If people actually read the claims... it's about fair business practices, this is why they are suing Sony:
> ... In the EU, it is forbidden for large companies to abuse their position to make more profit at the expense of consumers. Yet Sony does not fully abide by these rules.
>
> If you buy a digital game or in-game content, Sony will only ensure that you can do so through its own PlayStation Store. Sony keeps the market to itself in this way and can keep prices artificially high. This way you pay more, without getting anything extra in return. This is called the “Sony Tax.”
This is not a lawsuit about Sony "taking away my discs", it's something like "Sony allegedly used its control over the PlayStation ecosystem to restrict competition in digital distribution, allowing it to keep prices artificially high and harm consumers".
> Sony does not fully abide by these rules. If you buy a digital game or in-game content, Sony will only ensure that you can do so through its own PlayStation Store.
I have assumed that retail locations will continue to sell game codes, just not game disks, post disks going away. Currently there are games from like Just Dance that only include a game code in the retail box rather than game CD because of the way the game works (you're buying a dlc more than a game).
Maybe I'm wrong, but I would be surprised if PlayStation completely goes away from retail, for reasons including anti-trust, but also to encourage stocking the physical PS6 console.
Exactly. This is stupid. Physical is dead, there’s no point in arguing otherwise. And you will not win. Sony never signed a contract with you saying they would keep making physical forever.
Hell they could pull an old-school Apple, stop selling the PS5, make a tiny change, call it PS6 and be done with you. They could even announce that digital games for the PS6 are also compatible with the PS5! Wow, aren’t they nice.
We need laws providing consumer rights. Nothing else will work.
That's not what TFA is on about at all, it's about the monopoly Sony has on selling digital games exclusively through their store. Physical discs don't enter into it.
Why not going with both? Choice is never bad for the consumer, even if the majority or sales is digital. I usually buy both and they just lost me, I won't buy into their dystopian store
Have you seen the Warhammer franchise? lol... Thank you, I will see myself out.
Some Bro-flake is burying this thread, but you both made good points. GoG or Steam offer a lot of retro games these days, but the 4k upgrades sometimes come with a gameplay emulation downgrade. =3
So McDonald's has a monopoly on the Big Mac? Because you can go to Burger King (Xbox) or KFC (Switch) or Sonic (PC) as well but this group is arguing they want to have a Big Mac but not from McDonald's? Or actually McDonald's doesn't have a monopoly because you can technically buy a Big Mac from Uber Eats or Doordash?
Your analogy falls apart somewhere for me but I can't pinpoint the exact correction to make your analogy work for me. Either way I agree. If they don't like only being able to buy digital PS games via Sony's platform, go to one where they can.
That's not the fight I'd personally focus on. I'd personally focus on them revoking digital access after you've "purchased it". Then again, I don't have a game console and I don't "buy" digital media. I either rent via streaming subscription or own the physical.
They make games, they just don’t make all the games. Similar like a grocery store having their own brands in the shelves, you don’t expect to be able to buy these at other shops.
And yes the upfront costs being subsidized is exactly the point.
The PS5 was breaking even less than 6 months after its release. They don't subsidize anything. BTW, Nintendo also don't subsidize it. The BOM of the Switch 1 and 2 is lower than the total price including the margins for retailers!
If McDonalds were the only restaurant allowed to sell food within a particular market, and you couldn't buy food there from anyone else, then yes, your analogy would work. Otherwise it doesn't. A closer analogy would be Apple or the old company store model in company towns. In fact, why didn't you go with those?
yes, that's called a differentiated product in economics and it confers market power the same way any other monopoly does, Sony controls the Playstation ecosystem, Apple its ecosystem and it gives them leverage over the consumer, those products are not commodities.
That's why pharmaceuticals, patented medical devices or cable and broadband providers are regulated, see net neutrality legislation. Which exists exactly to commoditize information access in a market that's dominated by differentiated providers so they can't exercise their gatekeeping power to drive prices between you and online services up.
