According to the legal representatives of the 'Fair PlayStation' campaign, at least 1.7 million Dutch PlayStation owners pay too much for their digital downloads. Economic research shows...
I thought recent rulings talked about Consoles as a special class that was exempt from being forced to have third party stores. Was this EU only? I found it notable, because I think if iOS is forced to have third party app stores, consoles should be too.
I don’t have explicitly what you’re looking for as I am not a lawyer, but game consoles aren’t a general-purpose computing device (despite theoretically capable of being one if appropriately jailbroken), and as such, prior case law for PC doesn’t apply.
iOS/Android tend to be classified a general-purpose computing device because it does all the same things a PC does (or did) and more. It plays games and does banking and plays music and browses the web and displays pictures and movies, etc etc. For some, it’s their primary and only computing device.
game consoles aren’t a general-purpose computing device
I know that’s the legal argument that manufacturers make, but it’s always been bad faith. Long gone are the days when a console does one thing: play games. Now they stream, have web browsers, social media, apps… they’ve been general purpose for many, many years. Being locked down anti-competitively is not an excuse for something to be locked down anti-competitively.
I agree with your argument overall, but I think it would be reasonable to say they are broader-purpose computing devices now, and are not yet general-purpose. Consumers don’t have an expectation to reach for their game console to do an arbitrary thing. They generally can expect their phone or laptop to.
“There’s an app for that” just isn’t true for huge swathes of apps on almost all consoles.
I don’t get how Apple has to open their shit up (although they’re certainly dragging their heels over it and sulking like a toddler) but Sony, MS and Nintendo don’t.
Not because they’re required to, but because their console platform is dying lol. I mean, I welcome the changes, but I’m sure long-time Xbox users are not as happy with it.
It’s claimed that in addition to exploiting its dominant position, Sony bans other potential app stores from having access to the PlayStation platform.
It would be fascinating if this lawsuit forces Sony to open their platform to 3rd party stores. I am assuming they would be far more opposed to this than even any multi-hundred million euro fines.
To be honest that would just be the end of the consoles system as there is a reason Sony is selling the PS5 for so cheap.
As much as I understand why Apple shouldn’t be allowed to keep everything in the Apple Store, Sony’s situation isn’t the same.
But what would bother me more is if Sony starts to raise the prices of everything without justification.
I got a Steam Deck and I’m slowly migrating my gaming from Playstation only to Linux/Playstation gaming. Still a Playstation 5 is a great product, especially with kids and its ease of use and great graphics for your bucks.
Maybe it’s because I don’t use it enough but the last Sony console I bought was the absolute opposite of “no fuss”. It was nothing but mandatory unskippable updates and I constantly got signed out and had to sign in and the 2fa app kept changing names. And also all those updates and sign-ins had mandatory EULAS you had to scroll through. Such a hassle.
Edit: also it tried to talk to my Sony tv in some “smart” way over HDMI (so I couldn’t disable it) which would sometimes cause my TV to crash and reboot for several minutes.
For the updates: I put it to sleep. However my power cuts out every now and then. When the power comes back, the ps4 turns itself back on on and makes obnoxious beeping noises, just to tell me the power was cut. The dumb thing is it will stay on that screen until manually dismissed and won’t auto-update until you dismiss that screen, with no timeout. The hassle-free appliance experience!
For your claim that the eulas being easy to skip, keep in mind that sometimes there were back-to-back updates that each required me to agree to a eula. So I would babysit the thing, walk away when it was taking forever, and when I came back it wouldn’t even be ready for gaming. Even windows isn’t that obnoxious.
Also my tv at the time had no way to disable CEC (my new one does, and also doesn’t crash lol).
As an aside. I fucking hate smart TV shit. We were gifted a like Samsung 80 inch 4K tv and I was so excited to get that as a gift. I’d never had a tv bigger than 35. But all the smart shit makes it such a miserable experience.
I’ve also decided I hate HDR. Who made the decision that the TV has its own HDR settings, the console has HDR settings, and then individual games have settings as well. I have no clue if my shit is looking the way it’s supposed to. I recently got a PS portal and on god everything looks better on it than the TV, I think because it’s preconfigured.
I miss just plugging in the game and it looking fine.
To be honest that would just be the end of the consoles system as there is a reason Sony is selling the PS5 for so cheap.
They stopped selling them for cheap as soon as they reached market dominance, so good riddance I say.
I’m also not sure how much the PS exerience differs from Xbox, but my last console was an XOne (got it for cheap) specifically because I wanted the “no fuss” experience, and it was such a headache that it convinced me to switch to PC instead.
Well I bought my ps5 a while ago, but I think that despite the price increase, it’s still cheaper than a comparable PC.
As for the no fuss experience, my Steam Deck, which I love and have had for a few month, has already given more to tinker and solve than my ps5 in a few years.
