This is not abandonware. The devs haven’t abandoned their games. This is an active and purposeful fuck you from the publisher to the devs.
It costs them literally nothing to keep those games up, and yet they’re taking them down against the devs’ wishes. In fact, they refuse to be the least bit convenient to the devs, making them jump through hoops just to relist their own games.
Anti porn laws, “child protection” laws, cryptographic attestation of client devices (windows 11 TPM requirement anyone), it’s all headed in a very scary authoritarian direction
It already is. For example, it’s basically impossible to run your own email server these days, because most big email providers just block residential IPs to reduce spam.
Lots of ISPs block or heavily filter things like torrents.
Your ISP might decide you having a personal server at home is against their terms and force you to make a business account. They don’t want people uploading, only downloading.
Some countries are trying to weaken or ban encryption across the board.
And this is only slightly related, but things like websites that let you watch movies or shows are dying. They either all share the same server for video, or they just copy the files from each other. If you find one and watch a video with a little glitch, you’re likely to find that same glitch in all the other websites too. Think things like TV logos, audio suddenly changing language for a few seconds, scan lines on old VHS or TV recordings, etc… There used to be a lot, but now all the small players are being sued or shut down, and only the largest ones are still alive. The noose is tightening.
Problem is that one day, it will. I’m old enough to be able to see the difference in how much freedom has been lost online.
It’s not impossible. North Korea exists. There’s nothing stopping the rest of the world from adopting the same authoritarian regulations and technology bans.
That’s why people need to be involved in their governments; elections, local regulations, and what have you. It’s easy to complain that things aren’t perfect, or that you don’t like any of the options; but being part of the process, long term, is the only real way to fix that. The more people that give up and say they don’t care, the faster corruption infects everything and ruins what good is there. And trying to be clever and say that “one side is just as bad as the other” is not only a selfish lie people tell themselves to feel better about not doing anything, but it actively helps the authoritarians claim power.
The only thing that staves off corruption and authoritarianism is when the people being governed get involved and stay vigilant. Even small things like school board elections matter down the road.
You want to have a free internet? Then vote in school board elections. Seriously.
I miss my Deck so much, it’s the pinnacle of gaming technology. It went missing about a month ago, as if it disappeared off the face of the Earth. Turned my house upside-down methodically looking through every room and nothing. Never would’ve taken it out of the house without the case, it’s just gone, vanished. Waiting to see what happens with taxes before deciding if I want to buy a new one, assuming I get a refund.
I de-cased a samsung smart tag (basically an airtag) and stuck it in my deck so now I can ping it or track it if I ever lose it. Maybe consider something similar if you buy a new deck.
Already did, got an Airtag and have a stickie case for it I’ll be putting on to it should I ever find it again or get a new one. It never came up before because the Deck was only ever in two or three locations and I live with wife & kids, so it wasn’t a roommate who took it (unless somebody broke in without a trace and only stole that one thing). Kids would’ve left it somewhere in plain sight on the floor or somewhere stupid. Smaller things they can lose, but something that big is hard to lose.
Baldur’s Gate 3 - Better played on my 65" television through the PS5.
Vampire Survivors - I played the hell out of this… when it was called “Robotron 2084” in 1982, with better graphics. Alternately when it was a free, hidden game called Geometry Wars packed in with Project Gotham Racing 2 in 2003, also with better graphics.
I guess my major complaint is the graphics. I don’t suppose it can be re-skinned or anything?
Dave the Diver - Not really interested in indie games or sim games.
Hogwarts Legacy - Platinumed on PS5, GREAT game.
Elden Ring - Not masochistic enough for Souls games.
Palworld - Would literally rather open my wrists.
Cyberpunk 2077 - Again, 65" television, this one through the Xbox Series X.
Grand Theft Auto 5 - Never really been interested in the GTA games. 4 was OK, I guess.
Stardew Valley - Sim game. Meh.
Red Dead Redemption - Loved this game… in 2010… 2 never clicked for me. It was slow and the controls were super janky.
The steam deck isn’t really meant to replace your home consoles. I personally use mine when I travel or know it’ll be slow at work, or when I just can’t be assed to get out of bed.
Sounds like you already own all the consoles that a steam deck can emulate/replace. I’m on the other side of the spectrum where the deck allows me to experience a console life, with my pc library. Never owned a ps5, or Xbox or any of that, so a Steam deck offers me the experience of couch gaming, TV gaming, or mt favorite, sit in bed all day an watch TV on my deck!
