I’ve been a PlayStation guy since 1998. Looks like the PS5 is my last PlayStation console.
Steam being all digital is fine because I’m buying games for 75-90% off… If I got told I was losing access to a game I played $2.50 for 6 years ago and played for 40 hours I would… actually I’d still be annoyed but less annoyed than losing huggers of dollars.
Steam lets you play games that you bought, even if they’ve been delisted in the meantime.
Steam is the good guy (for now). GOG is even better though, since they let you save offline installers with no DRM.
Yep, Love GOG
So don’t buy a fucking Playstation.
This isn’t that hard to sort out.
I already have one because they were the best platform when it came to actually owning your games.
Do not worry, Sony is not at all known for taking away from people digital media which they keep in their servers for those people
/s (just in case)
I stopped when they fucked me on my PS3, update and lose linux ability or don’t update and lose netflix and any online purchased games.
And that’s were i left console for PC
At least you can jailbreak a PS3 and add back the Other OS feature.
I played it till it red-ringed. my last sony purchase.
So, having a PC is better again, because there is not subscription for online services there…?
Cool. If thats the case I will no longer be offering Playstation my money for games.
Play station will no longer be offering games- Yup still no games
I will no longer be offering money to receive playstation games. 🤷♂️
Fair
Honestly, if I have to go digital, my money is going to Valve
Better to Gog, atleast you own what you buy
Fun fact: Some Steam games are also DRM-free
Stop spreading this lie.
https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212632089-GOG-User-Agreement?product=gog
2.1 We give you and other GOG users the personal right (known legally as a ‘license’) to use GOG services and to download, access and/or stream (depending on the content) and use GOG content. This license is for your personal use. We can stop or suspend this license in some situations, which are explained later on.
This refers to downloading, after you donwload the DRM Free Game from Gog there is no license or online check forever, the game is just yours.
You can also do that on Steam, that doesn’t make it any less piracy.
Not that there is anything wrong with that, but let’s stop pretending that GOG is somehow better than Steam.
Not reliably as in Steam there is no contractual limitation on games having their own phone-home DRM plus some games are tightly integrated with Steam features (which Steam incentivizes) and don’t work well offline, plus you need to known were the installers are cached as you can’t just download them to a location of your choice and how to use stuff like the Goldberg Emulator otherwise only games which have ZERO integration with Steam will fully install and run offline.
In GOG, access to download the offline installers is right there in the product page in your library and contractually the games can’t have any DRM as “No DRM” is GOG’s unique value proposition as a games store.
Steam doesn’t make it too hard to go around the phone-home DRM they put in place (making it better than just about all other phone-home DRM out there) but that’s not at all the same as “here are the installers for you to use whenever you want online or offline and they’re guaranteed to have no DRM”.
Nobody is saying you cannot do on Steam, the big difference is that you can do that on 100% of Gog games, on Steam only on a very small percentage.
And there are other noticeable difference, on Steam you have to go through the file and backup them, on Gog you get the drm free installer for the last version of the game and any previous version that you want.
Is clear to me that on this regard Gog is much better than Steam, would be crazy to say otherwise.
Actually, FYI, you can do that for a large percentage of Steam games, maybe even most, if you use the Goldberg Emulator that replaces the steamapi DLL.
Steam DRM is one of the easiest to bypass around, and I like to think that’s very much a purposeful choice.
However, the entire thing is designed for it not to be easy to do for somebody with the technical know-how of the average gamer, plus it’s not reliably possible and there’s no way to know upfront if it will work or not when making a purchasing decision on a game in Steam.
Meanwhile “No DRM and with downloadable Offline Installers” is literally the Unique Value Proposition of GOG as a games store - access to download offline installers is there in the games page after purchase and that installer is guaranteed to work forever and ever if you still have the hardware and OS version supported by the game.
Yeah there are ways of course, but if we insert in the discourse unofficial tool and methods to remove DRM whats the point of the discussion?
