3 ms·

You would think music, film, and games would be comparable, but I find that these fall into distinct categories for me. I am totally okay with paying a monthly

You would think music, film, and games would be comparable, but I find that these fall into distinct categories for me. I am totally okay with paying a monthly flat fee for films and series (mostly watch once and be done with it). I am also okay with paying once for a game and not keeping the downloaded files around after I finish it. Rather, I let Steam or the HumbleStore handle that, and if these go belly-up one day, I don't feel like I've lost much; the value I get in hours of entertainment is in balance with what I spend there, and I am okay with the limited risk of losing access to some games. For music on the other hand, I absolutely want the files on my hard disk. Music is replayed over and over, and losing access to what is essentially the soundtrack of your life is something I would like to avoid. I'd love a service that allows me to download, say, up to 8 hours of music (any genre, in an open lossless format) a month from a universal catalogue for a reasonable flat fee (like Netflix), but this simply doesn't exist. It is either streaming or paying way more than I find reasonable. Interestingly, for games the existence of reliable, affordable legal channels for digital delivery means that I have not felt the urge to illegally download any game at all for over a decade, and the same seems to hold true for many colleagues and friends. People are totally fine with downloading films, series, and music for a variety or reasons, but why bother with games? The money you pay, say, Steam or the HumbleStore seems to flow back to the developers in a fairly fair fashion, there are good deals to be had, and it is all very convenient — for games it just seems like a solved problem.

scrollaway 10y ago
Games are essentially solved as far as consumption goes. There's still some fuckery going on with DRM in some companies, but that's the minority. However, they aren't solved when it comes to archival. It's getting constantly worse with the rise of online-only games with closed source, undistributed servers. A subject for another day, though.
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  Fair point. The archival question is complex because of the inherent difficulty in keeping old software running on modern operating systems. At some point it doesn't pay to keep supporting newer operating systems even if you still have sales; only for the really popular titles. Perhaps containers would work?
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    Yeah, emulation or containerization works nicely for old games. However, newer games have server components which are required to run the game and/or have any content. When the money runs out, the servers get shut down and usually aren't redistributed. This isn't a problem torrents can solve, unfortunately.
    - Nullabillity 10y ago
      > When the money runs out, the servers get shut down and usually aren't redistributed. This isn't a problem torrents can solve, unfortunately. IIRC, the cracks for the old always-online UPlay DRM basically contained a MVP implementation of their servers. And of course, you have MMORPG "emulators", but those take a lot of effort, only come out for ridiculously popular and lasting games, and end up rewriting most of the game logic based on speculation. So the end result is more like Minetest vs Minecraft than cracked Assassin's Creed vs legit Assassin's Creed.
- Nullabillity 10y ago
  > There's still some fuckery going on with DRM in some companies, but that's the minority. Sadly it seems to be coming back, with all the recent Denuvo garbage.

scrollaway 10y ago

Games are essentially solved as far as consumption goes. There's still some fuckery going on with DRM in some companies, but that's the minority. However, they aren't solved when it comes to archival. It's getting constantly worse with the rise of online-only games with closed source, undistributed servers. A subject for another day, though.

Freak_NL 10y ago
Fair point. The archival question is complex because of the inherent difficulty in keeping old software running on modern operating systems. At some point it doesn't pay to keep supporting newer operating systems even if you still have sales; only for the really popular titles. Perhaps containers would work?
- scrollaway 10y ago
  Yeah, emulation or containerization works nicely for old games. However, newer games have server components which are required to run the game and/or have any content. When the money runs out, the servers get shut down and usually aren't redistributed. This isn't a problem torrents can solve, unfortunately.
  - Nullabillity 10y ago
    > When the money runs out, the servers get shut down and usually aren't redistributed. This isn't a problem torrents can solve, unfortunately. IIRC, the cracks for the old always-online UPlay DRM basically contained a MVP implementation of their servers. And of course, you have MMORPG "emulators", but those take a lot of effort, only come out for ridiculously popular and lasting games, and end up rewriting most of the game logic based on speculation. So the end result is more like Minetest vs Minecraft than cracked Assassin's Creed vs legit Assassin's Creed.
Nullabillity 10y ago
> There's still some fuckery going on with DRM in some companies, but that's the minority. Sadly it seems to be coming back, with all the recent Denuvo garbage.