> What I don't understand is why Sony is the one being targeted for this when this has been the case with any digital purchase for 20 years?
Examples: literally two days ago Sony permanently removed access to over 500 movies for people who had "purchased" them, and only a couple months ago Sony announced their plan to permanently shutter physical media production for Playstation.
I agree with you that it's a systemic issue but it also doesn't surprise me that Sony is seen as the lead boogeyman. I think if you asked the average gamer what their opinion of Valve's business practices was vs. Sony you'd get a very different answer even if the legalese in the TOS is similar.
Lik Sang was awesome back in the day for procuring accessories like classic XBOX controller to USB adapters that weren't dodgy duct tape jobs. Hard to believe they were forced out of business by Sony two decades ago.
They had all kinds of weird stuff which the big makers didn't want to exist - adapters to use Xbox controllers on Playstation and every permutation you could think of.
All the big console manufacturers sued them. Said it was about modchips (and maybe it really was). Sony bore the most guilt.
The gaming industry is a little less wonderful these past 20 years.
Indeed. I find myself going back to older games anymore. Aside from maybe looking forward to GTA 6, I can't say I'm terribly interested in many modern titles. It's becoming more soulless.
I maybe should have phrased that better since I do understand their announcement around disks and removing the movies is a reason why they are the current target.
I just find it hypocritical, people keep saying they are going to move to xbox or pc next gen and its like. Their policy is exactly the same. You have the same risk and not really ownership.
And I am not defending Sony, they have a long history of getting cocky with their consoles and pulling some shit. But in this particular case they are following the trend that we allowed by going all digital on PC and buying digital games on consoles.
Sony isnt going to be the one that changes this, the only way to expect change would be targeting all of them including Valve. But everyone, like this article, just seems to gloss right over that and seem to imply its only Sony that is the problem here.
On consoles in general, backing up digital media (if even possible) requires full-system exploits, thus bypassing DRM, and decrypting them also requires breaking DRM
Woah, we're not talking about cracking your games. I think every console from at least the last two generations has supported copying game files to external/removable media.
Disabling DRM is required for basic archiving if the issue is someone else having the ability to decide the thing you bought will self-destruct. Copying doesn't matter if it doesn't produce a usable backup.
If you remove the DRM, then you do actually own the thing for practical purposes. And non-ownership of things you buy is unjust, so entertaining the law here is silly.
> Disabling DRM is required for basic archiving if the issue is someone else having the ability to decide the thing you bought will self-destruct.
Don't move the goalposts.
The only thing I am conceding is that conceptually it still ownership if you own the encrypted bits but they work fine with some other hardware that has the keys to decrypt them. I can backup my games on one playstation and play them on another.
Otherwise, we agree ideologically. At the same time I'm rhetorically supporting the point at the top of the thread that this has been a problem long before Sony decided to go digital. I am copyleft and anti-drm and whatever else you can imagine. It doesn't change the fact that there's a precedent that consumers will purchase drm games that require a rootkit to run under ambiguous terms that make it clear they don't own the bytes and it's a true observation that for some reason people allow this to happen on PC but when Sony does it it's the end of the world. I think to make progress here you need to address the root of the issue legally, not attack Sony for doing what society has condoned for decades.
You can't back up your encrypted bits on one machine and use them on another without constant permission from Sony though. Other hardware doesn't have the keys to decrypt them (actually this is it's own issue: it's obviously a very monopolistic, anticompetitive move that you can't run a PS5 game on a commodity PC because of their encryption). As far as I know, Valve's "DRM" just calls into a dll that asks Steam whether you own it, and you can just give it your own implementation of the Steam API dll that says you do. Or many titles on Steam don't have any DRM at all.
There are reasons to criticize Valve (gambling, microtransactions, "achievements"), but they seem to be too busy making money to want to do DRM.
You can’t back up your games on one PC and use them on another without constant permission from Value either. It’s the same and that is all I’m trying to point out. DRM is a red herring, the real problem is the phone home always online bullshit.
