Sony should be worried because I will never own a Sony platform again.

5 generations of owning PlayStations. I have disks from the 90s that still work perfectly well. It was good while it lasted.

If you want to own your games, do not buy closed platforms like Playstation or Nintendo, do not buy games infected with Denuvo or any other malware/DRM that prevents you from backing it up, and do not buy games that require you to use a company’s servers with no option to host yourself.

Console software has been licensed for decades at this point. You never owned it.

I have 5 generations of PlayStation consoles, i probably won't have the 6th.

This kind of news should be paired with the pre-order numbers of GTA6. To better understand how many of the Sony users actually care about this.

Hint: it's not a lot.

For what it's worth I'm 100000% never buying a sony product again

This is why I really want to make my own open-source console platform.

Indie developers can target it, it can have some kind of cartridges (probably flash based) which people can sell directly, and complete open-source and hackable (but with simple ways to customize, so people can buy accesssories instead of making them, if they're not maker inclined).

If enough people could use this console, then even AAA devs might consider it.

But the problem is it has to be decently powerful while staying affordable. Traditionally consoles lose money (recouped when people buy first party titles). It's a failed business model as evident by all these major studios moving away from it. First SEGA leaving the console market, then Nintendo making Game Key Cards, and now Sony removing physical all together.

I mean tbh, people could simply target the Raspberry Pi 3B as a standard platform for gaming. Those still go for $35, unlike the Pi 4 and Pi 5, and are capable of 2D games and limited 3D games (perfectly fine for Indie). It runs Linux which is easy enough to develop for both in direct code and from game engines (except Unreal which is annoying about it). Add some sort of "card hat" like those readers a few people have made, and it could be great for that world at least. Wrap it up into a product for like $50 with a controller and it could be something

But idk, the AAA world is gonna continue to shift from these models. At least PC is a bit better with its digital storefronts, but it's not perfect either, and you still don't "own" anything.

Pirates own their games.

I'm sure they are so upset that they'll go and rent another $70 game from them to cope.

Something about if you buy something but it can be taken away from you arbitrarily by the company...

The end of ownership came a long time ago for PS players. Now it's just the end of fancy boxes and discs that give an illusion of ownership.

Which is still bad, but let's not mix up facts.

So... stop buying them?

That headline seems pretty snarky lol.

They never did anyway. Check the EULA.

We're overloading the term "ownership".

• When a company says "ownership" they mean over the property itself. Copyright. Only the rights holders "own" the game, only they can make a sequel to the game.
• When a player says "ownership" they're referring to their copy of their game, i.e. their license. No copyright. They do not own the game, they just own a license to experience it, they cannot make a sequel.

People then try to say "well the issue isn't ownership, it's DRM". No. DRM that makes the experience worse for paying customers is annoying, but it's not the issue at hand. Virtually all your games for all your consoles have some form of DRM, and yet you consider them "owned" in your collection.

What we need to demand is: ownership of a license that grants perpetual access.

• We don't want the license to expire.
• We don't want it to change what it grants us access to after we've purchased it.
• We don't want them to stop making the content available because they don't want to host their servers anymore.
• We want the ability to play without needing an internet connection.

If all of that can be guaranteed, then the license is on par with a physical copy.

But until we have legislation forcing it to be the case, we have to assume they fully intend to take your money and one day not be willing to provide what you paid for.

Sony is so bad at digital ownership that it was apparently easier for some dude in Brazil to claim my account than for them to double check I didn't move halfway across the globe overnight. Also the recovery process is absolutely terrible. It's literally the only moderately important account that guy was able to "hack" into.

And I did reset the reused password after it got leaked but I guess the guy was able to force his way through customer support simply by knowing the old password and the mail address (that they never had access to, mind you. It's still secured and regularly checked). Even fucking reddit did a better job at securing my old account.

The sooner people stop hanging on to "physical" ( and move on to more productive conservation initiatives ) the better. Sony's not likely to budge and frankly the medium has been dying for a while. Now DRM-free digital like gog or pirate copies still has a future I think, but relegated to a niche. I've been trying to picture the future landscape of gaming and I fear it's mostly "forever games". Both sony and ms have been pushing for live service/mobile crap ( and they still have the power to do it ) because a single mediocre skin or season pass can be as lucrative as a whole game. No need to innovate when you can make billions on slop. Take Candy Crush - it's what, 20 years old and still brings in billions. Same for roblox, despite being known as a pedo-heaven. Games as an artform looks like an increasingly niche hobby for hipster/aging gamers, because the vast majority of people just love their slop.

It's now time move on - hoard, archive and maybe still try and push for decent consumer protections.

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

It is morally OK to pirate and emulate Sony games.

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.

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.

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

"You'll own nothing and you'll be happy" - WEF

they will just go to PC or get a STEAM machine eventually.

It seems I'm going to be rich as an independent developer.

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