I wanted to show my gf the halo 1 campaign, so I downloaded the 30GB Masterchief Collection via steam. When I launched it, I was greeted with a black box. After 1 Minute it was a microsoft login screen that looked eerily like a browser inside the game. Since I couldn't do anything else, the game was stuck at a sub 720p resolution. I said fine Ill just create an account. Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email and email verification code later I had to do captcha which is clicking and holding down a button. "Help us against the bots" it said. I unironically spent 5 minutes clicking that button, then being stuck in a loop with "please try again" while my gf just sat there watching me.
Well I turned off MCC and gave up.
I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware
Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. It’s a shame. I can invite my friends over, boot up my GameCube to play some Mario Kart Double Dash. As long as the console and disc are okay, I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away.
These days? Not so much. I’ll never be able to be sure I can play GTA VI in twenty years. It just sucks not owning anything anymore. I know why they do it, it’s a massive profit difference.[1]
On the PC end of things, it’s not as bleak. Services like GoG let you download the standalone installer, DRM free. I try to get any single player games I can from GoG, you should too.
Support the corps that give you ownership. Buy those Blu-rays of your favorite films. Either to support physical media or to ensure you will have it until data degrades.
General principle: It is way easier to avoid lock in by not being locked in in the first place then to extricate yourself later. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming video service because I had a DVD collection that predates them, and I maintained it instead of being on a streaming service, so I've got a personal collection. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming music service because I have a CD collection started decades before they came into existence, ripped digitally, and I've got music I own already.
There's more entertainment of every kind, including video games that don't lock you down, then you could consume in a lifetime anyhow. If you limit yourself to just what doesn't lock you in, yeah, you may not be playing GTA VI, but it's not like you'll lack for good games.
On the one hand, buying a subscription service for $20/month does give you instant, temporary access to a lot of things... on the other, consistently putting that money into media acquisition over the same period of time will build up quite a collection in a few years. Remember that you don't just have to buy blockbusters... you can raid garage sales, you can buy used, you can pick up surprisingly cheap collections like [1], you can hit the Salvation Army... what you find may be haphazard but you can bootstrap a collection cheaply, and may find some surprising stuff on the way.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006LOC01G - but look at the used prices, not the new. There's a lot of things like this on Amazon where someone thinks they can get a lot of money for it "new" where the used market reflects the more accurate market reality.
> An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening hasn’t just caused issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from playing their disc-based games, too.
First line in the article. An Xbox owner who did the right thing by buying physical copies is still unable to play their games.
I don’t play on Xbox, but my kids do, and Overwatch worked fine yesterday (which is a Microsoft property). So I’m not sure what the outage is, but not being able to play discs is a real punch to the gut.
>and I maintained it
How do you plan on maintaining your CD and DVD players when the new ones will be sold with a subscription plan like printers?
You don't get in the locked box in the first place. That's the whole point.
A day may come where it is the only option. In which case, personally, I will still advocate for not getting in the box. If they're going to hold "music" and "movies" hostage tell them to go fuck themselves. It's your money they're using to lock you in. And the day that I have nothing left that can play MP3 files is too far in the future to be sure about anyhow.
If you're really concerned that that is a likely future, you need to be joining with me now, not trying to discourage me about the hopelessness of the task. The only reason it's hopeless is your apparent willingness to pay other people to lock you in. If you don't accept that bargain, you won't be locked in.
Further helping is that these closed ecosystems tend to collapse anyhow. If you're locked in, why spend money on giving you good content? Even if they are appealing today, they won't be tomorrow.
With the planned death of physical media for games, it will soon become impossible to do so. Like, Sony literally plans to stop making discs starting in 2028, and all games you buy will have to be digital only. GTA 6 is just giving a code in a box. It's really the end of times for physical media in a few years, maybe something can change if consumers push back but they likely will not if we are being realistic.
https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/physical-disc-produc...
> How do you plan on maintaining your CD and DVD players when the new ones will be sold with a subscription plan like printers?
If you buy physical media, you should rip it to FLAC and put the original disc in a safe place.
remember that time all of the frontier AI labs trained their models on copyrighted material and no one batted an eyelid? If they can do that, I don't see why I can't back up my CD's and DVDs or digital purchases with digital copies sourced from the high seas. If buying isn't owning...
How and why does anyone “come after you” for backing up your own BluRays, though?
Assuming you’re not redistributing, of course, which is another thing entirely.
The lawyers cost a lot more than what you are going to get back from GP in a copyright lawsuit.
Personal backup copies are fully legal, RIAA and MPA admit as much on their own websites; this was settled back in the VHS and cassette tape era
Plenty of dumb CD and DVD players on the market, and flea market for that matter.
Citation needed for this, as this makes no sense.
However, content shifting (i.e. ripping from CD to digital) is a thing, and that's what I do with my physical media.
It's genuinely hard to imagine commodity USB DVD-ROM drives being sold with subscriptions? There's millions of them, they cost nothing, they're built by a dozen no name Chinese factories
Good luck making my record player dial into the DRM server
And it's very hard but fame-inducing and illegal to defeat locks.
1. Hard. No. 2. Fame-inducing. No. 3. Illegal. Maybe where you live.
back.engineering folks seem to imply that Denuvo is another case of virtualization based obfuscator being vulnerable to a symbolic execution/optimization approach.
> As AI assisted static deobfuscation continues to improve we will see more virtual machine based obfuscators fold away. In an upcoming article we will publish details on how we fully statically devirtualized Denuvo anti(tamper/cheat). One of the most attacked pieces of software second only to anticheats.
…or you can not bother with analyzing at all and just feed correct CPUID/shared data/whatever values to Denuvo, like the hypervisor thing does.
Denuvo cracks have sped up a lot lately, and usually take two months or less.
Denuvo doesn't exist in a vast majority of games. It's not even used in all modern games.
That's the one reason I don't use Steam. I'm not saying Valve is evil or anything like that. But GOG's transparency and commitment to DRM-free games should be the market standard.
GOG's storefront backend is also much nicer than Steam's. The latter is a dungeon crawl through like 3 different UIs, I still don't know how to navigate to the depot page reliably despite using it for years.
