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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

#751

Post by genewitch »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #529
nirvdrum wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nintendo Switch cartridges don't have this problem, mostly. It's the reason I buy physical for the family library. Nintendo's digital licensing is terrible (slightly less so with Virtual Cartridges, but miles away from Steam Family) and doesn't really work for a multi-Switch household. But, I was traveling for work and brought the non-"home" Switch with me along with a copy of Breath of the Wild on cartridge. I fired…

...huh, do the online license checks only happen if you have the cartridge sharing stuff enabled? Wondering when/if I would run into this, I haven't yet. But I never use their "virtual game card" system, I only have one Switch and I think the whole thing is overcomplicated and too limited.

i have flaky internet and i am always able to play my virtual cards. I've never had an issue with wifi off, either. I just assume it needs to phone home because everything does, but it doesn't need to phone home to play right then.

Now, i got my kid another switch and he decided he wanted his own account tied to the family nintendo plan and now i am learning what a pain the virtual cards are. If he had just let me put my account on his switch he could have all the games i have, but that's not what we went with ;-)

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

#752

Post by duxup »

epistasis wrote: post #159
mawadev wrote: post #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, 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…

My phrase is that Microsoft's software feels like it is POINTED AT ME to make me do / jump through whatever hoops they want first. Me getting things done is an afterthought.

It's not just Microsoft of course, it's a lot of places (streaming platforms only seem to want me to watch very specific movies), but it's very noticeable with Microsoft.

Microsoft used to be imperfect, but it was utilitarian and I felt like I could get on with my task fairly fast and someone somewhere working there thought about how they might facilitate me doing those tasks. Now they think of other things.

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

#753

Post by altmanaltman »

everdrive wrote: post #744
altmanaltman wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How movies do you need in your life, how many books, how many paintings, how many plays? And yes it might be true for you that you never need to play more than top of 500 gog games but new games sell millions of copies which means millions of people do see the value in new games. You can disagree with that on principle but advocating people should only play top 500 gog because "that's all you need" is not a serious p…

Well if all I had were the best movies before 1998 I would still have a really awesome movie collection. Books fall into a different category in mind. They're leisure but are also deep personal enrichment and education.

all of this is your subjective view though, some people see and enjoy games as art, peesonal enrichment and even education. We cannot assume everyone shares our exact values.

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

#754

Post by genewitch »

trymas wrote: post #676
7e wrote: post #101

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.

Don't be obtuse. I own a physical book, I don't own the IP of it. As long as I own the book - I can freely read it's contents 100 years from now. If I own[1] DRM protected ebook on a Kindle. Tomorrow I may not have that book on my Kindle (and I will not be refunded, because fuck the plebs) or may not be able to open it even if I have the file, that I bought with my money. [1] I paid money for it, just like the physic…

it's also wrong because i can buy a painting, or a custom song, or a poem, or whatever, and that's mine, no one else can come take it away from me.

Isn't it weird how there's tiers to everything and they only benefit the top tiers.

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

#755

Post by everdrive »

altmanaltman wrote: post #753
everdrive wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if all I had were the best movies before 1998 I would still have a really awesome movie collection. Books fall into a different category in mind. They're leisure but are also deep personal enrichment and education.

all of this is your subjective view though, some people see and enjoy games as art, peesonal enrichment and even education. We cannot assume everyone shares our exact values.

Thank you. I had previously assumed that everyone did share my exact values, and that I could merely introspect and then successfully understand the perspective of any person on earth.

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

#757

Post by philistine »

grumbel wrote: post #725
philistine wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones Absolutely not. Libraries and archives are able to keep digital copies, with limits imposed on how they may share them, not on what they're allowed to keep. They're not allowed, without a convoluted exemption, to break DRM. So if Steam disappears, we're all collectively dependent on our ability to break DRM to maintain our culture…

> Libraries and archives are able to keep digital copies, with limits imposed on how they may share them Share them by bundling them with DRM[1]? Like archive.org does with books and games that you can't download, but only virtually borrow to watch in your browser (trivial to work around, but it's there nonetheless). DRM-free in a word with current Copyright isn't the solution unless you want to wait 90 years to be a…

Your discourse assumes two things: piracy will maintain the archival part without fail and that universal access is the natural end goal. None are true.

