Just in time for them to take physical discs away!
What an excellent way to convince aging gamers to just never buy from Sony again.
Yup, although I haven’t purchased a Sony product in over a decade because they started charging a monthly fee for online services I got free on PC. Funny because I was a fanboy like no other during the console wars.
I was considering buying one for GTA VI. I’ll wait for the PC release, thanks.
also found out switch deletes your cloud saves after a while if you stop paying
i bought portal2 when it came out on ps3… it also let me set up a steam account through my ps3, because that was going to be the next big thing (this was before ps+ and multiplayer was still free)
12 years later i got a PC, i downloaded steam… and when i logged in, there was portal2 waiting for me to download it.
sony can go fuck themselves
Did you actually play Portal 2? And what did you think of it?
Also not OP: It was fun. More backstory, more mechanics. I didn’t have a family to play the multiplayer co-op stuff, but it also looked fun.
Not the original commenter, but I really enjoyed it. A little bit longer than Portal with some real gems in the dialog. I would say if you enjoyed the first one, then play the second. I did not do any of the couch-co-op stuff, just the main story, so I have no idea if it’s decent.
Coop is fun, especially when you’re messing with your partner
It requires some experience with first person camera controls, though. I found out that can be a real challenge for people who don’t play a lot of video games.
Huh. That’s actually a little disappointing. I have a couple of exclusives on there that I would prefer not to lose. But I also no longer own any modern PlayStation consoles, nor am I likely to in the future. So trying to decide if this is going to be the thing that makes me leave Sony for good, or if I should just make a little effort to login from time to time.
Reminds me, I have an old ps3 with a broken disc drive in need of being jailbroken. I should get on that.
Super straightforward. Best thing you can do. Load a usb drive with ISOs and you are set. Its the best homebrew/emulation console you could hope for. If your disc drive was working it would be the cheapest bluray player you could hope for
I wonder if logging into the app on your phone would take care of that requirement.
Yes.
My decade old Sony boycott looks more & more prescient every week.
I should’ve listened to the haters. I got way too leveraged into Sony’s ecosystem and so now I suffer.
The good is I still have enough PC games that I actually own (well, control) to last me for years and years and years.
The last good product Sony made was the Walkman.
Trinitron, Vaio, Mini-Discs, Cybershots, FF/ASPC Cameras, WH-1000X headphones. They have had some decent stuff, less so recently.
You will eat nothing and you will be happy
I’ve been a hardcore PlayStation guy since I was about 9 when I got my first console the PS1.
Crash team racing is better than Mario Kart 64
Spyro the Dragon is the best 3D platformer of the late 90s.
I’ve had a PS2… That still works 22 years later.
I was in the great wars of PS2 vs XBOX.
I like Halo 1 and 2, I like Killzone 1, 2 and 3.
I was there at the beginning.
I was there when Sony moved their PlayStation HQ from Japan to America.
I was there when the quality of good JRPGs and adventure games plummeted so we could be fed a new call of duty and FIFA every year.
These days I’m PC, PS5 and switch. I will not be buying a PS6 or a Switch 2.
It should be mentioned that… I’d rather throw myself down a cliff than buy an Xbox.
It’s not just them. I accidentally ended up in prison for 5 years and lost my Google account, and because I had 2FA set up with email and the phone number I had at the time on pretty much everything that means I also lost my steam account and pretty much every single digital account I had. Thousands of games on different storefronts.
Ironically the only single place that helped me recover my account was the kind folks at Roberts Space Industries. I was an initial backer… Maybe one day the game will be done.
Everything else I pirate now. If you don’t own it physically, you don’t own it.
An initial backer of Star Citizen who still believes in the project is worth his weight in gold-pressed latinum to Roberts Space Industries.
… I mean, I don’t. They’ve done some cool shit, but they haven’t made one actual good game much less a billion dollars worth of good games. But after losing steam, GOG, PlayStation, and Microsoft accounts I just sort of got desperate.
Star Citizen depresses me because it has such cool stuff in it and tech and I feel like it would be great … If they reigned in the infinite scope creep, if they spent more of their time and budget on code refactoring and optimization and actually started squashing the same damn bugs that constantly rear their head in new and ingenious forms.
Like the 20% of the time you are playing and it’s working like it should - honestly superb. But not worth it since you’re spending the other 80% of the time fighting the UI or crashing to desktop or otherwise occupied in some fuckery of troubleshooting or just having to spend another 30 minutes for the 10th time getting a kit on and getting to your ship.
It’s kind of a great cautionary tale, or it would be if they didn’t have gobs of money and people still handing them more to worship at the alter of a busted game.
God I tried to play again just a few months ago, saw there was a new home station and thought “cool!” Promptly spawned into falling through the abyss and even after killing myself it wouldn’t respawn me properly. So yeah I have up again after that and after I walked around a little and saw all the NPCs are (years later) still standing still or weirdly hovering or not sitting right … Just … Yeah.
I know this game is still “in alpha” but like … Alpha functionality should include letting me spawn in at the starting location I selected. How fucked is CIG ame development process when that’s even a thing?