What’s even the point of complaining about denuvo if we think like this? There are methods to remove that too. Any type of DRM is bad for consumer and should not be justified, doesn’t really matter how hard is to bypass.
Valve and GOG.
GOG - the ones who recently sent out a newsletter ad with Nazi symbols on it? That GOG?
Yes they were using AI assisted headers for their emails because they were short staffed for a bank holiday in their country.
Which is Poland btw. Famously extremely anti Nazi.
They apologized and explained what happened so I am not going to hold it against them. Now had they not apologized or had an explanation, that would be different.
If anything its a good case study on why AI is only good for very limited use cases and almost never to replace an actual human being
You know they’re polish right? The ones that were attacked by the nazis?
Context is everything.
Yeah, Nazis in Eastern Europe, who could imagine!
Can you think logically instead of making misinformed emotional statements?
This is FUD, stop spreading this. Read their statement and chill the fuck out.
It’s a big, fat, nothingburger.
Did not hear that. Do u have a link?
Read their statement instead, it’s all a big nothingburger.
If buying is not owning, piracy is not stealing
This is such a great quote.
But if you read the fine print, you are not buying these games, you are entering into a subscription to them. Paying a one-time fee to subscribe to the games indefinitely. That’s why it feels like buying.
That’s how they getcha.
So it’s almost like buying is not owning?
Almost, but not exactly.
And look, I’m not saying its defensible, I’m just saying that they technically trick us into subscribing, and thus we can’t technically say we’re buying these games. So, GOG ❤️
The fact that it’s legal to have a purchase flow that looks like you’re buying things without the seller being legally obliged to have a disclaimer in big fat letters that says something like “THIS IS NOT A PURCHASE, IT’S A LICENSING AGREEMENT. LICENSING AGREEMENTS CAN BE REVOKED AT ANY TIME AND YOU WILL LOSE ACCESS TO THIS MEDIA YOU ARE LICENSING” is the actual problem.
IMHO, Corruption amongst Lawmakers and Regulators is the actual problem.
People should be avoiding like the plague any stores whose media they can’t actually download and keep in an open DRM-free format in their own devices, but they don’t because they’re not aware of it as the whole thing is one big bloody mess of expert legal domain and the fraud of misportraying a sale to be one things whilst it is a different thing being totally legal when it comes to digital media.
Can’t blame people for not understanding this and thus not navigating it in an informed way, but I sure can blame Politicians and Regulators for not doing their jobs which is to make sure that sales are fair and the consumer can make an informed choice when evaluating a potential a purchase.
I mean… They ask you to agree to the Steam subscriber agreement for each purchase. Pretty sure Epic has a similar disclaimer on each purchase as well.
People just don’t read. 🤷♂️ But yeah, it should be like a TikTok format video for all the inattentive people I guess. More people deserve to be aware of it.
Long document full of legal language than can only be truly comprehended by those with Legal Training isn’t at all the same as BIG FAT TEXT INDICATING IN A SIMPLE WAY THAT THIS IS NOT A PURCHASE.
Absolutely, in the absence of actual Pro-Consumer Regulatory Obligations, the whole “Agreement” is a valid way for sellers of digital media such as Steam to legally cover their asses and not actually saying to prospective buyers the true nature of what they’re buying.
It is, however, not a means to help a purchaser make an informed purchase, rather it’s a way for Steam and other such stores to, in the current legal and regulatory environment, legally get away with doing the very opposite and obfuscate the true nature of what the purchaser is purchasing.
Think about it this way: if the intention of Steam was to be honest and make sure purchasers were making informed purchases, then why not inform purchasers upfront in the product page in a simple way that what they would be buying was a REVOCABLE LICENSE rather than ownership of a PRODUCT, and even explain the difference, rather than hide it in a long document that requires Law training to fully understand?
why not inform purchasers upfront in the product page in a simple way that what they would be buying was a REVOCABLE LICENSE
But yeah, I definitely agree with you in general. You have perfectly valid points.
