6 ms·

Discs don’t matter. The whole “bring back discs” thing is pointless. They’re gone. Period. Rights matter. If we had the same rights with digital purchases we h

by MBCook 2mo ago

Discs don’t matter. The whole “bring back discs” thing is pointless. They’re gone. Period. Rights matter. If we had the same rights with digital purchases we had with old physical games the disc thing would be a much much smaller issue. Would many care outside true collectors? Don’t confuse the two. If you do, and you complain loudly enough, you’ll get the monkey’s paw version of discs. All the downsides of both, no upside at all.

Barrin92 2mo ago
Discs matter because centralized digital distribution is what is eroding your rights. The medium's the message. It's the malleability and ephemerality of digital content that has enabled not just restricting people's rights, but destroying the authenticity of media by arbitrarily replacing its content. The reason Amazon could delete 1984 from your Kindle, is its digital nature. Nobody, except you, can delete a book from your shelf or change its content.
- scared_together 2mo ago
  Have you read the article? > For years now, the testers at DoesItPlay have been documenting this trend, testing thousands of physical game releases to see which ones live up to the promise of full “plug and play” functionality without an Internet connection. Thus far, a full 27 percent of the physical releases they’ve tested require some sort of download to fix game-breaking bugs or obtain core game content that is not stored on the physical release itself. That ratio balloons to 34 percent for tested PS5 games and 50 percent for those on the Xbox Series X.
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Barrin92 2mo ago
    yes but that's exactly my point, if all you get is a code in a box and you rely on online services to download the game that's the dependence you need to get away from. That example is my case for full, offline, physical copies of a piece of media I can plug and play into my console without an internet connection.
- jerf 2mo ago
  It's not about the digitalness, it's about the hardware that enforces the rights management. You can stick every Super Nintendo game ever made on to a not-very-large SD card. It's completely digital. No one anywhere can control what you do with them. It's honestly more "yours" in that form than the corresponding rather enormous pile of cartridges. Turning things into big piles of numbers isn't what takes them from you. It's the hardware and ecosystem that limits what you can do with the numbers. The reason Amazon could delete that book isn't that the numbers were particularly deletable somehow, it's that people were using systems that let someone else control them.
  - saghm 2mo ago
    > You can stick every Super Nintendo game ever made on to a not-very-large SD card. It's completely digital. No one anywhere can control what you do with them. It's honestly more "yours" in that form than the corresponding rather enormous pile of cartridges. And further, see how much effort companies spend on trying to prevent people from putting games onto computers like that and using emulation to play them. There's a pretty solid argument that copying games from older physical media like that to purely digital copies actually preserves them, because it's a lot harder for someone to construct a bunch of mechanically functional SNES consoles than it is to distribute copies of an emulator.
- MBCook 2mo ago
  No. Thats the whole point. The point is you have no rights digital or physical. That’s the problem. Disc are not magic totems. There is nothing promising you the disc you will work in 10 years, 10 months, 10 days. Nothing ensuring that you can resell it for >$0. They could trivially make the disc hold a one-time redemption for the game. If you buy a physical used copy of Anthem can you play it? Nope. They could do that with single player games. What’s the resale value of, effectively, a coaster? Can you lend it to a friend? Your current rights are about the coaster. Not the software. You happen to have abilities with physical discs because of tradition. You’re not guaranteed those. Digital makes that obvious. This is a rights issue.
  - saghm 2mo ago
