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I remember back in 2013ish when digital games distribution blew up and I heard people saying that digital games would be cheaper. I thought to myself "guys, this isn't how capitalism works."
I'll tell exactly how this will play out. When we went "diskless" we told clients it was to save on the cost of production. We never reduced the cost of the software. Any clients that still preferred to get their yearly update by disk now how to pay a premium price for it. The disks only cost us like 75c a Dvd if that. Originally they use to get the disk "free" as a part of their first-year release. We only charged them for update disks but after the change over every disk was minimum 25 bucks a release (that included version X.1000 and any future updates). So they went from "free disks" to pay avg 75bucks/yr (as we avg at least two major updates a year). I said the same thing too that we were ripping off the clients. My manager replied "Microsoft does it too (referring to MAPS subscription)." That was over 10 years ago.
@@laurencefraser That also depends on the terms of those contract. Because in most countries (if not all), contracts do not overrule the law. Meaning that if a contract contains rules that contradict existing law, they will not hold up in court. But then again, most customers aren't lawyers... and, I mean - who reads those damn terms of service anyway...
Since these large companies like Sony want to say buying is no longer equating to owning, then piracy is no longer theft. Because even if you buy it, you don't OWN it. Owning means it's yours to keep, even if a certain form of access should go down, or gets sold off to another company like when Sony and Crunchyroll bought Funimation.
"If purchasing isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing." Digital "purchases" should never be full priced then. Revoking a digital license should see money back.
And that whole Terms and Conditions should be given BEFORE purchase with a clear note that the product is constituent to a contract stating clearly that the seller can revoke ownership at any time. It makes no sense whatsoever that you have to purchase the product before you get faced with a terms and conditions (which you HAVE TO SAY YES TO in order to play the game) with a hidden clause saying ownership can be revoked at any time. If anyone selling a physical product did that, it would be a massive slam dunk lawsuit. But because it’s digital, suddenly consumer protection doesn’t exist. It’s bullshit.
Making you choose on Netflix (or any other service) between RENT a movie and "BUY" the movie...where i have 2TB external HDD full of movies, tv shows, games and music which will work even if i don't have an internet connection. Things i do not wish to lose access to, ever, things i'd like to pass on to the next generation.
If that goes through and it is retro active to all purchased titles than we should file a class action lawsuit of refunding money as we were deceived of purchasing and owning that content which is not the case anymore 🤭😂
Consumers who supoort digital games that cant be owned are all idiots. I have been saying for a decade that digital games on Steam and Epic are a scam. But most idiots dont seem to realize their idiotic actions in supporting digital eco system even paying too dollars for 'renting' games. I have never bought a digital game on Steam, and I will also teach my kids not to touch digital games as they are corporate fraud. GOG is the best platform where you own games.
Piracy is consuming anything without paying for it. If you go to the cinema, you don't own the movie. You just paid to be able to watch it. So if you watch the movie at home without paying for it, you're committing theft/piracy.
@@vdimension6300technically your paying for the venue to watch the film, the same way when you buy drinks at a bar you technically paying for the venue (hence why shots are £6 when a bottle of 20 shots is £20)
It will, when they see lower sales numbers, because people won't "rent" a videogame for 70 bucks. An equilibrium between physical ownership and digital rentals will set in. Try explaining to Joe Shmoe that he doesn't own his Madden game... and look as he goes to buy a physical copy.
Yeah, this is completely useless for consumers. We already knew digital "ownership" was an outright lie; changing the language used to reflect that is the _opposite_ of what we want.
Won't happen. Just simple capitalism at work. Plus all the interweaving stuff between digital and physical, like how much of the game/program is actually on the disc. Most of us go digital because of convenience. We can have a huge game library without it taking up a ton of physical space. We can buy the game day 1 without having to go to the store, without it being sold out, or any of that stuff. That's what we're paying for. And, honestly, I'm 100% fine with paying the same for a digital copy as a physical one, provided some on-going business doesn't just arbitrarily yoink it from my collection. The physical space savings alone are worth it.
@@cainsalem3544 digital will always be more expensive then physical, even more so if they remove the little ownership we have left. nothings stopping them from highering prices, making all games a subscription service making you pay even more. oh and forget about refund cause as of rn theres no legal rights for refunds of licences
Steam actually tried that early on. Legal shenanigans resulting from how that interacted with physical retialers at the time resulted in Steam giving up on that idea and instead spending the money that would have been saved on providing better service to both customers and developers. ... which combined with the convenience meant that Steam was an even Bigger threat to physical retailers than it would have been otherwise... at least once internet connections good enough to use it became common. ... and then Steam managed to, between sales and providing viable and accessable distribution methods for sub AAA games, generally drive the average price of games down Anyway even with their large cut. (AAA games still cost an arm and a leg and the AAA publishers keep trying to drive them UP, but so many good games are made on smaller budgets and sold at lower prices that simply couldn't have happened before, and Steam is a big part of why (though there are a lot of other factors as well, of course)). The thing is, Steam doesn't set the price of the game, the publishers do (sometimes the publisher in question is the developer, of course)... and quite a few of them did realise there was a pretty big market for games cheaper than what the AAA companies demand.
Big shout out to GOG in times like these being seemingly the only company willing to let their customers own their games fully with no DRMs at all. You don't even need the GOG Galaxy app or a launcher to play them you can boot them straight up like we used to. If they weren't mostly just old games with modern patches they would be at the top of the list or at least equal with Steam.
You only need the launcher if you want to play multiplayer. But I guess there is nothing they can do about that. Too bad developers stopped supporting LAN
It's good that GOG does this but the truth most digital stores don't want to do that because it makes it incredibly easy to pirate the games. That's why GOG mostly sell old games.
You can buy drm free on steam as well but I believe it’s on the developer and most don’t bother with it because people like their achievements and such.
You dont see new games (from big devs) on gog because they dont want a free pirated copy from the start. Denuvo and all that shit at least prevent piracy for a few days to months. Could be lost sales if gog wouldnt have anything.
One of the biggest misconceptions on this channel is that physical media is good, digital media is bad when actually it is DRM that is causing these issues behind the scenes. GOG is a living proof that you can own your digital license to play a game just as much as you could own your physical license to play a game.
@@pienipehmea3243 whats even more funny is if everything goes licence based or subscription based (which is the direction we are going because people don't understand what they are agreeing to 90% of the time) will only reinforced DRM and places like GOG won't exist anymore) because there would be no need for resellers..
This doesn't help at all. The law they SHOULD make is that you DO own digital products, and that it should be illegal for companies to take them away from their customers.
If it is clearly advertised as a rental or subscription with a given time period of guaranteed functionality, and those terms are honored, then it's in line with many older business models that are proven and legitimate. Dealing with the false advertisement/double-standard is a useful first step.
@@shanematthews1985 problem is if you don't have owner ship of it and its is legally just a licence then theres no laws stating your even entitled to a refund... theres no protection for you. No only that but if all media become considered as a subscription or licence then expect the prices of these to double not lower
Nah, it helps. It means you're not allowed to pretend you're selling a product unless you're actually selling a product. It might not seem like much, but that's a pretty big win in its own right, by way of substantially undermining some common corporate propaganda... and also the legal shenanigans they often use to get out of meeting their responsibilities as sellers (they'll pretend they're selling a product and thus not obligated to fulfil any of the responsibilities that come with the alternatives... only to turn around and insist that it is absolutely not a product/not being sold the moment they have to fulfil the obligations of That status (... such as the product actually being Fit For Purpose. A game that won't run on a system that meets the listed specs is not fit for purpose, just fyi.)) Now, it doesn't magically fix everything, no. But it does help. If nothing else it makes the benefits to the customer of GOG's model more obvious.
It doesn't solve the issue but it's a babystep in the right direction. The overwhelming majority of people do not understand that they don't own digital products. Because most people don't understand this, they don't have a problem with it. Ideally, the change will alert much more people to the situation so a larger discussion can happen, which can lead to change eventually.
I agree. It isn't enough for them to just inform their customers that they're treating them like garbage. They need to be stopped. The law needs to clearly state that a digital purchase must be refunded in full if a company ceases to provide access to it for a cumulative period longer than, say, 30 days per calendar year (which would more than cover any unplanned outages).
Good luck with that. This law only cements that you own nothing. Congratulations, the politicians got paid and the only thing that changed is now you can't sue people for taking things that you paid for away from you.
Yeah not going to happen, and it wouldn't matter anyway, so what if you still owned a copy of concord for example, you literally can't use it anyway because the servers no longer exist So making sure they leave you with a copy of a literally worthless digital file doesn't really give you anything, and no there will never be a law that requires them to keep the servers running nor any law that requires them to let you keep playing once those servers go offline
This is a good first step though. We'll have to wait until gen alpha grows up and become politicians. Millennials and gen z politicians facing too much old school and ignorant opposition from older politicians.
Same I've been aware of what companies could do with an all digitial future for years, yet even now people don't want to give up the temporary convenince it offers. I'll happily go to the store to get my movie or game if it means I own it forever.
You wont be able to use them anymore! AI will scan if you use illegal aka owned things and alert the thugs who will warn you to destroy those illegal copies! All TVs all devices will be SMART aka Devices for Control! SMART means Tyranny!
You do realize with games nowadays you’re basically just putting in a permission key every time to play the game games don’t come in full in the disk anymore since like the PS3 and 360 so even if you physical if that game is cut off like Concord, you won’t be able to play it regardless of physical or digital
Same here. I don't do digital content unless it's something long out of print or something that never got a physical release. Then again, some physical movies I buy do come with Digital Codes for Copies of those Movies. So I do use them
All this talk about how its framed is pointless. Look, its simple: We need laws to make it when rights are revoked, full refunds are given. This would make companies absolutely hate it whenever they have to take a game off their storefront. The storefronts would force the publishers into a permanent agreement or not do business with them. Thats the only thing that should ever be. discussed in these videos.
So, even IF sony had left you the game, which would have meant no refund, you do know you literally wouldn't be able to even play concord even if you still had access to the files right? It was an online only game, the game files literally do not work anymore, also, when they removed the game you got a full refund, so you losing access to the game in that case is entirely normal, do you buy a physical game in a store then take it back for a refund and still expect to keep the game?
@shanematthews1985 The alarming thing is the principle of the matter. A company can decide that you don't get to have your game anymore, and btw, EULA says "yeah, you signed us the rights". It was nice this time, but it shows they can, and if they find the need pressing, they will.
@@shanematthews1985 That's not quite true. There are multiple MMOs that have been shut down, for example, that still exist and run on private servers. People have either managed to obtain a copy of the server side code or reverse engineered it back into existence. Now, I doubt anyone would care enough about Concord to do that, but, regardless, there are server required games that have survived losing their official servers. And it could pave the way for laws requiring the release of the server code base if an online game is shutdown, to make an easy transition to private servers. All it requires is governments that care more about people than they do about companies.
@@IdiocracyWorldTour7774 It's no more than $60 which was the release price of Resistance Fall of Man but go off. Zelda Ocarina of time was $80 if you want to talk about money. Games today costing $70 is about $10 cheaper than their inflation adjusted prices from 2006-2014. Stop buying from the bargain bin and look at actual new release prices.
@SecuR0M I don't think that is the point being made. A physical and digital version of a game will probably cost $70. The digital version you don't even own, though. Should be cheaper.
