I wrote the context of IP which you hand wave all of history and reality away to double down on your point that software is somehow different. To be blunt, it isn’t.
I am not fighting anything, just giving an obvious critique of a broken system. The only person defending anything is you.
You deny the right of resale and can’t even state a real reason for this and instead blame it on the consumer. This is because only someone acting like a bootlicking corporate loser would think people don’t have the right to resale their property and that they don’t actually own anything. This is what is counterintuitive to everyone. You want to destroy ownership because it serves your masters. That is all that is going on here.
Neither Sony nor Xbox ever seriously contemplated a digital resale system. You can’t just make up facts. Xbox did propose a system that would heavily restrict game sharing and allow retailers to conduct digital and physical transfers. The problem is you could no longer share a disk with a friend without their designated 3rd party being involved.
You place all the onus on their infrastructure but with a distributed system not bent solely on corporate control, everything you describe is simply not necessary. Also, I have been in the server space so I know you could run an authorization server for less that $100 a year. I am am sure Sony and Xbox couldn’t afford this enormous burdensome cost.
Comparing a dumb receiver like a TV to a computer is silly. Furthermore it ignores that people did record the information they received with the advent of the VHS. I find it ironic that you are taking corporations side in this argument and that you would have been up against Mr. Rogers when they tried to ban VHS.
You know you have a bad argument if you are against Mr. Rogers. This also highlights your profound ignorance of history and technology. It makes your argument very weak in my opinion.
You clearly don’t understand the IP system in regards to software. You make so many obviously silly arguments and ignore the evidence. While code is copyrightable, ideas, algorithms, and functionality is not. You entire argument is based on misunderstanding as I said in the beginning. You are probably thinking of software patents which I personally find extremely distasteful for the reasons I have already mentioned.
I said that IP itself is an absurd principle because it relies on creating artificial scarcity. You say cave art isn’t the same because it has no monthly bill. This highlights how much less digital content is worth. You can’t even access it without expensive hardware and Internet. Cave art is actually worth much more because of its tangible non-connected nature. This reality teaches us purely digital products should be much much cheaper than their physical counterparts.
You have constructed quite the strawman saying gamers are demanding a single purchase and indefinite support. The problem is, you are the only one saying this. I would recommend looking up Stop Killing Games movement to understand what people are actually asking for.
They aren’t asking for companies to indefinitely host content. What they are asking for is for companies to stop killing games when they can easily turn off server checks once they have decided to stop supporting a game. Essentially corporations want their cake and to eat it to thus destroying art in the name of commerce.
You make lots of other insane claims that I am not going to bother shooting down because frankly, it is not worth it. Thanks for talking with me.
When the ad hominem attacks and “bootlicker” insults come out, it is usually because the technical and legal arguments have run dry. Let’s bypass the emotional outbursts and look directly at the staggering technical inaccuracies in your response.
$100 Enterprise Server Myth
You claim an authorization server costs $100 a year. Let’s look at the actual math for enterprise infrastructure. Amazon’s enterprise DDoS protection (AWS Shield Advanced) costs a flat $3,000 a month before you even factor in data transfer fees. https://aws.amazon.com/shield/pricing
Enterprise-grade Multi-AZ databases run thousands of dollars a month depending on IOPS and storage scale. Maintaining standard SOC 2 Type II security compliance to handle user data costs between $30,000 and $150,000+ a year. https://drata.com/learn/soc-2/cost
All this infrastructure requires a 24/7 rotation of Site Reliability Engineers, who average over $130,000 a year in base salary. https://www.kore1.com/sre-salary-guide-2026
You are off by a factor of about ten thousand
“Stop Killing Games”
You claim companies can “easily turn off server checks” once they drop support for a game. This betrays a complete absence of experience with modern captive console infrastructure and server-authoritative game loops.
For a live-service game, the server is not a DRM tollbooth checking an ID at the door. The client on your machine is largely a dumb terminal. The server actively runs the critical game logic: authoritative physics, AI behavioral trees, secure state management, and proprietary matchmaking APIs. You cannot “just turn off the check.”
