I wanted to show my gf the halo 1 campaign, so I downloaded the 30GB Masterchief Collection via steam. When I launched it, I was greeted with a black box. After 1 Minute it was a microsoft login screen that looked eerily like a browser inside the game. Since I couldn't do anything else, the game was stuck at a sub 720p resolution. I said fine Ill just create an account. Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email and email verification code later I had to do captcha which is clicking and holding down a button. "Help us against the bots" it said. I unironically spent 5 minutes clicking that button, then being stuck in a loop with "please try again" while my gf just sat there watching me.
Well I turned off MCC and gave up.
I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware
This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
There's something seriously wrong in Redmond.
At least with linux, you can search on the web and find a forum post telling you the magic incantation. With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged, barely workable, edge case until it might or might not work.
It is strange to me that people are re-discovering this today, in 2026. Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ years ago) by running a business fixing problems with Microsoft products for their clients.
I was able to take a 25 year break from Microsoft, from 2000 to 2025. Yet I was drawn back in because my son wanted to play Minecraft. This was the worst account process of any system ever invented, as far as I can tell. Plus in 2025 I had some interesting clients that are large corporations that use Microsoft as their core IT practice. The escape to the relative simplicity and consistency of AWS interfaces, from MS land, was the best part of the IT experience with that client. (With how much I've moaned and complained about AWS over the years, that last sentence is the most damning thing I can possibly say about Microsoft's products.)
I started writing a long rant about my experience with Microsoft accounts, Minecraft and Microsoft Family whatever they call it. Parental controls and stuff. But I think I'll just agree with you. It sucks, it's confusing and is designed to suck as much money out of you as possible.
Just pirate it. Minecraft is really easy to pirate if you don't want to play multiplayer, or want to play on pirate-compatible servers (which is one boolean flag in the official server configuration file and doesn't require a pirated server).
Make sure to get Java Edition. The other one is just an ad-riddden slopfest where they also ban you if you say swear words.
That is my plan, I have (had, you have to let it go) an old account from when it was a just username, never bothered "updating" it to the email account, I tried to convert when Microsoft said they were dumping all the old accounts, but the process was not working and I quickly decided I don't actually want a Microsoft account. At which point I decided that if I ever wanted to play again I would just do so sans account.
Which raises an interesting question, If I legally have a license for the game but they shut off the license servers, is it actually copyright infringement? (or piracy as people like to call it because copyright infringement sounds lame)
They will certainly argue, and win, by saying that for legal mumbo jumbo reasons, you only have permission to play it in the exact ways they say you can, and if you already bought the game, but they say you can't play, then it's illegal to play.
Which is why coming at this from a legal perspective a farce. Most of the world is like this, actually. You can assume that if some action brings money to large corporations then it's legal and if it takes away their actual or potential revenue then it's illegal. Go with what you feel is morally correct.
It isn't if you can afford enough lawyers to make microsoft's legal department blink at the cost of prosecution. If you can't drop $10K+ on a lawyer at the start though I would not put any money on winning.
The referenced config setting is apparently literally just whether to have the server authenticate accounts with Microsoft, so pirate and nonpirate players can play together on a server with checking off.
I switched to Mac with the Intel change around...2006 maybe? Converted my entire family.
I personally switched to various flavors of linux around 2016-2017 because I wanted more hardware options.
Eventually, my son got into gaming and eventually we let him get an Alienware laptop maybe 2-3 years ago. Then my wife had to get one for work this year. It's like nothing has improved in 20 years.
If ever there was a case study in the complexity of "market forces", it's Microsoft's Windows' resilience to pressure from clearly superior options like MacOS. As a life long Linux user, I'd like to believe it's the year of desktop Linux, and Linux is a clear threat, but...maybe next year.
Naively one would think that the single greatest market force on Windows would be its users making informed decisions and migrating to better OS options. But continually they don't. So it's clear that Windows' own merits are not what shapes those market forces, but a complex ecosystem of gaming, IT departments, and a long tail of other things difficult to enumerate.
There were problems, but they were problems of a distinct and different kind.
Back in the early 1990s you'd get Microsoft Office from the store, as a box containing 10 floppy disks. And they had to put a lot of effort into testing it, because patching was impossible. And of course it was fully offline. Perpetually licensed, with paid upgrades.
The problems were instead things like "this notionally multi-user OS is just a single-user OS with a decorative login screen" and "any application can crash the entire OS" and "spreadsheets auto-run macro viruses" and things like that.
'always online' has created a whole new set of buggy from a lot of companies. For example cyberpunk is NOW a playable game. Launch date was a very mixed bag. 'fix it after launch' ugh.
I never had problems with cyberpunk but I think I know why: I built a new PC right around its release and it was good enough to play it smoothly on 4K medium or HD ultra.
When I checked to see what 4K ultra looked like, the graphics latency caused a bunch of scripting to fall apart and the game glitched really bad.
IIRC the console release was notorious for bugs, so I assume consoles were not performant enough to run the game buttery smooth nor could they be easily upgraded.
I encountered bugs when it first released even with a decent PC. IIRC there was a mission where you were running away in a truck, and it would crash every time at a certain point so I could never complete it. Also the whole save file size limit debacle, where they never actually removed deleted items from your inventory and the save file would reach a certain size that the game could no longer read (10mb or something like that)
I guess it’s surprising because how ubiquitous their products are. You’d expect them to be of better quality considering everyone is using MS software one way or another.
Their products/services are ubiquitous not because they are good but because they got where they are today by abusing monopoly power and shady tactics.
On the business side, with M365, they use lock-in tactics and extremely aggressive bundle pricing. The only competitor is Google Workspace, and it's missing features you get bundled with something like an E5 license. So your choice becomes: just pay Microsoft $60/user/month and get Identity, Office, Intranet, MDM, EDR, DLP, ZTNA, the works. Or, buy Google Workspace and then also buy Slack, Okta, JamF (or Jumpcloud or similar), some ZTNA product, etc. and you are now at double or more the price of an E5 license.
On the consumer side with Windows, they secured their monopoly via internet explorer, and predatory OEM contracts to prevent machines being sold with anything else. Now Windows is just an ad-delivery network disguised as an OS. People don't leave Windows because its still, through those shady backroom deals, the default OS on every off the shelf PC, and because of existing software.
Microsoft has zero incentive to build a good product now, they already won. People use it because they have to not because they want to.
Don't agree at all. Microsoft originally hoped that other vendors office type offerings would be good enough, they weren't (lotus notes) so Microsoft did it themselves.
Bill gates also understood the value great programmers. The whole business revolved around this premise. this was different from other software companies at the time. Read the likes of Gabe Newell and Joel spolsky said about their time there. It was in a league of it's own.
There are a lot of great things we got from Microsoft, a zero fee platform to target, a platform that would run on what ever cobbled together pc parts you threw at it. An unbelievable attention to backwards compatibility.
Compare that to what we have now in the app store and play store.
I mean it's a good deal. As you say, when a company goes above a certain size, it does not make sense to pay for GSuite + Slack + Zoom + RMM/MDM + Zscaler
Windows is still good for gaming PCs, and it will now handle and update itself reliably. No I don't need to hear anecdotes, I work in the IT desktop space. IT janitor monkey if you will. There is no way an enterprise will convert laptops to linux or chromebook.
You see it as malicious, but well, even Google have trouble in this space. Because it is hard.
And they got that position of dominance more via shady deals and sketchy practices than by producing excellent software. Microsoft has done some good engineering, but that's not what made them what they are.
They haven't supported Office in years. You're only supposed to use the web app version now. And it's not called Office any more, it's called Copilot 365. Not joking.
Product quality has nothing to do with ubiquity. Its all about shady business deals that locks you into products where the migration cost is much higher.
Microsoft products are no longer ubiquitous. That's an early 2010s view. In 2026 most clients are running Android, followed by iOS, followed by Mac, and use Google Docs for their office work. Windows is only used on a per-company basis. If your company uses it it uses it, otherwise it doesn't.
Only small companies here (North EU - Sweden) use Mac + Gsuite + Slack + Zoom as a stack.
Companies over 20 staff are on Windows laptops + Office 365 E3 or E5.
Android and iOS? Sure on the phones...
What "clients" are you talking about? Edit: Re-reading I think you mean clients as in general computers, not business clients. Yes, more of the world is on phones but that is due to cost and society (ipad/iphone kids or third world on android). Real work is all done on PCs/Macs.
Schools are on chromebooks for the kids and Windows or Mac for teachers.
You got it mostly right. It's Android, then iOS, then Windows. It is still the number one PC OS, in terms of active users and sales. MacOS is a distant second. Of course in 2026, if you want to make money as a developer selling directly to consumers, your best targets are probably iOS and macOS. Android and Windows are rife with users who'll never buy anything and pirates.
You're confusing number of people with percentages. There's still a large share of people who'll pay to use software on windows or android provided your software is good enough. This wrong impression comes from the fact that many users are from 3rd world countries who can't afford anything else. Steam made their entire business selling stuff on windows. And not just proprietary software. Many blender and godot addons are paid and nobody complains. Apart from developing software, where linux and osx are far ahead, in terms of industry software such a autodesk, solidworks, rhino, flstudio, etc, windows is THE platform you want to target of you are planning on monetization. And I'm saying this as a exclusive linux user of 3 years. You know who won't pay money? Linux users. Not out of lack of it, but mostly because of principle of FOSS software. And yes, I'd rather use a inferior FOSS alternative than a slightly better proprietary one
> ... considering everyone is using MS software one way or another.
This used to be the case when Apple was in dire straits and MS abused their monopoly position to gain 95% of browsers market share. Grim days.
But those days are thankfully long done and there are plenty of people who are completely Microsoft-free.
The one thing people are using one way or another is Linux, because it's now in just about everything. Even those in the Apple ecosystem, with an iPhone and Mac computers, very probably have a Linux router and Linux TV at home.
The number of devices in the world running one version of Linux or another outnumber Windows devices by something like 10 to 1. Maybe more.