I will be fucking amazed if squadron 42 is real and reliably works. I want it to, I so desperately want to be wrong and have an ostrich sized egg on my face. Pretty sure I’m going to turn out to be right ,sadly.
Anyways just a random rant for the internet.
I mean… it’s been like 20 years, hundreds of millions spent, over a billion raised. Still being “in alpha” says it all.
Maybe it will be ready for my retirement, and we can play it in VR while really high in a nursing home. o_O
That would be pretty awesome. Although by the time I’m in a nursing home really high playing a space sim in VR I expect something better to have emerged. Oh and also star citizen would have to start supporting VR which afaik it still doesn’t.
Honestly, it’s a really good lesson in why sometimes the big bad mean publishers and studio execs can be a necessary evil to get a game released.
I just would expect to not be running into the same bugs from literally 5 years ago still popping up in the game but it’s a byproduct of how the software has been designed and coded. I’m not saying it’s a straight up scam, shit I might even suggest someone spend the $30, or whatever the cheapest pledge is, just to play with what I’d consider an overblown tech demo. The software is cool, a lot of stuff in the game is cool, hell the game just looks pretty. Plus it is awesome when it works, but it’s fiddly as hell and everything takes too long because it’s part of some convoluted system that is poorly explained. That’s the rub too, it does take easily 30 to 45 minutes just to get some gear and even get to your ship and get your mission/load out/cargo sorted. When you spent 30 minutes walking around only to get stranded by a bugged out elevator, or fall through a floor, or watch the train that you need to take to get to your hangar glitch out … Etc etc … It’s beyond aggravating. Especially because there is no quick and easy way to reset.
Idk why I’m just in a rant mood but thanks for humoring me.
“Maybe one day the game will be done,” is more grace than that game deserves, as you probably are aware.
I just found out about Luanti, a voxel-engine with a bunch of different implementations. It’s free. I’m going to try that this week.
the only playstations i will be buying are ones with old and outdated firmwares and hen support
The formatting of my message got ruined… I had to use two returns or it all ended up in a giant wall of text…
(For people under 30, Return is what the Enter key is called… I don’t know what it’s called on phones… the icon on your phone that is going down and has an arrow pointing left).
Hey now, I know what it is and I am only… Oh god…
‘Return’ is a typewriter holdover for new line + carriage return, since a new line just went down without returning all the way to the start. The arrow to the right means its a ‘return’ key ;) Just turned 33 too
I’m PS5, Switch 2, and PC tertiary. Honestly, I regret buying the Switch 2 since I can nearly play all the same games on SW1 still.
Ill probably still get a PS6 since I already only buy digital, but having an account deleted after only 3 years is complete BS, and makes me rethink everything.
Good. Fuck everyone and everything.
As per another comment, I didn’t know Gmail can delete an account after 2 years of inactivity. Proton mail is only 12 months on the free plan. With so many things being related to email I feel like I should have a more robust system.
I logged into steam after like 15 years and it still worked.
how is that even legal?
we need better consumer protection for digital purchases.
Read the EULA sometime on a game you “own” on steam (or any platform for that matter).
Almost without a doubt you’re being granted a license to one copy of the game used the way they say it can be used. Most of the licenses are revokable for violating the conditions, many just outright say “hey we can take this away at any time for any reason and you can suck it” which is in a legal gray area I suppose.
As far as how it’s legal, you don’t have to do business with any of these various entities and you’re agreeing to their terms when you get their product. Plus, like you said, there is very little consumer protections in place.
I agree we need more consumer protections on general and particularly for digital purchases. However, at least in the USA, the prevailing political winds are heavily in favor of companies and anti consumer. The Trump admin basically dismantled the bureau of consumer protection so … That should tell you their priorities.
I know, no digital purchase actually has the product, just a license, unless you get a drm free product.
Yeah I’m just saying like … It’s been anti consumerist from the very beginning. Particularly when games started to get made by studios, publishers got involved etc.
I agree with the premise that it should not be like this.
It’s literally because of consumer protection laws. GDPR requires the deletion of unused data, to ensure companies aren’t just holding onto your data indefinitely. This is simply the consequence of that, because Sony has apparently determined that three years is enough of a threshold to be considered “unused”.
GDPR only requires that, if there is no legitimate use for keeping the data. Ongoing software license is a legitimate use.
Yes, but not every single PSN account has any software licenses. Some people are just playing F2P games or subbing to PS+.
But, it’s trickier to word their clause in such a way that it only specifically applies to free accounts.
Whether it’s trickier or not doesn’t matter. Sony is an enormous company, any difference in lawyer fees would be miniscule.
No, it’s not for GDPR compliance. It’s like this talking point “stupid data protection laws, all those cookie banners”. Nobody is forcing any company to use all those shitty tracking cookies ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Why lie about something like this?
Because it isn’t a lie. Companies need to justify why they are retaining personal information after they stop using it. If they can’t justify it, they need to delete it.
And you think Sony is going to put their neck on the line to try and argue that keeping old unused accounts open is a justifiable reason? They have literally zero incentive to do so, and a large profit incentive to delete accounts as soon as they can reasonably argue that they are too old. Because that will push people towards re-buying games they already purchased once before.
