Ownership is a lie we tell ourselves to cope with a world that is perpetually impermanent.
If buying isnt owning, then piracy isnt theft
there are so many amazing free pc games with no microtransactions, how are physical releases someones only way to play games?
Like most people who aren’t up in arms about this TechnicallyTee hasn’t actually given it a seconds worth of thought. “Well I don’t play games on disc” it’s such a surface level retort. If you’re not going to spend 10 seconds actually thinking about it, why have you bothered to make a comment?
“Well I don’t have anything I think I need to hide, so privacy doesn’t matter!”
Same vibe.
The problem is that we dont spend this time complaining about any other consumer product like games. As if you need them to eat and live.
Don’t buy Sony products. Fucking done. What is there to complain about and give free advertising labor to Sony over? Outrage is retention wearing clown makeup. They are playing you all.
Thanks to population size and people never agreeing on anything, even a common cause. Voting with your wallet doesn’t work anymore.
Though don’t get me me wrong, it should still be done especially in the light of last weeks news of sony removing digital goods. Just that the insignificant hit we can do is completely undone by the masses still buying.
I still haven’t pre-orderd any game or paid above 59,99, but those things are still getting more popular.
It’s not exactly good advertising is it.
Somebody needs to invent a way to rip your entire library on steam to portable installation cartridges so you just plun-n-play them
I’ve never actually tried this but presumably I can just download the games on Steam and then uninstall Steam and the game should still work right as long as they’re not even the steam folder. After all you can put games on Steam so presumably you can take them off.
It shouldn’t be that hard. I may look into this.
Really it’s just install the game, copy the local files and apply the steam crack (for most games), maybe repack it into a nice packed executable with some lightweight compression of the files for easier storage.
I suppose the worst thing would be to manage the exceptions to the rule, games that use other drm, or that maybe need some tweaking for the steam crack to work,nor maybe need to create some extra folders to work. But for most simple games it should me enough.
Imagine having an entire library of modern games on cartridge. Look up what game to play, grab it from the shelf, No DRM, put it into a cartridge bay and hit a switch, and the computer copies part of it to RAM and runs it. Just like N64, but 10,000x bigger.
People do keep trying to make modern “retro style” consoles. But the problem is they always have limited processing capacity so they’re always quite niche. Also the price of having to put everything on a cartridge of some kind would probably mean you wouldn’t get indie games on the platform.
I’d imagine indies could release “special editions” with physical SD cards sent out for collectors and fans about a year after release. There’s some indie games where I’d definitely buy that.
And even if the cartridges didn’t have DRM, so what? They already made a lot of their money
I think, most if not all games would need to be installed on the computer, as they are made like that. Running them from an external cartridge would be slow/problematic.
But at least I think it would be easy enough to have a way to mass generate rips for our steam libraries to burn on cd/dvd/blueray or to store in external drives. Then just have them installed like they were gog installers.
trevor noah???
Famous people play vidya games too!
stop giving them money
Gamers need games to live!
the “i do what i want with my money” people are so annoying. i wish they would be on the suffering side for change, maybe it would teach a little solidarity for others.
I remember handing a younger sibling my copy of Dragon Quest 9 when I was about 12-14, it was maybe the earliest memory of me truly understanding the joy of giving someone something I felt was special. I wanted them to get a bit of the magic I got from the adventures that game took me on. I would be so overjoyed when they would update me on their play through, remembering parts that stuck out to me, hearing parts they loved that I had forgotten about. Sure you can absolutely still experience that joy of giving a gift, my friend group buys steam games for each other all the time. But that was my 1 copy of the game (at the time), I remember them hesitating cause they knew how much I loved it. And I think that made the game mean more to them.
You should be able to get video games from your local library.
Billionaires were literally put against the wall and shot, so “using your library card to play video games” should be feasible.
At least where I live, they actually do! They have video games that you can check out just like books/movies/cds. It was one of the ways I got to try out a ton of games growing up.
When were billionaires literally put against the wall and shot?
Nicholas II of Russia?
Maybe “millionaires” would have been a better choice of words, my bad
The crazy thing is, there’s no actual reason we can’t own digital copies of the media. We could easily own the rights to a digital copy, the game and movie industry has just unanimously decided that they won’t allow that.
GOG DRM-free digital games are ownership
We could easily get a lot of things, but we don’t fight to receive them. We think that the laws are supposed to be made to benefit us, but that stopped being the case as soon as we allowed corporations to influence things in their own favor instead. Everything in capitalism is a battle - you’re either fighting to win, or letting someone else win by default.
At this point things are so bad that we’d have to band together and fight like hell even for a minor win, and few people want to do that. Stop Killing Games is the closest thing we have to what we should have organized as soon as digital media started becoming common.
Well, I’m just happy that they can’t remotely delete the game from my PC’s drive if they do choose to unsell it. Unless they can with EULA clauses like “We reserve the right to remotely access and update the Product at any time” in which case, Fuck
They can make them unplayable with online checks. Hence why piracy is the only way to truly own digital media
Fairly sure steam has sufficient access to your system to do just that to the games it installed.
Even if they can’t, the publisher can always just push an update that makes it unplayable.
I’m pretty sure they can require an update before launching, and you have to be online every once in a while to play games on steam at all.
The industry makes billions renting instead of selling their stuff, and they spend it all trying to stop piracy.
There’s another reason. Sometimes, the copy gets held by an individual and the company destroys it so archival would need to be brought forward by the undestroyed copy.
Also, if they’re not copyrighting it through the Library of Congress, how is pirating illegal? Doesn’t the FBI need a copy to inform “their original?”