Microsoft is a despicable company producing turds since forever. I hate them and the crap they produce with a passion since the DOS days.
As the saying goes: the day Microsoft shall produce something that doesn't suck is the day they'll start selling vacuum cleaners.
They're ubiquitous because everyone else fucked up during the 80's and 90's charging too much for everything. MS was affordable. It's really just Apple gaining economy of scale by manufacturing in China and Linux being free while being higher quality that make MS look bad.
Also MS stuff has always been slop. Hate their business practices too. But without Linux we'd be choosing between MS, Apple and Oracle Solaris or something...
Since some time around 2024, the problems started to grow way more numerous than they already were; the workarounds started to be disallowed; and more broken software started to be pushed as necessary for basic functionality. People were adapted to a certain level of breakage, but are seeing a different one.
Last time I remember them doing something similar was on the last days of XP / earlier Vista time. But it wasn't so bad at the time.
A very very limited defense of Microsoft and their whole "support vendor" "ecosystem": if you are selling a complex product, there is value in having a robust knowledge base of known problems with known solutions, and a huge base of people who know all the right workflows. A buggier product that's well known and understood is maybe even preferable to a less buggy product with poorly understood failure modes. At least back in the heyday of the NT kernel times, it seemed like there were "MVP"s or whatever that knew the right way to do everything.
(Not that I would know, I don't touch Microsoft's shit with a 10-foot-pole)
I remember that back in the mid 80s the Application group was not happy about the quality of work so someone circulated a memo about software quality, which I read from Steven Sinorfsky’s blogs. Adding NT on top of it, I’d say they definitely treat software quality a lot more serious than today.
I think they completely let it go when they laid off the testers and let users pay $$ to be testers, starting from 2010s perhaps. Maybe earlier.
I remember windows 2000 being pretty rock solid. I used it as my gaming os for years while folks struggled with windows me and windows xp (IIRC, xp did eventually become pretty good)
Literally everything that came after Windows Me both in the consumer and server space is based on NT, to this day. So I'm not sure this argument weighs much.
P.S. My personal opinion is that Windows could be a great OS but MS keeps intentionally saddling it with more and more shit in the name of getting more from the user, instead of giving more to the user.
The kernel is okish. But compared to Linux it is surprisingly bad at a number of things. Handling lots of tiny files in huge directory trees is much slower on Windows than Linux for example. I dont know if that is due to NTFS vs ext4/btrfs/xfs, or if it is some broader issue in the NT kernel.
Some other things have been baffling over the years (but I belive they are now at least somewhat solved). For example in Windows 7 and older Windows would spend tens of seconds on "installing drivers" for a USB stick every time a new stick was inserted (or even an old stick inserted into a new port). I don't remember seeing this on Windows 10 (or 11), but I barely used those.
But yes, compared to the userspace the kernel is way less jank. (Like how Windows Updates takes minutes to run to conclude that there are updates, and dozens of minutes to install them, while pacman -Syu on Arch can be done in second if there are no updates, and maybe 2-4 minutes in the worst case of a kernel update with dkms modules being rebuilt.)
> I remember windows 2000 being pretty rock solid.
Windows NT (including Windows 2000) was considered to be a workstation OS by Microsoft. From Windows XP on, the NT-based Windows operating systems (except for the server ones) were targeted to consumers.
I would argue that Microsoft had a solid run for some years in the middle where their software was pretty good quality. I think it started with Windows 2000 and certainly lasted through the XP era. Windows 7 was pretty decent too. Their operating system was straight up trash before win2k and has been in steady decline for some years now. It doesn't surprise me that younger people are only now (re-)discovering that Microsoft operating systems are bad.
> Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ years ago) by running a business fixing problems with Microsoft products for their clients.
I don’t see that as support for the claim that Microsoft’s products were half-baked in the 80s and 90s.
If Linux had sufficient market penetration in small business, I bet you could run a successful business fixing problems with Linux products, even today.
(It may be a bit of a stretch but you could even argue Amazon is making serious money supporting big companies with their Linux problems)
As someone else stated earlier, the NT kernel is actually great.
I find Windows 10 and 11 really good once you tweak it a bit and remove some cruft and tweak regedit/GPO settings. Both for modern software. Not to talk about backwards compatibility, Steam games from 2009 run just fine. Windows is also the standard for online games with anti-cheat. Also, for companies, Excel is a must. Yes, still is.
The whole ecosystem of AD+GPO+ Exchange since 2000 is unparalleled, Novell had something like AD but AD won. That continues with Office 365 where it's not just an office package. It is Identity/accounts/SSO (Entra), MDM (Intune), EDR/"antivirus", Storage (OneDrive), Sharepoint (docs + storage), Teams (Slack + Zoom).
You can buy Okta, Zoom, Slack, Gsuite, an EDR, an MDM but at that point you are paying a lot more for your stack...
I understand if you are a smaller company, then Gsuite + Slack and Zoom is a good choice. But go over 100 people and it starts to not make sense.
I also hear developers liking their IDEs, both full VS and VS Code.
I'd say somewhat fine depending on the title, they broke a lot of backward compatibility recently
> You can buy Okta, Zoom, Slack, Gsuite, an EDR, an MDM but at that point you are paying a lot more for your stack...
I'd also say that's where they won, because it looks like an attractive option for the executive and people in power who can purchase these.
As if you're asking me, sure it's cheaper but these MS products are nowhere near as good as any of the alternatives you listed and you'd have to factor the productivity loss.
It's kind of a cheap all-in buffet, sure it's cheap but quality isn't there.
The NT kernel was actually an IBM project, which got divorced from IBM because of contract stuff and Microsoft got to keep a copy. It grew out of VMS which was a heavyweight OS for DEC VAXen, which IBM acquired.
Part of the revisionist history these days is making IBM out the be hero that was crushed by Microsoft but nothing could be further from the truth. IBM was the lumbering giant that evaluated developers by lines of code produced, had 14 levels of management, and wanted to protect their hardware interests more than anything. Microsoft hated working with them because they sucked. OS/2 was so buggy that the first patch was almost as big as the entire original install.
I actually went into reading this thinking I'd agree with you that "yeah that's such hyperbole they must have made something good", and to my shock the good things they have shipped they eventually ruined.
Examples: Edge (bloated with ads and Copilot), Office (now a subscription, hasn't evolved, annoying integration with copilot), Skype (dead), Halo (virtually dead), Doom (studio gutted), Visual Studio Code (locked down marketplace, replaced plugins with their own, now a giant GitHub copilot ad), Flight Simulator (massive regression with 2024)
Looked through it. I'm only considering things while they owned it. For example, Github was pretty good until Microsoft made them migrate to Azure. Uptime has been bad since.
Several of the games are good, but those were mostly made by game studios they own (or later bought). Those are not really part of the core Microsoft culture.
Old versions of Office (pre-ribbon UI) were perfectly usable (if you ignore the years of Clippy, or you disabled that). But in recent years, not.
VS Code was good but it has been getting worse. Every new release is 90% AI features rather than useful things. And it is an open source project anyway, so they aren't the only contributor.
I guess Minesweeper and Solitare are still pretty good (unless they messed them up in Windows 11, which I have stopped using entirely).
But that is pretty damming isn't it? Pretty much everything on that list is bad currently. And the majority was never great.
It really became a problem only with Windows RT attempting to merge mobile OS with desktop. All the non-sensical UX compromises are still from that.
Later they abandoned consumerware after losing the mobile space but that's a different story. Microsoft isn't really a consumer software company any more so there's no point judging it on that basis.
To bring it back to Xbox a little. I recently picked up an Xbox one X, the late performance boost to their last generation. Firstly, the performance to price ratio is brilliant nowadays, when you get title at native 4K it is a really neat little thing to see.
It can throw around a decent amount for a machine that is almost a decade old... except Halo 2 anniversary, the framerate is cooked on that one but does resolve a native 4K image, so there is that.
But the system software quality is absolute rubbish. I have never seen any other system just trip over itself for just random reasons, it can be UI hang ups, installation issues, network connection issues, that it is constantly pinging their servers just to do basic things, endless random crash outs or any manner of similar problems. I never had that issue on their previous consoles or any other console for that matter. I mean once the software is going in a straight line, you can see the magic but the amount of junk to get to there is comical.
an aside, the only game I can consistently have fail on Switch and PS4 nowadays is Quake 2 when you use their own hand picked mods, and yes, Microsoft owns Bethesda who releases it. Something is very wrong in Redmond. Yeah MS has always had a history of software quality problems but this feels very different. It is like they are just stacking abstraction layers on top of others and ending up with a rat-king of technology debt. Not just that but there seems to be a vibe of just general complacency, that is dragging it all down.
Oh and their online web potart is some of the slowest most bug riddled trash I have ever seen online.
10 redirects to get to the portal, when creating an account/etc. if you do one thing wrong it might just disappear from a tenant or not bind properly or something and then you gotta do it all over again (happened last year)
I just don't know how this is possible, why is everything so broken?
It’s actually impressive just how badly Microsoft fcuked the online experience in Minecraft.
It’s so bad that Occam’s Razor should suggest malice; because an organisation that large and that profitable surely cant be that incompetent at managing the sign in process for the world’s most popular game. Yes here we are.
Back in the early 00s I coined the phrase “everything Microsoft touches turns to shit”. A reverse Midas touch. And unfortunately this is still proving true even into the 2020s
You know whats the cherry on top? I got it working today and you have to download the actual halo 1 campaign as a DLC from inside or outside the MCC game. Even if I got it working yesterday, I'd have to wait for another download. What the 30GB MCC does initially is still a mystery to me.
I looked into it and apparently just the launcher itself is 16GB because it's filled to the brim with extremely oversized videos and sound files, on top of an already overweight base.
All this is supposed to be the peak of game dev prowess. We've had like 50 years of game dev just to evolve to this. It's not just huge launchers - almost everything AAA that's made today feels like it was designed to appear flashy at first glance in some meeting for people who have no idea what they're looking at, while performance, technical features, and the most basic user experience considerations are thrown out of the window.