While I'm all for sueing Sony, and digital games cost more than physical games sound wrong and shouldn't happen, I feel like they focus on the wrong thing to sue Sony for. Like someone mentions in this thread, this feels like sueing McDonalds for having a monopoly on Big Mac, and only sell Big Mac in their stores. I don't know what the alternative solution to this problem is, but this doesn't feel right to me. For me, I would rather focus on digital rights and access.
As a consumer, I agree that something feels wrong and should be illegal. I understand the intention of the case, but wrong execution, as in, what they're sueing for, is a tough case to win, and doesn't actually solve the problem, but maybe I'm just naive, and there's a precedent for this already in Netherlands or EU.
HP was a great company, and released HP48 ROMs into community curated public license at the end of the product life-cycle. To this day I measure every company by that decision to support customers when the company moves on to bigger and better projects.
For many years, Apple also had phenomenal customer support years after a sale. OS 7.5.3 could be installed decades after the product EOL.
Sony DRM just become Tying with extra steps, as consumers now rarely own what they pay for... especially on upgrades. With the loss of physical media, proof of sale and preserved license terms are now ephemeral. =3
I'm too small brain to understand the whole monopoly in my own business aspect. Because they are not arguing about game exclusivity, you can buy the same game most of the time on Xbox, Switch, PC (and if not that's an entirely different story) but the fact they want to buy on that platform (Playstation) but from a different store (not Sony). Can't wrap my head around that logic.
Taking Switch as an example, I can buy digital games at Walmart or Amazon. For instance, Amazon might have a sale where their price for a given digital game is ~10% lower than Nintendo's eShop.
I have mixed feelings about this campaign. Their main ask is that Sony give up exclusivity for the Playstation store, which prevents anyone selling PS games without Sony's approval (and a 30% cut of revenue generated); their main argument is that Sony has total market domination makes it subject to specific EU rules.
I would like if there were other options besides the PS store for PS software, because the hardware is very nice and there are a lot of cool things developers could do with it if they didn't have to worry about compliance with Sony's narrow view of what constitutes digital entertainment and how big a company has to be to be an acceptable media partner. For example it would be nice to use a Playstation for non-game activities (math explorer, sci-fi style news dashboards, weird physics simulations) or have the choice to connect to the Criterion Collection and enjoy obscure media curated for other film snobs like myself, or...
On the other hand, if any malign software infects individual users' Playstations, or undermines the experience of other users who interact with the first group - eg participants in multiplayer games who are impacted by cheating or some sort of exploit - who is going to get blamed? Of course, it will be Sony. They could say 'well we warned you not to use XYZ app store and the only reason XYZ app store exists is that EUrocrats forced us to allow it on our beautiful platform', but no matter who is actually at fault it would be a huge hit to the Sony brand.
Say what you like about the economic and philosophical shortcomings of walled gardens, the reality is that most people find them preferable to a Plants vs Zombies type free-for-all, and I find it hard to blame companies for making a profit by catering to the garden-enjoyers rather than the wilderness-enthusiasts. The latter are after all free to just use some other computing/entertainment platform like Xbox, Steam, etc.; the argument made by campaigners is that they want all the quality of engineering, manufacturing, and access to top games that Sony makes available now, but also the possibility of breaking the hardware and/or the business model that brought it to market. I really think that when it comes to consumer technology, if you don't like the way the company operates you should just not use their products.
I don't think that potential reputational damage should be used as an excuse for monopolizing software distribution. Sony can have a tightly curated PlayStation Store and build its reputation around it without that necessarily implying that nobody else may sell software for the hardware. "Bad third-party software might exist" (we have examples of that existing on the PS Store anyway, but I digress) is an argument for giving consumers ways to distinguish trusted software from untrusted software, not automatically an argument for eliminating the competing distribution channel altogether.