Counting on piracy means we will lose stuff. By definition, piracy has adversaries whose job it is to stop it. We cannot count on pirates never to lose any single cultural artifact because their existence is adversarial. Archives and libraries do something legal, they keep culture alive for future generations. Waiting 90 years to obtain the right to make copies is a tradeoff. The point of libraries and archives is not to give you web access to every rom with a single click, it's to preserve culture. Access is a bonus, not the point. That's why most of a museum's collection is in their vault. What Archive.org is doing is with their collection is a compromise, and is actually criticized by many other archives who see their adversarial stance with copyright owners as detrimental to the mission of preservation.

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

#758

Post by Danox »

epistasis wrote: post #159
mawadev wrote: post #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, 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…

Over the years when Microsoft has to compete on a level playing field they are hopeless, they only know one way playing from a monopoly and when they don’t have it well they suck. Copilot will be the end of Nadella.

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

#759

Post by andrewla »

Ruphin wrote: post #735
andrewla wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the technology [1] to do this simply doesn't exist. I'd say the core of the problem is that copying a digital artifact is easy, is a solved problem. You simply copy the data that represents the artifact, and now you have another copy. *Deleting* data (and its cousin, *moving* data) is a nearly intractable problem. How can you verify that someone no longer has access to data that you gave them? The…

I hate to be that guy, but in this case I think it's appropriate to say that "Blockchain" solves this problem. The core idea behind Bitcoin and (some) derivatives is that it enables digital objects that cannot be copied and have a distinct owner. You are not wrong that from a technical perspective this is a very hard problem (digital objects are just bits of information, and there is no way to restrict making a copy…

Blockchain solves the double spend and ownership problems, but it does requires (a) that you be connected to the internet to establish or transfer ownership, and (b) that any consumer of encrypted data respect the blockchain state as well. If I have a video player and I give it a video that I downloaded with an ownership token, that player needs to either confirm that the token is still valid and deny the ability to play the video (even though it could), or it has to get a decryption key of some sort from the blockchain and use that to play the video, and further guarantee that said decryption key cannot be saved or copied.

Blockchain does not solve this problem.

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

#760

Post by andrewla »

pessimizer wrote: post #601
andrewla wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the technology [1] to do this simply doesn't exist. I'd say the core of the problem is that copying a digital artifact is easy, is a solved problem. You simply copy the data that represents the artifact, and now you have another copy. *Deleting* data (and its cousin, *moving* data) is a nearly intractable problem. How can you verify that someone no longer has access to data that you gave them? The…

> The problem is that the technology [1] to do this simply doesn't exist. The technology is tort law.

This is the correct answer. The problem is that copyright law was created in a higher friction environment and it cannot adapt to the present.

If I bought a book, made a xerox of the whole thing, and then sold the book to another party, I have committed a copyright violation that is in theory actionable. This is basically unenforceable; in theory if it came to light that I had a copy of it and had sold my copy then there is an actionable claim, but nobody is going to do this. But the friction here is high so we know that we can live with this, because nobody could possibly do this at a scale that would make a difference.

With pure digital goods the friction drops to zero. For a while friction kept up with technology; when CDs were first around, making a digital copy of a CD was just not feasible. You maybe had a 1GiB hard drive and could store a single CD on it. With mp3 compression becoming mainstream that math changed, but at least games and things like that, that were not easily compressed, were somewhat safe. CD-R allowed you to break this but was high friction. Same with DVDs when they were first around.

But now storage is no longer a concern, so all of that friction has disappeared.

Streaming and on-demand content gives a possible solution to this, and that's why everything is moving in that direction -- trying to increase the friction of creating durable copies of the media. As soon as you allow backup of the content (as in the GP's post) then everything breaks, so that's the thing that you (as a content creator or distributor) have to fight.

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