I mean yeah, just wait until you hear about Ark survival ascended: A game with a single 188gb ucas file extracts itself during update, taking over 400gb just to patch 2gb and then rezips itself.
I've always felt the elimination of their QA department once the current CEO came in is what really started the decline in quality. Now they are being called Microslop for good reason.
Microsoft is basically Oracle Lite. Oracle is not a software company, it is a government contract fulfilment company with a specialisation in software. Its function is to get money and the engineering department is only an excuse to tick all the boxes on a given contract so it can get paid. Microsoft is the same but also does corporate clients. The rest of us get the scraps.
The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry, and that was somewhat extended to Xbox. But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!"
> But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!"
They gutted QA in 2014, ending their software development engineer in test positions, and suggesting the developers should test their own code to get velocity.
Subsequent releases were worse than before, and things have compounded since then. Hard to say that laying off the rest of the team made a noticable difference.
Oh thanks for the correction/supplemental information. The gutting you're referring to might be the huge lay offs that I'm thinking of. Possibly conflating the recent AI driven layoffs with those from 12 years ago.
Thank you for the correction! I think I was conflating the two (having heard about the one from 2014, and then also hearing about the more recent rounds, and not recognizing they were different)
This definitely does not extend to games. I remember microsoft games having terrible UX over a decade ago (not the game, the account garbage around it).
So, I've had a pretty shit time with Microsoft products over the last ten years, but it wasn't quite as bad 5-7 years ago. Our disagreement on that might be that I'm only in my late 20s, so if you're older than I am, or had newer consoles than I had around that time, I might be a little more tolerant of jank.
But according to the other replies, it seems Microsoft has been purging QA for years now.
I don't have much to add except that people have the idea that this is a new low from microslop thanks to vibe coded Devs but it's really not. There has been for so long a culture of contractors being treated as printers. Then never given a long enough contract to receive any benefits because it is cheaper. Way and repeat. Nothing is fully understood and nobody knows where the focus needs to be. No wonder everything is in a state that it is. Garbage.
>With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged,
Or, you'll find the official Microsoft documentation, but will just be out of date, or wrong, or otherwise will not reflect the actual Microsoft product in front of you. It's baffling that people say Linux is hard when I never need to work so hard to get basic things to work as I do with a normal Microsoft product.
Is it? People are buying this crap, why should MS spend more money to increase quality? They will receive the same quarterly revenue but with lower profits. Shareholders will not be happy!
There is some brotherhood of coders who will not acknowledge programmers are anything less than perfect. All bugs and errors are the fault of project managers.
Can you explain this to me? I think it's far more 2000s, when we were having debates about whether software engineers were actually engineers, with professional responsibility, or not.
WinUI 3 was upgraded to stable/release when it had literally thousands of outstanding issues, including stuff like [fully replicable] 'using drag and drop causes the program to crash.' That was about the time I started opting out of the entire MS ecosystem after investing decades in it.
I can't even imagine the chaos they must have going on inside for them to be failing the way they are on the outside. I'm also curious what started it. They've never been a pinnacle of engineering, but things went really went downhill hard in more modern times.
> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
> There's something seriously wrong in Redmond.
I'd say: There is something seriously wrong with the people buying this shit since over 40 years.
It's not like Microslop products weren't pure utter trash already decades ago. They got worse over time, especially lately with "AI", that's true, but nothing ever changed substantially.
Well, the classic BSODs were not all Microsoft's fault, many of them were on 3rd party driver developers.
I think the worse thing here is all the subtle breakages and inconsistencies in Windows, as well as in the MS Office suite of products, constant redesigns of things that worked, adding layers upon layers of "make-up" on top that obscures functionality, etc etc.
Microsoft in the 90s was doing things that hadn't been done before with Windows. And the NT line, converging to consumers at XP, solved many of them, and by now they don't have an excuse any more.
I would argue that they where tge first to try and do all that at once while on non-specified hardware systems. Yes Apple, Amiga etc will similar stuff but they at least had set target hardware.
Microsoft tried to do everything for better and worse on wildly varied commodity hardware.
The first one that pretty much anyone could use and was useful for them. We credit Apple for popularizing the GUI, too, even though they stole it from Xerox.
> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
AKA: Slop. Microsoft was publishing slop before LLMs were even a thing, it's no wonder they were so eager to jump on the AI bandwagon once it showed up. Their company is uniquely set up to take advantage of a slop generator.
I had bought Minecraft before Microsoft bought Mojang, and eventually I was forced to migrate my Minecraft license to a Microsoft account.
After I had successfully created the account, logged in, and transferred the license, and ONLY after I had transferred the license, I was suddenly locked out of my account until I provided a phone number.
I will never buy a Microsoft product again, and I think I've done a decent job reducing the amount of their stuff that other people have bought, as well.
I tried to simply purchase some Minecraft thinggy for my kid and Microsoft sent me through what seemed to be a 70 step process of logging in, captcha, authenticating, verifying, logging in again, trying to buy, getting blocked, captcha, authenticating again, E-mail verification, online verification, blocked again, contacting support, authenticating, talking to their fraud team, re-logging in, captcha, authenticating, E-mail verification... All the while, the browser is redirecting between Microsoft and Xbox websites (I don't even fucking own an Xbox--this is on the PC).
Anything that touches a Microsoft account is fraught with horror and pain. Which is why the idea of requiring one in order to turn on your PC is ludicrous.
Bought Minecraft on one of the first survival mode releases back when Notch was streaming himself making the game and Microsoft stole this from me. I'm not particularly sad about the digital access itself but this low-key meant something to me :|
Happened to many people. The system claims it's because of some suspicious activity but everybody who gave in to this blackmail and submitted personal details said that after logging in there was no notice of anything suspicious.
since this is a game it's probably mostly kids whose identifying information Microsoft is hunting for. I can't believe it's legal and the company was not sued yet
me I just pirate it now, never played on servers anyway.
I've had this happen with at least three accounts, the most recent one for the purpose of playing Grounded with a friend. IIRC, between registering and trying to log in, my account was flagged for suspicious activity and required a phone number.
I bought Minecraft in the alpha days when all you needed was a username and password. At some point they mandated an email in the years I wasn't playing and later found out I could no longer sign in.
I bought a new "copy" and lost it because I didn't migrate to a Microsoft account. I didn't migrate because I assumed it was just a scare tactic and I wasn't playing at the time anyway. When I later wanted to play they stopped allowing me to log in.
When I look at the top selling games[1] and see Minecraft in second place with 400 million, I wonder how many of those are the same people buying it again. I'm sure nobody bought Super Mario because it would stop letting them sign in to play offline.
If you bought during Alpha you're entitled to play it for free forever including all future editions (currently Bedrock) and you could go to small claims court to get your account back, maybe.
Happened to me every time I ever made a Microsoft account. It works for one day, then some fraud process runs overnight and if I try to use it the next day I need a phone number. Good thing I first discovered this on a throwaway account.
This is the same effect of wanting to watch an old film... If you want to do it the legit way, you will have to face all kind of hurdles, starting from finding a service provider that might have the film, then forget about all the modern audience "edits" they put on these things, at times the quality isn't even good, the audio tracks are messed up...
So you either give these jackals at least 30 to 60 minutes of your life (plus money) for the luxury of using their crap services and obtaining a half-assed version of what you want, or you just go to good old Forum McTorrent and get what you actually want for free.
The streaming service is a Cathedral: You've paid your tithe to the temple of HBO Max? Marvelous, please come in, my child and gaze upon our wonders! What? James Cameron's True Lies? It is not in our collection, please remain here and we can watch Commando together! It's just as good!
The digital copy is a Bazaar: You wander the booths of Prime Video, iTunes, and... Fandago!?! They assure you their copy of True Lies is the best! Ignore that other booth... you may save $2 but are you certain that video will still exist in a year?
And the whole time you know that just under the bazaar is the Underground/Black Market where all is preserved and all can be had, but you'll need to work for it.
From a moral PoV pirating old movies isn't a big issue, especially in cases where the original makers are already dead. At that point you're only feeding Hollywood bosses, shareholders and decendants. Same as torrenting music from dead artists. I don't care for Jimi Hendrix' greedy sister or 'Authentic Brands Group', which owns the rights to Elvis Presley's music. These people can create their own art instead of living off other people's work.
Hendrix has been dead for twice the length that copyright originally lasted, and for longer than the copyright period at the time he was alive (i.e. during his life when he was assessing the economic fairness of creating his music, he would've expected his work to already be public domain today). My daughter is older than her grandmother was when that music was written. Why would we care any more than e.g. what Francis Scott Key wanted?
A decent proxy for the maximum appropriate length of copyright might be when the next generation starts making those edits or disclaimers for changing culture (so the original is no longer considered appropriate for current markets), so at most ~20 years or so. One generation, and then it is history/heritage to pass on (or critique, as the case may be).
Who made his guitar? It seems like he made all his art on the back of someone else’s work… they should be getting royalties for every track made with their product
(I’m pointing out the absurdity of trying to assign ownership within a system of shared creation)
I don't think that the guitar manufacturer asked for royalties.
On the other hand there are video cameras that you can't use for commercial purposes because they lack the appropriate video codec license from MPEG-LA :-)
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42735824)
The whole collection, mostly on Blu-Ray, was 50% off at Barnes and Noble when I was there a couple of weeks ago.
There was a huge display right at the entrance of this huge chain retailer, so in spite of the online streaming hype, there must be a non-niche audience for optical media.
Blu-Ray is risky from the DRM side of things. Those disks can be disabled at anytime and can just stop working if the players are offline too long or the manufacture's servers go down. Rip them to your hard drive if you want to keep being able to watch them without begging for permission.
I don't know if I agree with you with this example. Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works. Usually true with a film or TV show through the "forums" too, but not always. Sometimes it's the wrong episode, sometimes it's the wrong language, sometimes one particular show keeps buffering even for no obvious reason. And even though it's quite rare, you never know until you're sat with your wife or friends watching it, because who checks the show in advance?