DRM-free was a nice idea 20 years ago, the problem is that it doesn't scale. There is just way to much media out there to keep track of and especially with games you are looking at frequent updates and patches, that your DRM-free backup won't get, unless you turn backup up a full time job to keep track of it all.
If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones, since I gave up trying to back them up a decade ago.
On top of that, those updates can be kind of useful. None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux. Also annoying: None of the GOG games run on a genuine Win9x either, as what you are getting is an updated version for modern Windows, not the original game.
Either way, I just don't think DRM-free is the proper solution for media management today or in the future. The olden days of static media are largely gone and the modern world is just way more fluid. So far none of the proposed solutions are able to capture that properly.
I'm a pretty heavy GoG customer and I disagree with a lot of this premise. Most games aren't getting updates past a year or two after their release, and the ones that are aren't DRM-free. And even if they weren't, I'd rather be able to play an older revision of a game I own than not own it at all.
Your Steam games run on Linux run due to Valve's (truly excellent) work on their compatibility layer. However, that work is not exclusive to Steam. I can play my DRM-free GoG copies of big budget Windows games just fine on Linux. There's an extra step you have to invoke, but they still run superbly. Supporting DRM-free is the best we have in an increasingly hostile customer market.
DRM is a software layer that restricts your ability to run a given program, in this context it's specifically a form of access control. It has nothing to do with anything you just said.
> There is just way to much media out there to keep track of and especially with games you are looking at frequent updates and patches, that your DRM-free backup won't get, unless you turn backup up a full time job to keep track of it all.
I don't want to write a redo of the infamous Dropbox comment, but if you really want to go /r/datahoarders on it, you can simply have a GOG downloader running in a monthly (or whatever) cronjob.
> None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux.
That's funny, I don't have that issue at all. I have whatever GOG 3rd party client running on Bazzite do the downloading & updating for me, and the only game with which I had an issue was Timberborn.
You mean Windows games thanks to Proton.
>Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. I
It's much worse with Gaming. At least with TV/Movies/Music there are standards-based 'offline' formats that one could preserve the content. Games, on the other hand, may be intrinsically tied to proprietary hardware and online 'live' services for patches and content. The recent hubbub about Sony removing disk access was somewhat of a red-herring as most disk-based games you buy today have incomplete games.
well there is a way
> I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away.
At least there are already extensive ways to get a game cube running games off an SD card using a pi pico and some hardware that uses the expansion port.
So even once disc rot takes away the original copy you can keep going.
Optical media capped out at 4 layer blu-ray (~128gb) which I'm not even sure that consoles can reliably read.
So my theory is that GTA 6 is somewhat larger and they really didn't want to invest into engineering a solution for multiple-disc or something when ~everyone downloads their games nowadays anyways. So in some sense, the true physical release "can't" exist.
This doesn't apply to most anything but GTA 6 is the one example I think could very realistically be unable to be stored on a disc at all, or unable to be stored on a 3-layer and the supply chain just isn't there for 4-layers in 2026.
Baldur's Gate 3 is already there. It's over 120GB and IIRC PS5 games only use up to triple layer. There was no disc release.
The current Gran Turismo is around 140GB. I think it has a disc, but it'll only have like half the game on it.
Final Fantasy XIV is around 200GB now, and they're talking about dropping PS4 support because drive capacity is going to be too low during the patch cycle for the next expansion.
Also, median US internet is over 100Mb/s now, so downloading a game is faster than installing it from a BluRay reader. And then you don't have to get up and change discs to change games...
Regardless, most console owners buy their games online. Otherwise there would be more games than Funko Pops at GameStop. They also have frequent sales, unlike retailers.
Please, it’s nothing to do with any of this nonsense.
They know people will buy it regardless of format and price, so not having to spend money to print those pesky little discs is a major net profit.
GTA VI is a cancer slowly metastasising. It will signal to all other game companies that they can charge whatever they want for their pos games and people will just swallow it all down because their favourite nobody with a YouTube channel told them to.
We were already heading for an even darker age in gaming, but mark my words, GTA VI is the torchbearer of an altogether darkerer.
I can buy and own legal copies of movies and music. But I often really can’t with games.
Not staying this to be pendantic or to annoy you, but you really do know that at the bottom line, the same sort of license applies to movies and music that as of games. It is just accepted with movies, music and books that people just 'have' them. The publishers seriously know what a huge outrage there would be when they did the same to those forms of media like they did with games, but they would if they could get away with it.
They already did though. Sony removed your movies from your PlayStation. And every Blu-Ray player can brick itself if you insert a disk with a player blacklist update.
> And every Blu-Ray player can brick itself if you insert a disk with a player blacklist update.
That seems to be somewhat of a myth.
Discussion here, 37 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48698374
A lot of games are not sold with re-sellable licenses at all while almost all movies are.
You can resell a movie (dvd/blu-ray) and music (cd, tape, etc) like you can resell a physical book. But if the license you have actually agrees on that, i don't really know. Back then i had several dvd's that granted watching it in a family environment but did not grant you reselling.
What I really mean is a difficult to revoke license. Not dependent on a server or DRM. I realize I do not actually own copies.
Automation has its drawbacks.
Eh?
I can still go to the store and buy some music on physical media, and (if history is any indicator) I can still play it forever until it or my playback equipment wears out.
As a practical matter: You do know that when I spin up an album at home, I simply do not care what limitations any licensing agreements may or may not apply, right? I'm going to play it anyway, and it will work when I play it -- free from outside influence.
I read you and i agree.
My son and we as his parents really love Bluey, but it's impossible to buy a DVD set here in Germany, with German dub, because Disney distributes it exclusively through their plus platform.
There are many more examples like these. Very sad state of affairs.
Netflix does that too. It’s very annoying to know some things will never have a Dvd/Blu-ray release.
Someday that GameCube will break and so will all the others. And someday that PC capable of running open source emulators will also break. And all that will be left is corporation controlled hardware running corporation controlled software. Maybe we'll be lucky and be allowed to rent a few of the old games.
I wish Gog made a Steam Deck.
You can install GOG games on a normal Steam Deck already. What you want is better integration with their store but Heroic also works great on Deck and can automatically add your GOG games to Steam as well.
