Sony's Shift: Gaming Rights at Stake in Digital Age

Your money means nothing now. At least, that’s what has sent the gaming community into a frenzy these past few months. Sony has begun a multi-stage plan to wean PlayStation users off physical discs so they can have complete control over the games on the market, taking games down and never allowing them to be recovered unless they allow it.

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Sony has announced that in January 2028, it will no longer release physical copies of new releases, removing the option for people to share discs with each other or resell them as they wish. On its own, this has upset not only their fan base, but the gaming community as a whole, which feels as though it’s losing a fundamental piece of gaming history and culture.

But it doesn’t end there.

Sony has also made a public statement saying that people who purchase games on its online store do not own the license for the game, and that Sony reserves the right to pull the game from its stores whenever it wishes. This has sparked major discourse in the gaming community, whose game libraries are now at risk of being controlled by distributors, leaving them with no way to play games they pay for once they’re removed.

Movie poster for 'Biohazard: Requiem' featuring a woman with a gun in a leather jacket and a shadowy figure behind her, set against a dark, rainy background. — The poster for the recent video Biohazard: Requiem. Used under Creative Commons.

This discourse came about through a class action lawsuit, in which Sony made various statements about its policy on digital ownership and explained why it cannot transfer ownership upon purchase. In the lawsuit, Sony cited two users who each purchased Resident Evil: Requiem from its online store, with one buying it weeks before the other. Sony argued that if it had transferred ownership to the first buyer, the second buyer could not have purchased the game from the PlayStation Store because it would have been the first customer’s property.

The crux of the issue lies in a simple contrast of ideas: gamers reason that digital copies should work similarly to physical copies: upon purchase, you now own that copy, that one specific instance of the game. Sony, on the other hand, treats online storefronts as a way to distribute that single instance of the game to multiple people at once, rather than selling a copy of the game to every individual.

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Fortunately, Sony’s extreme idea of not giving players game licenses upon checkout has not been adopted by all online game stores. For example, Steam reserves the right to pull game licenses, but any games you’ve already purchased and downloaded remain on your computer. Furthermore, Gabe Newell, co-founder of Valve, the parent company of Steam, commented in 2011 that piracy was not a pricing issue, but rather an issue with how people can get games, a sentiment that gamers have been reflecting on, applying it to Sony’s controversial marketing.

To put the argument simply, gamers have been taking the notion that pirating a game is no better than stealing something more tangible, like a car, and comparing that to Sony’s selling and revoking of games. To the public, what Sony is doing is like selling you something only to take it back later.

The central pillar of our society is that when you spend money, you get something for it. And if gamers are expected to pay the modern price of around $70 for a digital, non-shareable, and non-resellable game, they should be able to keep it for as long as they want, rather than having it taken away.