It took Sony's controversial news to bring me back. I'll never be gone for good.

We all know the news: Sony announced that Playstation will no longer support physical games and gamers are in an uproar. I've not bought a physical game since the 3DS, so I literally do not care, but it brings up something really interesting. "Ownership."

There is this sentiment going around that the outrage is not about liking physical media, but that physical media means you own your games. But it doesn't mean that. There are economic forces at play that I think almost no one understands, and weird takes around this that don't make any sense, but at the end of the day, it really revolves around one thing: piracy and copyright.

First, one obvious think needs to be agreed on - physical media is digital media. It's the same thing. People are talking about how you can only preserve games through physical media - my brother in Christ... How do you think it got there? No media is physical. All of it is digital. What we call physical is just the medium of storage, which again is always physical whether you download it on a disk or on a hard drive. The problem with downloading it on a hard drive is not an issue about physical vs digital. The software is digital and the storage is physical always. The problem is copyright.

When you "buy" a game, you purchase a license to use it. This is always the case. The reason you purchase a license instead of the game outright is because the digital thing is the copyrighted material. The disk its on, for example, is not. The console it's on is not. You can sell a PS5 with some game on it, but you can't sell the actual game because selling the game, and not the hardware its on, will always be copyright infringement, because selling the game, and not the hardware, requires copying the software. It's physically impossible to do this otherwise.

People hate DRM and the licensing nature of video games, but this is because copyright exists. Without DRM, it becomes trivially easy to reproduce software because the marginal cost of reproduction is $0, and it becomes insurmountably difficult to enforce because enforcement costs to much in comparison with the profit anyone is expecting to make. People hate that Sony is doing this, but Sony is doing this because they can't keep making money otherwise. There's a reason they've largely switched to live service business models. There's a reason Nintendo switched (lol) to game key cards. There's a reason Xbox has switched to their weird pseudo-console limbo they are in right now.

You can't perpetually make money on a good that costs $0 to reproduce unless you create artificial scarcity, but the methods they used to use it not working as well anymore, and I bet a large reason for that is because you don't really need a console to game anymore, so all 3 are facing a lot more competition than they used to. You can play PC games on android now, PC is becoming more console like, and PC has piracy. 

I know people like to believe that piracy only exists when companies fail or something, but that's not true. Piracy is economics working predictably. People pirate because it's as easy to download 100 free games as it is to harvest water in the rain. Right now, you can download a launcher that can play almost any game you want past present or future on one device and have it run exceptionally, and you actually own it all. People love GoG because there's no DRM, but that means that the only reason to buy a game on GoG is principle, because realistically you will not get caught if you download the game for free somewhere else, and I promise you if it doesn't have DRM isn't already torrent-able somewhere. And the funny think is that if you pirate a game, you can literally just burn it on a disk, put it in a nice box, add a manual lol whatever you want. You can make physical games that literally don't exist.

You're not entitled to physical media, and Sony isn't evil for not wanting to make it anymore. What they are is delusional, as is the rest of an industry built on the lie that there is inherent exchange value to non-rivalrous goods. So they are going out swinging, and so are gamers. Gamers want to pay the cheapest price possible for a game, but not $0, and companies want to charge the most expensive price possible, but it can't ultimately be more then $0. It doesn't matter how many hundreds of millions of dollars it costed to produce. It costs $0 to reprice, which means the supply is abundant, which means the price should be moving to that marginal cost of reproduction. Gaming companies aren't entitled to making their money back just because they worked really hard and spent a lot of money on making a game, even if people really like it. That's not how economics works. It's supply and demand. They chose to put millions of dollars into making something with infinite supply, and are complaining when people don't buy it. They outlaw it.

There's this idea that if there was no copyright law, no one would ever make anything and everything would stagnate... Except for literally everything everything invented before copyright law existed. There's a large upfront cost to making things, isn't there? How can anyone afford to make anything if they don't expect to make money from it to recoup the upfront cost? First, there has always been patronage, but second, the reason things are so expensive upfront is because the entire global supply chain is artificially inflated by copyrights. If there was no copyright, then literally every thing needed to make anything would be exponentially cheaper because there wouldn't be an added copyright tax. Almost every good on earth, digital or otherwise, would almost immediately reach its price of marginal reproduction. The price of marginal reproduction is the cost to make a copy of something. If you have a computer, the cost to make another one of that computer is the marginal cost of reproduction.