I like Gog and use Heroic, but that has not been a smooth experience on Steam Deck.
It’s slowly improving, though.
It’s a little jank to switch to Heroic to install the game but I haven’t had problems once it’s added to Steam (automatically, I might add, just tick the checkbox in Heroic preferences).
What's the issue? Its just an ultrabook with a screen and controller peripheral attached.
Me too. It’s coming to Linux though. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/07/gog-confirm-they-are-w...
Until then we use this: https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
If you have the rig already, you could also use Sunshine and Moonlight for streaming. https://moonlight-stream.org/
Meh I don't want another store app, I want an API that I can use from my store-agnostic open source game launcher / library. They should just officially support efforts like Heroic instead.
They haven’t even made a Linux client yet. They are about 13 years behind steam
Why not an actual Steam Deck? You can install any software you want on it.
You can and it actually works ok. For the sake of the argument you would/could be more 'free to do with your games what you want', because GoG does not do DRM.
You can but having to hook it up to a mouse and keyboard and monitor every time I want to install new games from not-Steam would be a pain.
You could write a game store interface that works on whatever its normal mode is.
Out of curiosity, why not use desktop mode without an external mouse and keyboard for that?
Not saying this is a great solution either, though it beats the trackpad + on screen keyboard. I like to VNC into the deck and do these things.
Pitacy is back in the menu for me.
That "if buying is not owning then piracy is not stealing" sounds corny and is legally void, but hell if morally it is not justifiable at this point.
When I want to support the creator I go and "buy" the thing, but I also go and pirate anyway.
> That "if buying is not owning then piracy is not stealing" sounds corny and is legally void, but hell if morally it is not justifiable at this point.
A law isn’t by default just, so when it turns from a safeguard into a manacle it is only logical, fair and correct that we rebel against it.
If buying does not imply ownership, then piracy cannot mean theft.
Eh, I'd probably leave music off that list. Even mainstream music releases are still pretty easy to buy DRM-free via services like Qobuz, even if the majority of people are using streaming platforms these days. Although I wonder if that's maybe just because music seems like it would be pretty easy to sidestep DRM, even if they do come up with some kind of innovation (heck, even my friend told me he pirated my album... WHICH IS FREE, BTW).
But e-books? Holy crap the drm on those things is soooooo annoying to avoid.
If I want an e-book, I buy it from bookshop.org and then pirate the DRM-free version. It clears my conscience: the author gets paid, a small bookshop gets the sale, and I can read my book anywhere.
That’s fair about music. I didn’t even know about Qobuz. I do wonder how long big labels will permit that, but I’m glad it’s here now.
E-book DRM is crazy, I agree. I should have included that.
In twenty years it doesn’t matter if Rockstar delists GTA6.
The DRM will be cracked. You will be able to play and you WILL have a better experience playing a cracked DRM free version than any official version.
You can play an emulated Mario Kart Double Dash on a Steam Machine (or any PC) today and get a better experience than playing it on a Game Cube.
Digital only games sounds bad at first but preservation of video games will be done digitally more effectively than physically. How many full rom sets of Super Nintendo games are just sitting there on millions of PCs around the world? It is trivial to preserve them: copy paste to a new machine. Done.
Disks will rot. GameCube optical lasers will fail. One day, maybe not soon, but it is it inevitable that all disk based games will become unplayable and lost one day. Maybe if we’re lucky an independent company will create an accurate FPGA based GameCube for people to play their games but emulation is just better.
Prices on the second hard market will be astronomical making physical copies innaccessible - this has already happened for arcade PCBs and it will happen for disk based games. PCBs that used to go for a few hundred now go for tens of thousands. I personally believe that this push for physical preservation is largely driven by speculators that know this. You see insane prices for things like sealed copies of Super Mario Bros already. PCB prices were driven up by speculators hoarding supply and they’ll do it for console games too.
If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.
Preservation needs to be about accessibility FIRST.
Physical Videogame Preservation Makes No Sense: https://youtu.be/3rM1jaFvM58
This assumes a large portion of the game doesn’t rely on servers.
We can reverse engineer those too, by looking at what the game client expects. Its harder, obviously. But far from impossible.
I started writing my own world of warcraft server about 20 years ago by disassembling the WoW binary. I got to the point that you could log in to the game and run around in a big empty world. I even found a couple mistakes in wow's in-game encryption in the process. Lots of teams have gotten much further than I did. There's whole communities who play wow on private servers.
If we can do that for MMOs, we can do that for just about anything. Especially with LLMs. LLMs are incredibly good at this sort of work.
The online portions will be reverse engineered and there will be community servers or the online checks will be replaced with offline stubs. You think in twenty years they won’t be able to do this in minutes for practically nothing using GPT 15 or whatever?
Sure, but that's orthogonal to discs. Nothing prevents a game developer from making "check the server" the first thing that happens when the game on a disc loads.
This is why Stop Killing Games exists.
The absurdity is that back in gen-7 we had everything figured out: PS3 used the (free) servers only for matchmaking and all online games were hosted on the consoles themselves. The matchmaking servers are still up and working, and everybody plays with better latency thanks to the prominence of fast fiber.
No internet? Games work offline and support LAN if you have a switch and a couple of consoles.
In 2026 I can still insert any used disc I bought in my ps3 and it will generate a (offline) client-side license for me and let me play and update the game with the disk inside just as a "proof" of still owning it.
If I'm online I'll get patches, else I'll just get served the version on the disc.
(Btw, ps3 also has a print spooler and can natively rip CDs and serve them while acting as a NAS. Or, you can stream games to your psp with remote play. It was truly a "let's cram everything we can inside" era and more like a proper pc with a mediacenter interface)
> PS3 used the (free) servers only for matchmaking and all online games were hosted on the consoles themselves. The matchmaking servers are still up and working
That's not true. Naughty dog shutdown online servers for their ps3 games in 2019:
https://www.naughtydog.com/blog/uncharted_the_last_of_us_mul...
Rockstar games shut down gta online for ps3 in 2021:
https://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/51989315o2aa3...
