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 ™ probably cannot be trusted.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
Update: It appears that contrary to what I first believed, the single-player portion of the game—Order of War without the “Challenge”—is still available on Steam, and only the multi-player content has been removed.
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.
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.
Sony spent 20 yrs completely committed to proprietary storage media. They sold memory sticks and the like at vastly inflated costs compared to the media built to standard specs. The PS 2 was smack in the mix with that shit. Remember memory cards? They used special Sony developed encryption, for no reason but to maximize vendor lock in.
The PS4 and 5 being storage manufacturer agnostic is a really big deal and I will give them credit for it.
Like I said, I never owned a PlayStation. What made me boycott Sony is buying many products, things like headphones, and paying double or triple the price of comparable products which probably were better than the more expensive Sony version. I know I had some shitty koss headphones I bought for $30 that were better than $200 Sony ones.
And I know someone is going to question this and ask me what model, etc. I don’t know or care. It wasn’t just the headphones it was just several times in a row of thinking I paid more and got something nice and later finding out it was shit.
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.
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.
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.
In all fairness, PS1s and PS2s still work fine (albeit, some may need a laser replacement, and you might need an HDMI adapter) but it’s not like it’s impossible to play old PS games.
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 ™ 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
That’s what house insurance is for.
“Have you considered Game Insurance?” - Ubisoft, probably
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.
Homie, I’ve made backups of thousands of games.
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.
You can make Steam offline mode and you absolutely will have access to any game installed on your machine.
Not any game. Games that depend on third-party DRM may still demand a brief internet connection during offline mode.
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.
You’re just one heartbeat away from seeing Steam turn into an EA competitor by some billionaires son/ self made CEO
Incorrect. Steam games are licensed to you. If the dev or publisher want to remove the game from Steam, it will still be in your library.
You conveniently left out that Valve can terminate your account for reasons unrelated to the games you’d lose that way.
there is this old game “Blur”, it got discontinued and delisted on Steam, yet those who owned it can still download and play it
Until it isn’t.
It still is, the Single Player is still available if you read the article. They just shut down servers, and that’s on Square Enix.
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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.
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You’re hyperbolizing. The Playstation 2 is the best selling video game hardware of all time. It was the opposite of a “bad product” objectively.
Sony spent 20 yrs completely committed to proprietary storage media. They sold memory sticks and the like at vastly inflated costs compared to the media built to standard specs. The PS 2 was smack in the mix with that shit. Remember memory cards? They used special Sony developed encryption, for no reason but to maximize vendor lock in.
The PS4 and 5 being storage manufacturer agnostic is a really big deal and I will give them credit for it.
What about the PS3 era of Sony made you go “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!”
Like I said, I never owned a PlayStation. What made me boycott Sony is buying many products, things like headphones, and paying double or triple the price of comparable products which probably were better than the more expensive Sony version. I know I had some shitty koss headphones I bought for $30 that were better than $200 Sony ones.
And I know someone is going to question this and ask me what model, etc. I don’t know or care. It wasn’t just the headphones it was just several times in a row of thinking I paid more and got something nice and later finding out it was shit.
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.
In all fairness, PS1s and PS2s still work fine (albeit, some may need a laser replacement, and you might need an HDMI adapter) but it’s not like it’s impossible to play old PS games.
Most PS2 Games don’t have copy protection. You can just run them on a PC via an emulator like PCSX2.
Anakin Skywalker agrees: A monarchy is great if you have a really nice and competent ruler, we just had unusually bad luck with those in the past!