PlayStation founder Ken Kutaragi says discs became "metaphor for 'owning' games", and that upset at their discontinuation is a "mentality issue"
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123 replies
Ok. I'll read a book instead. I haven't turned my ps5 on in a year. Corpo execs have a mentality problem in that they've worthless leeches of people with addictions. I'll just sell it and probably make all my money back because I have the discs with an overpriced system that continues to go up even though it was released years ago.
I'm a much happier person today. You don't need these things anymore. Now is the time for humanity to return to common and basic activities. It will help us come back together and solve a lot of our social problems.
They're doing us all a huge favor by pricing everything out and stealing what little we can afford. Face the music. They're telling you the thing you paid for is theirs and not yours. It's time to move on.
Most games today are shiite cash grabs anyway. They are made to waste your time, not to engage the player or to have fun.
Sounds like that dipshit has a reality issue.
Oh. So he is an asshole like Elon. Good to know.
Its very crowded there at the asshole department.
Its because they are about to merge into their final form, Mega Elon.
You mean the same guy that told people to work two jobs for the honor of buying his five hundred and ninety nine dollar console in 2006? Oh yeah, he's an asshole.
Giant enemy crab
What is that a screenshot of??
um, i searched giant enemy crab gif and it came up. i kind of want to know too
Fight Crab. I've never played it but the YouTuber I watched play it liked it.
But it had Ridge Racer!
Right, why would anyone expect this asshole to say anything different?
We are fools each time to expect any different :(
All of them are, especially when you get anywhere near the size of Sony.
Again, we know that we don't own Crash Bandicot, the IP, but, we wanna own a copy of a game that features Crash Bandicot.
That cannot be revoked arbitrarily by fuckheads like this piece of trash.
No one is trying to claim they own the IP, and no one is claiming they own the source code to the game either.
That seems to be the way all these fucking companies try to frame things to justify telling you to pay them and then fuck off. They're trying to justify having you pay them for nothing, and then enforce it legally.
best we can do is you own nothing and be happy!
Sony doesn't even make anything if merit anymore.
They stopped making televisions, the only thing of note are headphones which have decent profit margins but that market is so crowded their still not a top 3 player.
These dipshits are playing Russian Roulette with their company by trying to strip consumers of their ownership.
They're literally staking their company's survival on the idea that they can do this without their consumers simply walking away.
Don't let them.
Haven't turned on my PS5 in a year. I'm not some revolutionary. I'm a person who quits a rigged game and I know bullshit when I see it. I don't argue with myself or sulk. I quit immediately and find something that I'll enjoy. No one is enjoying their PS5 the way they enjoyed gaming systems in the past.
Getting a system meant something. Now, it's like a poor financial decision. The hardware is iffy at best and you know you have to hit a wall of subscription requests, ads, filling out forms, giving up personal information...and it never used to be like this. We'd rip open the box, slam a game in, and start playing as a group in the family room.
It's not the same experience anymore. It hinges on addiction. What was once fun is now a dead social experiment. Look at gaming today vs the 80s and 90s. Depression and online gaming go hand in hand. I never gamed back then because I was depressed. It was fun and we partied over Goldeneye. What we're experiencing today is harmful to people.
There's definitely more to this story than we're all privy to.
I haven't bought anything Sony since they put malicious software on their CDs.
Holy shit how is this the first I'm hearing of this!!!
People should feel that others look at them dimly for giving money to sony, any personal boycott is just personal decision that affects only your own life.
Absolutely true. If there wouldn’t be a lot of cases where Sony just deleted the digital versions someone paid to own, and that I am unable to trade what I own with someone else, I wouldn’t mind a digital-only ecosystem at all.
But it is not a mentality issue. It is a pretty conscious decision to protect your own rights.
ceos getting upset at people pirating their games is a mentality issue.
They are really asking for it.
I think GTA, and this most anticipated release of a game in perhaps ever, really fucked up in screwing over their union right before the release, (last I heard, in passing,) and are similarly just asking to be pirated.