Large gaming companies would probably stop making games, because there would just be no profitability anymore, but people would still make games out of passion. You would see a lot more indie-like experiences, and as technology improves, they would rival AAA in ambition, much like how one person can make a game now that would have been AAA 15 years ago. This already happens in music and in film. People make things for free because they love it, or they would crowdsource the creation of something because people are willing to pay for the production of the first thing rather than the ownership of the second.

But all this probably sounds icky to most of you, because piracy has this social stigma largely because people tie economic value with qualitative value. It seems insulting to claim that the most beautiful, impactful, innovative game on earth is worthless, but it is. It's worthless. It's worth nothing. So is the best film on earth, the best album on earth, and the best book on earth. All worthless, monetarily. Buying a good is a trade of something you have but don't want for something you want but can't get otherwise. It's not charity.

So gamers want piracy because it gives them the ownership they want over their games, but they don't want piracy because they think games are valuable qualitatively, and they want that to translate monetarily. If you see a struggling indie gamer, you want to sell them the fantasy that their game is worth something because you want to believe that fantasy for them. But they would realistically be better off working hard for 10 years in a job they don't like that pays well, saving to buy a farm somewhere cheap, living off the land so they don't need an income, making a kickstarter for the game they want to make, and then releasing the game for free.

Gamers want piracy and gamers don't want piracy. That's a contradiction. It can't logically be both, so which one is it?

Also I do not advocate piracy of any kind. It's illegal and you should not commit crimes, because the consequences can be bad for you. That being said, if you did and just used a vpn, no one would find out an you would save thousands of dollars and have a better experience and it would be better for the world. What I do advocate for is making legislation for ending copyright laws and decriminalizing piracy, because while it's illegal, it's definitely not wrong. Do not pirate. Contact your local representative and help get the laws changes so you don't have to call it piracy anymore. it's really just sharing.

EDIT: OMG, also for those of you who do this, stop calling yourselves "consumers," and stop letting companies talk to you like that. You're not a being whose role it is to hedonistically consume what is fed to you. That's borderline a slur - don't let people talk to you like that and don't talk about yourself or other people like that. You're not a "consumer:" you're a person. Be a producer. Be a gamer. Be anything else, but don't let people categorize you as something who's relevant function is to consume things. Insane that that's a thing.

If Pirating is OK, then everyone should do it right? But if everyone Pirates, who's going to buy games? No one? Then no games are going to be made.

Pirates know this. They hope there are paying gamers out there, so games keep being made for them to Pirate.
Essentially Pirates leach off those that do pay.

I think if someone is religious, the fear of "thou shall not steal" would be a deterrent. Sure they could hide behind a vpn, but they can't hide anything from St Peter.

If every gamer had all the time and money in the world, some would still pirate things. However, most of the people who pirate would rather buy it than pirate it. Steam's role in reducing PC piracy drastically over the years prove so.

You cannot fully erase piracy, so the question is how to make all people who would rather pay than pirate it actually do so instead of sailing the seas. That's a combination of price, ease to purchase, non-oppressive DRM, and enough customer confidence. They all know that, but they don't want that. They want full control of their sales, and a lot of control over the players (data gathering, mandatory official servers with no private servers, mandatory internet connection, no modding to push microtransactions-DLC, Denuvo and other anti-piracy, "limited license" instead of actual sales...). Anti-piracy is just an excuse they use to get the control they want.

Piracy and physical media are completely unrelated things.

The point of physical media is to be able to buy, collect and resell it, and so that you have some level of guarantee that 20 years later you can still play the game you paid for. Everything else has applied to books for more than 500 years.

I might read this fully later, but by the time I'd read just about a third, I was already disagreeing about so much that I'm not so sure I want to invest the time to do so.

I wouldn't do it. But if it upticks, they only have themselves to blame. History shows the masses behave in certain ways when certain things happen. They have that historical data to pull from just as much as the rest of us.

You forgot one point: Archiving.

It's a bit hard to archive fully digitally, especially if there were other things in the box. Source codes generally got saved on a physical media even though Git and similar alternatives exist, including internal servers.

