Sony's Disc-Free 2028 Plan Hands it Total Price Control, Dutch Group Warns in Exclusive Wccftech Statement as €400M Lawsuit Escalates

Nah most people understand how digital stuff works compared to physical, since every other media format has already gone through this transition. People know that songs and movies get removed from streaming services and digital stores. People know how it works on steam and mobiles, which have been digital only for years.

Obviously. But steam already killed the used game-market many moons ago. And physical games. I boycotted them for years when they launched, knowing how it would end. And here we are. Physical PC games totally eradicated. Gifting away games I'm done with to poorer people who like to game too? Gone. Buying a semi interesting game for half price used? Nope. All gone. And if you buy a physical box, you get a key and a disc with an outdated installer at best.

Remember doom shareware?

But even I caved in and spend 100k on steam games I will never own. At least they offer a great deal of service around it. As long as gaben lives...

Movies and series I exclusively pirate. Music bandcamp, as I can still own the shit I buy.

Except not. There's currently a resurgence of people buying and using Blu-Ray movies, just like vinyl records

OK cool, so you see how it’s probably actually the majority that understands the physical/digital trade-off, and they’re ok with it.

A resurgence that’s still a rounding error in size compared to digital.

By the time the PS1 came out, lots of people already had CD players though. They weren't cheap, but they weren't crazy expensive either. DVD and Blu-Ray were in their infancy as the consoles were released, and they were the cheapest options available for playing them.

That's a pretty big boost for console ownership.

They've longed lobbied for anti-circumvention legislation and the corrupt politicians in the US and the rest of the World (with the EU Comission as a notable mention) have made sure it was implemented everywhere, exactly to avoid such a future.

The entire rotten edifice of Intellectual Property in the present day is literally the product of decades of corrupt politicians stealing more and more from the Public Domain to extend and protect this entirelly artificial kind of "property" for the benefit of the ultra-rich - as Digital became more and more important, laws were made or changed to take more and more rights away from common people in order to make the wealthy wealthier, which is why the richest people in the world right now are mainly in Tech.

I was there in the 90s when this corrupt destruction of the "commons" started limiting what could be done in the Digital domain and saw how we Techies lost that war, which is how we ended up with two decades of every more and ever more enshittified "closed garden" setups for all kinds of digital things.

Without shit like anti-circumvention legislation run of the mill people would have easy access in their friendly corner store to China-made devices doing things like what you describe or, for example, break your iPhone out of Apple's closed garden.

The shit low-innovation (certainly when compared to the 90s) World we live in right now is the product of decades of this purposeful transforming of the digital and intellectual commons into a Feudal system.

This is a valid observation, but also much more widespread than just Sony.

Xbox, Google Android, Apple, Oculus; there’s probably others. Many electronics companies have made devices that can only interface with their own App Store, in a digital fashion.

And that’s not me excusing it. A perfect world should probably have alternatives - but it does also make one worry that in that future, manufacturers wouldn’t have any incentive to sell their consoles under manufacturing costs.

Something the lawsuit may have to deal with is whether Sony can be aggressively forced into building a disc reader into consoles, in a world where many devices have no such thing.

So you have nothing to add to the conversation besides negativity and contrarianism? You can be safely ignored then.

Yeah, stick to the companies that really care about the consumer like Intel, Gigabyte, and NVIDIA! 🤡

There are an estimated 3,600,000,000 active video game players worldwide...

Why does it never occur to anyone in these threads that YOU might just be an insignificant but vocal minority?

The actual data does not support your conclusion.

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/11/gaming-games-consels-xbox-play-station-fun/

...Nespresso, SodaStream, Swiffer, HP, Gillette, Glade, Brita, Oral-B, Cricut, GE, Keurig, iRobot, Dyson, Shark, Breville, Weber, Traeger, Pentair, Ring, and Tovala enter the chat...

Even in that chart it does. In 2003 (Steam rolls out for the first time), the blue PC portion of the chart is clearly smaller than the green console portion. In 2020, at the end of that graph, PC is bigger than all consoles combined. That's not shared equally, and there are outliers aplenty, like League of Legends probably making a disproportionate amount of money compared to the rest of PC for several years, but we've seen traditional console publishers like Ubisoft and Capcom show that PC is now more often than not the lead platform. In 2011, there had to be a petition to bring Dark Souls to PC when it wasn't even considered before, and then about 10 years later, Elden Ring on PC outsold both PlayStation versions combined.

It's very clear that PC and Console have remained relatively flat and comparable, while Mobile eats BOTH their lunch. PC has not experienced the runaway capture your intentionally vague wording implies it has...

From 2006 to 2026:
Console market share dropped 24%
PC market share dropped 22%