@@TheTraveler980 I don't know if the Steam client would let you link custom game executables like that, but the GOG Galaxy client lets you do the inverse; link custom game executables and run it, including Steam games. You'd still have to have the game run through Steam but Galaxy would be the single launcher for everything.
Anytime the company kills your digital media that you paid for, they should give you a full refund. If someone steals a game or book off your shelf in your home, at the very least, they should have to pay you for it.
"Purchase" will still be used They will just have much smaller text that says "game license*" with a sh*tload of fine print that no one will read at the bottom of the web page. These scumbags have entire departments dedicated to relieving you from your hard earned.
The EULA for every game you purchase already has that text in, so it already existed, but people didn't read it, so they still aren't going to read it, and the overwhelming majority just won't care, i've known about games being licenses for the better part of the last 2 decades, console users are just finally catch up to what PC has had for that entire time
by the sounds of it they are legally not allowed to use the words purchase or buy. Id imagine purchase with a big askierisk would not be allowed by the wording of things
Exactly this. The law says they can't use the word buy or purchase UNLESS they inform customer this is not their property. Which means Steam and other storefronts will simply add that disclaimed to a purchase page or something. This changes nothing.
@@Ross516 Read it again. It says they aren't allowed to use those words UNLESS they inform customers they aren't getting unrestricted access. That UNLESS is a massive keyword. It means stores like Steam can keep the store pages exactly the same so long as there's some small print disclaimer somewhere, like when you go to finalize your purchase.
I’d rather the practices change than the terminology. We’re still all gonna say “I bought that game,” and companies are still gonna exploit our lack of ownership.
I wouldn't be surprised if you could find a sympathetic judge who would read this law as companies are committing theft and who would rule against the company if someone sued them for theft if they stole games they said you "purchased".
Indeed, they just normalice/ignore something that should be considered a crime or at least a bad practice. And in a legal document (that may be copied on other states or even a country)
You can't own something that doesn't exist. Inevitably, online services will shutdown, storefronts will go under, or people lose access accounts. One day you WILL lose it. Can you really say you own it after that?
@@saladv6069 The same holds for physical media though. It will eventually degrade with age, get lost, get damage, or whatever. And then you'll buy a new copy, maybe. That's all fine. Those things happen. But that's different than someone who is still in business yoinking the game from your library. If someone did that to your physical copy, that's theft. So, hey, if the company goes out of business, yeah, you lose it, that's life. But if they are in business, what is yours should be yours.
What this should hopefully do is actually educate the consumer base into understanding what licencing is. Bcos you can't swindle someone if they know the trick. Which in this case, collectively we all should be able to than negotiate for better licencing contracts, rather than as the comment section shows, ppl sitting around complaining about renting.
Not so much us giving it up, rather than them pushing digital so hard. It's far cheaper for everyone to cut out the middle man in regards of sales, they've been against it for a decade. First they used the 1 time use codes to discourage pre-owned purchases because they don't get any money from pre owned purchases in retailers, now it's far cheaper to not do anything physical - and push everything digitally.
@@ashleyjohansson230 Within the law. It's why if you want to change things, you have to get your government to start make laws to prevent these corporations from doing this stuff.
There's no such thing as buying a license, we buy the product and the product downloads to our property and we should do whatever we want with it. That should be how it works.
@@cameraredeye3115 For get the decade, software was ALWAYS a license... that license was just bound to a physical item that contained the data you were licensing the use of... Exactly the same as a Physical Book, and was generally treated the same as said book: the master copy, that you bought, and the license, that you bought, were inextricably bound together, and when the master copy changed hands, so did the license. (And where I live, you were, and are, absolutely allowed to make as many copies as you want... but they Must all be either passed on with the master copy or destroyed when said master copy changes hands, because you no longer have the necessary license to them at that point). The thing is, just like the book, while the master copy of the data and the license that goes with it were functionally a single object, and the 'license' consisted of 'you bought a copy, you are therefore free to do Anything (legal) You Want with it, For Ever, and no one else (barring occasionally law enforcement) can do anything to it without your permission until and unless you transfer ownership to someone else. So it's not as neat and tidy as people like to make it seem.
Finally some justice for us consumers! I hope this sweeps the entire industry soon enough, because we really should have the right to own what we purchase
@Sniperbear13 Yeah but if something happened to that console, sd card hard drive ect, all that digital data goes bye bye including saves and purchased cosmetics
@@coletrainhetrick It might also get customers to not buy games unless they are actually going to play them. Because they don't want to have stuff in their backlog, like the Crew, get deleted from their accounts and such.
Unfortunately, I don't think this is going to make a difference. Now there's just going to be more to the terms of service that they'll make you click through before you buy
I don’t think people should get discouraged. Yes it’s true that this single act of legislation on its own won’t do anything. But if we advocate for more states to pass similar legislation, then it will make a difference
That's where awareness comes in. We know it has to be there now, it's a fact. We just have to make people aware of that if Sony or other companies try to hide it in the terms of service.
What you mean by owning is that you own your license to play the game. If you buy your digital games from a DRM-free store like GOG, that is actually the case.
And why is that? Servers cost money to run and operate, storage space costs money, bandwidth costs money, IT staff cost money, digital delivery isn't exactly free you know that right?
@@shanematthews1985 Whats your alternative to companies screwing people over? Just sit and do nothing? Twittle our thumbs and hope something changes? Nothing will ever change if people dont do anything.
There are a few things that need to be done, First, any games that require online play, and cant run without an internet network, should be banned from selling physical copies, Second, physical copies need to be owned copies, not paid licenses, so you should be able to skip options for physical games to try to detect internet connections, and play it without any connection to the internet.
Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, the sponsor of the bill, told Game File she was initially prompted to take action by Sony's planned removal of Discovery content from the PlayStation store because of expiring licenses. Not only would the shows no longer be available for purchase, but those who had already purchased them would lose access. Sony eventually reversed the decision, but the damage was done: Irwin introduced the bill in February. Two months later, Ubisoft helped convince her it was the right move when it started revoking licenses for the racing game The Crew. Sales of The Crew had already been halted in December 2023, but the game-including its singleplayer portion-was dependent on remote servers, and those went offline in April. That rendered the game unplayable even for those who already owned it, but Ubisoft apparently wanted to be sure nobody whipped up a DIY option to get the game running again.
So she got pissed because of a removal and then decided to support the bill that screaming "YOU DON'T OWN ANYTHING SO DON'T BUY IT PLEASEEEEEEE" and then just be ok with it? Future seems too bleak.
@@hartantoanggoro It's a bill that in fact tells the companies to stop lieing and kills a bunch of shenanigans, as well as heavily undermining various propaganda and disinformation said companies put about a lot. It's an important first step towards actually fixing the acutal problems. But yeah, ti doesn't actually do much in and of itself.
There is no set date though in most cases, the license normally expires when the games servers shut down, which is an unknown in most cases until its announced
@@shanematthews1985personally I don’t find that much matters. A sale is a sale, but if your renting or licensing then it’s more a contract. I don’t think a unknown expiration should ever be acceptable as a term of contract. It’s far too vague. For things like, WoW, it’s much more clear cut, as the expiration is just the end of your sub.
@@shanematthews1985 There is, in fact, routeinely no good reason why the license for most games should expire in the first place because there is no reason for them to require access to an external server in order to function other than the fact that the publisher included unnecessary malware to Force that to be the case.
TF is making companies admit they're just renting licenses? The law should make it so they're required to sell products. This is just politicians making up another loophole.
More like forcing companies to admit the truth. Sure, it's not what customers want, but at least companies can't lie and say we are buying/purchasing the game.
Well, you can't MAKE anybody sell anything. But this is a baby step, hopefully. We have to evolve somehow, we're never gonna just get what we want all at once.
The government is forcing them to stop lying. It's a significant improvement over what we have now, and people will be more aware that they do not OWN their game. If they 'sell' products they have to keep digital server forever. That said, oddly GoG would be least impacted by this since they do require batch download instead of clients like steam, epic, or even company specific like XBOX or Ubisoft.
Can you imagine walking into a place like Blockbuster back in the day and paying full price for a video game or movie just to have it for a couple of days? No one would ever rent because buying it to keep and own would make more sense.
alot of people have that destiny 2 apologist mindset and it's been spreading to other games like overwatch 2 which is pretty ironic lol gamers love being prayed on for cosmetics
That's nice and all, but it doesn't change that they have control, even though you paid for it. Once things are only digital, the customer will be left with just a license or nothing.
Always prefer physical. Cheaper used games. Problem is so much of the game isn’t in the disc these days, sometimes it seems little more than an access key to download the game.
explain to me how "physical" solves this issue. let's go through the steps… 1) you get the disc from the store. 2) you install the game from the disc. 3) you try launching the game. 4) the DRM stops you. 5) ??? 6) physical media good?
Its a start though. Will also raise awareness when suddenly either the verbiage changes on digital stores, or there is a wall of text that you have to agree to when you make your "purchase".
Nah, I think politicians are behind it. They probably don't want to have to deal with any more complaints about this from their constituents nor do they want to side with the corporations on this.
@@Razman.99 It's not a start, it's a free, get out of all responsibility card, gifted to the platforms. Who now have the legal mandate to wipe their hands clean and say, "Well... the customer was informed & knew what they were doing... Purchasing a limited licence, and not actually owning it". Raising awareness is not going to save your library from being taken away. So what good is it for the consumer really? If the underlying practice is untouched.
After we re-establish what ownership is we need to demolish and rebuild the corrupt copyright laws that allow some of these practices to be commonplace.
I think if the game goes offline and the company lost rights to the game you buy, the company need to do a buy back and give a portion of the money back to the customer who bought the game.
I am a consumer who this year restarted my efforts to build out my physical media collection in response to industries trying to aggressively convert everything to a digital landscape dependent on corporate granted permission to download purchases. The final system migration resulting from the Crunchyroll / Funimation merger is a prime example of how customers relying on their previous digital copy/purchase can get screwed over when the platform's owner just decides to say "No". I have gone slightly further than needed, chasing premium and deluxe versions of DVDs rather than just settling for the basic Bluray cases whenever possible. Even still, those higher costing physical cases will ultimately end up being fewer dollars in the long run compared to me keeping a bunch of subscriptions active for months/years on end (looking at the collection lasting well into my senior years for that to be the case). Only thing I got to worry about is ensuring I have a working Bluray player of some sort (and players tend to have longer lifespans than more modern gaming consoles).
if you read the actual law, it only requires the companies to inform the buyer about the nature of the transaction. which they already do, so this achieved nothing.
@@TheRogBG Tell that to Newsom when he snuck in legislation which excluded Panera Bread from the minimum wage increase law by exempting "bakeries" due to meetings with his CEO buddy who owned dozens of franchises. So are you gonna pay me or what?
The part that concerns me most of all is that these issues don’t just stop at platforms that SELL game licenses like Steam, but even the companies MAKING games, because The Crew had physical copies that you could own and possess in your hand, but the servers getting shutdown means even the physical copy can be revoked. That can’t be allowed to continue
@@peterc3262Then 1) don’t sell it as a physical copy, or 2) don’t render the single player campaign unusable by requiring a server for it. This isn’t rocket science, it shouldn’t even be a debate. If your game will cease to exist as a physical product for a person who purchases it as one, then it should REMAIN usable to a significant extent for as long as the owner can maintain the physical quality of the item. If a studio can’t guarantee that, they should not be allowed to sell it in disk or cartridge form, or anything that isn’t explicitly stated to be “a license” before point of sale.
