This is why we got Stadia. Imagine Netflix where you pay a monthly fee and still have to buy all the movies and shows at full price. That was Stadia’s model.

Thos erodes the concept of ownership so that it is substituted for rental, without stating that clearly. Stadia failed but in doing so it probably helped Microsoft figure out how to eventually get away with doing the exact same thing.

Games should clearly say if you’re basically renting them, not have it buried in the EULA. Let publishers full price and let consumers decide if they are prepared to live with it.

Totally agree. You always leave yourself room to negotiate down.

Imagine not supporting this because you think it’s unfair to the industry, given the very specific examples that have been given.

He talks about that. I think the gist is that a lot of games that are online services could run locally, the publisher just chooses not to. That’s why Ross chose the Crew 2 as his hill to die on: there’s evidence that an offline does/did exist and just wasn’t enabled. That’s a practice that needs to be challenged.

The argument goes that a game that relies on server side technology to run in any form shouldn’t be sold as a product that you can own. This needs to be reflected in the price and licensing model. That seems fair.

The big question is why TF we’re at a point where a company should be allowed to sell you a product and say you own it then remove your right to use the product arbitrarily. I bet there’s IP in the server side code, but having a system where a corporation’s IP and ability to make money from the IP is more important that the concept of ownership is deeply fucked up.

Technology Tangents did a video where a game he bought on CD and tried to play on period-correct hardware won’t run because there was DRM that called a server to check the date and to make sure it wasn’t leaked early. Decades after the release, the server is gone and the game can’t run, ironically, because it’s so far outside of its release date. That’s the kind of bullshit that absolutely shouldn’t be tolerated.

That article is from Jan 2023 when Sony responded to a Bloomberg report that they had cut production due to lower than expected launch sales.

It’s possible they will rebut this article too, but they haven’t so far AFAIK.

It’s… a me.

Using the terms “telemetry” and “spyware” interchangeably makes the former seem more nefarious and the latter less nefarious. I understand where you’re coming from but I wouldn’t want to see the term “spyware” diluted to include anonymised data about how users are using product features.

That’s not to say telemetry data is fine or that a company might claim to only use telemetry data isn’t actually using spyware.