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The History and Future of Digital Ownership (www.theverge.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'd like to get the community's feedback on this. I find it very disturbing that digital content purchased on a platform does not rightfully belong to the purchaser and that the content can be completely removed by the platform owners. Based on my understanding, when we purchase a show or movie or game digitally, what we're really doing is purchasing a "license" to access the media on the platform. This is different from owning a physical copy of the same media. Years before the move to digital media, we would buy DVDs and Blu-Rays the shows and movies we want to watch, and no one seemed to question the ownership of those physical media.

Why is it that digital media purchasing and ownership isn't the same as purchasing and owning the physical media? How did it become like this, and is there anything that can be done to convince these platforms that purchasing a digital copy of a media should be equivalent to purchasing a physical DVD or Blu-Ray disc?

P.S. I know there's pirating and all, but that's not the focus of my question.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

You would have a platform to trade games, and another to keep them. The trading platform will be able to undercut the holding platform due to practices such as exclusivity deals. This, in turn, will make the holding platform require a commission fee whenever a game is transferred to it.

If you could get a game for free in the Epic store and transfer it to Steam, where does Steam get the money from?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

If you can transfer / buy everywhere, how would there be any exclusivity, though?

Platforms are all already dealing with the possibility that they don't make money but still have to distribute the games. If you bought a game for $0.99 on Steam 15 years ago, and you download it today, they're not making money off you. If you download a F2P game via Steam and never buy anything, they lose money. Hell, I've never bought anything on Steam, but I've probably downloaded terabytes of data from them. They're not making money on me, except maybe with ads (which would apply to this other scenario too).

The platforms also already have to deal with the issue of not getting paid because you bought / got the game somewhere else. You can buy from GMG, etc. and then download from Steam. And publishers give away games frequently during anniversaries, etc. that you then download from Steam or Epic.

My thinking is that the platforms would obviously want to make money, so they're going to price compete to make sure you buy it there instead of buying it somewhere else and downloading it from there.

I also think an inevitable outcome of digital distribution in general is that companies are going to start charging for downloads. Digital games are one time purchases requiring lifetime support. They're not going to let it work that way forever.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Will I suppose that's where we gotta disagree then. I cannot ever imagine exclusivity deals going away. Unless we somehow manage to get a government-subsidized middleman to track and enforce parity, you'll always have platforms attracting prospective developers with exclusivity deals. Then you don't have to compete with pricing at all!

As for your last point, I believe most gamers would tell any company charging for downloads to fuck off. But I can see this actually happening in the future.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

You know, I've routinely been surprised what gamers do and don't put up with, so I really don't know what to expect anymore.

I dunno if you remember how gamers responded when Steam came out, but they really, really hated it. And it wasn't just the issues with slow internet, bugs in Steam, and stuff like that. They seemed to kinda philosophically hate it. Even the gaming magazines ran articles about how it ruined software ownership, it was awful how it made it so that you couldn't even do things like give your old games to your kids or your friends, etc. And gamer forums had the same kinda complaints. And it was even worse since Valve forced people to start using Steam to keep playing CS, even though CS had previously not required Steam.

But fast forward to some years later, and nobody cares about any of that stuff. Well, I guess they do sometimes. People complained about Epic moving Rocket League to EGS, which was kinda funny since it was moving from a service that had, years prior angered people when it started being required for a different hit multiplayer game.

Anyway, I could see gamers complaining and then just getting onboard 5-10 years later. That's what they usually do if the developers they like push for it.