Okay so if I understand this correctly they want Sony to compensate (Dutch) customers because Sony no longer sells digital download codes/game keys to third-parties? If they started doing that, would they still have a case?
For example, Nintendo does sell digital download codes, so this line of thinking doesn't apply to them? Maybe I'm misunderstanding. Or is this about 3rd party app stores again?
There are already class-actions against Sony in the US and UK for what appears to be this exact thing (using their dominant monopoly position to charge high prices) so it's not surprising to see it pop up in other jurisdictions this late in the game.
I don't know how the specifics would work, but if they reversed course immediately, they would have still caused some harm to some consumers during a specific amount of time.
yay suing Sony! I think that countries should start disallowing hardware sales where the user doesn't have the root key. We are not renting the hardware, we are buying it.
I would rather have a right to unlock. Make it law that Sony can't prevent alternatives OS installation. Then when you get Arch running on a PS5 you can install Steam on top
This would help but doesn’t solve the problem these people want solved (Sony being able to take away games after purchase and reselling games being impossible because the games are all digital)
Even when the PS3 supported Linux, Sony didn’t give OtherOS full access to the GPU. So I doubt you’d get any benefit running Steam on a hypothetical Linux-powered PS5.
The translation feature of Safari on macOS worked well enough for me. I would assume that functionality exists on another browser/OS, maybe yours has it?
So they want Sony to be required to sell slightly discounted codes to resellers who then sell them to consumers? How does that matter to anyone besides resellers? I guess the resellers could pass some of that discount on to consumers? This seems like a pretty irrelevant concern since Sony is has no state granted or effective monopolies in game sales, they aren't a common carrier, they aren't benefiting from access to public right of ways or other exclusivity that gives them a market advantage that citizens need to be compensated for. I don't think this matters and I don't care about this.
It matters to consumers because businesses have greater financial power to pressure Sony into reducing prices than individual consumers.
Additionally, businesses will not only sell Sony codes. They won't be like car dealerships, tied to 1 manufacturer. Due to this, they'll have even greater incentive and negotiating position to pressure Sony as if Sony doesn't want to play ball, the sellers can start promoting non-Sony products to consumers.
With direct sales only, Sony can have perfect vertical integration: they make the console hardware, they make the custom OS, they own the game publishers, they own the developers, and they own the store that sells games too. That's beneficial only to Sony.
i can think of 3-5 bigger issues hitting the games industry than this. It's a sort of bike-shed issue that everyone can pile onto. I'm sure people have a lot of angst over the decline of games, and this is an easy focal point. But I would like the other issues addressed.
Ballooning budgets, unnecessary hardware upgrades, un-skippable cutscenes, low player expectations, distracting or subversive narratives, pathetic mechanics, and so on.
"Stop Killing Games" is pure gamer slopulism. This idea is even sillier and more pointless than the last couple. There is a ton of competition in the games industry for games, platforms, hardware, etc.
If people actually read the claims... it's about fair business practices, this is why they are suing Sony:
> ... In the EU, it is forbidden for large companies to abuse their position to make more profit at the expense of consumers. Yet Sony does not fully abide by these rules. > > If you buy a digital game or in-game content, Sony will only ensure that you can do so through its own PlayStation Store. Sony keeps the market to itself in this way and can keep prices artificially high. This way you pay more, without getting anything extra in return. This is called the “Sony Tax.”
This is not a lawsuit about Sony "taking away my discs", it's something like "Sony allegedly used its control over the PlayStation ecosystem to restrict competition in digital distribution, allowing it to keep prices artificially high and harm consumers".
> Sony does not fully abide by these rules. If you buy a digital game or in-game content, Sony will only ensure that you can do so through its own PlayStation Store.
I have assumed that retail locations will continue to sell game codes, just not game disks, post disks going away. Currently there are games from like Just Dance that only include a game code in the retail box rather than game CD because of the way the game works (you're buying a dlc more than a game).
