- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
- technology@lemmy.world
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I have content I purchased on steam 19yrs ago. Shit was built for completely different hardware but I can go install and play it right now. The physical console games I bought that year only work in consoles that have long since broken. I can go play HL2 whenever I want, to play my copy of THPS3, I have to find and buy a PS2 that still works.
Digital ownership can apparently work just fine
Sony is reminding us that Sony is a shitty company. The company that bought you amazing technology like the memory stick ™ probably cannot be trusted.
Don’t find yourself in a false sense of security.
Your games on Steam are just as ephemeral as any other digital content purchased online.
All the physical games i ever owned went up in flames when my house burned down. I can still play games i bought on steam in 2008
That’s what house insurance is for.
“Have you considered Game Insurance?” - Ubisoft, probably
You could have made digital backups of your physical games and stored that somewhere safe.
You cannot make backups of DRM’d Steam games that work without Steam.
Please don’t fucking tell me you mad digital backup of your 50 xbox games and 40 playstation games and have a modded playstation and xbox laying around where you can just burn them whenever you wanna play them.
Exactly. Some of the replies in this thread are so disingenuous.
Just because you don’t care about backing things up doesn’t mean nobody else is.
I can promise the number of people backing up their Xbox/SNES/Sony/whatever games at the time/era of release, are a rounding error number of people who purchased at all. And even if that was the case, how are you gonna do that for the discs that have DRM? Obviously it can be cracked, but how does that help you in that specific time of need (referencing the house fire), when the tech to crack that DRM didn’t even exist?
Nobody is arguing with “physical copies have better security” (digital storefronts closing, keys being revoked, etc), they’re only arguing with you for pretending everyone is seemingly clairvoyant, with pools of money and compute hardware, to make backups of these things. There is no way you can possibly think that all one needed to do was “copy da files dumbass” when even the hardware to do that, didn’t exist (for the public or at all), or was itself prohibitevly expensive.
Don’t need to burn them, you can play them off a USB! Or over an SMB share.
Homie, I’ve made backups of thousands of games.
How do you think PS2 ROMs are uploaded?
You can’t make digital backups of physical games with drm either since you need the original disc to play (or atleast that was the case last time I bought a physical game which is probably around 2005 or something lmao)
You are spot on, DRM is the problem at the core. That’s why I prefer DRM-free stores like GOG over Steam whenever possible.
Luckily many of the old games I own on CD are also available on GOG.
Steam doesn’t enforce DRM, your game can use Steamworks even without DRM.
The no-DRM policy sure is very good, but in the end any game on GoG is there by choice of the publisher, who could also choose not to use DRM on Steam.
Many games on Steam use Steamworks DRM despite being available DRM-free on other stores, one prominent example being Batman Arkham City.
Digital backups of my Steam games exist on torrents. If Steam ever becomes shitty like this I can stop purchasing from them and reacquire it from the Jolly Roger.
You can make Steam offline mode and you absolutely will have access to any game installed on your machine.
Not any game. Games that depend on third-party DRM may still demand a brief internet connection during offline mode.
True, but at least at this point, Valve is not a publicly traded company. Gabe clearly understands that piracy is an availability/distribution problem.
Even then in a worst case scenario due to the open platform piracy is a possibility. That’s where some of the peace of mind comes from compared to purchasing of digital goods for a closed system.
Pirates are the librarians of the new age. But I caution you, much media cannot be found as soon as you step of the path of the big releases. So it really isn’t the final solution.
It’s the best we’ve got unlike the rather ridiculous proposals of backing up their own games some have made. Average person does not have the storage or the determination to digitize everything and keep it safe in case of corruption with multiple back ups.
If you can’t find something on piracy trackers you just need better trackers.
That’s not always true. There are a lot of obscure/niche products that just aren’t popular enough for there to be perpetual seeders for all of them. Plenty of things have been lost to the annals of time, unfortunately. It doesn’t help that some companies will still witch-hunt pirates offering their ancient products that the company no longer even offers a way to procure legitimately (cough Nintendo cough).
