Just in time for them to take physical discs away! Edit: This is only in EU! For now.
It’s almost like Sony doesn’t want to have a PlayStation division anymore.
It’s odd timing given that microsoft seems to be giving up on Xbox
The Xbox people have a better grasp of things. Consoles have little reason to exist… and the writing was on the wall when the PS3 stumbled out the gate. Really, in the PS2 era, all those Renderware / id Tech 3 / Unreal 1 games running the same on every platform was a big hint that there was no longer a benefit to having different platforms. Now there’s just various badges over x86 PCs and smartphones - and the smartphones are starting to run Steam games.
None of which is to say that Microsoft has conducted their grand scheme to computer-ify the console market with any degree of finesse, consistency, or follow-through. They’re still idiots for setting successful studios on fire, and for refusing to shit or get off the pot vis-a-vis whether there’s gonna be an Xbox The Next One.
tbh, the big thing that made PS2 great for me when I was young is that I could just plug in the disc and play the game… well, at least most of the time. “Please insert a PS2 disc” was definitely a pain.
Back then, the PS2 was graphically-superior to the PC, at least in terms of cost per dollar. They designed console motherboards to integrate to the different components in ways to make them much faster at video games specifically.
Nowadays, consoles are just glorified PCs, and they have no technological advantage. No technological advantage, no public appetite for console exclusives, no reason to exist.
Like HL2 running on your browser
I wouldn’t be surprised.
The whole tech industry is very overtly hell bent on pushing through an ai controlled dystopia.
What good would the current model of gaming be?
Have a bunch of people work very hard on a game and all that work “loses it’s value” after a year or so. (In their eyes, shit’s gotta sell).
When you can have ai just dream/hallucinate up a game and stream that instead? (It’s nowhere near that yet, but holy shit would they love it)
Now you have an endless stream of stuff to sell that costs you zero manpower.
Now the good peasants go work and can have half an hour of slop per day as a reward. And if they revolt, you just cut them off.
Where this breaks down is where the AI tech is in this decade/century. Between running out of RAM and the fact these agents barely get marginally difficult tasks (programming wise) done, they won’t be outputting the slop AAA games are today. When you have people making games and most players are pissed at how bad they are and how expensive, we all know that AI built games will be way, way worse and stild as expensive.
do they have any other lines of business that make them money??
i know the camera business is supplies sensors to the majority of cellphones… but the tv business is dead, the phone business is dead (or might asd well be, since it’s asia only), the movie studio can’t buy a hit, what does sony do if it doenst have paystation??>
The phones are not Asia only
Notably, the clause is conspicuously absent from terms governing Mexico, the United States, and several other regions, meaning players there are not currently subject to the policy. By contrast, the provision has been enforceable in the United Kingdom and various European countries for years, though it largely escaped public notice until the recent physical-format debate brought renewed scrutiny to Sony’s digital practices.
guys let me introduce you to chinese handhelds with 1351251351513 games on, your old shool consoles with physical disk, and remind you of ALL THOSE cool games you always wanted to play but had no time to do so.
Yeah really I have no desire for new stuff. Like, why? Ive never once cared about graphics, even when I was around 8, I remember thinking people caring about graphics was stupid, because its the game that matters. Never have I bought a game because it was “shiny” or because I could see a baseball players eyelash. Who cares. I want a game, not a reality simulator (well, I do enjoy walking/ driving simulators once in a while, but not because of graphics!)
Now flashy graphics are fine and all but not at the expense of the game.
Iif I even tried completing every game from 1975 to 1999, I’d have enough play for more than a lifetime of gaming.
New really isnt that great, for me. Some good indie games here and there, sure.
I think ps3 graphics are good enough any thing higher doesn’t make me more immersed and pulling out of immersion to go “oooo pretty” is neat now and then but not that important. I’ll say I do occasionally stop to be impressed by really good shadows though
I always goto Civilization as the example. One of the best games ever before the recent versions… No emphasis on graphics…just well balanced strategy and gameplay. Civ 3 ftw
Graphics are all cool and all, but unless the game is great, graphics to me are worthless. I never understood people that put graphics over gameplay. Such a stupid concept. To top all you said, new games are mid at best, and shit in their usual state. Rarely a game comes out that is GOOD! I tend of playing 10+ years old games recently … and why would I need a newer console or PC ? For what ?
You like walking simulators? You should try DayZ
I have, it was too complex for me
Pick a direction, walk until you die. Rinse, and repeat.
