this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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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 (tm) probably cannot be trusted.
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.
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
True, but at least at this point, Valve is not a publicly traded company. Gabe clearly understands that piracy is an availability/distribution problem.
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.
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.
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.
You’re just one heartbeat away from seeing Steam turn into an EA competitor by some billionaires son/ self made CEO
You conveniently left out that Valve can terminate your account for reasons unrelated to the games you'd lose that way.
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.
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 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.
There's nothing about owning physical media that would prevent that.
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.
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.
Most PS2 Games don’t have copy protection. You can just run them on a PC via an emulator like PCSX2.