How to think of games has changed over the years.

Arguably the first real computer game game “Spacewar!” followed the “the “hacker ethic”, whereby all programs were freely shared and modified by other programmers in a collaborative environment without concern for ownership or copyright”.

After a while, copyright came into play, and people were expected to “buy” a copy of the game, but “piracy” was common.

Meanwhile, the consoles pretended the game was a physical object, and that you needed that physical object to play, and that you could give that physical object to someone else, or sell it back to the store.

And then there was the shareware model, used for games like Doom. It kept the idea that games were copyrightable stuff, but it didn’t try to stop people from copying, and allowed them to share the games around. People were just asked to pay for extra levels, or sometimes just to send in some money if they liked the game.

On PC, Steam became the dominant platform because it’s less of a headache than piracy. Steam doesn’t pretend you own a physical object, you’re buying a license.

Fundamentally, gamers want the games to be free. If possible, they want to avoid paying for them at all. They want to be able to give them to friends, and have no restrictions on how or where they can run them: online, offline, on a phone, on a toaster, whatever. Once they have access to the game, they don’t ever want to have to give up access for any reason. They want the companies that make the games to release patches for any bugs that are discovered, and ideally, they’d like free additional content post-release.

Game companies want gamers to pay as much as possible for games. They want people to buy their games, they want an additional purpose for every additional machine the game is installed on. In addition, if they can manage it, they want people to pay continuously for playing the game, so it’s not just a one-time payment. They also want to be able to revoke access to the game at any time, and not have to pay the players when they do that. They don’t want to have to keep maintaining the game after it has been released, though they might be willing to do that if it’s profitable because it means more people will buy the game.

Neither extreme position makes much sense. If people aren’t going to give money to the developers, there will still be people making games as a hobby, but there won’t be high-budget AAA games made as a business. On the other extreme, if a game is too expensive, can’t be refunded, might be revoked at any time, and requires that you continuously pay while playing it, most people won’t bother.

So, what’s left is a negotiation, what will people put up with? Gamers typically hate paying for live service games, but if they do that there’s a reasonable business case for the game company to keep releasing content for the game. Gamers would like to be able to re-sell their game (really their licenses to those games), but that means a significant loss of revenue for the game companies, so they’re unlikely to accept that. The additional revenue means they can either keep the price lower, or can make a better, more polished game. Gamers would love to be able to play games forever without additional payment, even online games requiring servers. Game companies don’t want to have to support that based on a single sale that might have happened a decade ago. Game companies would love it if old games stopped working, so people have to buy new ones. That’s unlikely to be a fight they win in the long term though, because unless there is a required online component, it seems absurd to cut off access to the game just because it’s old.

In the end, there will probably be compromises. For a lot of people, the compromises will be unfair. Maybe they’ll play more indie games or even free software games. For other people, they’ll grudgingly accept, but in exchange will get games that have 100,000x the budget of something like “Spacewar!”