I barely touch my PC these days. Steam deck everywhere. Playing all the games I bought but never got around to. Crysis 2, mass effect, LA noire. Amazing piece of kit,
I’m seeing many bugs on the steamdeck with bg3. It’s perfectly fine working, it’s mostly software bugs. Some were funny ( teleporting chars) but the latest one stopped my progression. Share trials, one of the orbs to continue…just doesn’t appear. I’ll have to get the game working on another machine in order to fix, but it sucks. I have over 60 hours in the game.
Nintendo: “Let’s force retro gamers to buy the Switch if they want to play our titles, by pressuring Steam to remove all Nintendo emulators, and by suing Switch emulators into oblivion.”
Also Nintendo: “Why don’t retro gamers want to buy our products anymore?”
You will just purchase rent your old Switch games on the New Switch 2 Eshop2. Then you can play up to 30 days so long as it is on your Home Wifi, and you do not have guests over.
If the Switch 2: Electric Boogaloo detects an emulator running on any device on the same network the Nintendo Security Devision will dispatch a crack team of lawyers to dispense justice immediately. This team is called … the N-Team!!
Don’t get me wrong: I’ve played through games with it and it’s really great. But there’s a ton of glitches and games that don’t play well. In another 5 or 10 years (hopefully I’ve upgraded my hardware by then) it’ll probably be great. But today it’s reserved for enthusiasts who enjoy tinkering with settings or playing less demanding games.
I only used it to replay Kingdom Hearts a few years ago, but I never had any issues with it. And based on this video RPCS3 released yesterday, it looks like there are plenty of games that are very playable, by any definition.
Playable status with the green mark has been a pretty polished experience for me without issues after putting the settings recommended in the wiki. Those that have issues have been stuff like Mgs4 and infamous get ingame status.
I played through MGS4 recently on Arch Linux. Lots of community patches, and tinkering with settings. But it was mostly playable. Textures on any kind of screen in-game (like when a character is video chatting you), some of the flashback sequences, and a few random times the NV mode in south America went completely out of whack. But it was enough to look past the issues and enjoy the story and gameplay after playing MGS1-3
Luckily Steam will keep Duck Game in my library, but I dread the moment Valve leadership changes. Steam has existed for 20 years, and I naively hope I’ll still be able to play my games in 40 years on my Steck Deck.
Well, since you retain a license to the content until you or valve closes your account, you should be covered.
According to their own personal Steam Subscriber Agreement, you only forfit licenses when you end your subscription (like EA Play) or when the main service contract ends (close your account).
Although they may try, but then you can still sue for breach of contract.
That’s as things may be now. What we have consistently seen is that company’s can often change their policy whenever they want. It’s happened too many times already to think the current lunch is future proof
Steam can remove games from your account. Their definition of a subscription is different than what you think it is:
the rights to access and/or use any Content and Services accessible through Steam are referred to in this Agreement as “Subscriptions.”
The clause allowing games to be removed from a group of people:
Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally,
That was always the point of digitizing the world. It’s crazy to me that people didn’t see it coming, but it’s nice that people are actually taking notice now.
I disagree, digitizing is what is saving a lot of the media. You can save hundreds of thousands of hours of videos and many games in a single 20TB drive today. You couldn’t do that without digital technology.
In fact, the lack of digital storage is why, to name an infamous example, the only recordings of most episodes of the original Doctor Who show are from the private collections of viewers: the BBC, lacking both funding and storage space, were forced to record new content over episodes with no backup.
I hate it when luddites pine for the days of my childhood and early adulthood where the storage, transfer, and use of every single type of media was so damn impractical compared to now.
It’s like wanting to go back to horses and walking being the only forms of land transportation because some trains are loud 🤦
Yeah, it’s bizarre reading people say they want physical games because if it’s not physical steam might remove it. Bro just download it and don’t delete it from your device, steam is offering a re-download service but nothing is stopping users from just downloading the game and keeping it in their disks.
It’s more like wanting to go back to horses and walking because some cars have started driving themselves to the manufacturer to be scrapped in the middle of the night, but i have to agree with you.
It is far easier to make an iso work than to crack a compiled program open and edit out its securities, and anybody who says otherwise has no idea what they’re talking about.
Because it in its entirety can be run with a disk reader and associated hardware. At most it might ask for a license code, but otherwise any game that needs online connection via a proprietary app is just a digital good with extra steps.