To be fair, there are private servers for these games, thanks to reverse-engineering efforts, but those are community efforts.
I wanted to play an old call of duty game to reminisce about my childhood. I tried Modern Warfare II and Black Ops, but it’s impossible. You get into a game fine, but every single game is just full of cheaters - not just cheaters with fairly benign (yet unfair) things like wall hacks, cheaters that literally change the physics of the server for all users in a completely unworkable way.
I’m not sure whether this is because of the PS3 client-hosted server model, or just poor coding from COD.
Either way, I gave up eventually. It was a brief passing thought one evening; I’m sure if I really wanted to I could figure out a way to play properly. But you can’t just put the disc in and play online, at least in my experience.
Yea, but there are bigger problems coming, this outage is just a temporary preview of the future. What happens to game preservation in 20 or 10 years when the authentication servers for this generation are permanently shut down? Millions of physical discs will instantly turn into e-waste.
The same thing that happened with all the Denuvo games so far: some hackers remove the DRM.
Removing DRM is all fun and games until single player titles start requiring constant internet access in the future.
Denuvo requires internet access. It's been cracked anyway.
Do you know about this tool called Ghidra? It makes most programs open source. Not the ones with DRM, though.
That would be possibly illegal, requires someone highly specialized to care about each and every one of your games, and assumes there won’t be a crackdown on the openness and anonymity of the Internet that currently allows the distribution of pirate software.
We need to have this right codified into law before we lose it.
Not just possibly, the DMCA makes it a felony to remove or bypass any copy protection measure, even if it doesn't work very well.
Not every jurisdiction has the DMCA, so that’s why I said possibly. It’s definitely illegal in the US.
Hasn't Microsoft had a good track record of enabling playing old generation games on new hardware?
Xbox kinda, windows no
Not really. They left games broken when they shut down Games for Windows Live.
e-waste is the last of the problems.
Figuratively and literally!
One consideration I have on every purchase I make is that I own it, like actually own it (with exceptions where necessary, of course). Internet access in something that shouldn't need internet access is a downside. It's a way to mess with the purchase you made.
If my e-reader had a bad battery after years of use, I should be able to replace that battery myself without issue (personal skill allowing). I purchased it. Why wouldn't you be able to? I haven't yet found reason for this in consumer devices, except because they want you to send it in or buy a new one from the manufacturer.
Every time we see something like this, it doesn't get enough eyes or care from those who use these platforms. Sony takes your movies away, Xbox requires you be online, Amazon updating your books automatically without asking you, etc. My favorite that I repeat constantly is all of the BS that BMW has done over the years: heated seats subscription, proprietary bolt heads, ads in the infotainment. If you buy a BMW at this point, I'm sorry, but you had alternatives and I don't feel bad. The scary part is when enough people accept it that everyone else in the industry follows suit and then the outliers are the ones that respect you.
If I purchased a physical disc, I'm not even asking for the source code (which I'd love), I'm just asking that I can run the damn software I bought, but you can't even do that now. Viva open source and right to repair. Make the educated choice when purchasing software and hardware, to your benefit, where appropriate. Of course, the proprietary system is what you need/want sometimes, but I bet most of us don't most of the time.
> All I'm saying is it's all digital on the PC side of things, and has been for ages, but we have means of maintaining access to the games we love over here, and it's one of the reasons I've gravitated to the PC for quite a while now.
It all depends on where you buy your games of course; GOG will let you download DRM-free installers, but if Steam goes down, your libraries goes down with it. They have made a vague promise that they would prevent that if the company ever went out of business, but who knows if they will keep that promise.
Guarantees about playability went out the window the day free, easily-obtained updates came out on PC as much as consoles.
At least on the PC side, there's a vibrant piracy community.
Even if you get all of your games via Steam, provided you have them downloaded, you can still run them without Steam if you know where to look. Obviously GOG is far better in this regard, but preservation is not a concern on PC, outside of games that are reliant on a server.
Starting next generation when prices are going to be obscenely high, I'm really struggling to see why anyone should invest in a console as opposed to a (mini-)PC.
Depends. Steam is not DRM itself, you can open the game folder and copy the game to another computer and steam doesn’t care. The game often has its own DRM though which will stop you.
GOG is different in that they ban DRM outright.
Realistically, if Steam closed down tomorrow, within 4-6 hours there'd be a megathread on Reddit explaining how to get the games running without Steam. Within 48 hours there'd be an auto-crack tool floating around on GitHub.
Steam for some reason gets a pass even though it normalized the use of DRM for PC games over 20 years ago.
Good customer service and mostly benevolent for the last two decades, it buys them a lot of goodwill they otherwise wouldn't have.
That and people simply trust steam because it has always been trustworthy (on the whole).
Yeah, I’ve been on Steam for about 20 years now and I can’t recall many bad moments with Valve.
The only one that comes to mind is the “outrage” when they decided to release L4D2 just a year after L4D back in 2008 instead of making this a free upgrade. Times have definitely changed. looks at yearly COD with barely any changes
Most Steam games don't actually have any DRM. They just link to steamapi.dll for things like achievements, and that makes you think you can't run them without Steam.
Some have DRM, of course.
What is the command I can use to run them without Steam then? If the game links to a dll that launches Steam and won’t play without it, then that is effectively Drm.
Before I even play the game without Steam: how do I download it without Steam?
Oh there are Dlls? And as a non-technical consumer I just know this do I? I know how to dig deep into my file system and copy+paste a dll file into software I can’t/don’t understand? How do I download and install a copy without Steam?
You can download a fake steamapi.dll from a pirate site. It will fill in all the function stubs and it isn't even illegal.
Or so I assume. I have Steam installed, so I wouldn't know.
You download it with Steam, then run Steam's backup function to back up the games you care about to physical media. Or in the vast number of cases you can just copy the game folder
Obviously if you buy it with steam you need Steam. But you only need it at the time of purchase, for the vast majority of titles
I got Kerbal Space Program to run by just copying the entire folder then deleting the Steam dlls. Not sure how many games that will work for though.
Depends on the game. Stardew Valley can be run outside Steam, and I do it to be able to add mods.
How do you run an application? Depends on the application, as they all have different filenames...
