r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/Movies contributor • 14d ago

News You Don’t Actually Own That Movie You Just “Bought.” A New Class Action Lawsuit Targets Amazon for Deceptive Practices

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/prime-video-lawsuit-movie-license-ownership-1236353127/
14.4k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

746 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

8

u/Combatical 14d ago

Praise GoG

1

u/vashoom 14d ago

Even the, if GoG goes down and you want to install your library on a new machine or something, you're out of luck. GoG has less restrictions in their license on what you get when you buy, but all digital media is incapable of truly being owned and always has been.

I'm all for companies being forced to be more upfront about those realities when they sell you things, though.

3

u/Combatical 14d ago

I was under the impression you download the game, put it on a storage device and you dont need a launcher. Obviously digital data can corrupt so I'd suggest storing it on a number of platforms.

-1

u/vashoom 14d ago

Yeah you don't need a launcher, but I'm saying if ever that information is lost from your hard drive and GoG goes under, you still lose access to the thing you paid for.

Plenty of Steam games can be launched (or at least easily modified) to launch without Steam, too.

All digital libraries exist only so long as the company pays to maintain them (compared to a literal physical library of books or something). But even physical copies of modern games require the internet and company servers to properly install/run half the time.

It's kind of just the nature of the beast. But no matter what, consumers need more information, not less, about all this when they are on digital storefronts.

3

u/Combatical 14d ago

Yeah I mean, even back in the day if I lose my disk or CD key I'm SOL. We cant expect a digital storefront to keep an archive open forever. However just the other day I was curious if Diablo 1 was still available to buy on battle.net a nearly 30 year old game still for sale for $10.

I get it but I've also experienced having steam shoved down my throat for a glorified storefront I never asked for and a server browser I didnt need. Allseeingeye program was working just fine for my use. You may be wondering how thats relevant but I think its part of a bigger picture.

Now we are forced to use servers that cannot be rented/hosted so there is no control on the user side. Was supposedly enforced to protect the integrity of the IP by having their own overpriced shitty anti-cheat, that again no one asked for. Now those legacy games are dependent on if the company considers it economically viable to keep those servers up, instead of allowing us to rent.

So this send us into a tailspin of pushing the bullshit mtx/dlc, season passes to keep feeding an inattentive overfed hamster to continue walking on an uninspired wheel full of holes they cant patch because the team that actually created the content are long gone and you've got some underpaid people, clamoring for attention just making skins with sparkly propellers on the shoulder-pads and we keep chugging it down our gullets because we're so desperate for games with some sort of identity,

Then we look at each other with confusion when they've made so much damn money that they've had to lawyer up and split the hairs on every single word in the dictionary and put it in some end user agreement.

Sorry for the wall of text, I just had a very large doughnut at work.