Top-notch research. You would have thought that a daily investor would at the very least read the terms, conditions, and other agreements attached. All the 'physical' games, related to this conversation, have and will always be digital.
It has always been a licensing issue. Yet, that word is absent. Fix licensing. Licensing should be broken up into categories, where digital products could be considered owned. Those who own the IP are very much against perpetuity.
I once had this whole conversation with people who promote game preservation, and all the people could do is only highlight having owned the games (or media) that they have bought. Having that mindset won't solve the problem. You have agreed to an EULA. Licensing as a whole needs to be reviewed.
What needs to be ventilated is whether a license is a product? I have long held the view that the right to use (a select criterion) should be considered ownership.
As much as MS (XBOX) and Sony are going toe-to-toe, concering the ownership (or its actual idea) XBOX danced around their DRM servers not being available some time ago. So much so, that Scott Van Vliet didn't even mention license, licensing, or DRM in a long X post. He did call it 'entitlement check'. Entitlements checks shouldn't require the end-user to always be online. It only needs to be done once, per account, per hardware.
This:
The copy of Assassin’s Creed, which I bought, however, is a different story. On Nintendo’s digital store, the game is priced at around R899, slightly cheaper than the version I bought.
The version of the game which I purchased from the retailer’s website is also usually priced at R999, meaning that at full price, I would have paid an extra R100 to get an empty plastic box with my download code.
Declan Thompson bought a right to use and access license. The rest is packaging, and then there are regional and distribution rights which may vary in how a 'product' is priced because death and taxes amongst other things.
