Comment on PlayStation keeps reminding us why digital ownership sucks
Pohl@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I have content I purchased on steam 19yrs ago. Shit was built for completely different hardware but I can go install and play it right now. The physical console games I bought that year only work in consoles that have long since broken. I can go play HL2 whenever I want, to play my copy of THPS3, I have to find and buy a PS2 that still works.
Digital ownership can apparently work just fine
Sony is reminding us that Sony is a shitty company. The company that bought you amazing technology like the memory stick ™ probably cannot be trusted.
Agreed. Physical ownership is the shelf of old DVD and CDROM PC and XBOX classic game boxes in my basement that take up space, collect dust, will never work again, and will only be a remembrance of nostalgia for a bygone day. Plus I’ll probably never seriously want to play them again… let’s be honest. I can watch a video of someone else playing, it scratches the same itch, and saves me the trouble.
I like digital ownership, but there needs to be protections so we can’t be screwed.
I agree. It’s hard to draw lines though right. Say your country made a law that companies could not pull the sort of shit Sony is pulling here. They would have to put a timeline on it right? It’s unreasonable that they should support a 10$ digital purchase for centuries. But 10yr old content disappearing is also horseshit. So what is a good line? What expectations is it reasonable to have as a consumer?
What can I reasonably expect when I pay a few bucks for a downloaded movie. I feel like that is what we are really debating here. To me, getting 20+ yrs of support for a game on steam seems like an insanely good deal. I never got that for physical games. I am forced to admit that digital games on steam are a better deal than any physical games I have ever bought.
Digital ownership CAN work but you have to decide who you trust. I would never trust Sony (or other console manufacturers) to maintain my digital library over the long term. But I guess trusting valve worked out. Shit, all my old ebooks still work too, and that’s Amazon, hardly a paragon of ethics.
The problem isn’t digital ownership, it’s the companies that are selling stuff and/or the regulatory structure that they operate in.
Public domain should be 20 years not 80
I’ve never even owned a PlayStation but I’ve owned enough absolute shit made by Sony that I started boycotting them like 15 years ago. They really are a truly shit company. It always amazes me they are considered a quality brand.
Word! The nastiest vendor lock in bullshit you’ve ever seen. My bitchin’ yellow Walkman aside, bad products top to bottom.
You’re hyperbolizing. The Playstation 2 is the best selling video game hardware of all time. It was the opposite of a “bad product” objectively.
Sony spent 20 yrs completely committed to proprietary storage media. They sold memory sticks and the like at vastly inflated costs compared to the media built to standard specs. The PS 2 was smack in the mix with that shit. Remember memory cards? They used special Sony developed encryption, for no reason but to maximize vendor lock in.
The PS4 and 5 being storage manufacturer agnostic is a really big deal and I will give them credit for it.
What about the PS3 era of Sony made you go “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!”
Like I said, I never owned a PlayStation. What made me boycott Sony is buying many products, things like headphones, and paying double or triple the price of comparable products which probably were better than the more expensive Sony version. I know I had some shitty koss headphones I bought for $30 that were better than $200 Sony ones.
And I know someone is going to question this and ask me what model, etc. I don’t know or care. It wasn’t just the headphones it was just several times in a row of thinking I paid more and got something nice and later finding out it was shit.
Shit was built for completely different hardware
It's still PC architecture. May not be 64 bit, but there's nothing stopping a modern x86-64 processor from directly running software made for an IBM PC from the 1980s without a VM or emulation.
Drivers are a different story.
It’s not just PCs and Steam. I can still play my Original Xbox games from 20 years ago on my Series X (they predate Xbox Live, let alone digital versions of games), and I can still play the digital 360 and Xbox one games that I bought as well.
Gamers give Sony and Nintendo way too much of a pass for shitting on backwards compatibility.
there’s been instances of issues with steam games. like paid characters and skins in games being removed after the ip owners decided it was worth more money. dead by daylight did this multiple times.
Or GTA getting patched to remove music from a game you already “own”.
As is tradition at this point, those that pirated the game get a better experience
Im not arguing that all digital ownership works great for consumers. But it can work. Shitty companies who’ll always be shitty and it doesn’t matter how you possess the goods, you bought them from shitty companies.
As a general rule which applies to all products: if the company you are paying has to pay another company a license fee for your product to work, it’s not going to work for very long. Be it a Blu-ray Disc or a marvel skin, your vendor will stop paying their vendor as soon as they can.
