You don’t own it

Sony says you do know

Sony is in court in the U.S.A. for basically acting in their own interests as a company, over and against the interests of people who buy their games, to an excessive degree. That’s what’s going on, even if that’s not what’s on the court list.

The accusation is that Sony hasn’t put across the fact that you don’t own the games you buy digitally on the Playstation store clearly enough. Sony have responded that reasonable people already know that.

The story comes from Game File, and it would be surprising if I were Romulus or Remus, or unconscious; instead I’m an older, slightly more cynical man than I was five minutes ago.

Sony is right to the extent that some people are aware that when they buy a game from the Playstation store they don’t actually own it, at least as Sony sees it, that much is obvious from the number of people complaining about Sony’s decision to cease production of physical games in the future, but a lot of people also don’t. And even the outcry shows that some of those people, though they had some idea of the problems with digital games, didn’t know just how little rights they actually had, or at least how what little good will Sony has for fans with digital purchases.

I’ve never been under any illusions about Sony, Nintendo, Sega or any other videogames company, they want to make money, that’s it. It’s because of this that I’m not surprised by Sony’s behaviour. What will be interesting will be Sony’s next State of Play event. With the show being aired on Youtube, I’m wondering whether Sony will let the viewers air their opinions on the stream. If they do, well, I expect they won’t have the same issues Sony does about being up front.

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.