They actually have a point. People are pissed that they don't own their games anymore. So guarantee ownership. Give us recourse when servers shut down. Let us trade, sell, borrow second hand games. Let us play games without an account. We should be free to do with a game whatever we want
Yeah, the fact that you call it a "metaphor" proves you don't understand it at all.
It really is an us vs them thing now. There's zero respect given to the consumer. They believe all people are their addicts who will always push the button to receive their food pellet.
My PS5 hasn't been turned on for a year. Others will catch on. Reading books has taken over because they've become a better experience than turning on a corporate product.
We just need to be honest with ourselves and say no more to corporate products. The video games, the crappy food, bad drive thru coffee, electronics that are all junk, and even our news and information is comes from the same types of places. All of it is crap. Worthless crap and we've been spending our lives consumed in it.
It's a metaphor in the sense that if they didn't get rid of physical disks, they would still be putting games on them that don't work without an internet connection and cannot be resold.
True.
It became a metaphor back around when they released Empire, Total War, (edit: 2012 ish maybe,) and the disk meant nothing and just sent you to Steam to download it, forcing you to keep steam on your computer that tried to run at all times, and make you ask for permission every time you wanted to play the game, revocable at any moment I presume.
Ok boomer
Good job Onion, nailed it aga....
Wait this isn't satire, he actually said that?
Whelp, that's reason enough to repost it at /c/NotTheOnion.
If a member of the wealth class is brutally killed, upset at their discontinuation is a "mentality issue"
I have a mentality issue where I'll spend my money elsewhere.
So, Ken, got any jiggalicious PH neutral seven spice aubergine conditioner to go with your foul snake oil opinions?
Can I sell my digital copy to someone else? Or borrow it to them?
You keep making it different, asshole.
Lend
I'd borrow you one of my fucks, but I don't have any.
I give you knowledge for free, broke ass
These days "borrow" can mean "lend" because it all comes down to common usage. Dictionary writers are historians of language, not arbiters of it.
I've only ever heard people who have English as a second or third language mix them up.
That's not true at all in my experience, almost everyone uses them interchangeably. Although many also do correct people on it.
It's like saying that guy and me, it is improper, it's that guy and I. But no one follows the rule anymore.
fwiw I've never heard someone say that they can borrow someone something before. Might be a regional thing.
I'm not the person you were responding to, but I have also never heard anyone other than a child that made a mistake say borrow instead of lend. I'm not saying it isn't a thing, but maybe it isn't as widespread as you believe it to be.
Maybe it's an American English vs British English thing then.
Here's a few relatively modern examples to illustrate my point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irregardless
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nimrod
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/random
It doesn't matter if you agree with it, it comes down to common usage.
Here's a nice list and explanation of how English is a living language:
https://wordopedia.org/words-that-changed-meaning
But go ahead and down vote me over dictionary squabbles. I'll just call you a fool* for arguing.
*(one with a marked propensity or fondness for something)
People are discussing if it's in common usage.
He'd probably argue you couldn't legally do that with the disc copy you had though.
It's true tho, we never owned games, music, or movies on physical media either. We owned the revokable rights to view/use that copy of the media for private usage.
Every teacher that showed a movie in class broke a federal law.
It was just one of those things that was unenforceable and no one understood.
It doesn't mean we should accept not owning media, it just means we have zero chance of fixing it if we never understand it. A purchase should be lifetime usage, regardless of media. What you're buying is a license to view/use it, method doesn't matter.
Like how some people back in the day would only download a movie if they owned the DVD. That should be legal.
But trying to explain that never goes well
Naw man, that's just what they want you to believe because it benefits them.
We've de facto owned copies of whatever was purchased until the Internet changed the way ownership functions.
Laws are written by people. Traditionally, greedy people.
I think everyone understands just fine, we just won't be able to change that until the people who write laws are changed.
No, that's literally how software/media has always worked...
If you "own" code, then you can copy, distribute, and profit off of it 100% legally.
That's why software/media you "buy" is a license for personal use.
That's the entire point of the issue....
