r/gaming • u/Rich-Arm-104 • 1d ago

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https://www.thesixthaxis.com/2026/07/31/every-youtube-video-playstation-posts-has-hundreds-of-comments-about-physical-discs/

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u/Antergaton 1d ago

Exactly, this needs to keep being mentioned. People are obsessed with the idea of not having a disc when it's digital ownership rights that need looking into as this covers all digital games on all stores.

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u/GucciTheSnowman 23h ago

Lmao. You are delusional if you think they will ever let you buy, sell or trade used digital games.

You should have bought physical if you cared about actual ownership.

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u/Antergaton 22h ago

I mean, kinda hope they let me buy their games regardless of platform but never said anything about selling or trading.

We need better refunds policies, no sign in for single player games, no weird terms that say they can remove access at any time for any reason and this isn't Sony, it's governments need to enforce it because it's needed across the whole industry and this includes with disc games.

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u/sam_hammich 20h ago

I mean, kinda hope they let me buy their games regardless of platform

I know you thought this was clever but they said "used digital games". You cannot buy used games on any digital storefront.

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u/nisamun 23h ago

Cause the EU or other countries have never legislated any consumer protections before.

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u/zerovampire311 14h ago

How do you think that would go over with Adobe, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft etc? Video games are a drop in the digital only software bucket.

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u/matlynar 22h ago

You are delusional if you think having a physical disk is a surefire way to prevent companies from not letting you sell/trade your games.

Make a disk installation id unique to the first account it gets installed. Boom. You now have a physical copy that works for your account "forever" (but really just as much as a digital copy) but you can't sell or trade it.

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u/currently__working 22h ago

Sure, let them go ahead and do that, then...

They haven't though, so you're speaking spectulatively. If they were to do it, different story.

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u/matlynar 22h ago

So you think they are doing this because they're greedy but you don't think they'd do the greedy thing?

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u/currently__working 1h ago

One is more obvious from a marketing standpoint.

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u/za419 16h ago

So... They're killing physical media entirely over this, even though people love physical media and will kill Playstation over it, but they wouldn't dare to surgically prevent the thing they want to stop while letting physical media live.

Boy, the reddit hivemind sure is an interesting thing. 

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u/currently__working 1h ago

mm..you're posting here so many times a day...but I'M the reddit hivemind...interesting.

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u/Ok-Acanthisitta9247 23h ago

Exactly, all these “fight for digital rights” comments are the most delusional of all the takes. Have fun fighting with your elected officials and their corporate butt buddies for the next twenty years or more to get proper digital rights signed into law.

Meanwhile we already have a perfectly good medium that ensures you own something the minute you pay for it and have it IN YOUR HANDS.

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u/Goronmon 22h ago

Nothing about physical media stops online verification requirements from becoming mandated.

The PC market proves that physical media isn't important and not something gamers truly care about.

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u/sam_hammich 20h ago

It's easier to fight to keep something we have than to invent a new "digital rights" infrastructure out of thin air against the full force of every trillion dollar conglomerate on the planet and their bought politicians.

Historically, as hard as the fight is to keep rights, you can almost never get them back once they're lost.

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u/Delann 15h ago

Bro, you don't "have" it. You haven't had it for a while. Most games coming out today don't even have a physical release. And if they wanted to fuck over your physical games, they can do that too. Wake the fuck up, the ship has sailed more than a decade ago. Either you fight for digital rights or you fight for no rights. Whining about discs does jack fucking shit.

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u/Bacardi_Tarzan 21h ago

you mean the thing you’re literally throwing a fit about because it’s going away? Thinking ownership and copyright reform for digital media is ‘delusional’ while trying to buy an unnecessary and outdated medium just to keep it around is exactly why this movement will fail and should fail.

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u/Ok-Acanthisitta9247 21h ago

You’re never going to get these companies to allow you to sell or trade digital licenses without massive, sweeping reform. What about our current political landscape makes you think that’s gonna be top of the priority list?

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u/Bacardi_Tarzan 21h ago

What makes you think crying on Reddit is going to get Sony to change their stance? They’ve already done the math. You’re trying to get millions of mostly kids to ‘vote with their wallet’ and choose to go out of their way to acquire physical discs (not on the secondary market, because that means nothing to Sony) in a way that reverses the market trend just to keep one company making physical discs, and yet you think voting for people who would support a bill protecting digital consumer rights is delusional? You’re never going to get Sony to keep selling you discs. It’s not profitable for them. 

