Comment by somenameforme
1 day ago
Fully in support of this, but it will never happen, at least not for digital purchases, for a simple economic reason: the internet enables far too efficient a market and it'd wreck businesses with the first sale doctrine. One game sold by the publisher would then be constantly resold by endusers with an ever decreasing price to the point that you could probably buy most of any game for a couple of bucks a year or so after release. The reason this doesn't already happen with physical copies is because there's tedium + cost involved in the transfer, and they also create a motivation to collect. It's somehow enjoyable see a shelf full of games, music, movies, or whatever else.
More realistic would be improving copyright law. I think it'd be reasonable to state that copyright lasts 20 years from the first 'transfer' (sell, licensing, etc) of a creation. 20 years is long enough to fully monetize, but also short enough to really enable some interesting acceleration/derivation in society. For instance just about now XBox 360 games would be coming out of copyright protection. That seems perfectly reasonable, especially in the era of LLMs where 'sidestepping' copyright is going to be increasingly trivial anyhow.
The people who really ruined for everyone else are the hipsters that supported coffee machines connected 24/7 to the internet and wouldn't function unless you paid a monthly subscription.
This comment is right up there with the ones claiming millennial financial woes are due to eating avocado toast.
Don't forget to pay your subscription for the product you've already paid for :)
Or anyone who fanboys for Steam. The origination and normalization of game non-ownership.
Most Steam games are DRM-free in the sense that if you copy the game folder to another computer and add a stub steamapi.dll they'll run. Some of them will run even without steamapi.dll as they load it dynamically.
Games were licensed long before Steam. Heck, I remember buying a game in the early 1990's that would disable use of the floppies once it was installed to the hard drive. By the time Steam rolled around, registration keys with online verification were normalized.
Securom? StarForce?
I don't think you know what 'hipster' is, and no, there is not some group that did the wifi coffee machines, and if there were, that would not have changed anything.
FYI the IoT wave was firmly industry driven.
have you ever bought anything from gog.com?
I suppose they'll just have to give up on selling games in the US.
Do you think it's possible we could simply sell physical copies on physical media and deal with the necessity to build new products every so often?
I don't think it was ever the case that games which could theoretically be redistributed were unprofitable. It's more that locking everyone into a subscription or renting-as-buying for everything just happens to be more profitable. That's true for just about anything ever in the world, it just so happens that the game, film, and music industries were able to actually pull it off. Other industries suffered from problems of bad public opinion, but the frog is being boiled as we speak, just take a look at the car industry for example.
You need to somehow increase the cost of doing the bad thing, and then the natural equilibrium will return to doing the good thing. It's like whenever anyone raises taxes or proposes regulation, someone out there cries about how millionaires or landlords or whoever will all leave. But that rarely happens, if ever, because it's rare that the regulation actually makes something so unprofitable as to not be worth doing, usually it just makes it somewhat less profitable than doing it the unrestricted way.
On the other hand it’s not sure that is a good model in the long term.
Like how can the game industry thrive by turning AAA dollars into GAME PASS dimes? Netflix and Spotify make money at the top but not for artists. Netflix was part of a ‘golden age’ when there was fierce competition to make prestige TV at the expense of investors but that party is over.
I can believe subscriptions are win win for adobe and some of its customers, I mean adobe does get to fund continuous improvements in their products and it is certainly cheaper to keep up with the latest CC than it was before though some might want the option of paying a fortune for just one version once.
I think they are fashionable because investors like ‘seeing like a bank’ and it is so easy to put a valuation on a steady cash stream from a customer.
The law is how you increase the cost. Every law has a punishment for breaking it.
I don't think it matters even one iota how much more profitable it is to do something explicitly bad for consumers, explicitly to ensure you extract more profit from those consumers. McDonald's can beg to put sawdust in their burgers, and dairy providers can beg to put chalk and other whiteners in their milk, and game devs can beg to retain full ownership of everything they rent out AND be able to change the thing you've rented without notice or recourse.
All of that is profitable. It's also all desperately in need of regulation.
I'm so sick of people getting downvoted for telling the truth that people don't like. HN, do better. If you want an infinite warm hug where we lie to each other and pretend that utopia and magical rainbow unicorns for all is right around the corner, please go somewhere else, or please please manage to suppress these urges for long enough to maintain HN as the science and logic based community it once was. Or crash and burn in a hopium-fueled echochamber that benefit no one, what do I care. shrug
Are you saying you think it's not economically viable to build and sell games that work offline and can be bought used? If so, how did the gaming industry survive and continue growing for several decades from the 1980s through the 2010s?
Physical vs digital ownership, as I went at lengths to distinguish between.
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I didn't downvote, but I read the comment and simply thought in my head "so piracy should have tanked the market 25 years ago, in the Limewire age huh?"
History's disproven the notion that easy copying means constantly depreciating prices. The premise is flawed unless something so fundamentally different about piracy in 2026 is happening compared to 2000.