It does have a bit of a learning curve but it’s pretty rewarding if the gameplay clicks with you. Plus it’s apparently great at modeling nature (compared to other games, that is). My lumberjack friend is constantly raving about how the trees types/placement and the forests in general are pretty realistic
The problem is that most of the trillions of games suck and the ones that I had heard of often aren’t on there. I also wish there was some way for multiplayer, I would pay more if they figured that out for some games.
There is a way you put your own games. Most of those handhrlds are simple emulators that you can put whatever you like up to ps3 in some cases even (hard).
There is multiplayer. Almost all modern handheld Chinese consoles have multiplayer for many games. Look it up, they are very mature.
There isn’t on the one I have. What brand do you recommend?
Anbernic, ayeneo, motion mini, lots of options, and to be honest much more there if you dig deeper :)
Which one has the best multiplayer platform or do they all work the same?
I cant say much. I have seen up to 4 people play different games on these platforms. Usually Anmbernic is the most popular choice, and I would personally, but look at aliexpress etc. even their official web page is more expensive than that. Again dont take my word for it, look up youtube, there are tons of videos on those. I personally like the vertical handhelds, but I know people preffer the horizontals, and they are more powerfull.
Another coice is Odin btw, that is I think one of the most powerfull handhelds, that can even run steam no problem *others can as well but with limited capabilities because of the hardware.
The Nintendo DSi can also be made to use emulation. I play nes and snes on mine currently and also downloaded ds games
3DS is even better for that and easier to homebrew. Gives you access to a huge library, including DS and Gameboy advance games
What are you talking about
Follow the conversation idk.
I logged into steam after like 15 years and it still worked.
how is that even legal?
we need better consumer protection for digital purchases.
It’s literally because of consumer protection laws. GDPR requires the deletion of unused data, to ensure companies aren’t just holding onto your data indefinitely. This is simply the consequence of that, because Sony has apparently determined that three years is enough of a threshold to be considered “unused”.
GDPR only requires that, if there is no legitimate use for keeping the data. Ongoing software license is a legitimate use.
Yes, but not every single PSN account has any software licenses. Some people are just playing F2P games or subbing to PS+.
But, it’s trickier to word their clause in such a way that it only specifically applies to free accounts.
Whether it’s trickier or not doesn’t matter. Sony is an enormous company, any difference in lawyer fees would be miniscule.
No, it’s not for GDPR compliance. It’s like this talking point “stupid data protection laws, all those cookie banners”. Nobody is forcing any company to use all those shitty tracking cookies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Why lie about something like this?
Because it isn’t a lie. Companies need to justify why they are retaining personal information after they stop using it. If they can’t justify it, they need to delete it.
And you think Sony is going to put their neck on the line to try and argue that keeping old unused accounts open is a justifiable reason? They have literally zero incentive to do so, and a large profit incentive to delete accounts as soon as they can reasonably argue that they are too old. Because that will push people towards re-buying games they already purchased once before.
Companies need to justify why they are retaining personal information
And the justification is “this person holds a perpetual software license with us and we need to be able to grant them access unless they tell us otherwise”. Case closed.
Do they?
Please prove that every single PSN account has digital software purchases on it. EVERY single one.
If you fail, you’re liable for GDPR and are holding customer data past its use!
BS. You only have to prove it for the individual account. They obviously don’t have to delete my data because you have no software purchases on your account.
I’ve honestly had it with all the anti GDPR fearmongering and propaganda. It’s not some eldritch horror that will eat your company if it notices you. It’s a powerful and at the same time pretty reasonable customer protection tool. As long as companies don’t take more data than they need to do the business the customer actually came to them for and make sure only people who need to work with the data can acces it they are in the clear 100% of the time.
It’s totally easy to check if an account has a digital software purchase on it or not. That’s just one database query. Sony is totally able to solve that.
Easy on a technical level, yes, but also harder to define in a legal document level.
A game counts - obvious. Does a game demo count? Does one piece of microtransaction DLC count in a F2P game? How does a legal document define those things?
Now that scrutiny is on it, it seems like people would’ve preferred they define this granularly. But at the time, I’m going to guess they decided it wasn’t worth legal risk of having people they did not reserve the right to delete, but also needed to delete for GDPR.
It absolutely is a lie.
It really reveals the nature of your purchase, doesn’t it? Apparently you are just buying some entries in a database. Sadly any software we can’t use offline can just be deleted like this. The pendulum swung too far towards the cloud, hopefully it comes back down to earth soon.
yhea, that is 100% bullshit.
GDPR isn’t new, and no company was forced to do that.
Might as well block the highway with my car saying that the law forces me to do that, because I cannot pass cars on the left lane, and I point to the “right” lane (opposite direction traffic) on the other side of the barrier.
