274
Dutch consumer foundation sues Sony for overpricing digital PlayStation games
(www.gamedeveloper.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
274 points (100.0% liked)
Games
18861 readers
149 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Hence why nobody should ever buy the digital-only edition of a console. You buy like one used game and make the money back. Then, you can sell that game once you're done and turn a profit over digital-only.
Honestly? It's been probably a decade-and-a-half since the last time I bought a physical game, and I don't exactly miss it. I lived through the era of having cubic metres of space taken up by discs and boxes of games that you finished once but don't really want to get rid of since you liked them and might want to revisit them. I lived through scratched discs and reading errors crashing the game mid session or preventing installation altogether. Having a digital games library is just magnitudes more convenient in practice, and I don't mind paying for that. Especially since I buy 90% of my games on big GOG/Steam sales anyway.
Sure, but this is specifically about consoles. They don't have the same open market that PC digital games have so the only way to not be price gouged is buying physical.
Bluray is extremely scratch resistant. I'm sure there are extreme cases, but scratched disks haven't been a problem for 15+ years.
I still remember when AAA games where $30 and that cost included the disk and case, sure inflation is a thing but with digital only these games still should be cheaper, not the same or more expensive than a physical copy.
I started buying games after buying myself an OG play station. Even back then, I remember $40 and even $50 MSRP game prices. Their greatest hits line was discounted to $20. Final Fantasy 7, which remains an all time favorite of mine, was $50 at launch.
Their greatest hits line was generally priced at $20, which offered a way of discounting games after launch. IMO man games in Steam follow a similar pricing strategy these days - high launch prices with discounts later.
Note that I'm not advocating for the digital only model. Not being able to sell your games again is super lame.
For the longest time, they couldn't undercut physical MSRP with digital MSRP because they didn't want to upset Walmart and have them stop stocking their wares.
From the perspective of a PC owner you sound like you are stuck in the 90s or early 2000s, back when you needed extra shelf space for physical game boxes at home.
Lmao. I primarily game on PC. I own hundreds of digital games. Even with it's superior sales and open market, PC struggles to beat buying a used game from marketplace or ebay.
Also, are you seriously dissing physical media? The benefits of actually owning something cannot be overstated. Even with Steam, you're technically just buying a revokable license to play a game. Physical media can not be revoked, it can be resold/shared, and it works offline. See: the recent PSN outage where people were locked out of their digital games for a few days.
Plus, having a physical collection is just plain fuckin cool.
With physical media you are also just buying a license.
Blatantly incorrect
Sorta.
The legislation that applies to physical copies of copyrighted materials is different and comes from the time when the only physical copies of copyrighted materials were paper books.
Whilst strictly speaking you are buying a license for both, for physical media it's quite a different format of license with quite different conditions than for digital media.
The physical media license is implicit, standardized (the same no matter where you buy the media, the publisher or even the game) and associated with the media (i.e. ownership of the media means having the license) which means that it's transferable without requiring a 3rd party intermediary (transfering ownership of the physical media means transfering the license that is associated with it).
Digital games licenses, on the other hand, are not standardized and vary from store to store, publisher to publisher and/or even game to game (the usual is to have to accept the terms the store presents you, which are not at all an industry standard set of contract terms, much less a legal standard, and to properly judge them one would require legal help). They're all very explicitly personal (associated with the buyer) and them having or not any of the buyer rights one has in the implicit license of the physical media, is a crapshoot (generally each store has it's own unique licensing agreements, with sometimes unique elements for certain publishers or games). Most notably, it's very rare for them to be transmissible (it hugelly depends on the store) and even then it requires a 3rd party to approve it (generally the store). As far as I know, there is no consumer license for games digital media which has the same or more rights for the consumer than the implicity license for physical media and only commercial licenses (which cost thousands of dollars) will give you more rights than that.
Things like EULAs are pseudo-legal attempts at circunventing the implicit license of physical media, which is why they're not valid in most countries (they're deemed a one-sided attempts at forcing a change of the implicit contract terms of the sale, after the sale has been concluded, and hence have explicitly been judged as having no contractual force whenever those things went to court in most of the World).