I just think that the Playstation experience isn’t as good and cheap as it used to be compared to PC.
Cheapness ended after PS3 era I think. Even if it (ps4, ps5) is cheaper than a comparable PC, online access after a year or two would probably ruin all the savings.
Agreed but you can play only offline without missing on much. I currently have the ps plus for a few more months, but I’m dropping it as the only one playing online is my son and hés playing fortnite.
But, if you’re an online player, it’s gonna be cheaper to play on pc.
Agreed but you can play only offline without missing on much
That’s such a bad take. Game companies are not allowed to have multiplayer that bypasses psn network.
The Sony and Nintendo have dominant positions in the game market for their consoles. The wallet garden must be breached for the consumer - why do you cate about company profits🙃
If you have a dumb TV you can use a USB to CEC adapter that talks to the tv. If you have a smart TV it is probably supported by Home Assistant so you can rig your computer to wake the TV.
Edit: both of these solutions are arguably no-code-required but I agree they’re a bit technically involved.
Yeah I ran into these solutions but unfortunately I can’t seem to find any USB-CEC adapter other than the Pulse Eight, which doesn’t seem to ship to Australia in any economical manner.
I ended up getting a Flirc USB, couldn’t get the existing TV remote to work with that (once paired with the TV it stops sending IR signals, and the TV wouldn’t let me select the PC input as needing to activate the IR mode on the remote), ordered the Flirc Skip 1s… and now that’s working well enough we’re using the Skip1s as the primary remote for the TV as well. About 150AUD down the hole for this solution, and it’s not truly turning the PC off, but close enough!
How is it even going to work though? The SDK is under NDA, there is no documentation and devkits are not sold freely, so random studios can’t just develop games for Playstation and upload to a 3rd party marketplace
I like to read the comments left by people/“people” on these types of websites, and all those comments were basically saying that this is a little overstepping since “there is plenty of competition” i.e. Xbox and Nintendo.
One of them even said something about “imagine DRM on like your tractor” or something like that, and boy howdy do I wish I didn’t have to create an account to comment back, “Like John Deere…?”
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I thought recent rulings talked about Consoles as a special class that was exempt from being forced to have third party stores. Was this EU only? I found it notable, because I think if iOS is forced to have third party app stores, consoles should be too.
I don’t have explicitly what you’re looking for as I am not a lawyer, but game consoles aren’t a general-purpose computing device (despite theoretically capable of being one if appropriately jailbroken), and as such, prior case law for PC doesn’t apply.
iOS/Android tend to be classified a general-purpose computing device because it does all the same things a PC does (or did) and more. It plays games and does banking and plays music and browses the web and displays pictures and movies, etc etc. For some, it’s their primary and only computing device.
I know that’s the legal argument that manufacturers make, but it’s always been bad faith. Long gone are the days when a console does one thing: play games. Now they stream, have web browsers, social media, apps… they’ve been general purpose for many, many years. Being locked down anti-competitively is not an excuse for something to be locked down anti-competitively.
I agree with your argument overall, but I think it would be reasonable to say they are broader-purpose computing devices now, and are not yet general-purpose. Consumers don’t have an expectation to reach for their game console to do an arbitrary thing. They generally can expect their phone or laptop to.
“There’s an app for that” just isn’t true for huge swathes of apps on almost all consoles.
I was a PS gamer since the PS1. Thousands of hours spent over decades.
I switched to PC (linux) late last year and my PS Plus membership lapsed in April of this year. I won’t be back.
I don’t get how Apple has to open their shit up (although they’re certainly dragging their heels over it and sulking like a toddler) but Sony, MS and Nintendo don’t.
Microsoft seems to be preemptively doing that already.
Not because they’re required to, but because their console platform is dying lol. I mean, I welcome the changes, but I’m sure long-time Xbox users are not as happy with it.
It could also be a strategy to then lobby and make everyone else give up their stores, levelling the playing field.
It would be fascinating if this lawsuit forces Sony to open their platform to 3rd party stores. I am assuming they would be far more opposed to this than even any multi-hundred million euro fines.
To be honest that would just be the end of the consoles system as there is a reason Sony is selling the PS5 for so cheap.
As much as I understand why Apple shouldn’t be allowed to keep everything in the Apple Store, Sony’s situation isn’t the same.
But what would bother me more is if Sony starts to raise the prices of everything without justification.
I got a Steam Deck and I’m slowly migrating my gaming from Playstation only to Linux/Playstation gaming. Still a Playstation 5 is a great product, especially with kids and its ease of use and great graphics for your bucks.
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I totally agree and it’s a pleasure to read someone who’s able to talk about the advantages of each side.
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Maybe it’s because I don’t use it enough but the last Sony console I bought was the absolute opposite of “no fuss”. It was nothing but mandatory unskippable updates and I constantly got signed out and had to sign in and the 2fa app kept changing names. And also all those updates and sign-ins had mandatory EULAS you had to scroll through. Such a hassle.