How would a downloaded file buffer? That sounds more like streaming sites, which yeah are bad. But if you download a movie or season of a show in advance I don't think you'll have the same issues. Language ones or missing subtitles maybe - you gotta check those as the download finishes and before you put it on a media server.
I've no idea. It happens sometimes and only seems to happen with certain fils. In this case I'm sure it's a jellyfin issue, but this just comes down to having to debug while someone is waiting to watch - which is exactly the time I don't want to.
As for language/subtitles it's true if it happens from the start (which I agree, is usually true) but occasionally the downloads get weird midway through.
At that point you’re not playing the downloaded file. You’re either playing a transcoded version of it which will buffer as a computer tries to convert on the fly. Or you’re dealing with a network throughput issue related to the bitrate of the file you’re trying to remotely play.
> Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works.
On streaming services shows get silently censored or edited, or episodes are just outright removed (and get re-numbered so you don't even realize what was removed), and episodes get put out in the wrong order, or they aren't released at all in the right language, and there are no subtitles, only closed captions. Neither streaming or piracy are perfect, but only one them allows you to save a show to your hard drive so you know it will be there the next time you want to watch it unlike streaming where they constantly pull shows offline
> Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works.
Well that's hilariously untrue. Movies getting pulled out of streaming services is why I started to buy physical DVDs again.
> Sometimes it's the wrong episode, sometimes it's the wrong language, sometimes one particular show keeps buffering even for no obvious reason. And even though it's quite rare, you never know until you're sat with your wife or friends watching it, because who checks the show in advance?
Yes, those things do happen with commercial streaming platforms; Paramount is especially bad IME, but hardly unique.
Maybe I'm old school, but the primary lesson Limewire taught me was to always check the media before you show it to someone else.
Every 'issue' that you mentioned about wrong episode, wrong language, etc. If those are the costs to ride the ride then so be it. No CEO gets paid in 'had to redownload a different version'.
> Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email and email verification code later I had to do captcha which is clicking and holding down a button. "Help us against the bots" it said. I unironically spent 5 minutes clicking that button, then being stuck in a loop with "please try again" while my gf just sat there watching me.
I think some of the most prophetic writing in terms of specifics came from Richard Stallman that basically called it all out in the late 1980s, including social media.
You may not always like what he has to say but he did think through how this stuff can be leveraged against the users.
Not related to the Microsoft gaming division, but yes, Microsoft products are a mess. I am forced to use Office 365 to do some slides for work, and I decided to use Office for macOS so I could use Claude extension.
All went relatively well, until I needed to share the slides with others using Office 365: my first try of sharing the slides by clicking the Share button inside Office for macOS caused it to upload to SharePoint as read-only: not even myself (the document owner) could edit it.
I said "fine, I will just upload the .pptx file manually", and it worked well enough, until the file came back with some comments for fixes: now if I clicked the "Open on desktop" button, it kinda created a local copy that I could never sync with the remote one, but they're still clearly the same file because it did show as the same file when I went to properties on both desktop and web versions.
At that point I was getting really pissed off, so I started editing locally and copying my changes to the remote version. Office still had one more surprise: I could copy whole slides remotely, but copying part of a slide (say a rectangle form with some text) would instead convert that part to an image. Seriously, what the f*ck Microsoft?
In 2023, spent multiple hours setting up a Microsoft account for my GF just so she could play Minecraft. The process involved HTTP 4xx, 5xx, missing emails, activation codes that were "expired" even though they were less than 30 seconds old, countless instances of HTTP 302 (or JS / HTML based redirects?) that simply went to a landing page instead of redirecting to the "You've been authenticated" thingy and tons, tons and tons upon tons of captchas. Audio-based ones even, at some point! Some of the voices I could easily understand, others had like a thick accent or something - and English is not my mother tongue. The only thing driving me forward was a boiling hatred towards Microsoft.
Mojang was username+password later email+password, following industry trends (username is easily seen in-game so you only have to guess a password which for many people is easier than guessing their email).
It continued to be so, and then Microsoft forced everyone to switch to a Microsoft account, deleting the account of anyone who didn't do so (in complete violation of Notch's original sales contract with players). If you watch the progress bar of Prism Launcher logging you in to a Microsoft account you see it logs into Microsoft, goes through a bunch of indirection, logs into Xbox (!!), bunch of indirection, then logs into Mojang. And then you get to launch the game.
It used to be a simple endpoint with username+password -> auth token. Not any more with Microsoft!
Thank you for sharing. MCC is nice when it works. I’ve also found that running the original Halo in Xemu emulator makes for an extremely lightweight, fast, and performant experience. It’s remarkable how heavy weight MCC is compared to the original games.
In Xbox's defence, pretty seamless. I am signed into my xbox account, which is a Microsoft account. When launcing a game all that account auth bullshit is taken care of.
My wife has her own account, and our accounts are bound to our controllers. When you press the xbox button you are immediately signed into your profile, and it's instant. When she launches a game with her controller, she sees her saves and vice versa for me. With Baldur's Gate 3 it even keeps all her mods separate from my mod-free setup.
Some game publishers (activision, ubisoft et al) require their own accounts, and that's usually also taken care of automatically. The xbox goes and sets up a profile on that publisher's system on first game launch.
I have a 10 years old Xbox One, and every fucking time my family and I want to play a game, maybe once in a few months or so, it's always a struggle. Oh, let me download a few gigs of a system update. Oh, and the game you want to play needs an update too. Oh, and you are now logged out so go remember your password and type it using the controller. It's never a seamless experience that you would expect of a game console, which has one job: let the users play games.
I mean, come on. The vast majority of services that have apps running on TV implemented QR code based login workflow ages ago, and it just works. For Xbox, logging in is always a struggle.
It does but it's not reliable. The update process is also the slowest imaginable other than Windows update. It takes several minutes at times just to discover which games need updates.
It probably does, but it's turned off the majority of time. It's still plugged in, so I wouldn't mind if it updated itself silently, but no, it does not do it when it's turned off.
And that's just the login system, not even mentioning the glacial pace of updates which end up consisting mostly of slop anyway (though I like the nether and aquatic update. Those areas were sorely empty before.)
Reminds me of the fact that I lost my Xbox account because they shutdown hotmail. My account is working on my Xbox but the password reset options are not supported by the OS on the Xbox. And I can’t change the email of the account from an Xbox. The support wasn’t helpful either. I read that somebody with the same issue got them to change the mail by logging in and out while on the phone. I don’t have the energy to jump through these hoops.
Ha! This is pretty much what happened to me on my steamdeck the night before last. Login via GitHub or something nonsense. I was too tired, I turned it off. I tried a few years ago and I ended up in and endless loop of login redirects. Totally broken.
Why on earth does this it require a login in to play!? I'd prefer to emulated the OG box version, but that is one emulator I've never got working.
I had a similar experience this weekend. Some friends got together, one got the new Halo campaign, and we looked forward to playing co-op, like the good ol' days.
Well, adding a screensplit co-op now requires a log-in, which requires a phone to register via a QR code, which, after about 5 minutes of trying, completely failed. So we just turned it off and played Catan.
Had the same thought but with the new Halo remake which I own on PS5.
On booting the game, you're presented with the text "Press X to join" in the second player slot. That's a lie, pressing X just makes the screen flash.
Had to search online what to do. Turns out you need a Playstation account AND Microsoft account, AND they need to be linked just to join as a split-screen player. However, no prompt or UI is implemented to explain or do any of those for a second player.
Ok, setting out to do this BS. Feeling nostalgic about Halo CE LAN parties with 0 internet connection or accounts needed. She logs in with the PS account which she had to make to play another couch co-op one time a year ago. That itself was for no reason other than to boost Sony's MAU metrics but I digress. MS account made. I assume you need to create an Xbox gamer tag too, so we do that. Back to Halo, same flashing screen issue. No prompt appears to link the PS account to the MS account. I have a hunch that MS is incompetent and didn't implement the linking process except for the primary player. I'm right. You have to force close the game, switch the primary PlayStation profile to the second player, then relaunch the game. Finally got the prompt to link accounts. Now "Press X to join" works. Truly egregious how poorly implemented and communicated this is.
At this point we're 45 min in and have lost interest.
>I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware
For several years, you've been forced to login with a MS account on first boot.
Been there as well. You just want to play a game you own and end up making new accounts and sharing personal details, and even then might not even succeed.
This is a big reason I try to keep my old consoles alive. My OG Xbox is queued up ready for a clock capacitor replace so I can fire up real Halo CE any time I want!
I had one I received as a gift. Every week or two it would boot up to its green Welcome screen and then just sit there animating itself gently, without being interactable in any way. This is how it does software updates. Apps that have problems with things like server outages tend to just sit there failing silently, eventually taking the whole machine down. Sometimes It complains that wifi is too unstable to install an update and demands a wired ethernet connection instead.
Every month or two my unit started locking up at random forcing a system reset and reinstallation. I'm not sure why, mainly it runs youtube, netflix and crunchyroll; I've never enjoyed the feel of the xbox controller for gaming. You can't get any sort of technical information out of it unless you want to pay $30 or so for a developer pack, which provides some basic OS utilities and lets you run your own unsigned apps. I briefly considered doing the latter so I could make dashboards and browse them on the sofa, but I grew to despise the xbox design ethos so much that I just bought a PS5 instead.
I also have a ps3, which has been going strong for >15 years and only ever hiccups if the power is cut suddenly and it needs to do a disk check/repair on its next boot - in which case it informs me clearly about what's happening and why. The only reason it's not my main console is that companies like Netflix and crunchyroll stopped supporting the platform. I still boot it up sometimes so I can watch things I paid for via Amazon prime without ads, because Amazon stopped updating their ps3 app some years ago but it still works.
I started out with MS-DOS back in the 80s... errr, the 20th century and was technically invested in Microsoft's way of doing things for years, as it balanced technical depth and accessibility with an approachable user interface, without the constant tinkering and driver annoyances of Linux. Nowadays you would need to pay me to use it. The only gripe I have with Sony hardware is that there isn't any way to self-sign software if you want to make your widgets or apps to run on your own machine. The closest you can get is installing Roblox and then using their free developer tools (engine + a Lua derivative).
