Sony Seems Confused

Do we own it?

Sony has found themselves under criticism from all over the place recently, and it all really comes down to who owns what. The constant fantasising over how more money can be squeezed out of every transaction from some corporate heads has led to no end of absurd thoughts, things that would be considered such under anything other than the ‘digital age’, but somehow, making videogame production cheaper has somehow meant that some companies need to make even more profit off them, and that’s the driving force behind Sony’s need to defend in court the idea that only unreasonable people could hold the belief that they own the games they buy on the Playstation store. The problem is that, as I just wrote, the idea that you don’t really own the games you buy is an absurd idea relative to most of the history of both videogames and the exchange of goods more generally. Because of that, it seems that some people at Sony have occasionally slipped into the reasonable thinking that the digital games do actually belong to the people that own them.

Despite their claims in a recent lawsuit, Consumer Rights Wiki, an online database of anti consumer rights and practices, has collected numerous instances of Sony mentioning that people who buy digital games do own them. These include literature Sony has published that says things like

‘To upgrade an eligible digital PS4 game you already own to the digital PS5 version’.

People have done an excellent job of tracking down many statements from Sony just like that one, but that statement is wholly at odd with the statements Sony make that you absolutely do not own the games you buy from them digitally.

The notion is so intuitively ridiculous, despite what Sony or any law might say, that even people at Sony cannot help but use language of ownership.

Playing videogames, writing about videogames, considering videogames—that about sums it up. Videogames are the one hobby that I’ve kept since I was only little, zapping ducks on the NES or knocking out MR. X. And when I’m not enjoying classics from the bit generation of games or checking out those earliest of polygons, I’m probably playing something from today’s age of modern gaming: if I’m not complaining about it. Something I’m doing at the moment? Playing dome of the survival horror games in my GOG and Steam libraries.