MudMan

Because it shouldn't be on me to ask for permission to do stuff with my software that I bought.

Maybe I'm too old, because I remember when I bought a disk and I just copied it and used that. Which is legal, by the way.

Well, alright, I don't need to remember too far back, because I was ripping some movies today. Which, again, fair game. I paid for them, I get to use them. I shouldn't have to explain to you, Valve, Netflix or anybody else why I want to back up the thing I bought.

In fairness, the headlines written around this were generally atrocious, save a few (shout out to IGN and the original reporter, which may or may not have been techradar). Sure, in most of those you could read a more complete quote inside, but... staying at the headline isn't just a gamer thing. Clickbait is dangerous for a reason.

And also in fairness, the point he's making is still not great. I mean, he's the guy in charge of their subscription service, so I wouldn't expect him to be too negative on the idea, but he's still saying that it's a future that will come. Not that all models will coexist, but that a Netflix future for gaming is coming.

But yeah, gamers can be hostile without justification and often default to treating every relationship with the people making the games as an antagonistic or competitive one, which is a bummer. In that context, letting this guy talk was clearly a mistake.

No, that's where the service provider's backups are stored. I don't have the ability to make my own. That's a huge stretch and very tortured logic. And even if I went for it, by not being able to make backups at my pleasure I'm still being impacted, so... still, by definition, a negative impact on the paying customer that people pirating the same media don't have. They just Ctrl C Ctrl V that stuff.

This is such a weird take. I mean, either I am sharing the bill (I'm not), and the cutting off is rising my price or I... you know, actually like the person using the sub when I'm not and I'm still mad that they are getting cut off. Plus who's to say I'm the primary user? For all I know I'm in there way less than the other person.

It's weird to assume that I would only be annoyed at my own inconvenience and not by the inconvenience of someone else. Plus in practice the outcome would have to be paying their cut-down "second account" nonsense and paying more myself, it'd be kinda petty otherwise.

I would have to sanity check that math, honestly. I am so sporadically in so many of my media subs that if we counted by watched items as opposed to all items you get access to it may break even.

That said, I'd be lying if I said I don't have BluRays still shrink-wrapped that I haven't watched, so I guess it does cut both ways.

Yeah, I thought we had figured this out after Twitter. Or Reddit.

FWIW, I did not remove my subscription, but I did respond to the recent price bump by downgrading to a lower tier, and we're still sharing it (if they ever shut us down for that I'm certainly not paying a second sub, but so far the locations are close enough and it's used rarely enough in one of them that it's never been an issue).

The big thing that I did was to go back to physical media and home streaming. Boycotts won't work, but that? That might. At least it'll make it less likely for physical media to be fully eliminated as an option.

At an absolute minimum, the DRM prevents me from easily making a backup of my legitimate copy, which I am otherwise entitled to do.

So yeah, by definition DRM has a negative impact on paying customers.

Wait, you get dual physical sims but they don't repurpose one of the slots for an SD card if you don't use it? Why? At that point it's removing a feature just for the sake of it. Well, for the sake of making you overpay for more storage, but still.

Oh, it makes sense. I think there's a place for subscription services, absolutely.

I don't think a transition to subscription as the default model for gaming makes sense, though. Which was the point of the question and the implicit goal in the answer. And even if it did make practical sense (if people "got used to it") it'd be bad for the art form and the industry on the aggregate.

Alright, I was only gently pointing it out because what he actually said is still a pretty bad take, but at this point it's just annoying.

No, he didn't say that.

He said that gaming subscriptions won't take off UNTIL gamers get used to not owning their games. Wihch... yeah, it checks out.

The all-subscription future already sucks, can we at least limit our outrage to the actual problem? I swear, I have no idea why gaming industry people ever talk to anybody. Nothing good ever comes of it.

I'm curious now that we've talked so much about it. Is it any good, locked bootloader aside?

Yeah, and it can get stuck in customs. It's a good thing to do if you're there for a bit, even for a layover, but it's harder to buy. Still, man, for that price gap even if you get taxed you'd probably be at worst flat with the official release. That's a 30% hike, plus 10% you're losing in the currency exchange. It's a lot.

I'd maybe shop around. That can't last forever, and a cursory search right now already shows some offers with 50 euros cut off that sticker price (in Amazon.de, for one). Of course that's also for the worst model, so... you know, modern phone pricing.