But good news, according to EU regulations you should just a toilet in your house, you are meant to spew shite into it.
Read the EULA sometime on a game you “own” on steam (or any platform for that matter).
Almost without a doubt you’re being granted a license to one copy of the game used the way they say it can be used. Most of the licenses are revokable for violating the conditions, many just outright say “hey we can take this away at any time for any reason and you can suck it” which is in a legal gray area I suppose.
As far as how it’s legal, you don’t have to do business with any of these various entities and you’re agreeing to their terms when you get their product. Plus, like you said, there is very little consumer protections in place.
I agree we need more consumer protections on general and particularly for digital purchases. However, at least in the USA, the prevailing political winds are heavily in favor of companies and anti consumer. The Trump admin basically dismantled the bureau of consumer protection so … That should tell you their priorities.
I know, no digital purchase actually has the product, just a license, unless you get a drm free product.
Yeah I’m just saying like … It’s been anti consumerist from the very beginning. Particularly when games started to get made by studios, publishers got involved etc.
I agree with the premise that it should not be like this.
What an excellent way to convince aging gamers to just never buy from Sony again.
Yup, although I haven’t purchased a Sony product in over a decade because they started charging a monthly fee for online services I got free on PC. Funny because I was a fanboy like no other during the console wars.
I was considering buying one for GTA VI. I’ll wait for the PC release, thanks.
i bought portal2 when it came out on ps3… it also let me set up a steam account through my ps3, because that was going to be the next big thing (this was before ps+ and multiplayer was still free)
12 years later i got a PC, i downloaded steam… and when i logged in, there was portal2 waiting for me to download it.
sony can go fuck themselves
Did you actually play Portal 2? And what did you think of it?
Also not OP: It was fun. More backstory, more mechanics. I didn’t have a family to play the multiplayer co-op stuff, but it also looked fun.
Not the original commenter, but I really enjoyed it. A little bit longer than Portal with some real gems in the dialog. I would say if you enjoyed the first one, then play the second. I did not do any of the couch-co-op stuff, just the main story, so I have no idea if it’s decent.
Coop is fun, especially when you’re messing with your partner
It requires some experience with first person camera controls, though. I found out that can be a real challenge for people who don’t play a lot of video games.
This is a good thing, companies shouldn’t hoard people’s data forever.
Non-spamblog version of the same article: https://www.levelup.com/en/news/playstation-could-permanently-delete-your-psn-account-and-digital-library-for-this-reason/
Thanks, saw MSN had entire articles essentially that were just slop summaries the other day & was put off worrying about journos
My biggest mistake was buying a PS4 instead of jumping to PC a generation earlier than I eventually did.
I bought my wife a ps5. Regretting that decision too.
Sony’s reminding me of their “599 US DOLLARS” era very heavily lately. Gaming has been in such a rough spot lately, it’s a shame.
The fact that digital everything has been such a clusterfuck of unwashed ass pushed me back to rock climbing. Thanks/go fuck yourself tech conglomerates! I’ve definitely drawn similar associations, Rick
I started playing ukulele because i did not feel like spending a years savings on a new gaming pc and nvidia fucked up gforce now. A recorder/flute is like 7 $. But its impossible to play silent.
It had the curse of being worth more than movies and television, so it attracted every “entertainment” investor around, demanding short term profits like movies do. Now we have giant corporations thinking they can even remotely understand what a creative medium is, and then being shocked when we don’t buy their latest “written by HR”/microtransaction bullshit. Meanwhile Indie is doing great! Surprise, creative people make good creative products.
This is for UK and EU due to GDPR that requires companies delete all user data for inactive accounts. It’s a unintended consequences of the law and other gaming companies including Xbox have similar clauses.
The law says they can’t keep your PII after you stop being a customer, not anything about linking your email address to purchases for an entirely legitimate ongoing reason.
The law covers personal data not PII and is much broader than PII that is defined under the US Office of Privacy and Open Government which has no bearing on the GDPR.
As for personal data, email addresses are covered and even user names could be considered personal data depending on if it’s linkable to a person and since your account is linked to your email and linked to you user name potentially, when they have to delete personal data the have to delete all of those foreign keys in their database that says your email once got a receipt for that game you bought digitally.
Except they don’t have to delete any of that as long as you hold ongoing software licenses with them, as that’s a legitimate interest. This is malicious compliance posing as “well they made us do it”, same as all the GDPR banners on the web.
