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As it has been for all of time: as long as Tom is trying to eat Jerry, Jerry will find new inventive ways to kick Toms teeth in.
Digital storefronts are fine. The actual problem is the lack of consumer protection in console (and mobile) ecosystems.
On PC, the classic mitigation is piracy.
But on consoles that seems to be not an option, so there is no way to fight back console company overreach.As a consumer, just sticking to PC gaming is the obvious solution.
Valve is better than Sony because it can’t just prevent consumers from going somewhere else. Gabe Newell is just as much a greedy bastard as other big corp CEOs. But judges forced him to allow refunds (btw, GOG has a 30-days-no-questions-asked refund policy without being forced to). And he cleverly price-gauges the game devs with his massive cut rather than the consumers. Combined with the threat of delisting games that are available cheaper in other shops, he secured his quasi monopoly.As usual, vote with your wallet - while you still can.
You wouldn’t steal a car.
I would if the manufacturer had the right to come take it from me at anytime without any compensation.
A few years ago I bought Star Wars squadrons in steam. It hasn’t worked in years (I never made it through the single player story.) I never understood why. It was not my antivirus, it was not my VPN. It wasn’t even my OS. I used Windows 11 briefly (I originally had it on windows 10) and it still didn’t work. I am on Linux mint and it doesn’t boot up.
Now recently I bought RoboCop Rogue city on steam. I originally had it pirated, but on Linux mint it had a hard time booting up. I thought buying it would fix that.
Nope. It did not. Now I spent 40$ on a digital paperweight.
If we pay for something. We have a reasonable expectation for it to work.
I hate to be that guy but did you try changing which version of proton its using? I know for some games you gotta change it for it to boot properly.
I do agree though it should just work, but you gotta remember unlike consoles PCs are made of many different parts and not all agree with eachother. Developers can only test so many configurations.
I remember when no man’s sky came out, so many people had issues while mine booted and worked properly. Thankfully steam does offer refunds.
To add on to this, sometimes it’s better to switch from the linux runtime to proton. Most of the time when I have problems with a game running, it turns out they tried to support linux but for some reason the compatibility isn’t there like it is with proton. At least I assume it’s compatibility because they had to have tested it on some systems at least.
Piracy is a responsible, meaningful response to ongoing investor-driven enshittification. Investors are hell bent on reverse robin hooding the economy and they’ll keep at it until it’s no longer profitable to do so…
if buying something does not give ownership then piracy is not stealing
I think a thing this highlights is a moral line. With piracy now being easier and ubiquitous, and a clear alternative to orgs monopolizing and ignoring their user base. I think the one thing they are overlooking is the moment someone does it once. The moment they install something like stremio and realise how effortless it is the org has lost a user. Not even because of cost, but because they have taken advantage of the user…so its fair game to take advantage back.
I used to eat MacDonald’s…usually took the kids say fortnightly, and one day i just didn’t because it got crap and expensive. One you step over the line and they lose you, they lose you.
I used to pirate, don’t anymore.
- I was young, it was convenient, and satisfying. Eventually, I relented to the idea that I was doing it more for personal reward than for any kind of “fuck the establishment” message.
- I got a good-paying job, and felt the satisfaction of buying a good game on sale with my own money.
- I still maintain, as do most people, that tons of publishers are scummy and anti-consumer, but I also built more positivity towards developers that don’t exhibit such behaviors.
Even if Steam were to somehow go down for a month, by now I’ve learned about other storefronts and methods of purchase that provide a place to move to. There’s a devoted centrism to the way people consume most media franchises that basically guarantees they can flip prices to infinity, control purchases, and never suffer consequences, and piracy absolutely feeds into that; helping them to paint themselves as victims to policymakers while they rake it in.
It’s not only one user - people are talking and one guy finding out and learning about piracy can totally bring his friends to piracy, too. There is no downside to letting your friends stream from your jellyfin or to send that cracked copy to the guy from your soccer club
I was traveling across the us without a car about a year ago. Long story. Was stranded, pulling a long night til the next bus instead of sleeping rough. Only place to get fluids nearby was a McDonalds.
It was painfully expensive, and genuinely felt like I was being fucked with and screwed over when I ordered. I just wanted a cup full of caffeinated sugar-water and someplace warm to sit. It sucked so fucking much. It was fucking unpleasant. Eventually I hydrated, pissed, and just left to wait outside for the last few hours.
I looked through food. I couldn’t justify paying those prices for that shit. It genuinely didn’t seem like food prices. I couldn’t. The next day I found a more reasonably priced 7/11.
I buy games from steam here and there once it’s on sale but I don’t see it as a purchase tbh. You can’t own digital media that way.
I see it as paying for access. I am paying for them to give me access from any steam computer with the benefits of having my saves in the cloud.
That’s not worth $60-$100, but it’s worth <$10 for certain games.
We used to pay full price for something to have it forever. Now we’re trained to pay full price to “pay for access.”
We’ve been trained to pay more for less guaranteed. :(
It’s closed platforms the issue. You buy an expensive machine, pay extra for the disk drive and now they will stop making disks, you have no option.
