Oh look, Sony revoking more licenses for video content that people “bought”.
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This is where our lazy lawmakers need to step in and protect consumers. Make it illegal to revoke these types of licenses over greedy, lazy, exploitative business mergers and acquisitions. If corporations want to fight that, then they shouldn’t be able to “sell” digital movies or games anymore: Any time you go to “purchase” digital content, it must plainly tell you that you’re renting said content for an undetermined amount of time.
Funny how so much recent talk has emerged yet again about how companies like Microsoft want to get rid of disc drives on their next Xbox… It’s almost like companies don’t actually want you to ever truly own anything. A rent economy is toxic and rotten, and it’s infuriating that it’s literally becoming our entire economy.
Companies change the contracts all the time and customers just agree to them.
Consumer protection would help, so maybe it’s time to start voting for the people who support it.
It’s entirely unreasonable to assume that the average person has the time or knowledge necessary to read, comprehend and agree to every terms of service agreement shoved in their face. Legislation should reflect this fact, and there should be something similar to game and movie ratings that give an easy to understand summary of the agreement.
Well said. I love everything about this agreement and the limits it inherently puts on “creative” terms in their agreements.
Imagine if there was a law for making the contracts easier to understand.
- We’ll spy on you and sell your data to the highest bidder.
- When something goes wrong, it’s your fault.
- You can’t blame us.
- No money back.
- When in doubt, we do what Darth Vader would do.
Sign here: _______
Come to think of it, slot machines do tell you quite clearly how bad the odds really are, but people still dump their money on them. Why can’t we have similar honesty and clarity when it comes to contracts.
I want a lot of things from the US Congress, but platform planks like better consumer projection/rights just sound like easy votes for any candidate. I can’t wrap my head around why nobody is at least lying that they’ll address this.
They’re probably getting paid specifically to not address this is the issue.
Meanwhile, the EU is crafting all sorts of consumer protection laws just like the member countries have been doing long before even joining the union.
Funny how so much recent talk has emerged yet again about how companies like Microsoft want to get rid of disc drives on their next Xbox… […]
While I will freely admit that the lack of a physical drive is a huge way to drive downloaded (and licensed, revokable) content controlled by the company, it’s worth noting that physical media is really not all that great a medium for transferring things like games or movies anymore. Blu-ray discs can hold, in ideal situations, around 50GB of data. A lot of games – especially AAA games, are well beyond that. I think Spider Man 2 came in at like 85GB? The internet says Hogwarts Legacy is ~75GB on XBox.
Network connectivity, and downloading content to our devices is almost certainly going to be the way a lot of the world works going forward. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be able to back our content up elsewhere, or offload it to some other device.
Your right in noting that the laws and regulations need to keep up and protect consumers’ right to the content they’ve purchased.
edit: Here, I’ll bold the important part.
Then put the games onto high-storage solid-state cartridges like Nintendo does. There’s no reason to be limited by existing technology like Blu-Ray except for laziness. Hell, they could even just put an SD card reader in as the physical game tray and put games onto SD cards if they’re that lazy and don’t want to spend on R&D.
Removing the capacity to have physical copies of games at all is always a bad move that is disingenuously masked with a “but the world is going all digital!” all the while knowing that this gives them greater control over things we’re supposed to own.
Would the reading speed of those SD cards be as fast as the reading speed of Blurays? Or is the reading part of using Blurays unnecessary in the first place because most of the game is loaded onto the console itself?
I imagine you could write-protect the SD cards the same way you do with Blurays, so if the question above is a non-issue, then that’d be quite a cool solution. SD cards pushing terabytes easily now, they’d be large enough for sure.
But then again, afaik, the discs are not really needed and don’t need to accommodate that much space in them except for licensing and DRM stuff, I think, since the majority of the game is downloaded regardless, right?
Would the reading speed of those SD cards be as fast as the reading speed of Blurays?
Disc speeds are notoriously slow. PS vs N64, Cartridge based systems were instant where as discs had to be loaded into a ram space/buffer and had terrible load times. The difference back then was that disc’s had a boatload more storage where cartridges were very expensive to get any significant capacity. That’s still kind of true today, but at scale not nearly as much as it used to be, and max capacity of sd cards are WAY bigger than discs overall.