I don't want piracy, I want accessibility. If a title isn't available any other way apart from pirating it, even if it was only for archiving purposes, then I can't blame piracy, I blame the rights holders for not giving a legal way to access the title. This is even more acute with online-only titles, as once the servers are shut down there's little in the way of accessing or acquiring that title anymore unless someone was able to run it on a private server beforehand.

This is also why I support Stop Killing Games wholeheartedly, as the games are part of our history, and I don't want any part of history to be erased forever.

Yes, if piracy is okay, then it's okay if everyone does it. If everyone pirates, no one buys games.

It does not follow that if no one buys games though, that no one will make games. That assumes the false premise that games can only be made if people buy them, but that's not true. Fan games exist, people make games for free, and patronage models exist where people commission art. What piracy destroys is the reproduction market. What it doesn't touch is the first production market. Kickstarter and patreon proves this. If a game people want won't get made unless the person making the came makes X amount of money, and there is demand for X amount of money for that game to merely exist, then that supply of 1 meets the demand of Z and the game gets made.

What you are talking about is the free loader problem, but that isn't a problem and only exists because the goods have no inherent exchange value and pirates know it. Actually, everyone knows it, but we buy games anyway out of principle or fear of prosecution.

Piracy isn't theft, though: it's copying. For something to be theft, one person loses something and the other person gains something. With piracy, no one loses anything and the other person gains something.

I don't think it's the case that most people who pirate would rather buy than pirate. I think most people who pirate would rather pirate. I think Steam reduced piracy because buying games on steam was more convenient than pirating at the time, not because people want to pay for something rather than get it for free. That's not the case anymore. There are launchers that allow you to download pirated games from a storefront that feels like steam, has achievements, friends lists, emulation fronts, big picture mode, etc, and they are free and open source. I think people pirate because buying a game doesn't make fiscal sense when you can pirate almost any game you want as easily with the same conveniences now for free forever with no platform anchoring. Also, piracy is surging on PC again. Valve momentarily put a bandage on the abundance problem, but like Spotify, it was not and could never be a permanent solution.

I think it's more than just that you can't fully erase piracy. You cannot eternally sustain copyright. It depends on a false assumption - that prices for abundant goods can be artificially made scarce forever. Value comes from supply meeting demand. The supply of all software that is not the first one is always potentially abundant, which means that someone will always figure out that it will cost less money for everyone to figure out how to distribute that piece of software once than it is for anyone to actually pay for it. You can't escape that.

Again, economics isn't charity. People are not going to pay more than more than software is worth forever, and it's to expensive to enforce now. Eventually it will cost less money to let people pirate than to enforce its protection. For most devs it already is. That will increase until it's not feasible for anyone, which will lead to more piracy, which will lead to less profits until these companies can't sustain themselves anymore because the entire business model contradicts thermodynamics. You can't legislate this stuff away for ever because people will always want to pay less than more, so eventually enough people won't care that maintaining copyright law will become unpopular.

You can buy, collect, and resell things now, with digital media. You just have to sell your system. On pc, you can buy an SD card and put it on that and you literally have a game cartridge. In fact, you can do that 100x and make a business out of selling physical versions of Cyberpunk 2077 with a box and manual and a little cyberpunk sticker on it and everything to make it collectable. The thing is, doing that is making a copy, which is copyright infringement.

Or hey, you can just download the download on that SD card. Same thing, and now you are not selling a copy. Not copyright infringement, but you're doing the same thing as selling the system. Buy the physical media is not what gives you the guarantee that you can play the game 20 years later. It's the lack of DRM enforcing an EULA, which exists to protect the risks of copyright when it meets with reality.

Either way, copyright is the issue, and the solution is not physical media, it's either no DRM, which makes piracy easier, or DRM, which means you don't "own" your games. Emulation is the prime way games are preserved today. That's digital preservation, not physical. Piracy guarantees you can play the game you paid for 20 years later, not physical media.

Digital games are associated with your Microsoft/XBox/AppleId/Playstation account or whatever.  There is no resell option.  There is no official box to put on your shelf.

To be fair, I suspect that the days of games that get to a "final state" you can put on a disk are mostly over.  Mostly companies will want you to have a monthly subscription which requires changes, and events, and updates.  Then you can play it as long as you continue to pay monthly.