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Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

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Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#21
post #7

> 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 pro…

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

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#22

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?

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#23
post #12
post #2

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…

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.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#24
post #20

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…

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 ha…

And it's very hard but fame-inducing and illegal to defeat locks.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#26
post #19
post #7

> 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 pro…

Steam for some reason gets a pass even though it normalized the use of DRM for PC games over 20 years ago.

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.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#28

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?

You need to be online to prove they currently will let you play it.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#29

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…

You can just pirate movies.

Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc

#30
post #19
post #7

> 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 pro…

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).

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