@@GameJam230 Nah, they just need to be honest like the old MMOs used to be: you're paying for a product (the software) and a service (the servers)... where that applies. Well, for games which have any reason what so ever to be online in the first place. (so... online multiplayer, mostly). For everything else they need to stop actively sabotaging the software which would work perfectly Fine without a connection to their servers if not for the fact that they decided to build a killswitch into it.
@@laurencefraser It literally doesn’t sound like you disagreed with me on anything there. All of the points I have made have been on games that have single player campaigns and physical copies with unnecessary kill switches built in, I never had anything to say about the online modes of MMOs at all here, and in general I’d agree that you can’t force a company to pay for dead servers, but the issue where I begin to draw the line is SPECIFICALLY the games they can avoid doing it in. There are dozens of possible solutions forwards from here, and most of them don’t even require punishing companies for CURRENTLY released games, only requiring them to be conscious of these problems for FUTURE games they make, so people need to stop acting like all we’re doing is trying to enforce companies to lose money forever. I KNOW how much servers cost, I’ve developed games and test projects with small scale servers myself and I’m glad I had the ability to shut them down at any point, but all I’m saying is that companies shouldn’t be left entirely unrestricted when they’re using it as an excuse to take away the playability of PHYSICAL games discs I can hold in my hands that have perfectly functional single player modes available.
Digital content you purchased that is made unavailable should require whoever made it unavailable to pay you a full refund with legal options to demand more if physical versions of that digital content are hard to come by.
lol not happening, no to mention everything decreases in value over time, in most cases by the time you lose access to the content you've owned it long enough that you already got your monies worth from it
I've purchased a digital game that I don't own. I also pirated a digital game that I didn't own. So essentially they can't call it theft because legally you never owned the game. You just refused to purchase a license
Lets be real Nothing will change regardless. It took laws this long to catch up. These companies will figure something out like 8 times over before this goes anywehre significant
As a musician, I have started buying hardware gear recently. Cause having all your music depending on the good will of digital software companies is a very bad idea in my opinion. It's the same problem as with games or other tools. If they decide to change their subscription format or not to update their apps anymore, you are screwed.
It’s 💩 like this that makes me disinterested in playing video games. Back when internet connectivity wasn’t a thing just yet, most games were playable offline. Now a online membership is like a phone plan where you need it in order to play and all games nowadays are suppose to have a online connection. Now that companies want to tell us they can cut the cord because we don’t “own” it and are lobbying for these types of laws, kills my joy for games even more.
This changes absolutely nothing. Distribution companies are just going to switch to using the word download instead of buy or purchase, completely nullifying this useless bill and making no change to the lack of ownership situation.
Remember that often nowadays, even if you buy physical media, you don't actually own your games, because: - The box only has a digital code to download the game. - There's a disc, but it only has a few files, the actual game must be downloaded and the disc is only a key. - Sometimes, only parts of the game are available on disc, you can play without internet, but not the full game. - You can play the game without internet with just a disc, but not the good version of the game, because at launch, the game is full of problems and you need to download a patch later or there's a patch since the launch day. - Sometimes, the patch is so big that you are almost downloading the whole game. - You still need to connect to the internet to buy and download DLC. - To play online, you need to download the most recent version. - Many games are online-only, require a constant connection to the internet, even on single-player, and to make things worse, the servers often close, making your physical copy a paperweight.
Been like that for some time. I remember buying Killzone Mercenary for the Vita and the day one patch was huge! Plus additional patches after that! Do I really own the game? Sort of, but it's a broken and buggy version.
Not all games are like that as u describe Also even if a game releases in a broken state on day 1 and is fully printed on disc u still own the game (Just a broken version of it)
There's a site that marks physical games as fully playable on the disc or not. A ton of games do still have the full game on disc without need of an internet connection. It's frustrating how much of a dog whistle this take of the whole game not being on the disc has become
@@dante1nero1 I know, but there are still many games where while you can play without internet, you can't play the good version of the game since the launch game is full of glitches and you need to patch it.
Gaming companies have been pushing for all an all digital future for years because once people stop buying physical media they can choose to sell directly to the consumer via their own digital stores allowing them to control the price of the digital licence. Digital only games remove competition from the market meaning you'll only be able to buy the game from them for £80 - £120 per game. Why do you think the PS5 Pro is digital only unless you buy an overpriced £80 disc drive which has no innovative technology in it?
See, you say that... and while console manufacturers have managed it for their specific consoles, game publishers attempts to sell directly to consumers have mostly failed, or at best are limping along barely justifying their existence, because they were all so much worse than Steam.
@laurencefraser that's exactly my point. Gaming companies are failing to sell directly through their own digital stores because they're trying to sell a licence at RRP whilst competition still exists with digital companies such as Steam and with physical media via retail stores. Competition keeps prices of games reasonable. If they can push for a fully digital future and remove the need to sell physical media altogether then they can choose to take full control of digital distribution and make their games accessible only through their own digital stores. They'll be in a position to stop allowing companies such as Steam to sell their games. Consumers will then only have the choice to buy the game from one place at prices gaming companies directly control. Look at the Horizon Dawn remaster. They're selling it as a £10 upgrade if you own the original game or at full price if you don't own the original. As a result they have stuck the original digital game back up to RRP to stop people buying the original game digitally at the current low price and then purchasing the upgrade. Consumers can circumvent this outrageous strategy by buying a physical copy of the game in retail stores for £15 - £20. Once physical media is gone then the gaming companies can take full control of pricing and you'll have to pay what they ask of you.
That’s why all Digital media should be half the price. 🤨 I’m hoping that this will incentivise the corporate executives who are running this Gaming industry down into the ground to *MAKE REAL VIDEOGAMES* & stop making *ZERO COST* Money Syphoning Application Grifts that indefinitely sends their grift victims money straight into their wallets. 🤨
Why not 33% or 5% ? You don't know for how long you'll enjoy the product. Also, few people mention this but before digitalization you could always RESELL your copy. You're also deprived of that.
1) your precious "physical media" can be shut down just as easily if it has DRM, and modern releases always do. 2) let's say they give you this 50% discount. how does this prevent games from being destroyed?
@@arsenii_yavorskyi individual copies can still be destroyed but when enough of them are out there in the wild the games will always still exist in physical form. The greedy execs just don’t want to spend money to make money anymore. They just want to siphon money from the populous through the proxy of an intentionally shit product that’s only designed to take even more money out of your bank account’s on a permanent basis. This whole endeavour to prevent games from being preserved is their back door paper shredder way of keeping evidence out of the Government’s hands for when their Consumer Protection Rights regulations eventually catch up to them & rein them in for their blatant greed & exploitation. 😒
Only applies to california, so in the grand scheme of things, this wont worry companies much, in fact they will make things even worse possibly make all games free, and make consumer pay an arm and a leg for dlc. Or just switch games to a subscription only services. I keep seeing content creators promoting deleteme, if they are so good why would i need to subscribe. I think content creators should prove they use the services they are promoting or also be liable for false advertising.
these past few months, I kept buying physical games as this glaring issue is the sole reason why Im doing that thank God there are people like that law-maker who will put end the publisher's dubious schemes
Yes, someone that was raised in California and born there. Yeah Governor is not the best but I mean he has some good policies that he passed. I just don't support some of his policies
It's going to do diddly squat. I don't know why people are praising him for this. The gaming companies have already scammed billions out of their customers. This is the most pointless legislation in the history of pointless legislation. Most companies have already added a clause to the mile long terms of service that no one reads that states you don't own the game.
It didn't actually change anything though, digital storefronts always told you it was a license, if you buy something on steam i'm pretty sure that during the checkout process it tells you that you're buying a license, and the EULA for the game certainly does, it just requires consumers to, you know, read what they buy
@arsenii_yavorskyi Let's see sony touch my ps2 and all my games that's right they can't.Every since ps3 xbox 360 everything changed gaming ain't the same anymore
Stop buying digital, stop renting, stop using their subscription services. They will pay attention to us when we stop giving them our money. They will bring back ownership to us if it’s the only way they can make money. The idea of digital is great in concept, if we could purchase and download a copy from a disk or online and keep it without the need to be connected to the internet to use. Corporations have twisted everything that could be positive for their own profits.
Thing is, modern physical games media don't always have the complete game on the disc. So even in these cases, you can be unable to play a game if it requires downloading the rest to play.
It went to operating the servers, buying the storage space, paying for the electricity, the bandwidth, the coders and developers who keep those services online, the physical infrastructure required to digitally deliver content, did you think the internet was free or something?
@@shanematthews1985 the actual change was that the game devs didn't need the "factory" actually making and burning CD's, the actual CD cases, printing of the CD case covers, shipping of those parts with vans, trucks and than moving it all to a physical retailer (that also took a part of the earnings), moving it again with trucks and vans making the CD's requiring physical space in the store (in the showcase and shelves as well as in the backroom storage). And if u look at COLLECTORS edition, those things had even more physical interactions with the world, and even more people working on it. All of that was a big part and a part of the actual 60€ went to other firms aside from the developers. If Steam takes 30% of those 60€, how much went to those physical retailers? Same thing happened with newspapers, but now "the news" is freely accessible on the internet, not more expensive...hmmm...a stark difference.
@@Willow4526 No the hosting was NOT there for the physical age, I assure you Final Fantasy games up to 15 (not including 11) absolutely did NOT have all that cost associated with it...
@@raizil0513 as early as the 1980s internet access to video games existed. Even than the death of the physical age isn't that old, as early as 2010-15 the physical age was still alive & guess what existed then?
Not really, because GOG only removes the DRM, any games they sell that are online only will still cease to work once those servers go offline, and if GOG ever shuts down you'll lose access to naything you haven't downloaded and once you lose that data you will have lost your purchase anyway
@@shanematthews1985 If GOG ever shuts down, there will be a time period where the servers will still be running to give people the chance to download all their bought games. Of course just to be sure I keep digital GOG copies of my favourite games on several usb drives. In that way I always own them physically.
Heh I saw on Twitter a guy mention after the hurricane hit his town, it knocked out all wireless services, meaning they couldn't get any streaming for days. Resulting in people going to Wal-Mart and getting any DVDs and Blu-Rays they could find. If that doesn't tell you how important physical is, I don't know what to tell you.
@@shanematthews1985You are dropping comments on comments everywhere. What are you worked up about? If these things people are complaining about are fixed, how does that negatively effect you? "It doesn't need fixing." For you. Does it irritate you? A minor change in text here and there? Why?
@@arsenii_yavorskyi That type of EULA is generally found void in short order if challenged in courts. Or at least the unreasonable parts are. The sorts of EULA that aren't unilatoral anti consumer horseshit, on the other hand, actually do serve valid and important purposes and exist for good reason.
You would think that companies would have a buy back program to maximize profits. If I buy a digital game at $60 and pass it then I can resale it back to them at a 50% loss which in turn would allow me to buy another game. Which means, I'll be spending more money. And since it's a digital copy it would be easy to add a code that kills the game after you resale it back to them.