I don't know and let me spice this up with another story:
I have a ps4 and I undusted it a couple of weeks ago, then after a couple of os and game updates that took 2h to finish, they asked me to subscribe to playstation plus to play online and to basically use my internet.
What exactly is the point of a console at this point?
The point of the console is to make you only buy games that are compatible with the console. For example if you have a PS5, you'll give a cut of your games to Sony instead of giving a cut to Microsoft.
> but the gaming experience is easier and less frustrating
??? It's not the early 1990s anymore where you had to fiddle with autoexec.bat and assigning IRQs to get your DOS games to run. The only "downside" of PC gaming is that the hardware isn't subsidized like game consoles are, so you're upfront investment is a couple hundred bucks more. But then you don't need a subscription for multiplayer gaming, and PC games are cheaper (80 Euros for a game? come on...)
I am not sure it's fair to equate the xbox 360 with the current generation which is the Xbox Series X/S, which was preceded by the Xbox One X/S, so the 360 is two base iterations old at this point.
Not that I am defending M$FT here. I'm just clarifying so we don't drift into calling everything a "Nintendo" like my parents did.
I tried to login to Microsoft's account this week to play Sea of Thieves, and I literally couldn't log in for 30 minutes because it kept going on a redirect loop. Enter email, enter password, "we're checking your information", logged into into the account dashboard, but as soon as I clicked any button [1], got sent back to the login screen.
Tried two browsers to no avail. Found someone on Reddit that suggested resetting the password and finally managed to make progress. Utterly loathsome software, how the hell does a tech company exist when they can't even get their login system working properly?
1: all because I needed to change the country, now that I'm not in UK any more, as the game required age verification just to allow access to the multiplayer functionality. Thanks, Starmer.
> I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware
It was pretty great up to the 360, but with the Xbox One everything went to shit. Game consoles were meant to be plug-and-play, today they are more hassle to setup than a PC with Steam (ok, I guess Playstation isn't quite as terrible yet).
Nothing infuriates me quite like an additional gaming account inside of a dedicated gaming platform. Running under a Steam/PSN/Xbox account and want to play the game you just bought? Sucks to be you. First create a Ubisoft/Blizzard/indie-studio-with-one-game login so we can better monetize something.
I've lost count of the times my buddy and I wanted to play coop, and I was forced to log in to my ms account for a split screen game. I remember back on the original xbox, and x360, using 'guest' just worked. Forcing people to login for couch coop is asinine.
I wonder if this one is actually deliberate as a slop-pushing thing, or if it's actually a developer level thing where some devs assumed every player has an account.
It definitely depends on the game. Some allow second (or third or fourth) players to play as "guests" (not signed in to any particular account), and some don't. Party games, or games designed primarily for co-op, are definitely more likely to allow guests.
Weirdly, in my limited experience it seems that 'premium' / AAA games are more likely to require an account - I suspect it's because they want to be able to save unlocks/progress for those players. Perhaps they think it will incentivize those players to buy a copy of their own.
I recently bought far cry 3 on steam and spent 20 minutes post-install trying to log into my ubisoft account between forgetting an old password, 2fa across multiple devices and a badly broken captcha system.
uConnect and the various 3rd party storefront/DRMs are a travesty on the Steamdeck - the Decky plugin Junkstore goes some way to remedying it, but Far Cry 3 is harder to get working than any number of tempermental Switch emulations with pre-cached shaders and other graphics hacks.
Eh. Recently I invited a friend over to play games. I have Linux so it's normal that shit doesn't work but I came across a bug where Steam would just casually take 300% of CPU when Steam Controller was connected and even if I managed to start the game, controllers wouldn't work. I couldn't debug the issue on time, so we did not play games. After she left I figured out that if I first connect the Xbox controller and then the Steam controller then it works, but if it's the other way around then it doesn't. Or in reverse, I don't remember and I'm away from my PC.
Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. It’s a shame. I can invite my friends over, boot up my GameCube to play some Mario Kart Double Dash. As long as the console and disc are okay, I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away.
These days? Not so much. I’ll never be able to be sure I can play GTA VI in twenty years. It just sucks not owning anything anymore. I know why they do it, it’s a massive profit difference.[1]
On the PC end of things, it’s not as bleak. Services like GoG let you download the standalone installer, DRM free. I try to get any single player games I can from GoG, you should too.
Support the corps that give you ownership. Buy those Blu-rays of your favorite films. Either to support physical media or to ensure you will have it until data degrades.
General principle: It is way easier to avoid lock in by not being locked in in the first place then to extricate yourself later. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming video service because I had a DVD collection that predates them, and I maintained it instead of being on a streaming service, so I've got a personal collection. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming music service because I have a CD collection started decades before they came into existence, ripped digitally, and I've got music I own already.
There's more entertainment of every kind, including video games that don't lock you down, then you could consume in a lifetime anyhow. If you limit yourself to just what doesn't lock you in, yeah, you may not be playing GTA VI, but it's not like you'll lack for good games.
On the one hand, buying a subscription service for $20/month does give you instant, temporary access to a lot of things... on the other, consistently putting that money into media acquisition over the same period of time will build up quite a collection in a few years. Remember that you don't just have to buy blockbusters... you can raid garage sales, you can buy used, you can pick up surprisingly cheap collections like [1], you can hit the Salvation Army... what you find may be haphazard but you can bootstrap a collection cheaply, and may find some surprising stuff on the way.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006LOC01G - but look at the used prices, not the new. There's a lot of things like this on Amazon where someone thinks they can get a lot of money for it "new" where the used market reflects the more accurate market reality.
> An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening hasn’t just caused issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from playing their disc-based games, too.
First line in the article. An Xbox owner who did the right thing by buying physical copies is still unable to play their games.
I don’t play on Xbox, but my kids do, and Overwatch worked fine yesterday (which is a Microsoft property). So I’m not sure what the outage is, but not being able to play discs is a real punch to the gut.
Ironically, Xbox One support for true offline play was gutted when Xbox gutted a lot of planned Family Sharing support when Sony claimed the Xbox One was not going to allow you to play games offline and made that a marketing campaign with pawn shops like GameStop. (The same campaign that also called in-box Kinect a mistake and complained that the Xbox One was too "media focused" and "not for real game players".)
The resulting early Xbox One pivot removed features that would have been useful when systems were down and replaced them with "offline capable theater" instead. (The same pivot that also killed the Kinect and Xbox One multitasking and host of other useful media features.)
To be fair, I don't think Stallman is against buying or selling software, I think he just feels that the source code should be provided with it (and that you can share it afterwards...)
You don't get in the locked box in the first place. That's the whole point.
A day may come where it is the only option. In which case, personally, I will still advocate for not getting in the box. If they're going to hold "music" and "movies" hostage tell them to go fuck themselves. It's your money they're using to lock you in. And the day that I have nothing left that can play MP3 files is too far in the future to be sure about anyhow.
If you're really concerned that that is a likely future, you need to be joining with me now, not trying to discourage me about the hopelessness of the task. The only reason it's hopeless is your apparent willingness to pay other people to lock you in. If you don't accept that bargain, you won't be locked in.
Further helping is that these closed ecosystems tend to collapse anyhow. If you're locked in, why spend money on giving you good content? Even if they are appealing today, they won't be tomorrow.
With the planned death of physical media for games, it will soon become impossible to do so. Like, Sony literally plans to stop making discs starting in 2028, and all games you buy will have to be digital only. GTA 6 is just giving a code in a box. It's really the end of times for physical media in a few years, maybe something can change if consumers push back but they likely will not if we are being realistic.
I don't think you're quite getting it. I'm saying, don't get in the box.
"But the bait looks so nice!"
Yes. Yes it does.
Yes, you may have to sacrifice and not get some things you want in the moment. Our capitalistic overlords have demonstrated that they will absolutely abuse you to the maximum extent you permit. If you are willing to give everything to play GTA 6, then they will take it.
The compensation is that there is already more than you could possibly do available in spaces where they are not locking you in a box, or you can break out of the box with minimal moral quandaries and technical difficulties.
This isn't really news. Control your desires or they will control you is not new wisdom. Though the modern ability to exploit other's inability to control their desires certainly does have some new twists on it.
"Each man's master is the person who has the authority over what the man wishes or does not wish, so as to secure it, or take it away. Whoever, therefore, wants to be free, let him neither wish for anything, nor avoid anything, that is under the control of others; or else he is necessarily a slave." - The Encheridion Of Epictetus, second century AD
I generally agree, but I don't think it's wrong to mourn what is lost or to try and advocate politicians regulate and restore what was lost. Especially since the policy of "the customers own nothing" has been extending past video games in ways that are unavoidable. For example, John Deere locking down their tractors. Car manufacturers increasingly trying to turn everything into a subscription.
I agree, the right action as a consumer is boycotting rent seeking products and pestering politicians. But it does feel hopeless as too few of our politicians seem to care about these sorts of seemingly minor grievances.
How many games do you need in your life, though? I'd say the top 500 games on the GoG catalog would be more than a lifetime of gaming. That's not even including open source or rom sets.
Then if you really want to do something yourself instead of waiting for leet hackers to do it, buy one, reverse engineer it thoroughly, write a protocol emulator so you can buy the game from the store and download the bits to your PC, and then develop a method to store those bits to as many compatible consoles as you want.
Oh no! GTA6, the 2026 simulator, may not be accessible?
If the death of physical media locks me into playing whatver is forcefed to me by AAA studios, I will reject that bargain and engage in the decades of backlogged media I haven't gotten to yet. If every studio stopped making music, movies, and TV today, there is still so much I haven't seen/listened to/played that it won't even move the needle.
