True, but at least at this point, Valve is not a publicly traded company. Gabe clearly understands that piracy is a distribution problem.
Comment on PlayStation keeps reminding us why digital ownership sucks
HKayn@dormi.zone 9 months agoDon’t find yourself in a false sense of security.
Your games on Steam are just as ephemeral as any other digital content purchased online.
prole@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
stardust@lemmy.ca 9 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 9 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 9 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 9 months ago
If you can’t find something on piracy trackers you just need better trackers.
bassomitron@lemmy.world 9 months ago
That’s not always true. There are a lot of obscure/niche products that just aren’t popular enough for there to be perpetual seeders for all of them. Plenty of things have been lost to the annals of time, unfortunately. It doesn’t help that some companies will still witch-hunt pirates offering their ancient products that the company no longer even offers a way to procure legitimately (cough Nintendo cough).
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 9 months ago
That simply isn’t true. Some stuff is obscure, especially if it’s in a less-spoken language or it’s dubbed content for a less-spoken language.
Other times the torrent exists but it has no seeders.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 9 months ago
The defaults picked out by Radarr sometimes fail. Not sure where it’s pulling Seed/Leech figures from but those are never right. The only way to find out it to try downloading a few and then nuke the ones that have least seeders you can connect to.
Pohl@lemmy.world 9 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 9 months ago
I think pcsx 2 let’s you put a PS2 CD in and run it through the emulator
samus12345@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It does.
HKayn@dormi.zone 9 months ago
Have you ever come across the idea of making digital backups of the physical media you owned?
greybeard@lemmy.one 9 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.
HKayn@dormi.zone 9 months ago
A good portion, yes. The rest you’ll have to crack.
Pohl@lemmy.world 9 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?
HKayn@dormi.zone 9 months ago
You can play them on an emulator. You can even connect a Dualshock 3 controller to your PC, and it’ll be just like playing on the “specialty hardware” it was made for.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
making digital backups
So you’re in favour of digital ownership then?
HKayn@dormi.zone 9 months ago
Yes, I am.
You need to understand that an online library on Steam et al is not ownership.
Having the files on your own harddrive, without any dependencies to external services, that is digital ownership.
shrugal@lemm.ee 9 months ago
[deleted]Pohl@lemmy.world 9 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?
shrugal@lemm.ee 9 months ago
I removed the comment because what I was criticizing in it wasn’t necessarily said in the one it was answering, but I do still think the comparison is adequate!
There is no reason for digital content to ever go bad, other than not having any compatible physical devices anymore. Idk what you base your “reasonable expectation” on, but properly stored digital content does not degrade, so it could last basically forever. I guess you just extrapolate from what you’re used to from these platforms, and I’m sorry to tell you that they’ve been ripping you off the whole time. There is no physical reason why they couldn’t keep the digital content available, at least until they go out of business. Hosting static data is incredibly cheap, the limitations are all about contracts and money making.
If anything, the house in the metaphor is actually not long-lived enough.
Coasting0942@reddthat.com 9 months ago
You’re just one heartbeat away from seeing Steam turn into an EA competitor by some billionaires son/ self made CEO
BruceTwarzen@kbin.social 9 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 9 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 9 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.
burliman@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Exactly. Some of the replies in this thread are so disingenuous.
LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
Don’t need to burn them, you can play them off a USB! Or over an SMB share.
HKayn@dormi.zone 9 months ago
How do you think PS2 ROMs are uploaded?
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
Homie, I’ve made backups of thousands of games.
Skipcast@lemmy.world 9 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)
HKayn@dormi.zone 9 months ago
You are spot on, DRM is the problem at the core. That’s why I prefer DRM-free stores like GOG over Steam whenever possible.
Luckily many of the old games I own on CD are also available on GOG.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 9 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 9 months ago
You can make Steam offline mode and you absolutely will have access to any game installed on your machine.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 9 months ago
That’s what house insurance is for.
pdxfed@lemmy.world 9 months ago
“Have you considered Game Insurance?” - Ubisoft, probably