How is that maximising profits though Thats cutting potential profits in half, why would they want to sell you a game for half price when they can sell you the game at full price They know that if you want a game badly enough you'll buy it regardless, because you will
@@shanematthews1985 half of something is better then a whole lot of nothing. Consumers are getting tired of being swindled. That's why a lot of games are failing. Also, by having a sell back program it ensures that you have a returning customer. And I said 50% as an example but it could easily be (50% digital bucks for a new game or 30% in actual cash) also digital is cheaper to produce because they save money on physical products having to sit on shelves they have to pay for. All digital has a higher profit margin because of this so a sale back program would be a financial benefit in the long term because of more returning customers and new customers that are more willing to fork up a big price tag knowing that they can return if they don't enjoy it.
This seems something what only corrupted politicians would do, because at first glance only corporates will benefit from this law I don't see how this benefits us customers at all, in fact this law only seems to deal harm for us even further. Like, can customers still ask for a refund from digital games if they don't actually own it?
I would say “About Time,” but it really should be illegal to sell a product with the seller maintaining rights to rescind the product at any time without a refund clause or a very firm understanding between buyer and seller that the ownership is constituent to a contract BEFORE the transaction takes place. It has been law for physical products for over a century; if you buy a physical product, by the transaction taking place, you now have ownership of that product. If the seller wants it back, they cannot just take it. How that isn’t law for a digital product, I have no clue.
I said a long time ago the words buy, purchase or own overrides any legal agreement because it misrepresents itself on its face of what it is. This is also why I said we need a gamers Union so when companies take advantage of the customer they can be sued most of the time it could be handled just through a threat of a lawsuit and most companies will make it right before it even goes to court. But these games should say lease or rent on them not buy or purchase. Same with movies. But once it says lease or rent on t hem that will drop the value of the item a lot. But a word of advice to everyone if you can't resell it you don't own it. Just imagine buying a new Mercedes g wagon for $200,000 and then a few months later Mercedes shows up and takes it away from you and says you was just using it we know it says purchase but that's not what we meant in the fine print.
No, because you're still buying the license, the customer just doesn't read these days and incorrectly assumes things and then falls foul to their lack of understanding
@@shanematthews1985 know you're renting or leasing the license you're not buying the word buy means ownership you need to educate yourself on definitions of words. That's why these companies are getting in trouble.
@@shanematthews1985 so let's say they change the wording. would this prevent them from destroying your purchase? because that's the problem here, not the legal technicalities.
@@davidframe1613 Unfortunately, you actually do straight up buy the license. that is the correct term. The trick is that you used to also buy a physical object that the license was inextricably tied to, which contained a copy of the thing you were licensing, and the other party didn't have the ability to randomly show up in your house and vandalise said object at will. The problem comes with the ability of the publisher to revoke said license unilatorally and at will, and disclaim any obligations regarding you actually getting what you're paying for, combined with their ability to vandilise said product at will.
@@laurencefraser that would be up to a judge to determine. I guarantee you these companies would not win on the way they word stuff and then the way they sell it, it's trickery and they know it. Also remember each state have different rules on leasing and selling something so each state would have different cases against these companies.
What’s to prevent them from still saying you are “buying/purchasing” and then down in the text underneath it mentions you are buying/purchasing a license?
@@ZeroXSEED I agree with you....I can also imagine a good sophist ($$$ Lawyer) arguing that purchasing a license is the same as buying the game (only for a certain amount of time). Hope you are right. 🙂
@@jonathanbowling3129 Only if said license's text includes an actual time limit and isn't deliberately presented in such a way as to mislead one into thinking that was not the case.
If only people could group together and try to fight for protections for themselves. If people as a whole boycotted digital products, companies would be forced to make physical copies. Consumers have the power, it's people's weaknesses that prevent us from success.
This is the equivalent to trying to stop a school bully from bullying a student by just giving a public speech about how bad bullying is instead of... you know, punishing the bully accordingly. This law effectively solves almost nothing. AT BEST it *MIGHT* serve as an initial catalyst for the government to persue for better digital ownership laws in the future. But at the moment the actual problem is still here, that being companies being able to take shit away that you paid for when they shouldn't be allowed to do so.
GoG is my preferred platform when buying games. Unfortunately the selection is limited. More people need to support them so more studios and gaming companies offer their games on it. In the end, money talks and if the majority of consumers went to GoG so would the games companies and studios.
Here we go. People will start buying physical media again. And corpos will start uping the price because its physical is it "cost more money than digital". Just you watch, 75-80 dollar games on the way. We are all going to get fucked with it. At least thats what i think.
Physical media isn't even going to be any "safer" either. As Companies can easily keep all the information you need to actually play the game in a server that the game has to conect to.
Well, the companies went digital and didn't lower prices. Corporations are going to corporation. Buy games a year after release and on deep discount. Unless you are provably going to pass away in the next year there is no reason to rush. If nothing else the patching and optimizing need to be done, there is no reason to pay full price to beta test.
If you think people are gonna go back to buying physical because of a simple word change, you grossly underestimate public laziness. The average person will give up A LOT for convenience. Next to nothing will change from this.
As part of this, companies should also be required to advise of the date at which a licensing agreement or servers for a certain product come up for renewal or expires on the store page where a license to said product can be acquired.
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- A great first step towards protecting consumers from awful practices surrounding digital games. Hopefully they'll take it a step further and make it so companies can't choose to completely erase digital content from peoples' libraries without consent.
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Remember that even if you buy physical media, you often don't really own your games either, just look at The Crew.
Just hopefully those games will never be removed in the library forever
@@Rabbitlord108only the intro tho for the second time
8:45 "but before we discuss that" wha? Haven't we been here before?
Then digital media shouldn’t be the same price as physical media
Agreed 👍
exactly
I wouldn't be surprised if this law makes it easier for consumers to force that change on the industry.
I remember back in 2013ish when digital games distribution blew up and I heard people saying that digital games would be cheaper. I thought to myself "guys, this isn't how capitalism works."
I'll tell exactly how this will play out. When we went "diskless" we told clients it was to save on the cost of production. We never reduced the cost of the software. Any clients that still preferred to get their yearly update by disk now how to pay a premium price for it. The disks only cost us like 75c a Dvd if that. Originally they use to get the disk "free" as a part of their first-year release. We only charged them for update disks but after the change over every disk was minimum 25 bucks a release (that included version X.1000 and any future updates). So they went from "free disks" to pay avg 75bucks/yr (as we avg at least two major updates a year).
I said the same thing too that we were ripping off the clients. My manager replied "Microsoft does it too (referring to MAPS subscription)." That was over 10 years ago.
If license is revoked - i should be paid back.
well, not if it's revoked due to you breaking the contract you agreed to as part of the purchasing process, but otherwise, yeah.
@@laurencefraserRight. Like if I install aimbots on some game and they take my license away, I shouldn’t be refunded for being a cheater.
@@laurencefraser That also depends on the terms of those contract. Because in most countries (if not all), contracts do not overrule the law. Meaning that if a contract contains rules that contradict existing law, they will not hold up in court. But then again, most customers aren't lawyers... and, I mean - who reads those damn terms of service anyway...
Well you agreed to their T&Cs before buying. So no
@@bellissimo4520most people think that TOS is above the law and anything they write in it applies.
Since these large companies like Sony want to say buying is no longer equating to owning, then piracy is no longer theft. Because even if you buy it, you don't OWN it. Owning means it's yours to keep, even if a certain form of access should go down, or gets sold off to another company like when Sony and Crunchyroll bought Funimation.
Bingo
If you bought a product and can't access it, it's morally ethical to pirate.
By your logic, it's not theft to steal books from the library, since they weren't for sale anyway. That's not how it works, jackass.
@@theInfra-Recon1000%
Love how y'all copy and paste this comment over and over and act like you're saying some profound unique thing 😂 yes we all hate this practice
"If purchasing isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing."
Digital "purchases" should never be full priced then. Revoking a digital license should see money back.
Bingo!
property rights are human rights
so ULAs are a vehicle for violating human rights
And that whole Terms and Conditions should be given BEFORE purchase with a clear note that the product is constituent to a contract stating clearly that the seller can revoke ownership at any time. It makes no sense whatsoever that you have to purchase the product before you get faced with a terms and conditions (which you HAVE TO SAY YES TO in order to play the game) with a hidden clause saying ownership can be revoked at any time. If anyone selling a physical product did that, it would be a massive slam dunk lawsuit. But because it’s digital, suddenly consumer protection doesn’t exist. It’s bullshit.
It would be a theft of service. The law protects the powerful, not you. Always remember that.
@@DisDatK9 That's why Consumer Protection Laws need to be redone to consider Digital Purchases.
So why the hell are we paying full price for something we don't own? Really selling me on pirating all digital goods going forward.
Same here bro
Making you choose on Netflix (or any other service) between RENT a movie and "BUY" the movie...where i have 2TB external HDD full of movies, tv shows, games and music which will work even if i don't have an internet connection. Things i do not wish to lose access to, ever, things i'd like to pass on to the next generation.
If that goes through and it is retro active to all purchased titles than we should file a class action lawsuit of refunding money as we were deceived of purchasing and owning that content which is not the case anymore 🤭😂
Consumers who supoort digital games that cant be owned are all idiots. I have been saying for a decade that digital games on Steam and Epic are a scam.
But most idiots dont seem to realize their idiotic actions in supporting digital eco system even paying too dollars for 'renting' games.
I have never bought a digital game on Steam, and I will also teach my kids not to touch digital games as they are corporate fraud.
GOG is the best platform where you own games.
You're paying full price?
So, if piracy is illegaly owning something, and I can't own digital game, I believe the high seas has just got lawless.
arrrr mate
Aye!
Piracy is consuming anything without paying for it. If you go to the cinema, you don't own the movie. You just paid to be able to watch it. So if you watch the movie at home without paying for it, you're committing theft/piracy.
@@vdimension6300And???
Who cares c:
@@vdimension6300technically your paying for the venue to watch the film, the same way when you buy drinks at a bar you technically paying for the venue (hence why shots are £6 when a bottle of 20 shots is £20)
I dont mind this, BUT I rather the law force them to say digital is FULL ownership. And Force them to keep things up.
Absolutely
exactly. I think in a way this is helping companies... now they can say "hey you knew what you were buying so we can remove it faster"
It will, when they see lower sales numbers, because people won't "rent" a videogame for 70 bucks. An equilibrium between physical ownership and digital rentals will set in. Try explaining to Joe Shmoe that he doesn't own his Madden game... and look as he goes to buy a physical copy.
@@dinkleding2294 issue is that even physical games require to download the game it self or part of it…
Yeah, this is completely useless for consumers. We already knew digital "ownership" was an outright lie; changing the language used to reflect that is the _opposite_ of what we want.
Now let’s talk about how digital games should not be the same price as their physical counterparts and should be cheaper across the board
That will never happen because Retailers will not allow it. That's not as simple an issue as you think it is.
Doesn’t change what they said.
Won't happen. Just simple capitalism at work. Plus all the interweaving stuff between digital and physical, like how much of the game/program is actually on the disc.
Most of us go digital because of convenience. We can have a huge game library without it taking up a ton of physical space. We can buy the game day 1 without having to go to the store, without it being sold out, or any of that stuff. That's what we're paying for. And, honestly, I'm 100% fine with paying the same for a digital copy as a physical one, provided some on-going business doesn't just arbitrarily yoink it from my collection. The physical space savings alone are worth it.