    > Disc are not magic totems. There is nothing promising you the disc you will work in 10 years, 10 months, 10 days. Nothing ensuring that you can resell it for >$0. They could trivially make the disc hold a one-time redemption for the game. I think the funniest thing about all of this to me is that we're literally talking about the company that put rootkits on their CDs to try to stop the content from being used in a way they didn't like. They might literally have the worst track record in history when it comes to predatory consumer behavior related to discs, and people are trying to get them to keep making them.
    - MBCook 2mo ago
      That was Sony music, not Sony Computer Entertainment. Different divisions of a mega corp. We know divisions fight. The hardware business had to make MiniDisc worse so Sony Music wouldn’t be too mad.
      - saghm 2mo ago
        If you could point to a division that had incentive to try to block the types of online checks like I described, that would be one thing, but I don't think there's any evidence of that, so it's not that much of a leap to fall back to assuming that the overall incentives coming from the top of the company that led to the decision "let's put malware on the discs we sell to try to force people to buy even more of them in the future" might be relevant.
sudobash1 2mo ago
Discs do matter in one way. I don't think I have ever seen a digital "purchase" of any significance which I could resell or gift at a later time. Some "in game" things are resellable, but only within the game's ecosystem. All digital games, music, movies, ebooks, audio books, etc are not (AFAIK). So if I get tired of my DVD movie collection, I could sell it or give it to my kids. If I ever decide I'm too old for the retro game cartridges I have, they could go to future grandkids. But my GOG games or Bandcamp music is stuck with me forever (legally speaking). Nobody would know if I "gave" them to my kids, but there certainly is no way to resell them. Now this is still a rights issue, but physical media makes this easy (outside of keys/DRM as you point out) You always have the right to hand on a physical object.
- tshaddox 2mo ago
  It’s trivial to sell media or software on a disc such that the disc itself is not equivalent to a license to use the media or software on it. I don’t know of video games do this yet, but this was the case for a prominent PC operating system for decades.
  - MBCook 2mo ago
    Even if it has the full game they can EULA out if it. There are no laws saying they can’t. Discs are accidental theater. They didn’t start out that way but that’s what they’ve become.
- saghm 2mo ago
  Sure, but the context of the article is the recent kerfuffle over Sony deciding not to continue producing disc copies of games. It would not be difficult for them to keep producing disc games but still restrict them in the same way as digital games (e.g. requiring you to authenticate to the PlayStation servers with an account the first time you put the disc in, and then refusing to allow that copy of the game to work for any other account in the future). That might sound extremely, because it is, but let's keep in mind this is a company that made the CDs people bought install rootkits to try to avoid letting people burn copies. The point that I read the parent commenter as making is that if the loud outcry in favor of discs go so loud that they were forced to spend effort with continued manufacturing of physical discs, it seems like a pretty reasonable assumption they might try to do something like what I described, because at least they get some of what they're trying to go for with the digital-only strategy even if it's not all of it. Focusing on the discs themselves is a distraction from the actual issue.
nradov 2mo ago
Legal rights don't matter if the other party is ever liquidated, or otherwise unable to meet their obligations.
- musicale 2mo ago
  If gog.com went away tomorrow, downloaded games and installers should be copyable to another PC relatively easily (so far this has worked 100% for me at least). I'm not sure how easy it will be to copy downloaded games to another PS3 once Sony pulls the plug on the PSN store (and likely PSN login) for PS3 next year.
  - dawnerd 2mo ago
    I’ve run into several games that will not launch at all of you don’t have galaxy or galaxy has no internet.
    - musicale 2mo ago
      Interesting - I have (fortunately) not run into these issues (yet), but found a list (with specifics) at https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singleplayer_games_with_drm/page1 https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singlep... Most of the listed games seem to be playable but with some content locked behind DRM, galaxy, or online connectivity. Overall it does seem like they are trying to live up to their DRM-free claim/promise, but it looks like there are still a few annoying exceptions.