I sort of get it. Every competitor, except maybe GOG, has come down hard in hyper-capitalist value-extraction mode quickly after pretending to do any good-will. For Valve, being a somewhat decent company is part of their ethos, for their competitors it's a means to an end.
I trust Valve not to screw me over, even though I know they totally could. Their own DRM is pretty weak (just put a modified DLL in the game directory and the game will launch), luckily.
> Steam for some reason
Currently probably because of Valve's work on Proton, and before because Steam just worked and didn't seem to exploit players.
Steam games are not required to have DRM, it's entirely up to the game developer/publisher.
It allows you to play your games offline though, so if Steam's servers go down you can still play your games. I'm not sure if that's permanent or if you need to reactivate your DRM / license every once in a while though.
Around a decade ago i had to move to another city and spent a few months without internet. I had all my favorite games downloaded on Steam and was able to play them offline with no issue for all that time. Not sure if it still like that, but it was possible back then.
Which has nothing to do with Steam...
Also there is a vibrant retrogaming community, with lots of games much more interesting than yet another COD or FIFA.
If steam goes down you can play offline. They have a portable game console that doesn't need to be connected to play. They have big warnings on the store page of games that require online drm.
There's a surprising amount of games on my Deck that refuse to run without internet. It's not even marked anywhere which sucks because you find out when you have no connectivity.
Is that generally caused by Steam, or by the game itself needing an online connection?
They don’t let you resell games, if you die your library is gone, if said steamdeck (or steam machine) breaks those games are gone, the list goes on. It is a digital store with the exact same limitations of any video game console full of digital purchases.
I use Steam but I also know I’m vulnerable to a rug pull. We all are. That’s why I’ve been shifting over to GOG and making sure to back up my library in an organized fashion. I wish I had done it sooner, but hey, today’s the best day.
As for warnings, I mean…come on man. That’s like hiding behind ToS. Let’s be realistic here: how many people here (including yourself) see a game they really want, see it has a little DRM note on the uttered store page, then decide never to buy it? Few people let that stop them from getting a game they actually want.
Seeing the little DRM note kills my joy entirely. I have used steam, but the runtime anti-tamper malware has no place on my system. I don't use the word malware lightly. I trust it about as much as a random "overdue" invoice pdf from my spam folder. Maybe less.
The deck and machine are not going to delete your account if it breaks? Theyre just PCs what are you on about?
I don't buy games that require third party launchers ever. Been burned losing my Ubisoft account or w/e a few times. The warnings are helpful and steam doesn't have to say anything at all.
If steam shuts down and all your games are on a valve device. I only addressed that because it seemed it was being used as an example given prior, as if that protects them more than an Xbox does.
Steam has some backup feature. I do backups of my games. Compressed to slow HDD dedicated to backups. Faster to install than downloading again from network. Don't know though how much will that help
Can one download a backup first, then install (using usb drive) into an "offline" machine first (without steam/online?)
Yeah, if the game is set up to not use steam as drm. You can check by going to the installed files and running the exe directly - in most cases it'll still launch even if you're signed out.
The fight should never have been about physical vs digital, but about ownership.
If I buy a game/movie/book/song, regardless of where or in what format, I should be able to:
1. Keep it forever without the risk of remote deletion.
2. Use it while offline, unless internet connectivity is strictly required for the experience.
3. Move it between my devices.
4. Backup and archive it.
5. Resell it.
6. Pass it on to my children.
Beyond that I don't really care what the container for the bytes is. If the game isn't sold on a disc I can easily burn my own.
Every publisher can offer all of this today, but they choose not to. And proprietary devices/formats means the free market isn't going to work in the consumer's favor. The only thing that can fix the problem is legislation.
For most modern software, you are not buying a product, you are buying a window of service. You are entering into an agreement that the software will be supported for a reasonable amount of time. Bugs will be fixed, you might get some additional 'free' content. Games got to the point of being so large and expensive, they crossed this threshold long ago. A single player offline game like The Witcher 3 has had what, about 30 updates? And those games are constantly being dwarfed by seasonal, micro-transation games. The single release game was an endangered species a long time ago.
After weeks of discourse where the physical token of the Compact Disc had become the all-important object of the fight, it's reassuring to see that we're back at the beginning, where it was clearly understood that you don't meaningfully "own" a game if you need to be online to use any of it.
You need to be online to prove you own it, which now means you don’t?
Unless the party you prove it to is obligated to stay up forever and has service guarantees, yeah
You need to be online to prove they currently will let you play it.
The symbol of ownership doesn't hold much value without any of its benefits.
I don't have a console other than an old PS4 rarely used and I was going to buy a PS5 until the recent news. Now I don't want to buy xbox because of this post. So, what's left? I have a kid and little time and I haven't been a "gamer" since I was a teenager but I want to be able to play maybe 5 or 6 games (co-ops, FIFA, GTA) without downloading anything.
It's even more annoying for me because I often have phases of only playing every 2 months, so it's always true that I would need to update first.
Emulation. Tons upon tons of games just sitting there.
Your kid isn't going to know what it was like to play it back then, throw them the classics and sigh in relief knowing that's he's not being tricked in to corporate exploits such as loot boxes, skins and the likes.
My eight year old nephew loves my old mega drive.
If buying ain't owning, then p****y ain't stealing.
You can say pussy on the internet
Clearly parent poster meant 'policy'. 'The policy isn't about stealing', referring of course to the Terms and Conditions being something to ignore when they cover anti-piracy but don't sell you anything.
Yarr
The word was "piracy"
HN is the propaganda arm of a billionaire enrichment company, so it's understandable that someone might be unsure whether you're allowed to say that word here.
We all know what the word was, it was a joke to replace it with another word that has the same first/last letters that obviously wouldn't fit here. A joke about how words are censored all over the internet as a way to appease advertisers on various platforms.
If said billionaire enrichment company was really upset about it, they would be able to detect forbidden words like piracy even when replaced. It's not that difficult, it's a problem that was solved decades ago.
Just go two routes at once
First, we need to make it illegal to say you are buying something when you are actually renting. Words mean something.
They did this in California. Solution: stores don't use any of the words now. Now the buttons say "add to cart" and "proceed to payment". Sometimes the button just says the price.