If you download the game through a client or other proprietary software then in all likelyhood it does not function without that client. Meaning you don’t have the game. You have a fragment of the game.
They've been trying for at least 30 years, probably closer to 50-60 TBH.
One of the concepts they(RIAA/MPAA) were looking into for the entire CD/DVD era was the idea of a time-limited disk that would only work for a short period of time before becoming unreadable.
By the time they got it working, Steam was already a thing and distribution through physical media was on the way out.
Now they control movie theaters through streaming. They stream the movies to the theaters, the theaters rarely get physical or even digital copies anymore. It just gets streamed right to the projector.
They also monitor outbound streaming. I've twice had a documentary movie I was watching at a theatre stopped because so one was supposedly live streaming the movie to the internet. The second time it happened they stopped the movie until the person doing it stopped, only it turned out they made a mistake and no one was live streaming it at all - they just interrupted the movie for fucking ages because of wanky attitudes. What made it even more stupid was that it was a special screening for a one off event AND a pretty niche documentary that most people wouldn't give a fuck about let alone pirate 🙄
The developer of another game distributed by WB, Fist Puncher, commented on the Ars Technica story about this.
Found it, it’s the “Promoted Comment” now.
therealmattkain I’m one of the creators and developers of Fist Puncher which was also published by Adult Swim on Steam. We received the same notice from Warner Bros. that Fist Puncher would be retired. When we requested that Warner Bros simply transfer the game over to our studio’s Steam publisher account so that the game could stay active, they said no. The transfer process literally takes a minute to initiate (look up “Transferring Applications” in the Steamworks documentation), but their rep claimed they have simply made the universal decision not to transfer the games to the original creators.
This is incredibly disappointing. It makes me sad to think that purchased games will presumably be removed from users’ libraries. Our community and our players have 10+ years of discussions, screenshots, gameplay footage, leaderboards, player progress, unlocked characters, Steam achievements, Steam cards, etc. which will all be lost. We have Kickstarter backers who helped fund Fist Puncher (even some who have cameo appearances in the game) who will eventually no longer be able to play it. We could just rerelease Fist Puncher from our account, but we would likely receive significant backlash for relaunching a game and forcing users to “double dip” and purchase the game again (unless we just made it free).
Again, this is really just disappointing. It seems like more and more the videogame industry is filled with people that don’t like and don’t care about videogames. All that to say, buy physical games, make back-ups, help preserve our awesome industry and art form. March 7, 2024 at 12:51 am
IIRC Steam lets people who purchased (or rather add to their library) a game access to it indefinitely. A famous example was second party side-scrolling half-life game named Codename Gordon. It’s delisted but still available with the right steam command. I personally also have a source mod on steam on my account where it had been delisted due to potential lawsuit but I can still play it if I wanted.
IIRC Steam lets people who purchased (or rather add to their library) a game access to it indefinitely.
That has definitely been the case with at least some games in the past that publishers removed. I am not aware of any cases where a game that someone purchased stops being available.
That being said, I kind of suspect that if it’s not possible to buy it any more, an existing player probably isn’t going to be getting much by way of any fixes at that point, but that’s gonna be the case for any game at some point.
No, you don’t. Games can include online-checks via company servers. If those shut down, some of your games cannot dial home anymore and will not start. Then you got useless discs lying around.
Piracy solves that issue, so for this kind of situation, the only way is piracy. I know some people like to stay within legal limits but that’s not a fair playing field at all for the consumer.
I didn’t say anything about purchasing the media only that a physical copy is the only way to ensure you retain access. Online checks are trivial to bypass (see: them being bypassed constantly.)
How do you back up the games you’ve pirated if not to a physical media? Further “physical media” doesn’t mean “only dvds” but means “hdds” as well. Some of you people are just so eager to argue and correct someone you don’t even think about the comment you’re replying to, have fun with that.
edit: I’m not arguing against piracy, I’m arguing for making backups and not assuming that torrent (or infrastructure to activate software) will always be there. Unless you control the data (physically) it’s not yours.
discs are a personal archiving solution (quite a bad one too, unless you’re into m-discs n stuff) and do not solve the data accessibility issue (copying it is labor intensive and needs human interaction, in contrast to a torrent)
That’s what in saying, you store it on media you control. If you need to migrate it every decade or so to avoid loss/degradation so be it. Unless you physically have that data it’s not yours and access can be lost at any time.
Agreed, a single physical copy can easily be lost.
