GOG. It’s not all games, but you can own some of them. Steam, in spite of the CEO that keeps it decent, started this lease under the guise of buying model.
That said, subs are much worse. If the Disney/Kimmel situation taught us anything, it’s that boycotts work.
Subs are costing most Americans, on average, $300/mo. (More Perfect Union covered it.). That’s a monthly grocery bill for 1-2, if you buy right and cook. Subs are part of the “squeeze” that siphons money to the top 1%.
MonkeBizNES@lemmy.cafe 15 hours ago
Unless its from GOG of course, because then you really do own your game
Gladaed@feddit.org 15 hours ago
Even there you only get a license. You don’t get to resell the copies. Or claim ownership.
warm@kbin.earth 14 hours ago
Legally sure, but what people mean is you have a copy and there's no DRM check-in to execute it and play it. Steam offers DRM-free titles too, it's entirely up to developer discretion.
plantfanatic@sh.itjust.works 14 hours ago
Unless you have limitless storage, you still can’t access the title when their servers go offline. So no you STILL don’t actually own it.
This is the worst perpetuation of the GOG program that keeps getting tossed around.
ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 13 hours ago
By that logic, you don’t own even physical media that you yourself made. It’s going to rot eventually, so you need limitless storage for the backups.
e0qdk@reddthat.com 13 hours ago
You can get huge HDDs for about $15~20/TB (US) right now – possibly even better priced if you spend more than the 30 seconds I did looking. You can get up to 30TB in a single disk now if you really want.
I have hundreds of games I’ve bought on GOG over the last decade or so. I have a copy of the offline installers for every single one of them, and they can fit on a single HDD. Literally the first thing I do when I buy a game is download the offline installer so that it’s mine forever.
If you give a shit about preserving the games you bought and don’t do the bare minimum of downloading the offline installer for what you paid for… that’s not a problem with GOG; that’s on you.
SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
A lot of Steam games also have this functionality. Turn your steam offline and see what games are still available to play. You can store them on whatever drive you want as well.