Okay we’ll fix this one by making an open source software that loads all the files into a 7zip before its runs the downloaded content. That way it has to compile everything before it runs essentially breaking it down before it gets, “repaired,” in a 7zip which holds the, “files to be compiled” but can still be ran separately.
So, it would have no choice but to export everything to a 7zip.
If someone made a web extension it could be used to do it to movies you purchased on streaming sites and it would rip the movies and compile it into a digital format the, “copyright,” would be broken by removing traces of copyright by coding said program to remove the encryption but also having it set to identify any company logos so it’ll convert the video into loading whatever you ripped into the format you want And it would remove logo’s or identifying markers from it.
Piracy is the shyt. 16 years ago I was downloading flstudio and Rollercoaster tycoon. I think I still have bioshock and the first two fallout games too. I gotta check. I got all my favorite shows and movies so I don’t have to use the internet or better yet have something to watch when the internet goes out.
Piracy has saved me so much fucking money it’s unreal. After I got my first laptop I never went back to the movies until I got a girlfriend. I say to myself oh well this service doesn’t have it I bet I could find it though.
Funny enough I downloaded a bootleg of that movie Obsession, great movie.
Piracy isn’t the problem, it’s the societal factors that push us to use piracy. High ticket prices for movies, over 300$ software, buying something and realizing it’s a rental because it’s all digital and a company can rip it from you.
WHO WOULDN’T TURN TO PIRACY!!!
Part of the problem is the Big Software crushing any hobbyist software. I used to be big into 3D design. 20 years ago there were dozens and dozens of different programs of different quality available to people wanting to do 3D design, along with top tier programs like 3DSMax and Maya, and even they had “learning editions” with stripped down features for free non-professional use.
Now? Most all 3D design software is proprietary, subscription-based, and stupid expensive. Very, very few programs are available to anyone wanting to do hobby work or learn, and plenty of them are “freemium” with better features paywalled.
Point being, choice has been restricted or eliminated. 20 years ago there was a lot more to choose from both skill and price-wise. Now it’s $200/month/seat, or a couple paywalled freemium programs.
Unless you open source which can be iffy on quality if not consistently maintained. FreeCAD proves that.
Yeah, didn’t want to get too deep in the weeds about it, but FreeCAD is definitely an example. I feel like I’m using a perpetually unfinished decade-old program. While it certainly qualifies as one of those older free packages it never really took off.
Piracy is necessary. I remember back in the days in school that you had to turn in essays in Word and do presentations with PowerPoint. Like how the fuck would a kid from a family that could barely afford a used PC be able to get Office without piracy.
Same with Photoshop, Illustrator, Maya etc. Basically the entire workforce for entire industries exist thanks to piracy.
After I learned about LibreOffice 12 years ago I never went back but I feel you on that. I used to tell my mom I can find a registration code for Microsoft office and not to pay for it.
I think my windows 10 pc isn’t registered and if it is it’s from a code I found on Google.
I don’t pay for software probably ever unless a year after a release theres nothing around and I genuinely need the software I’ll pay for it but if it’s subscription based I’ll try to find an alternative that does the same but I can find a code for.
The ps5 debacle is a bigger problem, alongside the Stop Killing Games Initiative.
Edit: SKG is a good thing*
I hate to say it. But the general sentiment will lead to crackdowns on VPNs because they are the only thing between us and corperations for ownership.
Legislatures are already trying to stop us from having privacy, but the corporate lobby tied to the privacy lobby is a deadly situation.
I am lucky enough to have my media where i want it to be, but i am so nervous now that the general public is getting involved - i have a number of friends who would never have asked about this kind of stuff buying hardware.
Im not really sure where that leaves us.
But fucking god damnit. Im sad that it has gotten us here.
Nintendo blowing up about ROMS didn’t help a fuckin’ thing.
Then they turn around and offer a subscription service for you to stream ROMs from their own software/hardware… you can’t make this shit up.
And yet, people still download free ROMS. The ported games that aren’t available unless you pay extra is such a scam. Better off a wired 360 controller and Vimms Lair or a mayflash and a wii u pro controller.
You have to double check if your external hd isn’t wifi enabled these days. I made sure not to get a wifi enabled one.
Well, you can also give up video games. Fuck those companies.
I remember when Sony joked at Xbox’s expense for disallowing secondhand games… they’ve basically done the same here. Fuck Sony.
Nah Sonys is significantly worse. Microsoft was going to have digital trade-in/re-selling and loaning.
Oh the irony:
…Yes I could open it in my browser to avoid this (and the ads)
I don’t get it. Steam doesn’t sell disks, right? The popular meme is that everyone is shooting themselves in the foot while Valve is doing nothing and winning. But now Sony is just saying they will do what Valve does. Why is everyone so pissed about it? Suddenly everyone loves disks?
People who cared about physical games haven’t been PC gamers for 20 years. You could still care about physical games on consoles until about last week.
Valve is also good to gamers with consumer friendly pricing and their client extends the gaming experience rather than running in the background, mostly useless like the console features and the other store fronts.