6x Bluray drives (which is what is in the PS4 for example) read at about 27MB/s. I don’t know what speed the PS5 is, but bluray supports up to 72MB/s as a standard and has it’s highest capacity at ~100/128 GB.
Meanwhile… You can hop on amazon and buy 200MB/s sd cards no problem. I’ve seen them as “fast” as 300 MB/s, and as high capacity as 1TB. So easily 3x more bandwidth, and significantly more capacity. Usually costs more though. Some weird side-benefits though… You can actually update the game that lives on the card. You can leave some assets on the card that get called less often when you install to SSD to save space on internal storage. Or if you’re live loading assets from the sd card to an internal SSD, any load times will be significantly faster. You CANNOT do these things on spinning disc, it’s too slow.
The real difference here is latency though. A disc has to spin… You have a physical laser head that has to seek to a particular sector. That’s slow as hell and at the density of tracks that you have to do on BD-XL disks, you can actually overshoot tracks if they’re laid out poorly which increases the delay of getting the data. SD cards don’t care at all, everything is nearly instantly responsive.
So yes, sd cards are significantly faster than bluray discs in a number of ways.
Edit: Minor edit to make it more clear.
Thanks for the detailed response. Lots of interesting new information!
SD cards rule, then lol
I bought a 1TB micro SD card recently, it cost less than a new AAA game. Almost any individual AAA game would fit on a quarter of that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#BDXL
Even normal UHD BRDs can and do hold upwards of 100GB, as those can have 4 layers (~25GB each layer).
A lot of game size bloat is due to lazy optimization. Lords of the Fallen on PC–while it had questionable game performance for some folk–the game looked gorgeous and was quite a massive world, yet the download for it was around 40GB.
There are very few games I can think of that warrant being 100+GB. And even if they’re more than 100GB, what’s stopping them from just using 2 Blu-rays? Remember the PS1 days when games like FF7 had 4 discs? Or when WoW came out, it came with like 8 installation discs or some other absurd number? Blu-rays are more expensive, sure, but I can’t imagine games getting to be more than 2 discs long during the lifespan of Blu-ray as a storage medium anyway.
Except that games are broken at release and need day1 patch in order to work. Although you will ship BD, the day update servers are taken down, your physical copy won’t allow you to play the game either.
The only question I have is : Is torrenting game patchs / updates concidered piracy as well ? If it is, we are definitely doomed.
Yeah if I have to go all digital that’s the last console I get. At least with a PC I can get DRM free copies.
A rent economy is toxic and rotten,
Not always. I would gladly pay to rent something I need only every now and then instead to buy it.
But that is the concept of renting rather than a rent economy.
An industry or economy based entirely around renting with 0 other options is almost always rotten to the core.
Its barely the second month of the year and these companies are nose diving to the fucking bottom.
“The bar you had to clear was on the ground and y’all brought shovels.”
We’re lowering the bar all the way to hell
Enshitification is at phase 2
🏴☠️ sharing is caring.
I am altering the deal. Pray that I don’t alter it any further.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
This Deal’s Getting Worse All The Time | Robot Chicken - YouTube
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
If what they’re doing isn’t theft, then digital “piracy” isn’t theft either.
And with the unrelated rumours of Microsoft potentially leaving the console business and going multiplatform, it begs serious questions.
Do you really want Sony to have a monopoly on console gaming when they can’t even respect ownership rights for digital goods?
Tbf I left the console market a decade ago and haven’t really felt like going back. Computers do everything I need in the gaming sphere
Without extortionate extra fees either. I recently wanted to crossplay Overcooked on my PC with a couple friends on my PS4. “Buy PSPlus for only $100+ to play this game online!” Yeah, fuck off.
still think its crazy that online match making is a paid service on consoles.
remember when microsoft tried to do the same with PCs?
Emulate the consoles.
it begs serious questions.
Nope. It just raises them without beggaring them.
I fear we are rapidly approaching (or have already reached) the point where the definition of “begs the question” is going to be changed to include “raises the question,” much the same way “literally” now also means “not literally.”
I am not pleased by this development, but I was also not consulted.
What do you mean monopoly? If anything it’s a duopoly with Nintendo.