There’s nothing about owning physical media that would prevent that.
A monarchy is great if you have a really nice and competent ruler.
In all fairness, PS1s and PS2s still work fine (albeit, some may need a laser replacement, and you might need an HDMI adapter) but it’s not like it’s impossible to play old PS games.
HKayn@dormi.zone 6 months ago
Don’t find yourself in a false sense of security.
Your games on Steam are just as ephemeral as any other digital content purchased online.
BruceTwarzen@kbin.social 6 months ago
All the physical games i ever owned went up in flames when my house burned down. I can still play games i bought on steam in 2008
HKayn@dormi.zone 6 months ago
You could have made digital backups of your physical games and stored that somewhere safe.
You cannot make backups of DRM’d Steam games that work without Steam.
BruceTwarzen@kbin.social 6 months ago
Please don't fucking tell me you mad digital backup of your 50 xbox games and 40 playstation games and have a modded playstation and xbox laying around where you can just burn them whenever you wanna play them.
Skipcast@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You can’t make digital backups of physical games with drm either since you need the original disc to play (or atleast that was the case last time I bought a physical game which is probably around 2005 or something lmao)
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Digital backups of my Steam games exist on torrents. If Steam ever becomes shitty like this I can stop purchasing from them and reacquire it from the Jolly Roger.
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
You can make Steam offline mode and you absolutely will have access to any game installed on your machine.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 6 months ago
That’s what house insurance is for.
pdxfed@lemmy.world 6 months ago
“Have you considered Game Insurance?” - Ubisoft, probably
prole@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
True, but at least at this point, Valve is not a publicly traded company. Gabe clearly understands that piracy is a distribution problem.
stardust@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
Even then in a worst case scenario due to the open platform piracy is a possibility. That’s where some of the peace of mind comes from compared to purchasing of digital goods for a closed system.
Aurix@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Pirates are the librarians of the new age. But I caution you, much media cannot be found as soon as you step of the path of the big releases. So it really isn’t the final solution.
stardust@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
It’s the best we’ve got unlike the rather ridiculous proposals of backing up their own games some have made. Average person does not have the storage or the determination to digitize everything and keep it safe in case of corruption with multiple back ups.
teft@startrek.website 6 months ago
If you can’t find something on piracy trackers you just need better trackers.
Pohl@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Dude it’s been 20yrs. I bought a game 20yrs ago and I can still play it. The physical media that I OWN did not last that long.
Any day it could go away. Just like my PS2 games went away when the only hardware on earth allowed to play them died.
A quarter of a human lifetime and counting is ephemeral? You think you are going to be able to get a blue ray player in another 20yrs? You know that making one requires paying fees to Sony, right? If you want media that lasts for generations, buy paintings and sheet music.
hellishharlot@programming.dev 6 months ago
I think pcsx 2 let’s you put a PS2 CD in and run it through the emulator
samus12345@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It does.
HKayn@dormi.zone 6 months ago
Have you ever come across the idea of making digital backups of the physical media you owned?
greybeard@lemmy.one 6 months ago
You can make a backup of your Steam games too. A good portion of them can be copied out of the Steam folder and run completely independently. If you want to retain your steam games permanently, you are a free to hack them up as physical media.
Pohl@lemmy.world 6 months ago
What good would a backup do for a game that requires specialty hardware to run. I still have my ps2 games. I just can’t play them.
I still have my cod1 pc disks, they just don’t do anything.
What is the backup for?
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
So you’re in favour of digital ownership then?
shrugal@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Pohl@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This is the most insane false equivalence I have seen in this thread.
The point is that some providers of digital goods have already surpassed reasonable expectations, and some fall very short. 20yrs of support for a video game on any format is really great. Any thing past that I think belongs in the preservation category which is the responsibility of libraries and archivists, not publishers.
Returning to your house analogy, when your 20yr old furnace fails, do you call the builder and expect him to fix it for free? When you clog the toilet do you plunge it yourself or does somebody owe that to you as condition of the sale? At some point everything you buy reaches the end of its useful life. What makes people thing digital goods should last until the sun burns out?
Coasting0942@reddthat.com 6 months ago
You’re just one heartbeat away from seeing Steam turn into an EA competitor by some billionaires son/ self made CEO