I’m getting awfully darn tired of having to pay for what I already own.

What do I mean?

Sony just announced that the PlayStation Portable titles you already own may be usable on your PlayStation Vita after all … for a price.

Plenty of people have already noted that the PS Vita doesn’t come with the UMD drive from the PS Portable. Backward compatibility is being ditched more and more these days. If Ninty can do it, so can Sony. Especially on portable gaming, where once it was a veritable guarantee that you could take your old game and plug it into your new Nintendo Gameboy handheld, the last few generations have been shooting that down quite rapidly. And Sony is doing the same.

Except where with Ninty you can pay to download the game you already own on a cartridge, with Sony you … wait … can pay to download the game you already own on disc. Err… So it’s basically exactly the same.

Through a device called the UMD Passport you basically get to re-pay for the PS Portable game that you already own so that you can play it on your PS Vita as well. Prices are reported to be in the range of ¥100 ($1.30) and ¥2,400 ($31.16). So yes, you could be paying over thirty bucks to continue playing a game that you already paid for.

That is, assuming that Sony even brings the UMD Passport to the US. So far they’ve only announced it for Japan.

Is it really too much to ask that we go back to the good old days of backward compatibility? I mean I was playing my old GameBoy carts on my GameBoy Advance, and loving it. Zelda brought back to life. Metroid 2 was still fun. Only since then I haven’t touched a Nintendo handheld because I want my GameBoy to be able to play all of my games, dammit! Nintendo has lost a lot of sales opportunity there from me.

And now Sony is taking the same route?

Nuh uh!

Looks like Sony is going to lose a lot of sales opportunity from me too then. Should have seen it coming though when Sony screwed over their emulation on the PS3.

It’d be pretty sad if I only bought PC games in the future. But then again, what with UMPCs and old games being released for free or even open-sourced, maybe it won’t be so sad after all. For me. For Nintendo and Sony however … too bad. So sad. No more hard-earned money from me.

If I own it, I own it.  I’m not “licensing” it.  I freaking own my copy.  It’s the way it’s always been.  You can’t just change that midstream now.  Though it’s certainly not stopping people from trying to remonetize on what you already paid for.  Like Apple and their iTunes Match, convincing people to pay an additional twenty five bucks a year to listen to music that they already bought.

I’m just really getting tired of these scams.  I’m paying once and only once, thank you very much!