Lastly, going against the grain here, but GTA 6 looks about as unappealing as it possibly could. I don't want to play 2026 Simulator, no matter how good it looks. Really it just looks like parody version of current politics and society and that's what games are helping me escape from.
remember that time all of the frontier AI labs trained their models on copyrighted material and no one batted an eyelid? If they can do that, I don't see why I can't back up my CD's and DVDs or digital purchases with digital copies sourced from the high seas. If buying isn't owning...
We've all heard this. But let's not forget that recently, some important representative of Microsoft went and told some important politicians, that buying is stealing.
Yes. She said that buying is stealing. Buying the game and playing multiplayer on your own server is stealing, more specifically.
The obvious risk is that you don't have nearly as much budget to spend on lawyers if someone does come after you for it. The copyright system tends to disproportionately punish small players and not punish larger ones.
It actually did. There weren't that many, they were just high profile news at the time. And most of them either lost or recovered minimal damages. There was no actual $250,000 payment for downloading an MP3. That's why the industry stopped doing it and now only targets distribution sites.
The RIAA/MPA still goes after individuals, but they target them with settlement offers to avoid going to court. 3k and an admission of guilt is a lot less than it would cost to get a lawyer and fight back in court so people do pay them, including completely innocent people since the companies who spam out DMCA notices don't care all that much about accuracy. They've also been going after ISPs and extracting money from them for no reason, but after losing the Cox case, that might not end up being worth it to them.
The part I was responding to was "with digital copies sourced from the high seas". The premise that they were responding to was if the only domestically available media playing devices required subscriptions. It's not clear why the assumption would be that getting content from arbitrary international online sources would be something that isn't also sanctioned in this scenario. That doesn't mean the entire scenario is likely, but if that's the objection, then why reply to me and not the original comment proposing it?
I've never seen this for CD or DVD players, and only the shittiest printers are sold with a subscription plan. Plenty of unencumbered printers available, and CD and DVD players even more so
It's genuinely hard to imagine commodity USB DVD-ROM drives being sold with subscriptions? There's millions of them, they cost nothing, they're built by a dozen no name Chinese factories
Or for cheaper, you can sail the high sea. You build a collection of music, movies and games that will last you a lifetime for free. Then you can spend the saved money on supporting artists you like, studios you respect or buy a locked on guilty pleasure once in a while.
No reason to play by the rules if decency is not in the picture anymore.
back.engineering folks seem to imply that Denuvo is another case of virtualization based obfuscator being vulnerable to a symbolic execution/optimization approach.
> As AI assisted static deobfuscation continues to improve we will see more virtual machine based obfuscators fold away. In an upcoming article we will publish details on how we fully statically devirtualized Denuvo anti(tamper/cheat). One of the most attacked pieces of software second only to anticheats.
…or you can not bother with analyzing at all and just feed correct CPUID/shared data/whatever values to Denuvo, like the hypervisor thing does.
That's the one reason I don't use Steam. I'm not saying Valve is evil or anything like that. But GOG's transparency and commitment to DRM-free games should be the market standard.
GOG's storefront backend is also much nicer than Steam's. The latter is a dungeon crawl through like 3 different UIs, I still don't know how to navigate to the depot page reliably despite using it for years.
DRM-free was a nice idea 20 years ago, the problem is that it doesn't scale. There is just way to much media out there to keep track of and especially with games you are looking at frequent updates and patches, that your DRM-free backup won't get, unless you turn backup up a full time job to keep track of it all.
If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones, since I gave up trying to back them up a decade ago.
On top of that, those updates can be kind of useful. None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux. Also annoying: None of the GOG games run on a genuine Win9x either, as what you are getting is an updated version for modern Windows, not the original game.
Either way, I just don't think DRM-free is the proper solution for media management today or in the future. The olden days of static media are largely gone and the modern world is just way more fluid. So far none of the proposed solutions are able to capture that properly.
I'm a pretty heavy GoG customer and I disagree with a lot of this premise. Most games aren't getting updates past a year or two after their release, and the ones that are aren't DRM-free. And even if they weren't, I'd rather be able to play an older revision of a game I own than not own it at all.
Your Steam games run on Linux run due to Valve's (truly excellent) work on their compatibility layer. However, that work is not exclusive to Steam. I can play my DRM-free GoG copies of big budget Windows games just fine on Linux. There's an extra step you have to invoke, but they still run superbly. Supporting DRM-free is the best we have in an increasingly hostile customer market.
> There is just way to much media out there to keep track of and especially with games you are looking at frequent updates and patches, that your DRM-free backup won't get, unless you turn backup up a full time job to keep track of it all.
I don't want to write a redo of the infamous Dropbox comment, but if you really want to go /r/datahoarders on it, you can simply have a GOG downloader running in a monthly (or whatever) cronjob.
> None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux.
That's funny, I don't have that issue at all. I have whatever GOG 3rd party client running on Bazzite do the downloading & updating for me, and the only game with which I had an issue was Timberborn.
>If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones, since I gave up trying to back them up a decade ago.
That's a you problem. I keep mine backed up. GOG even makes it easy to just go grab the latest patch if you downloaded the base game years ago.
>None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux. Also annoying: None of the GOG games run on a genuine Win9x either, as what you are getting is an updated version for modern Windows, not the original game.
Solvable with Wine/Proton (or a Proton fork). If you want to be lazy Heroic launcher makes it easy and even logs into GoG if you don't have them backed up locally. Heroic launcher lets you pick what you want to use to run the game whether it be Proton/Wine/Etc, this even works with Game-Porting-Toolkit on MacOS.
> If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones
Absolutely not. Libraries and archives are able to keep digital copies, with limits imposed on how they may share them, not on what they're allowed to keep. They're not allowed, without a convoluted exemption, to break DRM. So if Steam disappears, we're all collectively dependent on our ability to break DRM to maintain our culture accessible. Games that use draconian authentication could simply disappear. With GOG, the only thing stopping us from having easy access is our ability to walk to our local library.
DRM is a software layer that restricts your ability to run a given program, in this context it's specifically a form of access control. It has nothing to do with anything you just said.
DRM-free gets confused with wrapper-free or launcher-free in games. This is probably triggered by the observation that many Steam games won't run if Steam isn't running. However, this is a basic check in steamapi.dll which can be easily replaced.
> None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux.
Stop spreading misinformation. Even if you're a non-techie you can add non-Steam games to Steam's launcher (my extremely tech illiterate friend just did this) and they'll run with Proton.
It comes down to a game by game basis, and it's still extremely rare (outside of recent 2025/2026 anticheat AAA title stuff) that any game would have a Linux specific/impacting patch.
For games that require online services, this will always be an inherent issue. But for games that don't, I'm betting on emulation continuing to save the day. When the PS3 was released with its complex/novel architecture, it seemed like an emulator was highly unlikely, but look at how good RPCS3 is now.
On the Microsoft side, they've been incredibly good about first-party backwards compatibility. I bought most of my Xbox 360 games digitally, and I have been able to play them on my Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and now they are even bringing them to PC. My son and I were just playing the timeless classic NBA Jam: On Fire Edition (a 15yo game) a couple of days ago.
Emulation development will probably be significantly enhanced by the ability to use LLMs as well.
This idea that you should have to log into an online account, in order to use a device that is otherwise entirely offline, is the root of all evil in consumer electronics today. Not just game software and game consoles, but PCs, TVs, smartphones, home automation... Everything requires a totally unnecessary tether to the manufacturer, and only allows you to use it if the manufacturer is 1. still listening to the connection, and 2. is satisfied that you tethered properly.
I shouldn't need an online account to use 99% of the things that I have that currently require an account.
>Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. I
It's much worse with Gaming. At least with TV/Movies/Music there are standards-based 'offline' formats that one could preserve the content. Games, on the other hand, may be intrinsically tied to proprietary hardware and online 'live' services for patches and content. The recent hubbub about Sony removing disk access was somewhat of a red-herring as most disk-based games you buy today have incomplete games.
The Steam DRM is trivially bypassed and they don't seem to be interested in playing the cat/mouse game with it at all. It's not a great argument that you can crack things you already legally purchased, but I'm conflicted. If digital software could be reasonably/legally transferred, then it'd probably put most software companies out of business simply because the digital domain would enable efficient reselling of 'used' copies with an exponential decline in price.
This isn't a problem with physical copies because there's a lot of friction to selling stuff, and there's also something quite nice about having a physical collection of games, music, or whatever else. But with digital stuff there's no friction, and much less incentive to collect. The efficiency of the digital domain really messes with a lot of things we take for granted in the real world.
Not staying this to be pendantic or to annoy you, but you really do know that at the bottom line, the same sort of license applies to movies and music that as of games. It is just accepted with movies, music and books that people just 'have' them. The publishers seriously know what a huge outrage there would be when they did the same to those forms of media like they did with games, but they would if they could get away with it.
They already did though. Sony removed your movies from your PlayStation. And every Blu-Ray player can brick itself if you insert a disk with a player blacklist update.
You can resell a movie (dvd/blu-ray) and music (cd, tape, etc) like you can resell a physical book. But if the license you have actually agrees on that, i don't really know. Back then i had several dvd's that granted watching it in a family environment but did not grant you reselling.
> Not staying this to be pendantic or to annoy you, but you really do know that at the bottom line, the same sort of license applies to movies and music that as of games.
You can not only buy music on physical medium (CDs or vinyls) but you can also buy, legally, DRM-free lossless music.
And once you own that music, your right to listen to it (privately) cannot be removed from you.
And for, say, a vinyl or a CD, both in the US and in the EU, your right, for example, to sell that CD at a garage sale cannot be removed from you.
And just as I can, today, boot a Commodore 64 from the 80s, I'll still be able, in 40 years, to boot a Raspberry Pi and play my music files from it. And play my CDs if I've still got a reader.
P.S: FWIW I rip my audio CDs to lossless files, in a bit-perfect way (which is automatically cross-checked with checksums of people who made the same rips, so we all know our rips are bit-perfect).
I can still go to the store and buy some music on physical media, and (if history is any indicator) I can still play it forever until it or my playback equipment wears out.