No. Copyright doesn’t need to be registered to be valid. In the US specifically, registration only allows the copyright holder to pursue the case through the federal courts, which can award punitive damages as well as costs.
Digital goods are not the problem. DRM is. Direct your outrage appropriately.
Honestly, in this case I think its time based licensing that is the issue. This would be very limited as an issue as a whole if publishers/creators couldn’t say “yea so you have the ability to sell this, but after X years you lose the ability to host it period”
Currently big companies like sony can just offload the blame to the license holder saying “yea we cant host it anymore” when in reality it shouldn’t matter.
Licensing that expire over time shouldn’t be legal. If you bought a license to use a product, you should be allowed to keep that product. Don’t provide updates if don’t want to, but if you paid for the ability to have and use a product (in this case media) it shouldn’t be legal to retroactively pull it without compensation.
Said compensation should also at minimum be a percentage of the product based off how much it was used, with the overall refund not allowed to go under half the price of the product paid. The fact they can be like “yea we don’t wanna host this anymore but we aren’t going to provide refunds” is ridiculous.
Being said, I agree with your sentiment. I firmly believe bypassing DRM for a product you bought and have the right to use should be legal. I don’t agree that Ripping a movie that you purchased that has a DRM component should be illegal, just like I don’t agree that removing a DRM component from a game I own should be illegal. If you own the product, you should be allowed to use it how you want. I can understand the exception of distribution(this doesn’t mean I agree with it), because I get it $$$ but the fact I can potentially be charged criminally for ripping a 4k disk, and then putting it on my private media server that only I have access to, is insane to me.
Correct. Digital goods with DRM cannot be owned by definition. Its a remote killswitch whenever they like. They should be banned from using the word purchase or buy on those products. They should be forced to use the words “acquire revokable licence”
If someone else is storing the digital copy for you, on a system you don’t control, it’s not “ownership”.
Eh, digital goods are still a problem. For exactly the reasons stated above.
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Resale/gifting of used copies becomes more difficult and often impossible.
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Your digital library can be taken away from you at any time, with no recourse.
Your digital library can be taken away from you at any time, with no recourse.
No it can’t. Steam is not all digital game libraries. You are talking about a DRM problem, not a problem with digital games.
People have forgotten because he turned out to be a sex pest…
But once upon a time Louis CK would get annoyed with piracy and sell copies of his new standup show at $5 with a no DRM copy of the file, just politely asking people to not pirate.
He made $5 million almost overnight which helped fund his foray into television with Louie which was on TV for five years.
This literally was the thing that took his career to the next level. Where he went from a comic with a pretty okay career to one with a massive career.
He used to do the same for other comedians, too. I bought a couple Todd Barry specials from his website the same way: $5, DRM-free media files.
I still have all those files backed up.
These are both DRM issues.
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also what few people are acknowledging is what happens when the PS7 is released and womp womp it’s not backwards compatible with PS6 software? so your entire library of PS6 games will just vanish. OR you hold onto that PS6 for as long as possible but eventually Sony will shut the servers off for that hardware. OR (and what likely WILL happen) is those PS6 games you bought will be “upgraded” for the PS7 and you’ll have to buy them all over again. THIS is also likely the reason why Sony decided to stop selling first party single player titles on Steam. They’ve been planning this for a long time now.
It’s not a matter of IF you lose those games but simply WHEN.
Backwards compatibility applies both to physical and digital media though? I think it’s actually worse for physical media.
This should just be about choice, people should be able to buy physical copies if they want. Some people want the ability to resell the game, others might not. Of course, Sony wants to boost their bottom line, and that’s best done through inconvenient DRM that leaves little to no recourse when things go south for the consumer.
I guess the question is why shouldn’t a business get the choice, too? I’m not sticking up for anyone here, because the solution is not to buy.
somebody? thats trevor noah… hes hilarious
Any time I see this “I don’t understand what the problem is” what I hear is “I’m incapable of putting myself in the minds of others”.
TBF. we’re training the younger generations to accept it. They’re born and raised not owning anything.
Sounds like parents are shit in multiple ways then.
The older generations are definitely failing the younger generations, but what are parents going to do as individuals? Try to convince them that the only music they can afford on their shit jobs isn’t ok? My kids know how to sail the seas, but that’s not something I could expect every parent to do.
We need the same kind of outrage AI is getting applied to record labels and media companies. We need a metric fuckton of anti-monopoly hurled at the remaining 4 big players.
Wait until you find out the ai rage is coming from inside the ai companies themselves. They’ve got a whole creator thing happening right now in Berkeley for this exact thing.
Yall are being played in every way.
So, you’re saying the AI companies are trying to get people mad over datacenters?
How’s that plan work?
I recall, back in the day, seeing articles written for a younger millennial audience that treated the idea of not owning stuff as a kind of virtue. “Saves you from the hassle.”
Yeah, I get that. I was full on piracy for decades, when netflix came, I just ended up pausing most of that. I naively thought that they had finally figured it out, and we could just pay for access. Would have been kinda nice not to have to manage risk on a bunch of disks.
Then my 4-year-old was in the middle of Chuggington when netflix just dropped it outright.
I then realized that convenience cuts both ways and if it was more convenient for them, I was going to get fucked.
To this day, the fam watches netflix, but if someone is truely into something, It also comes down getting curated through the torrents.
“What’s the big deal with horror novels? They’re not scary, it’s just inky paper.”
Yeah like he didn’t host one of the biggest shows in the 2010s era.
I highly recommend reading his book, this guy is an OG media pirate
Listen to it on audiobook. 100% worth it.