They need to retain financial data for way longer though, and are basically allowed to store their bookkeeping stuff for forever. So they could restore accounts from that anyways. I’d argue, they could keep the account details which can be recovered from financial data under those circumstances. Which probably would be everything necessary to keep the purchased games. They’d need to delete e.g. usage data, connection data etc.
I’m not here to defend the corporations.
Email addresses are PII under GDPR, aren’t they? So linking email addresses to purchase history is explicitly retaining PII and data about someone they can identify.
You are explicitly allowed to retain PII for critical business purposes. So in this case as a key component that the software licence is attached to they can retain it forever anyway.
Hah! I guess Sony argues that “who bought what” is not a “critical business purpose”…
Pretty sure that the gdpr specifically precludes forever retention. Data should be retained as long as is necessary and whether 1, 3, 5, 10 or however many years, sooner or later deletion is appropriate, and the timeline depends on what is reasonable.
3 years is a long time to not log in and if a court decided that it exceeded a ‘reasonable’ period for legitimate interest the fines can go to 10% of global revenue. The law encourages risk averse behaviour.
They could make a better system where the user sets the timeline but it would be impossible to predict the return.
On this one i think its probably driven by risk management not nefarious intent.
3 years is not a long time at all. I’ve been collecting games on my steam account for 19 years, and there was a period of >2 years where I didn’t use it.
i didnt touch my steam account for like 12 years… i set it up when portal2 came out on ps3, but that never went anywhere…
literally a dozen years later, i built a gaming PC and when i logged into steam, there was a portal2 license waiting for me to press download
3 years is not long at all if you factor having kids into the equation. There is not a lot, if any, time to play video games when your kids are small. Imagine having 2 kids 1-2 years apart and not finding time for gaming (on your PS) until the youngest is at least 2 years old - then you are quickly looking at 3-4 years without login.
Not something i need imagination for. Im not saying 3 years is optimal, but there does have to be a threshold somewhere. Personally i’d build it into user settings to allow users to self select a time period they accept.
I haven’t logged in since my PS3 died a couple years ago.
Tried to log in to their website with my saved password. It said the password was wrong. I reset my password, entered the same one that I previously used, fully expecting it to give the frustrating answer “Previous passwords can’t be re-used.” But no, it let me use it! Weird.
So some password systems prepend the hash algorithm to your password hash, that way you can tell if the user has migrated to the new algorithm or not when you change your hashing scheme.
Odds are after the PSN breach they changed the algorithm and have since removed the code to check the old algorithm. So it just sees the hash didn’t match with the new algorithm even though the password is the same.
I had not used my ps3 in ages and he to redo the thermal paste on it. Once I got it back up I was able to access my downloaded games without connecting to the network. Maybe the ps4 or 5 is always online requirement?
I think it does affect PS3, because I booted mine up a couple months ago and it would not let me log in or play my downloaded games. I have to reactivate my account or some bullshit. Should have just left its network cable unplugged
Similar for me, a few years I tried to log back on to claim a free game giveaway just in case I bought a PS4/5.
Instead my account was deleted. This account doesn’t exist, or something like that. Can’t make a new account with that email because an account exists. Amazing. I had some stuff on there, I got the receipts.
So I’m surprised at this thread because I thought that was already the policy. Maybe for accounts in countries with no consumer protection rules this was more or less already happening.
I even logged into my Uplay because I knew it was linked to my PSN, to see if there’s a way to get any information about my PSN account. And yes, it showed the accounts were linked, and that I was unsuccessfully logging on with the correct email.
I could have bought a used PS4 during Covid and maybe later a PS5 if I got into their stuff. Alas (for Sony) I tripled down on PC. Even got a Steam deck at an extortionate markup when I felt like it would be worth it for me, via a third country where it’s not officially available. Good stuff
I’ve been a hardcore PlayStation guy since I was about 9 when I got my first console the PS1.
Crash team racing is better than Mario Kart 64
Spyro the Dragon is the best 3D platformer of the late 90s.
I’ve had a PS2… That still works 22 years later.
I was in the great wars of PS2 vs XBOX.
I like Halo 1 and 2, I like Killzone 1, 2 and 3.
I was there at the beginning.
I was there when Sony moved their PlayStation HQ from Japan to America.
I was there when the quality of good JRPGs and adventure games plummeted so we could be fed a new call of duty and FIFA every year.
These days I’m PC, PS5 and switch. I will not be buying a PS6 or a Switch 2.
It should be mentioned that… I’d rather throw myself down a cliff than buy an Xbox.