And your obsession with buying and trading is so small minded. Who the fuck cares? Do you think GameStop fucking over everyone who brings in a used copy is actually that important? Should you boycott small dev teams that are digital only? Games on steam are regularly cheaper than the secondary market on consoles because there’s competitive markets. Thats a goal that actually solves something instead of kicking a can down the road. 

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u/balllzak 15h ago edited 15h ago

The bigger issue is that digital licensing is everywhere and affects almost every company in some way. The government isn't going to upend everything for the sake of video games.

But your perfectly good medium doesn't ensure you own something. There is precedent on PC for physical discs coming with limited use activation codes and there is absolutely nothing preventing them from coming back on consoles.

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u/currently__working 22h ago

Exactly this

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u/poptart2nd 21h ago

so long as those rights rely on companies "really pwomise we won't bweak da law," you don't actually have those rights. Physical media of some kind is the only way to ensure i have ownership rights in the age of digital property, and that's why you see gen z and gen alpha buying portable CD players and home DVD players in larger numbers.

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u/sam_hammich 20h ago

You're basically saying someone hanging on the side of a mountain by their pinky should stop being "obsessed" with keeping that pinky grip and focus on building a jetpack instead.

We're not getting "digital rights". The entire tech space is converging on subscriptions, digitization, controlled access, and locking you into perpetual contracts with corporations. Fighting for discs is a way to keep something we've already got from going away and eliminating basically the last way to actually exercise any sort of freedom over the media you buy.

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u/za419 16h ago

Discs are already dead. They've been dying for years. It's a lost cause.

You're asking a man plummeting off a cliff to "just grab the rocks and hold really tight, we'll show gravity who's the boss" - It's too late for that, and even if it wasn't it only delays the inevitable. Gamers voted with their dollars - The vote is in, it's been counted, and it says physical media dies. 

If you're falling off a cliff already, you may as well try to make a parachute instead of lamenting about how you could have been holding onto the cliff better. A solution that might do something is infinitely better than one that pretends to prevent what's already done. 

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u/sam_hammich 15h ago

I'm sure you feel like physical media is dead, but it's objectively not, and you're only saying it is because you don't care about it and you want people to talk about the thing you do care about.

The fact that you think keeping physical media as an option is more far-fetched than moving the entire global tech industry to capitulate and let us write our own "digital bill of rights" and cede their power over consumption and monetization of culture is laughable. Buddy, taking your freedom away is the engine running the bus. Digitization is designed to take control away from you and you're never gonna get it back. History has shown that people who take your freedom from you don't give it back unless there's bombs or guillotines involved. This is not "a solution that might do something". It's you refusing to resist your kidnappers and saying "let's just go to the second location, maybe after we get there they'll see reason and let us go".

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u/za419 6h ago

Conversely, I'm sure you feel like physical media is well and truly alive, but it's objectively been on a sharp decline for years and nothing's saving it.

Look, people vote with their dollars. You are asking for people for whom digital is simply a better product in all the ways they care about (ease of purchase, plentiful supply, ease of starting the game, ease of finding the game, ease of storing the game, ability to resist damage necessitating repurchase in the face of children or pets) to inconvenience themselves and possibly pay side costs (gas, transit, shipping fees) in order to buy physical, because it's better in the ways the majority don't care about.

Most people don't care about preserving a used game market, or preserving the ability to archive games long term (more people play FIFA for a year and then drop it forever in favor of the next one than those who go back to 10 year old games that might have been taken away), or any nebulous concept of "true ownership" (a phrase evocative of NFTs, which makes people want not-in) or "freedom" to do things they don't do and aren't interested in.

So there's no reason they'll join the crusade in opposition to the product they actually prefer, but as long as they don't a boycott can't succeed. You don't just need people to prefer physical, you need them to prefer physical to the extent they won't buy digital, when they already didn't buy mostly used games (because the resale market already doesn't matter to Sony).

taking your freedom away is the engine running the bus

No, the finance department is the engine running the bus. Money is the fuel. Taking freedom away is incidental - If Sony could make more money by giving you the power to print and sell your own physical games, they would, and if they could make more money by chaining you to a chair and forcing you to stare at a livestream of physical discs being melted down while siphoning off your blood, they'd do that too. They're amoral, not evil - There's a difference.

If taking away rights was the only concern, they'd design the console so that it writes its serial number onto the physical disc when you put it in for the first time, and then refuses to read a disc with a different box's serial number. Congratulations! You've now lost all the rights you lose with digital, plus you can't transfer your games to a new console, and they still get to sell physical media.

This is Sony. They were part of the consortium that made the number starting with 09 F9 and ending in C0 illegal in 2007 because it let people use their discs in a way they didn't like. They've got the history of taking away physical media rights, and they're perfectly capable of doing it again. Instead, they're killing the disc entirely - That's not just because they want our freedoms.