@@cainsalem3544 digital will always be more expensive then physical, even more so if they remove the little ownership we have left. nothings stopping them from highering prices, making all games a subscription service making you pay even more. oh and forget about refund cause as of rn theres no legal rights for refunds of licences
Steam actually tried that early on. Legal shenanigans resulting from how that interacted with physical retialers at the time resulted in Steam giving up on that idea and instead spending the money that would have been saved on providing better service to both customers and developers. ... which combined with the convenience meant that Steam was an even Bigger threat to physical retailers than it would have been otherwise... at least once internet connections good enough to use it became common. ... and then Steam managed to, between sales and providing viable and accessable distribution methods for sub AAA games, generally drive the average price of games down Anyway even with their large cut. (AAA games still cost an arm and a leg and the AAA publishers keep trying to drive them UP, but so many good games are made on smaller budgets and sold at lower prices that simply couldn't have happened before, and Steam is a big part of why (though there are a lot of other factors as well, of course)). The thing is, Steam doesn't set the price of the game, the publishers do (sometimes the publisher in question is the developer, of course)... and quite a few of them did realise there was a pretty big market for games cheaper than what the AAA companies demand.
Big shout out to GOG in times like these being seemingly the only company willing to let their customers own their games fully with no DRMs at all. You don't even need the GOG Galaxy app or a launcher to play them you can boot them straight up like we used to. If they weren't mostly just old games with modern patches they would be at the top of the list or at least equal with Steam.
You only need the launcher if you want to play multiplayer. But I guess there is nothing they can do about that. Too bad developers stopped supporting LAN
GOG will be shutdown!
It's good that GOG does this but the truth most digital stores don't want to do that because it makes it incredibly easy to pirate the games. That's why GOG mostly sell old games.
You can buy drm free on steam as well but I believe it’s on the developer and most don’t bother with it because people like their achievements and such.
You dont see new games (from big devs) on gog because they dont want a free pirated copy from the start. Denuvo and all that shit at least prevent piracy for a few days to months. Could be lost sales if gog wouldnt have anything.
GOG: "Oh yeah, it's all coming together."
One of the biggest misconceptions on this channel is that physical media is good, digital media is bad when actually it is DRM that is causing these issues behind the scenes. GOG is a living proof that you can own your digital license to play a game just as much as you could own your physical license to play a game.
@@pienipehmea3243 whats even more funny is if everything goes licence based or subscription based (which is the direction we are going because people don't understand what they are agreeing to 90% of the time) will only reinforced DRM and places like GOG won't exist anymore) because there would be no need for resellers..
This doesn't help at all.
The law they SHOULD make is that you DO own digital products, and that it should be illegal for companies to take them away from their customers.
That can happen also to physical copies. If online connection is required, your physical copy will just become electronic waste.
If it is clearly advertised as a rental or subscription with a given time period of guaranteed functionality, and those terms are honored, then it's in line with many older business models that are proven and legitimate. Dealing with the false advertisement/double-standard is a useful first step.
@@shanematthews1985 problem is if you don't have owner ship of it and its is legally just a licence then theres no laws stating your even entitled to a refund... theres no protection for you. No only that but if all media become considered as a subscription or licence then expect the prices of these to double not lower
Nah, it helps.
It means you're not allowed to pretend you're selling a product unless you're actually selling a product. It might not seem like much, but that's a pretty big win in its own right, by way of substantially undermining some common corporate propaganda... and also the legal shenanigans they often use to get out of meeting their responsibilities as sellers (they'll pretend they're selling a product and thus not obligated to fulfil any of the responsibilities that come with the alternatives... only to turn around and insist that it is absolutely not a product/not being sold the moment they have to fulfil the obligations of That status (... such as the product actually being Fit For Purpose. A game that won't run on a system that meets the listed specs is not fit for purpose, just fyi.))
Now, it doesn't magically fix everything, no. But it does help.
If nothing else it makes the benefits to the customer of GOG's model more obvious.
It doesn't solve the issue but it's a babystep in the right direction. The overwhelming majority of people do not understand that they don't own digital products. Because most people don't understand this, they don't have a problem with it. Ideally, the change will alert much more people to the situation so a larger discussion can happen, which can lead to change eventually.
Politicians must draft laws protecting digital purchases and digital ownership 100%
I agree. It isn't enough for them to just inform their customers that they're treating them like garbage. They need to be stopped. The law needs to clearly state that a digital purchase must be refunded in full if a company ceases to provide access to it for a cumulative period longer than, say, 30 days per calendar year (which would more than cover any unplanned outages).
Good luck with that. This law only cements that you own nothing. Congratulations, the politicians got paid and the only thing that changed is now you can't sue people for taking things that you paid for away from you.
Yeah not going to happen, and it wouldn't matter anyway, so what if you still owned a copy of concord for example, you literally can't use it anyway because the servers no longer exist
So making sure they leave you with a copy of a literally worthless digital file doesn't really give you anything, and no there will never be a law that requires them to keep the servers running nor any law that requires them to let you keep playing once those servers go offline
These people won’t even help their citizens eat bro
This is a good first step though. We'll have to wait until gen alpha grows up and become politicians. Millennials and gen z politicians facing too much old school and ignorant opposition from older politicians.
I hate this timeline.
Yesterday during the PlayStation outage I couldn’t play Spider-Man 2 digitally.
The fact that laws have to say this is insane.
These companies have grown to be avengers level threats.
@@Suhayl_Khatib what’s more surprising is that it’s Newsom who passed this law
@@thekurgan3688 I always hated that guy. He just exudes dickhead energy.
This is why I buy physical copies of all the movies I really like.
Indeed. I don't buy a physical for all the media I consume, but the ones I like the most I do want a physical copy.
Same I've been aware of what companies could do with an all digitial future for years, yet even now people don't want to give up the temporary convenince it offers. I'll happily go to the store to get my movie or game if it means I own it forever.
You wont be able to use them anymore! AI will scan if you use illegal aka owned things and alert the thugs who will warn you to destroy those illegal copies!
All TVs all devices will be SMART aka Devices for Control!
SMART means Tyranny!
You do realize with games nowadays you’re basically just putting in a permission key every time to play the game games don’t come in full in the disk anymore since like the PS3 and 360 so even if you physical if that game is cut off like Concord, you won’t be able to play it regardless of physical or digital
Same here. I don't do digital content unless it's something long out of print or something that never got a physical release. Then again, some physical movies I buy do come with Digital Codes for Copies of those Movies. So I do use them
All this talk about how its framed is pointless. Look, its simple: We need laws to make it when rights are revoked, full refunds are given. This would make companies absolutely hate it whenever they have to take a game off their storefront. The storefronts would force the publishers into a permanent agreement or not do business with them. Thats the only thing that should ever be. discussed in these videos.
Regardless of how awful Concord was, the fact Sony (and any company) can just wipe it from your account, is concerning.
kindle did it first when they reached into your reader and deleted books
So, even IF sony had left you the game, which would have meant no refund, you do know you literally wouldn't be able to even play concord even if you still had access to the files right?
It was an online only game, the game files literally do not work anymore, also, when they removed the game you got a full refund, so you losing access to the game in that case is entirely normal, do you buy a physical game in a store then take it back for a refund and still expect to keep the game?
@shanematthews1985
The alarming thing is the principle of the matter. A company can decide that you don't get to have your game anymore, and btw, EULA says "yeah, you signed us the rights". It was nice this time, but it shows they can, and if they find the need pressing, they will.
@@shanematthews1985 That's not quite true. There are multiple MMOs that have been shut down, for example, that still exist and run on private servers. People have either managed to obtain a copy of the server side code or reverse engineered it back into existence.
Now, I doubt anyone would care enough about Concord to do that, but, regardless, there are server required games that have survived losing their official servers. And it could pave the way for laws requiring the release of the server code base if an online game is shutdown, to make an easy transition to private servers. All it requires is governments that care more about people than they do about companies.
That is the tip of the Spear for games that's fully Digital. They can do whatever they want.
Digital games should definitely not be the same price as physical copies then.
I’d prefer they just let us own it digitally, I don’t want to pay for any game that I can’t keep imo.
They aren't. If you account for inflation, games today are 20% cheaper than a decade ago.
@@SecuR0M I guess $70 today is cheaper then 50 and 40 we paid a decade ago. Yeah ok
@@IdiocracyWorldTour7774 It's no more than $60 which was the release price of Resistance Fall of Man but go off. Zelda Ocarina of time was $80 if you want to talk about money.
Games today costing $70 is about $10 cheaper than their inflation adjusted prices from 2006-2014. Stop buying from the bargain bin and look at actual new release prices.
@SecuR0M I don't think that is the point being made. A physical and digital version of a game will probably cost $70. The digital version you don't even own, though. Should be cheaper.
As someone who's been a GOG customer for years, I find their comment on that tweet to be absolutely spectacular. 👌
As a Steam user, can I use GOG downloaded titles on there?
@@TheTraveler980 I don't know if the Steam client would let you link custom game executables like that, but the GOG Galaxy client lets you do the inverse; link custom game executables and run it, including Steam games. You'd still have to have the game run through Steam but Galaxy would be the single launcher for everything.
@@TheTraveler980 yes through the Add Game function in your library
GOG is the old school way of gaming.
Anytime the company kills your digital media that you paid for, they should give you a full refund. If someone steals a game or book off your shelf in your home, at the very least, they should have to pay you for it.
15:00 Love that saying:
"If paying is not owning, then piracy is not stealing"
"Purchase" will still be used
They will just have much smaller text that says "game license*" with a sh*tload of fine print that no one will read at the bottom of the web page. These scumbags have entire departments dedicated to relieving you from your hard earned.
The EULA for every game you purchase already has that text in, so it already existed, but people didn't read it, so they still aren't going to read it, and the overwhelming majority just won't care, i've known about games being licenses for the better part of the last 2 decades, console users are just finally catch up to what PC has had for that entire time
by the sounds of it they are legally not allowed to use the words purchase or buy. Id imagine purchase with a big askierisk would not be allowed by the wording of things
Exactly this. The law says they can't use the word buy or purchase UNLESS they inform customer this is not their property. Which means Steam and other storefronts will simply add that disclaimed to a purchase page or something. This changes nothing.
@@Ross516 Read it again. It says they aren't allowed to use those words UNLESS they inform customers they aren't getting unrestricted access. That UNLESS is a massive keyword. It means stores like Steam can keep the store pages exactly the same so long as there's some small print disclaimer somewhere, like when you go to finalize your purchase.
Or they'll put it in the Eula and say "We did infact disclose it"
I’d rather the practices change than the terminology. We’re still all gonna say “I bought that game,” and companies are still gonna exploit our lack of ownership.
I wouldn't be surprised if you could find a sympathetic judge who would read this law as companies are committing theft and who would rule against the company if someone sued them for theft if they stole games they said you "purchased".
Indeed, they just normalice/ignore something that should be considered a crime or at least a bad practice.
And in a legal document (that may be copied on other states or even a country)
You can't own something that doesn't exist. Inevitably, online services will shutdown, storefronts will go under, or people lose access accounts. One day you WILL lose it. Can you really say you own it after that?
@@saladv6069 The same holds for physical media though. It will eventually degrade with age, get lost, get damage, or whatever. And then you'll buy a new copy, maybe. That's all fine. Those things happen.
But that's different than someone who is still in business yoinking the game from your library. If someone did that to your physical copy, that's theft. So, hey, if the company goes out of business, yeah, you lose it, that's life. But if they are in business, what is yours should be yours.
