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Comment by hellotheretoday | Hacker News Reader

I can sort of understand ending life for allowing purchasing on the platform but why would you not create servers for the new consoles in a way that allows you to continue to serve downloads or at the very least whatever licensing necessary to launch the software to old hardware?

If I buy a game I should be able to launch it and redownload it. If the above is not feasible then strip the drm at the consoles end of life and allow me to download my library and launch it indefinitely until bitrot destroys it. Absurd that we have this current system of “purchase digitally and play until the servers are shut off, which is a timeframe that is unclear”

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> If I buy a game I should be able to launch it and redownload it.

unfortunately, this is not the right for which you paid, despite the fact that it is what people believe when they click purchase.

That's why i condone piracy. It enables preservation, regardless of the choice of the copyright owner.

That's why i would always want to make an offline backup of whatever i buy. It's hard to do sometimes, and the onus being on me to do it is a failing of the consumer protection laws that did not evolve with digital purchases.

Agreed and why when I do purchase I only purchase physical. The digital downloads of games I have are either games that were so hilariously cheap on sale my moral compass didn’t matter (eg marked down to sub $5) or the free downloads I get from various promotions like the epic store. I don’t pirate video games but I don’t have any qualms with someone who does given the gross anti consumer practices the industry has been getting away with for ages

Unfortunately consumers don’t seem to agree and have no problem shelling out billions of dollars for these things. The current console generation is clearly pushing hard to shift things entirely to digital; it is actually becoming difficult to purchase physical copies of games. The recent yakuza game didn’t get a physical release in the USA and I had to import a copy from play-Asia. It works fine on my us ps5 but they were clear as it’s a region 3 release any future patches/dlc/psn support may not work correctly unless I create a region 3 psn account specifically for that game. Quite a headache. Although funny enough the game itself was $10 cheaper so even with tax and shipping it worked out to be the same as if I had bought it on psn.

"If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing."

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/

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