Maybe I'm wrong, but I would be surprised if PlayStation completely goes away from retail, for reasons including anti-trust, but also to encourage stocking the physical PS6 console.
Going digital was inevitable, i'd rather focus on making digital ownership better than fight to restore discs or game codes to 3rd parties
Exactly. This is stupid. Physical is dead, there’s no point in arguing otherwise. And you will not win. Sony never signed a contract with you saying they would keep making physical forever.
Hell they could pull an old-school Apple, stop selling the PS5, make a tiny change, call it PS6 and be done with you. They could even announce that digital games for the PS6 are also compatible with the PS5! Wow, aren’t they nice.
We need laws providing consumer rights. Nothing else will work.
That's not what TFA is on about at all, it's about the monopoly Sony has on selling digital games exclusively through their store. Physical discs don't enter into it.
Why not going with both? Choice is never bad for the consumer, even if the majority or sales is digital. I usually buy both and they just lost me, I won't buy into their dystopian store
"Choice is never bad for the consumer"
nonsense that dumb people say without giving any thought to the nonsense
I’m not sure what your actual objection is here. Are you just taking issue with GP’s use of the word “never”?
Have you seen the Warhammer franchise? lol... Thank you, I will see myself out.
Some Bro-flake is burying this thread, but you both made good points. GoG or Steam offer a lot of retro games these days, but the 4k upgrades sometimes come with a gameplay emulation downgrade. =3
So McDonald's has a monopoly on the Big Mac? Because you can go to Burger King (Xbox) or KFC (Switch) or Sonic (PC) as well but this group is arguing they want to have a Big Mac but not from McDonald's? Or actually McDonald's doesn't have a monopoly because you can technically buy a Big Mac from Uber Eats or Doordash?
Your analogy falls apart somewhere for me but I can't pinpoint the exact correction to make your analogy work for me. Either way I agree. If they don't like only being able to buy digital PS games via Sony's platform, go to one where they can.
That's not the fight I'd personally focus on. I'd personally focus on them revoking digital access after you've "purchased it". Then again, I don't have a game console and I don't "buy" digital media. I either rent via streaming subscription or own the physical.
It’s that there is a large upfront cost (buying a PlayStation) which isn’t in the analogy.
Additionally, many of the games are already on different platforms (PC), just not any other consoles.
I think the biggest thing is that Sony doesn’t actually make the games (they don’t have the kitchen nor the cooks), they just sell it.
So a more apt comparison would be a grocery store, I think.
The large upfront cost is lower than it would be because its subsidized by buying the games for it!
Sony does make the games, they have many excellent first party studios!
What are you talking about!
They make games, they just don’t make all the games. Similar like a grocery store having their own brands in the shelves, you don’t expect to be able to buy these at other shops.
And yes the upfront costs being subsidized is exactly the point.
Not quite. Grocery stores make common products and clones.
Sony’s 1st party stuff is (often) exceptional. It’s the reason an Xbox or PC isn’t a complete replacement.
The PS5 was breaking even less than 6 months after its release. They don't subsidize anything. BTW, Nintendo also don't subsidize it. The BOM of the Switch 1 and 2 is lower than the total price including the margins for retailers!
> The large upfront cost is lower than it would be because its subsidized by buying the games for it!
This isn't true anymore.
I can imagine that BK’s “have it your way” branding does enable the occasional off-menu Big Mac style burger sandwich transaction.
If McDonalds were the only restaurant allowed to sell food within a particular market, and you couldn't buy food there from anyone else, then yes, your analogy would work. Otherwise it doesn't. A closer analogy would be Apple or the old company store model in company towns. In fact, why didn't you go with those?
No, they're arguing that you shouldn't have to make your home kitchen a McDonalds franchise in order to eat Big Macs in it.
>So McDonald's has a monopoly on the Big Mac?
yes, that's called a differentiated product in economics and it confers market power the same way any other monopoly does, Sony controls the Playstation ecosystem, Apple its ecosystem and it gives them leverage over the consumer, those products are not commodities.
