this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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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.
I think pcsx 2 let's you put a PS2 CD in and run it through the emulator
It does.
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?
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.
Have you ever come across the idea of making digital backups of the physical media you owned?
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?
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.
Is PS2 emulation that accurate now?
Yeah, same with Gamecube (via Dolphin).
PS3 emulation has a way to go yet.
It is for me. Has it not been accurate enough for your use?
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
Yes. Not 100% perfect for all games, but close.
Holy crap. That's a huge milestone!
I remember when PS1 emulation was still spotty...
Yeah, and with PS3 and 360 emulation still being pretty spotty, it will probably be the limit of near-100% emulation of a system for a while.
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.
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.
A good portion, yes. The rest you'll have to crack.
So just like the DRM on physical media, only with fewer steps and no additional equipment.
So you're in favour of digital ownership then?
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.