I like the idea of reclaiming the word "buy" to only be the traditional type of ownership transfer (first sale doctrine or whatever if it's a copyrighted thing). Mandate the use of the word "license" or "rent" if it's something else
Exactly. Conflating buying with renting indefinitely, without resale ability, is a deliberate way of confusing people for profit. My younger, more naive self, might have been surprised at just how long society has allowed this to slide.
Good point. It really flies in the face of the First Sale Doctrine when a game company says "you buy the game" when it's just a license, because if you had bought the game, then the FSD would apply (gloriously) in so many ways.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
Is there a better word for this sort of transaction (non-resellable, arbitrary cancellation of service at some unknown point in time by some entities)?
“License” seems too legal, and implies either a lifetime license or fixed term license, which is different than a “we’ll shut down game servers whenever we feel like it”
“Rent” already has a different meaning that is commonly understood.
Is there any suitable existing word? Maybe the awkward phrase “revocable at any time license”?
"Lease" perhaps?
> lease - a contract renting land, buildings, etc., to another; a contract or instrument conveying property to another for a specified period or for a period determinable at the will of either lessor or lessee in consideration of rent or other compensation.
Lease is pretty similar to rent in my mind — you're getting a product for either a fixed period or for as long as you keep making regular payments, neither of which applies here.
I don't think there'd be consumer confusion if they sold it as an 80 year lease for $60. Maybe backlash.
> you're getting a product for either a fixed period [...] neither of which applies here.
Typically, as a practical matter, the license ends with your death. You can't pass your kindle ebooks and steam games as inheritance like you can with physical books and game discs.
I think they'd just switch from Buy to Pay. For what? For whatever ... so you can play now.
Revocable license, temporary use, indefinite borrow?
There’s no good word because it’s not a reasonable position.
Privilege
Mark Lemley's Terms of Use paper (2006) outlines how property law/right (rights of us citizens) have been eroded steadily by contract law (what other people say they can do to us). It's so sad for technology to be so very strongly affiliated with such a critical defilement of the human spirit as this. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=917926
It's so sad that there have been so very few legal efforts to bolster property rights, to reassert some sovereign claim over the things we have about us & that fill our homes. In fact, the opposite keeps happening: anti-circumvention laws spread like the plague they are, making any attempt to exercise one's property right a felony offense.
This is murdering the human spirit. Man the toolmaker's god-granted rare ability to understand the world about us, to model & learn, and then to adapt & alter is trapped in an infernal legal hell. What's happening is against my spiritual beliefs & is so terrible to suffer, is such high tragedy.
Keep it simple and just use the word rent. No need to complicate it.
“Rent until we choose to not allow you to access it for a one time payment of $x”.
Idk, I think "rent" and "license" have different meanings. Modern definitions of "rent" include periodicity into the definition, which is at odds with the "one time until we shut off the servers" definition. I agree with the GP on the terminology for these reasons.
I “rented” a movie on Apple TV last night. I’m quite confident I won’t be paying again in 30 days :)
That is good reason to not use "rent" because it is already used in industry for short fixed-term rental.
The whole point is to highlight, for the lay consumer, the periodicity of their purchase, regardless of the periodicity of payments. And hopefully create market pressure for sellers to sell things rather than rent them.
Fair, I can get behind that reasoning
I'm afraid that the connotations around rent (namely monthly payments) would only encourage the worst publishers to only go further.
No one is renting a game for $70/month.
Not sure of the cost of MMORPG, but at one stage they were like $12-$14, and Everquest even had a server that was lived for a couple of years, legend, where it was like $40/month, a bit pay-to-win server...I mean with a better CS support.
> but at one stage they were like $12-$14
they (the ones that are subscription) still are.
And most of them have micro-transactions on top of that as well. Some will give you a (very) limited number of micro-transaction currency-units per month.
Not yet!
Absolutely! Markets evolve, see, for example, nobody was willing to pay on things like Siri, and now millions of folks are spending 25 USD/month on Siri+.
EDIT: sorry, just came from the future.
