Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. It’s a shame. I can invite my friends over, boot up my GameCube to play some Mario Kart Double Dash. As long as the console and disc are okay, I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away.
These days? Not so much. I’ll never be able to be sure I can play GTA VI in twenty years. It just sucks not owning anything anymore. I know why they do it, it’s a massive profit difference.[1]
On the PC end of things, it’s not as bleak. Services like GoG let you download the standalone installer, DRM free. I try to get any single player games I can from GoG, you should too.
Support the corps that give you ownership. Buy those Blu-rays of your favorite films. Either to support physical media or to ensure you will have it until data degrades.
General principle: It is way easier to avoid lock in by not being locked in in the first place then to extricate yourself later. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming video service because I had a DVD collection that predates them, and I maintained it instead of being on a streaming service, so I've got a personal collection. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming music service because I have a CD collection started decades before they came into existence, ripped digitally, and I've got music I own already.
There's more entertainment of every kind, including video games that don't lock you down, then you could consume in a lifetime anyhow. If you limit yourself to just what doesn't lock you in, yeah, you may not be playing GTA VI, but it's not like you'll lack for good games.
On the one hand, buying a subscription service for $20/month does give you instant, temporary access to a lot of things... on the other, consistently putting that money into media acquisition over the same period of time will build up quite a collection in a few years. Remember that you don't just have to buy blockbusters... you can raid garage sales, you can buy used, you can pick up surprisingly cheap collections like [1], you can hit the Salvation Army... what you find may be haphazard but you can bootstrap a collection cheaply, and may find some surprising stuff on the way.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006LOC01G - but look at the used prices, not the new. There's a lot of things like this on Amazon where someone thinks they can get a lot of money for it "new" where the used market reflects the more accurate market reality.
You don't get in the locked box in the first place. That's the whole point.
A day may come where it is the only option. In which case, personally, I will still advocate for not getting in the box. If they're going to hold "music" and "movies" hostage tell them to go fuck themselves. It's your money they're using to lock you in. And the day that I have nothing left that can play MP3 files is too far in the future to be sure about anyhow.
If you're really concerned that that is a likely future, you need to be joining with me now, not trying to discourage me about the hopelessness of the task. The only reason it's hopeless is your apparent willingness to pay other people to lock you in. If you don't accept that bargain, you won't be locked in.
Further helping is that these closed ecosystems tend to collapse anyhow. If you're locked in, why spend money on giving you good content? Even if they are appealing today, they won't be tomorrow.
remember that time all of the frontier AI labs trained their models on copyrighted material and no one batted an eyelid? If they can do that, I don't see why I can't back up my CD's and DVDs or digital purchases with digital copies source from the high seas. If buying isn't owning...
That's the one reason I don't use Steam. I'm not saying Valve is evil or anything like that. But GOG's transparency and commitment to DRM-free games should be the market standard.
DRM-free was a nice idea 20 years ago, the problem is that it doesn't scale. There is just way to much media out there to keep track of and especially with games you are looking at frequent updates and patches, that your DRM-free backup won't get, unless you turn backup up a full time job to keep track of it all.
If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones, since I gave up trying to back them up a decade ago.
On top of that, those updates can be kind of useful. None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux. Also annoying: None of the GOG games run on a genuine Win9x either, as what you are getting is an updated version for modern Windows, not the original game.
Either way, I just don't think DRM-free is the proper solution for media management today or in the future. The olden days of static media are largely gone and the modern world is just way more fluid. So far none of the proposed solutions are able to capture that properly.
My son and we as his parents really love Bluey, but it's impossible to buy a DVD set here in Germany, with German dub, because Disney distributes it exclusively through their plus platform.
There are many more examples like these. Very sad state of affairs.
Not staying this to be pendantic or to annoy you, but you really do know that at the bottom line, the same sort of license applies to movies and music that as of games. It is just accepted with movies, music and books that people just 'have' them. The publishers seriously know what a huge outrage there would be when they did the same to those forms of media like they did with games, but they would if they could get away with it.
They already did though. Sony removed your movies from your PlayStation. And every Blu-Ray player can brick itself if you insert a disk with a player blacklist update.
You can resell a movie (dvd/blu-ray) and music (cd, tape, etc) like you can resell a physical book. But if the license you have actually agrees on that, i don't really know. Back then i had several dvd's that granted watching it in a family environment but did not grant you reselling.
I can still go to the store and buy some music on physical media, and (if history is any indicator) I can still play it forever until it or my playback equipment wears out.
As a practical matter: You do know that when I spin up an album at home, I simply do not care what limitations any licensing agreements may or may not apply, right? I'm going to play it anyway, and it will work when I play it -- free from outside influence.
Someday that GameCube will break and so will all the others. And someday that PC capable of running open source emulators will also break. And all that will be left is corporation controlled hardware running corporation controlled software. Maybe we'll be lucky and be allowed to rent a few of the old games.
You can install GOG games on a normal Steam Deck already. What you want is better integration with their store but Heroic also works great on Deck and can automatically add your GOG games to Steam as well.
Meh I don't want another store app, I want an API that I can use from my store-agnostic open source game launcher / library. They should just officially support efforts like Heroic instead.
You can and it actually works ok. For the sake of the argument you would/could be more 'free to do with your games what you want', because GoG does not do DRM.
Eh, I'd probably leave music off that list. Even mainstream music releases are still pretty easy to buy DRM-free via services like Qobuz, even if the majority of people are using streaming platforms these days. Although I wonder if that's maybe just because music seems like it would be pretty easy to sidestep DRM, even if they do come up with some kind of innovation (heck, even my friend told me he pirated my album... WHICH IS FREE, BTW).
But e-books? Holy crap the drm on those things is soooooo annoying to avoid.
If I want an e-book, I buy it from bookshop.org and then pirate the DRM-free version. It clears my conscience: the author gets paid, a small bookshop gets the sale, and I can read my book anywhere.