Do you think a software monopoly by Microsoft is better?
if you can take it from me, I can take it from you. piracy has become a moral imperative to stop valuable art being flushed down the memory hole.
They only took the digital copy though. Shitty move, but you still have a copy.
Pirating only takes a digital copy, they still have the physical ones.
I think many didn’t read the article. The only way to get a Funimation digital copy was by using a code that came with the physical copy.
Even if they’re taking away the digital copy, you still have the physical one.
Sony should be fined for each unit they delete.
if they pull this shit with music, i’m gonna have to look for self hosted music streaming apps.
Why stream music when SD cards are approaching TB?
Because 90% of standard phones now don’t have SD card slots. Thanks pixel
You vote with your wallets. Each time you buy a phone without SD cart, you are submitting a ballot.
Seriously. phones are 99% identical anyways. It’s not so hard to filter for the 2-3 criteria you actually care about.
I would also like a great camera, a non-locked-down bootloader and a non-customized OS with updates for at least 5 years. I can’t vote with my wallet aside from “not buying any phone”, which isn’t a vote.
Oh I would also like small smartphones back. But there are simply no good ones on the market; nothing I could vote for.
“Vote with your wallet” only works if there is a good enough set of choices on the market.
Like regular voting, you pick the best one of the bunch; even if it’s only marginally better than the rest. Even if it’s still terrible.
Repeat. Repeat again.
True, and that’s why you can only marginally change anything on the market with that. If no player on the market offers what you want, your only choices are to punish everyone (which they won’t notice) or reward one of the least-bad players.
Both can set the wrong incentives for companies to change or continue.
So it’s ok to bitch a shitty choices.
deleted by creator
This is a cop out. I have a 2023 Motorola phone that has everything but ir blaster and removable battery. Why lie like this??
There is a good enough set of choices on the internet you’re just a spoiled baby. Who needs green chat bubbles 🙄
There is a triangle of camera quality, software support, and peripheral support. You can have 2.
Fairphone is the close, but they removed the headphone jack when they upgraded their camera in order to push their shitty earbuds that they only sold/supported for 2 years I think before scrapping them and are continuing the cycle with their new headphones (directly contrary to their mission). They also refuse to add simple wireless charging.
Sony has camera quality (only their photo pro, not in their shitty default camera app) and peripherals, but no software support (2 years max).
Voting with my wallet is buying no phones ever, apparently.
There’s also Shiftphone out of Germany, but it looks like they’re still securing funding for their next round of phones.
Messed up world out there
Yeah, but they don’t meet the criteria because their camera is pretty poor IIRC.
Search for camera and peripheral support, as for software support, search models which have open source kernel code and bought alot, they usually have best community support, I’m saying this as current owner of poco x3 pro, and i learned my lesson when i bought redmi note 4 mtk 4/64, they didn’t released source code for mtk model, so only way to support it is to make Frankenstein from source code of snapdragon note 4 model, some smartphone kernel code with that mtk cpu support, and cherry pick updates from Linux 3.18 to current, while testing and fixing bugs from one lts version to another till you reach current one
I want to buy a fairphone, but they refuse to add wireless charging (even as an add-on) and they also removed the headphone jack so that they could pish their Bluetooth earbuds which they discontinued after barely a few years, now they have Bluetooth headphones where they will likely do the same. Completely contrary to their ethos.
Though I don’t see how it relates to my comment in the slightest. Showing that 1 phone that has an SD card slot is just my point. There are few good phones being made currently with SD card slots.
There is a Venn diagram of camera quality, software support, headphone, and SDcard where you can have 3 but never all 4.
but they refuse to add wireless charging (even as an add-on) and they also removed the headphone jack
I discounted the headphone jack because your comment included the Pixel, but I feel the same. My current phone has a jack and I tend to use it quite often. Also, I don’t see a good reason to require another batteried device that I need to worry about, on top of it potentially not working in high interference environments.
This has been one of the 2 main reasons why I haven’t taken one yet. The other being non-availability.I am still unable to understand how important wireless charging might be.
I really just wish I could get a handheld pocketable computer with a cellular radio and GPS navigation related sensors, with some version of UEFI on which I could install whatever Linux I wanted.
