this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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Here's how they get you; did you buy "Destiny 2" or did you acquire a limited use license subject to change at the publishers discretion?
I haven't bought a game since Cyberpunk 2077 on GOG. Sure I've "perpetually leased" some games on Steam since then, but I didn't buy them. They can be taken away from me by the owner at any time and I'm very aware of this.
Very sad, people should be able to buy games to own, keep and share those treasured memories throughout their lives. I can still whip out Final Fantasy 7 on original disks if the kids ever want to see how we did it in "ye olde days". Destiny 2-players can never do such a thing.
Makes me question if it's even the same type of products.
Steam is exceptionally good at this though as I don't know of a single game that has been removed permanently ever. They have delisted and stopped selling a bunch, sure, but you can still download and play them. Even those that simply don't work anymore as the servers are dead - by no fault of Valve.
Sure. I hope I didn't come across as claiming that I've lost any games I licensed through Steam. Just that it's a possibility.
I see this argument a lot.
I’m someone who has been gaming since the C-64 days (load “*”,8,1), and honestly I think I’ve lost more games through data corruption on the physical media, simply losing a disk, having a compatible operating system go away, or having the physical media hardware no longer be supported. I actually like the fact that I can just re-download a game whenever I want to play it.
I’ve had a bit less luck with streaming audio, where a service will have licenses for some but not all of the tracks of an album (that’s really annoying), but the trade off there is that I’m not actually buying it, and as a result I have access to god knows how many artists and albums.
The one that really gets me is the fragmentation of video content among a dozen or more services, but hopefully we will start to see a move back towards consolidation there.
I agree love being able to just download games.
But with those old games, I'll bet most of them you could play again via an emulator or something similar.
Fair point. If I get the itch to play something old, I’ll usually just check gog to see if it’s been ported. It’s probably been about ten years ago now, but I finally went through my old software box that had been sitting in a closet forever and tossed games like Wasteland on 3.5” floppies. Oddly, one of the toughest ones to toss was Darklands, which I would never play again but which at the time sucked me in like few other games ever had.
And now apparently it’s available on Steam and works on the Deck, so I might actually try it out again…
But, again, that’s my point.