What this should hopefully do is actually educate the consumer base into understanding what licencing is. Bcos you can't swindle someone if they know the trick. Which in this case, collectively we all should be able to than negotiate for better licencing contracts, rather than as the comment section shows, ppl sitting around complaining about renting.
I hate that we give up all our rights for convenience.
🎯💯
Not so much us giving it up, rather than them pushing digital so hard. It's far cheaper for everyone to cut out the middle man in regards of sales, they've been against it for a decade. First they used the 1 time use codes to discourage pre-owned purchases because they don't get any money from pre owned purchases in retailers, now it's far cheaper to not do anything physical - and push everything digitally.
There are no such thing as "rights" in capitalism. The corporation gets to do whatever they want with their products.
@@ashleyjohansson230 Within the law. It's why if you want to change things, you have to get your government to start make laws to prevent these corporations from doing this stuff.
People are willing to pay way more for something for the sake of convenience. People are lazy. Convenience is a big way to make money
Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight Trilogy) said the very same thing: “buying digital movies is a long rental.” Physical media 4-4-4-LIFE!
I buy all movies physical
There's no such thing as buying a license, we buy the product and the product downloads to our property and we should do whatever we want with it. That should be how it works.
Somebody's been out of the loop for at least a decade.
@@cameraredeye3115 Nope - He is buying his games on GOG. That give him exactly what he wishes for.
@@cameraredeye3115 For get the decade, software was ALWAYS a license... that license was just bound to a physical item that contained the data you were licensing the use of... Exactly the same as a Physical Book, and was generally treated the same as said book: the master copy, that you bought, and the license, that you bought, were inextricably bound together, and when the master copy changed hands, so did the license. (And where I live, you were, and are, absolutely allowed to make as many copies as you want... but they Must all be either passed on with the master copy or destroyed when said master copy changes hands, because you no longer have the necessary license to them at that point).
The thing is, just like the book, while the master copy of the data and the license that goes with it were functionally a single object, and the 'license' consisted of 'you bought a copy, you are therefore free to do Anything (legal) You Want with it, For Ever, and no one else (barring occasionally law enforcement) can do anything to it without your permission until and unless you transfer ownership to someone else.
So it's not as neat and tidy as people like to make it seem.
Finally some justice for us consumers! I hope this sweeps the entire industry soon enough, because we really should have the right to own what we purchase
Well, we shouldn't be told we're buying things we're actually renting
It's not going to change anything except now we know we're renting, not owning.
the question is will it be cheaper?
@@ryanl3722 Damn well should be.
Talk about a reality check...
...but that dude has got a point.
Physical Media is forever. And this law (hopefully) will make companies remember that….
downloading roms / emulators onto a external and playing a pc not online is forever too.
forever till it gets worn down to the point it no longer works anyways.
If anything it makes them more assured they will face zero consequences now that consumers know they aren't buying games. This only benefits them
@Sniperbear13 Yeah but if something happened to that console, sd card hard drive ect, all that digital data goes bye bye including saves and purchased cosmetics
@@coletrainhetrick It might also get customers to not buy games unless they are actually going to play them. Because they don't want to have stuff in their backlog, like the Crew, get deleted from their accounts and such.
Unfortunately, I don't think this is going to make a difference. Now there's just going to be more to the terms of service that they'll make you click through before you buy
I don’t think people should get discouraged. Yes it’s true that this single act of legislation on its own won’t do anything. But if we advocate for more states to pass similar legislation, then it will make a difference
That's where awareness comes in. We know it has to be there now, it's a fact. We just have to make people aware of that if Sony or other companies try to hide it in the terms of service.
You already had to click through those terms as it is, people are just too dumb to read
@@keeysOST people already know, they just don't care.
Depends. EULA/ToS in some countries aren't legally binding.
If purchasing isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing.
We didnt even commit piracy though. We just got free public aarpunto video games.
They’ve been saying for years (at least Sony and MS) that you are licensing the software.
Copyright infringement was never theft in the first place, for reference.
This still doesn't fix the issue of them being able to take your purchase away from you in the first place
It just makes it more obvious. You will own nothing and you will like it.
We deserve to own what we buy! If we are just "licencing" then all digital games should be sold at 50% off! That's $35 for a brand new AAA game!
why do you fixate so much on digital vs physical? if the game has DRM, it can be shut down remotely regardless of the medium.
I agree. Since if we don't own them then we need to pay for these "rentals"
What you mean by owning is that you own your license to play the game. If you buy your digital games from a DRM-free store like GOG, that is actually the case.
The revival of disk drives!
Disc*s not Disk drives. STOP USING TEXT TO SPEECH. We don't use floppy disks at all.
i still have cd burbers in 2 of my gaming pc guess i will get 1 a blue ray burner
Sadly that didn't help the crew 1. Unplayable after ubisoft decided so
@@lightmetro7508 Apparently The Crew 2 will be getting an offline mode. We'll have to see what form that takes. Still betting there's a catch.
@@MaoRatto speak for yourself? there are plenty of us who still uses disKs, whether they be hard or floppy.
People, please stop paying full price for digital. It’s not the same and shouldn’t be treated as such
And why is that?
Servers cost money to run and operate, storage space costs money, bandwidth costs money, IT staff cost money, digital delivery isn't exactly free you know that right?
@@shanematthews1985 Whats your alternative to companies screwing people over?
Just sit and do nothing? Twittle our thumbs and hope something changes?
Nothing will ever change if people dont do anything.
the same as what? a DRM-locked disc? you end up with nothing either way. the problem is the destruction of games, not the delivery method.
@@shiguriyamamo6730 That guy has been shilling to corpos in every comment threads here. "BuT HoW ArE ThEY GoING To MaKe MoNEy??"
@@shanematthews1985Do you own Ubisoft or are you 20 yo?
Never gonna stop buying physical media.
You honestly will by the time physical media is finally dead for good 😂
There are a few things that need to be done, First, any games that require online play, and cant run without an internet network, should be banned from selling physical copies, Second, physical copies need to be owned copies, not paid licenses, so you should be able to skip options for physical games to try to detect internet connections, and play it without any connection to the internet.
Assemblymember Jacqui Irwin, the sponsor of the bill, told Game File she was initially prompted to take action by Sony's planned removal of Discovery content from the PlayStation store because of expiring licenses. Not only would the shows no longer be available for purchase, but those who had already purchased them would lose access. Sony eventually reversed the decision, but the damage was done: Irwin introduced the bill in February.
Two months later, Ubisoft helped convince her it was the right move when it started revoking licenses for the racing game The Crew. Sales of The Crew had already been halted in December 2023, but the game-including its singleplayer portion-was dependent on remote servers, and those went offline in April. That rendered the game unplayable even for those who already owned it, but Ubisoft apparently wanted to be sure nobody whipped up a DIY option to get the game running again.
So she got pissed because of a removal and then decided to support the bill that screaming "YOU DON'T OWN ANYTHING SO DON'T BUY IT PLEASEEEEEEE" and then just be ok with it? Future seems too bleak.
@@hartantoanggoro first time?
@@ytnewhandlesystem42 yeah, maybe I'm not cutout for this trash
@@hartantoanggoro It's a bill that in fact tells the companies to stop lieing and kills a bunch of shenanigans, as well as heavily undermining various propaganda and disinformation said companies put about a lot.
It's an important first step towards actually fixing the acutal problems.
But yeah, ti doesn't actually do much in and of itself.
@@laurencefraser @ytnewhandlesystem42 huh my previous comment had suddenly removed, but it's my first time hearing about this, sorry about that
They should also have to specify the date that license expires.
There is no set date though in most cases, the license normally expires when the games servers shut down, which is an unknown in most cases until its announced
Totally
@@shanematthews1985 Yup, like what happened to "The Crew" by ubisoft. I wonder when will the division will shut down.
@@shanematthews1985personally I don’t find that much matters.
A sale is a sale, but if your renting or licensing then it’s more a contract.
I don’t think a unknown expiration should ever be acceptable as a term of contract. It’s far too vague.
For things like, WoW, it’s much more clear cut, as the expiration is just the end of your sub.
@@shanematthews1985 There is, in fact, routeinely no good reason why the license for most games should expire in the first place because there is no reason for them to require access to an external server in order to function other than the fact that the publisher included unnecessary malware to Force that to be the case.
TF is making companies admit they're just renting licenses? The law should make it so they're required to sell products. This is just politicians making up another loophole.
More like forcing companies to admit the truth. Sure, it's not what customers want, but at least companies can't lie and say we are buying/purchasing the game.
Well, you can't MAKE anybody sell anything. But this is a baby step, hopefully. We have to evolve somehow, we're never gonna just get what we want all at once.
The government is forcing them to stop lying. It's a significant improvement over what we have now, and people will be more aware that they do not OWN their game. If they 'sell' products they have to keep digital server forever.
That said, oddly GoG would be least impacted by this since they do require batch download instead of clients like steam, epic, or even company specific like XBOX or Ubisoft.
They already told you it was a license in the EULA, people just don't read more than 4 words
companies already tell us that we only get the license. so, yeah, this solves absolutely nothing.
Can you imagine walking into a place like Blockbuster back in the day and paying full price for a video game or movie just to have it for a couple of days? No one would ever rent because buying it to keep and own would make more sense.
alot of people have that destiny 2 apologist mindset and it's been spreading to other games like overwatch 2 which is pretty ironic lol gamers love being prayed on for cosmetics
That's nice and all, but it doesn't change that they have control, even though you paid for it. Once things are only digital, the customer will be left with just a license or nothing.
Always prefer physical. Cheaper used games. Problem is so much of the game isn’t in the disc these days, sometimes it seems little more than an access key to download the game.
Yep, exactly. They could at least give us a shipping option for a physical copy.
Gog is sorta like that
Cheaper unless it's an old pokemon game, at that point I fully support emulation.
explain to me how "physical" solves this issue. let's go through the steps…
1) you get the disc from the store.
2) you install the game from the disc.
3) you try launching the game.
4) the DRM stops you.
5) ???
6) physical media good?
Thats pointless, we need own our digitals games.
Companies are probably behind this bc they don’t wanna be sued. The verbiage, when you “buy” a game or license, will change and nothing else.
Its a start though. Will also raise awareness when suddenly either the verbiage changes on digital stores, or there is a wall of text that you have to agree to when you make your "purchase".
Nah, I think politicians are behind it. They probably don't want to have to deal with any more complaints about this from their constituents nor do they want to side with the corporations on this.
@@Razman.99 It's not a start, it's a free, get out of all responsibility card, gifted to the platforms. Who now have the legal mandate to wipe their hands clean and say, "Well... the customer was informed & knew what they were doing... Purchasing a limited licence, and not actually owning it".
Raising awareness is not going to save your library from being taken away. So what good is it for the consumer really? If the underlying practice is untouched.
@@quadcarnage8462 sounds like it may make others think twice about all digital products. I surely will
@@quadcarnage8462 It saves future customer from reckless behavior
After we re-establish what ownership is we need to demolish and rebuild the corrupt copyright laws that allow some of these practices to be commonplace.
I think if the game goes offline and the company lost rights to the game you buy, the company need to do a buy back and give a portion of the money back to the customer who bought the game.
I am a consumer who this year restarted my efforts to build out my physical media collection in response to industries trying to aggressively convert everything to a digital landscape dependent on corporate granted permission to download purchases. The final system migration resulting from the Crunchyroll / Funimation merger is a prime example of how customers relying on their previous digital copy/purchase can get screwed over when the platform's owner just decides to say "No".