Did you think Blockbuster or any other rental store could buy a copy from Walmart and rent it out? Those were different licenses and the rental stores paid a shit ton more for their copies to be able to rent them.
Because it's never been about the physical media, but the license attached to it that determines fair usage
Yes and no. They did have licensing deals for video, but for video games they relied entirely on the First Sale Doctrine. Nintendo tried to sue because they didn't want to allow rentals, and lost.
You misunderstand me.
It hasn't always worked the way it does today. I know you buy a "license". But when you bought that cd rom or floppy or dvd or whatever physical media, you didn't have to do anything else to make it work. That copy ALWAYS worked, and you could sell it when you no longer needed it. Or you could let your friend borrow it.
"Fair usage" doesn't really work the way it used to.
That is not what “fair use” means in the context of copyright.
Also most of those licenses were non-transferable which means it was illegal to sell those games secondhand. But again it was unenforceable.
What you are talking about is DRM.
I think you are also missing my point.
I'm not talking about what the law is/was.
Also, I put "Fair usage" in quotes for a reason.
My point is that those producing media should not be able to sell you something that you are not allowed to control to some extent, and use at your disposal.
Doesn't matter. Money will never be realer than the imagination of suckers. That is how Closed Source is what steals their souls. Dumbasses.
Is every account on that instance still just the same person?
Personally, I only have one account there and it's not my host, so, no.
Do you mean you're not the admin of that instance?
Because they use terms like "host" and "alter" to describe themselves
Correct.
Straight up wrong. There's an exception to copyright for educational purposes for starters, so you're really being a dipshit eating your foot more than you are correct.
De facto, yes. De jure, no.
Sure, but like I said. People write the law... Greedy people usually.
I think he's correct that it's a mentality issue: but the issue is with Sony's mentality, not the consumer. If the PlayStation store operated like gog.com there wouldn't be as much of an issue.
I think he also underestimates the advantages of a separate disk per game, especially when he mentions hardware prices in the same breath...
Correct, thats what I thought as well.
They’re trying so hard to implode. All we have to do is nothing and they’ll be gone in a few years.
It really makes me worried to be fair.
I'm not one to subscribe to conspiracy theories, I try to think myself as someone who can process information in an objective^1^ , level-headed, reasonable (scientific) manner. Occam's razor and all - and pretty much every theory fails these simple tests of logic.
(^1^Objective in thinking, not in opinion. Opinions are by definition subjective)
But I can't help coming back to the "forced no local computing" theory that's been going around for about two years, where people theorised that the entire DRAM/NAND/chip shortage is just a ploy to move computing power away from ownership by people and towards corporate hosted services.
Which is obviously dumb because what company would say "you know what, B2B is enough for us, why should we sell for B2C?", what company would axe half its market just so the other half can sell a service instead of a product?
Especially when you consider some of the heaviest computing dependent things: gaming being the foremost leader, followed by various other 3D rendering requisites (from artistic through engineering modelling, physics test frameworks for about a dozen major industries that use them indirectly, including construction, aerospace, radio technologies and so on), compute heavy processing of data, hell, code compilation or even complex map rendering...
But then all of a sudden the big gaming giants began faltering. Xbox had three layoffs from Xbox and a new one is rumoured as they're "restructuring" the department from gaming-focused work to 'digital media creation'... Sony is doing their best to lose customers, and Nintendo... well they didn't change a bit.
Every single major gaming studio/publisher seems to be running straight into the forest of dicks with a wide open mouth. And it can't just be greed and stupidity. Some companies doing this, I'd agree, but all the major ones, at the same time? This looks more and more like an intentional attempt at destroying the primary consumer market for high end computer hardware. Destroy the demand, wait 5-10 years, restart game studios (consolidated into 2-3 megacorps of course), and sell games as a service. No ownership, no modding, no piracy, no need for "loud and hot local hardware", just a display and a controller. Wet dream of business execs...
Micron, one of the three major RAM and SSD manufacturers.
