Oh look, Sony revoking more licenses for video content that people “bought”.

  • bassomitron@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    This is where our lazy lawmakers need to step in and protect consumers. Make it illegal to revoke these types of licenses over greedy, lazy, exploitative business mergers and acquisitions. If corporations want to fight that, then they shouldn’t be able to “sell” digital movies or games anymore: Any time you go to “purchase” digital content, it must plainly tell you that you’re renting said content for an undetermined amount of time.

    Funny how so much recent talk has emerged yet again about how companies like Microsoft want to get rid of disc drives on their next Xbox… It’s almost like companies don’t actually want you to ever truly own anything. A rent economy is toxic and rotten, and it’s infuriating that it’s literally becoming our entire economy.

    • evatronic@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      Funny how so much recent talk has emerged yet again about how companies like Microsoft want to get rid of disc drives on their next Xbox… […]

      While I will freely admit that the lack of a physical drive is a huge way to drive downloaded (and licensed, revokable) content controlled by the company, it’s worth noting that physical media is really not all that great a medium for transferring things like games or movies anymore. Blu-ray discs can hold, in ideal situations, around 50GB of data. A lot of games – especially AAA games, are well beyond that. I think Spider Man 2 came in at like 85GB? The internet says Hogwarts Legacy is ~75GB on XBox.

      Network connectivity, and downloading content to our devices is almost certainly going to be the way a lot of the world works going forward. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be able to back our content up elsewhere, or offload it to some other device.

      Your right in noting that the laws and regulations need to keep up and protect consumers’ right to the content they’ve purchased.

      edit: Here, I’ll bold the important part.

      • essteeyou@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        I bought a 1TB micro SD card recently, it cost less than a new AAA game. Almost any individual AAA game would fit on a quarter of that.

      • bassomitron@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#BDXL

        Even normal UHD BRDs can and do hold upwards of 100GB, as those can have 4 layers (~25GB each layer).

        A lot of game size bloat is due to lazy optimization. Lords of the Fallen on PC–while it had questionable game performance for some folk–the game looked gorgeous and was quite a massive world, yet the download for it was around 40GB.

        There are very few games I can think of that warrant being 100+GB. And even if they’re more than 100GB, what’s stopping them from just using 2 Blu-rays? Remember the PS1 days when games like FF7 had 4 discs? Or when WoW came out, it came with like 8 installation discs or some other absurd number? Blu-rays are more expensive, sure, but I can’t imagine games getting to be more than 2 discs long during the lifespan of Blu-ray as a storage medium anyway.

        • jyte@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Except that games are broken at release and need day1 patch in order to work. Although you will ship BD, the day update servers are taken down, your physical copy won’t allow you to play the game either.

          The only question I have is : Is torrenting game patchs / updates concidered piracy as well ? If it is, we are definitely doomed.

  • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Its barely the second month of the year and these companies are nose diving to the fucking bottom.

  • paddirn@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    If what they’re doing isn’t theft, then digital “piracy” isn’t theft either.

  • Clbull@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    And with the unrelated rumours of Microsoft potentially leaving the console business and going multiplatform, it begs serious questions.

    Do you really want Sony to have a monopoly on console gaming when they can’t even respect ownership rights for digital goods?

  • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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    10 months ago

    if you can take it from me, I can take it from you. piracy has become a moral imperative to stop valuable art being flushed down the memory hole.

    • Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 months ago

      They only took the digital copy though. Shitty move, but you still have a copy.

        • Hawk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          10 months ago

          I think many didn’t read the article. The only way to get a Funimation digital copy was by using a code that came with the physical copy.

          Even if they’re taking away the digital copy, you still have the physical one.

  • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    We gonna go after every company that does this because pretty much all of them are.

      • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Everybody seems to say this to me until I tell them that the companies that own the rights they are selling to distributors are also at fault and we should blame both. Then people are like “what? No! Why would we punish Paramount or Fox, or Universal?”

  • Phegan@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Digital ownership is a real issue. We need to ensure we own when we buy, or we should not buy

  • hperrin@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    I’m down to one streaming service left. Just need to… ahem… acquire the rest of what I want to watch there before I no longer pay monthly for services I barely use, where anything can be ripped away from us at any time.

    Never again.

  • virr@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    This is why we prefer to buy physical media, getting a digital with it is nice, but physical is key.

    It wasn’t even me was pushing for us to get physical media, it was my spouse. Of course my plex server the house probably helped. But after a few “forever” is only until next month, or shows completely disappearing altogether from any streaming, they started pushing for more physical media.

    • Fisch@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      I think I’m alone with that on here but I don’t really like buying physical media. I get that that way you own it but it’s still just a storage medium with data on it, putting that data directly on my hard drive achieves basically the same thing. Since I can pirate basically anything anyway, I just think that even if a company takes away my access to something digital I bought, I can always just pirate it and I have it again. To me, physical discs are kind of a waste of money, space and resources because of that. I don’t have it anything against people who buy physical media tho, I do get the point of that.

      • xantoxis@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Same, and I’ve already had to do this. Google started revoking things I “bought”. When they announced it I immediately went into Google Play, made a list of everything I “bought”, and pirated it onto my home media server.

        It’s mine, and it’s on “physical media”, which I call an SD drive in a NAS.

        I don’t need or want optical disks of things–they are subject to rot, more so than my NAS, and they are far far more fragile than the NAS+the backups. They take up space and collect dust. If I wanted cover art, I’d own the art and have it on my wall.

        You can truly own things, and you don’t have to have plastic covers on a shelf to do that.

    • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 months ago

      I’m with you on most of this except I’m the physical media person, and also run the Plex server for my f&f ;)

      I’m going to be setting up a self-host game streaming server soon too, because I won’t -buy- digital-only… but I will pirate it and throw some money at the indie devs when I can!

  • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    But in addition to offering video streaming, Funimation also dubbed and released anime as physical media, and sometimes those DVDs or Blu-rays would feature a digital code. Subscribers to the Funimation streaming service could add those digital codes to Funimation and then stream the content from the platform.

    Okay, I honestly feel bad for anyone not old enough to remember the last few times big media firms pulled this kind of crap. This kind of thing is always a trap, or at best a temporary add-on to the media you purchased. If you buy a DVD or BluRay, anything other than the videos on the medium have a short shelf life. Plus, anything having to do with internet websites are considered disposable by big business*, but doubly so in this kind of scheme.

    In the past we’ve had bolt-on features to media that have aged poorly. 1-800 support numbers for video games. Websites with supplementary media. Executable programs on disk that only work on Windows95 or MacOS 9. Console exclusive content. Extra media on disk in formats like Flash. Heck, there are even old cassettes and LPs that have C64 BASIC programs on them. Downloadable game content through redeemable codes. The end result is less a product value-add and more of a novelty.

    Then there’s the litany of broken-by-design media, like DivX. And of course, let’s not forget about formats that have no modern release and are only viewable on players that haven’t been made in a dozen years or more.

    Yes, Sony/Funimation should be taken to task for misleading advertising. But we should also be vigilant and look for the warning signs too.

    (* - If that makes you uncomfortable about IoT devices, you’re paying attention.)