I wonder if it's legal to build a completely scam store like this. You pick a game, you click on "$7", you pay $7, you don't get anything at all, and if you try to sue them, they point out they never actually sold you anything, you just voluntarily clicked on the button to donate $7.
I'll never buy one of these systems because I want to be able to play my games in 20 or 30 years.
I just bought a Nintendo 64 and a Wii and it's great just being able to play my games with my kids and know that in five years nothing will change.
Even if the games are played off the internal hard drive with updates, there's a bit of "legal grey area" where enthusiastic fans of the game rebuild the code, and run the game with assets from the original media. "Technically" only folks with the original media in their possession will be able to play the original game.
For example the Ship of Harkinian PC port of Ocarina of Time. This requires a legal or illegal copy of the original game to run, so the copyright authorities don't crack down on it yet.
Are we sure that this is the reason the authorities aren't cracking down on it, and not that a game released in 1998 that also has a newer release on the 3DS just isn't financially valuable enough at this point to try to protect now? And it's getting an even newer remake, which is where Nintendo's concerns would be, I'd assume.
Nobody can be sure, but there is a consistent pattern here: decompilation projects can include as much code as they want and not get punished, but if they include assets they are taken down.
I suspect it's actually because the authorities don't know what the project is, if it's only code, or they can't be sure it's an infringing derivative work (it is).
Yes, because Nintendo is constantly taking down projects that cross the unspoken line and redistribute assets.
I keep seeing article like this, that look like they have been written by these companies to push the opinion. People saying "who cares because you cannot play it anyway" instead of "discs should be less dependant on network to gain another advantage".
But the case for physical disk is not (only) about playability, it's mostly about ownership and the fact that you can actually lend it to someone or resell it. It's also about retail, and it's about collectors. About people with a slow or limited connection having access with that much less to download.
Another thing is also that if I have a physical copy, I have the right to a digital copy. So a non-working disc might not always be the end. But if I have a digital copy and they take it off the table, I do not have this right and it is gone forever.
> But owning a game on a disc today isn't really the same thing. It's still just a license, and Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo can either intentionally or, in this case, unintentionally prevent you from playing that game, even if you own the physical copy.
I am pretty certain that there are different legal requirements nonetheless. The author kind of tries to mitigate the danger of big corporations forbidding physical media. Does he think that these corporations have the good of the people in mind? Or are they more interested in milking their cash cows?
Thankfully I am not the target audience anyway. I don't give my money to these greedy corporations to begin with. Them disowning people further here, by killing physical media, would just have been another stepping stone towards a movement away from these big corporations anyway. I don't have time to play games anymore anyway due to old age, but if I would I'd much rather support Indie games - with physical media.
> "But owning a game on a disc today isn't really the same thing. It's still just a license..."
Here's the crux of the problem in their own sentence and they don't even realize it.
Owning and Licensing are not the same thing. If I own something, I own it outright. If I license something, I am leasing it.
It does get fuzzy with media, I will admit. But we need the same protections as physical books and game cartidges. If I buy it, it is mine to use as I please and even resell or transfer. If that's not what the transaction is, then don't call it buying or purchasing, call it leasing or licensing.
Require stores and publishers to use language that reflects the nature of the transaction.
The issue with owning discs now is they tend to not even have the full game on them. They either shipped the discs before the game was done so there's something practically unplayable on the disc, or sometimes it's a demo and you have to download the remaining 95% of the game. The one advantage it has over digital for the time being is you can resell it, assuming they didn't lock a bunch of content behind a one-time-use download code in the box.
And this isn't anything new. Mortal Kombat X came out 11 years ago and the disc had 2 characters and a basic tutorial on it. To get the rest of the game you had to download it.
Asha Sharma where are you? Keep up your reputation as a great new Xbox CEO.
Physical is mostly a lie once you go past PS2, 3DS etc. It confers a few benefits over digital, like trading and selling, but those are illusory as well, as we see here.
It's not strictly true that all physical disks are just license keys - those are marked on the packaging.
Sounds more like a complicated subscription or renting scheme than ownership
Error: Forbidden
Your client does not have permission to get URL /comic/2026/07/03/returnal-3 from this server.
What does it say?
Says how originally people played arcade games and didn't own them at all, since you were constantly putting in quarters to play more of the game.
It's an interesting point, though not 100% accurate due to how there were early video game consoles at the same time as arcade games. Pong clones were common for home play in the early 1970s, and things like the Fairchild Channel F and Atari 2600 date from the mid to late 1970s.
Part of the overall trend to eliminate in-person shopping and physical product ownership.
In the end, 1 guy owns everything and we’re all batteries.
Something something layoffs?
Our only hope are the pirates.
Buy games on GOG.
The death of the used games market is still a big deal, even if said used games still depend on the manufacturers' networks and licenses being valid. A digital only world where Sony and Microsoft have the only say about pricing and used games are no longer available is a downgrade for users even from the already-bad status quo
For a golden decade or so, piracy was less convenient than paying: Xbox had subscriptions offering on tap games, there was only really one streaming service to speak of that had high quality content, music came from Spotify or YouTube, etc.
We are back to where we are in the 2000s: the gatekeepers of large tracts of culture are behaving so badly that piracy is probably going to end it's lull. It is a shame for artists, developers, and anyone else who needs to get paid that companies running genuinely very good services have chosen to behave so badly.
Normalize usage of "have been granted a limited license for" instead of "own." The word "own" implies all manner of things that don't exist for things like Xbox games, Kindle titles, etc.
This stuff is turning me into a physical media pre-2010s truther more and more by the day
Is this really newsworthy? This has been the case for over a decade.
It has, but recent events have shown that people need a reminder.
Own? You don’t own someone else’s work. Even when it goes into public domain, you don’t own their creation. At that point, nobody does.
I own everything I've learned. I also own some hardware on which I sometimes deposit this information for later retrieval. I own all of it, keys to nuts.
Nag your representatives ad nauseam to make laws against this.
It's shown again and again and again that nagging representatives doesn't actually work.
There are more radical options involving representatives (and other figures for that matter) that could work, but those are generally frowned upon.