      - dawnerd 2mo ago
        Yeah overall very happy with it. I think those games that fail to launch are more just bad code more than anything. Edit: looks like a couple of my games that had issues have been patched, nice. Thanks for that link.
    - WillAdams 2mo ago
      I have one game, (Lego Lord of the Rings) which won't launch, but it was an impulse purchase on sale, and I am no longer on vacation and stuck at my mother-in-law's, so haven't investigated beyond an unanswered (last I checked) forum post.
p0w3n3d 2mo ago
Disc is a manifestation of right. Without this they will screw people without them even noticing
- MBCook 2mo ago
  It’s a pretend manifestation, as the article points out.
  - movedx 2mo ago
    It cannot be a "pretend" manifestation, when a physical disc that requires nothing more than an official piece of hardware to use continues to work 100 years into the future (assuming the physical hardware survives that long.) Those are the "rights" that are being fought for in this instance. I'm interested to understand the self-denial and mental gymnastics you're using to make the claim: physically owning something that cannot be taken away from you is just pretending that you physically own something that cannot be taken away from you. The wedding ring on my finger cannot be taken away from me by the person who made it. It's mine. I can wear it for the next 50 years or I can throw it to a river. Those are my rights as the owner of the physical medium. There's no pretending happening here.
    - MBCook 2mo ago
      You can keep your coaster for 500 years. Thats not want you wanted when you bought it. What if the full game isn’t on the disc? How are you going to play it in five years when the servers are gone and you can’t download the rest. What if the game isn’t on the disc at all? What if it’s basically a magic unlock code and then the whole thing gets downloaded. Like Nintendo’s game key cards. No one can ever take away your right to stick your disc into the console. And it will always do whatever it did if you did that when the console was not connected to the Internet. Today you can’t always play the game in that situation. Which means that having the thing in your hand already isn’t good enough. Digital download makes that fact obvious. People think discs are still in PS1/2 days where they're always enough. Thats gone.
Groxx 2mo ago
It's a proof of purchase that can be transferred without approval by (or knowledge of) the original seller. There is literally no equivalent possible with digital sales, unless you accept flawless, pervasive DRM everywhere. It doesn't have to be a disc. It almost certainly does need to be physical.
tomkarho 2mo ago
Sony and other digital vendors have proven more than once that if it's digital, you are not in control regardless of legislation. Discs matter because they are the only even remotely trustworthy way of actually owning what you buy in perpetuity instead of this "renting" that we do now. Despite whatever rights you might have now or in the future they can just hand wave all that away with update to TOS. Sure, technically speaking it might not enforceable but realistically who is going to sue? Even class action lawsuits have very little teeth because the penalties are in the region of lunch money/pocket change. Now if Sony executives went to prison for a few months after each lawsuit that might encourage some behavior changes. Monetary penalties though? It's just the cost of doing business for them. And even if you do win, do you get to keep your account? Doubt it. Good luck trying to prove in court that you were shut down in retribution since it is their platform they can and will cut you off at their convenience. That's the contract you signed when you accepted those terms of service and there is no consumer law to protect you since it is their platform. With discs there is no middle-man and physical things have longer-standing legal precedence when it comes to protections so it is the path of least resistance for preservation of rights. Average consumer has no lobbying power to write entire new laws over digital goods and whatever gets written is reflective of what is currently in place and right now the people writing these laws are on the level of competence that they read their email from printed out paper: a physical format. Fighting for physical makes sense because the people involved with enforcing that protection understand that format better than digital.

