Corpo probably owns the sub
You don’t have to pay them anything.
Arghhh
Grow a fucking pair and make a sacrifice for the world you want to see. Ppl are so fucking weak. Adjust your life to remove the liability of corporate greed, whenever possible.
I see your point but it’s pointless when most people are sheeple. The 1% of power users never make a difference in the world of today.
Those power users are the ones who build the alternative. That path already exists, you simply refuse to walk it. The more who do, the better it gets.
But big business is very, very skilled at exploiting the parts of us that change behavior. Who am I, with a few words, to convince you to change, regardless of how much better would be if you did, when I’m up against the relentless propaganda expertise that convinces you, everyday, to keep accepting the path that is worse in the long run?
It is easier than you think bur your mindset is a big roadblock
Voting with your wallet works, just look at the billionaire epstein class doing it for proof
So this is more about reddit mods than anything else. Yeah, reddit mods, for the most part, are complete dicks. Reddit sucks.
Reddit men, what did you expect?
yarr harr harr, what be this then?
You know, it reminds me a lot of when Google got rid of “do no evil” in their mission statement.
It made plain something that was true from the start?
The used market is called ‘emulators’ for some odd reason.
No used market means PIRACY will run free.
I’m sure everyone can afford that with the world collapsing. Joke’s om them.
People buy this shit on installments. Consumer culture has turned the average person into a product chugging zombie.
It’s their walled garden, which they control and were they get to do whatever the fuck they want.
Never, ever jump into a tech stack which is a walled garden, because sooner or later you’re almost certainly going to get shafted by those who control it. This applies just as much as a tech consumer as it does as a tech professional.
The amount of companies that I’ve seen dive face-first into walled gardens because “they wouldn’t screw us over, we’re paying customers!” is mindblowing.
2 years later, and those same CHUDs have
and are yelling at me because prices have gone through the roof, and there’s no way to get out of the stack without a complete redesign.How do the idiots that make these decisions keep failing upwards?
Must be white men… lol?
In most countries Management is not Meritocratic - people whose job is Organizing, Tactical Planning and even Strategical Planning are in practice selected on Networking (the social kind, not the tech kind), Social and Image Management skills as well as Knowing The Right People (which often is Coming From Well Off Families And Attending The Right Posh Schools) instead of concrete metrics on the skills they’re supposed to have and apply on the job.
Since performance measuring in that domain is often pretty nebulous (especially in IT), it’s a lot easier to get away with being mediocre at the job than it is in more strictly measurable domains where results are clearly PASS/FAIL.
So you get tons of Shoot From The Hip, Make It Up As You Go and generally insufficient problem space analysis, none of which conducing to reliable, sustained and robust outcomes. Since generally the management pyramid is people like that all the way up, the higher ups just see the inevitable problems that emerge later as “just the way things are” because they themselves did the exact same thing, and often even promote such people because they’re like them:
The
- Some manager does insufficient upfront analysis and preparation, and then, when things needlessly blow up because of that, in a “superhuman effort” “saves the day” by avoiding catastrophe, hence is seen as a hero and gets promoted.
is very common exactly because upper level management themselves work in the same way and are thus unable to spot the causal relationship between not doing something they themselves don’t do and the later crisis when a “unknown unknown” that should’ve been a “know unknown” for which there was already some defensive planning turns into a near catastrophe for which in their eyes “nobody could have seen coming” is a valid justification.
Mind you, this actually varies quiet a bit from country to country as the overall management culture is not the same - in my own professional experience it’s not at all the same thing in Northern Europe and Scandinavia as it is in Western Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries and in turn between those and Southern Europe and Latin America.
While I agree, the average person doesn’t consider things like this (even though they should), and we should avoid getting close to victim blaming.
We’ve tried to educate, but the general public is just so fucking stupid and won’t learn any lessons at all. How many pre-orders does it take before they realize it’s a scam? Fuck, there are still idiots that buy the latest FIFA game at full price every single year.
It’s not even victim blaming when they repeatedly don’t learn they are being shafted over and over again.
General public is tired, mfs working minimum wage and want some joy out of their paycheck, they want to play the lastest sports game with their friends, doesn’t appeal to me but ik plenty of power users who still buy those games and play them too actually, honestly its not even expensive if you work and actually play those games all year every year?
I agree but it’s not even a point of education (for the most part) imo. It’s that a large amount of people are easily manipulated and are not properly equipped to fight it off.
Societal peer pressure carries a lot of this stuff very far. If two friends but the latest game, a third will likely do so as well; and the sample size is rarely limited to three.
The first part it is indeed true.
For the second part it really depends: one thing is a technologically naive person who gets themselves into such a situation because of not knowing better, a whole different thing is somebody who should know better but still go in because of convenience and hoping for the best.