Companies need to justify why they are retaining personal information
And the justification is “this person holds a perpetual software license with us and we need to be able to grant them access unless they tell us otherwise”. Case closed.
Do they?
Please prove that every single PSN account has digital software purchases on it. EVERY single one.
If you fail, you’re liable for GDPR and are holding customer data past its use!
BS. You only have to prove it for the individual account. They obviously don’t have to delete my data because you have no software purchases on your account.
I’ve honestly had it with all the anti GDPR fearmongering and propaganda. It’s not some eldritch horror that will eat your company if it notices you. It’s a powerful and at the same time pretty reasonable customer protection tool. As long as companies don’t take more data than they need to do the business the customer actually came to them for and make sure only people who need to work with the data can acces it they are in the clear 100% of the time.
It absolutely is a lie.
yhea, that is 100% bullshit.
GDPR isn’t new, and no company was forced to do that.
Might as well block the highway with my car saying that the law forces me to do that, because I cannot pass cars on the left lane, and I point to the “right” lane (opposite direction traffic) on the other side of the barrier.
But good news, according to EU regulations you should just a toilet in your house, you are meant to spew shite into it.
It really reveals the nature of your purchase, doesn’t it? Apparently you are just buying some entries in a database. Sadly any software we can’t use offline can just be deleted like this. The pendulum swung too far towards the cloud, hopefully it comes back down to earth soon.
Note that technically the agreement says that Sony reserves the right to delete the account after 36 months, not that they’ll actually do it. It might “just” be a stupid bit of legalese to cover Sony’s ass in case they’re required to delete older data.
Of course the idea is worrying nonetheless.
note my myself: whenever entering a contract with u/ChairmanMeow@programming.dev just tell him those terms that are not in his favor are just legalese for some edge case and I certainly will voluntarily not make any use of those terms that are totally in my favor and they should not worry.
I feel like this would actually work on most people
if they can delete someones account and potentially make them buy everything again (at least that is how i think the executives must view it) why wouldnt they?
Consumer trust, most likely. You do this to 100 people and you lose far more in customers who don’t want to touch your stuff anymore.
This is for UK and EU due to GDPR that requires companies delete all user data for inactive accounts. It’s a unintended consequences of the law and other gaming companies including Xbox have similar clauses.
The law says they can’t keep your PII after you stop being a customer, not anything about linking your email address to purchases for an entirely legitimate ongoing reason.
The law covers personal data not PII and is much broader than PII that is defined under the US Office of Privacy and Open Government which has no bearing on the GDPR.
As for personal data, email addresses are covered and even user names could be considered personal data depending on if it’s linkable to a person and since your account is linked to your email and linked to you user name potentially, when they have to delete personal data the have to delete all of those foreign keys in their database that says your email once got a receipt for that game you bought digitally.
Except they don’t have to delete any of that as long as you hold ongoing software licenses with them, as that’s a legitimate interest. This is malicious compliance posing as “well they made us do it”, same as all the GDPR banners on the web.
They need to retain financial data for way longer though, and are basically allowed to store their bookkeeping stuff for forever. So they could restore accounts from that anyways. I’d argue, they could keep the account details which can be recovered from financial data under those circumstances. Which probably would be everything necessary to keep the purchased games. They’d need to delete e.g. usage data, connection data etc.
I’m not here to defend the corporations.
Email addresses are PII under GDPR, aren’t they? So linking email addresses to purchase history is explicitly retaining PII and data about someone they can identify.
You are explicitly allowed to retain PII for critical business purposes. So in this case as a key component that the software licence is attached to they can retain it forever anyway.
Hah! I guess Sony argues that “who bought what” is not a “critical business purpose”…
Pretty sure that the gdpr specifically precludes forever retention. Data should be retained as long as is necessary and whether 1, 3, 5, 10 or however many years, sooner or later deletion is appropriate, and the timeline depends on what is reasonable.
3 years is a long time to not log in and if a court decided that it exceeded a ‘reasonable’ period for legitimate interest the fines can go to 10% of global revenue. The law encourages risk averse behaviour.
They could make a better system where the user sets the timeline but it would be impossible to predict the return.
On this one i think its probably driven by risk management not nefarious intent.
3 years is not a long time at all. I’ve been collecting games on my steam account for 19 years, and there was a period of >2 years where I didn’t use it.
i didnt touch my steam account for like 12 years… i set it up when portal2 came out on ps3, but that never went anywhere…
literally a dozen years later, i built a gaming PC and when i logged into steam, there was a portal2 license waiting for me to press download
3 years is not long at all if you factor having kids into the equation. There is not a lot, if any, time to play video games when your kids are small. Imagine having 2 kids 1-2 years apart and not finding time for gaming (on your PS) until the youngest is at least 2 years old - then you are quickly looking at 3-4 years without login.
Not something i need imagination for. Im not saying 3 years is optimal, but there does have to be a threshold somewhere. Personally i’d build it into user settings to allow users to self select a time period they accept.
Seems illegal.
