https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24254922/california-digit...
California new law forces digital stores to admit you're just licensing content
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41663432 - Sep 2024 (11 comments)
(2) There is also a submission from today related to this article (though TFA and this other article are both rather light and shallow at ~1 paragraph each):
Steam now tells gamers up front that they're buying a license, not a game (engadget.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41809193 (15 comments)
(3) Finally, a marginally more informative article from Ars:
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/steam-now-reminds-you...
I've switched to retro gaming and find I enjoy it more. For example, exploring 90s Japanese games that never saw wide release in the US. Recently I've found some real winners exploring the X360 and PS3 back catalog of indie games via emulation. I'd never seen many of these because they were only released on their respective online services. Of course, with the shutdown of those stores, these titles would be lost to time were it not for the preservation and emulation communities archiving them. This is why I'm a fan of publishers like GOG who're at least making an effort toward perpetual availability.
Games are getting definitively worse. You are a revenue stream, not a customer or a person to app Al to in any way but the most lazy and base ways possible.
Each successive graphic generation places additional production cost to build models and world's, arguably to the artistic detriment of any game: first, since there is so much labor, corners are cut and artistic vision can't be applied everywhere to an army of graphic artists, many outsourced. Second, the overall production costs, much like movie production, makes producers conservative and cookie cutter in pursuit of a reliable return on investment.
The emulation community is preserving not just games, but an entirely different culture of gaming.
Perhaps AI can help with better mass generation of artistic assets, but really an AI is a mass averager of it's inputs: artistic vision is fundamentally a deviation from a norm, and large AI models are anything but
but if you rewind your render quality expectations by about ten years, there are still great games being made for way under $100mm. I'll plug two of my current favorites:
* factorio ($20). if you don't already know what it is, I can't really summarize it here. the entire team is < 10 people, but it's rare example of engineering excellence combined with a carefully curated user experience. I try to get all the devs and PMs I work with to read their blog.
* zero k (free). a bit more wacky, but one of the best rts of all time. they also have an interesting dev blog, and for a nice cherry on top, it's open source. some feature requests on the forums get the reply "great idea, I look forward to your PR", which I find pretty funny.
Modern games are wrestling with a lot of uncanny valley stuff still. They've improved a lot from the polar Express movie, but it's still an issue.
I recall the recent ads for first descendant where a guy is clearly smoking, which I thought was some vaping thing in realtime, but the smoking is even worse. Probably cigarette companies shadow funding things there.
It's been pretty lightspeed how the days of google do no evil has went to the great woke purge after covid and now is no holds barred mamma sociopathy. It was like 5 years.
I get the MBA sociopathy has been bubbling under the surface and lots of scary movements around the borders, but it is scary what is going on with big tech.
My account is almost 20 years old (I signed up because you had to in order to play HL2) and I've purchased a lot of games over the years.
I only buy maybe 2-3 games a year from Steam directly. Most of the games in my library are from humble bundle (or similar sites). It's just been easier to click the Paypal button for the occasional impulse buy than to track down my wallet.
I'll probably go ahead and put my CC details in now that I know Paypal carries risk.
Once burned twice shy.
I just stole the games instead!
Maybe someone will create a gaming model that 'borrows' from every known game in existence, so that we'll finally get an Artificial Gaming-you Intelligence.
I treat games as mostly consumption items. I play them for a while, and then I might as well throw them to trash if they were physical items. If it wasn't for that I wouldn't accept lack of source code anyway, just like with the OS and important personal computing software.
Machine code has always been enough.
I'm just stating the fact. If you want to own software, you need to get the source code. If you don't get the source code, you're paying $10-$60 per perishable consumable, and should be always be aware of that, not deluding yourself about some "ownership".
I own my personal computer software, from the Linux OS, through code editor, compilers, etc. I have the source code. I personally care, so I do own, and pay extra (in time and money) for that privilege and look down on people who don't, as I think they are foolish. I do not care about the games, so the license deal is fine with me. I played the game already, if I really want to play it again, I can pay $5 on sale again.
If you and others care about owning games, or any other software for that matter, demand and pay for the source code. Otherwise you own nothing.
And even if source code is provided, it can be next to impossible to build it on your machine, so hopefully it has a docker image or what have you. Would also need to know the GPU requirement to compile it.
Not saying I wouldn't want the source code to be provided, but I'd like it purely for research and modding purposes, not to make sure I can build from source 10 years from now.
I'm not sure about today given stuff getting "smarter", but home appliances do typically include the schematics. You typically find them inside an envelope as you disassemble the thing.
Same thing with open code -- one may say that depending on its license you also may not own it. But I say it's one step better.
> (b)(1) It shall be unlawful for a seller of a digital good to advertise or offer for sale a digital good to a purchaser with the terms buy, purchase, or any other term which a reasonable person would understand to confer an unrestricted ownership interest in the digital good, or alongside an option for a time-limited rental...
> (4)This section does not apply to any of the following: ...(C) Any digital good that is advertised or offered to a person that the seller cannot revoke access to after the transaction, which includes making the digital good available at the time of purchase for permanent offline download to an external storage source to be used without a connection to the internet.
https://digitaldemocracy.calmatters.org/bills/ca_202320240ab...