That's why pharmaceuticals, patented medical devices or cable and broadband providers are regulated, see net neutrality legislation. Which exists exactly to commoditize information access in a market that's dominated by differentiated providers so they can't exercise their gatekeeping power to drive prices between you and online services up.
And thats the solution. Not lawsuits. Regulation.
Lawsuits are how regulations are enforced...
While I'm all for sueing Sony, and digital games cost more than physical games sound wrong and shouldn't happen, I feel like they focus on the wrong thing to sue Sony for. Like someone mentions in this thread, this feels like sueing McDonalds for having a monopoly on Big Mac, and only sell Big Mac in their stores. I don't know what the alternative solution to this problem is, but this doesn't feel right to me. For me, I would rather focus on digital rights and access.
It is not a new phenomena, and would be illegal in any other physical market. =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robber_baron_(industrialist)
As a consumer, I agree that something feels wrong and should be illegal. I understand the intention of the case, but wrong execution, as in, what they're sueing for, is a tough case to win, and doesn't actually solve the problem, but maybe I'm just naive, and there's a precedent for this already in Netherlands or EU.
HP was a great company, and released HP48 ROMs into community curated public license at the end of the product life-cycle. To this day I measure every company by that decision to support customers when the company moves on to bigger and better projects.
For many years, Apple also had phenomenal customer support years after a sale. OS 7.5.3 could be installed decades after the product EOL.
Sony DRM just become Tying with extra steps, as consumers now rarely own what they pay for... especially on upgrades. With the loss of physical media, proof of sale and preserved license terms are now ephemeral. =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
I'm too small brain to understand the whole monopoly in my own business aspect. Because they are not arguing about game exclusivity, you can buy the same game most of the time on Xbox, Switch, PC (and if not that's an entirely different story) but the fact they want to buy on that platform (Playstation) but from a different store (not Sony). Can't wrap my head around that logic.
Taking Switch as an example, I can buy digital games at Walmart or Amazon. For instance, Amazon might have a sale where their price for a given digital game is ~10% lower than Nintendo's eShop.
I have mixed feelings about this campaign. Their main ask is that Sony give up exclusivity for the Playstation store, which prevents anyone selling PS games without Sony's approval (and a 30% cut of revenue generated); their main argument is that Sony has total market domination makes it subject to specific EU rules.
I would like if there were other options besides the PS store for PS software, because the hardware is very nice and there are a lot of cool things developers could do with it if they didn't have to worry about compliance with Sony's narrow view of what constitutes digital entertainment and how big a company has to be to be an acceptable media partner. For example it would be nice to use a Playstation for non-game activities (math explorer, sci-fi style news dashboards, weird physics simulations) or have the choice to connect to the Criterion Collection and enjoy obscure media curated for other film snobs like myself, or...
On the other hand, if any malign software infects individual users' Playstations, or undermines the experience of other users who interact with the first group - eg participants in multiplayer games who are impacted by cheating or some sort of exploit - who is going to get blamed? Of course, it will be Sony. They could say 'well we warned you not to use XYZ app store and the only reason XYZ app store exists is that EUrocrats forced us to allow it on our beautiful platform', but no matter who is actually at fault it would be a huge hit to the Sony brand.
Say what you like about the economic and philosophical shortcomings of walled gardens, the reality is that most people find them preferable to a Plants vs Zombies type free-for-all, and I find it hard to blame companies for making a profit by catering to the garden-enjoyers rather than the wilderness-enthusiasts. The latter are after all free to just use some other computing/entertainment platform like Xbox, Steam, etc.; the argument made by campaigners is that they want all the quality of engineering, manufacturing, and access to top games that Sony makes available now, but also the possibility of breaking the hardware and/or the business model that brought it to market. I really think that when it comes to consumer technology, if you don't like the way the company operates you should just not use their products.
