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.
Installing a media server is the easy part.
It may not feel easy the first time. There are unfamiliar settings, folders that refuse to appear and devices that behave differently for no obvious reason. Eventually, though, the application starts. A film plays on the television. An album appears on a phone. The small thrill of having built something useful is real.
For a while, that can feel like the finished project.
Self-hosting is becoming more interesting for a reason that has little to do with fashionable infrastructure. People are discovering that services they relied on can become worse while they are still using them.
Features disappear. Prices change. Limits arrive. Advertising takes over. A product that began as useful becomes harder to use, less private or dependent on an account that can be closed.
Cory Doctorow calls this process enshittification. In Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, he argues that platforms can first attract users with convenience, then lock in users and businesses before shifting value away from both groups.1 The Creative Salon article supplied alongside this book is another useful reference point for the discussion.2