The difference in concept is the same as the difference in concept between owning a house and owning a trademark. They're both forms of ownership, but with different details. It's a lot harder to repossess a house than it is to repossess a trademark.

While the license to the physical game resides with the disc, the license to the digital game resides with the account. The company can't cancel a physical disc, but they can cancel an account.

That's a matter of convinence then, not a matter of ownership. This topic is soley about the legal ownership of the game itself, not the convinence of sharing/selling games. Sharing/selling the disc =/= ownership of the game, which is the point I was trying to make.

They can cancel your access to the game though, legally it is well within their right. They don't, however, just like how usually your account won't get completely banned unless you do something illegal or grossly against the ToS.

They can only cancel your access to a physical game if you break the law regarding it (and then they still need to go through legal channels to remove your license). On the other hand, accounts can go down by mistake, they can be taken down at the company's whim if they feel you've broken the ToS, or they could go bankrupt and the servers could go down (this one applies in the case where the game itself calls home).

What's more, if they cancel your access to a physical game, you can still sell the physical disc to somebody else, who can then play it. If they cancel your account, that's the end of it. No more game. And no form of financial restitution whatsoever.

People want to be able to play games even if the online servers are down/kaput. Biggest concern with digital is that they might require online based activation or keep alive type stuff. Even if they don't right now, they could add such a requirement.

While we all know the disk version of the game works without any online check-in, even there they could add some kind of online check-in requirement like MS was planning to do with XBO until all the gamer backlash. As long as gamers stay vigilent, they can keep both the retail and digital spaces user friendly to the way gamers legally buy and consume games.

PS - Even though I buy physical where I have option over digital except rare cases, I like that digital exists because it allows for many innovative awesome indie games to exist which wouldn't in a purely retail driven business.

i am digital only so far this gen, but what you are saying though technically correct, isn't entirely true.

key difference is in change of ownership. by law nothing stops you from selling your physical games or buying used physical games.

this is practically impossible with digital games. being that with digital while you own the license to the game, you lack the means to transfer that license to anyone you want. Now if we had a way to sell or transfer our digital licenses at any price we wanted.. then yeah, there really would be no difference owning the two.

A simple fic for this would be for sony/ms/nintendo to have a fixed license transfer fee, say $10 so anyone can transfer ownership of their digital games. So whatever you add to that $10 goes into your account. eg. you sell a game you own for $20, they take $10 and you get credited $10.

In Brazil digital is not a good option, internet here is too slow in 95-98% of the country, only major capitols get the good stuff.
Not even PSNow works in my area...

It is not a major part of the debate, because the debate is principally around resale / lending / swapping and portability. The fact of owning a plastic disc a case and, if you're lucky an insert or game manual, and a licence rather than all of thosebthings plus owning an actual copy of the game is merely a technical legal distinction that has no bearing on what people do or can do with their licence.

We also don't own the movies we buy on DVD/vhs /blue ray, or the music we buy on CD, or the books we buy. In all cases we have know rights over that material except that which has been granted by the rights holder. But you don't ever hear people talking about owning a licence to read a book or watch a video. So in the end you're just talking semantics not practical realities.

Yeah, no. Read your EULA. They can pretty much cancel your rights to the game whenever they please.

But semantics is exactly what I'm discussing. Practical reality is a different matter altogether. In practical reality, people buy and trade physical games, and always have access to their digital games. In terms of pure semantics though, there is no legal ownership for physical games. In pure semantics, a company can take away your right to play the physical game just as easily as a digital. My point is, legal ownership is not a favorable point for phyysical games. You can make the case for convinence, which is a subjective point for both, but legal ownership is clear cut in this case.