Sony Removing Purchased Content
Cindy Harper (Hacker News, ArsTechnica):
Sony plans to wipe 551 movies and TV shows from the PlayStation Store libraries of customers who paid full price for them. The deletion is coming on September 1 and so far the company has said nothing about giving anyone their money back.
[…]
Anyone who hit “buy” on one of them will open their library that morning and find a hole where it used to be. PlayStation’s notice states it without apology: “You will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal, and it will be removed from your video library.”
The justification Sony offers runs to six words, “due to our content licensing agreements.”
You might try to avoid this problem by purchasing physical discs, but movies and TV shows no longer always make it to that medium. And the same will be true for games.
Sid Shuman (via Nick Heer):
As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only.
Timothy Geigner (Hacker News):
In all of our discussions about how the digital revolution has created a system in which people don’t actually own the things they think they’re buying, I get particularly frustrated by the lack of change in it all. We’ve spilled much ink complaining that this clearly anti-consumer practice needs to be done away with, where an unsuspecting public thinks they’re buying “a thing” only to learn months or years later that “the thing” they bought was actually a license to use/view/listen to another “thing”, and that license exists at the pleasure of the company that collected the money for it.
[…]
As Kotaku notes later in their post, part of what is striking in all of this is the sheer mundanity of the announcement. Because there have been no consequences, or any action at all from the public or government, Sony treats this all as if it’s perfectly normal and no big deal. You can tell me all you want about how the Ts and Cs in these purchases do in fact note that the nature of the purchase is a temporary licensing of the content for an undetermined time period… but I can promise you that the public in general doesn’t understand that. They think they’re buying a thing, not a license.
And that’s because of the purposeful obfuscation of that fact.
Sony’s recent decision to stop producing physical PlayStation games in the near future has naturally led to a renewed focus and appreciation for physical games that can be played just by sticking a cartridge or disc in a console. But an increasing number of those “physical” games these days still require additional downloads from a centralized server to function as intended.
Previously:
- Xbox Outage Affected Discs
- Removing Archives of Comedy Central and MTV News
- Sony Removing Purchased Discovery TV Shows
- HomePod Late Adopter
- Arrested Development Leaving Netflix Soon
- Apple Sued for Removing Purchased Content
- Apple Can Delete Purchased Movies From Your Library Without Telling You
3 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
The only sure path to digital ownership is to steal it, and no one should feel even a crumb of guilt for doing so.
“You might try to avoid this problem by purchasing physical discs, but movies and TV shows no longer always make it to that medium. And the same will be true for games.”
Yeah, that’s why people have started to realize physical media matters. What Sony is doing should be illegal, obviously, but we were foolish to let ourselves get to this place
And Apple pushed us into this mess sooner by removing disc drives so quickly