Making physical copies often requires cracking/piracy. E.g. in my jurisdiction it’s illegal to circumvent “functional” copy protection, even though the right for a private copy is written in law. The problem is courts consider DVD’s long broken copy protections functional.
This is why in my opinion physical copies and piracy/cracking go hand in hand. The former isn’t possible without the latter.
E.g. I bought Lego Star: TCS again on Steam, because it was less work than getting rid of the copy protection on the disk.
Just a side note that M-DISC exists which is essentially a blue ray disk with a claimed longevity of a thousand years (strong emphasis on “claimed”. there’s a lot of controversy around it)
but yes the only way to retain access is piracy as it allows people that didn’t have the media to get it
Thanks for reminding me I need to try mdisc. I have multiple redundant backups but don’t trust any of them for long term. (Hard drive, SSD flash, USB flash)
My carefully burned DVDs are going bad after 15 years just like you said. (They were checked for pio errors at time of burn using only verbatim azzo 100 year media and stored in my basement in black dvd cases.)
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by magazine, feel free to expand. I’ll answer the party I can though… I back up certain media to an additional hard drive, but not everything. Some movies, all music, and some old comic books and magazines (Savage Sword of Conan, and it’s like).
Every bit of physical media I have is also backed up digitally, because I don’t even watch physical media anymore.
I dont really have a point to make, just writing out my thoughts.
Magazine is just the nomenclature in the fediverse, this is a “magazine” not a subreddit.
I back up pretty much everything, I guess a lot of the confusion is based on my phrasing, I was considering a RAID in your closet a physical backup while obviously the media there is being stored digitally.
I honestly don’t understand the math of not releasing movies and un-releasing games. People say tax purposes but I’d think streaming is essentially pure profit, hard to imagine not being able to make 20% of your money back or whatever credit you get for taxes.
You clearly have no idea what a tax write off is. If you get 50$ profit spend 25$ on your business and pocket 25$ you pay taxes on your pocketed 25$ not the companies expenditures. That is a tax write off. A “company” doesn’t pay taxes.
The second part of this comment doesn’t make a lot of sense.
My understanding is that the tax system allows for the declaration of depreciation in assets as a business expense. This is fine for assets with transparent market valuations.
The part where this system could be abused is in willfully withholding the release of a movie, overvaluing the expected revenue, and then subsequently declaring the lack of revenue as a depreciation in assets which is then declared as a business expense to reduce the tax burden.
A clearer example of this, with very obvious fraud, might be:
I paint a picture, spending about an hour of my time and 30$ of paint and canvas.
I then organize a silent/shady auction for my painting, and secretly bid $1,000,000 for my own painting
Then I decide to not pay for it and at the same time I decide to retract the sale instead of opening it up.
On paper I have a $1,000,000 asset that has been depreciated by $1,000,000 which allows me to deduct $1,000,000 from my other taxes.
So obviously this example was fraudulous. It’s possible that the expected revenue on the cases involving movies was estimated transparently and was fair, because of market forces.
You can’t write off expected future profits. That would essentially make income taxes meaningless. You can use a depreciation schedule for movies that you’ve produced and spread your tax savings out if you want(and you can avoid doing that by cancelling the movie all together and claiming it on your taxes now as a deduction), but that only matters when you’re actually making future money for the movie that you want to reduce your tax burden on. WB is losing a hell of a lot of money in the future to save money right now.
They are losing money on streaming. It was so bad that they took their cash cow HBO and grouped it with their streaming divisions to improve their financial report. WBD is making insane decisions because their #1 goal is to increase free cash flow to pay off their debts, whereas most companies’ #1 goal is to “increase shareholder value.”
You got the production company that pays $100 million to make a movie. The production company is owned by a studio. Production company licenses the movie to the studio that owns it for $200 million. But it’s all the same ownership and no money changed hands. It’s just on paper. So now the $100 million movie cost $200 million. Then the studio licenses out the movie to the marketing company, which the studio also owns, for $300 million. Again no money changed hands and the value is all on paper.
Do that a couple more times and that’s how a movie that literally cost $100 million and made $500 million at the box office “barely broke even”.
Might be off on the layers, but I heard that description of movie accounting years ago.
Exactly. I left that part off since I thought it was already a long description. But completely true. Can’t pay out an actor that takes a percentage if it never made any money on the “official” paper.
A big part is also residuals, they don’t want to have to keep paying actors, directors, and others involved with production, after the fact on a losing property. If there is zero income there are zero continued payments.
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