• Pohl@lemmy.world
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    11 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.

    • Kayn@dormi.zone
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      11 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
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        11 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

        • Kayn@dormi.zone
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          11 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
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            11 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
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              11 months ago

              Exactly. Some of the replies in this thread are so disingenuous.

              • Kayn@dormi.zone
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                11 months ago

                Just because you don’t care about backing things up doesn’t mean nobody else is.

                • QueriesQueried@sh.itjust.works
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                  11 months ago

                  I can promise the number of people backing up their Xbox/SNES/Sony/whatever games at the time/era of release, are a rounding error number of people who purchased at all. And even if that was the case, how are you gonna do that for the discs that have DRM? Obviously it can be cracked, but how does that help you in that specific time of need (referencing the house fire), when the tech to crack that DRM didn’t even exist?

                  Nobody is arguing with “physical copies have better security” (digital storefronts closing, keys being revoked, etc), they’re only arguing with you for pretending everyone is seemingly clairvoyant, with pools of money and compute hardware, to make backups of these things. There is no way you can possibly think that all one needed to do was “copy da files dumbass” when even the hardware to do that, didn’t exist (for the public or at all), or was itself prohibitevly expensive.

          • Skipcast@lemmy.world
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            11 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)

            • Kayn@dormi.zone
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              11 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.

              • Laser@feddit.de
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                11 months ago

                Steam doesn’t enforce DRM, your game can use Steamworks even without DRM.

                The no-DRM policy sure is very good, but in the end any game on GoG is there by choice of the publisher, who could also choose not to use DRM on Steam.

          • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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            11 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
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            11 months ago

            You can make Steam offline mode and you absolutely will have access to any game installed on your machine.

            • Kayn@dormi.zone
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              11 months ago

              Not any game. Games that depend on third-party DRM may still demand a brief internet connection during offline mode.

      • prole@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        True, but at least at this point, Valve is not a publicly traded company. Gabe clearly understands that piracy is an availability/distribution problem.

      • stardust@lemmy.ca
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        11 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
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          11 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
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            11 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
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            11 months ago

            If you can’t find something on piracy trackers you just need better trackers.

            • bassomitron@lemmy.world
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              11 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).

            • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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              11 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.

              • QueriesQueried@sh.itjust.works
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                11 months ago

                I think that’s why Jackett is recommended to use with Sonarr/Radarr now. I just got my unraid server (mostly) running and that was one of the recommendations I saw made frequently.

                • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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                  11 months ago

                  I use Prowlarr. Maybe it’s that. I dunno if anything produces the right figures tbh.

                  Surely something has to connect to the torrent servers to see how many seeds there are, and that can even take the torrent program a little while to find them all.

                  I’ve only had one torrent fail at 99% so far as the last “seed” seemed to be fake.

            • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
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              11 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.

      • Coasting0942@reddthat.com
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        11 months ago

        You’re just one heartbeat away from seeing Steam turn into an EA competitor by some billionaires son/ self made CEO

      • dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        11 months ago

        Incorrect. Steam games are licensed to you. If the dev or publisher want to remove the game from Steam, it will still be in your library.

        • Kayn@dormi.zone
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          11 months ago

          You conveniently left out that Valve can terminate your account for reasons unrelated to the games you’d lose that way.

        • punseye@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          there is this old game “Blur”, it got discontinued and delisted on Steam, yet those who owned it can still download and play it

          • Syrc@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            It still is, the Single Player is still available if you read the article. They just shut down servers, and that’s on Square Enix.

              • Syrc@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                Update: It appears that contrary to what I first believed, the single-player portion of the game—Order of War without the “Challenge”—is still available on Steam, and only the multi-player content has been removed.

      • Pohl@lemmy.world
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        11 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.

          • Pohl@lemmy.world
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            11 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
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              11 months ago

              I removed the comment (maybe still visible on some instances?) 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, and without DRM even well beyond that. Hosting static data is incredibly cheap, the limitations are all about contracts and profit maximization.

              If anything, the house in the metaphor is actually not long-lived enough.

        • Kayn@dormi.zone
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          11 months ago

          Have you ever come across the idea of making digital backups of the physical media you owned?

          • Pohl@lemmy.world
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            11 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?

            • Kayn@dormi.zone
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              11 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.

                  • otp@sh.itjust.works
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                    11 months ago

                    Holy crap. That’s a huge milestone!

                    I remember when PS1 emulation was still spotty…

                  • PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocksB
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                    11 months ago

                    Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

                    Yes.

                    Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

                    I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.

                • Kayn@dormi.zone
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                  11 months ago

                  It is for me. Has it not been accurate enough for your use?

                  • otp@sh.itjust.works
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                    11 months ago

                    I hadn’t had a capable enough machine to do PS2 emulation smoothly until I also didn’t have enough time to spend time playing them, lol

                    I’ve fixed the computer issue, and I’ll be fixing the time issue soon! Lol

          • GreyBeard@lemmy.one
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            11 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.

            • Kayn@dormi.zone
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              11 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.

    • burliman@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • Pohl@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        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.

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • Pohl@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Word! The nastiest vendor lock in bullshit you’ve ever seen. My bitchin’ yellow Walkman aside, bad products top to bottom.

        • dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          11 months ago

          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.

          • Pohl@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            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.

        • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          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.

    • thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • Pohl@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Im not arguing that all digital ownership works great for consumers. But it can work. Shitty companies will 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.

      • Womble@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        There’s nothing about owning physical media that would prevent that.

    • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      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 the Xbox Live Store), and I can still play the digital and physical Xbox 360 and Xbox One games that I bought in those eras as well.

      Gamers (and legislators), give Sony and Nintendo way too much of a pass for shitting on backwards compatibility.

    • TimeSquirrel@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      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. Backwards compatibility on PC is amazing. Drivers are a different story.

      With dedicated consoles, the hardware is often bespoke and completely changes with each iteration of the console. In order to remain backwards compatible, emulation is required to recreate the previous environment so older games will run. That or they literally just stuff a miniature subsystem of the old console into the new one.

    • dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 months ago

      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.

    • RmDebArc_5@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      Most PS2 Games don’t have copy protection. You can just run them on a PC via an emulator like PCSX2.

    • shrugal@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      Anakin Skywalker agrees: A monarchy is great if you have a really nice and competent ruler, we just had unusually bad luck with those in the past!