The defaults picked out by Radarr sometimes fail. Not sure where it’s pulling Seed/Leech figures from but those are never right. The only way to find out it to try downloading a few and then nuke the ones that have least seeders you can connect to.
I think that’s why Jackett is recommended to use with Sonarr/Radarr now. I just got my unraid server (mostly) running and that was one of the recommendations I saw made frequently.
I use Prowlarr. Maybe it’s that. I dunno if anything produces the right figures tbh.
Surely something has to connect to the torrent servers to see how many seeds there are, and that can even take the torrent program a little while to find them all.
I’ve only had one torrent fail at 99% so far as the last “seed” seemed to be fake.
That simply isn’t true. Some stuff is obscure, especially if it’s in a less-spoken language or it’s dubbed content for a less-spoken language.
Other times the torrent exists but it has no seeders.
You’re just one heartbeat away from seeing Steam turn into an EA competitor by some billionaires son/ self made CEO
Incorrect. Steam games are licensed to you. If the dev or publisher want to remove the game from Steam, it will still be in your library.
You conveniently left out that Valve can terminate your account for reasons unrelated to the games you’d lose that way.
there is this old game “Blur”, it got discontinued and delisted on Steam, yet those who owned it can still download and play it
It still is, the Single Player is still available if you read the article. They just shut down servers, and that’s on Square Enix.
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Update: It appears that contrary to what I first believed, the single-player portion of the game—Order of War without the “Challenge”—is still available on Steam, and only the multi-player content has been removed.
Dude it’s been 20yrs. I bought a game 20yrs ago and I can still play it. The physical media that I OWN did not last that long.
Any day it could go away. Just like my PS2 games went away when the only hardware on earth allowed to play them died.
A quarter of a human lifetime and counting is ephemeral? You think you are going to be able to get a blue ray player in another 20yrs? You know that making one requires paying fees to Sony, right? If you want media that lasts for generations, buy paintings and sheet music.
I think pcsx 2 let’s you put a PS2 CD in and run it through the emulator
It does.
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This is the most insane false equivalence I have seen in this thread.
The point is that some providers of digital goods have already surpassed reasonable expectations, and some fall very short. 20yrs of support for a video game on any format is really great. Any thing past that I think belongs in the preservation category which is the responsibility of libraries and archivists, not publishers.
Returning to your house analogy, when your 20yr old furnace fails, do you call the builder and expect him to fix it for free? When you clog the toilet do you plunge it yourself or does somebody owe that to you as condition of the sale? At some point everything you buy reaches the end of its useful life. What makes people thing digital goods should last until the sun burns out?
I removed the comment (maybe still visible on some instances?) because what I was criticizing in it wasn’t necessarily said in the one it was answering, but I do still think the comparison is adequate!
There is no reason for digital content to ever go bad, other than not having any compatible physical devices anymore. Idk what you base your “reasonable expectation” on, but properly stored digital content does not degrade, so it could last basically forever. I guess you just extrapolate from what you’re used to from these platforms, and I’m sorry to tell you that they’ve been ripping you off the whole time. There is no physical reason why they couldn’t keep the digital content available, at least until they go out of business, and without DRM even well beyond that. Hosting static data is incredibly cheap, the limitations are all about contracts and profit maximization.
If anything, the house in the metaphor is actually not long-lived enough.
Have you ever come across the idea of making digital backups of the physical media you owned?
What good would a backup do for a game that requires specialty hardware to run. I still have my ps2 games. I just can’t play them.
I still have my cod1 pc disks, they just don’t do anything.
What is the backup for?
You can play them on an emulator. You can even connect a Dualshock 3 controller to your PC, and it’ll be just like playing on the “specialty hardware” it was made for.
Is PS2 emulation that accurate now?
Yeah, same with Gamecube (via Dolphin).
PS3 emulation has a way to go yet.
Yes. Not 100% perfect for all games, but close.
It is for me. Has it not been accurate enough for your use?