In twenty years it doesn’t matter if Rockstar delists GTA6.
The DRM will be cracked. You will be able to play and you WILL have a better experience playing a cracked DRM free version than any official version.
You can play an emulated Mario Kart Double Dash on a Steam Machine (or any PC) today and get a better experience than playing it on a Game Cube.
Digital only games sounds bad at first but preservation of video games will be done digitally more effectively than physically. How many full rom sets of Super Nintendo games are just sitting there on millions of PCs around the world? It is trivial to preserve them: copy paste to a new machine. Done.
Disks will rot. GameCube optical lasers will fail. One day, maybe not soon, but it is it inevitable that all disk based games will become unplayable and lost one day. Maybe if we’re lucky an independent company will create an accurate FPGA based GameCube for people to play their games but emulation is just better.
Prices on the second hard market will be astronomical making physical copies innaccessible - this has already happened for arcade PCBs and it will happen for disk based games. PCBs that used to go for a few hundred now go for tens of thousands. I personally believe that this push for physical preservation is largely driven by speculators that know this. You see insane prices for things like sealed copies of Super Mario Bros already. PCB prices were driven up by speculators hoarding supply and they’ll do it for console games too.
If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.
We can reverse engineer those too, by looking at what the game client expects. Its harder, obviously. But far from impossible.
I started writing my own world of warcraft server about 20 years ago by disassembling the WoW binary. I got to the point that you could log in to the game and run around in a big empty world. I even found a couple mistakes in wow's in-game encryption in the process. Lots of teams have gotten much further than I did. There's whole communities who play wow on private servers.
If we can do that for MMOs, we can do that for just about anything. Especially with LLMs. LLMs are incredibly good at this sort of work.
The online portions will be reverse engineered and there will be community servers or the online checks will be replaced with offline stubs. You think in twenty years they won’t be able to do this in minutes for practically nothing using GPT 15 or whatever?
One consideration I have on every purchase I make is that I own it, like actually own it (with exceptions where necessary, of course). Internet access in something that shouldn't need internet access is a downside. It's a way to mess with the purchase you made.
If my e-reader had a bad battery after years of use, I should be able to replace that battery myself without issue (personal skill allowing). I purchased it. Why wouldn't you be able to? I haven't yet found reason for this in consumer devices, except because they want you to send it in or buy a new one from the manufacturer.
Every time we see something like this, it doesn't get enough eyes or care from those who use these platforms. Sony takes your movies away, Xbox requires you be online, Amazon updating your books automatically without asking you, etc. My favorite that I repeat constantly is all of the BS that BMW has done over the years: heated seats subscription, proprietary bolt heads, ads in the infotainment. If you buy a BMW at this point, I'm sorry, but you had alternatives and I don't feel bad. The scary part is when enough people accept it that everyone else in the industry follows suit and then the outliers are the ones that respect you.
If I purchased a physical disc, I'm not even asking for the source code (which I'd love), I'm just asking that I can run the damn software I bought, but you can't even do that now. Viva open source and right to repair. Make the educated choice when purchasing software and hardware, to your benefit, where appropriate. Of course, the proprietary system is what you need/want sometimes, but I bet most of us don't most of the time.
Yea, but there are bigger problems coming, this outage is just a temporary preview of the future.
What happens to game preservation in 20 or 10 years when the authentication servers for this generation are permanently shut down?
Millions of physical discs will instantly turn into e-waste.
That would be possibly illegal, requires someone highly specialized to care about each and every one of your games, and assumes there won’t be a crackdown on the openness and anonymity of the a Internet that allows the distribution of pirate software.
We need to have this right codified into law before we lose it.
I keep seeing article like this, that look like they have been written by these companies to push the opinion.
People saying "who cares because you cannot play it anyway" instead of "discs should be less dependant on network to gain another advantage".
But the case for physical disk is not (only) about playability, it's mostly about ownership and the fact that you can actually lend it to someone or resell it.
It's also about retail, and it's about collectors. About people with a slow or limited connection having access with that much less to download.
Another thing is also that if I have a physical copy, I have the right to a digital copy. So a non-working disc might not always be the end. But if I have a digital copy and they take it off the table, I do not have this right and it is gone forever.
> All I'm saying is it's all digital on the PC side of things, and has been for ages, but we have means of maintaining access to the games we love over here, and it's one of the reasons I've gravitated to the PC for quite a while now.
It all depends on where you buy your games of course; GOG will let you download DRM-free installers, but if Steam goes down, your libraries goes down with it. They have made a vague promise that they would prevent that if the company ever went out of business, but who knows if they will keep that promise.
Guarantees about playability went out the window the day free, easily-obtained updates came out on PC as much as consoles.
At least on the PC side, there's a vibrant piracy community.
Even if you get all of your games via Steam, provided you have them downloaded, you can still run them without Steam if you know where to look. Obviously GOG is far better in this regard, but preservation is not a concern on PC, outside of games that are reliant on a server.
Starting next generation when prices are going to be obscenely high, I'm really struggling to see why anyone should invest in a console as opposed to a (mini-)PC.
Depends. Steam is not DRM itself, you can open the game folder and copy the game to another computer and steam doesn’t care. The game often has its own DRM though which will stop you.
Realistically, if Steam closed down tomorrow, within 4-6 hours there'd be a megathread on Reddit explaining how to get the games running without Steam. Within 48 hours there'd be an auto-crack tool floating around on GitHub.
Yeah, I’ve been on Steam for about 20 years now and I can’t recall many bad moments with Valve.
The only one that comes to mind is the “outrage” when they decided to release L4D2 just a year after L4D back in 2008 instead of making this a free upgrade. Times have definitely changed. looks at yearly COD with barely any changes
Most Steam games don't actually have any DRM. They just link to steamapi.dll for things like achievements, and that makes you think you can't run them without Steam.
