6 ms·

This is what can and will happen if we decide it’s a good idea to rent games instead of owning them. Same with always online games - at some point the developer

• wolverine876 4y ago
  Did they shut down these servers?
• turtledove 4y ago
  I hear this, and I respect it, but I'll offer a different perspective: Media is transient, it's ephemera. We will remember the big names but forget the small things. There's more media being produced than I could consume in a lifetime, so if something disappears I can move on to the next thing. I find that experiencing media in the moment is part of the allure - this is something happening now and it's something I'm interested in now. That's not to say we shouldn't have archives and history, but letting go of my collection has been a huge weight off my back.
  • rektide 4y ago
    I don't get this kind of callous, tough-love, blow-up-your-memories sell. There's nothing about any of this that looks like a ticking time bomb. Everything was fine until one day some part of the world around us unceremoniously disappeared, for no real ascertainable reason, in a way totally beyond most peoples control. This is shit. Unqualifiedly just shit. Good for you that you feel free & clear for casting off the past, but it's cavalier & mean to tell people they're better off that their hard work & things they've enjoyed have, for no real reason, self-destructed.
    • Kbelicius 4y ago
      > but it's cavalier & mean to tell people they're better off that their hard work & things they've enjoyed have unceremoniously self-destructed. It is a fact of life that everything, if it isn't destroyed, unceremoniously self-destructs. Have you stopped to think how cavalier & mean it is to tell people how they should create things that others enjoy?
      • rektide 4y ago
        > It is a fact of life that everything, if it isn't destroyed, unceremoniously self-destructs. I went and played some turns of Civilization that I haven't touched in half a decade a couple weeks ago. Every couple years I like to play a couple matches of Mechwarrior 2. These things don't self destruct. They harken from an age before online services, when personal computers let us manage & operate our own systems, let us backup our saves & our games. > Have you stopped to think how cavalier & mean it is to tell people how they should create things that others enjoy? In a way that doesn't explode unexpectedly? Yeah, right, I'm the mean one here. Please, this is just more facetiously cruel antagonizing. What is with the anti-social cruelty?
        • Kbelicius 4y ago
          > I went and played some turns of Civilization that I haven't touched in half a decade a couple weeks ago. Every couple years I like to play a couple matches of Mechwarrior 2. These things don't self destruct. They harken from an age before online services, when personal computers let us manage & operate our own systems, let us backup our saves & our games. It takes time. > In a way that doesn't explode unexpectedly? Yeah, right, I'm the mean one here. Please, this is just more facetiously cruel antagonizing. What is with the anti-social cruelty? It doesn't explode unexpectedly. It explodes in a way that the creator made it explode. So, yeah, it seems that you are the mean one here.
          • lmm 4y ago
            Very rarely is "exploding" part of the artistic intent. More likely it's something the auteur was never consulted on and the publisher didn't care enough to avoid.
          • rektide 4y ago
            Your insistence & persistence in both being cruel to consumers & also personally insulting me at the same time is remarkable. There's been a pretty fair & reasonable deal in computing for decades. Preservation is getting harder, worse, impossible. This is- pretty clearly to most of us- a loss.
    • turtledove 4y ago
      It's not meant to be callous, it's meant to be accepting of the impermanence of all things. Nothing lasts forever, my attitude is more about being ok with that.
  • atoav 4y ago
    While I understand the sentiment, as someone with both an unusual music and film taste, doing what you think I should do would probably mean a lot of what I like would be lost forever, and it would be a shame. Medianis ephemeral, but art very often not so much. If someone decided to throw the works of Bach or Beethoven away we would have truly lost something for example. Of course not everything is art to everybody, not everything has value to everybody but there are things truely worth of preserving — and often for other reasons than we ontuitively would think.
  • andrewflnr 4y ago
    That's good for you, if you can pull it off. It's unreasonable to expect others to do the same. And as a technological justification for something that ostensibly exists to serve users, it would be inexcusable.
  • bakugo 4y ago
    You consider media to be something that is "consumed" once and then forgotten about, like food. That's fine, it's your opinion and you're entitled to it, but please don't imply that others should think the same way or that it in any way justifies situations like these. New media doesn't just replace old media unless you see it as nothing but a mindless waste of time.
    • turtledove 4y ago
      My dude, I literally said I respect other's opinions, then shared my perspective. I literally did the opposite of suggesting others just think the way I do. And new media can replace old media, and still be a mindful, thoughtful experience. Impermanence does not mean mindless.
