Recently a comment made by an Ubisoft executive that "gamers need to get 'comfortable' not owning their games for subscriptions to take off" caused, once again, a lot of furor among gamers and gaming youtube channels.
This is nothing new, of course. This always seems to be an extremely touchy subject among gamers. The idea that they would somehow "not own" the games they have purchased, and instead the game companies dictating how, when and if they can play those games.
The funny (and ironic) thing about this is that nobody seems to be able to explain what "owning a game" even means.
Seriously. I have asked many people online, who are outraged at such a preposterous proposition as uttered by that Ubisoft executive, what exactly they mean by "owning" a video game.
Some of them never answer the question and instead go to unrelated tangents, being outraged about the idea of "subscription based" games, and companies being able to remove your right to play a game. Rather than, you know, answering the question.
Others give completely incorrect answers. They seem to think that, for example, if they have purchased the game on a disc, that they now "own" the game. Not that they own the disc, but the game itself. When they are explained that just because they own the physical material object doesn't mean that the material contained within is now their own personal private property, usually copious amounts of arguing and handwaving follows.
A good majority of the answers are strongly related to personal feelings of how things "should be", what rights the users "should have", according to the personal subjective opinions of the person. Rather than, you know, what the law actually says.
In almost 100% of cases the responses are on eventually become very agitated and angry, as if this were a very touchy subject. In most cases it seems to stem from the fact that people just can't explain properly what "owning a game" means exactly, in their view, and when the flaws and misconceptions in their (often very poor and shaky) definitions are pointed out, they get angry.
That fact is: Even though you "buy" a video game, you don't own it. It's not your video game now, it's not your private personal property for you to do whatever you want with it. The data that the game consists of is still fully the property of the company that owns the legal right to it (usually the game's publisher). Ownership of this data is not somehow transferred to you when you purchase a copy of the game.
"Owning a video game", in any other sense that the legal rights that a person or a company has to their own creation, is a rather nonsensical concept. You don't "own" the game. You can't "own" the game in any legal sense. It's not your personal property. It's still the property of the company (or sometimes individual person) who created or published it.
When you purchase a game (or any other piece of software), what you are essentially doing is purchasing a legally-binding usage license that gives you the right to use that software (with limits). This is very well defined and enforced by law in most countries.
It could be loosely compared to renting an apartment: It's "your" apartment in a loose sense (in that it's legally assigned to you personally, and nobody else, sometimes not even the owner, can just trespass it), but you still don't "own" the apartment. It's not your personal property. You have simply agreed to a contract where you pay the owner money for the right to use the apartment (and this is a contract enforceable by law).
In the same sense when you purchase a game, what you are actually purchasing is a right to use the software. You are not purchasing the game itself, the intellectual property itself. You are merely purchasing a legal right to use it (with some limits). It is, in a sense, an implicit legally binding contract, a license agreement, between you and the company that actually owns the game.
If you purchase the game in a physical medium, then you do genuinely own the physical object (at least in most jurisdictions, and sometimes depending on the particular usage license), but only the object itself. You still don't own the data stored in that object. It's not yours to use however you please. (For example in the vast majority of jurisdictions it would be illegal for you to copy the data and start selling it. It's not yours to copy and sell.)
In this sense "owning a game" could be used to merely mean "having paid the game's owner for the right to use the game, ie. paid for a usage license". However, while a handy shortcut, I still don't like it because it can so easily be (and very, very often is) confused with the ownership of physical objects, like owning a hammer or a microwave oven.
In this sense, I don't see that sentiment that "gamers need to get comfortable not owning their games" as something preposterous. They already don't own their games. Nobody does (unless you have written the game yourself.) There is nothing that would change in this scenario.
Relating to ownership, that is. Of course what the Ubisoft executive is actually talking about is changing the traditional usage license of video games to a different one, where you don't purchase a lifetime right to use the game. "Not owning the game" is just extremely poor wording to express this.
A more technically accurate way of expressing the same thing would be something like: "Ubisoft exec says gamers need to get 'comfortable' not getting a lifetime usage license for their games for subscriptions to take off." But of course that's less catchy.
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