Sellers are smarter than that, they already go as far as they think buyers will let them. It is the buyers who need elucidation.
If you solution involves getting the general population to do something or "be better" somehow, it's not a practical solution.
Feel like it's worth linking to the Stop Killing Games campaign (https://www.stopkillinggames.com/) here! See also other recent thread on this story (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41665593) where one of the organizers commented on the relevance (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41666381). :)
It makes me wonder about the meta question about how to stop whatever the next iteration of this will be.
Like, if we look back at this, surely there were people saying, "Hey, things have changed. You don't actually 'own' the thing you think you're buying anymore. This could come back to bite you," but on the whole, not nearly enough people cared for it to shape the market.
There is sure to be another thing like this, some other movement where yet another owner of something finds a way to sell you access to it in a way that makes you think it's "yours," but actually all you have is permission to use it as long as they remain happy with you and happy to continue allowing you access. How do we make sure people know and care next time?
And what about the fact that, on the whole, most people are apparently fine with having access to things rather than ownership of them? How do you make the distinction when it matters, but allow both types of transactions? (For example, I'm glad I don't have to buy, and then sell, even a single room in a house to stay in when I'm traveling; paying to use it for a limited period is preferable to me in that situation.)
We know putting the information in the terms of use won't help, but what would?
> And what about the fact that, on the whole, most people are apparently fine with having access to things rather than ownership of them? How do you make the distinction when it matters, but allow both types of transactions?
We could engorge the commons. If people are okay with mere access, then (for easy-to-distribute things, like books and videogames) free culture should naturally outcompete comparable proprietary works.
Promote DRM-free cultural artefacts. If you'd drop $70 on a AAA title, drop $70 on a DRM-free game you like, and then tell your friends about it. (Try-before-you-buy is a feature, not a bug, though don't be stingy about this if you can afford not to.)
This isn't generally-applicable, of course, but deconstructing the "everything is property" schema might make it easier to get another angle on it.
This is the bill itself, which is pretty short and understandable: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
I think it's pretty sensible. For any digital good (including books and movies etc., not just games), if you're supposedly buying the thing, it can't be given to you in a form in which your ownership can be unilaterally revoked later.
Are they going to require refunds when the license is revoked?
That's not how any license agreement works.
ie. Your money is not collateral. You are paying for a license to use the software (game) for a period of time.
The disagreement concerns the licence's period of validity. If I lease a car, I know how long I can use it. When I buy a licence to use a game, the publisher can revoke the licence the day after I buy it, and the contract is drawn up in such a way that nothing obliges them to compensate me. The situation would be much healthier if the publisher announced a ‘5-year user license, including server maintenance and security patches’. It's like all those ‘lifetime’ licences that only cover one major edition of a software and give you a royal 20% discount on the licence for the next version. It's a deceptive practice.
> When I buy a licence to use a game, the publisher can revoke the licence the day after I buy it, and the contract is drawn up in such a way that nothing obliges them to compensate me.
On Steam (from Valve) you would be entitled to a full refund in that scenario.
Valve offers full refunds for any game you have played for less than two hours and owned for less than two weeks. In some other situations, they have also applied refunds outside that policy where the game turned out to be a fraud or something.
There are also many titles in people's Steam libraries that are no longer offered on Steam, but you can still download and play if you purchased it prior to it being pulled from Steam.
Valve probably has enough leverage to hold it off for a while, but rightholders seem to be trying to close that loophole. A store I previously bought FLACs from emailed me this week that a new Terms of Service comes into force on October 1 where the change is the service can remove downloads when the rightholder removes the music from sale and requests downloads to be removed as well. A few hours later I got a notification that a number of albums in purchase history will be removed from my available downloads on October 1st.
What if I've played for more than two hours and I'd like to finish the game? What if Valve changes its refund policy? What if the publisher forces me to go through another online shop (EPIC game)?
Valve is certainly a consumer-friendly company, but that's not the whole story and it doesn't change the fact that they're hiding vital information from consumers.
Valve doesn't refund you if the company shuts down their game servers, afaik.