What is the command I can use to run them without Steam then? If the game links to a dll that launches Steam and won’t play without it, then that is effectively Drm.
Before I even play the game without Steam: how do I download it without Steam?
Oh there are Dlls? And as a non-technical consumer I just know this do I? I know how to dig deep into my file system and copy+paste a dll file into software I can’t/don’t understand? How do I download and install a copy without Steam?
You download it with Steam, then run Steam's backup function to back up the games you care about to physical media. Or in the vast number of cases you can just copy the game folder
Obviously if you buy it with steam you need Steam. But you only need it at the time of purchase, for the vast majority of titles
I sort of get it. Every competitor, except maybe GOG, has come down hard in hyper-capitalist value-extraction mode quickly after pretending to do any good-will. For Valve, being a somewhat decent company is part of their ethos, for their competitors it's a means to an end.
I trust Valve not to screw me over, even though I know they totally could. Their own DRM is pretty weak (just put a modified DLL in the game directory and the game will launch), luckily.
It allows you to play your games offline though, so if Steam's servers go down you can still play your games. I'm not sure if that's permanent or if you need to reactivate your DRM / license every once in a while though.
Around a decade ago i had to move to another city and spent a few months without internet. I had all my favorite games downloaded on Steam and was able to play them offline with no issue for all that time. Not sure if it still like that, but it was possible back then.
If steam goes down you can play offline. They have a portable game console that doesn't need to be connected to play. They have big warnings on the store page of games that require online drm.
There's a surprising amount of games on my Deck that refuse to run without internet. It's not even marked anywhere which sucks because you find out when you have no connectivity.
They don’t let you resell games, if you die your library is gone, if said steamdeck (or steam machine) breaks those games are gone, the list goes on. It is a digital store with the exact same limitations of any video game console full of digital purchases.
I use Steam but I also know I’m vulnerable to a rug pull. We all are. That’s why I’ve been shifting over to GOG and making sure to back up my library in an organized fashion. I wish I had done it sooner, but hey, today’s the best day.
As for warnings, I mean…come on man. That’s like hiding behind ToS. Let’s be realistic here: how many people here (including yourself) see a game they really want, see it has a little DRM note on the uttered store page, then decide never to buy it? Few people let that stop them from getting a game they actually want.
Seeing the little DRM note kills my joy entirely. I have used steam, but the runtime anti-tamper malware has no place on my system. I don't use the word malware lightly. I trust it about as much as a random "overdue" invoice pdf from my spam folder. Maybe less.
The deck and machine are not going to delete your account if it breaks? Theyre just PCs what are you on about?
I don't buy games that require third party launchers ever. Been burned losing my Ubisoft account or w/e a few times. The warnings are helpful and steam doesn't have to say anything at all.
Steam has some backup feature. I do backups of my games. Compressed to slow HDD dedicated to backups. Faster to install than downloading again from network. Don't know though how much will that help
Yeah, if the game is set up to not use steam as drm. You can check by going to the installed files and running the exe directly - in most cases it'll still launch even if you're signed out.
After weeks of discourse where the physical token of the Compact Disc had become the all-important object of the fight, it's reassuring to see that we're back at the beginning, where it was clearly understood that you don't meaningfully "own" a game if you need to be online to use any of it.
> "But owning a game on a disc today isn't really the same thing. It's still just a license..."
Here's the crux of the problem in their own sentence and they don't even realize it.
Owning and Licensing are not the same thing. If I own something, I own it outright. If I license something, I am leasing it.
It does get fuzzy with media, I will admit. But we need the same protections as physical books and game cartidges. If I buy it, it is mine to use as I please and even resell or transfer. If that's not what the transaction is, then don't call it buying or purchasing, call it leasing or licensing.
Require stores and publishers to use language that reflects the nature of the transaction.
Clearly parent poster meant 'policy'. 'The policy isn't about stealing', referring of course to the Terms and Conditions being something to ignore when they cover anti-piracy but don't sell you anything.
HN is the propaganda arm of a billionaire enrichment company, so it's understandable that someone might be unsure whether you're allowed to say that word here.
We all know what the word was, it was a joke to replace it with another word that has the same first/last letters that obviously wouldn't fit here. A joke about how words are censored all over the internet as a way to appease advertisers on various platforms.
If said billionaire enrichment company was really upset about it, they would be able to detect forbidden words like piracy even when replaced. It's not that difficult, it's a problem that was solved decades ago.
Even if the games are played off the internal hard drive with updates, there's a bit of "legal grey area" where enthusiastic fans of the game rebuild the code, and run the game with assets from the original media. "Technically" only folks with the original media in their possession will be able to play the original game.
For example the Ship of Harkinian PC port of Ocarina of Time. This requires a legal or illegal copy of the original game to run, so the copyright authorities don't crack down on it yet.
Are we sure that this is the reason the authorities aren't cracking down on it, and not that a game released in 1998 that also has a newer release on the 3DS just isn't financially valuable enough at this point to try to protect now? And it's getting an even newer remake, which is where Nintendo's concerns would be, I'd assume.
Nobody can be sure, but there is a consistent pattern here: decompilation projects can include as much code as they want and not get punished, but if they include assets they are taken down.
I suspect it's actually because the authorities don't know what the project is, if it's only code, or they can't be sure it's an infringing derivative work (it is).
They did this in California. Solution: stores don't use any of the words now. Now the buttons say "add to cart" and "proceed to payment". Sometimes the button just says the price.
I wonder if it's legal to build a completely scam store like this. You pick a game, you click on "$7", you pay $7, you don't get anything at all, and if you try to sue them, they point out they never actually sold you anything, you just voluntarily clicked on the button to donate $7.