Both Valve and Sony run a completely legal video game platform service. There are minor differences here and there, of course… but this is 100% a general intellectual property law problem, not an instanced technical implementation issue.
Let's put the actual numbers in front of people: 1,924 out of 43,179 games, or 4.4%, as of today (according to PCGamingWiki) are DRM free.
The vast majority check whether you've purchased the game at runtime. If you stick to only indie games and the one off AA or AAA with no license check on Steam then sure thou-art-holier.
I think the argument is more precisely made by saying: on Steam, while the platform supports DRM, the decision is up to the publisher whether or not a game will use it and at least that provides the option for consumers to speak with their wallet and play only DRM free games. On Playstation it's all or nothing, you have to reject the entire platform/ecosystem if you want to avoid DRM.
At large, the problem still remains that our society allows DRM in the first place and if people want to avoid it then they need to be principled activists.
> The Steam DRM wrapper by itself is not an anti-piracy solution. The Steam DRM wrapper protects against extremely casual piracy... but it is easily removed
And it takes about 2 seconds to find the removal tools on github. So you can treat Steam's DRM as basically non-existent. This is unlike consoles, which require kernel exploits or hardware modifications to bypass.
So we agree that Valve, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft all operate platforms that support DRM. Wonderful!
I'm not interesting in bickering over who's DRM is the easiest to remove XD
In the US it's not piracy to make archival backups of digital media that you own in the first place, anyway. Even so, nothing gives you the right to use the software in ways that violate the EULA (except for your rights under the DMCA to create archival copies) regardless of whether you backed up the media with or without the DRM.
To put it plainly your right to create an archival copy does not extend to a right to run the media on unsupported/licensed hardware & software. I think that's an issue that should be solved, we likely agree, but let's not pretend that the situation with Steam is somehow healthy for society whereas with Sony it's not just because the DRM is slightly easier to circumvent.
> nothing gives you the right to use the software in ways that violate the EULA
Correct, that right is innate.
> your right to create an archival copy does not extend to a right to run the media on unsupported/licensed hardware & software
It does. Not even morally, but legally. Sony litigated this and lost, but bankrupted the emulator developer in the process. Emulators and compatible hardware and software have been consistently ruled legal. It is only the bypassing of copy protection that is not.
And if you're not interested in the feasibility of asserting your rights by removing the DRM, then naturally you'll never understand why people consider Valve and Sony materially different.
I've done my fair share of reversing, modding, rooting, jailbreaking. Asserting my rights is very interesting to me, which is why I think you're missing a fair bit of nuance. I ran this discussion through Astra to check my own recollection and it came to the point that: "copying proprietary firmware and circumventing DRM are separate questions".
The Connectix case doesn't establish a right to circumvent DRM to play games that you "own". It only provides fair use protections for emulator developers.
The Bleem case (the one where the president said the litigation bankrupt them) has to do with game screenshots in comparative advertising.
And probably most apropos, irrespective of whether DRM is used or not, there is no protection in the DMCA or other US code that allows you to circumvent an authentication check in order to play a game. So "just remove the steam dll load command, it's trivial" exposes you to the same level of legal liability as "ugh I have to strip the Sony DRM then crack my copy of <sony exclusive>".
If you look at what's happened recently, there are narrow regulatory exemptions, issued in 2024 and codified at 37 C.F.R. § 201.40(b)(19) that cover, among other things, restoring personal local play of lawfully acquired complete games after required authentication-server support ends. Other provisions permit preservation by eligible libraries, archives, and museums, including limited circumvention of console software. They do not establish a general personal right to jailbreak any console or decrypt any purchased game.
Very respectfully, I think you're conflating a few different things here. I very much wish the world was as you are trying to assert. But my own understanding of US law and case law and a check against Astra don't corroborate your claims.
How do you backup game files from a console, to an external drive/location that you own; and ensure the validity of that backup will still be usable on the console later?