GOG Galaxy has been experimental until recently and it is more concerned with being a unified gaming client rather than the primary way to distribute GOG games. In the last couple of years it has actually become quite unstable anyway and it is barely being maintained, clearly not a focus, Linux or not.
“Forcing its users to be at the whim of Microsoft” is quite a stretch.
But if the idea is that other platforms might screw you over some time down the line and this platform will have your back, I am not convinced if they entirely dismiss Linux. I know it is not practical for CDPR to develop Proton like Valve. The bare minimum they can do though is to show they have contingency plans in case Valve stops upstreaming its translation layer. Otherwise, why not stick to the platform that is too big to fail and is actually doing something useful?
Also consider the fact that a large fraction of GOG games are painstakingly restored old games, where revenue is clearly an afterthought, they sometimes seem like a nonprofit. You can’t reasonably expect them to also add Linux support to games from an era where Linux gaming was practically nonexistent, modern Linux translation layers will most likely be completely incompatible.
And again, they have not had a client for most of their tenure, and I cannot think of anything more consumer-friendly or consistent with Linux ideology than literally letting you download the files and do what you want with them without any DRM.
And you can just download the games from their website, they don't force you to use gog galaxy.
Proton itself is open-source[1].
If someone wanted to package up standalone Proton binaries for a Linux distro, then I don't see any particular barriers that would prevent that.
On GoG's part, they do provide the ability to just download a game with a web browser (the old-fashioned, DRM-free way). From there, I can manage the games I that own in any way that I choose.
Thus, I'm simply not seeing a problem here that needs solved. I already have the freedom to do whatever I want.
Which part of this situation is broken, do you suppose, and why does GoG in particular need to fix it?
[0]: https://boilingsteam.com/valve-breaks-the-shackles-of-proton...
The only way to ensure I have a working backup of a GOG installer is to download the Windows release even when Linux is an option.
also game developer that made Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077.
Can we please for the love of all that is logic stop repeating this cartoonishly inaccurate stereotype?
Of course, Linux users might pirate the games, as do Windows users. I am purely talking about legal rights here. I have to imagine there are quite a few developers with a primary Linux PC who are much more inclined to purchase a game if it doesn't require pulling out a special purpose Windows machine or dealing with an unofficial hack that barely works. Maybe those potential revenues don't justify the high costs of changing some compiler flags to CDPR.
Linux compatibility layers are actually getting pretty good anyway, and it's easier to get your game to run that way than to actually properly port it to linux.
> "In general, your GOG account and GOG content is not transferable. However, if you can obtain a copy of a court order that specifically entitles someone to your GOG personal account, the digital content attached to it taking into account the EULAs of specific games within it, and that specifically refers to your GOG username or at least email address used to create such an account, we'd do our best to make it happen. We're willing to handle such a situation and preserve your GOG library—but currently we can only do it with the help of the justice system."
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/gog-will-let-you-beq...
I've had to refund a few games, I've never had a problem.
Allow me a short incoherent essay on my thoughts on the subject.
Public domain is a fascinating concept to me, My view is somewhat US centric, for example, some countries have no legal equivalent of the concept. but I think the idea that we the public can collectively own something is neat. Nothing wrong with copyright, I think copyright is a very important legal structure recognizing the effort to create something. but I also think it somewhat enlightened to say after a given amount of time the public owns this. Or the way the US government says "works created by the US government are for the good of all US citizens and as such are in the public domain". should a person be allowed to say "I made this for the public good and release any claim of ownership over it". sqlite infamously has trouble because some countries are legally unable to recognize a work put in the public domain. But all of nasa's software and papers are available under the same consideration.
A manufactured item is fairly hard to copy and the law on counterfeit goods is correspondingly weak. There is some law there, but it is hard to get it enforced, usually requires a court battle, etc. for example design of garments are infamously impossible to protect, garment manufactures tend to have to lean hard on trademark law to get any protection on design.
But printed works, It is easy to get a perfect copy, and computers are even worse. Trying to make a computer not copy something is like trying to make water that is not wet. This is the domain that copyright law started to appear. Basically laws explicitly saying you own what you wrote and get rights about decisions on when and where it can be copied.
But the point of my rather long-winded and incoherent rant is to say they can and do sell copies. when you buy a work those bits belong to you. you can do whatever you want with them... well, almost whatever you want with them. It is illegal to distribute them to others as this runs afoul of copyright law.
Such people are taken by surprise when it turns out companies can take away your “bought” content simply by virtue of changing licensing agreements or corporate structure without public input. Some recent cases:
• Crunchyroll and Funimation merged. People who had “permanent” digital copies purchased from Funimation lost them.
• Sony’s license for Discovery Channel content was not renewed, so all Discovery videos people had purchased (most notably, 20 seasons of Mythbusters) were removed from customers’ libraries.
• Ubisoft shut down the servers for The Crew and removed it from purchasers’ Steam libraries, despite the presence of a 20‐hour single‐player campaign that was online only for no good reason.
Maybe people will get used to this and consider all purchases ephemeral. I hope not. That’s why I buy and advocate for DRM‐free media.
What happens when Gabe Newell dies is another very important question that adds some urgency - one or two decades - to establishing more balanced policies.
I thought it was common knowledge you’re only buying a license to play via steam. You never own the game outright forever.
While that wouldn't make sense these days, knowing the installer you downloaded will still work decades from now is great, and I hope to see more companies like GOG start doing this.