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somenameforme • today at 2:57 AM • 4 replies • view on HN

Fully in support of this, but it will never happen, at least not for digital purchases, for a simple economic reason: the internet enables far too efficient a market and it'd wreck businesses with the first sale doctrine. One game sold by the publisher would then be constantly resold by endusers with an ever decreasing price to the point that you could probably buy most of any game for a couple of bucks a year or so after release. The reason this doesn't already happen with physical copies is because there's tedium + cost involved in the transfer, and they also create a motivation to collect. It's somehow enjoyable see a shelf full of games, music, movies, or whatever else.

More realistic would be improving copyright law. I think it'd be reasonable to state that copyright lasts 20 years from the first 'transfer' (sell, licensing, etc) of a creation. 20 years is long enough to fully monetize, but also short enough to really enable some interesting acceleration/derivation in society. For instance just about now XBox 360 games would be coming out of copyright protection. That seems perfectly reasonable, especially in the era of LLMs where 'sidestepping' copyright is going to be increasingly trivial anyhow.


Replies

neya • today at 3:27 AM

The people who really ruined for everyone else are the hipsters that supported coffee machines connected 24/7 to the internet and wouldn't function unless you paid a monthly subscription.

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m463 • today at 6:07 AM

have you ever bought anything from gog.com?

kulahan • today at 3:06 AM

I suppose they'll just have to give up on selling games in the US.

Do you think it's possible we could simply sell physical copies on physical media and deal with the necessity to build new products every so often?

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phendrenad2 • today at 4:03 AM

I'm so sick of people getting downvoted for telling the truth that people don't like. HN, do better. If you want an infinite warm hug where we lie to each other and pretend that utopia and magical rainbow unicorns for all is right around the corner, please go somewhere else, or please please manage to suppress these urges for long enough to maintain HN as the science and logic based community it once was. Or crash and burn in a hopium-fueled echochamber that benefit no one, what do I care. shrug

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