I guess I am really rough on my USB C ports? I just plug them in at night and lay my phone on the bed, but after just 2.5 years my Sony 5ii is already getting loose. I clean it out with a toothpick occasionally, but I will probably have to replace the port next year. Everything else about wireless charging is shit to me, but not stressing the port is worth it.
My nokia (HMDGlobal) 7.1 the charging port literally stopped charging after 8 months and then every 2-3 months for the 2 years I had that one. That was the lowest of the low quality phones lol.
What you seem to want is a a PMOS phone with with Plasma Mobile
An anecdote, I insisted on getting wireless charging with my last phone change because my Sony Xperia XZ premium (that I loved) became a brick after the usb c port failed about 18 months in
What you seem to want is a a PMOS phone with with Plasma Mobile
You got that right. And TIL that the Fairphone 4 support for that is less than what I would require. i.e. GPS, Mobile Data, SMS, Calls …
Perhaps, if some day I can justify buying a phone with that price tag just for testing purposes, I’ll try helping with the support of those features…
There are Qi adapters out there for phones without wireless charging built in. See this CNET article. It’s not perfect, but a simple Google search says it’s possible. Plus, adding this adapter and hiding it inside your phone case has the benefit of protecting your phone’s charge port from dust and other ingress. I use wireless chargers for all my phone charging, so this is a viable option in case I ever want to go with a Fairphone or a Shiftphone (maybe even a Cube).
The headphone jack thing is annoying. I’d buy their Fairphone 4 to have the option between wired and wireless.
Yeah those adapters are handly except that they damage the case and leave a large cable buldge with the bend radius. I might still get one for my current phone, but not a great solution.
There are models out there that I’ve seen that have designed the cables to act more like bus bars that bend at sharp 90° in a flat strip profile, where the bend is less pronounced. But I agree that would be a failure point as time goes on to watch. I don’t really remove my phone case all that often, so I don’t think it’d be that big of a deal. They’re like $10 total for a replacement off of Amazon, so price nor schedule is an issue either.
Just came across the Pinephone. Looks like they’ve figured out how to do modular wireless charging for their platform that still allows free access to the USB-C port, but this isn’t compatible with phones that don’t have pogo pins.
the headphone jack is unforgivable for many users. as an audiophile i often use external DACs anyways, but it still sucks ass to carry around an “emergency audio adapter” which stops working after like a year (even the expensive ones) compared to a built-in one.
fuck you fairphone, but the upsides of the 4 outweighed the downsides for me.
Wow, I knew that Apple devices don’t, but I hoped that they’d be the only ones. Major oofs right there
It’s far from being perfect solution, but you can buy a miniature USB microSD card Reader very cheap these days.
i have a total of 512GB of storage in my Phone already, but my dad has repeatedly run into the storage limit of his 256GB phone. he’s not even that into music, and he stores his music compressed.
i can see all of the songs i listen to now taking up more than 300GB easily in lossles. plus i would be able to access the music from my phone as well as my PC without having to store duplicates, and having cross-platform playlists.
there’s a lot of benefit with streaming, and self-hosting is becoming more accessible by the day. if you have the bandwidth, i see no problem as long as your provider doesn’t fuck you over (which is on the horizon for spotify, we aren’t getting lossless and the prices are going up regardless)
just photos and some videos and somehow my 256gb is always struggling for space. I’d kill for an SD slot
that’s the perks of a phone company who keeps good design decisions going, except for the headphone jack. i will never forgive Fairphone (still bought the 4, sooo…)
I’m using jellyfin and it just works fine.
There are others more specialized in music. But I kind of like only having to use one service for all my media.
i already run jellyfin, i’ll check out how it works.
What makes you think they won’t? It’s a matter of time.
I use musicolet and just have a few GB loaded on my phone at any given time
May I suggest cloudplayer
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.doubleTwist.cloudPlayer
Not compatible with Android 14, and doesn’t seem to receive updates anymore (the last one was 2 years ago). So that looks like a terrible choice.
When my plex server does what Sony won’t/ can’t.
Not referring to Plex telling friends your porn habbits, I assume 😆
Not an issue if you don’t have friends.