You can make a backup of your Steam games too. A good portion of them can be copied out of the Steam folder and run completely independently. If you want to retain your steam games permanently, you are a free to hack them up as physical media.
A good portion, yes. The rest you’ll have to crack.
So just like the DRM on physical media, only with fewer steps and no additional equipment.
making digital backups
So you’re in favour of digital ownership then?
Yes, I am.
You need to understand that an online library on Steam et al is not ownership.
Having the files on your own harddrive, without any dependencies to external services, that is digital ownership.
Agreed. Physical ownership is the shelf of old DVD and CDROM PC and XBOX classic game boxes in my basement that take up space, collect dust, will never work again, and will only be a remembrance of nostalgia for a bygone day. Plus I’ll probably never seriously want to play them again… let’s be honest. I can watch a video of someone else playing, it scratches the same itch, and saves me the trouble.
I like digital ownership, but there needs to be protections so we can’t be screwed.
I agree. It’s hard to draw lines though right. Say your country made a law that companies could not pull the sort of shit Sony is pulling here. They would have to put a timeline on it right? It’s unreasonable that they should support a 10$ digital purchase for centuries. But 10yr old content disappearing is also horseshit. So what is a good line? What expectations is it reasonable to have as a consumer?
What can I reasonably expect when I pay a few bucks for a downloaded movie. I feel like that is what we are really debating here. To me, getting 20+ yrs of support for a game on steam seems like an insanely good deal. I never got that for physical games. I am forced to admit that digital games on steam are a better deal than any physical games I have ever bought.
Digital ownership CAN work but you have to decide who you trust. I would never trust Sony (or other console manufacturers) to maintain my digital library over the long term. But I guess trusting valve worked out. Shit, all my old ebooks still work too, and that’s Amazon, hardly a paragon of ethics.
The problem isn’t digital ownership, it’s the companies that are selling stuff and/or the regulatory structure that they operate in.
Public domain should be 20 years not 80
I’ve never even owned a PlayStation but I’ve owned enough absolute shit made by Sony that I started boycotting them like 15 years ago. They really are a truly shit company. It always amazes me they are considered a quality brand.
Word! The nastiest vendor lock in bullshit you’ve ever seen. My bitchin’ yellow Walkman aside, bad products top to bottom.
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You’re hyperbolizing. The Playstation 2 is the best selling video game hardware of all time. It was the opposite of a “bad product” objectively.
Sony spent 20 yrs completely committed to proprietary storage media. They sold memory sticks and the like at vastly inflated costs compared to the media built to standard specs. The PS 2 was smack in the mix with that shit. Remember memory cards? They used special Sony developed encryption, for no reason but to maximize vendor lock in.
The PS4 and 5 being storage manufacturer agnostic is a really big deal and I will give them credit for it.
What about the PS3 era of Sony made you go “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!”
Like I said, I never owned a PlayStation. What made me boycott Sony is buying many products, things like headphones, and paying double or triple the price of comparable products which probably were better than the more expensive Sony version. I know I had some shitty koss headphones I bought for $30 that were better than $200 Sony ones.
And I know someone is going to question this and ask me what model, etc. I don’t know or care. It wasn’t just the headphones it was just several times in a row of thinking I paid more and got something nice and later finding out it was shit.
there’s been instances of issues with steam games. like paid characters and skins in games being removed after the ip owners decided it was worth more money. dead by daylight did this multiple times.
Or GTA getting patched to remove music from a game you already “own”.
As is tradition at this point, those that pirated the game get a better experience
Im not arguing that all digital ownership works great for consumers. But it can work. Shitty companies will always be shitty and it doesn’t matter how you possess the goods, you bought them from shitty companies.
As a general rule which applies to all products: if the company you are paying has to pay another company a license fee for your product to work, it’s not going to work for very long. Be it a Blu-ray Disc or a marvel skin, your vendor will stop paying their vendor as soon as they can.
There’s nothing about owning physical media that would prevent that.
