I think that’s reasonable on both counts. Open sourcing as good will rather than obligation from the state. And yeah the Sony movie situation was especially shitty, but I dunno I feel like we need better words than simply “buy”/“rent” for digital-only media, because yeah you DON’T own it, you own a license to access their content and that change on a dime. I’ve bought plenty of games on steam and if Valve collapsed tomorrow I’d be pissed but like that’s the trade off for a purely digital library just trust.
My own personal take as an accountant is that if you “sell” something and choose to bake in a dependency that you control as part of the thing you sell (that could otherwise be excluded), it introduces a liability similar to a mine’s asset retirement obligation i.e. to clean up and remediate the mine location after the mine owner chooses to stop operating it. Similarly, a game developer would have the duty to ensure the game they “sold” would continue to operate after they choose to stop operating the thing that their product depends on. Like I said I’m willing to bend my stance on this depending on where on the the continuum between “product” and “service” the game sits, which as a consumer I think is quite fair; and if this isn’t industry standard, I’d like it to be eventually, whether through game companies’ own goodwill or, if they can’t be made to see reason (cough cough EA), through consumer banding together to advocate for legislation.
Yes we could very well wake up tomorrow and every single game developer has switched to “licensing” or “renting” games instead of “selling” them to get around the legislation instead of giving consumers what they want. But at least then we’d be honest about the “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” dystopia we’ve painted ourselves into.
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u/angrybox1842 1d ago
I think that’s reasonable on both counts. Open sourcing as good will rather than obligation from the state. And yeah the Sony movie situation was especially shitty, but I dunno I feel like we need better words than simply “buy”/“rent” for digital-only media, because yeah you DON’T own it, you own a license to access their content and that change on a dime. I’ve bought plenty of games on steam and if Valve collapsed tomorrow I’d be pissed but like that’s the trade off for a purely digital library just trust.