All of this is to say that video game ownership is incommensurate with being against file copying and file sharing. Companies do what Sony is doing because it is otherwise trivially easy to simply copy any game infinitely in literally less than a second and subsequently share it infinitely. Its abundance of supply craters demand for their games, because they have to compete in price with $0, something no one can do.
Whenever you “sell a physical game,” you are selling a combination of the physical media it’s on plus the game itself. This is true whether the media is a disk, a cartridge, or a console. The reason this is not illegal is because you’re kind of just selling the physical media. Again, without DRM, it is trivially easy to just copy the file to multiple SD cards and sell each of those. You don’t own the game - you own the physical media the game is on and you’re selling that, because you legally can’t just sell the game. When you sell a used book, you’re not selling the story - you’re selling the paper the story is on. You don’t legally own the story. The copyright holder does, and they have a legal monopoly on distribution.
What they don’t have is a physical monopoly on distribution. I have no sympathy to Sony or Nintendo or Microsoft or Valve or CD Projekt Red, but they do what they do because this business literally cannot survive the physical reality of non-rivalry and $0 marginal cost of reproduction. Sony making their systems digital only makes it exponentially harder to file-share games, meaning they can actually more effectively artificially limit supply within their platform before they are ultimately cracked. CDPR is sheerly operating off of non-existent good will, which is crazy to me.
EDIT: Here is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. I didn’t even know this existed. I just understand hardware and software enough to know that this is possible and that this is how it would work.
Someone made an operating system that allows you to download DRM free games directly onto an SD card and this operating system will automatically boot your DRM free games. The fact is that even if you legally purchase these games, which is the specific intent of this specific software since it’s not meant for file sharing or file copying free games, this is completely illegal in the USA at least unless you download the original file onto the SD card directly from the store you buy it at the moment do you buy it. Technically even moving a file from one folder to another is copying it and copying a copyrighted file is copyright infringement. What I just said literally has legal president. There was a case that makes this true.
So again, this has nothing to do with physical games and everything to do with the legality of file sharing and file copying. In other words, privacy.
Last edited by Frogger - on 10 July 2026
