Evergreen licenses are incredibly common when selling software, not just games.
Your suggestions are either:
- make publishers distribute goods without anti-piracy protection
- make buyers pay for games on an ongoing basis rather than just once
Publishers and buyers are generally happy with the current exchange as is even if you aren't. Digital games sales are increasing rapidly ever year while physical sales are declining. Why do you get to be the gaming czar?
There IS a reason they don't make it possible to download the game copies directly, which is it becomes trivially easy to perfectly replicate and distribute new copies online, which is not true of any physical good.
People who aren't overly-online forum denizens only care about this issue insofar as it affects them, and the only way it affects people in the real world is when they lose access to online games when the server shuts down. Offline games don't get access revoked in practice.
I can still play the games I bought on the nintendo switch 8 years ago.
> Why carry water for billion companies?
All companies at a certain scale are billion dollar companies. Also, how much money a company has is unrelated to whether they violated consumer rights or not. But, tangentially, I do generally respect entities that fund creative endeavors moreso than I respect gamers who go online to bemoan how persecuted they are
Rent and Subscribe would NOT be clear because they imply ongoing payment. Consumers care mostly about if they are paying money once or on an ongoing basis, not abstract things like DRM.
1. Because you referred to lines of code as the way to suggest SQL is obvious better, not performance
2. No, my point was that talking about code clarity was a distraction because to talk about lines of code as a determinant of performance is clearly wrong.
3. Tangentially, yes, if some behavior takes 100 lines of general purpose code to express, I would rather read it in the general purpose language than in SQL even if the SQL was fewer lines. It's hard to imagine why this would ever be the case though.
As yes, the poor, ignorant average joe, who doesn't realize the game they buy on the PLAYSTATION store needs PLAYSTATION to work in order to play it. If only enough bloggers wrote enough articles to enlighten them, then they would join the mob and demand forever access to the games they play for 3 weeks then never play again.
I am understandably pissed that Apple no longer makes small 5-inch iphones because I like them. But other consumers like the bigger phones, so Apple discontinued the mini line.
Is Apple doing me an injustice by not selling me the good that I want?
Is this a question of rights or consumer preferences?
This is just pedantry, and incorrect pedantry at that. BUY does not always mean you gain ownership. You can BUY a license or a haircut and you don't own anything.
Are consumers confused in practice by what happens when they click "Buy" on the playstation store? Does anyone really thing Buy here means they will be able to download the game onto their computer and play it there?
Fine, pass a regulation that makes online stores change the word to license or whatever. Will that relieve your sense of persecution? Or would just you find another way to cast game publishers as the conniving evil empire (market control, collusion to reduce consumer options, etc.) because they aren't giving you what you want?