In general, two kinds of solutions to political problems exist: those that don't work, and those that are illegal. Because why would politicians want something that worked to be legal?
Don't buy golden cage BS products, which you don't really own.
Consoles, Apple, Google, etc.
But that's all products, and even if it wasn't, consumer choice is mainly driven by marketing spend, which lock-in companies will always have the most of, because they extract the most money.
[dead]
[dead]
Our kids are going to be so fucked..
I've been wondering about this, in some sense we might hit a big cultural black hole where all these cool things that we've created in the last few decades just are functionally lost and all the amazing things of the previous generation that could be found on archive, roms, stuff on CD's / DVD's etc are what actually have cultural value going forwards
Everything else is in this position of "actively at risk" where if someone isn't "keeping it up" it may just disappear, at least until it gets orphaned, in which case I suppose reverse engineering is back on the table
Thank God for Fitgirl doing so much archival work with high quality highly compressed game releases. If you know where to look everything is available somewhere.
Fitgirl is a packing group. They take what other people have already done, and compress it (to a ludicrous degree). They should not be credited for anything besides the compression.
Which is exactly what have been said:
> so much archival work with high quality highly compressed game releases
Cataloguing and vouching for releases is very useful.
I don’t have time or interest to figure out how to go on the Usenet and research the reputation of scene groups.
> If you know where to look everything is available somewhere.
Until CPUs only run "approved" operating systems → mandatory age verification == government ID required to use any OS in a non-crippled form → browsers refusing to open "illegal" sites.
Unable to open archive - copyright detected.
[Delete File] [Notify Authorities]
I agree, but I feel like pointing out that any game that was distributed without DRM or that was successfully 'cracked' by pirates can also be found on archive and therefore might be carried over to future generations. Physical media isn't the only way.
The real risk, IMO, is live service games that don't function at all without the server being online. There are games where fans have reverse-engineered and made their own server, but there are definitely ones that will slip through the cracks and be forgotten too.
I agree that live service are the main threat, but even so you should not have to rely on pirated software to keep using something you paid for. Also not all game ends up being cracked
Recently got a big fancy TV with 4k + Dolby Vision
It’s a lot of work figuring out what movies support the format. And all the premium upgrades to Netflix, etc get them to stream premium formats. Then it doesn’t work and you’re spending 30 minutes debugging your TV, wondering why you’re not getting the amazing new restoration of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I totally understand why people just buy physical media.
Games may be harder given software updates. But I’d pay a premium for a physical copy of mature games I love (like Halo Master Chief collection)
Oh, you pay for 4K? Sorry, the CDN is a bit too overloaded to send you this movie today. I hope you’re happy with 1080p, randomly dropping to 360p on and off for a dozen frames at a time during an immersive sequence.
It's worse. All hardware and software in the chain must be approved for you to be allowed to watch 4K. Your browser, OS, CPU, GPU, HDMI cable, and TV must all be whitelisted before you get 4K. Very few people meet the requirements.
And the 4K video is compressed to lower bitrate than a 1080p Blu-Ray anyway.
> I totally understand why people just buy physical media.
Not to disagree with your larger point, but physical media can also be a nightmare. Try watching a 4K Blu-ray on your computer
Because even the fucking cable needs to support DRM. I hate this tech era with a passion
You can just pirate movies.
This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
There's something seriously wrong in Redmond.
At least with linux, you can search on the web and find a forum post telling you the magic incantation. With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged, barely workable, edge case until it might or might not work.
Office on the web is a horror show this way.
Azure is also such a mess.
10 redirects to get to the portal, when creating an account/etc. if you do one thing wrong it might just disappear from a tenant or not bind properly or something and then you gotta do it all over again (happened last year)
I just don't know how this is possible, why is everything so broken?
No owners, no responsability, no incentive to fix it. Ticket grabbers and checklist markers.
It is strange to me that people are re-discovering this today, in 2026. Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ years ago) by running a business fixing problems with Microsoft products for their clients.
I remember windows 2000 being pretty rock solid. I used it as my gaming os for years while folks struggled with windows me and windows xp (IIRC, xp did eventually become pretty good)
Literally everything that came after Windows Me both in the consumer and server space is based on NT, to this day. So I'm not sure this argument weighs much.
This is why Microsoft is good, there is an entire industry around fixing their nonsense. They are being a job creator!
You know whats the cherry on top? I got it working today and you have to download the actual halo 1 campaign as a DLC from inside or outside the MCC game. Even if I got it working yesterday, I'd have to wait for another download. What the 30GB MCC does initially is still a mystery to me.
I looked into it and apparently just the launcher itself is 16GB because it's filled to the brim with extremely oversized videos and sound files, on top of an already overweight base.
All this is supposed to be the peak of game dev prowess. We've had like 50 years of game dev just to evolve to this. It's not just huge launchers - almost everything AAA that's made today feels like it was designed to appear flashy at first glance in some meeting for people who have no idea what they're looking at, while performance, technical features, and the most basic user experience considerations are thrown out of the window.
I mean yeah, just wait until you hear about Ark survival ascended: A game with a single 188gb ucas file extracts itself during update, taking over 400gb just to patch 2gb and the rezips itself.
The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry, and that was somewhat extended to Xbox. But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!"
This definitely does not extend to games. I remember microsoft games having terrible UX over a decade ago (not the game, the account garbage around it).
It’s like they dump “bad at programming and don’t care about it” juice right into the water supply.
All problems with Microsoft products are design and intent problems, not engineering.
The design and intent are bad, but let’s not discount the large amount of bad engineering too.
This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
When you try to save a short-term buck by offshoring your workforce, you end up with long-term problems and brand damage.
And now vibe coding is the new offshoring, so we can make things worse at scale!
When did the offshoring happen, because Microsoft has been bad for a long time. Even in the 90s there were so many BSODs.
Well, the classic BSODs were not all Microsoft's fault, many of them were on 3rd party driver developers.
I think the worse thing here is all the subtle breakages and inconsistencies in Windows, as well as in the MS Office suite of products, constant redesigns of things that worked, adding layers upon layers of "make-up" on top that obscures functionality, etc etc.
