Comment on What's your preferred way of buying games? (digital/physical/physical digital)
tomkatt@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Digital everything. Books, games, movies, TV. I don’t want a bunch of physical stuff cluttering my space.
I do prefer things I can archive to my NAS whenever possible though. I make exceptions for gaming with Steam, but all my books, video, and music are locally stored, I don’t like streaming services as an indefinite solution.
the16bitgamer@programming.dev 1 week ago
In my view Physical games are digital game in containers that we’ve yet to figure out to open. Digital games almost always have a DRM on top of it, and rarely can be used outside of their designated environment. My GameBoy, and PSP games have had a very long shelf life thanks to emulation and the various methods to back them up.
tomkatt@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I’ve got games ranging from PS2/PS3 going all the way back to the NES and Atari 7800 on my NAS. The PS3 stuff is hit or miss, but everything PS2 and down is great to play today via emulation.
For modern digital games, it’s a toss up. Some have DRM, some don’t. There are games you can buy digitally on Steam, install, and just copy out the folder somewhere else, zip it, and move it to another system to play, it won’t care. Others, DRM prevents it. GOG is good for the DRM free stuff.
Funny enough, I have Madden 08 for PC. Bought it on Amazon many years back. Installed updates, patched the exe, and it’s good to go. It’s zipped on my NAS and completely portable. Last year I even installed it on my Steam Deck, works perfectly, just extract to a folder and launch the game. And it’s still way better than the modern Madden games.