This is my occom's razor explaination:
Around 2017, the video gaming industry hit a major milestone of becoming a hundred billion dollar industry. That caused businesses to flood themselves with MBAs and finance bros. To the best of my knowledge, this is usually a bad move as a big influx of MBAs into an organization is usually a net negative. Research I'm aware of shows productivity goes down, employee pay goes down, and usually stock prices grow at a similar rate than before.
However, along with everything else, it is also pretty well documented that an influx of MBAs into a business drops employee retention, and that the peak of that drop is 3-5 years. In something like the gaming industry, the brain drain of talent into adjacent industries like traditional software development, film, and advertising hits hard. There is a lot of tribal knowledge inside of individual studios that gets lost quickly with just a few layoffs and transfers.
Therefore, I think we are experiencing the down wind effects of the industry performing well, attracting MBAs, MBAs driving off talent, and tribal knowledge being lost at many companies in the game development industry.
Thanks for your contribution to the piracy ecosystem, Ken.
"A mentality issue that we've built a business model around. Now that our exploitive behavior is laid bare, you want to complain about it. I just don't understand why you're so attached to the 'metaphor' of ownership that we've been using to extract money from you."
CEO has CEO opinion, news at 11!
Did too much hair dye seep into his brain?
It's always pathetic when these super old guys dye their hair constantly, like Steven Seagall, he's like 80 without a single grey hair, and not grey roots even, meaning he is dying like all the time.
Everyone ages, at some point, just embrace it. After 60, 70 tops, just go with the grey.
Correct. If you own some data, nothing stops you from writing it to whatever media you want, be it laser discs, ribbon or HDD. Do console gamers own anything? Most probably not.
Owning a disc hasn’t been synonym with owning a game in a long time. And that was already an issue!
He can buy a ps6 and play it till it gets bricked. I won’t be getting one
Same here. Absolutely not getting another video game system. Probably ever. I didn't have kids so no future gamer coming from me.
The gaming community could all join forces to shut Playstation down if we wanted to. One long-lasting and legitimate boycott of PS online and PS6 doesn't happen.
Keep doubling down Sony, you’re doing great
No, it's a corporate greed issue that we don't want to deal with. Fuck him and capitalism.
Gamers who want to rent a PS6 will simply work a second job to afford it.
It wasn’t a metaphor until the games became too large for the storage media that the console manufacturers chose. They could choose better storage media.
I mean he is right that it's a metaphor for owning games.
And he is very wrong that it's a mentality issue.
Honestly I even believe him that physical discs are not feasible anymore to produce, but then again I ask: "don't we have a point in making sure we still own a copy of the product we bought?" It's not like we don't have a reason to be anxious about this.
And then if we go back to the discs, if you get rid of that, what's the point of consoles? The differences between PC and console get slimmer by the day, and this exacerbates it.
This metaphorical disc has the metaphorical bits of the game on it. Which I will metaphorically keep and backup forever. …metaphoricallly speaking.
He's half right. An all-digital future is an inevitability, one way or another. In a world where games have a long tail of updates and DLC, what's printed on the disc is often quickly obsolete anyway, it's not necessarily the version you want to preserve and won't be that useful by itself in 50 years time when all servers are gone.
But consumers are angry because you haven't given us an alternative that lets us trust that we own our games. The problem is that we don't trust you or the industry, not when the industry is actively fighting against ownership with DRM and games being shut down left and right. If you want to earn our trust, show us what your solution to these problems is. Don't just tell us we're wrong to want to own our games, solve the problem.
Exactly. I don't need a disk. If he would distribute games like GOG do nobody would bring this disk thing up.
The only issue with gog is its a centralised source that will probably be forced to introduce age verification which isn't a problem on th e disc second hand market.
An all-digital future is not by any means inevitable...
We're already a lot closer to it than you think. Do you know how many modern games don't even fit on the disc in the first place? Or ship incomplete because in order to meet a target release date they have to start pressing discs before 1.0 is actually finished? And what about all the updates and DLC?
In 50 years time, when servers are all gone and you can't redownload the data that wasn't on the disc, do you still own your games?