by MBCook 2mo ago

Barrin92 2mo ago

Discs matter because centralized digital distribution is what is eroding your rights. The medium's the message. It's the malleability and ephemerality of digital content that has enabled not just restricting people's rights, but destroying the authenticity of media by arbitrarily replacing its content. The reason Amazon could delete 1984 from your Kindle, is its digital nature. Nobody, except you, can delete a book from your shelf or change its content.

scared_together 2mo ago
Have you read the article? > For years now, the testers at DoesItPlay have been documenting this trend, testing thousands of physical game releases to see which ones live up to the promise of full “plug and play” functionality without an Internet connection. Thus far, a full 27 percent of the physical releases they’ve tested require some sort of download to fix game-breaking bugs or obtain core game content that is not stored on the physical release itself. That ratio balloons to 34 percent for tested PS5 games and 50 percent for those on the Xbox Series X.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- Barrin92 2mo ago
  yes but that's exactly my point, if all you get is a code in a box and you rely on online services to download the game that's the dependence you need to get away from. That example is my case for full, offline, physical copies of a piece of media I can plug and play into my console without an internet connection.
jerf 2mo ago
It's not about the digitalness, it's about the hardware that enforces the rights management. You can stick every Super Nintendo game ever made on to a not-very-large SD card. It's completely digital. No one anywhere can control what you do with them. It's honestly more "yours" in that form than the corresponding rather enormous pile of cartridges. Turning things into big piles of numbers isn't what takes them from you. It's the hardware and ecosystem that limits what you can do with the numbers. The reason Amazon could delete that book isn't that the numbers were particularly deletable somehow, it's that people were using systems that let someone else control them.
- saghm 2mo ago
  > You can stick every Super Nintendo game ever made on to a not-very-large SD card. It's completely digital. No one anywhere can control what you do with them. It's honestly more "yours" in that form than the corresponding rather enormous pile of cartridges. And further, see how much effort companies spend on trying to prevent people from putting games onto computers like that and using emulation to play them. There's a pretty solid argument that copying games from older physical media like that to purely digital copies actually preserves them, because it's a lot harder for someone to construct a bunch of mechanically functional SNES consoles than it is to distribute copies of an emulator.
MBCook 2mo ago
No. Thats the whole point. The point is you have no rights digital or physical. That’s the problem. Disc are not magic totems. There is nothing promising you the disc you will work in 10 years, 10 months, 10 days. Nothing ensuring that you can resell it for >$0. They could trivially make the disc hold a one-time redemption for the game. If you buy a physical used copy of Anthem can you play it? Nope. They could do that with single player games. What’s the resale value of, effectively, a coaster? Can you lend it to a friend? Your current rights are about the coaster. Not the software. You happen to have abilities with physical discs because of tradition. You’re not guaranteed those. Digital makes that obvious. This is a rights issue.
- saghm 2mo ago
  > Disc are not magic totems. There is nothing promising you the disc you will work in 10 years, 10 months, 10 days. Nothing ensuring that you can resell it for >$0. They could trivially make the disc hold a one-time redemption for the game. I think the funniest thing about all of this to me is that we're literally talking about the company that put rootkits on their CDs to try to stop the content from being used in a way they didn't like. They might literally have the worst track record in history when it comes to predatory consumer behavior related to discs, and people are trying to get them to keep making them.
  - MBCook 2mo ago
    That was Sony music, not Sony Computer Entertainment. Different divisions of a mega corp. We know divisions fight. The hardware business had to make MiniDisc worse so Sony Music wouldn’t be too mad.
    - saghm 2mo ago
      If you could point to a division that had incentive to try to block the types of online checks like I described, that would be one thing, but I don't think there's any evidence of that, so it's not that much of a leap to fall back to assuming that the overall incentives coming from the top of the company that led to the decision "let's put malware on the discs we sell to try to force people to buy even more of them in the future" might be relevant.

sudobash1 2mo ago

Discs do matter in one way. I don't think I have ever seen a digital "purchase" of any significance which I could resell or gift at a later time. Some "in game" things are resellable, but only within the game's ecosystem. All digital games, music, movies, ebooks, audio books, etc are not (AFAIK). So if I get tired of my DVD movie collection, I could sell it or give it to my kids. If I ever decide I'm too old for the retro game cartridges I have, they could go to future grandkids. But my GOG games or Bandcamp music is stuck with me forever (legally speaking). Nobody would know if I "gave" them to my kids, but there certainly is no way to resell them. Now this is still a rights issue, but physical media makes this easy (outside of keys/DRM as you point out) You always have the right to hand on a physical object.

tshaddox 2mo ago
It’s trivial to sell media or software on a disc such that the disc itself is not equivalent to a license to use the media or software on it. I don’t know of video games do this yet, but this was the case for a prominent PC operating system for decades.
- MBCook 2mo ago
  Even if it has the full game they can EULA out if it. There are no laws saying they can’t. Discs are accidental theater. They didn’t start out that way but that’s what they’ve become.
saghm 2mo ago
Sure, but the context of the article is the recent kerfuffle over Sony deciding not to continue producing disc copies of games. It would not be difficult for them to keep producing disc games but still restrict them in the same way as digital games (e.g. requiring you to authenticate to the PlayStation servers with an account the first time you put the disc in, and then refusing to allow that copy of the game to work for any other account in the future). That might sound extremely, because it is, but let's keep in mind this is a company that made the CDs people bought install rootkits to try to avoid letting people burn copies. The point that I read the parent commenter as making is that if the loud outcry in favor of discs go so loud that they were forced to spend effort with continued manufacturing of physical discs, it seems like a pretty reasonable assumption they might try to do something like what I described, because at least they get some of what they're trying to go for with the digital-only strategy even if it's not all of it. Focusing on the discs themselves is a distraction from the actual issue.

nradov 2mo ago

Legal rights don't matter if the other party is ever liquidated, or otherwise unable to meet their obligations.

