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

birchtree.me

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

#151
I wanted to show my gf the halo 1 campaign, so I downloaded the 30GB Masterchief Collection via steam. When I launched it, I was greeted with a black box. After 1 Minute it was a microsoft login screen that looked eerily like a browser inside the game. Since I couldn't do anything else, the game was stuck at a sub 720p resolution. I said fine Ill just create an account. Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email and email verification code later I had to do captcha which is clicking and holding down a button. "Help us against the bots" it said. I unironically spent 5 minutes clicking that button, then being stuck in a loop with "please try again" while my gf just sat there watching me.

Well I turned off MCC and gave up.

I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This assumes a large portion of the game doesn’t rely on servers.

Sure, but that's orthogonal to discs. Nothing prevents a game developer from making "check the server" the first thing that happens when the game on a disc loads.

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

#153
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Personal backup copies are fully legal, RIAA and MPA admit as much on their own websites; this was settled back in the VHS and cassette tape era

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

#154
post #15
post #3

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.

Removing DRM is all fun and games until single player titles start requiring constant internet access in the future.

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

#156
post #20

Earlier 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?

It's genuinely hard to imagine commodity USB DVD-ROM drives being sold with subscriptions? There's millions of them, they cost nothing, they're built by a dozen no name Chinese factories

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

#157
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The lawyers cost a lot more than what you are going to get back from GP in a copyright lawsuit.

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

#158
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How and why does anyone “come after you” for backing up your own BluRays, though?

Assuming you’re not redistributing, of course, which is another thing entirely.

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

#159

I wanted to show my gf the halo 1 campaign, so I downloaded the 30GB Masterchief Collection via steam. When I launched it, I was greeted with a black box. After 1 Minute it was a microsoft login screen that looked eerily like a browser inside the game. Since I couldn't do anything else, the game was stuck at a sub 720p resolution. I said fine Ill just create an account. Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, cou…

This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.

There's something seriously wrong in Redmond.

At least with linux, you can search on the web and find a forum post telling you the magic incantation. With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged, barely workable, edge case until it might or might not work.

Office on the web is a horror show this way.

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

#160
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The premise of this hypothetical is Steam's servers going away. Ping me about this if and when it ever happens and I'll write you a tool where you can select the steamapi.dll you downloaded and have it copied to where your games need it. There's a fair chance you might not even need to because someone else will have made it before me.
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