Personally I think we should bring back physical games to PC. Imagine a cartridge like device that can effectively use external storage as swap memory (which copies to ram as needed), laptops and desktops can be built with this while other computers could use an adapter.
And hopefully it dosent require the original game drive to be plugged in all the time when you want to play
The problem is how do you do that while preventing fraud?
The same way you do it digitally: add a thin layer of DRM that gives you legal protection, but doesn’t actually do much on a technical level. Check a license key from the game drive in the same way you’d check the key of software someone paid you for, then let the code run on their machine.
DRM itself isn’t a very good way of protecting media. The functional protections are almost nonexistent due to the nature of it. If you want to let someone play/watch/read content, you can’t also make it magically impossible for them to just take the code/video/text, and copy paste it somewhere else. The only thing DRM does is give you the legal right to invoke the state as a way of enforcing copyright law against anyone who ‘pirates’ your work.
Any fraud that could happen likely wouldn’t be stopped no matter what they tried. (or rather, if they did nothing protection-wise)
Or we could stop humoring companies that want to take people’s money and pretend that’s not a sale.
Absolutely, ideally we would absolish capitalism
It may surprise you to learn that selling goods and owning things is not the same as abolishing capitalism.
Fundamentally you do not own anything under capitalism, how would you create ownership if capitalism always steers towards what makes the most profit?
Apologies for the long comment you were fully within your right to haphazardly essentialise about the state of affairs, sometimes we just want to complain. Its just about the audience really, and it can be so difficult to distinguish between bad-faith actors and those who are being snobbish in their response to you when you have the wrong audience for your rhetoric.
It really depends on your audience, unfortunately the majority of people you speak your rhetoric too will not have 10% of the basis in knowledge required to make a consistent logical leap between neatly packaged concepts. Especially when many of those concepts have been prepackaged to the audience as inherently deserving of ridicule. Whereas the core ideas of most of those concepts are agreed upon across the political spectrum.
Its far easier to argue against the Friedman Doctrine, the idea that “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”, than it is to argue against capitalism itself in an optics sense.
Again its easier to argue against the current state of things, often colleqioully known as ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘late-stage capitalism’, than it is to argue against capitalism. Even if that implies the same as what you said (that capitalism tends towards or has tended towards inevitability), it will be received much more graciously as an observable fact of the current state of affairs.
The Trump camp argues against the current state of things very effectively, despite intentionally identifying the issues incorrectly and pushing them in the worse direction. Because most people can identify the current system is broken, and most want to believe they can help to make it better. If they are given the right framework, debunking common misconceptions, blaming ‘late-stage capitalism’ for example, corporate elites, info about PACs and lobbying (how capitalism undermines democracy through bribery), then they would hopefully come to the conclusion themselves.
My point being, while its not always your responsibility to meticulously articulate (some of) the core fundamentals of your ideology; if you hope for effective praxis then approaching people where they are at is necessary. Otherwise you risk appearing out of touch and facing (however (un)justifiable) pre-prepared ridicule potentially harming the ideology further through vibe association.
When your audience is non-leftists (liberals), argue against corporate greed and for real social responsibility for wealthy and corporate actors, who should be providing their fair share to society first. Then argue for state ownership of public services, some services should not be ran for profit and instead for maximising public good (public transport, healthcare, energy, water, etc.). Argue against nestles actions in flint for example, or healthcare costs. These are all easy wins, argue against the big monopolies making us pay more for worse services, argue they should be broken up to allow competition.
Like I say though, you are within your right to complain and not explain, just don’t be surprised when you have stinky libs acting smug and being arbitrarily obtuse.
Also, don’t be dissauded by the humiliation, that is their strongest tool in making us powerless.
I’m reminded of a quote from Yuri Bezmenov:
“I realized that the purpose of propaganda was not to persuade or even to deceive, but to humiliate. When a person hears lies of the most absurd kind, and can say nothing in return, eventually he will be emotionally spent and conquered, and will not feel that he has any right to say what is true, or that there is no one who will care. Once this has been achieved, liars can move on to action, to do whatever they please without a whimper in response.”
Very good points but your flaw is that you think I take any of this seriously, im just a cute girl being silly on the lemmy :3
(I am genuinely Anarcho-Syndicalist though)
Word salad.
What an incredible rebuttal, I think I got second hand liberal brainrot
Never wonder why you struggle to make your ideas catch on.
new law
OK. I know I’m about to get blown the fuck up but… You will own nothing and be happy. But. Like. Unironically.
I really don’t think most people want to manage thousands of music files on their computer. Or hundreds of movie files. Or thousands of picture files. Or hundreds of video game files.
There are definitely options for doing this, but people who go this route are usually tech elite nerds. Not your parents or grandparents. Not normies.
(I self-host Navidrome, Jellyfin, Immich, etc.)
You will be blown up, and you will be happy. Enjoy the technofeudalism you so desperately long for.
May be true but the core of the problem with buying games online is that you can pay for the game, the platform holder can just remove the game from the storefront at any tile, and essentially remove any access to the game you had previously purchased under the pretense that it is yours to keep, since you’ve paid for it, without citing any reasons or giving warnings. When we buy something, we usually assume, since that’s the way it is with physical goods, that you’re keeping what your buying.