Recently got a big fancy TV with 4k + Dolby Vision
It’s a lot of work figuring out what movies support the format. And all the premium upgrades to Netflix, etc get them to stream premium formats. Then it doesn’t work and you’re spending 30 minutes debugging your TV, wondering why you’re not getting the amazing new restoration of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I totally understand why people just buy physical media.
Games may be harder given software updates. But I’d pay a premium for a physical copy of mature games I love (like Halo Master Chief collection)
Oh, you pay for 4K? Sorry, the CDN is a bit too overloaded to send you this movie today. I hope you’re happy with 1080p, randomly dropping to 360p on and off for a dozen frames at a time during an immersive sequence.
It's worse. All hardware and software in the chain must be approved for you to be allowed to watch 4K. Your browser, OS, CPU, GPU, HDMI cable, and TV must all be whitelisted before you get 4K. Very few people meet the requirements.
And the 4K video is compressed to lower bitrate than a 1080p Blu-Ray anyway.
Normalize usage of "have been granted a limited license for" instead of "own." The word "own" implies all manner of things that don't exist for things like Xbox games, Kindle titles, etc.
For a golden decade or so, piracy was less convenient than paying: Xbox had subscriptions offering on tap games, there was only really one streaming service to speak of that had high quality content, music came from Spotify or YouTube, etc.
We are back to where we are in the 2000s: the gatekeepers of large tracts of culture are behaving so badly that piracy is probably going to end it's lull. It is a shame for artists, developers, and anyone else who needs to get paid that companies running genuinely very good services have chosen to behave so badly.
I own everything I've learned. I also own some hardware on which I sometimes deposit this information for later retrieval. I own all of it, keys to nuts.
In general, two kinds of solutions to political problems exist: those that don't work, and those that are illegal. Because why would politicians want something that worked to be legal?
But that's all products, and even if it wasn't, consumer choice is mainly driven by marketing spend, which lock-in companies will always have the most of, because they extract the most money.
I've been wondering about this, in some sense we might hit a big cultural black hole where all these cool things that we've created in the last few decades just are functionally lost and all the amazing things of the previous generation that could be found on archive, roms, stuff on CD's / DVD's etc are what actually have cultural value going forwards
Everything else is in this position of "actively at risk" where if someone isn't "keeping it up" it may just disappear, at least until it gets orphaned, in which case I suppose reverse engineering is back on the table
Thank God for Fitgirl doing so much archival work with high quality highly compressed game releases. If you know where to look everything is available somewhere.
Fitgirl is a packing group. They take what other people have already done, and compress it (to a ludicrous degree). They should not be credited for anything besides the compression.
> If you know where to look everything is available somewhere.
Until CPUs only run "approved" operating systems → mandatory age verification == government ID required to use any OS in a non-crippled form → browsers refusing to open "illegal" sites.
I agree, but I feel like pointing out that any game that was distributed without DRM or that was successfully 'cracked' by pirates can also be found on archive and therefore might be carried over to future generations. Physical media isn't the only way.
The real risk, IMO, is live service games that don't function at all without the server being online. There are games where fans have reverse-engineered and made their own server, but there are definitely ones that will slip through the cracks and be forgotten too.
Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. It’s a shame. I can invite my friends over, boot up my GameCube to play some Mario Kart Double Dash. As long as the console and disc are okay, I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away.
These days? Not so much. I’ll never be able to be sure I can play GTA VI in twenty years. It just sucks not owning anything anymore. I know why they do it, it’s a massive profit difference.[1]
On the PC end of things, it’s not as bleak. Services like GoG let you download the standalone installer, DRM free. I try to get any single player games I can from GoG, you should too.
Support the corps that give you ownership. Buy those Blu-rays of your favorite films. Either to support physical media or to ensure you will have it until data degrades.
1: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sESfDf0My84
General principle: It is way easier to avoid lock in by not being locked in in the first place then to extricate yourself later. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming video service because I had a DVD collection that predates them, and I maintained it instead of being on a streaming service, so I've got a personal collection. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming music service because I have a CD collection started decades before they came into existence, ripped digitally, and I've got music I own already.
There's more entertainment of every kind, including video games that don't lock you down, then you could consume in a lifetime anyhow. If you limit yourself to just what doesn't lock you in, yeah, you may not be playing GTA VI, but it's not like you'll lack for good games.
On the one hand, buying a subscription service for $20/month does give you instant, temporary access to a lot of things... on the other, consistently putting that money into media acquisition over the same period of time will build up quite a collection in a few years. Remember that you don't just have to buy blockbusters... you can raid garage sales, you can buy used, you can pick up surprisingly cheap collections like [1], you can hit the Salvation Army... what you find may be haphazard but you can bootstrap a collection cheaply, and may find some surprising stuff on the way.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006LOC01G - but look at the used prices, not the new. There's a lot of things like this on Amazon where someone thinks they can get a lot of money for it "new" where the used market reflects the more accurate market reality.
>and I maintained it
How do you plan on maintaining your CD and DVD players when the new ones will be sold with a subscription plan like printers?
> How do you plan on maintaining your CD and DVD players when the new ones will be sold with a subscription plan like printers?
If you buy physical media, you should rip it to FLAC and put the oroginal dosc in a safe place.
You don't get in the locked box in the first place. That's the whole point.
A day may come where it is the only option. In which case, personally, I will still advocate for not getting in the box. If they're going to hold "music" and "movies" hostage tell them to go fuck themselves. It's your money they're using to lock you in. And the day that I have nothing left that can play MP3 files is too far in the future to be sure about anyhow.
If you're really concerned that that is a likely future, you need to be joining with me now, not trying to discourage me about the hopelessness of the task. The only reason it's hopeless is your apparent willingness to pay other people to lock you in. If you don't accept that bargain, you won't be locked in.
Further helping is that these closed ecosystems tend to collapse anyhow. If you're locked in, why spend money on giving you good content? Even if they are appealing today, they won't be tomorrow.
remember that time all of the frontier AI labs trained their models on copyrighted material and no one batted an eyelid? If they can do that, I don't see why I can't back up my CD's and DVDs or digital purchases with digital copies source from the high seas. If buying isn't owning...
