Gaming

I grew up with PlayStation discs. You bought a game, took it home, put it on the shelf and could still pick it up years later. You could lend it to someone or sell it when you were finished. That was part of the appeal, not a technicality. So Sony reminding PlayStation customers that software is licensed, not sold lands badly with me. Its UK software terms say plainly that the software is not sold for you to own. That may describe how game software has been licensed for years, but spelling it out while asking full price for downloads does not make the purchase feel more secure. It makes me ask what, exactly, my money guarantees.

In 2011, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell said something about piracy that has stuck with me: “Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.”1 His point was fairly simple. If an unauthorised service is easier to use than the one selling the product, the seller has a problem. At the time, that could mean waiting months for something to reach your country, dealing with region locks or restrictive DRM, or hunting down a physical copy while an unauthorised version was already online.