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.
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
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.
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.
You can’t export save files on PS5. You can’t transfer licenses, so you’ll have to repurchase any games you want to continue playing. For trophy/achievement hunters, those are going to be locked away. And a lot of the online game accounts are locked to the platform so you’ll have to start any progress/reputation/level over.
Yeah, you can walk away, but let’s not pretend it’s the same thing as buying orange juice at a new grocer because your regular one only sells it with pulp now. People aren’t being irrational in being annoyed by this.
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.
Valve has an incentive to keep being benevolent because consumers have the option of using other stores on the same hardware.
If you have invested into Sony platforms and games, you're stuck. You either write it off and move now, buying hardware during a component crisis, or you keep investing moving forward. On a PC, I might lose access to games on Steam but my hardware will allow me to buy new games on a different storefront.
Proton is open source though (and a lot of the improvements are also upstreamed to Wine, which isn't directly under Valve's control), and you can use it to run third-party games if you want (even ones that are also sold on Steam's storefront). If Valve stopped being benevolent, it would be annoying, but they wouldn't be able to undo most of the improvements we already have.
An NFT is superfluous here. If you buy a digital copy, and someone gives you DRM-free files that you can copy and run anywhere you'd like, you have about as much ownership as you can get over a digital good. In this case, an NFT would just serve as an entry in a crypto ledger that you bought the game... which is an alternative to running a digital storefront and tying game purchases to an account, but it doesn't really change the fact that you can only redownload something for so long as it is hosted at the place where you bought it.
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.
Game consoles are not biological beasts which decay as a matter of nature or fact.
They are tools, toys, they are devices. I can still play my PS1 as before, I just need to pop in a CD and I'm good to go.
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
Every ps4 game works on ps5.
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.
You can’t export save files on PS5. You can’t transfer licenses, so you’ll have to repurchase any games you want to continue playing. For trophy/achievement hunters, those are going to be locked away. And a lot of the online game accounts are locked to the platform so you’ll have to start any progress/reputation/level over.
Yeah, you can walk away, but let’s not pretend it’s the same thing as buying orange juice at a new grocer because your regular one only sells it with pulp now. People aren’t being irrational in being annoyed by this.
They have a monopoly on disks for the PlayStation.
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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?
Many of them, yes. It's up to the individual publisher whether they want to release their game DRM-free on steam. https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g...
If you want to guarantee that you can backup your PC games and run them without a client, then there is always https://www.gog.com/
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.
Valve has an incentive to keep being benevolent because consumers have the option of using other stores on the same hardware.
If you have invested into Sony platforms and games, you're stuck. You either write it off and move now, buying hardware during a component crisis, or you keep investing moving forward. On a PC, I might lose access to games on Steam but my hardware will allow me to buy new games on a different storefront.
Proton is open source though (and a lot of the improvements are also upstreamed to Wine, which isn't directly under Valve's control), and you can use it to run third-party games if you want (even ones that are also sold on Steam's storefront). If Valve stopped being benevolent, it would be annoying, but they wouldn't be able to undo most of the improvements we already have.
At least with a PC you have control over the system. You're even freer with Valve because now have the ease of using Linux.
My entire Steam library is backed up to LTO tapes. I can get most everything running without needing Steam.
I will continue to support this business model, because I retain the power to own the system and the data.
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An NFT is superfluous here. If you buy a digital copy, and someone gives you DRM-free files that you can copy and run anywhere you'd like, you have about as much ownership as you can get over a digital good. In this case, an NFT would just serve as an entry in a crypto ledger that you bought the game... which is an alternative to running a digital storefront and tying game purchases to an account, but it doesn't really change the fact that you can only redownload something for so long as it is hosted at the place where you bought it.
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NFTs never would have given you any more power than Steam as at the end of the day the platform still controls what you can access or not.
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.
Insurance will tell you teeth are as well.
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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...
Reminder that Valve's liberal refund policy only exists because they were sued by the Australian government.
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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.