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Comment by stetrain | Hacker News Reader

I think the "Ridiculous" part is the trend of shipping a physical copy of the game with a giant patch of all the stuff that wasn't tested/ready in time for the disc to to go print.

If you're going to just effectively re-release the whole game as a day one patch, why not skip the discs and mail people a nice decorative card with a redemption code for the digital download version?

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If you have multiple people in a household, each with their own Live/PSN/whatever account, you can buy one physical disc and it unlocks the game for everyone in the household. If you buy the digital version, it's locked to only whichever account bought it.

That's why I still prefer physical versions of games. Both me and my wife have our own separate accounts on the services.

PS4 requires the physical disk in the drive to play. While yes you can simply share that copy with multiple people, they cannot play together simultaneously.

With PSN you can have two people playing the one purchase of a game simultaneously.

PSN/Xbox Live unlocks it for the _console_ (as well as the user). I have 4 accounts on my PS4, and they can all access content purchased by the other accounts.

Hmm, something is not right with our setup then, because I have absolutely been blocked from playing games my wife has bought on her account on our PS4.

You have to set your particular console as your PSN account's "primary" console. When a console is set as your primary console, any other accounts on that console can use software that you have bought using your PSN account. However, I think only one account can have a particular console set as their "primary" console at a time, so if your PS4 is your account's primary console, then it cannot be your wife's account's primary console, meaning if she buys software, your account cannot access it.

https://manuals.playstation.net/document/en/ps4/settings/act...

I bought FO76 from Best Buy, and that's exactly what I did - I just bought the "Digital Download" edition, which gave me a code I could enter into the Bethesda launcher.

I honestly don't remember the last time I bought software on physical media.

Could physical copies still be traded, whereas digital downloads are typically tied to a single account?

It's funny how much the Xbox One team anticipated this, and tried to move to that model, but got so much flak they gave up. People seem to like their ownership Totems (discs) that they can continue to sell to Pawn Shops (Gamestop) for pennies on the dollar of the original purchase price.

It's okay to me that the nice decorative card rack keeps growing, right next to the Totem shelves in most stores. If I'm going to download the whole thing anyway, I might as well not waste shelf space in my home on the Totem.

While I think you're right that the Xbox One's Always Online features were mostly just mistimed, (and marketed) in addition to a Totem aspect physical disks are also a way to keep a game longer than however long the service's servers exist, assuming there's no required day one patches and the like.

The Wii shop for example will be going down for good soon, making purchases not already on the console inaccessible. A copy of a Gamecube game on the other hand will work until the disk physically breaks.

Right, but there are also Wii games that won't work when the shop goes down because what's on disc isn't playable and needs a Day One patch it can no longer download.

We absolutely should be fighting for digital store rights, but focusing on physical discs isn't the right way to solve that.

What a silly way to trivialize stripping consumer rights. When you buy a game on disc, the disc is the product. You now OWN the game. You're free to lend it to a friend, sell it, give it away, trade it, or whatever the hell you want because its your property. Microsoft was attempting to go the Steam route and forcing people to LEASE their game and tie it to an anti-consumer terms-or-service agreement (redundant, I know). With that you're not allowed to do anything with the game that they don't approve of. And if you behave in a way they don't like, they can take away your entire library in the middle of the night. Naturally people don't like shit like that. And unlike Steam, the Xbox actually has competition, which is why people opted for other consoles instead.

On the contrary, I'm not trivializing the stripping of consumer rights, I'm suggesting that property rights in this matter have always been more complicated than "discs are property" and "codes are not", because in the digital realm discs are codes in a different form factor. The terms of service are the same on the Xbox for digital store downloads and discs. I refer to the disc as a Totem, because that physical artifact holds more spiritual value than it does physical value. Some property rights of that disc are implied, sure, by virtue of being a physical token, but they haven't been tested in court, and they aren't guaranteed. EULAs have been the name of the software game for ages now; they predate the digital stores (even Steam) and have always stated that Software is Leased, never Purchased. Discs were always a physical token tied a EULA. Now discs don't even have the actual software on them anymore, and its getting increasingly silly to pretend that they do.

The original Xbox One plan included lending, giving away, and trading games, it just intended to cut out the Gamestop middle man and let you do it directly Gamertag to Gamertag. That's what Microsoft was really punished for, cutting out the Pawn Shops.

We should be demanding our rights in the digital stores (and securing them in copyright reforms and regulations, if need be), not fighting for bits of plastic that pretend to be rights.

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