Yah I don’t have porn on Plex. Not a big porn fan.
That is why there is a selfhosted service called “stash” 😉
“homework” service 👍
Digital ownership is a real issue. We need to ensure we own when we buy, or we should not buy
Well, copyright proponents succeeded in persuading the majority of people that buying something you can’t copy or share is still ownership, despite it being against human instincts.
Only instincts matter more, not less, than laws. Because instincts work first.
So in fact they persuaded us that it’s normal to own less, rent more, buy a cat in a bag, buy something without any guarantees, buy something with unclear obligations, because everybody around does that and it’s socially shameful otherwise.
Which is amusingly similar to what fraudsters do.
So the next stage is the amount of obvious fraud from those big copyright-reliant companies increasing. Good night, sweet prince.
Yes, I’d like one cat please. No, not that one…the dapper tabby gentleman in the back…yes, that’s the one. What’s that? No, no thank you, I don’t need a bag.
…on second thought, yeah, go ahead and give me the cat in a bag. What’s the damage?
Aye-aye, Captain! 🫡
We gonna go after every company that does this because pretty much all of them are.
I’m game.
And my axe
Everybody seems to say this to me until I tell them that the companies that own the rights they are selling to distributors are also at fault and we should blame both. Then people are like “what? No! Why would we punish Paramount or Fox, or Universal?”
This is why we prefer to buy physical media, getting a digital with it is nice, but physical is key.
It wasn’t even me was pushing for us to get physical media, it was my spouse. Of course my plex server the house probably helped. But after a few “forever” is only until next month, or shows completely disappearing altogether from any streaming, they started pushing for more physical media.
Good news, physical media can still have revocable DRM
I think I’m alone with that on here but I don’t really like buying physical media. I get that that way you own it but it’s still just a storage medium with data on it, putting that data directly on my hard drive achieves basically the same thing. Since I can pirate basically anything anyway, I just think that even if a company takes away my access to something digital I bought, I can always just pirate it and I have it again. To me, physical discs are kind of a waste of money, space and resources because of that. I don’t have it anything against people who buy physical media tho, I do get the point of that.
Same, and I’ve already had to do this. Google started revoking things I “bought”. When they announced it I immediately went into Google Play, made a list of everything I “bought”, and pirated it onto my home media server.
It’s mine, and it’s on “physical media”, which I call an SD drive in a NAS.
I don’t need or want optical disks of things–they are subject to rot, more so than my NAS, and they are far far more fragile than the NAS+the backups. They take up space and collect dust. If I wanted cover art, I’d own the art and have it on my wall.
You can truly own things, and you don’t have to have plastic covers on a shelf to do that.
I actually like that thinking, haven’t thought of it that way. Should the day come when Sony decides to kill all digital copies of games people have collected over the years, who’s stopping them from just jailbreaking/rooting/cracking/CFW-ing their console to just download the games they want from dedicated communities who have dumped those games on the internet ages ago?
I did the same thing with my 3DS when the eShop was officially closed, and now I can’t imagine a 3DS without access to anything I could want on there.
I think I’m alone with that on here but I don’t really like buying physical media.
I suppose it depend on what you buy. Some things are worth to have the physical copy, some not.
I’m with you on most of this except I’m the physical media person, and also run the Plex server for my f&f ;)
I’m going to be setting up a self-host game streaming server soon too, because I won’t -buy- digital-only… but I will pirate it and throw some money at the indie devs when I can!
I’m down to one streaming service left. Just need to… ahem… acquire the rest of what I want to watch there before I no longer pay monthly for services I barely use, where anything can be ripped away from us at any time.
Never again.
What is left?
Just Hulu. I can’t get it for free, so it’s gotta go. Unfortunately, it’s the only place I can find My Hero Academia in English right now.
If piracy links aren’t allowed here, mods feel free to delete it, but Kayoanime tries to upload their stuff as dual audio mkvs. https://kayoanime.com/anime-hero-full-dual-audio/
Although I personally would still prefer to pay for everything, I’m sick of having to trawl multiple services for one bloody show… look what they did to pokemon :/
Yeah dubbed stuff is harder to find on some sites.
Usually nyaa has most of the stuff.Nyaa had it! Thanks for the tip!