I have gone slightly further than needed, chasing premium and deluxe versions of DVDs rather than just settling for the basic Bluray cases whenever possible. Even still, those higher costing physical cases will ultimately end up being fewer dollars in the long run compared to me keeping a bunch of subscriptions active for months/years on end (looking at the collection lasting well into my senior years for that to be the case). Only thing I got to worry about is ensuring I have a working Bluray player of some sort (and players tend to have longer lifespans than more modern gaming consoles).
Five bucks that rat snuck something in
ya more ways to pay more taxes for sure.
if you read the actual law, it only requires the companies to inform the buyer about the nature of the transaction. which they already do, so this achieved nothing.
Governors don't write legislation so he can't sneak anything in. Wheres my 5 bucks?
@@TheRogBG Tell that to Newsom when he snuck in legislation which excluded Panera Bread from the minimum wage increase law by exempting "bakeries" due to meetings with his CEO buddy who owned dozens of franchises. So are you gonna pay me or what?
@@arsenii_yavorskyi They do an exceptionally bad job of it, in an intentionally misleading way, currently.
The part that concerns me most of all is that these issues don’t just stop at platforms that SELL game licenses like Steam, but even the companies MAKING games, because The Crew had physical copies that you could own and possess in your hand, but the servers getting shutdown means even the physical copy can be revoked. That can’t be allowed to continue
That's because it was an online game. Online games are always temporary.
@@peterc3262Then 1) don’t sell it as a physical copy, or 2) don’t render the single player campaign unusable by requiring a server for it. This isn’t rocket science, it shouldn’t even be a debate. If your game will cease to exist as a physical product for a person who purchases it as one, then it should REMAIN usable to a significant extent for as long as the owner can maintain the physical quality of the item. If a studio can’t guarantee that, they should not be allowed to sell it in disk or cartridge form, or anything that isn’t explicitly stated to be “a license” before point of sale.
@@GameJam230 Nah, they just need to be honest like the old MMOs used to be: you're paying for a product (the software) and a service (the servers)... where that applies.
Well, for games which have any reason what so ever to be online in the first place. (so... online multiplayer, mostly).
For everything else they need to stop actively sabotaging the software which would work perfectly Fine without a connection to their servers if not for the fact that they decided to build a killswitch into it.
@@laurencefraser It literally doesn’t sound like you disagreed with me on anything there. All of the points I have made have been on games that have single player campaigns and physical copies with unnecessary kill switches built in, I never had anything to say about the online modes of MMOs at all here, and in general I’d agree that you can’t force a company to pay for dead servers, but the issue where I begin to draw the line is SPECIFICALLY the games they can avoid doing it in.
There are dozens of possible solutions forwards from here, and most of them don’t even require punishing companies for CURRENTLY released games, only requiring them to be conscious of these problems for FUTURE games they make, so people need to stop acting like all we’re doing is trying to enforce companies to lose money forever.
I KNOW how much servers cost, I’ve developed games and test projects with small scale servers myself and I’m glad I had the ability to shut them down at any point, but all I’m saying is that companies shouldn’t be left entirely unrestricted when they’re using it as an excuse to take away the playability of PHYSICAL games discs I can hold in my hands that have perfectly functional single player modes available.
Digital content you purchased that is made unavailable should require whoever made it unavailable to pay you a full refund with legal options to demand more if physical versions of that digital content are hard to come by.
lol not happening, no to mention everything decreases in value over time, in most cases by the time you lose access to the content you've owned it long enough that you already got your monies worth from it
but the media is still destroyed. this is not a solution.
That's not actually practical. But equally they should not be allowed to unillatorally revoke the license when you're not in violation of it.
If buying isnt owning, then piracy isnt thievery
I've purchased a digital game that I don't own. I also pirated a digital game that I didn't own. So essentially they can't call it theft because legally you never owned the game. You just refused to purchase a license
Lets be real
Nothing will change regardless. It took laws this long to catch up. These companies will figure something out like 8 times over before this goes anywehre significant
they'll only follow this in California, they will continue their scummy ways everywhere else
nothing really changes. its not making it so you now own things, its just changing the Wording.
This law doesn't actually change anything, the EULA's always told you it was a license you were buying
nothing will change because this legislation doesn't stop them from destroying games, which is the actual problem here.
@@shanematthews1985 And the EULAs were generally void upon contact with the courts, on the rare occasion things got that far.
Im glad yong noice he was going read the sponsor twice. I thought i was having a stroke for moment. 😂
As a musician, I have started buying hardware gear recently. Cause having all your music depending on the good will of digital software companies is a very bad idea in my opinion. It's the same problem as with games or other tools. If they decide to change their subscription format or not to update their apps anymore, you are screwed.
it's not if, it's when. every piece of media that's locked behind online DRM is basically on life support.
It’s 💩 like this that makes me disinterested in playing video games. Back when internet connectivity wasn’t a thing just yet, most games were playable offline. Now a online membership is like a phone plan where you need it in order to play and all games nowadays are suppose to have a online connection. Now that companies want to tell us they can cut the cord because we don’t “own” it and are lobbying for these types of laws, kills my joy for games even more.
This changes absolutely nothing. Distribution companies are just going to switch to using the word download instead of buy or purchase, completely nullifying this useless bill and making no change to the lack of ownership situation.
Remember that often nowadays, even if you buy physical media, you don't actually own your games, because:
- The box only has a digital code to download the game.
- There's a disc, but it only has a few files, the actual game must be downloaded and the disc is only a key.
- Sometimes, only parts of the game are available on disc, you can play without internet, but not the full game.
- You can play the game without internet with just a disc, but not the good version of the game, because at launch, the game is full of problems and you need to download a patch later or there's a patch since the launch day.
- Sometimes, the patch is so big that you are almost downloading the whole game.
- You still need to connect to the internet to buy and download DLC.
- To play online, you need to download the most recent version.
- Many games are online-only, require a constant connection to the internet, even on single-player, and to make things worse, the servers often close, making your physical copy a paperweight.
Been like that for some time. I remember buying Killzone Mercenary for the Vita and the day one patch was huge! Plus additional patches after that! Do I really own the game? Sort of, but it's a broken and buggy version.
Not all games are like that as u describe
Also even if a game releases in a broken state on day 1 and is fully printed on disc u still own the game (Just a broken version of it)
*Wears an eye patch*
There's a site that marks physical games as fully playable on the disc or not. A ton of games do still have the full game on disc without need of an internet connection.
It's frustrating how much of a dog whistle this take of the whole game not being on the disc has become
@@dante1nero1 I know, but there are still many games where while you can play without internet, you can't play the good version of the game since the launch game is full of glitches and you need to patch it.
Yeah this won't achieve anything. It'll just be one extra pop up consumers won't actually read.
the thing is, the average person already knows the thing they paid for may be taken away. but it's been so normalized that they think nothing of it.
This feel like the mark of the beast where u can't buy, purchase or own anything
it’s going to get to a point where you realize you should probably get another hobby or a whole new one
This solves nothing. We need a law against revoking licenses, not clarifying that the license can be revoked.
Im surprised that the government did something about this, despite them and the media bashing us gamers from hell and back
Gaming companies have been pushing for all an all digital future for years because once people stop buying physical media they can choose to sell directly to the consumer via their own digital stores allowing them to control the price of the digital licence. Digital only games remove competition from the market meaning you'll only be able to buy the game from them for £80 - £120 per game.
Why do you think the PS5 Pro is digital only unless you buy an overpriced £80 disc drive which has no innovative technology in it?
See, you say that... and while console manufacturers have managed it for their specific consoles, game publishers attempts to sell directly to consumers have mostly failed, or at best are limping along barely justifying their existence, because they were all so much worse than Steam.
@laurencefraser that's exactly my point. Gaming companies are failing to sell directly through their own digital stores because they're trying to sell a licence at RRP whilst competition still exists with digital companies such as Steam and with physical media via retail stores. Competition keeps prices of games reasonable.
If they can push for a fully digital future and remove the need to sell physical media altogether then they can choose to take full control of digital distribution and make their games accessible only through their own digital stores. They'll be in a position to stop allowing companies such as Steam to sell their games. Consumers will then only have the choice to buy the game from one place at prices gaming companies directly control.
Look at the Horizon Dawn remaster. They're selling it as a £10 upgrade if you own the original game or at full price if you don't own the original. As a result they have stuck the original digital game back up to RRP to stop people buying the original game digitally at the current low price and then purchasing the upgrade. Consumers can circumvent this outrageous strategy by buying a physical copy of the game in retail stores for £15 - £20. Once physical media is gone then the gaming companies can take full control of pricing and you'll have to pay what they ask of you.
That’s why all Digital media should be half the price. 🤨
I’m hoping that this will incentivise the corporate executives who are running this Gaming industry down into the ground to *MAKE REAL VIDEOGAMES* & stop making *ZERO COST* Money Syphoning Application Grifts that indefinitely sends their grift victims money straight into their wallets. 🤨
Why not 33% or 5% ? You don't know for how long you'll enjoy the product.
Also, few people mention this but before digitalization you could always RESELL your copy. You're also deprived of that.
1) your precious "physical media" can be shut down just as easily if it has DRM, and modern releases always do.
2) let's say they give you this 50% discount. how does this prevent games from being destroyed?
@@arsenii_yavorskyi individual copies can still be destroyed but when enough of them are out there in the wild the games will always still exist in physical form.
The greedy execs just don’t want to spend money to make money anymore. They just want to siphon money from the populous through the proxy of an intentionally shit product that’s only designed to take even more money out of your bank account’s on a permanent basis.
This whole endeavour to prevent games from being preserved is their back door paper shredder way of keeping evidence out of the Government’s hands for when their Consumer Protection Rights regulations eventually catch up to them & rein them in for their blatant greed & exploitation. 😒
Only applies to california, so in the grand scheme of things, this wont worry companies much, in fact they will make things even worse possibly make all games free, and make consumer pay an arm and a leg for dlc. Or just switch games to a subscription only services.
I keep seeing content creators promoting deleteme, if they are so good why would i need to subscribe. I think content creators should prove they use the services they are promoting or also be liable for false advertising.
these past few months, I kept buying physical games as this glaring issue is the sole reason why Im doing that
thank God there are people like that law-maker who will put end the publisher's dubious schemes
Not generally a fan of California but for once this is a regulation I support.
To bad it don't stop it just tell you your screwed
Yes, someone that was raised in California and born there. Yeah Governor is not the best but I mean he has some good policies that he passed. I just don't support some of his policies
It's going to do diddly squat. I don't know why people are praising him for this. The gaming companies have already scammed billions out of their customers. This is the most pointless legislation in the history of pointless legislation. Most companies have already added a clause to the mile long terms of service that no one reads that states you don't own the game.
The home state of the silicon valley big tech firms? Yeeeeeeah we'll see how this legistaltion effects the market before we judge either way.
It didn't actually change anything though, digital storefronts always told you it was a license, if you buy something on steam i'm pretty sure that during the checkout process it tells you that you're buying a license, and the EULA for the game certainly does, it just requires consumers to, you know, read what they buy
I still don't like digital games if you ever lose your account your account gets deleted all your digital games go with it
and if the server goes down or they invalidate your "physical" copy, you still lose everything.
