Comment by Marcan
18 hours ago
And don't forget closing the PS3 and Vita Playstation stores, which they announced at the same time:
https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/an-update-on-playsta...
This is a weird marketing strategy. They must feel free to do as they please since they know consumers are trapped.
> They must feel free to do as they please since they know consumers are trapped.
My take is somewhat difference: Sony is offloading the cost of their prior decisions onto consumers.
For things like movies, they should have negotiated a contract where sold copies are sold copies and cannot be revoked (even if their right to sell/rent copies lapse). For things like the PS3 store, it cannot be run indefinitely. That said, from my understanding, the authorization keys expire if the clock battery on the PS3 dies. That should not be permitted.
I don't think that this is a "do as they please" situation. I think it is a case of bad decisions being made in the past. For some, like the movies, there isn't much they can do to fix the problem after the fact. There is absolutely no incentive for the rights holders to let consumers continue to access previously purchased content (especially with Sony taking all of the blame). Even something like offering refunds to people who purchased the movies is problematic. In all probability, all of their contracts have similar terms. They would have to refund everyone for every purchase in the long run.
Other stuff, like access to PS3 purchases, are likely fixable. The question is: where is the incentive? They could create a patch for old consoles, but it would only affect a small number of customers who still have those consoles. (Worse yet, it wouldn't do anything for those who stored their consoles in the closet -- only to pull it out later to discover the authorization keys are invalid.) The math probably doesn't work out for them so they aren't going to do it.
> They would have to refund everyone for every purchase in the long run.
That is the minimum they should do. At best they should offer the movie collections for free through competitors.
There's no limit to what the best they could do is. A full refund is just what's simple, fair, and quick. I wouldn't put it past them to try to find some legal basis that the minimum is actually less than that in certain jurisdictions though.
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The trouble with that is you cannot operate a business where you pay your suppliers for a product then give everything away.
I am saying that as a reflection of reality, not to absolve Sony. Someone at Sony must have understood that their licensing agreements were incompatible with the definition of sale. Someone else likely stuck some clauses into the EULA to reflect that, fully realizing that no-one reads those things (also realizing that it is not reasonable to expect consumers to read an EULA for every transaction in their life). The someone who is now responsible for executing the outcome would also understand that there is the potential for legal action on such a matter, but they also understand that there are legal machinations that will, at worse, limit the damages to a sum that is lower than the cost of refunding the full value of each and every purchase made through their service.
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> For things like movies, they should have negotiated a contract where sold copies are sold copies and cannot be revoked (even if their right to sell/rent copies lapse).
This is how movies work on GOG.
In what might not be a coincidence, they haven't released any movies for many years, and the product category isn't even visible if you don't already own a movie through them.
I made a decision to get away from other consoles and only invest in Steam a while ago. In the 2010s I was a big Vita player but Sony backed away from investing in the Vita and I saw that the kind of Japanese games I liked were coming out on Steam so I sold my Vita.
Steam has been (mostly) a good citizen. But there's not much in the way of legal or technical hurdles to them going down the same path. It's all goodwill and reputation.
I hope it's enough.
If steam ever goes up in smoke, there will be infinite justification to never trust download only ever again.
You can at least make local backups of your Steam games. If a game is removed such that you can't even download it anymore, you can always just install it manually.
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And it doesn't have to be this way. I started buying Xbox games digitally for the Xbox 360, and with their backwards compatibility that ended up being a great choice. My current XSX plays games for the last 3 generations of digital purchases I've made.
Well it's just for new sales, access to purchased content remains "for the foreseeable future". How long the future is foreseeable for Sony? Might want to ask the Concord team maybe.
In the long run I think consoles might get replaced to "consolerized" PCs (they are already technically, but I guess we might see more advanced software environments like steam boxes).
Neither Sony nor Microsoft had a consumer orientation and they will likely loose against the competition.
Physical media was a method to have a "plug & play" game, although that changed in recent times. With that I don't think classic consoles can compete, especially with their new price points.
> they know consumers are trapped.
Gaming is a luxury good. We can all just walk away.
Walking away from the closed platform you invested hundreds/thousands of dollars into over the years is a luxury (especially if you were mislead into buying a PS5 with a disc drive thinking it'd be supported at least until the end of the product's lifespan)
Monopolies, anti-competitive behavior, and anti-consumer behavior in general are all bad bad bad. You have to be a very interesting individual to disagree with that.
> especially if you were mislead into buying a PS5 with a disc drive thinking it'd be supported at least until the end of the product's lifespan
8 years is roughly the lifespan for a games console though.
And I say this as someone who hates Sony perhaps more than most, having lived through their the CD rootkit and PS3 OtherOS debacles. And been burned by their substandard yet overpriced audio equipment.