I feel like this transparent language is a good step in the right direction
Currently I have multiple games in stream which have no store page and I still am able to install them just fine. And they even run on Linux guys proton
I’m not sure how Steam works exactly, but can’t you redownload games once you’ve added them to your library regardless of any store pages?
Yes that’s exactly my point. The comment I was responding to was saying stuff gets deleted on steam, which is true. But that you can still play them/they are still in my library
I think that a step in the actual right direction would be forcing platforms to give people actual ownership of what they pay for. If they have a licensing issue and want to pull the game, they can stop new sales, but they shouldn’t be allowed to make it unavailable to people who’ve already paid unless the entire company is going under and the store is shutting down (and even then, they should be forced to provide non-DRM downloads).
Yep, the step forward would be to regulate licensing in a consumer-friendly way. Not going back to buying every song or album separately.
No doubt
That’s why sharing tools or information via libraries is the most convenient and efficient way of managing. We don’t need to own everything if it’s easily available for everyone.
This is literally how it has always been.
You don’t own any of the games you paid for, you bought a license to play those games under specific circumstances. It’s the same with books & movies.
Valve have (allegedly) stated that in the case of Steam shutting down, games they can update to remove Steam DRM, they will.
it’s not stealing it’s not stealing it’s not stealing it’s not stealing it’s not stealing it’s not stealing it’s not stealing it’s not stealing it’s not stealing it’s not stealing it’s not stealing it’s not stealing it’s not stealing it’s not stealing it’s not stealing it’s not stealing
The reason people buy from steam though and develop for them though is because of their service.
Thor from pirate software mentions that even as a developer there are good reasons for them to use steam.
Even just the cloud saves and such is awesome
Did California’s new law requiring this already go into effect?
January 1 2025, guess Steam preferred not waiting in this case
It’s a good job Gabe Newell has made gamers comfortable with not owning their games.
You do own your games on Steam. You just aren’t authorized to play them without using the Steam launcher.
You also won’t be authorised to play them if your account is banned for any or no reason, or if steam somehow shut down (at least for any you havn’t already downloaded or if you ever uninstall them).
That doesn’t sound much like owning to me. Could you imagine if gamestop banned you from their store and suddenly you couldn’t play any game you bought there? Would any logical person consider that ownership?
Its pretty much up to the developer. You can have no DRM and not even require steam to be open, or you can make your game unplayable.
Imo Steam should tell people whether or not a game actually requires Steam (or another form of DRM) to run. I know they already do it for things like Denuvo, but they should also note if the game actually uses Steam as DRM or if the game can be launched without it.
Yeah that would be nice.
PCGamingWiki has that info for most titles I believe. It would be nice to see it in Steam though.
Afaik, Steam only sells licences.
Steam sells DRM-free games too, you can download them and then uninstall Steam and they will work. In this case though, on top of purchasing the game, you are buying a license to download updates for it through Steam. It’s a developer decision.
You still aren’t “purchasing” it.
For example, you don’t have right of resale the same way you would with physical goods. You’re buying a license to the game for personal use, regardless, you just don’t have DRM limiting your access.
Well that’s just digital goods, not Steam specifically.
You do get all the files for the game, that will work for as long as the OS will run them, with or without Steam (this is as close as you can come to ownership for software). Rather than a license to use them files, which become useless if you don’t run the game through Steam.
DRM is orthagonal to ownership
I do not disagree?
I hope we don’t get expiration dates now…
This was always the case, just stated explicitly now
It also doesn’t mean that you don’t own your game. It’s a license to play the game you own but only via Steam.
Guys, this is a standard license agreement. This isn’t them saying “haha we can remove games at will from your library!”
You know what else used to be standard? Slavery and feudalism. Things don’t have to be this way.
I mean, slavery is still standard if you consider the prison industrial complex
Yeah isn’t this like the thing that California required them to do?
I’ve been trying to tell people for years this is how it actually works, now they’re being ultra transparent about it so maybe people will actually care.
They can though
Sure they can. But it wouldn’t be legal. You purchased a game. It’s yours. You’re only authorized to play it via steam.
If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.
You know, I tried telling them this at Hertz, but they still called the cops on me! WTF! I gave them money, they gave me car. What’s the problem officer?!?!?
Bad argument piracy has never been stealing
Sure it has, back when it was on boats at sea
Only when they were stealing things.
based and property tax should be illegal pillec
based and property
taxshould be illegal pillecFix’d
If buying becomes owning, will people stop pirating?
People were more inclined to buy software when it was a one time purchase rather than a license subscription (for example Adobe).
If piracy was stealing I would do it even more
Stealing potential profits is no where near as fun as stealing actual profits
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I appreciate the transparency tbh. Would be better if things were different but it is what it is for now.
For context, Steam is now forced to display this due to a new law passed in California: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24254922/california-digital-purchase-disclosure-law-ab-2426
Valve is not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.
This is solving the wrong problem entirely.
You do own games. They’re products. They’re mass-market goods, as surely as when they came on plastic rectangles or glass circles.
Being permitted to continue having things on your hard drive is not a service.