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PlayStation keeps reminding us why digital ownership sucks
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this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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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
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.
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.
Exactly. Some of the replies in this thread are so disingenuous.
Just because you don't care about backing things up doesn't mean nobody else is.
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.
Don't need to burn them, you can play them off a USB! Or over an SMB share.
How do you think PS2 ROMs are uploaded?
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)
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.
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.
Many games on Steam use Steamworks DRM despite being available DRM-free on other stores, one prominent example being Batman Arkham City.
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.
That's what house insurance is for.
"Have you considered Game Insurance?" - Ubisoft, probably
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.
If you can’t find something on piracy trackers you just need better trackers.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
You’re just one heartbeat away from seeing Steam turn into an EA competitor by some billionaires son/ self made CEO