Asking for DUers opinion on "Right to Repair" Do you think it is an important issue?

[Jedi Guy]

35. "The goal is that you will own nothing and like it."

The same is true of video games these days, sadly. Once upon a time you bought your game on physical media: cartridges back in the day, then later CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray, etc. And once you had purchased the game, you owned it. You could loan it to a friend for a weekend or, once you were done with it, trade it in at a game shop for credit towards a new game.

And that, of course, was what developers and publishers hated, because if I buy my games used they don't see a penny from that sale. It all goes to the game store, which was, of course, why they aggressively pushed used product. It was a parallel economy within the industry that cut the devs and publishers out of the loop.

So now here we are and the industry is aggressively focusing on downloadable games where there's no physical media. Steam has been around for ages and other digital marketplaces have cropped up to compete with it. You buy and download your games now, so there's no requirement for the publisher to press a disc, create packaging, ship it, etc. Everybody wins!

Except that's not how capitalism works. Bringing a game to market digitally costs the publisher less, but game prices have gone up year after year. Part of that is because the cost of development has skyrocketed as the industry has matured, but none of those savings on avoiding physical media get passed to the consumer. It's just extra profit for the publisher.

But that's not even the worst of it. The worst of it is that if I buy a game digitally, I'm not buying the game. I'm buying a license to play the game, technically speaking. And the publisher can simply revoke that license and take away my ability to play and enjoy the game I purchased. Or they can shutter the servers that support the game and render it unplayable.

Apologies in advance if you're aware of all this, but your statement about owning nothing and liking it just resonated really powerfully for me as someone who plays video games as my primary hobby.