Unless you’re paying for some kind of “streaming” video game service, the game lives on your solid state drive/hard drive… which is physical media.
The license is what allows you to re-download and re-install it over and over.
This isn’t a death of physical media, because even the streaming video game services are storing the copies of video games they stream to you on hard drives and solid state drives. The physical media doesn’t disappear, but rather corporations are using technology to force you to use it how the company wants you to use it, and the bonus to those companies of the increased price of gaming hardware. Now we will have a difficult time owning our own physical media because it has become so costly.
Just because you don’t have enough physical media space to install every game you’ve ever bought doesn’t mean they aren’t all living on a hard drive or old cd/dvd-rom SOMEWHERE. The “cloud” isn’t actually ephemeral. Surprise, it’s just a bunch of other people’s computers.
Which is what these corporations want, they want to be in full control of who gets access and when, because you’re on their property on their hard drives. There is no profit for the game companies in people like us having enough physical media space to keep data forever.
The issue is that someone else holds the key to your license. They can revoke it at any time, with 0 meaningful consequences.
We must now provide our own physical media to store the game…which in principle is fine and makes more sense than a game disk. However, its the reliance corporations to not fuck you over that’s the issue.
Archiving all your games is easier than said done too.
To properly “keep” every game, you’ll need a lot of high-capacity storage devices.
Going by common file backup strategy, we need to store at least 3 copies, ideally 1 off site somehow. That’s going to add up quick.
And hopefully your game is DRM free and doesn’t try to phone home looking for a valid license on a deprecated server.
It’s not like they can remove At from your library at a future date. You can lose your login. You might wanna sell it and switch to a different platform. The disc is your key to that.
I mean, that part I understand, which is why I either download and keep installers if I can (GOG) or I pirate and store installers (usually also GOG copies). Despite being poor, I have that luxury of hard drive space for these installers.
I guess my point is, I do own those files, I am in control of them, they are mine, there is either no DRM to begin with or the DRM has been stripped.
I still consider that to be ownership on physical media that cannot be taken from me. Discs and hard drives both degrade over time, so either way, they must eventually be moved to a new medium of storage, which is always another type of physical media.
I think the conversation around physical media needs to change and people need to be doing a lot more buying from GOG and keeping torrents of those installers alive so we have a “public cloud” of game installers.
But I mean, I don’t know how to help people on consoles. That’s buying into a closed ecosystem to begin with, it comes with the territory.
Okay, let’s get down to brass tacks here…
Unless you’re paying for some kind of “streaming” video game service, the game lives on your solid state drive/hard drive… which is physical media.
The license is what allows you to re-download and re-install it over and over.
This isn’t a death of physical media, because even the streaming video game services are storing the copies of video games they stream to you on hard drives and solid state drives. The physical media doesn’t disappear, but rather corporations are using technology to force you to use it how the company wants you to use it, and the bonus to those companies of the increased price of gaming hardware. Now we will have a difficult time owning our own physical media because it has become so costly.
Just because you don’t have enough physical media space to install every game you’ve ever bought doesn’t mean they aren’t all living on a hard drive or old cd/dvd-rom SOMEWHERE. The “cloud” isn’t actually ephemeral. Surprise, it’s just a bunch of other people’s computers.
Which is what these corporations want, they want to be in full control of who gets access and when, because you’re on their property on their hard drives. There is no profit for the game companies in people like us having enough physical media space to keep data forever.
The issue is that someone else holds the key to your license. They can revoke it at any time, with 0 meaningful consequences.
We must now provide our own physical media to store the game…which in principle is fine and makes more sense than a game disk. However, its the reliance corporations to not fuck you over that’s the issue.
Archiving all your games is easier than said done too. To properly “keep” every game, you’ll need a lot of high-capacity storage devices. Going by common file backup strategy, we need to store at least 3 copies, ideally 1 off site somehow. That’s going to add up quick.
And hopefully your game is DRM free and doesn’t try to phone home looking for a valid license on a deprecated server.
It’s not like they can remove At from your library at a future date. You can lose your login. You might wanna sell it and switch to a different platform. The disc is your key to that.
I guess the point is that if you don’t have the disc then they can take it away from you
The way I see it is this has enabled companies to upgrade and rerelease games and keep them operational on newer hardware
I mean, that part I understand, which is why I either download and keep installers if I can (GOG) or I pirate and store installers (usually also GOG copies). Despite being poor, I have that luxury of hard drive space for these installers.
I guess my point is, I do own those files, I am in control of them, they are mine, there is either no DRM to begin with or the DRM has been stripped.
I still consider that to be ownership on physical media that cannot be taken from me. Discs and hard drives both degrade over time, so either way, they must eventually be moved to a new medium of storage, which is always another type of physical media.
I think the conversation around physical media needs to change and people need to be doing a lot more buying from GOG and keeping torrents of those installers alive so we have a “public cloud” of game installers.
But I mean, I don’t know how to help people on consoles. That’s buying into a closed ecosystem to begin with, it comes with the territory.