Citation needed for this, as this makes no sense.
However, content shifting (i.e. ripping from CD to digital) is a thing, and that's what I do with my physical media.
And it's very hard but fame-inducing and illegal to defeat locks.
1. Hard. No. 2. Fame-inducing. No. 3. Illegal. Maybe where you live.
Really? You cracked Denuvo?
Denuvo doesn't exist in a vast majority of games. It's not even used in all modern games.
That's the one reason I don't use Steam. I'm not saying Valve is evil or anything like that. But GOG's transparency and commitment to DRM-free games should be the market standard.
DRM-free was a nice idea 20 years ago, the problem is that it doesn't scale. There is just way to much media out there to keep track of and especially with games you are looking at frequent updates and patches, that your DRM-free backup won't get, unless you turn backup up a full time job to keep track of it all.
If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones, since I gave up trying to back them up a decade ago.
On top of that, those updates can be kind of useful. None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux. Also annoying: None of the GOG games run on a genuine Win9x either, as what you are getting is an updated version for modern Windows, not the original game.
Either way, I just don't think DRM-free is the proper solution for media management today or in the future. The olden days of static media are largely gone and the modern world is just way more fluid. So far none of the proposed solutions are able to capture that properly.
My son and we as his parents really love Bluey, but it's impossible to buy a DVD set here in Germany, with German dub, because Disney distributes it exclusively through their plus platform.
There are many more examples like these. Very sad state of affairs.
I can buy and own legal copies of movies and music. But I often really can’t with games.
Not staying this to be pendantic or to annoy you, but you really do know that at the bottom line, the same sort of license applies to movies and music that as of games. It is just accepted with movies, music and books that people just 'have' them. The publishers seriously know what a huge outrage there would be when they did the same to those forms of media like they did with games, but they would if they could get away with it.
They already did though. Sony removed your movies from your PlayStation. And every Blu-Ray player can brick itself if you insert a disk with a player blacklist update.
> And every Blu-Ray player can brick itself if you insert a disk with a player blacklist update.
That seems to be somewhat of a myth.
Discussion here, 37 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48698374
A lot of games are not sold with re-sellable licenses at all while almost all movies are.
You can resell a movie (dvd/blu-ray) and music (cd, tape, etc) like you can resell a physical book. But if the license you have actually agrees on that, i don't really know. Back then i had several dvd's that granted watching it in a family environment but did not grant you reselling.
What I really mean is a difficult to revoke license. Not dependent on a server or DRM. I realize I do not actually own copies.
Automation has its drawbacks.
Eh?
I can still go to the store and buy some music on physical media, and (if history is any indicator) I can still play it forever until it or my playback equipment wears out.
As a practical matter: You do know that when I spin up an album at home, I simply do not care what limitations any licensing agreements may or may not apply, right? I'm going to play it anyway, and it will work when I play it -- free from outside influence.
I read you and i agree.
Someday that GameCube will break and so will all the others. And someday that PC capable of running open source emulators will also break. And all that will be left is corporation controlled hardware running corporation controlled software. Maybe we'll be lucky and be allowed to rent a few of the old games.
I wish Gog made a Steam Deck.
They haven’t even made a Linux client yet. They are about 13 years behind steam
You can install GOG games on a normal Steam Deck already. What you want is better integration with their store but Heroic also works great on Deck and can automatically add your GOG games to Steam as well.
Me too. It’s coming to Linux though. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/07/gog-confirm-they-are-w...
Until then we use this: https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
https://zoom-platform.sh/
If you have the rig already, you could also use Sunshine and Moonlight for streaming. https://moonlight-stream.org/
Meh I don't want another store app, I want an API that I can use from my store-agnostic open source game launcher / library. They should just officially support efforts like Heroic instead.
Why not an actual Steam Deck? You can install any software you want on it.
You can but having to hook it up to a mouse and keyboard and monitor every time I want to install new games from not-Steam would be a pain.
Not saying this is a great solution either, though it beats the trackpad + on screen keyboard. I like to VNC into the deck and do these things.
You can and it actually works ok. For the sake of the argument you would/could be more 'free to do with your games what you want', because GoG does not do DRM.
Eh, I'd probably leave music off that list. Even mainstream music releases are still pretty easy to buy DRM-free via services like Qobuz, even if the majority of people are using streaming platforms these days. Although I wonder if that's maybe just because music seems like it would be pretty easy to sidestep DRM, even if they do come up with some kind of innovation (heck, even my friend told me he pirated my album... WHICH IS FREE, BTW).
But e-books? Holy crap the drm on those things is soooooo annoying to avoid.
If I want an e-book, I buy it from bookshop.org and then pirate the DRM-free version. It clears my conscience: the author gets paid, a small bookshop gets the sale, and I can read my book anywhere.
That’s fair about music. I didn’t even know about Qobuz. I do wonder how long big labels will permit that, but I’m glad it’s here now.
E-book DRM is crazy, I agree. I should have included that.
In twenty years it doesn’t matter if Rockstar delists GTA6.
The DRM will be cracked. You will be able to play and you WILL have a better experience playing a cracked DRM free version than any official version.
You can play an emulated Mario Kart Double Dash on a Steam Machine (or any PC) today and get a better experience than playing it on a Game Cube.
Digital only games sounds bad at first but preservation of video games will be done digitally more effectively than physically. How many full rom sets of Super Nintendo games are just sitting there on millions of PCs around the world? It is trivial to preserve them: copy paste to a new machine. Done.
Disks will rot. GameCube optical lasers will fail. One day, maybe not soon, but it is it inevitable that all disk based games will become unplayable and lost one day. Maybe if we’re lucky an independent company will create an accurate FPGA based GameCube for people to play their games but emulation is just better.
