The Reasonable Consumer

I think I'm a reasonable consumer. Reasonable in my expectations and reasonable in my behaviour.

As such, I take umbrage at Sony choosing to speak for me.

The electronics giant is currently fighting a class action lawsuit in the US which argues that the PlayStation Store's disclosures do not comply with the US' strict laws regarding digital ownership. Sony has been accused of being unclear about the ownership rights that are afforded to customers when they make a digital purchase. Sony has countered that its Terms & Conditions clearly state that "virtual content is licensed, not owned", though you do have to read several hundred words into the T&Cs before you'll find that point. (Thanks to Eurogamer for those details).

Sony has disingenuously claimed that "most reasonable consumers would not be misled" by their disclosures, and would understand that digital purchases do not equate to digital ownership. Basically, we "reasonable consumers" understand and accept that we do not own our digital games and that, in essence,  the concept of digital personal property is a fallacy.

I hate everything about this. Admittedly, that's partly because I've long been aware that digital purchases are essentially fancy rentals, so I feel very seen by Sony's comment. It shouldn't be news for anyone who has been paying attention the last decade, and yet we continue to buy digitally. But it sounds so much worse, and much more real, when Sony says it out loud and attempts to justify their policies.

Yes, the T&Cs are clear, and perhaps they are clear enough? I don't know, as I'm not a lawyer; I'm a reasonable consumer. As with most reasonable people, I do not have the time nor legal literacy to read and understand every page of every set of T&Cs I'm presented with, but that's a separate issue. Anyway, I won't pick at the legality here, but I will address Sony's framing of the larger issue of digital ownership.

If I'm renting my digital games, then why does the language used in the PS Store suggest ownership? I'm never given the option to "rent" a game nor thanked for my "rental". Instead, it's "buy" and "purchase". If that's not purposefully misleading, I don't know what is. It is a fair expectation that the licenses we buy are indefinite. If that's not the case, and these purchases are limited rentals, then there must be a clear end date for this contract, otherwise how else are we supposed to make a determination on value or worth? How is that even remotely defensible?

Much of Sony's argument is being made in bad faith. It counters that if we could "own" a digital game, then publishers would be unable to sell more than one copy.  A really fucking silly point, and one that's not even worth engaging with. We're buying a license to access a game, not the game itself - no one needs to read a 10,000-word T&Cs to grasp that.

I should add that, while Sony is the bad guy this week, I'm sure Nintendo and Microsoft share near identical views. If you were so inclined to read them, you'd almost certainly find the same language buried within their T&Cs. There are no good guys here, just corporations and consumers, reasonable and unreasonable.

So, where do we go from here? There can no longer be any confusion about whether or not we own our games. Sony has made it crystal clear that we do not, and their continued availability is entirely at its discretion. I'm sure that this will be of interest to consumer rights bodies, and it will increasingly become a hot topic, but as long as we continue to buy digitally our complaints will carry little weight. Soon, with the phasing out of disc drives in consoles, we will be forced to make a decision: opt into digital or opt out.

Although I do still buy games on disc, the vast majority of my purchases these days are digital. The PS Vita was my first mostly-digital platform, but it wasn't until the Xbox Series X that I went all digital. I'm mostly comfortable with that decision, and its just part and parcel of being a Game Pass user.

I've accumulated a large collection of digital games over the last twenty years, across all platforms, and I probably wouldn't notice if huge chunks of my library were suddenly unplayable. But that shouldn't be something I need to worry about. I should own what I buy, and the licenses to access my games should never be revoked, at least not without a refund or a bloody good reason.

I think that's reasonable.