In my eyes the former are victims, but not the latter, so I’ll definitely blame the latter for jumping in with some awareness of the risks thinking “I will probably be alright” - if you jumped in the pool were you knew there was a shark and got bitten that’s on you.
I also definitely blame fanboys, because their actions help pull in more of the first kind - when one is too ignorant about the broader implications of a choice, they shouldn’t be actively be trying to get other people to make that choice.
Should they? I mean if they don’t consider it, is honestly because they don’t care. And if they are happy paying full price on the PSStore let them.
No market? Is this communism?
/s
It’s ok when Valve and CDPR does it.
Part of the reason Valve gets away with it is that PC is an open platform. If you don’t want to buy from Valve you don’t have to buy directly from Valve. If you find a better deal elsewhere you can buy the game elsewhere. That’s not true for consoles. When it comes to digital only on Playstation you pay the price Sony tells you to pay because nobody except Sony is allowed to sell on Playstation. If Sony decides to jack up the price you just have to deal with it. If Sony refuses to put their games on sale you just have to deal with it.
The argument about removing your library is true for Valve (less so for GOG because you can just download all your installers and store them locally) but I think that’s a problem of the law. I think the law should catch up to digital media and give it the same rights as physical media. I hope SKG movements makes enough headway to lay the groundwork for someone else to come along and establish actual ownership of digital media.
Valve seems significantly closer to a reasonable compromise between our ideology and the opposing ideology, especially compared to Sony and Microsoft.
Valve makes drm easy but I’m pretty sure the developer can choose to not include it. It’d be on you to back up the files in that case, though.
GOG (not part of CDPR anymore) has no drm and gives you offline installers if you don’t use their client. Those games are yours forever.
Steam not so much, but Sony’s track record makes Valve look like saints in comparison.
Valve gets away with it because you can get games for dirt cheap there.
I suspect if we were looking at the same image as above except buying Dead Space for $6 like you can on Steam, we’d be seeing a lot less pushback. Part of the excuse they had was physical media having a way bigger distribution cost compared to digital. They’re kind of trying to have their cake and eat it too, here.
And yeah, GOG is DRM free so that’s a pretty big difference.
GOG games you download can be copied and played on any other computer without the need to connect to an external server. You do not even need the GOG Galaxy client to install the games you bought there.
Though Valve is a fair argument
Is it? The sales are often so good, and games I bought 3 or 4 PC builds ago still install and run on my new one.
Also with streak families you can share games.
But I get it, this is more about the used market.
DRM can still ruin the user experience a lot.
For a simple example, I have bought Fallout 3 on Steam, but I cannot run that version on Steam on an old Windows 7 machine by default even though its specs are enough to run it, I need to do some workarounds to launch Steam in the first place, and at that point I’d rather download it from a pirate site.
How would my experience be on the same machine with GOG? I can download it directly from the site, or if I cannot connect to it because of browser incompatibility somehow, I can save a downloaded copy to my flash drive from another computer, then transfer its files and it works.
Some old games might not implement Steam DRM and therefore work with the file transfer, but it doesnt work all the time. On GOG it always works because no DRM.
it tells you when games have drm
don’t buy those
imagine blaming steam for f3 lmao
It doesn’t tell if it has Steam DRM, it does when it has a 3rd party DRM.
The difference with Valve is that I still can use my PC hardware if Steam should get unavailable. I can’t download games from other stores on the Playstation.
Might be time to disable updates on your PS5 (if you can, I dunno, don’t console) so you can install Linux and get those other stores (once hacks are available for your BIOS).
That’s threading the needle a bit, but alright, as long as they’re just anticonsumer enough for you, but no further.
Sooo hot take I really don’t understand the extent of outrage about physical media. I don’t want physical media. It’s outdated. It feels like at this point we are just making up reasons to be angry, and millenials entering the “back in my day” age is feeding into this. Don’t get me wrong, I’m angry too, but I’m also a contrarian piece of shit and very pedantic about being angry for the right reasons. A used market is important for physical tech and all kinds of things to prevent waste and encourage re-use, but that doesn’t make sense for digital goods. I dunno am I way off base here?
I agree with you. I have zero need for plastic boxes and circles. They make NO sense to me at all.
I have never bought a game and thought: “is it worth it because I could sell it later?”
I remember when game stop’s dumpsters were full of used games, do we really want that to happen again?
At the same time: I would never buy a console. That seems ridiculous to me too.
My view is that with a physical copy I own it for life and there’s no way for Sony to come and take it away after they decide to “end support” or something. I can (and do) still plug in my ps2 and boot up any of my games from back then perfectly fine, and barring age/wear and tear I can continue to do so as long as I want. I’m also able to go buy old ps2 games from anyone who’s selling them, I don’t have to hope Sony has Mercenaries 2 on sale for $69.99 even though it’s older than a decent chunk of PlayStation users.
