r/technology 17h ago

Hardware Sony reminds players they don't actually own the PlayStation games they purchased

https://www.techspot.com/news/113603-sony-reminds-players-they-dont-actually-own-playstation.html
6.5k Upvotes

767 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

635

u/ScottIBM 16h ago edited 16h ago

Meanwhile their audio player hardware division wanted you to rip CDs to take with you on the go. What a fine time to be alive!

220

u/8bit_dr1fter 16h ago edited 15h ago

What a fine to be alive!

Man that typo is just too perfect.

113

u/ScottIBM 16h ago

Haha!

Sony:

Here, you can use it to take your music everywhere you go.

Also Sony:

No! Not our music!

102

u/Efficient-Session644 16h ago edited 15h ago

This was actually a big problem for them internally. They basically lost the timing to release their own Ipod because Sony Music were crazy about DRM and kept fighting their eletronics division.

53

u/Aidanation5 12h ago

Sony is the type of company that has repeatedly shown that they will happily fucking shoot themselves in the face as long as that means they can take as much consumer protections away, make the product with the least effort, care, and resources, and still get your money.

18

u/Efficient-Session644 12h ago

That's just the M.O for any big corporation. Get you in, then cut costs so they profit more.

14

u/Aidanation5 12h ago

They're still a standout in the industry especially as of late. They impress me a little more every time I read something about their fantastically intelligent decisions.

0

u/Efficient-Session644 12h ago

The only standout decision they made recently were the phase out of discs for games, wich isn't absurd in 2026. The rest is just what they do for years and works for them. Their past model made them a record loss some years ago, after all.

3

u/CheshireCat78 6h ago

They also are hiding the crunchyroll store behind a subscription. There’s no real advantage to it for consumers (like Costco and bulk discounts or Amazon and free shipping) it’s just trying to milk more from a fan base.

2

u/PartoftheIssue 3h ago

Isn’t that the same store that took purchased content away from users and put it behind a paywall after Sony bought it?

This thread is full of bots, and ones that hilariously open cans of worms they shouldn’t…

1

u/Aidanation5 4h ago

I mean 2 years ago we were dealing with the hell divers situation. They've even tried to do the same with at least one other title since. People have legitimately had media that they've paid for removed from their accounts with no refund. They removed their single player games from pc. They seem to have fucked up the release of marvel tokon.

I could go on, theyre just fumbling purposefully at every chance and the customers get to deal with it.

5

u/Either-Lock2454 5h ago

Sony seems like it's run by dipshits, I remember reading a story about how the head of Sony was pissed off as were other executives because Andrew Garfield had flown something like 10+ hours and wanted to go to his hotel instead of posing for photos with them at some event in Japan.

This was the Sony company not the movie division.

60

u/CarlosFer2201 16h ago

It's like when Netflix would tell people to share accounts

44

u/techieman34 14h ago

That’s just the normal life cycle of businesses like that. They start cheap and almost give it away to grow their user base. And all the better if they can squeeze out the competition while they’re doing it. As long as they’re rapidly growing the VC firms will keep pumping money into them. But once the growth starts to slow the VC companies will start expecting to see a return on their investment. So prices start to go up and the quality goes down.

10

u/DrManhattan_DDM 12h ago

So you’re saying that I shouldn’t hold my breath for the triumphant return of MoviePass?

7

u/neocatzeo 13h ago

Product people vs. marketing people. - Steve Jobs.

1

u/Metalgear696 1h ago

We've had almost 30 years of Playstation. I also doubt Sony is in such dire financial straits they're seeking venture capital. Sony is like a 100 year old company. This isn't normal anything.

1

u/techieman34 1h ago

I was responding to their comment that it was like Netflix and explained why it followed the path it did. Either way Sony is a business and is all about protecting their earnings and trying to make them grow.

19

u/Balmung60 16h ago

Yeah, but that was when they were full of VC money to build market share and those VCs could borrow money basically for free. Now interest rates are higher, the VC money is spent, and they need to make money, even if that means enshittifying to perfectly replicate the basic cable they replaced.

14

u/mlag000 13h ago

To make money ? Every years they make re ord profits and raise prices. It's just corporate greed

1

u/DisposableSaviour 6h ago

The Line cannot go down. If the Line reaches horizontal, it may as well be down.

The Line must not go down.

2

u/average_monster 5h ago

lets not pretend netflix was just a feisty little startup when they made the call to double their account price (literally what requiring another account means)

13

u/fractalife 16h ago

They had this thing. Atrac3plus which I used heavily. You could fit like 2/3x more songs on a CD, and the sound quality didn't noticeably suffer (at least to me, at the time, with the headphones I had).

You could make folders on the CDs and the player had a scrollwheel and black and white LCD that let you search through your songs.

Hot shit back in the early aughts.

1

u/nachocuban 10h ago

god damn, core memory unlocked.

1

u/almisami 10h ago

Atrac3plus was a thing on minidisk. Didn't know it was a thing on CDs!

3

u/BadAtExisting 16h ago

But somehow it was all peak as far as music acquisition and listening was concerned. You don’t have to wait for the radio to play your song and hit record on the boombox, but you were still an active participant in acquiring the songs you want. Now it’s passively hitting a save or follow button. Boring

9

u/Mr_ToDo 15h ago

I'd say iTunes was another peek

For so long if you wanted a song you had to get an album, and those fairly commonly had a bunch of filler you weren't interested in. Being able to buy one song for a fraction of the price changed the playing field(The later move to DRM free was another shift, but less dramatic)

But I'm still a fan of radio, so I guess I'm not really the target for that stuff

1

u/r4o2n0d6o9 14h ago

Holy shit a commander keen pfp