There has to be some implied period of time for which it's fully usable.
No sane court is going to uphold an adhesion contract where someone pays $100 for a substantially multiplayer game (e.g. not Portal 1) yet the publisher is allowed to disable servers required for the game's multiplayer operation a week later because they cost money to maintain and the userbase hasn't hit targets.
If you are required to fully prepay, instead of pay a recurring fee, then the license term should be fixed to eternity, meaning a refund is in order if the license is ever revoked. Otherwise, it should have to be phrased as a recurring payment ($XX for first 2 years, $YY/year after that). This model that you pay fully up front but for an undefined term length is odious and should be illegal.
I mean, that would be fine if specified except it's a perpetual license that can be revoked at any time. Whether it's one hour or 10 years I'm not sure how it is good-faith to sell such a license without explicitly specifying the license duration and terms. Of course in practice, it is more like "perpetual provided that the entity you are licensing from elects to re-license from the rights-holder every X years" but I really don't see how such an arrangement should even be legal. You shouldn't be allowed to sell those kinds of licenses where the duration is dependent on third-party negotiations that have nothing to do with the initial license sale.
It's an odd world where we willingly trade dozens or hundreds of dollars for a couple hours of entertainment (golf, amusement parks, movies, dinner out, bars, vacation) but we're unwilling to trade similar amount of money for software (games) that give you many, many more hours of entertainment.
There's people who have spent literal days entertained by a game, but then complain they had to spend $70 for the privilege. Where else can you be entertained for a couple bucks an hour or less?
In my opinion, if you license a game and play it for a dozen hours... you've gotten your money's worth already. That said, I too would be disappointed if a game I enjoyed was removed from my library.
Restaurants don't tell me that I'm buying a table in the restaurant; they tell me I'm getting a meal. Movie theaters don't tell me I'm buying a seat in the theater; they tell me I'm seeing a movie.
Paying to play a game for some time is fine, but they shouldn't lie about what terms you're getting.
The point isn't whether or not it's a good deal. If I agree to license a game for 12 hours in exchange for $70, great. Like you say, I make deals like that sometimes. But that's not what we're talking about here, the licensor is misrepresenting it as a perpetual license and that should just be considered fraud.
I think there are more factors at play in this situation.
This is a case where even if you wanted to pay money to continue or start playing a game, you can't because someone else simply doesn't want you to.
This is a consumer-hostile shift from earlier days where if you owned the disk, disc or cartridge and a computer that could play it, you could play the game, no questions asked. I think it's always worth fighting against consumer hostile shifts.
Some people are collectors as much as they are gamers. A license (or whatever) is less valuable to a collector than a game.
> A license (or whatever) is less valuable to a collector than a game.
To be frank - nobody cares about collectors. That argument will not change how software is licensed one bit...
I was not making that argument. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What about physical game disks? I own the disk and can play the game as long as I have the disk. I can also resell or share the disk. Sony once demonstrated this on stage during the PS4 launch.
Digital licenses take away all of this and add the possibility that your licence can disappear at any time.
> I own the disk and can play the game as long as I have the disk.
Depends whether the game is 'online-only' or not.
Physical game disks have maybe one console generation left. Nintendo might keep cartridges around for two tops. The future is basically all digital. When doing his Mea Culpa rounds about Xbox losing the console wars, Phil Spencer talked about how being second in the generation where gamers built up digital libraries was likely too much to overcome.[1] Most game sales already happen digitally[2], and the number continues to rise.
[1] https://www.trueachievements.com/n53706/phil-spencer-intervi.... [2] https://academyofanimatedart.com/gaming-statistics/#:~:text=....
I wonder if this trend will expand to other goods, like when you "purchase" a car.
You might be licensed to operate the vehicle but restricted in specific interactions with it.
It seems the industry is moving in this direction, which is concerning due to the cost structure. It shifts control away from consumers and toward the IP owners of these products.
Tesla may be a notable example, where you're unable to make modifications or repairs to the car without a proper license.