To make a live-service game function offline, a studio has to completely re-engineer the backend architecture to compile and run locally on the client’s hardware. They have to strip out licensed third-party middleware and completely rewrite the game to bypass the strict Technical Requirement Checklists (TRCs) and Xbox Requirements (XRs) mandated by Sony and Microsoft. You are demanding that a studio spend months of uncompensated engineering and QA labor to build a bespoke offline off-ramp for a deprecated product. It is a fundamental rewrite of the game’s spine, not a flipped switch.
Historical Revisionism of 2013
You are actively rewriting history regarding the digital resale market, likely because you were only experiencing it from the consumer side of the screen. Having been deeply embedded in the development and publishing pipeline during the transition to the eighth-generation consoles, I find the historical revisionism around what happened in 2013 baffling.
The digital resale and loaning mechanics were not theoretical whiteboard concepts or corporate propaganda. They were fully functional APIs baked directly into the Durango (Xbox One) and Orbis (PS4) DevKits. The hardware and the SDKs were entirely engineered around digital entitlement transfers. Xbox explicitly outlined the infrastructure to allow digital trade-ins at participating retailers and a “Family Sharing” plan that allowed a digital library to be shared across ten different accounts. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2013/06/06/license/
We were on the verge of a true digital secondary market. It was killed because a vocal minority of consumers kicked up such a massive fuss about physical plastic that Microsoft’s stock tanked and they completely backpedaled. Sony, who had the exact same infrastructure functioning in their dev kits, watched the backlash, scrapped their announcement, and presented the exact opposite plan eight hours later just to play the hero. Both companies then scrambled to re-engineer their system software prior to launch. Consumers killed the digital resale market themselves because they refused to accept the digital infrastructure required to make it function. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2013/06/19/update/
Misunderstanding of Mr. Rogers and VHS
Bringing up Mr. Rogers testifying in the Betamax case is a beautiful piece of nostalgia, but you completely misunderstand the legal ruling. Mr. Rogers testified in favor of time-shifting, the ability for families to record a broadcast to watch it at a more convenient time.
You can label the legal realities of software licensing as “corporate propaganda” all you want. But your entire worldview relies on pretending that complex, server-authoritative digital ecosystems are equivalent to static cave paintings, that global enterprise server architecture costs less than a Netflix subscription, and that re-engineering a live game for offline use requires zero human labor.
You are demanding permanent, absolute dominion over the ongoing intellectual labor of development teams and operations engineers, and you want it all for a one-time fee of $60. That is not a defense of consumer rights. It is a fundamental denial of how modern technology actually operates.
As with several commenters before you, you have brought a lot of emotional outrage to this discussion, but absolutely zero factual evidence to back up your legal or ethical claims. Your stance on the ethical capitalization of intellectual labor does not liberate anyone. By demanding, uncompensated access to a team’s ongoing maintenance and server labor for a single upfront fee, you are echoing the exact rhetoric used by robber barons to justify indentured servitude and union busting. You have simply replaced the 19th-century factory floor with a digital storefront, demanding the exact same permanent exploitation of the workers who keep it running.
I am just explaining to you how you act. If you don’t want people to treat you like a bootlicker then don’t act like one. It is rather simple honestly.
Oh look, you make up a bunch of additional costs that are not related to running the authorization server at all. You don’t have to use anything you are describing unless you want to. You don’t have to store personal information, you don’t have to have expensive DDOS protection which has turned into quite the racket for companies like cloud flare. You don’t have to have engineers on staff at all times.
You once again construct a strawman to satisfy your insatiable desire to be correct. No one said they expect a live service game to be run indefinitely. I find it amazing how quickly you construct lies. If you are not going to bother to read and understand then don’t be surprised when people dismiss the AI slop you spew.
I am so sorry that the last console push towards digitization didn’t work out because people didn’t like the restrictive systems being proposed. That they didn’t want to run down to GameStop to be able to trade a game with a friend. It was a ridiculous idea and blaming the consumer for what they want is both ham fisted and disingenuous to the situation.
I never said anything you claim. It is pretty bizarre how you just lie continuously and rely on AI to make your arguments. You have basically just argued with yourself the entire time. To each his own.
I wrote the context of IP which you hand wave all of history and reality away to double down on your point that software is somehow different. To be blunt, it isn’t.
I am not fighting anything, just giving an obvious critique of a broken system. The only person defending anything is you.