  • genewitch 4y ago
    <pats NAS and DVD and blu-ray backups of every movie and TV show i've ever bought> This bad boy right here!
  • paskozdilar 4y ago
    I agree with your perspective. However, I don't think it justifies the artificial loss that happens with renting software. There is no logical reason why would a program stop working on my computer if my computer has not changed. Software on my computer must not depend on any third-party-anything. Of course, that computer will break one day, and the software will stop working on it eventually. But it will happen when it is natural to happen - not when some CEO decides to pull the plug.
  • imtringued 4y ago
    Most of it is crap though. The amount of high quality media is actually lacking. A lot of good mobile games are just ports from a different platform. If you were to wipe all mobile games every five years the overall quality would go down.
  • hnlmorg 4y ago
    I think that's only fair if you have paid for the content in a way that is intended to be transient (like a theatre show, concert, etc). But when you pay for content in a way that is intended to be frequently played back (like a CD, book or computer game) then I think there is a fair expectation that content is persistent. This whole shift to "you license content, not own it" is a modern trend that has left many feeling cheated because it gives the illusion of persistence while giving the service providers complete control to remove your access at any time they wish.
• mdoms 4y ago
• CrashedSandal 4y ago
  "I really do hope game streaming and online-only single player games will stay as a niche." Same here, I gave up on some AAA games because of this reason. I frequently return to old games. Some of them are from 1997,some of them are 2000,some of them are 2010's. Most of them have patches but if stadia and likes become mainstream, I don't know how its going to end up in 20 years.
  • genewitch 4y ago
    a "nice" feature of consoles like the Nintendo Switch is that they can always be played offline, even the ones that are "always online" on other consoles and computers. There's a lot of issues with the switch - and Steam Deck is expensive, but maybe if it sells really well, other companies will make similar offerings and we might get some actual competition in "consoles" or handhelds that can play games up to about 6 years prior to the release of the console, perfectly. I imagine with the shrinking of transistors and whatnot, someone could theoretically release an extremely low power version of, say, a 9800GT, or even a 1050ti in a couple of years - Rather than needing all this active cooling and heatpipes and a huge PCB to spread out the RAM and everything, just put the same IP onto a 5nm process or something and get the same performance in 1/10th of the wattage.
• cheeze 4y ago
  I don't disagree but owning games isn't a solution to this problem. I've had gameboy batteries die and wipe the cart, I've had saves corrupted, it just happens. And it's the worst thing ever.
  • bakugo 4y ago
    We're not in the age of carts with batteries anymore, though. That was a technical limitation that doesn't exist anymore, and it's in no way comparable to this. If you own and control the game in such a way that you can access its saves and copy them elsewhere (which applies to almost every PC game that isn't live service garbage), you can pretty much ensure that losing them is impossible. This is basically a case of taking a solved problem and un-solving it. And keep in mind that when people say "owning a game" in this context it doesn't necessarily mean having the game in its original (physical) format, if you have a ROM of a gameboy game on your PC and play it via an emulator, in some ways you "own" the game more than if you had it as a physical copy because you can ensure the permanent preservation of both the game and its saves, unlike with the physical version.
• foolfoolz 4y ago
  this is fear mongering. this has nothing to do with renting. many multiplayer games for decades have had your data saved server side only. ghost recon breakpoint is online only on all platforms. this has nothing to do with gaming as a service
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• mattlondon 4y ago
  I have a "gaming laptop" that is in its own rights a powerful and capable machine. However I have found myself preferring to use geforce now for game streaming from a Chromebook. It is much more convenient to pull out a small light and cheap Chromebook and start playing a new game immediately (no downloads) than to get out the heavy, bulky gaming laptop, wait for it to boot, plug it in, apply Windows updates etc, download and install new game/patches/steam updates/etc, hear the multiple fans whirring like crazy and feel the heat and so on and so on. I love the game streaming from a Chromebook because you are up and running in seconds. I started doing this after I had my first kid and realised that I had small windows of opportunity - perhaps 15-20 mins - to do something "for me" and I didn't want to waste that waiting for a patch to download it whatever. With Chromebook and streaming (I use stadia too, but less so as the catalogue is poor) I can go from a closed laptop to in-game in like 20-30 seconds. We already have the save games synced to Steam, so nothing is really changing in terms of data location (at least for geforce now - stadia is different as you cannot use steam, which was a product-killing mistake for stadia in my opinion) The only thing that I personally miss is that I am not able to poke around the game data files - many a happy hour lost decompiling Unity-based C# code or spelunking through data files with a hex editor (sometimes more fun than the game itself!)