Submitted 11 months ago by arakhis_@feddit.org to games@lemmy.world
Like can we make this a more vocal opinion that Triple-A studios/publishers are like legally required to offer a version… Or what is your take on that, especially if you have a similar opinion with a deviation in execution. let me know why if you dont agree too!
I’d love to have and collect DRM free titles that last even after a platform is gone, also ubi cant pull off clown shows like the crew or whatever racing game they just erased out of power tripping spite
Something like legally required to offer a no-DRM version on all storefronts would be interesting. I don’t care about physical media much anymore but I do want to own what I buy.
If we’re wishing for things that probably won’t happen, how about a government agency for game preservation? Source code gets submitted before release, approval for sale is conditional on them being able to successfully build and deploy it. Then 20 years later it gets automatically published to the public domain. That way even online only games will end up being preserved.
Pphysical copies are kinda besides the point in terms of ownership and preservation. Just because you own the disk, doesn’t mean you have access to the software on it. DRM, as well as the laws that make it viable, have been around since well before media was sold digitally. Physical copies of the Crew are no more playable now than digital. If you want to be able to keep your games, you need to buy DRM-free, whether that limits you to digital-only or not.
On the other hand, if you want to actually own your games, we need to massively rework copyright law. The fact that a company can sell you a software licence, but add dozens of arbitrary restrictions on when, how and why you can use it is absurd, nonetheless the fact that its always non-transferable and revokable by the company for any reason. None of that should be legal.
I still want a physical copy in my library as a precaution against the apocalypse, regardless.
I guess I’m just old (and pessimistic about humanity’s future)… 🤷🏻♂️
Exactly a digital revolution is so needed for the sanity of humanity honestly. But speaking about that, there’s symptoms already that we somehow need to solve already… So yeah, not going to happen and tech giants continue to feast :(
I’m always pro to retail in arts, people should care more about digitalization into other fields. As a PC gamer I’m starting to collect some console and blurays, they costs mostly the same as digital but you own something. Also don’t forget the preservation issue.
It’d be nice but would hurt indies because indies thrive due to not needing a physical port, and only releasing one once they are popular and successful enough to afford it.
I guess you could include some verbiage that would target AAA studios, but they’ll find a way around it like they do everything else.
And at this point, I’m not really fond of most AAA titles anyway so this won’t do much for people like myself to care anymore. Physical releases are something I care about less since other issues have arisen over the years, specifically in the quality of the game, itself.
The Crew had physical copies.
Yeah, how you buy your Steam/Uplay/whatever key isn’t the problem here. This person is confusing “retail” with “DRM free”. Yes, DRM free versions would be great but physical vs digital makes no difference.
I would rather a law that extends many of the properties of physical ownership to digital sales.
*digital license agreements
🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
I want the law to allow resales of digital game licenses, and the storage medium shouldn’t matter.
Plastic cases, discs, etc are expensive and degrade over time. If we do get a video game preservation law, make it digital.
Emulation and piracy should be legal for games older than a certain point, or if the parent company goes under. And online games should be required to make a offline mode patch before shutting down.
didnt even think about that… but how do university libraries for example then keep up their valuable - or even more interesting - their non valuable old inventory? Never thought that degration was THAT potent
CDs and DVDs are digital media. There is no degradation of the content when you convert a fragile physical disk into a dumped ISO, and the dumped ISO can be stored on an arbitrarily large number of devices. Stuff like physical books or analog media (vinyl records, for example) are worth caring about physical degradation for, but a “physical copy” of a PC software disc is just a more fragile way to store the exact same ones and zeroes that can be stored on actually resilient media.
DRM-free is one thing, and it’s something that GOG offers universally, with an asterisk for some multiplayer games, and I wish that asterisk was handled better. You want DRM-free. Your physical copy quickly becomes out of date when new patches come out, and patch cycles are frequent for modern games, even when they ship relatively bug-free out of the gate. Speaking for myself, I have no desire to have physical games anymore. I have a bunch of old PC game boxes that I just put up on my shelves yet again after moving for the fifth time in 14 years. Many of them have GOG versions, and I’m looking to replace those games with the GOG equivalent during the summer sale so I can finally eBay my physical versions away and be done with them.
A mandatory physical version is a cost for a market that hardly exists anymore, but we could all benefit from DRM-free games.
Is there another meaning to “PSA” that isn’t “public service announcement”? It confuses me being in the title as this entire post is written as a suggestion / CTA, not a PSA.
Lemmy remove that
Youre right - its like people misusing pov and then show a view onto themself
I’d love to have and collect DRM free titles that last even after a platform is gone,
M-DISC (Millennial Disc) is a write-once optical disc technology introduced in 2009 by Millenniata, Inc.[1] and available as DVD and Blu-ray discs.[2]
M-DISC’s design is intended to provide archival media longevity.[3][4] M-Disc claims that properly stored M-DISC DVD recordings will last up to 1000 years.[5] The M-DISC DVD looks like a standard disc, except it is almost transparent with later DVD and BD-R M-Disks having standard and inkjet printable labels.
Those will outlive you.
You can get an M-DISC-capable burner on Amazon for $35, and M-DISC media for about $3/pop, each of which will store 100GB.
GOG is probably more-suited than Steam for this, since it’s aimed around letting you download the installers.
But you can just install a DRM-free Steam game — there are some games that don’t have any form of DRM on Steam, and don’t tie themselves to Steam running or anything, if you’re worried about Steam dying — and then archive and save the directory off somewhere. Might need a bit more effort if you’re on Linux and trying to save copies of Proton-using games, since there’s also a WINEPREFIX directory that needs to be saved. And then you can stuff that on whatever archival media you want.
I’ve copied Caves of Qud to my laptop, which doesn’t have Steam installed, for example. Just requires copying the directory.
I think “mandatory physical versions” kinda misses the point of the issue, tbh. It’s bad digital rights laws that are the cause of the problems that you’ve mentioned, not a lack of physical media. DRM has been around a lot longer than digital downloads of games, and shutting down a game’s online services affects purchasers of physical disks just as much as digital downloaders.
Besides, mass-producing physical media is expensive, and I’d rather not give publishers another excuse to make games even more expensive than they already are.
Yeah, abuse of unlawed commerce in digital spaces seems to be an issue above my desire.
but lets not act like publishers will choose the highest possible price anyway.
*cough *90$ for a ps1 era game cough
pory@lemmy.world 11 months ago
release installers DRM-free online. No need to bother pressing plastic and wrapping it in plastic and wrapping that plastic in thinner plastic and then putting it in a box full of plastic to ship around the globe on giant cargo ships, to be ferried from the docks to sit on store shelves or the shelves of some amazon warehouse where they’ll get wrapped in more plastic and shipped in more trucks all so that you can install the files to your SSD anyway, and if it’s DRM-free you could just make backups instead of holding onto the plastic.