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Console is the kind of thing where you upgrade every few years like for obviously games you bought for ps3 or PS4 don't work in the PS5 or Xbox 360 for Xbox one you have to buy one for each console. So people will switch to the competition, you can see on the sales of each consoles where their peak was. People might even get tired of Nintendo,Sony and Microsoft and just go with steam and valve
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I agree with your second sentence, and agree that Sony seems like a pretty bad actor as a result of all this, but the first sentence is false and hyperbolic.
It's not a luxury to walk away from a sunk-cost, no matter what % of your past expendable income it represents (I think that was kind of what you were hinting at). Anyone can do it.
Eh I think you're overstating the level of lock-in here. There's nothing about the platform itself that forces you to stay, it's just the games you've already bought. You can keep the system and just stop buying new games on it.
And most people probably don't replay most games after beating them once, for the handful you do want to replay, you just bust out that console occasionally, or you grab them again in a steam sale to play them on PC instead or something.
I’m just saying, you can stop buying new games. If enough people do it, Sony will fold.
Sony doesnt have a monopoly on gaming. There is PC, mobile, Steam, Nintendo, Apple desktop, etc. There are also retro games consoles like Mod64. You don't invest in a game console it is an entertainment expense. You can sell your used PS5 if you disagree with the direction.
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Plenty of PC games, the linux distros that run steam are great too!
Can you backup steam games and run them without steam?
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Just because valve is a benevolent dictator doesn't mean they don't already have the same dictatorship powers that Sony is currently chiseling out for themselves.
I wish NFTs had taken off as a system for managing decentralized transferrable digital purchases instead of being another investment scam.
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Exactly. Nothing is going to get better until consumers realize they have the power (at least for now).
So are cigarettes and liquor. And pot and on and on.
The vast majority of goods are luxury goods.
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The writing has been on the wall for a decade now for gaming being a purely rental-driven, consumer-antagonistic segment of the software market.
People have been talking about "walking away" for at least that long.
The soles of those walking shoes are as thick and un-worn as they've ever been.
If you decide to buy into Sony’s future, make sure you do it with your eyes wide open.
Unlike Valve who has never taken away what people have bought without a refund (to my knowledge), Sony doesn’t deserve that benefit of the doubt:
https://www.techradar.com/streaming/entertainment/this-shoul...
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I did it when OtherOS was removed. I have yet to miss any game I care about, and PCs have been a better investment overall.
I'm old enough to remember when people bemoaned the death of physical media, and saw Steam as the death of PC gaming.
Like all things, this too shall pass.
I play Arknights on my iPad but that's the one live service game I have anything to do with.
> This is a weird marketing strategy. They must feel free to do as they please since they know consumers are trapped.
I've been on PlayStation family since PS2, and used to think I was married to it, with my game library and my player character stuff/gear/creations in various games.
But the platform no longer lets me play many of those games, anyway, whether due to console gen or server shutdowns. And nobody cares about my PlayStation gamer score or trophies. So there's little tying me to the platform for the next game I buy.
Sony, please don't make me move to "Linux" gaming, via Valve/GOG/Epic (since I don't want to endorse Microsoft hegemony over the low-level gaming "standard"). PlayStation should be a beloved brand and platform that can be trusted to keep games working -- not one that throws away history, nostalgia, and community. You already impose rules on publishers, so this is within your power.
Related: Project Aces, I was fairly highly ranked in a couple of the Ace Combat installments, but when you shut down the servers, you took away what I'd invested in. I reluctantly bought AC7, but found I didn't have the heart to invest in it, just to have it taken away again, and I won't be buying AC8 nor anything else in the franchise.
Server shutdowns are a problem regardless of the platform.
There used to be a time when PC games allowed you to connect to random servers. These days Minecraft is the only one that still allows it. And even there, Microsoft go hard on the upselling of their Realms.
Some studios kill their servers after just a couple of years. Even for games that are online first.
Is this a place Sony could differentiate from other platforms?
Contractually require (and technologically support) that the servers are kept running for n years after the last sale, for example?
"Linux" gaming on Steam deck or Steam in general is a lean-back experience that's got almost nothing in common with the sweaty PC game experience of the past with the big chunky joysticks that were always falling apart and had to be recalibrated all the time and the too-sharp graphics and all.
I picked up some ACER handheld at Best Buy and it was a complete joke, the first thing I saw looked like a Windows PC with comically small fonts. My Steam Deck looks more like a Switch or PS Vita.
[dead]
Sony is dead to me now.
Parasocial relationship with corporation update from love to hate.
I mean the PS3 was launched in 2006.
The fact that the PS store has still been supported on the console for this long is kind of incredible.
The PS store enables spending money on the platform. It’s gotta be incredibly easy to justify server expenses for that.