Something something layoffs?
Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
141–150 of 797 posts
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Which has nothing to do with Steam...
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 try…
I'm a pretty heavy GoG customer and I disagree with a lot of this premise. Most games aren't getting updates past a year or two after their release, and the ones that are aren't DRM-free. And even if they weren't, I'd rather be able to play an older revision of a game I own than not own it at all.
Your Steam games run on Linux run due to Valve's (truly excellent) work on their compatibility layer. However, that work is not exclusive to Steam. I can play my DRM-free GoG copies of big budget Windows games just fine on Linux. There's an extra step you have to invoke, but they still run superbly. Supporting DRM-free is the best we have in an increasingly hostile customer market.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#144This stuff is turning me into a physical media pre-2010s truther more and more by the day
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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?
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 sourced from the high seas. If buying isn't owning...
The obvious risk is that you don't have nearly as much budget to spend on lawyers if someone does come after you for it. The copyright system tends to disproportionately punish small players and not punish larger ones.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#146Gaming 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…
Optical media capped out at 4 layer blu-ray (~128gb) which I'm not even sure that consoles can reliably read.
So my theory is that GTA 6 is somewhat larger and they really didn't want to invest into engineering a solution for multiple-disc or something when ~everyone downloads their games nowadays anyways. So in some sense, the true physical release "can't" exist.
This doesn't apply to most anything but GTA 6 is the one example I think could very realistically be unable to be stored on a disc at all, or unable to be stored on a 3-layer and the supply chain just isn't there for 4-layers in 2026.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 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?
Good luck making my record player dial into the DRM server
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#148Gaming 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…
> I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away.
At least there are already extensive ways to get a game cube running games off an SD card using a pi pico and some hardware that uses the expansion port.
So even once disc rot takes away the original copy you can keep going.
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is that generally caused by Steam, or by the game itself needing an online connection?
Re: Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
#150The death of the used games market is still a big deal, even if said used games still depend on the manufacturers' networks and licenses being valid. A digital only world where Sony and Microsoft have the only say about pricing and used games are no longer available is a downgrade for users even from the already-bad status quo