It’s not just them. I accidentally ended up in prison for 5 years and lost my Google account, and because I had 2FA set up with email and the phone number I had at the time on pretty much everything that means I also lost my steam account and pretty much every single digital account I had. Thousands of games on different storefronts.
Ironically the only single place that helped me recover my account was the kind folks at Roberts Space Industries. I was an initial backer… Maybe one day the game will be done.
Everything else I pirate now. If you don’t own it physically, you don’t own it.
An initial backer of Star Citizen who still believes in the project is worth his weight in gold-pressed latinum to Roberts Space Industries.
… I mean, I don’t. They’ve done some cool shit, but they haven’t made one actual good game much less a billion dollars worth of good games. But after losing steam, GOG, PlayStation, and Microsoft accounts I just sort of got desperate.
Star Citizen depresses me because it has such cool stuff in it and tech and I feel like it would be great … If they reigned in the infinite scope creep, if they spent more of their time and budget on code refactoring and optimization and actually started squashing the same damn bugs that constantly rear their head in new and ingenious forms.
Like the 20% of the time you are playing and it’s working like it should - honestly superb. But not worth it since you’re spending the other 80% of the time fighting the UI or crashing to desktop or otherwise occupied in some fuckery of troubleshooting or just having to spend another 30 minutes for the 10th time getting a kit on and getting to your ship.
It’s kind of a great cautionary tale, or it would be if they didn’t have gobs of money and people still handing them more to worship at the alter of a busted game.
God I tried to play again just a few months ago, saw there was a new home station and thought “cool!” Promptly spawned into falling through the abyss and even after killing myself it wouldn’t respawn me properly. So yeah I have up again after that and after I walked around a little and saw all the NPCs are (years later) still standing still or weirdly hovering or not sitting right … Just … Yeah.
I know this game is still “in alpha” but like … Alpha functionality should include letting me spawn in at the starting location I selected. How fucked is CIG ame development process when that’s even a thing?
I will be fucking amazed if squadron 42 is real and reliably works. I want it to, I so desperately want to be wrong and have an ostrich sized egg on my face. Pretty sure I’m going to turn out to be right ,sadly.
Anyways just a random rant for the internet.
I mean… it’s been like 20 years, hundreds of millions spent, over a billion raised. Still being “in alpha” says it all.
Maybe it will be ready for my retirement, and we can play it in VR while really high in a nursing home. o_O
That would be pretty awesome. Although by the time I’m in a nursing home really high playing a space sim in VR I expect something better to have emerged. Oh and also star citizen would have to start supporting VR which afaik it still doesn’t.
Honestly, it’s a really good lesson in why sometimes the big bad mean publishers and studio execs can be a necessary evil to get a game released.
I just would expect to not be running into the same bugs from literally 5 years ago still popping up in the game but it’s a byproduct of how the software has been designed and coded. I’m not saying it’s a straight up scam, shit I might even suggest someone spend the $30, or whatever the cheapest pledge is, just to play with what I’d consider an overblown tech demo. The software is cool, a lot of stuff in the game is cool, hell the game just looks pretty. Plus it is awesome when it works, but it’s fiddly as hell and everything takes too long because it’s part of some convoluted system that is poorly explained. That’s the rub too, it does take easily 30 to 45 minutes just to get some gear and even get to your ship and get your mission/load out/cargo sorted. When you spent 30 minutes walking around only to get stranded by a bugged out elevator, or fall through a floor, or watch the train that you need to take to get to your hangar glitch out … Etc etc … It’s beyond aggravating. Especially because there is no quick and easy way to reset.
Idk why I’m just in a rant mood but thanks for humoring me.
“Maybe one day the game will be done,” is more grace than that game deserves, as you probably are aware.
I just found out about Luanti, a voxel-engine with a bunch of different implementations. It’s free. I’m going to try that this week.
The formatting of my message got ruined… I had to use two returns or it all ended up in a giant wall of text…
(For people under 30, Return is what the Enter key is called… I don’t know what it’s called on phones… the icon on your phone that is going down and has an arrow pointing left).
‘Return’ is a typewriter holdover for new line + carriage return, since a new line just went down without returning all the way to the start. The arrow to the right means its a ‘return’ key ;) Just turned 33 too
Hey now, I know what it is and I am only… Oh god…
the only playstations i will be buying are ones with old and outdated firmwares and hen support
I’m PS5, Switch 2, and PC tertiary. Honestly, I regret buying the Switch 2 since I can nearly play all the same games on SW1 still.
Ill probably still get a PS6 since I already only buy digital, but having an account deleted after only 3 years is complete BS, and makes me rethink everything.
There are doing a speed run no one wants.
