this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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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 (tm) 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.
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.
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.