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Dutch consumer foundation sues Sony for overpricing digital PlayStation games
(www.gamedeveloper.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
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Lmao. I primarily game on PC. I own hundreds of digital games. Even with it's superior sales and open market, PC struggles to beat buying a used game from marketplace or ebay.
Also, are you seriously dissing physical media? The benefits of actually owning something cannot be overstated. Even with Steam, you're technically just buying a revokable license to play a game. Physical media can not be revoked, it can be resold/shared, and it works offline. See: the recent PSN outage where people were locked out of their digital games for a few days.
Plus, having a physical collection is just plain fuckin cool.
With physical media you are also just buying a license.
Sorta.
The legislation that applies to physical copies of copyrighted materials is different and comes from the time when the only physical copies of copyrighted materials were paper books.
Whilst strictly speaking you are buying a license for both, for physical media it's quite a different format of license with quite different conditions than for digital media.
The physical media license is implicit, standardized (the same no matter where you buy the media, the publisher or even the game) and associated with the media (i.e. ownership of the media means having the license) which means that it's transferable without requiring a 3rd party intermediary (transfering ownership of the physical media means transfering the license that is associated with it).
Digital games licenses, on the other hand, are not standardized and vary from store to store, publisher to publisher and/or even game to game (the usual is to have to accept the terms the store presents you, which are not at all an industry standard set of contract terms, much less a legal standard, and to properly judge them one would require legal help). They're all very explicitly personal (associated with the buyer) and them having or not any of the buyer rights one has in the implicit license of the physical media, is a crapshoot (generally each store has it's own unique licensing agreements, with sometimes unique elements for certain publishers or games). Most notably, it's very rare for them to be transmissible (it hugelly depends on the store) and even then it requires a 3rd party to approve it (generally the store). As far as I know, there is no consumer license for games digital media which has the same or more rights for the consumer than the implicity license for physical media and only commercial licenses (which cost thousands of dollars) will give you more rights than that.
Things like EULAs are pseudo-legal attempts at circunventing the implicit license of physical media, which is why they're not valid in most countries (they're deemed a one-sided attempts at forcing a change of the implicit contract terms of the sale, after the sale has been concluded, and hence have explicitly been judged as having no contractual force whenever those things went to court in most of the World).
Blatantly incorrect