Prices on the second hard market will be astronomical making physical copies innaccessible - this has already happened for arcade PCBs and it will happen for disk based games. PCBs that used to go for a few hundred now go for tens of thousands. I personally believe that this push for physical preservation is largely driven by speculators that know this. You see insane prices for things like sealed copies of Super Mario Bros already. PCB prices were driven up by speculators hoarding supply and they’ll do it for console games too.
If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.
Physical Videogame Preservation Makes No Sense: https://youtu.be/3rM1jaFvM58
This assumes a large portion of the game doesn’t rely on servers.
We can reverse engineer those too, by looking at what the game client expects. Its harder, obviously. But far from impossible.
I started writing my own world of warcraft server about 20 years ago by disassembling the WoW binary. I got to the point that you could log in to the game and run around in a big empty world. I even found a couple mistakes in wow's in-game encryption in the process. Lots of teams have gotten much further than I did. There's whole communities who play wow on private servers.
If we can do that for MMOs, we can do that for just about anything. Especially with LLMs. LLMs are incredibly good at this sort of work.
The online portions will be reverse engineered and there will be community servers or the online checks will be replaced with offline stubs. You think in twenty years they won’t be able to do this in minutes for practically nothing using GPT 15 or whatever?
One consideration I have on every purchase I make is that I own it, like actually own it (with exceptions where necessary, of course). Internet access in something that shouldn't need internet access is a downside. It's a way to mess with the purchase you made.
If my e-reader had a bad battery after years of use, I should be able to replace that battery myself without issue (personal skill allowing). I purchased it. Why wouldn't you be able to? I haven't yet found reason for this in consumer devices, except because they want you to send it in or buy a new one from the manufacturer.
Every time we see something like this, it doesn't get enough eyes or care from those who use these platforms. Sony takes your movies away, Xbox requires you be online, Amazon updating your books automatically without asking you, etc. My favorite that I repeat constantly is all of the BS that BMW has done over the years: heated seats subscription, proprietary bolt heads, ads in the infotainment. If you buy a BMW at this point, I'm sorry, but you had alternatives and I don't feel bad. The scary part is when enough people accept it that everyone else in the industry follows suit and then the outliers are the ones that respect you.
If I purchased a physical disc, I'm not even asking for the source code (which I'd love), I'm just asking that I can run the damn software I bought, but you can't even do that now. Viva open source and right to repair. Make the educated choice when purchasing software and hardware, to your benefit, where appropriate. Of course, the proprietary system is what you need/want sometimes, but I bet most of us don't most of the time.
Yea, but there are bigger problems coming, this outage is just a temporary preview of the future. What happens to game preservation in 20 or 10 years when the authentication servers for this generation are permanently shut down? Millions of physical discs will instantly turn into e-waste.
The same thing that happened with all the Denuvo games so far: some hackers remove the DRM.
That would be possibly illegal, requires someone highly specialized to care about each and every one of your games, and assumes there won’t be a crackdown on the openness and anonymity of the a Internet that allows the distribution of pirate software.
We need to have this right codified into law before we lose it.
Not just possibly, the DMCA makes it a felony to remove or bypass any copy protection measure, even if it doesn't work very well.
Not every jurisdiction has the DMCA, so that’s why I said possibly. It’s definitely illegal in the US.
Hasn't Microsoft had a good track record of enabling playing old generation games on new hardware?
Not really. They left games broken when they shut down Games for Windows Live.
e-waste is the last of the problems.
Figuratively and literally!
I keep seeing article like this, that look like they have been written by these companies to push the opinion. People saying "who cares because you cannot play it anyway" instead of "discs should be less dependant on network to gain another advantage".
But the case for physical disk is not (only) about playability, it's mostly about ownership and the fact that you can actually lend it to someone or resell it. It's also about retail, and it's about collectors. About people with a slow or limited connection having access with that much less to download.
Another thing is also that if I have a physical copy, I have the right to a digital copy. So a non-working disc might not always be the end. But if I have a digital copy and they take it off the table, I do not have this right and it is gone forever.
> All I'm saying is it's all digital on the PC side of things, and has been for ages, but we have means of maintaining access to the games we love over here, and it's one of the reasons I've gravitated to the PC for quite a while now.
It all depends on where you buy your games of course; GOG will let you download DRM-free installers, but if Steam goes down, your libraries goes down with it. They have made a vague promise that they would prevent that if the company ever went out of business, but who knows if they will keep that promise.
Guarantees about playability went out the window the day free, easily-obtained updates came out on PC as much as consoles.
At least on the PC side, there's a vibrant piracy community.
Even if you get all of your games via Steam, provided you have them downloaded, you can still run them without Steam if you know where to look. Obviously GOG is far better in this regard, but preservation is not a concern on PC, outside of games that are reliant on a server.
Starting next generation when prices are going to be obscenely high, I'm really struggling to see why anyone should invest in a console as opposed to a (mini-)PC.
Depends. Steam is not DRM itself, you can open the game folder and copy the game to another computer and steam doesn’t care. The game often has its own DRM though which will stop you.
GOG is different in that they ban DRM outright.
Realistically, if Steam closed down tomorrow, within 4-6 hours there'd be a megathread on Reddit explaining how to get the games running without Steam. Within 48 hours there'd be an auto-crack tool floating around on GitHub.
Steam for some reason gets a pass even though it normalized the use of DRM for PC games over 20 years ago.
Good customer service and mostly benevolent for the last two decades, it buys them a lot of goodwill they otherwise wouldn't have.
That and people simply trust steam because it has always been trustworthy (on the whole).
Yeah, I’ve been on Steam for about 20 years now and I can’t recall many bad moments with Valve.
