Most digital gaming stores are, except GOG and ItchIO. Even consoles are trying to push things that way. XBox has Game Pass and Playstation released a version of their console with no disc reader. Subscriptions may seem more fleeting that digital purchases but in actuality we've seen how companies can take down purchased media and entire digital storefronts.
I have purchased more Steam games than it would be sensible but as companies lose any qualm to take purchases away from customers, if anyone wants any any guarantee of ownership they really need to buy DRM-free and back them up independently.
Games using Steam’s DRM, have the benefit that if Steam ever goes down, there would be a massive amount of people interested in breaking it to free all the games at once.
It actually happens all the time, but Steam can roll out new “patched” versions of the DRM as long as it stays in business.
They are also aware of this, and even have promised to release a DRM bypass if they’re ever about to close shop… but in practice it wouldn’t really matter; whatever last version of the DRM they ever release, will get broken in record time.
I think more likely than Valve going under is Valve getting bought or going public. Both would result in the new owner (a megacorp in their own right, or greedy shareholders, respectively) turning the system into shit to squeeze more money out of it. And new DRM would be foisted onto the system regardless.
That’s a possibility. Then again, Steam games are getting stripped of DRM right now (and possibly enhanced with some malware), so the moment the value proposition of just installing Steam and not having to do anything else goes down, it’s likely for generic DRM strippers to appear, at least for older versions.
Imagine a company telling you that you should get used to not owning the things you buy when arguably the most popular game in their most popular franchise is about being a literal fucking pirate.
I legit wonder what would happen if this argument is used ( in a professional way by a professional lawyer ) in a court of law. Like, could this legit be argued to be the same?
NAL but technically speaking Ubisoft would lose because they would be unable to prove that they were deprived of anything or anything was appropriated from them with their current stance. Realistically they would just pivot and find some other nonsense to try, like claiming a theft of their computer server’s processing power everytime a pirated game accessed their lobby or some other nonsense that would barely fly, but fly none the less.
What if the game was purely offline? Also, how can a pirated game access online lobbies? The last time I pirated a game was because Epic had a BL3 exclusive. And I couldn’t matchmake.
I wonder who would have to prove what. Ubi, that they missed profit (because you’d want to buy the game and didn’t) or the player (who’d argue he wouldn’t ever buy it anyway).
Well the moving party has to prove their allegations, aka Ubisoft moving to sue you means they have to prove everything they say. Since their stated public position is that they are sole owner at all times irregardless of circumstances, they would be legally barred (estoppel) from arguing that any one could hurt their possessory interest (rights and share of ownership). They essentially would have to shift the argument over, similar to a theft of service argument (not paying a train fare is a crime but you didn’t steal a train or turnstile). The question then becomes what service does ubisoft provide? Online servers that do content distribution seem to be the only thing. If you got it on the high seas you never hit their network, so all I see left with my hypothetical napkin math is all that random network traffic ubisoft games seem to always have (even offline).
There’s a number of cracked games now with online play enabled, you just need to make a burner Steam (etc) account to use it so your main one with purchases doesn’t get nuked if they catch on.
I’m not sure how you drew this conclusion, since most people I know consider paying full price to obtain a digital copy to be extremely close to ownership.
I liked Telltale’s Law and Order series. They can’t sell it anymore, but I can still download my digital copy because I bought it full price.
The whole argument in the article is about monthly subscription rentals.
When a contract ending almost caused Sony to remove all Discovery content from users last year, including digital copies of things people had paid full price for, the cracks between buying a digital license and actually owning something that can’t be taken away became more visible to a chunk of people. It’s something, but it’s not ownership, and it can be taken away based on agreements you may have no way of gaining insight into.
Audible is open about it. Well, if you dig through the fine print. Easy enough to rip copies but I’d say most people only realise they need to when they loose access. Maybe not, but $30 for an audiobook seems like pretty shity value if you’re only renting it untill you cancel your subscription.
Forgery usually involves submitting what you faked to some other entity in order to do something. Maybe if you illegally copied and sold that music. Regardless the penalties are similar anyway.
Incorrect. Last I checked, theft is depriving the original owner of their product or service. When it comes down to it, piracy is essentially making an illegal copy, meaning the original is still there.
We already don’t own our games, because we can’t sell them. We used to be able to sell and exchange games, but with digital platforms like steam, we don’t have the right to sell them anymore, meaning we only bought the right to play the game, not owning it.
Not that there are many pro NFT folks here, but even with that approach it’s still just a transferrable license that they can change to be meaningless.
This is the direction the big companies are looking to move in. This is the direction Microsoft is banking on, too. Even if you like one service more, the end result may be the same. It’s a matter of time before we see subscription exclusives.
GamePass subscribers are the pre-orderers and mtx consumers of yesteryear, normalizing the industry to practices harmful to general consumers.
My big problem with quitting assassin’s creed is that it’s the best representation of what these places looked like hundreds of years ago. I know it’s not 100% accurate, but the fact that my wife could guide me around Rome in game because she’d lived there is one of my favorite gaming experiences. Replaying an AC game and reading all of the research has made vacations to places where they’re set amazing.
That said, I’m never buying a subscription to games. The second I can’t buy the game and have it, I’ll stop taking their abuse.
One downside of always-online DRM is that it kind of deanonymizes you. I mean, the game retailer knows that a given person is at a given IP address at a given time, and that information has value that could be used down the line to combine with other sources of data.
Avoiding that would require something like a VPN system that uses a different IP for different services.
It doesn’t matter any more than any other individual data point. The concern is that when all the data points are collated, it gives a LOT more information about someone than many people realize.
It’s not the game in particular – it could be any service that one makes use of over extended period of time. The issue is that one can correlate with other data.
It’s rather amusing how everything people fear happening under communism comes to pass under capitalism in one way or another. Turns out that it is the capitalists who aim to strip individuals of their personal property by transforming everything into a rental service. You see, you no longer possess your media, books, computer, phone, or any other device; they’ve all been transformed into internet-connected subscriptions. The moment you cease paying or when the company decides to discontinue its services, you find yourself in quite an unfortunate predicament.
kotaku.com
Aktywne