What are you referring to with the car? Of course there are traffic laws. Similarly there are lots of physical objects you “buy” yet are restricted from using them to bludgeon someone.
They are referring to no-resale and no-third party repair clauses, and the like.
They shouldn't be allowed to call buying something you can't sell away.
Willing to bet that the retailers will opt to change the button label rather than change business practices.
I actually don’t even see the word “buy” currently. I see “add to cart” and “checkout”.
That said, I doubt it has any real impact on sales. It’s like “Beef chili” vs “Chili with beef”. The average consumer wouldn’t know the difference.
> It’s like “Beef chili” vs “Chili with beef”. The average consumer wouldn’t know the difference.
Idk, but where I lived before, at some point virtually everyone knew the difference between e.g. "cheese" and "cheese[-like] product", because it quite mattered - one is real cheese made with real milk, another is typically a plant-based substitute with quite different properties (and typically of much worse quality).
Average consumers aren't exactly dumb (at least, not at the individual level) when things actually matter to them. They're just uninformed and don't actively express the desire to learn (so they remain uninformed), so they can act not in their best interest because they aren't aware about something. But when we know, when the information gap closes - we act differently, and that's not going back. Education is important.
So it may impact licensing of digital media where user intent was specifically focused on indefinite access. E.g. movie or music sales when people had incorrectly assumed that "buying" means they can rewatch/relisten it whenever they like, no matter what (and then their "purchased" content disappears because licensing deal wasn't renewed or something).
Retailers will not be selling physical games for much longer tho. Walmart US has already started phasing them months ago.
Game shops like EB are likely going to stop soon too I imagine which also conincides with all their gaming merch and toys thats taking up the majority of their store space these days.
With limited exceptions, “physical games” for PCs today are just an alternative delivery mechanism vs. using one’s own Internet connection: you still end-up going through Steam, Epic’s store, or whatever - which means mandatory online activation - which means physical media is no guarantee of irrevocable use.
Methinks we need something like a Criterion Collection but for games… which I suppose would be GOG.com - but if they carried triple-A games from day 1, instead of having to wait a decade first.
Not just games. The law applies to any copyrightable work, afaict.
So, cannot use "buy" for modern phones and cars either? ;-)
Uh, there is not any car that the manufacturer can take away from you at-will, only in-car "services".
Recent and related:
Sony, Ubisoft scandals lead to California ban on deceptive digital goods sales - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41665593 - Sept 2024 (100 comments)
I have faith that the marketing department can spin this. "Why just BUY a game when you can get A LICENSE TO GAME. Show you friends how much of a badass you are with ALL YOUR GAME LICENSES"
"By purchasing the Terrasault Start Menu Launcher, you will be granted a FREE perpetual license to play Terrasault!"
Perpetual seems unlikely.
[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41665593
In this case, licensing should be more affordable than the physical sale given its ownership cannot be transferred.
I don't think people really want "buy" either. Not deep down.
For instance, I bought Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. That game is locked in. No fixes, no additions, no nothing. What is on the cart is what you get. Nintendo has no more obligation to me and I have no more obligation to them.
But people expect updates and changes. Let's not talk about "incomplete games being finished through updates", games get updated all the time now. Even for physical copies. Games now often install on the hardware and check for updates on first run.
So if we go to "buy", if you get a broken game, that's on you. Don't buy from them anymore. You don't get to hound the developers to "fix" the game. You paid for the thing, they gave you the thing. If you want a refund, return the thing.
I think we still haven't quite figured out how to work with ephemeral goods like software. It's kind of like a performance, kind of like a physical item, etc. It requires far more effort to generate than it does to copy. And buyers want to buy on the value of the copying, but sellers want to sell on the value of generation.
> So if we go to "buy", if you get a broken game, that's on you. Don't buy from them anymore. You don't get to hound the developers to "fix" the game. You paid for the thing, they gave you the thing. If you want a refund, return the thing.
No, it's the developers' responsibility to release a finished product that works properly. The ability to simply do updates later has introduced a cancerous mindset to almost all areas of software development, where it is now suddenly OK to release an unfinished, buggy, or broken product and "fix" it later.