You deny the right of resale and can’t even state a real reason for this and instead blame it on the consumer. This is because only someone acting like a bootlicking corporate loser would think people don’t have the right to resale their property and that they don’t actually own anything. This is what is counterintuitive to everyone. You want to destroy ownership because it serves your masters. That is all that is going on here.
Neither Sony nor Xbox ever seriously contemplated a digital resale system. You can’t just make up facts. Xbox did propose a system that would heavily restrict game sharing and allow retailers to conduct digital and physical transfers. The problem is you could no longer share a disk with a friend without their designated 3rd party being involved.
You place all the onus on their infrastructure but with a distributed system not bent solely on corporate control, everything you describe is simply not necessary. Also, I have been in the server space so I know you could run an authorization server for less that $100 a year. I am am sure Sony and Xbox couldn’t afford this enormous burdensome cost.
Comparing a dumb receiver like a TV to a computer is silly. Furthermore it ignores that people did record the information they received with the advent of the VHS. I find it ironic that you are taking corporations side in this argument and that you would have been up against Mr. Rogers when they tried to ban VHS.
https://youtu.be/fKy7ljRr0AA?is=zKKOPioX98SbG7IE
You know you have a bad argument if you are against Mr. Rogers. This also highlights your profound ignorance of history and technology. It makes your argument very weak in my opinion.
You clearly don’t understand the IP system in regards to software. You make so many obviously silly arguments and ignore the evidence. While code is copyrightable, ideas, algorithms, and functionality is not. You entire argument is based on misunderstanding as I said in the beginning. You are probably thinking of software patents which I personally find extremely distasteful for the reasons I have already mentioned.
I said that IP itself is an absurd principle because it relies on creating artificial scarcity. You say cave art isn’t the same because it has no monthly bill. This highlights how much less digital content is worth. You can’t even access it without expensive hardware and Internet. Cave art is actually worth much more because of its tangible non-connected nature. This reality teaches us purely digital products should be much much cheaper than their physical counterparts.
You have constructed quite the strawman saying gamers are demanding a single purchase and indefinite support. The problem is, you are the only one saying this. I would recommend looking up Stop Killing Games movement to understand what people are actually asking for.
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/en
They aren’t asking for companies to indefinitely host content. What they are asking for is for companies to stop killing games when they can easily turn off server checks once they have decided to stop supporting a game. Essentially corporations want their cake and to eat it to thus destroying art in the name of commerce.
You make lots of other insane claims that I am not going to bother shooting down because frankly, it is not worth it. Thanks for talking with me.
When the ad hominem attacks and “bootlicker” insults come out, it is usually because the technical and legal arguments have run dry. Let’s bypass the emotional outbursts and look directly at the staggering technical inaccuracies in your response.
$100 Enterprise Server Myth You claim an authorization server costs $100 a year. Let’s look at the actual math for enterprise infrastructure. Amazon’s enterprise DDoS protection (AWS Shield Advanced) costs a flat $3,000 a month before you even factor in data transfer fees. https://aws.amazon.com/shield/pricing Enterprise-grade Multi-AZ databases run thousands of dollars a month depending on IOPS and storage scale. Maintaining standard SOC 2 Type II security compliance to handle user data costs between $30,000 and $150,000+ a year. https://drata.com/learn/soc-2/cost All this infrastructure requires a 24/7 rotation of Site Reliability Engineers, who average over $130,000 a year in base salary. https://www.kore1.com/sre-salary-guide-2026
You are off by a factor of about ten thousand
“Stop Killing Games” You claim companies can “easily turn off server checks” once they drop support for a game. This betrays a complete absence of experience with modern captive console infrastructure and server-authoritative game loops.
For a live-service game, the server is not a DRM tollbooth checking an ID at the door. The client on your machine is largely a dumb terminal. The server actively runs the critical game logic: authoritative physics, AI behavioral trees, secure state management, and proprietary matchmaking APIs. You cannot “just turn off the check.”
To make a live-service game function offline, a studio has to completely re-engineer the backend architecture to compile and run locally on the client’s hardware. They have to strip out licensed third-party middleware and completely rewrite the game to bypass the strict Technical Requirement Checklists (TRCs) and Xbox Requirements (XRs) mandated by Sony and Microsoft. You are demanding that a studio spend months of uncompensated engineering and QA labor to build a bespoke offline off-ramp for a deprecated product. It is a fundamental rewrite of the game’s spine, not a flipped switch.