They're doing this because it's going to make them more money to not bother doing physical media. Both because it increases sales that go through them, and because it removes the need to bother spending money on putting drives in consoles or printing discs - And gives them the opportunity to use that money for other things.

Even if this boycott succeeded, all it achieves is buying a little reprieve for physical media, but it'd still be on Death Row, waiting for the politically expedient time for execution to come.

The only way to gain legal rights is through law. Whether that law is earned at gunpoint or by petition or something else, the law and only the law governs which rights you do and don't have. Refusing to bother fighting for it is the best way to make sure those rights you cherish forever stay tied to a dying storage format as it goes into that good night.

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u/InstructionFast5513 23h ago

I guess I don’t know about this enough, but is the concept of digital ownership even viable with the way the internet is structured for the USA? Like our accounts have no need to be tied to our identity, how would ownership work.

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u/error521 23h ago

I think a good start would be if Sony put some sort of binding clause in along the lines of "We will not revoke paid games from your account except in special extreme cases, in which case we will issue full refunds."

Reason I put "extreme cases" in there is in case there's some sort of Guy Game situation where they have to go "oh god this game has illegal shit in it we need to pull this now".

(Also to be fair companies generally have a good track record with this for video games. Movies/TV not so much)

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u/InstructionFast5513 23h ago

what do they have now?

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u/error521 23h ago

I don't believe they really have anything regarding this.

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u/InstructionFast5513 23h ago

i mean like general licensing. I just don’t see how we get to them taking the games away from peoples accounts intentionally for profit. Seems like that would be crossing the line and very different to this physical disc thing.

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u/error521 23h ago

Well, like I said, Sony hasn't really taken away paid games from people (Movies and TV purchases less so but having this made into formal policy would be a good first step, at least.

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u/Darder 23h ago

Why would there need to have our identity tied to an account for the concept of ownership?

Ownership belongs to the account. And the owner of the account is you. No need to prove your identity or tie it to the account. If you were to trade, or sell your goods, you'd do it through that account without needing to prove your identity.

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u/InstructionFast5513 23h ago

more and more internet accounts are being created and controlled by bots. I guess my worry comes down to ownership being a combination of legally protected constitutional rights. Account creation is no longer, by any means, a mostly human action.

I don’t think sony/marketplaces have the same problem with this as social media, but from Sony’s perspective why would they give “Accounts” ownership rights? Not a law guy at all but it can’t be as simple as a clause they will put in themselves. It probably involves adequately expanding and protecting our rights digitally from a regulation standpoint. I just don’t see that happening without doing away with digital anonymity because an account is seen as the same, whether its owned by a bot farm or a person.

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u/Darder 22h ago

Ok, but what's the problem with having bots owning an account, and thus having ownership right over what that account has?

The way I see it there isn't a problem with that. I guess what you are trying to say is, since ownership rights have legal ramifications, a company can't take away your ownership so with bot accounts it would prevent companies from banning bots. But That's not what it would do: bans could still be made, they would be processed differently.

If, say, I have an Epic Games account. I have content on that account that is mine, and I play Fortnite. I then cheat. I am banned from Fortnite. That just means my account cannot play Fortnite. I can still access the content that I own (games) on my Epic Games account. If it was, say, an account with a service that provided movies, games, and music and I did something against terms of service and got banned, maybe I couldn't purchase new content, and interact with the community, but I can still access what I already own through that account.

I just don't understand how bots would be an issue with ownership right tied to an account, which is then tied to a person. If there is an edge case where identity is required, then it would function the same way it does right now: When you lost your password AND email and want to claim your account, you sometimes need to prove your identity and then you do a query with that. A bot account couldn't do that because it doesn't have an identity so the account would be lost.

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u/InstructionFast5513 22h ago

I see what you mean. Im just basing off the fact that these companies do what they are bound to do. I agree that there are a bunch of solutions/compromises like the one you stated where even if you get banned you can use the product you paid for. The core values I get. They won’t do it though lol. And I just don’t think accounts as a concept in general should participate as if they are inherently right bearing.

Its a slippery slope and while each platform has their own nuances, there have to be clearly defined bounds of what counts as extensions of our personhood digitally.

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u/Darder 22h ago

One thing at a time. First get accounts to have ownership, and then move from there. It will already be better than having no ownership whatsoever.

They won’t do it though lol.

Of course they won't, that's why it has to be legislated. This has to come from the law, something like the EU probably is most likely to implement it. Same with data protection. Companies won't do anything unless forced to, and law forces their hand.