It’s not just PCs and Steam. I can still play my original Xbox games from 20+ years ago on my Series X (they predate Xbox Live, let alone the Xbox Live Store), and I can still play the digital and physical Xbox 360 and Xbox One games that I bought in those eras as well.
Gamers (and legislators), give Sony and Nintendo way too much of a pass for shitting on backwards compatibility.
Shit was built for completely different hardware
It’s still PC architecture. May not be 64 bit, but there’s nothing stopping a modern x86-64 processor from directly running software made for an IBM PC from the 1980s without a VM or emulation. Backwards compatibility on PC is amazing. Drivers are a different story.
With dedicated consoles, the hardware is often bespoke and completely changes with each iteration of the console. In order to remain backwards compatible, emulation is required to recreate the previous environment so older games will run. That or they literally just stuff a miniature subsystem of the old console into the new one.
In all fairness, PS1s and PS2s still work fine (albeit, some may need a laser replacement, and you might need an HDMI adapter) but it’s not like it’s impossible to play old PS games.
Most PS2 Games don’t have copy protection. You can just run them on a PC via an emulator like PCSX2.
Anakin Skywalker agrees: A monarchy is great if you have a really nice and competent ruler, we just had unusually bad luck with those in the past!
We need to stop calling it digital “ownership”! You don’t get to own anything as a customer on these platforms, because rights that can be taken away on a whim are no rights at all.
If buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing.
It never was
Arr-men to that!
Whatsab!
In the case of pc platforms like GOG, and itchio, if you get a drm free version of a title, theres nothing the company can do to both stop you from storing it on an external storage (or multiple) if you wanted. They wouldnt be able to revoke it if its a single player game.
Works for a lot of Steam games too.
Technically, you still don’t own it. You have a licence that they can revoke at will. They just can’t enforce it.
What makes you say so?
GoG about page explicitly talks about owning, and terms even explicitly mention advance notification so you can download Dr free versions if they will ever become unavailable.
GoG terms do not qualify purchases as temporary access licenses - only to the degree of servicing downloads as long as possible and without other limitation.
- https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212632089-GOG-User-Agreement?product=gog
- https://www.gog.com/about_gog
We don’t believe in controlling you and your games. Here, you won’t be locked out of titles you paid for, or constantly asked to prove you own them - this is DRM-free gaming.
You know that’s the exception to the general trend though right? GoG has good terms, most others do not.
Physical media still is a better way to go than digital whenever possible.
Commenter specifically talked about gog and itch. Other commenter then replied you wouldn’t own it [there].
The comment chain specifically moved away from “general trend”.
because rights that can be taken away on a whim are no rights at all
They’re rights to temporary access. A contacted temporary right.
I agree with your main point that it’s not ownership though.
What you’re talking about is being allowed to use something or being tolerated, that’s different from having a right. A temporary right is a real right for a specified time frame, but here it would just be “until I decide you don’t”.
Remember the time when Sony invented rootkits to make their drm stronger? Pepridge farm remembers.
Remember when Sony made you use a proprietary mini SD card for your handheld instead of just allowing the format that was already in place and widely adopted?
PSVITA COULD HAVE WON THE HANDHELD WARS IF NOT FOR THIS /copium
I’m still salty
Pretty sure the Vita was just entirely abandoned, it would have been a powerhouse even as it was if Sony hadnt done so
Do not despair. Vita is one of the greatest home brew consoles ever. I love my hacked vita.
Remember when Sony stopped us all from having easy access to high density compact disc storage by slapping obnoxiously large fees onto blueray decoding licensing that they still maintain today? Or how about that whole… betamax… actually I’ll just leave that one to history.
HDDVD should have won for that alone
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a mini SD card. To me it seems that consumer electronics went from regular SD straight to micro SD, skipping the mini SD step. What was it used for? Phones?
Pretty much.
A very small set of phones used SD, then MMC (thinner), then mini-SD.
Once micro SD arrived, that was pretty much it.