As a practical matter: You do know that when I spin up an album at home, I simply do not care what limitations any licensing agreements may or may not apply, right? I'm going to play it anyway, and it will work when I play it -- free from outside influence.
At least there are already extensive ways to get a game cube running games off an SD card using a pi pico and some hardware that uses the expansion port.
So even once disc rot takes away the original copy you can keep going.
Saturn, 3DO, and Dreamcast collectors beg to differ. Some folks even finding sealed games to be unplayable. Could be the way it was stored, could be manufacturing defects like Sega cheapening out materially on Dreamcast discs.
Always good have backups and/or modded consoles for longevity.
Optical media capped out at 4 layer blu-ray (~128gb) which I'm not even sure that consoles can reliably read.
So my theory is that GTA 6 is somewhat larger and they really didn't want to invest into engineering a solution for multiple-disc or something when ~everyone downloads their games nowadays anyways. So in some sense, the true physical release "can't" exist.
This doesn't apply to most anything but GTA 6 is the one example I think could very realistically be unable to be stored on a disc at all, or unable to be stored on a 3-layer and the supply chain just isn't there for 4-layers in 2026.
Baldur's Gate 3 is already there. It's over 120GB and IIRC PS5 games only use up to triple layer. There was no disc release.
The current Gran Turismo is around 140GB. I think it has a disc, but it'll only have like half the game on it.
Final Fantasy XIV is around 200GB now, and they're talking about dropping PS4 support because drive capacity is going to be too low during the patch cycle for the next expansion.
Also, median US internet is over 100Mb/s now, so downloading a game is faster than installing it from a BluRay reader. And then you don't have to get up and change discs to change games...
Regardless, most console owners buy their games online. Otherwise there would be more games than Funko Pops at GameStop. They also have frequent sales, unlike retailers.
Hey just a correction, there was indeed a physical release of BG3 on PS5. It was released straight from Larian and came on 2 discs, dual-layer 100GB to be exact.
Xbox Series as well, but it came on 4 discs due to capacity limits.
Your point stands, though. Games have grown so huge that downloading them isn't a hassle for most, but disc definitely is or has maxed out. That's not to mention how long it takes to install stuff, especially on PS5!
A number of games (for example the new Halo) aren't actually on the disc or otherwise have mandatory download requirements. The disc is just used as a DRM mechanism. Rockstar is not shipping discs for completely non-technical reasons. Likely some combination of saving a few bucks, stopping people camping out at retailers, and blocking the secondary market.
Please, it’s nothing to do with any of this nonsense.
They know people will buy it regardless of format and price, so not having to spend money to print those pesky little discs is a major net profit.
GTA VI is a cancer slowly metastasising. It will signal to all other game companies that they can charge whatever they want for their pos games and people will just swallow it all down because their favourite nobody with a YouTube channel told them to.
We were already heading for an even darker age in gaming, but mark my words, GTA VI is the torchbearer of an altogether darkerer.
My son and we as his parents really love Bluey, but it's impossible to buy a DVD set here in Germany, with German dub, because Disney distributes it exclusively through their plus platform.
There are many more examples like these. Very sad state of affairs.
Eh, I'd probably leave music off that list. Even mainstream music releases are still pretty easy to buy DRM-free via services like Qobuz, even if the majority of people are using streaming platforms these days. Although I wonder if that's maybe just because music seems like it would be pretty easy to sidestep DRM, even if they do come up with some kind of innovation (heck, even my friend told me he pirated my album... WHICH IS FREE, BTW).
But e-books? Holy crap the drm on those things is soooooo annoying to avoid.
If I want an e-book, I buy it from bookshop.org and then pirate the DRM-free version. It clears my conscience: the author gets paid, a small bookshop gets the sale, and I can read my book anywhere.
Someday that GameCube will break and so will all the others. And someday that PC capable of running open source emulators will also break. And all that will be left is corporation controlled hardware running corporation controlled software. Maybe we'll be lucky and be allowed to rent a few of the old games.
You can install GOG games on a normal Steam Deck already. What you want is better integration with their store but Heroic also works great on Deck and can automatically add your GOG games to Steam as well.
I might be crucified for saying this, but I actually have a Claude skill file for that. I have SSH turned on for the Steamdeck, I use Lutris so all the configs are in a database, so I just point Claude to the MD file and the game files and tell it to set it up for me. The main purpose of the skill file is really just to save the SSH, rsync instructions and give it lutris config examples like which version of proton works, etc.)
It’s a little jank to switch to Heroic to install the game but I haven’t had problems once it’s added to Steam (automatically, I might add, just tick the checkbox in Heroic preferences).
Meh I don't want another store app, I want an API that I can use from my store-agnostic open source game launcher / library. They should just officially support efforts like Heroic instead.
Do you really need a Linux client? just download the installers. They announced a Linux client, and I honestly can't see a reason I would want to install it...
You can and it actually works ok. For the sake of the argument you would/could be more 'free to do with your games what you want', because GoG does not do DRM.
Meh, perhaps games from big studios, but the majority of games work fine without DRM. I find indie games and games from small studio a lot more fun and have a lot more soul than most "big studio" games.
In twenty years it doesn’t matter if Rockstar delists GTA6.
The DRM will be cracked. You will be able to play and you WILL have a better experience playing a cracked DRM free version than any official version.
You can play an emulated Mario Kart Double Dash on a Steam Machine (or any PC) today and get a better experience than playing it on a Game Cube.
Digital only games sounds bad at first but preservation of video games will be done digitally more effectively than physically. How many full rom sets of Super Nintendo games are just sitting there on millions of PCs around the world? It is trivial to preserve them: copy paste to a new machine. Done.
Disks will rot. GameCube optical lasers will fail. One day, maybe not soon, but it is it inevitable that all disk based games will become unplayable and lost one day. Maybe if we’re lucky an independent company will create an accurate FPGA based GameCube for people to play their games but emulation is just better.
Prices on the second hard market will be astronomical making physical copies innaccessible - this has already happened for arcade PCBs and it will happen for disk based games. PCBs that used to go for a few hundred now go for tens of thousands. I personally believe that this push for physical preservation is largely driven by speculators that know this. You see insane prices for things like sealed copies of Super Mario Bros already. PCB prices were driven up by speculators hoarding supply and they’ll do it for console games too.
If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.
Preservation needs to be about accessibility FIRST.
We can reverse engineer those too, by looking at what the game client expects. Its harder, obviously. But far from impossible.
I started writing my own world of warcraft server about 20 years ago by disassembling the WoW binary. I got to the point that you could log in to the game and run around in a big empty world. I even found a couple mistakes in wow's in-game encryption in the process. Lots of teams have gotten much further than I did. There's whole communities who play wow on private servers.
If we can do that for MMOs, we can do that for just about anything. Especially with LLMs. LLMs are incredibly good at this sort of work.
The online portions will be reverse engineered and there will be community servers or the online checks will be replaced with offline stubs. You think in twenty years they won’t be able to do this in minutes for practically nothing using GPT 15 or whatever?
Sure, but that's orthogonal to discs. Nothing prevents a game developer from making "check the server" the first thing that happens when the game on a disc loads.
This assumes the game isn't designed from the beginning to be entirely reliant on the operation of servers. For instance there never has been and never will be any form of offline function for Destiny 1 or 2, even if all the person wants to do is play the single player campaigns.
Yes, but never in the absence of the Bungie servers. It did have a full sequential single player campaign, but parts of the single player campaign took place in shared instances where the user could see other players running around the map. The single player campaign could also be played cooperatively with other players in the same 'fireteam' if desired, but that was optional.
Sure, but SPC still took place in the same shared world. It wasn't like there is a single-player vs multiplayer in CoD or BF. The only way to make those campaigns work offline is to remove all drops from them and remove co-op pieces that aren't optional. Doing a strike and joining right at the end of it, missing the entire story of that strike, was like a mandatory experience for D2.
Do we know any of the technical details of that? Is the SPC just instanced multiplayer with all game logic on the server, or is it just getting some encryption key?
First, SPC, at least in Destiny 2, required you to do Strikes. Second, you get item drops. Technically there is no SPC in either Destiny because it's an MMORPG. There are just plenty of things you can do all by yourself and things that you meant to do alone, and those things usually come with item farming, so you need server-side to make it fair.
> That "if buying is not owning then piracy is not stealing" sounds corny and is legally void, but hell if morally it is not justifiable at this point.
A law isn’t by default just, so when it turns from a safeguard into a manacle it is only logical, fair and correct that we rebel against it.
If buying does not imply ownership, then piracy cannot mean theft.
The fight should never have been about physical vs digital, but about ownership.
If I buy a game/movie/book/song, regardless of where or in what format, I should be able to:
1. Keep it forever without the risk of remote deletion.
2. Use it while offline, unless internet connectivity is strictly required for the experience.
3. Move it between my devices.
4. Backup and archive it.
5. Resell it.
6. Pass it on to my children.
Beyond that I don't really care what the container for the bytes is. If the game isn't sold on a disc I can easily burn my own.
Every publisher can offer all of this today, but they choose not to. And proprietary devices/formats means the free market isn't going to work in the consumer's favor. The only thing that can fix the problem is legislation.
It is basically about physical vs digital because these ownership problems are tied to the copy being digital, including on Steam. In theory you could have a digital copy that guarantees transferability like with Nintendo, but even then it'd be a promise they have to keep along with more technical complexity that could break it.
The problem is that the technology [1] to do this simply doesn't exist. I'd say the core of the problem is that copying a digital artifact is easy, is a solved problem. You simply copy the data that represents the artifact, and now you have another copy.
*Deleting* data (and its cousin, *moving* data) is a nearly intractable problem. How can you verify that someone no longer has access to data that you gave them?
The best we have is to have some sort of ownership token that is maintained in a shared store, and build a requirement that possession of that token is required to use the data. Even this is practically nearly intractable; you have to have some sort of "trusted" hardware or software that is responsible for validating the current possession of the ownership token before using the data.
Physical media is another way of trying to solve this problem, especially if the physical media can somehow be verified and is exfiltration-proof.
