Sony makes bold claim about game ownership – Words of the AgingGamer

Sony would like you to know that any reasonable gamer would know that purchasing a game is just licensing a game (Video Games Chronicle), not owning it. And there is truth mixed in with a bold-faced lie in that statement.

There is also a comically bad argument about ownership mixed in there that I am still chuckling about. I’m sure lawyers wouldn’t laugh as much as I am, but it sounds stupid to me so let’s go with that.

What gamers know

An average gamer, and I would hesitate to call such a beast “reasonable”, is pretty likely to be at least somewhat aware of software licensing. The idea is that we don’t actually own what we pay for, instead we own a right to use said thing.

And even that right to use is limited in various ways. If the software requires vendor provided servers to run the rights holder can terminate those servers at will, effectively rendering the software non-functional. This definitely applies to most multi-player games and also many single player games that have some form of “phone home” logic embedded in their code.

But most gamers, and software licensees in general, would expect to get some kind of value out of the money they spend. Gamers don’t expect a game they bought today to be rendered unplayable tomorrow by the vendor, and it is where the lie of software licensing resides. This is where laws need to be written to require vendors to either provide service for a reasonable period after purchase or refund unused value to the purchaser. Such laws either do not exist or are in a nascent form in various countries.

Sony’s strange argument about ownership

Sony’s argument is that players not only know that they are licensing software, they have a strange bizarro world take on ownership of software itself to back it up. In their proposed thinking, software cannot be sold because it is not finite, therefore you can’t sell the singular instance of the software without taking said software away from anyone else who might want it. This specific example was given:

“Were that the case, then Plaintiff Edward Heycock would not have been able to obtain the game Resident Evil Requiem on February 25, 2026 for $69.99 from the PlayStation Store after Plaintiff Jason Mendoza had obtained Resident Evil Requiem on February 14, 2026, because Mr Mendoza, not Sony, would have owned it then.”

That isn’t the way merchandise works. A cup isn’t the singular example of “cup”: you don’t buy the only cup, you buy a copy of the cup. Software works similarly, but there are a potentially infinite number of “cups” (copies of the software) that can be produced for a cost that approaches zero.

This feels like a strange reductio ad absurdum argument in reverse, where the argument isn’t disproven by reducing it: it is instead proven that merchandise and specifically software is sold as copies not as a singular entity. I’m not sure who Sony’s lawyers are trying to appeal to here, or if they just wanted to burn through a few dozen billable hours on an argument that makes no sense.

What a gamer is buying isn’t the singular example of the software: they buy a copy of said software, or more accurately a license to use a copy. Sony’s argument here should be dismissed as ridiculous on its face by any judge who understands anything about how software or even physical objects work. Sony does have a valid argument, however, on the whole “gamers know they aren’t buying the software, they are licensing it” front.

What this means for the court case

I am not a lawyer, and I don’t have the interest to read the whole position of either the plaintiff or the defendant. On the surface it seems to me, however, that the plaintiffs made a mistake in how they stated their case. It is positioned as a form of “false advertising” with “Buy now” buttons on Sony’s websites implying something is being purchased when the truth is only a license is being paid for. Nothing is owned.

I get where they are coming from, but the real problem is that customers pay for something they have a reasonable right to expect: a license to use the software for reasonable period of time. Sony and other vendors can and do violate that expectation, cancelling or removing support for games that were still available for purchase right up until their removal. Changing that equation is something that probably needs new laws, which may explain the rather weak-seeming case here.

No matter what happens in the case, Sony probably has more and better lawyers to bring to bear. They can baffle the court with bullshit while flooding the plaintiff with discovery and counter-claims costing them more than any normal person can afford. So I suspect this case won’t go very far.

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