I agree in principle but digital doesn’t come without drawbacks. It’s pretty difficult to keep a .exe file accessible for 30+ years even if your intentions are good. A service like Steam is a decent solution but that’s still a point of failure outside your direct control. A physical disc is simpler to keep track of in a lot of ways. If it gets damaged you lose one game, not potentially hundreds or thousands.
LemmyEntertainYou@piefed.social 1 day ago
This will probably be a controversial take but physical media shouldn’t exist in 2025.
Ownership of games SHOULD exist and so should multiple competing store fronts. We need to normalise DRM free digital copies rather than ewaste blu-ray discs that’ll one day degrade and become useless.
krashmo@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Agent_Karyo@piefed.world 1 day ago
It’s pretty difficult to keep a .exe file accessible for 30+ years even if your intentions are good.
That’s not really true. GOG installers are the obvious option, but even many of the games on Steam don’t actually have DRM and can be backed up.
And if you really want to you can get cracked versions. For older games, there are compatibility projects like DDrawCompat and dxwrapper. The more popular games have extensive usability mods (support for higher resolutions, bugfixes, UI scaling) and really popular ones have modern engines such as Augustus for Caesar III (originally released in 1998).
For example you can the Windows 95 version of Simcity 2000 Special Edition on Windows 10 (and I believe W11 too) on a 1440p monitor:
This is a 30 year old game!
Don’t get me wrong, I get the point of having physical copies (I have an extensive physical book library), but for video games, digital ownership (be it legal like with GOG or certain Steam games or using alternative approaches) is the way forward.
LemmyEntertainYou@piefed.social 1 day ago
There’s nothing stopping you from having multiple backups of your own game installers though if the DRM free options are there. It’s not too unfeasible for people to have dedicated offline storage in the form of a NAS or even just an external drive. Yes this has the same waste implications as discs but they’re at least multipurpose and have a longer lifespan. Obviously we should never rely entirely on a server that’s out of our control for backups to our purchases.
Zorque@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s still physical media, though. Just one you “create” yourself. You could say “This isn’t a hunk of plastic, therefore I’m not contributing to e-waste”… but that only matters if you decide to throw away the game after making a copy.
Drives still fail eventually, just like disks and cards.
subignition@fedia.io 1 day ago
By that logic digital media can't exist because the data has to be stored on something physical eventually.
JordanZ@lemmy.world 1 day ago
For all Steam’s faults…they host games forever it seems. A game I use to play was pulled from the storefront but stayed in your library(assuming you had it prior) because the publisher shut it all down back in 2017. I can still download and launch the game but the servers were gone so you couldn’t really play. Apparently pretty recently people found a way to get bootleg servers up so players were appearing as online again.
I’ll agree it’s still a point of failure if Steam just up and disappears but I’ve never had a game actually disappear from my library yet. Unlike basically every digital copy platform for movies (digital copy codes from physical copies). Just because you ‘own’ a digital movie doesn’t mean it won’t just vanish one day. iTunes will generally give you a couple bucks if you bring it to their attention that it’s gone but other platforms basically tell you to pound sand.
We basically have the exe issue with PC games on disc. I’ve got a few of those but most have been community patched so you just copy the cd contents, copy a file or two on top and launch the game for a modern os. Obviously some security risk here if those patched files are malicious.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
In the mean time, while we wait for IP law to fix itself over the course of decades, or probably just never: I have physical copies of most of my games.
… on an SD card, that I bought, formatted, and moved files onto.
Steam lets you make game backups, GOG releases are basically portable… make a backup, compress it, put it on a backup drive.
… and thats all without my pirate hat and pegleg on.
B0NK3RS@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I have mixed opinions on physical media but. I’m starting to agree with you on this point. In the past I’m all for having the option to buy it on disc/cartridge but when you have to install the game anyway and download a day one patch it kinda defeats the purpose of it. Also offline mode on consoles if just a joke at this point.
HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth 1 day ago
Almost got me with that hotness but I wouldn't necessarily disagree. In a perfect world, we would just own digital copies free and clear of any remote tampering.
Trouble is, physical media is relevant now because companies can't nuke your access to it once their licensing deals expire, like they can with digital streaming services and storefronts. Even digital copies are physical, they have to sit on a hard drive somewhere, and even those degrade over time. So let's say we own the hard drive, that's great, but I still need to transfer it once the disk/flash dies. It's unquestionably more efficient than disc media tho.
LemmyEntertainYou@piefed.social 1 day ago
I guess it’s not so much the discs I’m against (apart from the fact they do deteriorate faster than other types of storage) but the fact that there’s no option to retrieve and backup the data on said discs. Although saying that, most games require huge downloads to install anyway so is there even any benefit or security in ownership of physical media if it’s still useless without a significant download from a server than could theoretically cease to exist at any moment?
HarkMahlberg@kbin.earth 1 day ago
Well then I think your beef has nothing to do with the form of the media, but with DRM and lack of transferability. And I totally get the anxiety of having something and not wanting to lose access to it, but such is the nature of all games, movies, shows, books. Everything humans create has a shelf life and we're in a neverending fight against entropy.
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
What if usb sticks lasted hundreds of years, were still the same price or cheaper, were faster to read and write, and you could buy games that shipped to you on them, that you could potentially also add patchers onto? Like they would always have the original version on them, but has enough space to periodically add updates on over the years, so that you could revisit them.
And they were made in a shape that wasn’t awkward. And had good label surfaces. Throw them in a drawer or display them in a stack somehow.
And you didn’t have to install the game on your pc, you could just run the drive as is.
This is something we could potentially have in the future, if companies stopped being such short sighted greedy bitches about everything.
yakko@feddit.uk 1 day ago
A steady hand on the tiller of society? In this economy?
lolola@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Shit take. Give me something I can hold.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
There is no digital store for DRM-free digital movies and TV shows, and I hate it. Hollywood’s crying about the implosion of its industry, but they’ve operated as a cartel that stands in the way of stuff like this for a long time.
LemmyEntertainYou@piefed.social 1 day ago
I thought we were MAYBE heading that way in the days of iTunes but then the oh-so-convenient streaming came along and entirely killed the majority’s desire to actually own movies.
At least music is a medium that managed to transition to DRM-free digital storefronts, even if it is barely used.
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
It’s because musicians in general, are chill.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
No legal one, at least.
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
GOG opportunity!
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
They tried. They can’t sell movies that the rights holders won’t allow them to, and the studios all kind of unanimously decided not to do this.
SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Oh, did they? I must’ve either missed it or blocked it out. Well, Hollywood digs its own grave at everybody’s expense and loss