> You don't get to hound the developers to "fix" the game.
Generally people purchase products with the expectation of them not being defective.
When I buy a single player game I expect to be able to play it in 10 years or even 20. I should get DRM free binaries that run on Windows 11 or what not.
If in 20 years I need to run an air gapped VM to play it, fine.
What's not cool is if a single player game needs to phone home, and when it can't, my purchase is disabled.
I'm fine with the buy terminology. When I buy a car, I get fixes for manufacturing defects for free. Day 1 bugs are similar defects.
But if you go to a shitty concert, you don't get your money back.
If you buy a shitty album, you can't get your money back. And you can't get the band to "make it better" for you.
Is software a thing? A performance? A recording? It has elements of each. And despite people saying "we've solved this issue", we haven't. We keep slapping on different metaphors and complaining when that metaphor inevitably fails.
That and no one really wants to pay the actual price for complete, error-free software. What they want is to get complete, error-free software for the price they've paid. Which is different.
> But if you go to a shitty concert, you don't get your money back. If you buy a shitty album, you can't get your money back. And you can't get the band to "make it better" for you.
The difference is whether "shitty" is subjective or actually defective.
Like, if you don't like the music, that's on you, someone else might like it.
And, I've certainly been to concerts / movies / events where there have been "experience-breaking" technical difficulties and they've (partially or fully) refunded the tickets.
Hi, I'm a people. I want to buy games, deep down. I want to slap a cart into my console, press power and just have the game be ready to play. I don't want internet connectivity. I'll wait a year or two for the sequel if I enjoyed it enough. Maybe I'll trade it or sell it. Hell, if I really enjoyed it, I want to be able to hold onto it and play it like this well past its original production run.
> For instance, I bought Super Mario World for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. That game is locked in.
And can't be taken away from you by the sunsetting of game servers. And this isn't just a problem for multiplayer games.
I personally have no interest in “buying” anymore, either.
The games I care about are the ones that I can play with my friends, online. Nearly all of these have transitioned to driving revenue from other means than an upfront purchase.
I’m arguably paying less now, than I did when I was younger. I used to have dozens of games that I played just a few times. $60 to sit on the shelf.
Now, I “subscribe” to one or two flavors of the month. I pay perpetually, but my overall cost is lower since I’m only paying for what I actually use.
I don’t see why you think this can’t work when the current system has only been in place for the last decade. The majority of things pre-2010 were all “fixed”. If anything, quality has only decreased since then, because companies know they can release the absolute bare minimum, and only have to invest as much as it takes to get the majority of buyers to stop having the energy to complain about it. If that were a fixed game instead, putting in that bare minimum would be a one time event, after which no one would buy from them again.
Even when you license a game on say Steam the developers have no obligation to fix any problems.
You get to self-refund a game on Steam within a certain timeframe, after that it's on you.
Game breaking bug? Eh, they got their money.
Okay but "buy" back then also implied that a game had to work, or else the reputation of a developer would be destroyed permanently rather than temporarily until fixes came out. And, correspondingly, there was not a culture of selling broken console games like there is today.
> But people expect updates and changes.
This entitled attitude is part of the problem. A game can’t simply be shipped and done anymore. It means the quality can slip, because “we’ll patch it after we ship.” It also means the author has to continue development indefinitely, which means they’re also never done.
Companies in the past making games that you would pay for once were somehow still making lots of money despite providing support for the game for a few years after launch.
The cost of a few years of support is built into the price of the software.
People also buy cars and still expect major bugs in software and hardware to be fixed for free
>But people expect updates and changes. Let's not talk about "incomplete games being finished through updates", games get updated all the time now. Even for physical copies. Games now often install on the hardware and check for updates on first run.
How so, I do not expect that a developer will add more content to a finished game for free. And AFAIK in the games I own the content updates are paid DLCs, I can only think at No Man sky as an exception that added more free content, in fact the thrend is to have like 50+ paid DLCs and milk the players for at least a decade.