Historical Revisionism of 2013 You are actively rewriting history regarding the digital resale market, likely because you were only experiencing it from the consumer side of the screen. Having been deeply embedded in the development and publishing pipeline during the transition to the eighth-generation consoles, I find the historical revisionism around what happened in 2013 baffling.
The digital resale and loaning mechanics were not theoretical whiteboard concepts or corporate propaganda. They were fully functional APIs baked directly into the Durango (Xbox One) and Orbis (PS4) DevKits. The hardware and the SDKs were entirely engineered around digital entitlement transfers. Xbox explicitly outlined the infrastructure to allow digital trade-ins at participating retailers and a “Family Sharing” plan that allowed a digital library to be shared across ten different accounts. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2013/06/06/license/
We were on the verge of a true digital secondary market. It was killed because a vocal minority of consumers kicked up such a massive fuss about physical plastic that Microsoft’s stock tanked and they completely backpedaled. Sony, who had the exact same infrastructure functioning in their dev kits, watched the backlash, scrapped their announcement, and presented the exact opposite plan eight hours later just to play the hero. Both companies then scrambled to re-engineer their system software prior to launch. Consumers killed the digital resale market themselves because they refused to accept the digital infrastructure required to make it function. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2013/06/19/update/
Misunderstanding of Mr. Rogers and VHS Bringing up Mr. Rogers testifying in the Betamax case is a beautiful piece of nostalgia, but you completely misunderstand the legal ruling. Mr. Rogers testified in favor of time-shifting, the ability for families to record a broadcast to watch it at a more convenient time.
The Supreme Court ruled that time-shifting was a “fair use” exemption of copyright. They did not rule that the consumer suddenly gained ownership of the intellectual property, nor did they grant consumers the right to dictate how the studio distributed future media. Fair use is a legal defense for how you interact with a medium; it is not a transfer of ownership. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/464/417/ https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2010/09/10/09-35969.pdf
You can label the legal realities of software licensing as “corporate propaganda” all you want. But your entire worldview relies on pretending that complex, server-authoritative digital ecosystems are equivalent to static cave paintings, that global enterprise server architecture costs less than a Netflix subscription, and that re-engineering a live game for offline use requires zero human labor.
You are demanding permanent, absolute dominion over the ongoing intellectual labor of development teams and operations engineers, and you want it all for a one-time fee of $60. That is not a defense of consumer rights. It is a fundamental denial of how modern technology actually operates.
As with several commenters before you, you have brought a lot of emotional outrage to this discussion, but absolutely zero factual evidence to back up your legal or ethical claims. Your stance on the ethical capitalization of intellectual labor does not liberate anyone. By demanding, uncompensated access to a team’s ongoing maintenance and server labor for a single upfront fee, you are echoing the exact rhetoric used by robber barons to justify indentured servitude and union busting. You have simply replaced the 19th-century factory floor with a digital storefront, demanding the exact same permanent exploitation of the workers who keep it running.
I am just explaining to you how you act. If you don’t want people to treat you like a bootlicker then don’t act like one. It is rather simple honestly.
Oh look, you make up a bunch of additional costs that are not related to running the authorization server at all. You don’t have to use anything you are describing unless you want to. You don’t have to store personal information, you don’t have to have expensive DDOS protection which has turned into quite the racket for companies like cloud flare. You don’t have to have engineers on staff at all times.
You once again construct a strawman to satisfy your insatiable desire to be correct. No one said they expect a live service game to be run indefinitely. I find it amazing how quickly you construct lies. If you are not going to bother to read and understand then don’t be surprised when people dismiss the AI slop you spew.
I am so sorry that the last console push towards digitization didn’t work out because people didn’t like the restrictive systems being proposed. That they didn’t want to run down to GameStop to be able to trade a game with a friend. It was a ridiculous idea and blaming the consumer for what they want is both ham fisted and disingenuous to the situation.
I never said anything you claim. It is pretty bizarre how you just lie continuously and rely on AI to make your arguments. You have basically just argued with yourself the entire time. To each his own.