The only one that comes to mind is the “outrage” when they decided to release L4D2 just a year after L4D back in 2008 instead of making this a free upgrade. Times have definitely changed. looks at yearly COD with barely any changes
Most Steam games don't actually have any DRM. They just link to steamapi.dll for things like achievements, and that makes you think you can't run them without Steam.
Some have DRM, of course.
What is the command I can use to run them without Steam then? If the game links to a dll that launches Steam and won’t play without it, then that is effectively Drm.
Before I even play the game without Steam: how do I download it without Steam?
There are DLLs that remove any check of Steam running. Just keep a copy of one and use that on other games.
Regarding the download, it's the same issue with physical media. If I don't have the DVD, how can I acquire the game?
Oh there are Dlls? And as a non-technical consumer I just know this do I? I know how to dig deep into my file system and copy+paste a dll file into software I can’t/don’t understand? How do I download and install a copy without Steam?
You download it with Steam, then run Steam's backup function to back up the games you care about to physical media. Or in the vast number of cases you can just copy the game folder
Obviously if you buy it with steam you need Steam. But you only need it at the time of purchase, for the vast majority of titles
You can download a fake steamapi.dll from a pirate site. It will fill in all the function stubs and it isn't even illegal.
Or so I assume. I have Steam installed, so I wouldn't know.
> Steam for some reason
Currently probably because of Valve's work on Proton, and before because Steam just worked and didn't seem to exploit players.
I sort of get it. Every competitor, except maybe GOG, has come down hard in hyper-capitalist value-extraction mode quickly after pretending to do any good-will. For Valve, being a somewhat decent company is part of their ethos, for their competitors it's a means to an end.
I trust Valve not to screw me over, even though I know they totally could. Their own DRM is pretty weak (just put a modified DLL in the game directory and the game will launch), luckily.
Steam games are not required to have DRM, it's entirely up to the game developer/publisher.
It allows you to play your games offline though, so if Steam's servers go down you can still play your games. I'm not sure if that's permanent or if you need to reactivate your DRM / license every once in a while though.
Around a decade ago i had to move to another city and spent a few months without internet. I had all my favorite games downloaded on Steam and was able to play them offline with no issue for all that time. Not sure if it still like that, but it was possible back then.
It’s not possible with any Denuvo game which will require you reactivate with a drm server every so often.
If steam goes down you can play offline. They have a portable game console that doesn't need to be connected to play. They have big warnings on the store page of games that require online drm.
There's a surprising amount of games on my Deck that refuse to run without internet. It's not even marked anywhere which sucks because you find out when you have no connectivity.
They don’t let you resell games, if you die your library is gone, if said steamdeck (or steam machine) breaks those games are gone, the list goes on. It is a digital store with the exact same limitations of any video game console full of digital purchases.
I use Steam but I also know I’m vulnerable to a rug pull. We all are. That’s why I’ve been shifting over to GOG and making sure to back up my library in an organized fashion. I wish I had done it sooner, but hey, today’s the best day.
As for warnings, I mean…come on man. That’s like hiding behind ToS. Let’s be realistic here: how many people here (including yourself) see a game they really want, see it has a little DRM note on the uttered store page, then decide never to buy it? Few people let that stop them from getting a game they actually want.
Seeing the little DRM note kills my joy entirely. I have used steam, but the runtime anti-tamper malware has no place on my system. I don't use the word malware lightly. I trust it about as much as a random "overdue" invoice pdf from my spam folder. Maybe less.
The deck and machine are not going to delete your account if it breaks? Theyre just PCs what are you on about?
I don't buy games that require third party launchers ever. Been burned losing my Ubisoft account or w/e a few times. The warnings are helpful and steam doesn't have to say anything at all.
Steam has some backup feature. I do backups of my games. Compressed to slow HDD dedicated to backups. Faster to install than downloading again from network. Don't know though how much will that help
Can one download a backup first, then install (using usb drive) into an "offline" machine first (without steam/online?)
Yeah, if the game is set up to not use steam as drm. You can check by going to the installed files and running the exe directly - in most cases it'll still launch even if you're signed out.
Sounds more like a complicated subscription or renting scheme than ownership
After weeks of discourse where the physical token of the Compact Disc had become the all-important object of the fight, it's reassuring to see that we're back at the beginning, where it was clearly understood that you don't meaningfully "own" a game if you need to be online to use any of it.
You need to be online to prove you own it, which now means you don’t?
Unless the party you prove it to is obligated to stay up forever and has service guarantees, yeah
You need to be online to prove they currently will let you play it.
The symbol of ownership doesn't hold much value without any of its benefits.
> "But owning a game on a disc today isn't really the same thing. It's still just a license..."
Here's the crux of the problem in their own sentence and they don't even realize it.
Owning and Licensing are not the same thing. If I own something, I own it outright. If I license something, I am leasing it.
It does get fuzzy with media, I will admit. But we need the same protections as physical books and game cartidges. If I buy it, it is mine to use as I please and even resell or transfer. If that's not what the transaction is, then don't call it buying or purchasing, call it leasing or licensing.
Require stores and publishers to use language that reflects the nature of the transaction.
If buying ain't owning, then p****y ain't stealing.
You can say pussy on the internet
Clearly parent poster meant 'policy'. 'The policy isn't about stealing', referring of course to the Terms and Conditions being something to ignore when they cover anti-piracy but don't sell you anything.
Yarr
The word was "piracy"
HN is the propaganda arm of a billionaire enrichment company, so it's understandable that someone might be unsure whether you're allowed to say that word here.
We all know what the word was, it was a joke to replace it with another word that has the same first/last letters that obviously wouldn't fit here. A joke about how words are censored all over the internet as a way to appease advertisers on various platforms.
If said billionaire enrichment company was really upset about it, they would be able to detect forbidden words like piracy even when replaced. It's not that difficult, it's a problem that was solved decades ago.
Just go two routes at once
It's not strictly true that all physical disks are just license keys - those are marked on the packaging.
