91–100 of 543 posts
I paid extra for a disc version of the PS5 for exactly this reason. If I buy a game today I want to be able to play it 20 years from now. I can bet money that none of the mainstream digital stores of today will be operational by then.
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You're entirely missing the point of the comment if you think it's about games. It's about digital goods.
I can't think of any "digital good" where there is a risk of losing access in this way that isn't recreational in a similar way to games. So my comments would apply equally well to any such goods.
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I wouldn’t feel any guilt about pirating the content I bought on any of those services if my account was taken from me for inactivity. I’d be interested to hear the argument about why that would be wrong though.
These days I generally pirate the single-player content I purchase anyway. Anything that requires Origin, Epic, uPlay, or any other cancerous software to be installed gets paid for and promptly pirated. I trust the Pirate Bay more than I trust Ubisoft.
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I can't think of any "digital good" where there is a risk of losing access in this way that isn't recreational in a similar way to games. So my comments would apply equally well to any such goods.
You're on a forum called "Hacker News" and you can't think of a single digital good that's not recreational? In any case the biggest examples would be software.
(I personally have no experience with such things because I will never use or pay for software that is provided in this way.)
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I wouldn’t feel any guilt about pirating the content I bought on any of those services if my account was taken from me for inactivity. I’d be interested to hear the argument about why that would be wrong though.
I would be interested in knowing if that would be legal. As might you technically have purchased your license?
This article is a great example of why we need legislation around ownership of digital items. I generally hate getting the government involved in things, but if you're paying money for goods, there needs to be a way to be credited or receive your digital goods in a way that still works without your "account". Personally I always get kind of nervous around buying things on PSN, Xbox, Stadia, Steam, Oculus, etc. If the…
That’s because you never actually bought the item. You got a license to run it on someone else’s server. Let’s say you bought a bunch of things for The Matrix Online, do you expect that server to run forever? It won’t. It didn’t. Why should someone else maintain it forever? Are you getting a refund? Why? You already extracted the useful life of it. If there’s government regulation it’s around the deceptive use of the…
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I can't think of any "digital good" where there is a risk of losing access in this way that isn't recreational in a similar way to games. So my comments would apply equally well to any such goods.
Two that immediately come to mind are online textbooks and Adobe Creative Cloud.
I asked another poster just upthread about the software (such as Creative Cloud) case.
People won't like this, but we at Ultra.io are trying to tackle this exact problem by deploying certificates of ownership to a decentralized ledger as proof of your owning a game. AKA, we want to mint NFTs for each game sold, which allows a user to prove they own it. People hate those words, but we think that the tech has real value and a use-case in the market for solving inequity between publishers and users. This…
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Why is that? If you buy the game off Steam or something, this implies that the creators/publishers/platforms have gotten their due compensation. The cracks and files on ThePirateBay are done on a volunteer basis, meaning that it’s not costing the game developers any money.
However if you have already bought the game, and then download a pirated version, it isn’t.
This article is a great example of why we need legislation around ownership of digital items. I generally hate getting the government involved in things, but if you're paying money for goods, there needs to be a way to be credited or receive your digital goods in a way that still works without your "account". Personally I always get kind of nervous around buying things on PSN, Xbox, Stadia, Steam, Oculus, etc. If the…
That’s because you never actually bought the item. You got a license to run it on someone else’s server. Let’s say you bought a bunch of things for The Matrix Online, do you expect that server to run forever? It won’t. It didn’t. Why should someone else maintain it forever? Are you getting a refund? Why? You already extracted the useful life of it. If there’s government regulation it’s around the deceptive use of the…
Don't mean to sound too cranky but this "you just bought a license" crap has been a thing since software began being software. It was no more fair back then than it is now.
No one is arguing, at least I don't think they are, that a company has an obligation to keep servers running in perpetuity. But to tell me I have no portable way to retain the bits I bought--excuse me, "licensed"--from a company is just crap. If a game can run in single-player mode without a server, or if a movie file can be played, or a song file listened to, then the act of "buying" it should mean I can do that for as long as I can keep my computers running and the onus on keeping backups of those files is on me.
We call them app "stores," we use the moniker of "purchased," and the ads call them "ours." If companies don't want to let us keep the ability to independently use the software or content files we "purchased," then they should be prohibited from using the lexicon of buying things and be very explicit that this is a one-time fee for a rental that can be taken away at any time.
Being explicit does not mean burying it in a multi-thousand word document that no person with a regular command of English can understand and that none of us have the power to negotiate for ourselves.