musicale 2mo ago
If gog.com went away tomorrow, downloaded games and installers should be copyable to another PC relatively easily (so far this has worked 100% for me at least). I'm not sure how easy it will be to copy downloaded games to another PS3 once Sony pulls the plug on the PSN store (and likely PSN login) for PS3 next year.
- dawnerd 2mo ago
  I’ve run into several games that will not launch at all of you don’t have galaxy or galaxy has no internet.
  - musicale 2mo ago
    Interesting - I have (fortunately) not run into these issues (yet), but found a list (with specifics) at https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singleplayer_games_with_drm/page1 https://www.gog.com/forum/general/drm_on_gog_list_of_singlep... Most of the listed games seem to be playable but with some content locked behind DRM, galaxy, or online connectivity. Overall it does seem like they are trying to live up to their DRM-free claim/promise, but it looks like there are still a few annoying exceptions.
    - dawnerd 2mo ago
      Yeah overall very happy with it. I think those games that fail to launch are more just bad code more than anything. Edit: looks like a couple of my games that had issues have been patched, nice. Thanks for that link.
  - WillAdams 2mo ago
    I have one game, (Lego Lord of the Rings) which won't launch, but it was an impulse purchase on sale, and I am no longer on vacation and stuck at my mother-in-law's, so haven't investigated beyond an unanswered (last I checked) forum post.

p0w3n3d 2mo ago

Disc is a manifestation of right. Without this they will screw people without them even noticing

MBCook 2mo ago
It’s a pretend manifestation, as the article points out.
- movedx 2mo ago
  It cannot be a "pretend" manifestation, when a physical disc that requires nothing more than an official piece of hardware to use continues to work 100 years into the future (assuming the physical hardware survives that long.) Those are the "rights" that are being fought for in this instance. I'm interested to understand the self-denial and mental gymnastics you're using to make the claim: physically owning something that cannot be taken away from you is just pretending that you physically own something that cannot be taken away from you. The wedding ring on my finger cannot be taken away from me by the person who made it. It's mine. I can wear it for the next 50 years or I can throw it to a river. Those are my rights as the owner of the physical medium. There's no pretending happening here.
  - MBCook 2mo ago
    You can keep your coaster for 500 years. Thats not want you wanted when you bought it. What if the full game isn’t on the disc? How are you going to play it in five years when the servers are gone and you can’t download the rest. What if the game isn’t on the disc at all? What if it’s basically a magic unlock code and then the whole thing gets downloaded. Like Nintendo’s game key cards. No one can ever take away your right to stick your disc into the console. And it will always do whatever it did if you did that when the console was not connected to the Internet. Today you can’t always play the game in that situation. Which means that having the thing in your hand already isn’t good enough. Digital download makes that fact obvious. People think discs are still in PS1/2 days where they're always enough. Thats gone.

Groxx 2mo ago

It's a proof of purchase that can be transferred without approval by (or knowledge of) the original seller. There is literally no equivalent possible with digital sales, unless you accept flawless, pervasive DRM everywhere. It doesn't have to be a disc. It almost certainly does need to be physical.

tomkarho 2mo ago

Sony and other digital vendors have proven more than once that if it's digital, you are not in control regardless of legislation. Discs matter because they are the only even remotely trustworthy way of actually owning what you buy in perpetuity instead of this "renting" that we do now. Despite whatever rights you might have now or in the future they can just hand wave all that away with update to TOS. Sure, technically speaking it might not enforceable but realistically who is going to sue? Even class action lawsuits have very little teeth because the penalties are in the region of lunch money/pocket change. Now if Sony executives went to prison for a few months after each lawsuit that might encourage some behavior changes. Monetary penalties though? It's just the cost of doing business for them. And even if you do win, do you get to keep your account? Doubt it. Good luck trying to prove in court that you were shut down in retribution since it is their platform they can and will cut you off at their convenience. That's the contract you signed when you accepted those terms of service and there is no consumer law to protect you since it is their platform. With discs there is no middle-man and physical things have longer-standing legal precedence when it comes to protections so it is the path of least resistance for preservation of rights. Average consumer has no lobbying power to write entire new laws over digital goods and whatever gets written is reflective of what is currently in place and right now the people writing these laws are on the level of competence that they read their email from printed out paper: a physical format. Fighting for physical makes sense because the people involved with enforcing that protection understand that format better than digital.