It's not, though. Their ToS is the same. They reserve to right to deny you ownership of your games. Only Sony has been stupid enough to actually do it.
Every ToS in the world is designed to screw the signee over as much as it possibly can, so you'd need to go live in the woods if you wanted to escape it, but there is a tangible difference between how much companies actually abuse the provisions in their ToS. I don't know how you can say "Microsoft reserves the legal right to drill a hole in my skull" and "Sony is actively drilling a hole in my skull" are `exactly the same`.
So its fine that they force you to agree to something when you paid for it but its not fine when they do the thing you agreed too?
Instead of actually trying to fix the issue we just hope that Valve never has to do the thing they are legally allowed to do because we agreed they could.
I honestly don't care who has done what, I don't care what company is supposedly better than another company.
Overnight Valve, Microsoft, whoever could just as easily remove access to a bunch of digital purchases.
How about instead we just don't excuse any of the companies?
Of course, I am not arguing otherwise. But if your core problem is not the removal of content but what Sony is arguing right now. You should have just as much of an issue with Valve as you do Sony since you are signing up for the same legal risk.
Just because one has done it and the other hasn't is a technicality to me since that could change overnight.
The point that I am trying to make here is that it is insane to me that all of this is focused on Sony. And frankly I don't have a good solution here, but just arguing that one TOS is better than another because one company hasn't done the thing yet but could is not a good argument.
How many times have we seen management change, companies being bought, whatever and suddenly something really bad happens.
I am just getting really frustrated by Sony this, Sony that. Boycot sony, etc when if all we do is move to another platform with the same policies do we really expect anything to change?
We are in the most emotionally driven period of human history to date where reasoning takes a back seat. It's super frustrating but once you realize this instance isn't a one off you can start to focus on the bigger picture. I'm not saying this makes it less frustrating, but perhaps it'd help you to cast things in a new light. You're mostly talking past people who are dunking on Sony right now, because they are more interested in riding the emotional wave than actually making sense of the situation. Never mind that owning a physical disk has pretty much been dead for the better part of a decade or two anyway with day 1 patches and online activations. GIVE ME PHYSICAL DISK. To be 100% honest I think people want to put games on their shelf and look at them and any whiff of an argument is just people grasping at something, anything, rather than something based.
People did risk assessments with VMWare and we see how that turned out.
Things can change, just because you make your risk assessment doesn't mean you should ignore that there is still something in that contract that could turn on you just as easily.
Should we go back 10 years, maybe the risk would have been the same. Did Sony do any of these things then, but the policy was the same. How about 10 years from now, just because of your "risk assessment" doesn't mean that Valve is suddenly safer, just just means so far they have been safer.
I am not saying don't use Valve, but there is zero reason to believe they could not just as easily do this.
Nobody is arguing the risk values are exactly the same. The argument is that the risk posture is the same. You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value, which is an individual value judgement and thus incredibly far from an assumed fact. Some people do care about posture more than value and different people weight value differently as I'm sure your thousands of assessments have uncovered.
In any event, I think with all the data you'd see that Value has also removed games from its platform. So I'm not sure the value gap is even as wide as you seem to be implying.
>Nobody is arguing the risk values are exactly the same.
please re-read the part i quoted from the parent, where they say it's the same risk.
>You're taking a pretty rigid stance that the only thing that matters is risk value
i did not say "the only thing that matters" anywhere.
you, and the parent, are reading something into my comments that i have not written. the only thing i said is that the risk is not the same because sony has a pattern of behavior worth considering.
To be clear, you never owned the games, you own the disk that contains the games. The right they are reserving is to revoke your legal access to the games you're licensing. They can't repossess the disk, but they can deny you the right to use what's on it. Obviously digital-only also exists, in which case you own literally nothing. All that remains is the contingent access that they legally have control over.
