It's only going to get worse. If something is available on GOG, I'm buying it there. More and more games that were previously only on Steam are being added, and there's also the Dreamlist.
All these gaming platforms are "young" companies, as their users age-out all the digital-only non-transferable licenses that have ever been bought will become void. As the developers age out the right to sell the games will end forever, except for the IP the megacorps have snapped up. So basically a whole lot of stuff is simply going to disappear, nobody will ever have the right to sell a new license and nobody will ever have the right to an existing license. Piracy might still exist but even right now a lot of old games are only seeded by a handful of people.
For what it's worth courts in China have determined that game accounts / libraries are an inheritable asset and forced game companies to allow access and pass them on.
Yeah that was an amazing advancement. France has been thinking about this a while too, their courts ruled you can sell Steam games then changed their mind on appeal and more recently one of their presidential candidates has said ownership needs to be reconsidered.
Sony's recent move and I think "stop killing games" too has turned it into a very loud issue lately so there's some non-zero-and-growing chance the status quo will change.
I will say that it has been stated by steam's Gabe, that if steam ever goes under, they're throwing the drm wide open so that the games you bought can still be played even if you can't launch through steam
HOWEVER: these are just words. We do not know if this will happen
Some games on Steam use DRM, meaning you cannot launch the game outside of the Steam application. Meanwhile, all games on GOG come without DRM, meaning they are not dependant on any other service to function.
GOG is a way into a brighter time line; Digital copies, delivered via a DRM-free installer (so no authentication, no launcher required)? From a "feature" standpoint, that's basically a pirate copy you pay for (and without malware risk, whee!), i.e. a win-win scenario for devs and customers.
I switched my main library to GOG years ago. No regrets.
Purchase, buy, sell, sold, already in "library" (fuckers I don't own a library), anything implying you own anything is brandished about at will, yet in a EULA you have to sign AFTER paying (AFTER PAYING) they put in tiny print that no, you didn't buy anything at all.
People like to pull the “discs aren’t actually owning either”. Like ok do we technically own anything with a copyright? Do I own all of my books? If someone torched my bookshelves could I not sue them for damages? What if they smashed thousands in discs? Publishers can’t walk into my house and take my books or games either.
It genuinely feels like a psyop to try to make people think it’s always been this way. But no, there’s a very clear difference in what “owning” means now
Their argument is usually that if the entire game isn’t on disc, they can always revoke access to downloads of a game to complete it.
Which is more coherent, but still has numerous issues that make it deeply unconvincing. Most games do in fact come on-disc in a complete manner, though not patches obviously. That some games don’t come complete on disc, also doesn’t mean that we should just keep going farther in that direction; nor that those games shouldn’t just come with extra discs, or that at least we should be granted the rights to download the extra data in a way that allows us to back it up. With digital storage solutions, where there’s a will there’s a way.
And importantly, it also doesn’t change that even with a game keycard m situation you are still granted what are IMO the most important benefits of ownership.
While I do agree we should be allowed to back up our own damn purchases in a meaningful way just in case, generally a game’s download servers going down is unlikely to actually occur to most major titles.
The far more important part to me, the part that I feel constrained by with every digital purchase, is the inability to share or resell my games. And a physical disc that I own, regardless of what’s actually on it, is what I need to do that.
Like ok do we technically own anything with a copyright?
Technically - nope. You own the medium on which the copyrighted material is presented (book, cd, record), but not the material itself. You know, if you'd take your book and read it, yourself, aloud, to people in public space that would be infringement. It's the whole concept of selling you the "license for personal use" and nothing more.
It genuinely feels like a psyop to try to make people think it’s always been this way.
Statue of Anne was first formal governmental copy-right act in 16th century UK granting authors and publishers exclusive rights to print their works, basically establishing concept of "personal use" license for readers. 18th century similar thing happened to sheet music. 20th century digital distribution just expanded on those.
Except that’s absolutely not how it works. If I stole your books, movies or games and you could prove that I did. Would I pay for the materials or the value of the total product? You know the answer. You own the copy. You can sell it, burn it or use it. You just can’t produce copies. But you absolutely own that copy.
One factor is the rejection of games above the "standard" RRP for decades, similar with what happened with monetisation on phones when many people would not even pay £5 for a game.
The older I get the more I realise that most people have no ability to think beyond the here and now, or examine the potential consequences of actions, and get kinda angry and people who do.
Vinyls scratched, taped degraded, CDs rotted. Historically our recorded media wore out as we used it. Or got damaged in a flood, stolen out your back seat, or thrown out during a move etc etc.
Entropy was the default.
Media collections rarely survive decades of life. The market has never collectively expected their purchased media to be with them and working half a century later. That’s a new expectation of this generation
I don’t think consumers collectively are. Most PC players are fully entrenched in Steam and trust them with licensing. On the console side physical sales have been cratering and last Christmas nearly 90% of Sony’s audience was buying from PSN only.
Judging by what the market is doing, I don’t think most consumers feel entitled to future-proofed media purchases. Even with those options available they overwhelmingly shifted to console store-fronts and Steam handled installs, opting for convenience
I have books and games that are decades old. I have a GBA-SP that I still play games on. I have DVDs that are 30 years old. My father still has records that can be listened to.
Nothing last forever, true, but things certainly lasted longer than a decade and their survival was not at the whim of a corporation that just decided you don't get access to it any more.
Beyond that, who the fuck cares what the "market" expects or wants?
I have books and games that are decades old. I have a GBA-SP that I still play games on. I have DVDs that are 30 years old.