Edit: also it tried to talk to my Sony tv in some “smart” way over HDMI (so I couldn’t disable it) which would sometimes cause my TV to crash and reboot for several minutes.
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For the updates: I put it to sleep. However my power cuts out every now and then. When the power comes back, the ps4 turns itself back on on and makes obnoxious beeping noises, just to tell me the power was cut. The dumb thing is it will stay on that screen until manually dismissed and won’t auto-update until you dismiss that screen, with no timeout. The hassle-free appliance experience!
For your claim that the eulas being easy to skip, keep in mind that sometimes there were back-to-back updates that each required me to agree to a eula. So I would babysit the thing, walk away when it was taking forever, and when I came back it wouldn’t even be ready for gaming. Even windows isn’t that obnoxious.
Also my tv at the time had no way to disable CEC (my new one does, and also doesn’t crash lol).
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Yea I have one for my PC. Sony argues in court that a PlayStation is not a PC, but an appliance. I’m pointing out how untrue that is.
As an aside. I fucking hate smart TV shit. We were gifted a like Samsung 80 inch 4K tv and I was so excited to get that as a gift. I’d never had a tv bigger than 35. But all the smart shit makes it such a miserable experience.
I’ve also decided I hate HDR. Who made the decision that the TV has its own HDR settings, the console has HDR settings, and then individual games have settings as well. I have no clue if my shit is looking the way it’s supposed to. I recently got a PS portal and on god everything looks better on it than the TV, I think because it’s preconfigured.
I miss just plugging in the game and it looking fine.
Yea, hdr is very standardized.
They stopped selling them for cheap as soon as they reached market dominance, so good riddance I say.
I’m also not sure how much the PS exerience differs from Xbox, but my last console was an XOne (got it for cheap) specifically because I wanted the “no fuss” experience, and it was such a headache that it convinced me to switch to PC instead.
Well I bought my ps5 a while ago, but I think that despite the price increase, it’s still cheaper than a comparable PC.
As for the no fuss experience, my Steam Deck, which I love and have had for a few month, has already given more to tinker and solve than my ps5 in a few years.
I just think that the Playstation experience isn’t as good and cheap as it used to be compared to PC.
Cheapness ended after PS3 era I think. Even if it (ps4, ps5) is cheaper than a comparable PC, online access after a year or two would probably ruin all the savings.
Agreed but you can play only offline without missing on much. I currently have the ps plus for a few more months, but I’m dropping it as the only one playing online is my son and hés playing fortnite.
But, if you’re an online player, it’s gonna be cheaper to play on pc.
That’s such a bad take. Game companies are not allowed to have multiplayer that bypasses psn network.
The Sony and Nintendo have dominant positions in the game market for their consoles. The wallet garden must be breached for the consumer - why do you cate about company profits🙃
We sold our PS and now have a gaming PC hooked up to the TV.
Been a few teething issues with convenience issues like being able to turn it on from the couch, but the experience has gotten pretty smooth now.
If you have a dumb TV you can use a USB to CEC adapter that talks to the tv. If you have a smart TV it is probably supported by Home Assistant so you can rig your computer to wake the TV.
Edit: both of these solutions are arguably no-code-required but I agree they’re a bit technically involved.
Yeah I ran into these solutions but unfortunately I can’t seem to find any USB-CEC adapter other than the Pulse Eight, which doesn’t seem to ship to Australia in any economical manner.
I ended up getting a Flirc USB, couldn’t get the existing TV remote to work with that (once paired with the TV it stops sending IR signals, and the TV wouldn’t let me select the PC input as needing to activate the IR mode on the remote), ordered the Flirc Skip 1s… and now that’s working well enough we’re using the Skip1s as the primary remote for the TV as well. About 150AUD down the hole for this solution, and it’s not truly turning the PC off, but close enough!
Yeah, absolutely. Companies like Sony, Microsoft and especially Apple would rather pay huge monthly fines than opening up their platforms.
The “huge fines” aren’t huge enough if they can continue to be fined and still make a profit.
Their accountants factor it in as a expense
How is it even going to work though? The SDK is under NDA, there is no documentation and devkits are not sold freely, so random studios can’t just develop games for Playstation and upload to a 3rd party marketplace
Assuming they are forced to open up their platform, I’m sure they would be required to make changes to make it possible for others to use it.
I like to read the comments left by people/“people” on these types of websites, and all those comments were basically saying that this is a little overstepping since “there is plenty of competition” i.e. Xbox and Nintendo.
One of them even said something about “imagine DRM on like your tractor” or something like that, and boy howdy do I wish I didn’t have to create an account to comment back, “Like John Deere…?”
I wish it covered how they went from selling cards giving time for PS+, to requiring mismatched currency cards for PS+.
Wait what? I’m mostly steam now so I’m out of the loop. What the fuck…?