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- cross-posted to:
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The relevant section is blunt. “The Software is licensed to you, not sold,” the EULA states. “You are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, and personal license to play or use the Software for your private, non-commercial use on the system or device it was intended for.”
The terms also restrict renting, modifying, or obtaining games through unauthorised means. Nothing in there is new, technically. Sony’s EULA has always said this. The timing is what makes it land differently right now.
A lot of it is widely outside of PlayStation or Valves hands…
The puclishers have the same deal with them, and developers have the same deal with the publishers.
If that wasn’t there at every link of the chain, then that next person no longer has to pay anyone earlier in the chain.
We kind of see the same with in-game music. That has to be licensed from the owner of the master, and possibly a couple more people. They don’t like doing licences in perpetuity out of principle. If the Beatles let a game use a song and that game eventually sells for 10¢ or free, then that’s a loss sale even 30 years from now in the way licensing works. So after 5-10 years, songs disappear.
Or like how it took Kevin Smith forever to get actual ownership of the movie Dogma due to Weinstein being involved and everyone else just wanting to bury what he’d touched.
EULA’s and ownership is a lot deeper than software. Like, you can sell a used game of monopoly, but buying a copy doesn’t mean you can make you’re own and sell, the physical material is just associated with the license for the intellectual property.
Like ship of thesus shit, if you start with a legit paid game of Monopoly, replace every single piece over 20 years, you can still sell it as a “used Monopoly game” because at some point you bought the license. If you made every piece the same way and then sold it, that’s not legal