2 ms·

People focus too much on discs and cartridges, but too little on licensing and drm. The disc is meaningless if you cannot run it after drm servers died. Also, v

People focus too much on discs and cartridges, but too little on licensing and drm. The disc is meaningless if you cannot run it after drm servers died. Also, very often the game on the disc is unplayable because of lack of day-1 patch. Meanwhile you can burn games you bought from GOG on a cd and play it 10 years later without internet connection. So the physical vs digital discussion is completely irrelevant to the problem.

frollogaston 2mo ago
It's relevant because most game publishers won't want to hand out a DRM-free copy. So it's either a digital one phoning home or a physical disc/cartridge that they assume most people won't reverse-engineer. GOG is an exception to the rule and doesn't have a wide game selection.
JacobKfromIRC 2mo ago
Even on GOG, it's usually illegal to re-sell games you bought to other people, if I understand correctly. It's a minor point since there's no technical barrier to resale, but that's one difference between physical games and DRM-free digital games. There's a small number (~100?) of commercial games that also allow resale through Creative Commons licenses on itch.io. you can use filters like "assets-cc4-by-sa" plus "code-gpl3" to find games like that, but there's a lot of possible license combinations so it's difficult to see all games like that at once. I've also seen a couple of digital commercial games that allow resale but had some other restrictions (e.g. forbidding reverse engineering), from Humble Bundle, if I remember correctly, but in those cases I didn't know that was allowed until after I bought the game, so searching for games like that seems pretty difficult. Maybe there are games on GOG that allow this too, but I don't know how I'd search for them.
- frollogaston 2mo ago
  Exactly the type of reason some people want literal physical discs. You don't own the data on the disc, but you own the physical disc and can resell it, totally legally and practically allowed. And the disc has anti-copy measures so it's really a transfer, not a copy.

frollogaston 2mo ago

It's relevant because most game publishers won't want to hand out a DRM-free copy. So it's either a digital one phoning home or a physical disc/cartridge that they assume most people won't reverse-engineer. GOG is an exception to the rule and doesn't have a wide game selection.

JacobKfromIRC 2mo ago

Even on GOG, it's usually illegal to re-sell games you bought to other people, if I understand correctly. It's a minor point since there's no technical barrier to resale, but that's one difference between physical games and DRM-free digital games. There's a small number (~100?) of commercial games that also allow resale through Creative Commons licenses on itch.io. you can use filters like "assets-cc4-by-sa" plus "code-gpl3" to find games like that, but there's a lot of possible license combinations so it's difficult to see all games like that at once. I've also seen a couple of digital commercial games that allow resale but had some other restrictions (e.g. forbidding reverse engineering), from Humble Bundle, if I remember correctly, but in those cases I didn't know that was allowed until after I bought the game, so searching for games like that seems pretty difficult. Maybe there are games on GOG that allow this too, but I don't know how I'd search for them.

frollogaston 2mo ago
Exactly the type of reason some people want literal physical discs. You don't own the data on the disc, but you own the physical disc and can resell it, totally legally and practically allowed. And the disc has anti-copy measures so it's really a transfer, not a copy.