Was that the memorystick pro duo, which actually beat even many early UHS-I SD cards at write and read speeds?
The Vita used overpriced proprietary memory cards.
Interesting, from what I can find online even though it’s unique to the vita it’s still just the memorystick pro duo protocol under the hood, with a DRM system similar to the one Sony uses for their modern CFExpress Type A cards.
Ironically, it was adopted by everyone except Sony, which had Memory Stick, yet didn’t use it for the Vita.
Well, at least, the Vita cards were big enough to download all the great Vita exclusives such as… uh…
No but I remember the old school playstation memory cards that plugged into the front of the console that were required to save your games on. I still have one with PS2 saves for GTA San Andreas and Gran Turismo 3 & 4 and stuff
Playstation keeps reminding us that digital ownership is not ownership.
Obligatory if buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing
Yep. Rental is the more accurate term.
Yeah. Digital ownership is very convenient. Sony’s model is loanership or something
It’s all loanership, no matter which platform.
You own what you pirate
…and what you buy in a DRM-free form.
“You will own nothing and be happy”
Except they forgot the “be happy” part.
That’s because they don’t care about that part. Others being happy doesn’t buy them a private jet. Selling the illusion of ownership very much does.
In this case. But if you owned the keys to a room in a public accessible vault, you could properly own and have access to it.
Since its public, not even Sony could take it away.
It should be illegal to take back / away a digital purchase because of a rights change or any other reason. Sure, maybe I lose the ability to download again if the company goes out of business, but other than that, my media, my fucking property. And not in a distribution sense. Like it was a physical copy. It’s not like they’re allowed to enter my home and steal my blu-rays.
They’re not offering true purchases, they’re offering one time payment leases - and they should be forced to market them as such if they’re not willing to guarantee perpetual access.
Points at the Jolly Roger.
And it’s a heave-ho-hi-ho, comin’ down the way
“Stealin’” films and movies and all the other games
And it’s a ho-hey-hi-hey, corpos bar your doors
When you see the Jolly Roger on Francisco’s mighty shores!
OoO this would be fun to try to do the whole song…
I was hoping someone would recognize it lmao
I miss Armored Core Masters of the Arena. I will not under any terms, ever touch AC5 because of exactly this fucking bullshit brainwashing nonsense. It was perhaps the best video game I’ve ever played and that’s not a short list. I quit them and I’d only give exceptions to Sauerbraten these days and, well, I just don’t do it anyway cuz I now prefer board games because it’s like playing games with real people. I’m not good socially and need the means to practice, in all honesty.
So yeah, fuck Sony, and fuck PS. I refuse to even pirate their nonsense. I have zero interest in anything that isn’t FOSS.
🏴☠️
The ps5 and Switch will probably be my last consoles. I will just find ways yo mod the Switch when support dies for it to keep games on the go, and when psn is cut for ps5 that will be it. PC will be my way forward. I won’t put up with this “pay for internet twice and still not own your games” stuff after these generations.
I modded my switch once they started the online subscription. It’s a really great jailbreak experience. Got ability to export saves too.
If there’s DRM involved, then you’re renting, not buying. Take that into account when considering how to spend money.
Counterpoint: digital ownership — true ownership when you have the actual files — is amazing. It’s the media panacea we’ve wanted for years. Storage is cheap, content is boundless, and if you curate your own collection you can usually get it anywhere you want.
It isn’t vulnerable to physical degradation.
Back the fuck up! If you only have one copy, you have none.
Yeah, I’m at the point where I view all storage as temporary, just on different time scales. Storing anything indefinitely requires ongoing maintenance to replace degraded media with fresh media.
Yeah, lots of newbies fall victim to this. Nobody wants to believe hard drives fail, until their hard drive is dead and they’ve lost all their data.
I believe there’s a saying along the lines of “nobody wants to build earthquake-proof houses before the first earthquake.”
Yea but literally nothing is. The best thing you could do is have multiple backups in multiple locations.