SD cards instead of CDs. Problem solved.
Have you seen the prices on SD cards lately?
I wasn't speaking to price, you said modern games don't fit on discs. I was simply offering an alternative format that would hold it, it's not some impossibility.
It is a logistical impossibility if it can't be manufactured at a reasonable price. Problem not solved.
He's right.
Gamers that complain about this look and act exactly how you would assume. Look at the monstrosity that the Stop killing game dude is.
It's a literal mental health issue, it's a game, just get another hobby.
Stop doing drugs, lose weight, get in shape, get a better job, just stop acting so entitled.
Lol projecting much?
People who make unprovoked personal attacks always have the best arguments :D
But why stop at video games? Stop watching so much sports, stop watching all television and only do what I deem appropriate.
You sound like someone who doesn't understand much.
idk i assume we're all as pretty as me (and i'm a former model)
Gamers really need to learn about IP law. Y'all never owned anything. A CD was just a transferrable license. Buying games from steam is a non-transferrable license. Sucks, but that's what you get when you have IP laws as pervasive in the US. Gamers need to move on to the acceptance stage that you will never own your software.
Saying we own the disc never meant that we owned the right to the game. Just that we owned the disc and could therefore play whenever we want.
I do not understand why it is so difficult to understand that our money means something to us, and the word "buy" did indeed mean a binding contract between two parties.
Sony, the company that sold music as licensed on discs, you think believes games aren't things that can be licensed on a disc? Welcome to reality kid. It's called capitalism and unless gamers gain class consciousness nothing will change.
Yes what we want is transferable licenses, that's what we are losing and or lost with digital storefronts. We want to own the license. We want a physical, tangible thing
Technically yes, in the legalese context the term people should be using is 'license', but for most people that's what the game is, it's always been that, but that's not the term people use. "owning the game" is the exact same thing as the legal term "owning a transferable license".
What we want is that tangible transferable license, aka owning the game. We don't want the source code, or the IP. We just want to be able to own the game that lets us trade, borrow/lend, sell, or buy 'used' games.
But boiling it down to just "license" allows for that terms of the license to be changed because corporations have been given the power to change the terms of every license ever to fit their own whims without the real consent of both parties. We've seen that shit already with digital license games. Sony can just up and remove the game from your account without consulting you or even informing you the second party of the license. They don't have to give you a reason, they can just up and change the agreement without you needing to agree to the changes. And even if they do ask you to agree to the changes, they only present you with 2 choices: agree or lose access. That's bullshit.
Sony won't do it, and no one did anything when they stopped making music CDs. It's unfortunately just a pipe dream to think gamers get to force sony to print blurays but music enjoyers can't force them to make CDs or those live DVDs.
Hey, maybe I'm wrong, but capitalism doesn't usually go against the giant IP holders in America.
Music CDs never went away. Slowed down in north America yes, but even there they never really went away. Especially in Japan, where CDs have been a major way to only get some released songs.
irrevocable transferable licenses
You are an idiot. How do you charge two people separately if one can just transfer the license to another person independently?
What do boots taste like?
I sympathize for those who think that Sony is breaking the law, but I also sympathize with those who regard the situation as broken, and demand the law be changed.
I do kind of get the reasoning behind digital licenses being non-transferable. But overall, with people’s libraries getting deleted as a consequence, altogether too much control is on the license holder’s side.
If it's non transferable and can be shutdown or deleted at any time, it should be a whole damn lot cheaper than a disc that can still be sold or used a decade later.
In capitalism, the price of a thing is what someone is willing to pay. Games are marketed to kids with parents who can foot the bill or individuals who can afford it for themselves. They adjust their customer base with inflation, not their prices lol
I hate the current state of affairs but unfortunately I understand them. No one owns jack shit when it comes to IP media that isn't general merchandise. CDs, DVDs, BluRays, digital licenses — all the same thing to Sony.
The only people upset about not having a physical copy are the same with control issues in all other aspects of their life. Probably preppers too 😂 friggin boomer mentality.