@arsenii_yavorskyi Let's see sony touch my ps2 and all my games that's right they can't.Every since ps3 xbox 360 everything changed gaming ain't the same anymore
Let’s face it, this only happened because it happened to those politicians. If their libraries were unaffected, they wouldn’t have done anything lol
Truth
Stop buying digital, stop renting, stop using their subscription services. They will pay attention to us when we stop giving them our money. They will bring back ownership to us if it’s the only way they can make money. The idea of digital is great in concept, if we could purchase and download a copy from a disk or online and keep it without the need to be connected to the internet to use. Corporations have twisted everything that could be positive for their own profits.
I’m still going to keep buying digital lmao! 😂
Thing is, modern physical games media don't always have the complete game on the disc. So even in these cases, you can be unable to play a game if it requires downloading the rest to play.
This is why physical media always wins.
I have never understood why the price for digital is the same as physical with games. Where did the money to make and send the product go?
It went to operating the servers, buying the storage space, paying for the electricity, the bandwidth, the coders and developers who keep those services online, the physical infrastructure required to digitally deliver content, did you think the internet was free or something?
@@shanematthews1985 Those costs where already there during the physical age... The savings go to the CEO.
@@shanematthews1985 the actual change was that the game devs didn't need the "factory" actually making and burning CD's, the actual CD cases, printing of the CD case covers, shipping of those parts with vans, trucks and than moving it all to a physical retailer (that also took a part of the earnings), moving it again with trucks and vans making the CD's requiring physical space in the store (in the showcase and shelves as well as in the backroom storage).
And if u look at COLLECTORS edition, those things had even more physical interactions with the world, and even more people working on it.
All of that was a big part and a part of the actual 60€ went to other firms aside from the developers. If Steam takes 30% of those 60€, how much went to those physical retailers? Same thing happened with newspapers, but now "the news" is freely accessible on the internet, not more expensive...hmmm...a stark difference.
@@Willow4526 No the hosting was NOT there for the physical age, I assure you Final Fantasy games up to 15 (not including 11) absolutely did NOT have all that cost associated with it...
@@raizil0513 as early as the 1980s internet access to video games existed. Even than the death of the physical age isn't that old, as early as 2010-15 the physical age was still alive & guess what existed then?
If all digital storefronts were like gog, things would be significantly better
Not really, because GOG only removes the DRM, any games they sell that are online only will still cease to work once those servers go offline, and if GOG ever shuts down you'll lose access to naything you haven't downloaded and once you lose that data you will have lost your purchase anyway
@@shanematthews1985Pretty sure that's misinformation they have the info on the website how it stays yours.
@@shanematthews1985You also can download it straight to your PC not through gog to keep and copy to other places
@@shanematthews1985 If GOG ever shuts down, there will be a time period where the servers will still be running to give people the chance to download all their bought games. Of course just to be sure I keep digital GOG copies of my favourite games on several usb drives. In that way I always own them physically.
Heh I saw on Twitter a guy mention after the hurricane hit his town, it knocked out all wireless services, meaning they couldn't get any streaming for days. Resulting in people going to Wal-Mart and getting any DVDs and Blu-Rays they could find. If that doesn't tell you how important physical is, I don't know what to tell you.
Have the people inconvenienced by going to a store to buy physical media ever heard of Amazon? Or Target? Or wal-mart? They all have shipping options.
A Small, but important Step.
A Reminder for those in the EU to go to Accursed Farm's thing and sign it.
I mean, any consumer that does 5 seconds of reading will already know what they are buying, all the EULA's already tell you its just a license
@@shanematthews1985 and that EULA should be illegal.
@@shanematthews1985You are dropping comments on comments everywhere. What are you worked up about? If these things people are complaining about are fixed, how does that negatively effect you? "It doesn't need fixing." For you. Does it irritate you? A minor change in text here and there? Why?
@@arsenii_yavorskyi That type of EULA is generally found void in short order if challenged in courts. Or at least the unreasonable parts are.
The sorts of EULA that aren't unilatoral anti consumer horseshit, on the other hand, actually do serve valid and important purposes and exist for good reason.
Stop buying them
Buy physical and Indie stuff instead!
@@ethandtheangryenglishguy8253 Even physical games can be rendered useless, look at concord, even if you own a physical copy you still cannot play it
You would think that companies would have a buy back program to maximize profits.
If I buy a digital game at $60 and pass it then I can resale it back to them at a 50% loss which in turn would allow me to buy another game. Which means, I'll be spending more money. And since it's a digital copy it would be easy to add a code that kills the game after you resale it back to them.
How is that maximising profits though
Thats cutting potential profits in half, why would they want to sell you a game for half price when they can sell you the game at full price
They know that if you want a game badly enough you'll buy it regardless, because you will
@@shanematthews1985 half of something is better then a whole lot of nothing. Consumers are getting tired of being swindled. That's why a lot of games are failing. Also, by having a sell back program it ensures that you have a returning customer. And I said 50% as an example but it could easily be (50% digital bucks for a new game or 30% in actual cash) also digital is cheaper to produce because they save money on physical products having to sit on shelves they have to pay for. All digital has a higher profit margin because of this so a sale back program would be a financial benefit in the long term because of more returning customers and new customers that are more willing to fork up a big price tag knowing that they can return if they don't enjoy it.
We are stuck in limbo, while pleople advocate physical, bug fixes usually come after release. Example is stellar blade with bugs.
This seems something what only corrupted politicians would do, because at first glance only corporates will benefit from this law
I don't see how this benefits us customers at all, in fact this law only seems to deal harm for us even further.
Like, can customers still ask for a refund from digital games if they don't actually own it?
I want more physical copies of games 😢 because I want to share my games with my boyfriend.
that would only work for old games. modern releases have DRM, regardless of how they're delivered.
Well, Steam has family share feature.
So buy the physical copy….the fu ck?
@@ViperGillsYou why freaking out the fuck?
If buying ain't owning....then piracy isn't stealing
If i steal something and it's still there, is it really stealing? Digital goods are infinite aren't they.
@@juanclaudio1103 this is true
Ubisoft said gamers should get used to the thought of not owning games.
Ubisoft should get used to not owning their company anymore
Its like buying a dvd, you only own the carrier, not the movie, all rights reserved.
I would say “About Time,” but it really should be illegal to sell a product with the seller maintaining rights to rescind the product at any time without a refund clause or a very firm understanding between buyer and seller that the ownership is constituent to a contract BEFORE the transaction takes place. It has been law for physical products for over a century; if you buy a physical product, by the transaction taking place, you now have ownership of that product. If the seller wants it back, they cannot just take it. How that isn’t law for a digital product, I have no clue.
Just another reason why people pirate. If I download a movie onto my hard drive, it’s MINE!! Hahahaha
Stop buying digital entertainment 😊
Instead by physical and indie entertainment 😀👍
@@ethandtheangryenglishguy8253 how does this solve the issue? the DRM locks you out regardless of the delivery method.
It's okay I don't buy games anymore. I borrow them😏
Aye
how do you borrow games that were destroyed?
The wind is good today to sail. 😀
i agree. i absolutely should own the digital media that i purchase.
Good. I'm so tired of always online
This law being passed makes me think that it is a way of placating us to accept the death of games as long as were are told 😢
I said a long time ago the words buy, purchase or own overrides any legal agreement because it misrepresents itself on its face of what it is. This is also why I said we need a gamers Union so when companies take advantage of the customer they can be sued most of the time it could be handled just through a threat of a lawsuit and most companies will make it right before it even goes to court. But these games should say lease or rent on them not buy or purchase. Same with movies. But once it says lease or rent on t hem that will drop the value of the item a lot. But a word of advice to everyone if you can't resell it you don't own it. Just imagine buying a new Mercedes g wagon for $200,000 and then a few months later Mercedes shows up and takes it away from you and says you was just using it we know it says purchase but that's not what we meant in the fine print.
No, because you're still buying the license, the customer just doesn't read these days and incorrectly assumes things and then falls foul to their lack of understanding
@@shanematthews1985 know you're renting or leasing the license you're not buying the word buy means ownership you need to educate yourself on definitions of words. That's why these companies are getting in trouble.
@@shanematthews1985 so let's say they change the wording. would this prevent them from destroying your purchase? because that's the problem here, not the legal technicalities.
@@davidframe1613 Unfortunately, you actually do straight up buy the license. that is the correct term. The trick is that you used to also buy a physical object that the license was inextricably tied to, which contained a copy of the thing you were licensing, and the other party didn't have the ability to randomly show up in your house and vandalise said object at will.
The problem comes with the ability of the publisher to revoke said license unilatorally and at will, and disclaim any obligations regarding you actually getting what you're paying for, combined with their ability to vandilise said product at will.
@@laurencefraser that would be up to a judge to determine. I guarantee you these companies would not win on the way they word stuff and then the way they sell it, it's trickery and they know it. Also remember each state have different rules on leasing and selling something so each state would have different cases against these companies.
What’s to prevent them from still saying you are “buying/purchasing” and then down in the text underneath it mentions you are buying/purchasing a license?
That's a fraud.
@@ZeroXSEED I agree with you....I can also imagine a good sophist ($$$ Lawyer) arguing that purchasing a license is the same as buying the game (only for a certain amount of time). Hope you are right. 🙂
nothing. and they already do it like this, it's just buried in EULA. so this new law solves nothing.
Nothing... so long as they do it Properly. Trying to be sneaky about it gets them in hot water if you dispute it though.
@@jonathanbowling3129 Only if said license's text includes an actual time limit and isn't deliberately presented in such a way as to mislead one into thinking that was not the case.
If only people could group together and try to fight for protections for themselves. If people as a whole boycotted digital products, companies would be forced to make physical copies. Consumers have the power, it's people's weaknesses that prevent us from success.
This is the equivalent to trying to stop a school bully from bullying a student by just giving a public speech about how bad bullying is instead of... you know, punishing the bully accordingly.
This law effectively solves almost nothing. AT BEST it *MIGHT* serve as an initial catalyst for the government to persue for better digital ownership laws in the future. But at the moment the actual problem is still here, that being companies being able to take shit away that you paid for when they shouldn't be allowed to do so.
Looks like I'm doing all of my future business with GOG
GoG is my preferred platform when buying games. Unfortunately the selection is limited. More people need to support them so more studios and gaming companies offer their games on it. In the end, money talks and if the majority of consumers went to GoG so would the games companies and studios.
"Why can't we find more records of our most ancient and advanced civilization?!"
Meanwhile, our civilization....
Here we go. People will start buying physical media again. And corpos will start uping the price because its physical is it "cost more money than digital". Just you watch, 75-80 dollar games on the way. We are all going to get fucked with it. At least thats what i think.
Physical media isn't even going to be any "safer" either. As Companies can easily keep all the information you need to actually play the game in a server that the game has to conect to.
@@claudiofabian1054hardly any games require a online service so that is a non-issue
Well, the companies went digital and didn't lower prices. Corporations are going to corporation. Buy games a year after release and on deep discount. Unless you are provably going to pass away in the next year there is no reason to rush. If nothing else the patching and optimizing need to be done, there is no reason to pay full price to beta test.
@@claudiofabian1054 That's the law people need to force in
If you think people are gonna go back to buying physical because of a simple word change, you grossly underestimate public laziness. The average person will give up A LOT for convenience. Next to nothing will change from this.
As part of this, companies should also be required to advise of the date at which a licensing agreement or servers for a certain product come up for renewal or expires on the store page where a license to said product can be acquired.