They are gonna remove games in future like they did with the movies
They already have lol.
Licensed titles are different. Unless they’ve done that for non-licensed titles.
Kindle literally removed 1984 from people’s devices
That was a case where the seller literally didn’t have the rights to the book. If you search for the title today you’ll find a version that is listed as the Authorized Orwell Edition.
Not the same as what I was referring to. Video games based on licensed IPs, often get taken down from digital game stores because the publisher’s license has ended. What you described with 1984 is someone who shouldn’t be selling the media, having sold it. Sure, it sucks if the title disappeared from your device but maybe that was the only legal resolution?
Conveying something to someone in perpetuity (i.e. “selling” it to them) when you don’t have the right to do so is fraud. Just because Amazon or whoever’s right to continue offering the thing ended doesn’t mean their customers’ property rights somehow end with it.
It’s exactly as absurd as a car dealer stealing back all the cars they previously sold just because they ended their agreement with the manufacturer.
There is absolutely no sane world in which stealing your customers’ property could ever be the “only legal resolution!”
The proper legal resolution would be refunding the customer and then settle it between Amazon and the author that didn’t have the rights to sell what they sold. If I buy some food at the grocery store and there’s a recall due to for example contamination, I can go back to the store and get a refund. I can even go to any store selling the same item without an invoice and get a refund (for their list price I think). This is at least the deal in Denmark. This should be the same if something was sold with a missing license or improper license (if it is sold as a product but the license the seller has expires and is not renewed)
Sometimes the license for the music in games expires and developers/publishers just remove it from the games.
That, by itself, is absolutely outrageous and absurd. The game developer’s failure to license the music appropriately is between them and the music copyright holder; nothing gives them the right to steal the content back from the third parties they conveyed it to in perpetuity.
Agreed, licensing for anything like that in game should be required to be permanent. Only exception I can possibly think of is live service games where the content cycles out of availability.
I wouldn’t argue just that it should be; I would argue that it is and we have a massive problem with the FTC failing to enforce existing law.
I think it will no longer be available as an option.
I’d feel more strongly about this if I’d actually bought a game on a physical disc anytime in the last 3 years.
They’re often cheaper on disc. Random sales here and there nearly always undercut the PSN price.
The real reason I’ve not bought many this gen was PS Plus. There’s a lot of games I’d have been vaguely interested in picking up on a decent sale, only they’ve never been on one, and then went on PS Plus so now aren’t worth buying at all.
Realistically the loss of physical discs means we need far more robust digital rights. The right to trade games to other accounts. The right to continue playing them if the store closes, loading games and licence keys from USB etc. That last one is going to need some thought to prevent abuse, but I think it’s essential if we’re going to live in a digital future. On PC that last one could be done by transferring licenses to another store maybe.
It should still matter to you, unless you don’t mind paying $80 for every game. The competition of physical game pricing and the secondhand market helps keep digital prices lower as well.
3 years? About 15 years for me. Whenever civ 5 was released.
Yeah, but why not? I enjoy having access to the game within the same 10 minutes I buy it…
Now downloading, that’s a different story.
When was the last time you bought a game on some physical storage and did not have to download etc. things anyway?
OK, but you can sell the disc after using it or share it with friends…
That is the big ticket. We need to be able to sell digital items.
I also enjoy having access to the game as soon as I buy it, that’s why I download. Having to order and wait for shipment or going to the store takes considerably more time.
How many modern 3d games are there that fit on a reasonable amount of disks? Don’t you usually have to download shit either way?
I will be buying no more PlayStations then.
Xbox is pushing the same thing with gamepass, Nintendo lowered their digital games pricing to match/go lower than physical media. Everything is going that way.
Same.
If they could be trusted to treat digital copies as actual ownership, this wouldn’t be such a big deal.