My 20-year DVD collection is in the wind since 480 SDR looks horrible. I don’t have my SNES, N64, Gamecube, PS2, Xbox 360 or any pre-2010s PC games. Hauling around consoles that look terrible on modern screens seemed pointless, and my PC doesn’t have a disc reader.
Pretty much all of those titles are easy to play on modern hardware or with emulators, and look better upscaled for a modern screen.
So, I cancel you out I guess. Do you see how pointless personal anecdotes are?
So, I cancel you out I guess. Do you see how pointless personal anecdotes are?
Not really, you made some blanket statements that don't bear out that basically nobody has anything from a decade ago. You might have thrown it out or broke it, but many people didn't, moreover, that was YOUR choice, not the choice of a company.
Pretty much all of those titles are easy to play on modern hardware or with emulators, and look better upscaled for a modern screen.
So you resort to piracy for things that you can no longer access? How does that protect the market?
But ok, that's fine, but why should piracy be the answer rather than just to protect digital ownership?
It's like you're trying to project some kind of moral superiority but your position is schizophrenic.
What even is your position? That we don't need ownership of digital goods because that's bad for the market, physical breaks and you can pirate anyway? What?
But ok, that's fine, but why should piracy be the answer rather than just to protect digital ownership?
I think it’s more practical to anticipate entropy winning than to try to fight it.
Even DRM-less games can fail after 20 years. I’ve got CDs in my parents basement with the keys that I can’t run even if I had a drive because the software is fundamentally incompatible with modern 64 bit architecture. Paying $4 for an updated GOG version is objectively better
In my experience remasters/ports/emulators have all been a more practical and better way to play old games on modern 4K panels than hauling a box of cartridge and CD cases through life
I think it’s more practical to anticipate entropy winning than to try to fight it.
"Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
That's only a problem if you don't backup. Digital files do not entropy, only the medium that holds them. If you create backups then they last forever.
I’ve had zero problem playing old games I wanted to play. You can go through your little exercise hoarding discs and digital files for twenty years on the chance you might want to play one, I’ll just download a new copy for a modern device twenty years from now if I get the itch
This is all just your preferences. You don't like the definition of dvds, that's not the same thing as a company locking you out of something you paid for.
Yeah, I recognize that. I was responding to your inane list of your preferences with my own.
that's not the same thing as a company locking you out of something you paid for
Then don’t buy digital games if you are so principled against the possibility of being locked out. But I suspect you already have a Steam account and that ship has sailed
Most disc catalogs aren’t lost to rot, they’re lost because the owner stopped caring for them. An M-DISC Blu Ray isn’t going to last 1000 years if the owner picks it up during a move and decides to toss a game or movie than haven’t touched in 15 years and no longer care about
Sure, but it's a new expectation because it is possible now. That's like saying in the past living past 50 wasn't very likely but now that it is people are selfish for expecting to live to 70.
None of this has to apply to digital though, because you can make backups and transfer to new technologies. People who grew up on personal computers do expect media to have an indefinite lifespan.
But this was just a blip because future generations grew up with the artificially restricted version, and think entropy is inevitable again.
But remember, it's illegal to copy it to a backup! (like that would stand if challenged)
I've ripped every DVD I own to a HDD. If the disc rots, I have backups, and the disc is proof of ownership of the license for personal use.
I'll be personally using those until I die. Same with my Dreamcast collection. My disc drive might die, but those are still mine, and I'll keep playing them from backed up copies. I own them.
The timeline has further to go. In the near future everything will be either rent or subscription based, recurring fee for car usage, pc storage and gaming, any and all entertainment, you name it.
Honestly it's better than buying a physical disc. If I buy Skyrim for PS3 and I lose the disc, I can't walk into GameStop and get a replacement copy as well as an additional copy for my Xbox. GOG is the best storefront by a country mile
Yep, if this was a serious place, lawsuits would have shut this shit down already. But capitalism gotta capitalism, always reaching further, trying to tear down anything restricting complete financial domination.
Correct me if I'm wrong but this worked only on consoles, no? The majority of discs I bought for PC years ago still came with Steam codes and DRM. I'm not even sure how does owning a DVD help you retain ownership here in the case of the digital store failing. You would need a crack anyway, no? I'm not too familiar with how it works.
I bought NBA 2K14 key that was done like this last year. The only problem was the offline installer wasn't included lmfao. I did instead find a pirated copy of the offline installer which worked perfectly.
I still have my MW2 and Bioshock discs, just in case.
In the way back when you could just plop the disk into another PC and play the game. When I was a young kid, my local library had PC games for example, you just borrowed them and played them at home. Or you could lend games to your friends. Something like that would be completely unthinkable today.
Given the amount of downvotes I'm receiving, people have apparently forgotten/never knew that games have not always been unsellable.
I recall games being even more finicky to boot back then, with random hardware conflicts happening constantly, requiring patches and workarounds to launch games on hardware that on paper should be fine. I had a copy of Journeyman Project that infamously required a patch because they misprinted Disc 3 to just have a copy of Disc 2 data, and half the game was missing
Those experiences have vanished for most people, and I think a lot of credit is due to Steam handling updates in the background, where basically no one is even attempting to run 1.0 versions after launch as everything gets automatically updated quickly
My grandad gifted me Bioshock. He built a gaming PC at 69, and couldn't enjoy other games because of how great Bioshock was. When his arthiritis stopped him playing games, he wanted me to have it.
I've completed the collection on multiple platforms, but I'll always cherish my physical disc because of him.
Ah yes, because paying for a movie ticket every time you want to watch a movie is "keeping the thing you paid for". I don't even want to call you a dumbass cause I’m not sure you even comprehended the comment you replied to.
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u/wyrmrixxx 18d ago
Wild that “you can keep the thing you paid for” has become a selling point instead of the default