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if i ever had any shred of interest remaining in buying a console, it’s gone now. do they think they’re going to be the netflix of video games? good luck trying to compete with steam…
I was honestly rfully ready to be a sucker to buy a ps5 and gta6 on release day. Was ready for it. Money saved and set aside. All this anti consumer shit just made me not immediately.
If anything became adamant in the last 1-2 decades: never play on release-day (or patch-day for multiplayer-titles) and never ever preorder.
I feel the same way you do. I’m okay with digital purchases on Steam because it’s basically a catalog of receipts I can point at if I eventually have to pirate something I bought, but I don’t have that option on a console. Well, I do, but it’s a huge hassle.
Yeah…that’s not how copyright works. Just because you bought the game, doesn’t mean pirating isn’t still illegal. If they’re going to catch you, that steam purchase means nothing.
That being said, I pirate all the time, because fuck 'em!
Unless it’s a super small indy team that would actually be hurt by my pirating. Them I’ll support. But Nintendo can fuck off with that anti-rom behavior. I don’t need to pay Nintendo continuously to play Super Mario World. I feel no pity or shame in pirating a game like that. That whole thing goes back to my whole previously mentioned policy on “fuck 'em!”.
I mean, I don’t think that Steam sells any physical media either.
Granted, Steam isn’t the only place to buy PC games, but I went looking in an earlier thread that was talking about the PS5 physical disc shutdown. I could think of one retailer, Matrix Games — they specialize in milsims — that still sold physical media. It looks like they shut that down last year, had a “last call” for orders for games on physical media.
https://www.matrixgames.com/news/important-update-last-chance-to-purchase-physical-manuals-and-editions-before-march-1st
And that wasn’t a large portion of their library — like, you couldn’t get physical-media versions of most of their games even then.
PC allows you to (mostly) own your games once you buy them, at least the offline functionality. Sure it’s legally still just a “license to play the game” but technically you can back up your Steam library, move it to a new PC, whatever. Steam can’t really “take the game back” from you (again, at least the offline functionality).
Meanwhile on console if Sony decides to remove some game from their store, well, that’s it. IIRC it will even become unplayable on your console if you have it downloaded.
Same difference as buying & downloading MP3/FLAC files vs subscribing to a streaming service.
I mean…sort of. Steam will only run in offline mode if you first run it in online mode and ask Steam to allow the machine to enter offline mode. I imagine that this is to keep people from simply installing games on many PCs and then taking them all offline.
checks
Yeah, sounds like a maximum of one host can be offline for an account, and I imagine that they fingerprint hosts.
Some games don’t require Steam to be running. Like, Steam just downloads them and launches them, and they still work even if you launch them without Steam running, don’t use Steamlib. For those, yes.
There are other PC game vendors who do explicitly support this mode of operation, like GOG.
Huh, that’s fair. I mostly play non-DRM games (or I guess games which don’t check steamlib to start?) so never noticed this.
Honestly really increased my interest a lot. Been shopping the local game stores. Thinking starting with a N64. But there a bunch of good options.
I love my Wii, it’s always immediately ready, has good haptics and some of the games are just awesome.
I’ve been on a DS/3DS binge lately myself. It’s so fun hunting hidden gems for good prices.