Even if the games are played off the internal hard drive with updates, there's a bit of "legal grey area" where enthusiastic fans of the game rebuild the code, and run the game with assets from the original media. "Technically" only folks with the original media in their possession will be able to play the original game.
For example the Ship of Harkinian PC port of Ocarina of Time. This requires a legal or illegal copy of the original game to run, so the copyright authorities don't crack down on it yet.
Are we sure that this is the reason the authorities aren't cracking down on it, and not that a game released in 1998 that also has a newer release on the 3DS just isn't financially valuable enough at this point to try to protect now? And it's getting an even newer remake, which is where Nintendo's concerns would be, I'd assume.
Nobody can be sure, but there is a consistent pattern here: decompilation projects can include as much code as they want and not get punished, but if they include assets they are taken down.
I suspect it's actually because the authorities don't know what the project is, if it's only code, or they can't be sure it's an infringing derivative work (it is).
Yes, because Nintendo is constantly taking down projects that cross the unspoken line and redistribute assets.
First, we need to make it illegal to say you are buying something when you are actually renting. Words mean something.
They did this in California. Solution: stores don't use any of the words now. Now the buttons say "add to cart" and "proceed to payment". Sometimes the button just says the price.
I wonder if it's legal to build a completely scam store like this. You pick a game, you click on "$7", you pay $7, you don't get anything at all, and if you try to sue them, they point out they never actually sold you anything, you just voluntarily clicked on the button to donate $7.
Recently got a big fancy TV with 4k + Dolby Vision
It’s a lot of work figuring out what movies support the format. And all the premium upgrades to Netflix, etc get them to stream premium formats. Then it doesn’t work and you’re spending 30 minutes debugging your TV, wondering why you’re not getting the amazing new restoration of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I totally understand why people just buy physical media.
Games may be harder given software updates. But I’d pay a premium for a physical copy of mature games I love (like Halo Master Chief collection)
Oh, you pay for 4K? Sorry, the CDN is a bit too overloaded to send you this movie today. I hope you’re happy with 1080p, randomly dropping to 360p on and off for a dozen frames at a time during an immersive sequence.
It's worse. All hardware and software in the chain must be approved for you to be allowed to watch 4K. Your browser, OS, CPU, GPU, HDMI cable, and TV must all be whitelisted before you get 4K. Very few people meet the requirements.
And the 4K video is compressed to lower bitrate than a 1080p Blu-Ray anyway.
> I totally understand why people just buy physical media.
Not to disagree with your larger point, but physical media can also be a nightmare. Try watching a 4K Blu-ray on your computer
Because even the fucking cable needs to support DRM. I hate this tech era with a passion
You can just pirate movies.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2026/07/03/returnal-3
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Your client does not have permission to get URL /comic/2026/07/03/returnal-3 from this server.
What does it say?
Normalize usage of "have been granted a limited license for" instead of "own." The word "own" implies all manner of things that don't exist for things like Xbox games, Kindle titles, etc.
Part of the overall trend to eliminate in-person shopping and physical product ownership.
In the end, 1 guy owns everything and we’re all batteries.
Our only hope are the pirates.
Buy games on GOG.
For a golden decade or so, piracy was less convenient than paying: Xbox had subscriptions offering on tap games, there was only really one streaming service to speak of that had high quality content, music came from Spotify or YouTube, etc.
We are back to where we are in the 2000s: the gatekeepers of large tracts of culture are behaving so badly that piracy is probably going to end it's lull. It is a shame for artists, developers, and anyone else who needs to get paid that companies running genuinely very good services have chosen to behave so badly.
Is this really newsworthy? This has been the case for over a decade.
It has, but recent events have shown that people need a reminder.
Own? You don’t own someone else’s work. Even when it goes into public domain, you don’t own their creation. At that point, nobody does.
I own everything I've learned. I also own some hardware on which I sometimes deposit this information for later retrieval. I own all of it, keys to nuts.
Nag your representatives ad nauseam to make laws against this.
It's shown again and again and again that nagging representatives doesn't actually work.
There are more radical options involving representatives (and other figures for that matter) that could work, but those are generally frowned upon.
In general, two kinds of solutions to political problems exist: those that don't work, and those that are illegal. Because why would politicians want something that worked to be legal?
Don't buy golden cage BS products, which you don't really own.
Consoles, Apple, Google, etc.
But that's all products, and even if it wasn't, consumer choice is mainly driven by marketing spend, which lock-in companies will always have the most of, because they extract the most money.
Our kids are going to be so fucked..
I've been wondering about this, in some sense we might hit a big cultural black hole where all these cool things that we've created in the last few decades just are functionally lost and all the amazing things of the previous generation that could be found on archive, roms, stuff on CD's / DVD's etc are what actually have cultural value going forwards
Everything else is in this position of "actively at risk" where if someone isn't "keeping it up" it may just disappear, at least until it gets orphaned, in which case I suppose reverse engineering is back on the table
Thank God for Fitgirl doing so much archival work with high quality highly compressed game releases. If you know where to look everything is available somewhere.
Fitgirl is a packing group. They take what other people have already done, and compress it (to a ludicrous degree). They should not be credited for anything besides the compression.
Cataloguing and vouching for releases is very useful.
I don’t have time or interest to figure out how to go on the Usenet and research the reputation of scene groups.
> If you know where to look everything is available somewhere.
Until CPUs only run "approved" operating systems → mandatory age verification == government ID required to use any OS in a non-crippled form → browsers refusing to open "illegal" sites.
I agree, but I feel like pointing out that any game that was distributed without DRM or that was successfully 'cracked' by pirates can also be found on archive and therefore might be carried over to future generations. Physical media isn't the only way.
The real risk, IMO, is live service games that don't function at all without the server being online. There are games where fans have reverse-engineered and made their own server, but there are definitely ones that will slip through the cracks and be forgotten too.