I also don’t care for steam but I’m not upset about it because I just stopped playing on PC for years. The games I do play, still came out on disc. I remember that CoD MW2 was the game that broke the camels back, even though you installed it off the disc, it still wouldn’t launch without steam. (Same with HL2 but I knew that going into it and didn’t buy it)
In a sense you’re correct but in reality it’s slightly different because Valve has competition with other digital storefronts as well as the rare physical PC release. Even though Sony are also the ones manufacturing PlayStation discs, they were sold by third parties, and even had the used market for their digital storefront to compete with, keeping prices and sales comparatively in check. If you can only get PlayStation games from a single place, price fixing is going to be easy because customers have nowhere else to go.
I would be curious how that will work with anti-trust legislation. At least currently, there’s an argument that Sony does not prevent people from buying games from other sources, or other publishers from publishing physical games for their consoles.
That’s no longer the case if they switch to a purely digital model, since they become the sole source of all the games on PlayStation, and have unilateral authority over them. The only place you can get a game on a digital model is Sony.
Since the iPhone was released, Apple was the only place you could buy Apps from. The same has been true of a lot of niche appstore-driven devices, like VR headsets. It’ll be hard to argue that a game console, a device to run software, must produce that software on discs, and must sell those discs to other retailers.
In a way, this fight was going on between Epic and Apple over Fortnite back in 2020. Gamers just didn’t care because those devices didn’t have disc drives.
It’s hard to picture how competition could be formalized though. It’s a good thing Valve decided to create their own through the key system, but I can’t picture Sony doing something similar. We might lose discs no matter what happens - I am still trying to think through how we might win back ownership and control regardless. With a lot of goods, you could just claim price competition on things like games, but when so many gamers could barely afford one console to begin with, hardly anyone will afford a second to take advantage of Xbox prices or something.
Makes sense, thanks.
Because they didn’t even wait a week since they showed that they can take away your purchases from you library. At least Valve to my knowledge never pulled a gane from libraries, even if the game was pulled from the store.
I’ve got Unreal Tournament 3 (and all of the UT games) on steam. Those games haven’t been available to purchase on steam for a long time now, not since the Epic games store started up.
I can still download and play those games from steam today. I can still play them with people who bought them on other storefronts.
Steam has been in the news a lot lately for “Anti-consumer” policies, like requiring their storefront games to be the same version as any other store front, forcing developers to sell DLC on Steam if that DLC is available anywhere else, forcing publisher to price their games the same on steam as they are anywhere else… And all those things are pro-consumer, I feel protected from shitty publishers because of the strong requirements Steam has to list items on their storefront.
Now, I will say that Steam, like any other digital storefront, has the opportunity to really fuck us over, and the protections from that was always the existence of physical media. Steam was built from the ground up to compete with owning physical copies of your games. Other digital storefronts have been built with the sole goal of competing with Steam. After physical media is dead, Steam will only have to compete with those other storefronts, and will only need to offer better services than the likes of Sony…who is deleting your purchases and keeping the money.
Ok, so it’s not as much about physical media as about Sony being shitty company. Thanks.
There was a reason people bought consoles. One of those was physical media and the fact you actually owned your copy, could resell it and lend it out. So this has nothing to do with Valve who has almost always been digital. If you want to compare it, you’d need a hypothetical like “Valve always sold digital games but will now switch to disk only games.”
It’s why they got rid of memory cards and split screen. More people to buy their own games and systems.
It’s more than the discs. It’s about the fact that you’re not owning what you purchase and you can spend as much as you like on digital and one day, poof, it’ll be gone and so will your money. Discs aren’t able to be deleted. Even if a format goes obsolete, there’s media players like vlc that will play them.
That’s what it’s about.
Like video games
You can buy all the games you want on steam if goes away after 90 days that’s just how it is but when you buy a game for a system at a what 80$-120$ a game you expect to play it forever be able to play it when the wifi goes out, be able to play with your friends, be able to save your data but all that is online and they’re able to use that against the consumer.
They took split screen, they forced us to use internet, they took memory cards, they dissolved servers. What more can they do oh yeah make it so we don’t actually own the game.
Besides what others mentioned (Valve being kept in check, barely, and offering more service as a platform), I think Sony can’t afford to do what Valve does, because on equal footing they lose.
Sony saves you a bit of money on the hardware purchase, a small benefit if you buy a lot of games. Maybe some exclusives.
Steam lets you mod the game, play it on whatever device you want (PC now, PC you get in 10 years, Deck, Windows, Linux, likely even some Android devices in the future), and twink the settings to whatever you want, for whatever resolution, quality, or framerate you want. (Edit: also, your device doesn’t become a useless box if Valve becomes evil)
Physicals and exclusives are just about the only thing consoles have going for them, and Sony just lost one. (Oh, and they lost couch gaming too, because SteamOS is opening up)
I agree that it’s not a price issue because I wouldn’t mind paying inflated prices if that money went to the workers. It would be worth it, in fact. But the corporate entities that get that money while the workers get laid off.