When it comes to Playstation, you can either buy from PS Store or buy a disk somewhere else where it can be cheaper. Without physical media you only have one store, a full monopoly. I think that’s the main issue.
I like being able to touch the things. The tactile feedback of something in my hands is nice.
Also: Don’t have much digital storage.
I do have that childhood nostalgia for cartridges, but that aside the modern joy of physical media is usually something like works offline, works 20 years from now, can’t be remotely disabled. But I’ve found that once you’re paying $599 for a brick with a 5 year expiration time bomb built-in, $70 per game, 20GB downloads before you can start playing, the dark patterns don’t end there, and the whole ecosystem just isn’t worth all the hassle.
I don’t want it either, but look at this and look at gog.
While there are a lot of reasons why getting rid of physical media is bad (such as physical media getting certain consumer protections that digital currently doesn’t) I’m going to try to make an argument I think you’d understand. From the image in the post Dead space digital version costs 69.99 but Dead Space physical version costs 18. Why does it cost 69.99 digitally and 18 physically? Because corporations like money. A physical disk cuts into their profit margin. They could’ve made 139.98 by selling the game to two people but instead they only made 69.99 (I know the numbers aren’t accurate and from physical sales corporations make even less but for the sake of the argument I’ll stick to those numbers) because only the first person paid the corporations and when that person was done they sold it to the second person who didn’t pay the corporations anything. In a sense physical media cost corporations a sale. But that’s one of the benefits of consoles for consumers. You can actually get old physical disks relatively cheap on the second hand market. Now you could argue that physical disk users are a minority and you’re probably right, but the fact that a physical market exists keeps corporations in check. If a game is priced too high you can always see if you can find a physical version for cheaper. But if there’s no physical version available you pay what they tell you to pay. Digital only on a closed platform is just giving corporations more control over the pricing of games and we know they want to jack up the price.
I’m with you, I prefer digital media over physical. But my digital media is also bought on an open platform so I can choose where I get the best deal when buying digital media. I don’t have to pay the price Steam gives me, I can buy the game on GOG or Itch or a plethora of third party sellers. Despite the media being digital I retain (some) control over the pricing. That’s not true for consoles so on consoles digital only is a horrible idea.
I’ve bought plenty of games that turned out to be dogshit, and the only solace they’ve provided is the ability to recoup some of the money by selling or trading the games. The physical games I do own are carefully curated, and I can still play all of them. I don’t want to be put in a position where I can’t get my money back AND I’m stuck with some shitty Hogwarts game.
You aren’t off-base, you just aren’t taking Sony’s, Nintendo’s, Microsoft’s tendencies to say “You don’t own that game you bought anymore” into account. Games are way too expensive to be able to brush off the full price of a game that you have every reason to be able to go back to after years of not playing them. Don’t put your trust in companies, especially after decades of eroding consumer trust.
Steam doesn’t do this (anywhere nearly as often). The lesson you should be getting from this new game sales trajectory is that if buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t theft. Don’t reward companies for clawing back any benefits you have of buying something. All you’re doing is ceding ground that you won’t get back.
I agree with the theory. the reality is that there is no structure to resell digital goods and doing so isn’t in the favour of the corps controlling it.
if there were a third party way to transfer ownership of digital goods? absolutely. but there isn’t, you’re at the mercy of the corp that wants more money and fuck you give it to them
You’re not way off, digital is superior and less wasteful in theory, and in a progressive society we’d have already realised that digital goods should be transferable and should not expire (= should not have DRM), certainly not sooner than physical goods! We do not live in that society atm (:
A practical example from experience: a steam game can only be gifted (aka transferred) to another account if you buy at least a second copy/key. The first copy is therefore less valuable than a game on a physical copy, that I can lend or gift to a friend.
The issue is removing another option for acquiring a game as well as a lack of ownership.
Physical media allows you to do whatever you want with your copy of the game. It allows the market to determine the price of the game instead of just sitting at whatever price they want on the digital store.
There is also the issue of download speeds. There are still many people in the world who have awful download speeds and/or data caps. Those people will lose the option to have the entire game on the disc.
Physical goods aren’t here for nostalgia, they’re here for media that can’t be remotely recalled the moment the corpos decide for whatever reason you can’t own it anymore.
Its very important in the legal space. On the high seas, a HDD thumb drive or archival mdisc/tape drive are the same.
GOG has managed to put out DRM free games though on a digital distribution platform. I can have my entire library backed up and it isn’t possible for them to nuke it in any way, as far as I know. It really isn’t a problem inherent to digital downloads, only the way some are trying to do it.
People just want physical discs so they can own what they buy.
