license that they can revoke when they feel like it. My feelings on the matter have been summed up by someone else more clever than me as:
If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
Copying something isn't stealing by any legal definition. It's copyright infringement.
I’m just collecting training data for my AI.
automated intercept... or acquisition interface. /s
You wouldn't steal a baby
Speak for yourself.
I might download one.
I'm hoping someday this will go the same way as other companies trying to redefine "unlimited", "free", or "lifetime". I hope lawyers reclaim "buy", "own", and "purchase" from shitbag marketers back into contract law, where they have English meanings.
https://retailwire.com/t-mobile-att-verizon-fined-10-2m-for-...
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/lawsuit-t-mobile...
At the very least, if Sony yanks your purchase, they should merely refund it in full.
A $10m fine for mobile telcos is a rounding error. “Softer quarter due to outstanding legal and regulatory obligations…” The fines need to be a standard percentage of income or the personal assets / freedom of officers needs to be on the line if we want those punishments to change behavior.
"we're training the public that they're 'buying' a revokable license, not the song" ~MPAA ;)
Pretty sure you could get some action from the ACCC here in Australia if you go through the process to lodge a complaint.
Unrelated, but that is such an unfortunate acronym.. There's no way the people who perpetuated it didn't know what they were doing
I propose, let's see..
Definitely Isn’t Legal Doctrine, Obviously
or.. Based Only On Basic Speculation
perhaps Consult Official Counsel, Kindly
or more succinct, This Isn’t Trained Solicitor Advice