Unless you use mdiscs. Those still degrade, but it’ll take centuries.
Too bad it’s not applicable to defective-by-design appliances like the PlayStation 5.
What the hell they talking about? Digital ownership is amazing. I can stream all my content from my server and keep it forever as long as I backup regularly. What sucks is buying shit digitally because then you don’t own it at all
Yeah they’re not talking about ownership here. They’re talking about custodial “ownership”. Like when you buy bitcoin and keep in on an exchange - you down actually own it.
Some people think if you buy a movie from Sony or any other online only marketplace you actually own it….
It’s a “permanent” rental, Until something like this happens.
It’s not even a rental. It’s “permission” to stream anytime anywhere or possibly store a cached copy until the company changes its mind or ceases to exist.
I think “licensing” is the correct word here, instead of “ownership”.
The users in question don’t “own” anything, they merely “license” it.
After the spyware disclosure and consent form on launch of Horizon Zero Dawn, I ceased getting anything Sony.
But the recent discontinuation of service shows us the ethic of piracy is (and always was) one-sided. Sony takes what it pleases, and no one is going to enforce otherwise.
We are justified in taking whatever action is necessary to ensure our own survival and fair benefit including violent terrorism so long as the state’s agencies are not going legislate or adjudicate fairly but in the favor of plutocrats and corporations.
The whole point of the social contract is equal treatment and preventing the bloodshed of natural disagreement resolution (typically intergenerational family feuds)
Sony can appreciate we just want our shows and tunes and games with little hassle, and not revenge for being a traitor to the peace.
Sony will totally download a bear.
After this I’m getting an external drive and backing my gog library, since it and itch io are the last bastions of ownership (shame I can only pay in USD on itch).
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Thanks for the tip
Steam can be too, fyi
Not sure why anyone at this point is stoked to own a Playstation. Literally all of their games are going to be on PC, GTA6 will eventually be on PC, not to mention all of the cross platform games on PS5 that are, you guessed it, also on PC.
Between digital storefronts removing content you paid for and the price tag on all new releases, it just doesn’t make sense to engage with this new generation of “you don’t actually own your games now”.
Because it costs like a quarter of an equivalent gaming PC, and there’s actually an option for physical disc ownership unlike PC.
“But consoles suck compared to PCs of the same price!”
~People who built their PCs before bitcoin was popular
Honestly, buying a disc for a new game and selling it a month later is still the cheapest way to play new things without being constrained by a subscription’s library. PC is excellent for old/indie stuff going cheap, but discs are awesome.
Lots of reasons to enjoy having a Playstation. Having a full PC setup is expensive when you factor in more than just the case build. It’s nice to have something you can boot up and get right into. Everyone acts like their system is superior but the superior system is whatever one best suits your needs. I personally would absolutely love a PS5 varient that didn’t require internet and just let me play my single player games in peace.
I think the big cost savings on PC come from a lack of subscription fees. Plus a huge variety of storefronts to choose from so prices tend to be low. Games get cheap fast if you wait a little bit.
It’s pretty easy to match console performance with a budget PC, but it definitely isn’t as easy. I can’t wait until I can pause/resume games on my desktop like I can on the Steam Deck. Huge quality of life feature.
Auto run steam at startup and with big picture mode?
On the Steam Deck, ‘game mode’ runs in exclusive fullscreen mode without the KDE desktop environment. I’m not an expert, but I think the gamemode desktop environment is specifically tuned to the Steam Deck hardware and isn’t something that you can just replicate on your own hardware.
I really want to test this though, I’d love to build a ‘Steam Console’ running on standard x86 desktop hardware running Linux that launches directly into Steam.
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Just remember, any game that requires patches will not be able to get patches after the switch loses support from Nintendo
So you own the physical cartridge but the patches that were (in some cases) required to make the game work will be unable to be downloaded in the future
This is why I support modding consoles, that way I can continue to have a fully functional console long into the future
On the switch, the titles that require the day one update to function is generally a lot lower than the other platforms.