To be clear, when I use the phrase "deny you ownership of your games", I'm talking in Common English, not legalese. We don't actually have to normalise this. Legalese aside, the social contract for decades has been that you own your digital purchases. Now that the social contract is being violated, we certainly should be striving to enshrine it in law via regulation, which would also render any amount of ToS legalese to be worth as much as digital toilet paper.
I think you're under-appreciating the importance. It's not just pedantry. This has been true since EULAs have existed. And it's kinda insane that people think owning a disk gives them ownership of the intellectual property contained on it. You've always been given a license. The difference is that you can often transfer that license by selling the physical copy of a game whereas most digital licenses are exclusive.
The ability to deny ownership does exist these days. Sony can push an update that bricks your Playstation.
So this whole thing is actually an argument over whether games should be made available in a form that allows license transfer (which I support) or not. But it's a fair point to argue that for any actual benefit the remedy has to be applied globally, not just to Sony.
Like the other commenter said, we don't have to normalize this. A reasonable jury can and should find that Sony pushing an update to intentionally brick Playstations is criminal destruction of property, regardless of what some EULA says. And we can make it very clear in the law that that's the case, and prosecute any individuals involved.
Sony can add a signature to a list and your game stops launching even if it's a physical disk is the point. We should fight back legally and prevent publishers from trampling on the rights of individuals to use bits they paid money to presumptively own. If I buy a digital asset nobody should be able to take that away from me. You can stop selling it but it shouldn't be allowed to be disabled in the field. Seems like something our society could agree on and legislate 100%.
The problem is that ownership is itself a legal fiction, so it's kind of necessarily legalese. It's interchangeable with "legitimate control" in common parlance. IE if I break into your house and throw you out of it, I don't suddenly own your house. Even though I'm in possession of it, the control I have of it isn't legitimate. Ownership is the guarantee that your possession and control of something can be defended by our society's conflict resolution mechanisms, in this case that's the legal system.
While socially we might disagree with the law on the validity of licensure in this context, that changes the domain a bit. I do have ultimate control over the games I've purchased on Steam, regardless of the law's opinion, even though they're technically licensed. I back up every game I buy, away from where Steam could be able to know to delete it or even discover it. If my legal license is revoked, I still have control over the bytes. With a steam emulator I can still access most of them (and the remainder can be fixed by setting an LLM about cracking them) but this isn't legitimate in the eyes of the law. Practically speaking it doesn't matter in the slightest what the law thinks on this matter.
Now let's consider that the rhetoric here generally includes Steam's arrangement as a perpetrator of "you will own nothing". But given the above, that's a hard circle to square. In your proposed notion of ownership, ostensibly I own everything I bought on Steam. With a little bit of technical literacy (and the money for storage, which is easier said than done these days) it can be true of anybody. It's only in the eyes of the law that I don't actually own anything, and the DMCA probably has plenty to say about it.
So do we use the legal definition, or is it merely the possession of the software and means of access that constitute ownership? It's exactly this edge case which is why I insist on this pedantry. Otherwise the violation of ownership at the hands of Sony begins and ends with the fact that it's not an open platform with software freedom. I'm very amenable to making that be our standard here, of course, I think at minimum the freedom to do as you please with a personal computer is an ethical and moral directive.
Perhaps what we as a society need is that what you actually buy is a "license to download". Upon being in possession of the bytes, you own them. For as long as you maintain the integrity of those bytes, they're yours. Of course, redistributing them to other parties would constitute an IP violation, but that's not a problem to concern a storefront. If your license is revoked, what you are actually losing is the ability to download.
Examples: literally two days ago Sony permanently removed access to over 500 movies for people who had "purchased" them, and only a couple months ago Sony announced their plan to permanently shutter physical media production for Playstation.
I agree with you that it's a systemic issue but it also doesn't surprise me that Sony is seen as the lead boogeyman. I think if you asked the average gamer what their opinion of Valve's business practices was vs. Sony you'd get a very different answer even if the legalese in the TOS is similar.