I don't think that potential reputational damage should be used as an excuse for monopolizing software distribution. Sony can have a tightly curated PlayStation Store and build its reputation around it without that necessarily implying that nobody else may sell software for the hardware. "Bad third-party software might exist" (we have examples of that existing on the PS Store anyway, but I digress) is an argument for giving consumers ways to distinguish trusted software from untrusted software, not automatically an argument for eliminating the competing distribution channel altogether.
Okay so if I understand this correctly they want Sony to compensate (Dutch) customers because Sony no longer sells digital download codes/game keys to third-parties? If they started doing that, would they still have a case?
For example, Nintendo does sell digital download codes, so this line of thinking doesn't apply to them? Maybe I'm misunderstanding. Or is this about 3rd party app stores again?
There are already class-actions against Sony in the US and UK for what appears to be this exact thing (using their dominant monopoly position to charge high prices) so it's not surprising to see it pop up in other jurisdictions this late in the game.
I don't know how the specifics would work, but if they reversed course immediately, they would have still caused some harm to some consumers during a specific amount of time.
yay suing Sony! I think that countries should start disallowing hardware sales where the user doesn't have the root key. We are not renting the hardware, we are buying it.
Announcement post: https://xcancel.com/StopKilingGames/status/20868405145197285...
Silly idea.
I would rather have a right to unlock. Make it law that Sony can't prevent alternatives OS installation. Then when you get Arch running on a PS5 you can install Steam on top
This would help but doesn’t solve the problem these people want solved (Sony being able to take away games after purchase and reselling games being impossible because the games are all digital)
Even when the PS3 supported Linux, Sony didn’t give OtherOS full access to the GPU. So I doubt you’d get any benefit running Steam on a hypothetical Linux-powered PS5.
That’s dumb. Why should you have to unlock?
Viva La Resistance!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUHyYkPnJv0
I expected this to be geohots diss track to Sony (https://youtu.be/9iUvuaChDEg)
No english translation?
The translation feature of Safari on macOS worked well enough for me. I would assume that functionality exists on another browser/OS, maybe yours has it?
So they want Sony to be required to sell slightly discounted codes to resellers who then sell them to consumers? How does that matter to anyone besides resellers? I guess the resellers could pass some of that discount on to consumers? This seems like a pretty irrelevant concern since Sony is has no state granted or effective monopolies in game sales, they aren't a common carrier, they aren't benefiting from access to public right of ways or other exclusivity that gives them a market advantage that citizens need to be compensated for. I don't think this matters and I don't care about this.
It matters to consumers because businesses have greater financial power to pressure Sony into reducing prices than individual consumers.
Additionally, businesses will not only sell Sony codes. They won't be like car dealerships, tied to 1 manufacturer. Due to this, they'll have even greater incentive and negotiating position to pressure Sony as if Sony doesn't want to play ball, the sellers can start promoting non-Sony products to consumers.
With direct sales only, Sony can have perfect vertical integration: they make the console hardware, they make the custom OS, they own the game publishers, they own the developers, and they own the store that sells games too. That's beneficial only to Sony.
What prevents Sony from charging the retailers $60 for the code to a $60 game?
Congratulations, you can buy anywhere you want. You don’t have to buy from Sony. It just costs more.
Yeah, that’s gonna be real great for making games cheaper for you.
i can think of 3-5 bigger issues hitting the games industry than this. It's a sort of bike-shed issue that everyone can pile onto. I'm sure people have a lot of angst over the decline of games, and this is an easy focal point. But I would like the other issues addressed.
Ballooning budgets, unnecessary hardware upgrades, un-skippable cutscenes, low player expectations, distracting or subversive narratives, pathetic mechanics, and so on.
"Stop Killing Games" is pure gamer slopulism. This idea is even sillier and more pointless than the last couple. There is a ton of competition in the games industry for games, platforms, hardware, etc.