Microsoft stole my copy of Minecraft.
I had bought Minecraft before Microsoft bought Mojang, and eventually I was forced to migrate my Minecraft license to a Microsoft account.
After I had successfully created the account, logged in, and transferred the license, and ONLY after I had transferred the license, I was suddenly locked out of my account until I provided a phone number.
I will never buy a Microsoft product again, and I think I've done a decent job reducing the amount of their stuff that other people have bought, as well.
My original Minecraft account got lost in all these shenanigans as well.
This is the same effect of wanting to watch an old film... If you want to do it the legit way, you will have to face all kind of hurdles, starting from finding a service provider that might have the film, then forget about all the modern audience "edits" they put on these things, at times the quality isn't even good, the audio tracks are messed up...
So you either give these jackals at least 30 to 60 minutes of your life (plus money) for the luxury of using their crap services and obtaining a half-assed version of what you want, or you just go to good old Forum McTorrent and get what you actually want for free.
The streaming service is a Cathedral: You've paid your tithe to the temple of HBO Max? Marvelous, please come in, my child and gaze upon our wonders! What? James Cameron's True Lies? It is not in our collection, please remain here and we can watch Commando together! It's just as good!
The digital copy is a Bazaar: You wander the booths of Prime Video, iTunes, and... Fandago!?! They assure you their copy of True Lies is the best! Ignore that other booth... you may save $2 but are you certain that video will still exist in a year?
And the whole time you know that just under the bazaar is the Underground/Black Market where all is preserved and all can be had, but you'll need to work for it.
Just a minor correction: Commando is superior to True Lies ;)
From a moral PoV pirating old movies isn't a big issue, especially in cases where the original makers are already dead. At that point you're only feeding Hollywood bosses, shareholders and decendants. Same as torrenting music from dead artists. I don't care for Jimi Hendrix' greedy sister or 'Authentic Brands Group', which owns the rights to Elvis Presley's music. These people can create their own art instead of living off other people's work.
but enough about anthropic
I don't know if I agree with you with this example. Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works. Usually true with a film or TV show through the "forums" too, but not always. Sometimes it's the wrong episode, sometimes it's the wrong language, sometimes one particular show keeps buffering even for no obvious reason. And even though it's quite rare, you never know until you're sat with your wife or friends watching it, because who checks the show in advance?
How would a downloaded file buffer? That sounds more like streaming sites, which yeah are bad. But if you download a movie or season of a show in advance I don't think you'll have the same issues. Language ones or missing subtitles maybe - you gotta check those as the download finishes and before you put it on a media server.
> How would a downloaded file buffer
I've no idea. It happens sometimes and only seems to happen with certain fils. In this case I'm sure it's a jellyfin issue, but this just comes down to having to debug while someone is waiting to watch - which is exactly the time I don't want to.
As for language/subtitles it's true if it happens from the start (which I agree, is usually true) but occasionally the downloads get weird midway through.
If you're talking about those random malvertising-supported streaming sites then sure, but torrenting is not like this at all.
No, I'm talking about downloaded files. It happens maybe 2% of the time. You can't be sure the indexers are giving you the correct one.
> Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works.
I have 2 words for you: "soon leaving". You may have seen them on Netflix.
And in the US you have the advantage it's generally leaving to go somewhere. In many smaller countries this is not true.
I've never those words in File Explorer.
> Since I couldn't do anything else,...
Sail the high seas my friend.
In 2023, spent multiple hours setting up a Microsoft account for my GF just so she could play Minecraft. The process involved HTTP 4xx, 5xx, missing emails, activation codes that were "expired" even though they were less than 30 seconds old, countless instances of HTTP 302 (or JS / HTML based redirects?) that simply went to a landing page instead of redirecting to the "You've been authenticated" thingy and tons, tons and tons upon tons of captchas. Audio-based ones even, at some point! Some of the voices I could easily understand, others had like a thick accent or something - and English is not my mother tongue. The only thing driving me forward was a boiling hatred towards Microsoft.
It's wild cause it was so easy circa ~2010, back before Mojang was purchased.
Microsoft makes a web login seem like some kind of lost knowledge like Roman aqueducts.
As far as i am concerned they stole my Minecraft account by force migrating it and me cannot being bothered doing all that, all the time again.
Reminds me of the fact that I lost my Xbox account because they shutdown hotmail. My account is working on my Xbox but the password reset options are not supported by the OS on the Xbox. And I can’t change the email of the account from an Xbox. The support wasn’t helpful either. I read that somebody with the same issue got them to change the mail by logging in and out while on the phone. I don’t have the energy to jump through these hoops.
Average Ubisoft game experience on Steam.
I was gonna say, this is every time the gang feels like firing up a round of Uno.
I've lost count of the times my buddy and I wanted to play coop, and I was forced to log in to my ms account for a split screen game. I remember back on the original xbox, and x360, using 'guest' just worked. Forcing people to login for couch coop is asinine.
the hardware is good
but it is so hard to give them money on it
i dread buying new games as it os a game of chance what way might work this time
I don't know and let me spice this up with another story:
I have a ps4 and I undusted it a couple of weeks ago, then after a couple of os and game updates that took 2h to finish, they asked me to subscribe to playstation plus to play online and to basically use my internet.
What exactly is the point of a console at this point?
I recently bought far cry 3 on steam and spent 20 minutes post-install trying to log into my ubisoft account between forgetting an old password, 2fa across multiple devices and a badly broken captcha system.
Nothing infuriates me quite like an additional gaming account inside of a dedicated gaming platform. Running under a Steam/PSN/Xbox account and want to play the game you just bought? Sucks to be you. First create a Ubisoft/Blizzard/indie-studio-with-one-game login so we can better monetize something.
Silly, you should've paid $60 for the re-re-remake of halo one (which would still need a login i guess...)
Sorry though, i just reinstalled MCC yesterday to play Halo 1 myself, and lucky me my Microsoft account worked fine
And the Steam version is distinctly better to boot. The XBox Store version last I tried just straight up didn't work.
Microsoft's gaming division was in an absolute shambles and that was before they gutted it.
sounds tough. have you considered showing her an actually good game? just spitballing here