Its the reason why when a game leaks in advance, piracy can play it, because the cart dump is usually the complete functional game
I’m more referring to patches in general.
A great example of a past Nintendo console that no longer has support but is online enabled is the 3DS.
Pokemon X and Y had a game breaking bug on launch that if not patched means that there’s a whole chunk of the game that of you save in that location the game save corrupts, now that online support is gone you can no longer get the patch that fixes the bug.
So if you got a copy of Pokemon X or Y and a 3DS today, you’d never be able to get the patch.
Nintendo, to date, has never shut down the CDN for any console. You can still redownload titles purchased on the Wii Shop Channel, for example. This means that you would be able to download updates for Pokémon X and Y or any other 3DS game.
Not x&y specific, but at times, newer versions of carts will contain the update for a game. Not all carts are the 1.0 version of the game.
Not all carts ship with version 1.0, but all versions that shipped with 1.0 will stay at 1.0.
For example:
Breath of the Wild is on version 1.3.1, if you have a cart from launch it will still be on the older version and the console will prompt you for an update. But without online functionality those updates will be impossible to get.
Technically, there one other option, the switch allows for updating via local updates. Youd just need another user who has the update installed nearby.
Which will be a number of people that will only go down with time
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I’m talking about when Nintendo no longer support the online functionality of the console
And in the regards of patches
You will be unable to get patches for the game after they drop online support
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DLC and bug fixes are downloaded as patches, once online support is gone you won’t be able to download that stuff again. So if you buy a second hand cart after online is gone or you uninstall the game data after online is gone there’s no getting that back. It’s gone without a modded console.
For example:
Breath of the Wild is on version 1.3.1, all changes since the version on the cart you have will be impossible to get once online functionality is gone.
Thing is that most games on physical media aren’t much good in the long run either for the very same reasons. Even the single player ones have a myriad of little bits and bobs of online connectivity nowadays. I expect 95% of them to break once their servers go down. Most of them for super stupid reasons…some version mismatch here, a weird timeout in the launcher there. And being on closed systems,.there will be no way to patch them by the community on consoles.
The only games I expect to still work are Nintendo games. That’s not because they are the good guys but because their understanding of this whole internet thing is so laughably bad.
Nintendo had games breaking at parts because of interrupted services, even games that are single-player or playable offline.
Some examples :
Fire Emblem : Shadow Dragon has a shop that connects to the internet and is the only place where you can get an item required for a specific class promotion. I shit you not, the only reason it needs access to a long dead server is to check the current date, because the shop’s content depends on the day of the month.
Similarly, Metroid Prime 3 and Metroid Prime Trilogy had an “online” component… Some of the in-game rewards could only be obtained by spending “friend credits”. What happened is you earned a credit, you couldn’t spend it yourself, you had to send it to a friend and have them do the same for you. This was the only way the games used the online service. Bonus, they rereleased Trilogy on Wii U, long after the server shutdown, and did not do anything to let you go around that.
And also on the Wii U, Mario Vs Donkey Kong Tipping Stars had a level designer. You could unlock parts for the designer with stars, earned by playing levels… Shared on miiverse. They shut down Miiverse, even before the end of the console’s (short) life, and they even kept selling the game after that, with only a short message to warn “not all functionalities” were available. The truth is that without the miiverse stars you could barely unlock anything for the designer, so it was basically useless even for offline.
Most of the “physical” media games are just launchers to download a copy anyway. Modern gaming outside of GOG or places that allow you download DRM free, fully offline functional games (at least for single player) are the only thing I would consider when thinking about whether you “own” the media. But the most popular methods for getting games through Xbox, Playstation, or PC (Steam, Epic, etc.) you only “own” it as long as the company continues to allow it.
I mean, even like 10 years ago when I bought a PS4 for Christmas for our kids, it was a pretty fucking disappointing Christmas Day because opening the console you have to update before you can use it, and none of the discs we bought were actually playable without gigs of downloads. I don’t think anyone got to play anything until like 9pm that day.