[1] I say "technology" here but really I strongly suspect that this is actually impossible given reasonable theoretical assumptions around what data means.
You're trying to solve with technology a problem that lives in the abstract human world. Even the simplest possible case, you make a physical unique object that you define as conferring ownership to the person who possesses or controls it. Someone steals
the object, now the person in possession of the object isn't the owner. There's this allure of trying to tie this abstract notion of ownership to a physical thing but it's breaks down immediately. It doesn't even work for physical objects.
Automated enforcement of ownership rules is completely tangential to the actual problem you're running into. You own a physical book, you make a copy then sell the book. That's a copyright violation, no "verification" or whatever nonsense needed. What happened in regards to ownership in this case is already clear. Companies sure do like DRM but it's as much a pale imitation of ownership as anything else.
> I mean can't you see why 4 and 5 are irreconcilable?
I really can't. The only argument I see is "we can't allow it because every customer is a potential thief". What will enabling resale cause? Piracy? Well piracy is happening regardless. People who want to illegally download games can do it today in one click. Instead the piracy excuse is being used to restrict legal resale so you have no option but to pay the publisher's inflated sale price.
Yeah but there is really no way to enforce a single resale other than extensive DRM measures, which is the whole thing we want to avoid.
By allowing resale of digital copies outside of platforms all you get is essentially the complete repeal of intellectual property rights for digital media.
But, on the other hand, without IP, DRMs lose a lot of their power. Once the DRM is cracked, the protected data can be freely shared once more. The only usefulness for DRM in most industries would be preventing unauthorized copies in the first days.
I agree with you in principle, but from a practical perspective if you make piracy that trivial you'll get a lot more pirates, maybe even accidental pirates.
I think as a compromise I'd be okay with some kind of license database (maybe blockchain-based, maybe not) that keeps track of who owns a legal copy of what. People reselling digital copies of copyrighted material would have to transfer ownership of that license to prove they're conducting legit business and not just minting new copies out of thin air.
Yes, we all know it, but good luck finding a jurisdiction that will agree with you on this.
One of the more galling aspects of the inevitable US-NATO[0] trade war is the fact that nobody is willing to reevaluate the legal underpinnings of US tech hegemony - namely, copyright and anticircumvention law. All the proposals for sovereign tech are really just "let's build more AI data centers". People like Cory Doctorow who have the actual way to play hardball with Trump - "let's get rid of anticircumvention and declare open season on AppleMobileFileIntegrity.kext" are sidelined as "IP thieves". Hell, even the Stop Killing Games people got brushed off by the European Commission with an excuse almost like "we can't mandate your game purchases work offline, that'd be stealing".
The reason for this is pretty straightforward: the moves done in the 90s to ensure digital purchases meant no ownership were as much a product of Europe as it was the US. Actually, the vast majority of international copyright law is actually a European invention, and the US was the last holdout on things like copyright registration and fixed (as opposed to life-plus) terms. Europe spent centuries binding the world to the most extreme version of copyright imaginable, specifically to ensure developing countries would never be able to actually economically develop.
Every country that has economically developed itself does so through a subsidy of IP theft. The Industrial Revolution was owned by England but stolen by America; and America itself wound up being stolen from by China, Japan, and South Korea. Economic development is not a game you win by playing by the rules, because the rules are designed to keep the winners on top. The entire debate over games preservation and ownership is downstream of the fact that the big American and European cultural industries are not financially viable without you renting your culture.
The reason why the fight has focused on physical vs. digital is that it's the one battle we've been somewhat victorious on. Physical ownership has generally been treated as sacred: Microsoft tried using the Xbox One launch as a way to massively restrict discs, and it created a backlash so large Xbox never actually recovered from it. Sony in contrast had to boil the frog[1], and Nintendo wound up doing so more or less by accident[2]. And when game consoles have problems loading physical discs, it's still treated by console manufacturers as a bug rather than a feature.
[0] In practice, the US vs. all of it's allies, including non-NATO ones.
[1] They were clearly intending to kill off discs with the PS5, just from the industrial design alone, but didn't actually do it until mid-cycle when everyone's actually bought their consoles and thus the impact would be minimized.
[2] It has been Nintendo policy since the 3DS to ban anyone who goes online with a duplicate cartridge ID. I don't think this was intended to poison the used market, but once cheap Switch flashcarts and means to clone cartridges became available, it absolutely did. The people using 3DS homebrew to load pirated games at least had to know what "public headers" meant in order to avoid getting banned.
Circumvention is, in practice, legal as long as you don't get caught. Nothing except your own patience stops you from REing Apple's kexts right now. Or taking an always-online single player game and making it work offline. I suggest you don't publish the results on your own website, but find a group that specialises in hosting politically sensitive material.
The absurdity is that back in gen-7 we had everything figured out: PS3 used the (free) servers only for matchmaking and all online games were hosted on the consoles themselves. The matchmaking servers are still up and working, and everybody plays with better latency thanks to the prominence of fast fiber.
No internet? Games work offline and support LAN if you have a switch and a couple of consoles.
In 2026 I can still insert any used disc I bought in my ps3 and it will generate a (offline) client-side license for me and let me play and update the game with the disk inside just as a "proof" of still owning it.
If I'm online I'll get patches, else I'll just get served the version on the disc.
(Btw, ps3 also has a print spooler and can natively rip CDs and serve them while acting as a NAS. Or, you can stream games to your psp with remote play. It was truly a "let's cram everything we can inside" era and more like a proper pc with a mediacenter interface)
I remember PS3 Call of Duty online play being very unreliable compared to Xbox Live. It didn't use relay servers, so the host needed port-forwarding or upnp, which is a dubious situation to be in.
> PS3 used the (free) servers only for matchmaking and all online games were hosted on the consoles themselves. The matchmaking servers are still up and working
That's not true. Naughty dog shutdown online servers for their ps3 games in 2019:
I wanted to play an old call of duty game to reminisce about my childhood. I tried Modern Warfare II and Black Ops, but it’s impossible. You get into a game fine, but every single game is just full of cheaters - not just cheaters with fairly benign (yet unfair) things like wall hacks, cheaters that literally change the physics of the server for all users in a completely unworkable way.
I’m not sure whether this is because of the PS3 client-hosted server model, or just poor coding from COD.
Either way, I gave up eventually. It was a brief passing thought one evening; I’m sure if I really wanted to I could figure out a way to play properly. But you can’t just put the disc in and play online, at least in my experience.
Seems like ps3 was kind of the sweet spot in terms of decent graphical capability, being allowed to actually own your games, patching, and online capabilities. Given the backlash we’re seeing towards the console giants and their desires to kill off physical media, I wonder if a console with the features mentioned above could be released today with any chance of being competitive? Does anybody know of any projects like that?
Yea, but there are bigger problems coming, this outage is just a temporary preview of the future.
What happens to game preservation in 20 or 10 years when the authentication servers for this generation are permanently shut down?
Millions of physical discs will instantly turn into e-waste.
That would be possibly illegal, requires someone highly specialized to care about each and every one of your games, and assumes there won’t be a crackdown on the openness and anonymity of the Internet that currently allows the distribution of pirate software.
We need to have this right codified into law before we lose it.
Every jurisdiction was bullied into adopting this provision as part of every trade deal the US ever makes. Cory Doctorow wrote about it. Look for the keyword "anticircumvention".
> All I'm saying is it's all digital on the PC side of things, and has been for ages, but we have means of maintaining access to the games we love over here, and it's one of the reasons I've gravitated to the PC for quite a while now.
It all depends on where you buy your games of course; GOG will let you download DRM-free installers, but if Steam goes down, your libraries goes down with it. They have made a vague promise that they would prevent that if the company ever went out of business, but who knows if they will keep that promise.
Guarantees about playability went out the window the day free, easily-obtained updates came out on PC as much as consoles.
At least on the PC side, there's a vibrant piracy community.
Even if you get all of your games via Steam, provided you have them downloaded, you can still run them without Steam if you know where to look. Obviously GOG is far better in this regard, but preservation is not a concern on PC, outside of games that are reliant on a server.
Starting next generation when prices are going to be obscenely high, I'm really struggling to see why anyone should invest in a console as opposed to a (mini-)PC.
Depends. Steam is not DRM itself, you can open the game folder and copy the game to another computer and steam doesn’t care. The game often has its own DRM though which will stop you.
> The game often has its own DRM though which will stop you
I think you missed the "know where to look" part. It's called a Steam emulator, for starters. Note that I speak about this strictly for preservation purposes, as people who raise Steam DRM as an obstacle to preservation have not done their homework.
Realistically, if Steam closed down tomorrow, within 4-6 hours there'd be a megathread on Reddit explaining how to get the games running without Steam. Within 48 hours there'd be an auto-crack tool floating around on GitHub.
Yeah, I’ve been on Steam for about 20 years now and I can’t recall many bad moments with Valve.
The only one that comes to mind is the “outrage” when they decided to release L4D2 just a year after L4D back in 2008 instead of making this a free upgrade. Times have definitely changed. looks at yearly COD with barely any changes
Most Steam games don't actually have any DRM. They just link to steamapi.dll for things like achievements, and that makes you think you can't run them without Steam.
What is the command I can use to run them without Steam then? If the game links to a dll that launches Steam and won’t play without it, then that is effectively Drm.
Before I even play the game without Steam: how do I download it without Steam?
Yeah pretty clearly falls under 'bypassing a digital lock' according to the DMCA. they got you when you clicked ok on the license agreement. Movies and music is a different thing: you don't need to agree to a license when you buy a disk but I'd be surprised if we don't start seeing little pamplets thrown in there saying "by keeping this disk you agree to _____..."
Oh there are Dlls? And as a non-technical consumer I just know this do I? I know how to dig deep into my file system and copy+paste a dll file into software I can’t/don’t understand? How do I download and install a copy without Steam?
Has the barrier for non technical consumer gone down? Back in the 90s when some game didn't work because of some weird issue (we had two CD drives and it would refuse to detect the CD in either drive) my parents had no problem downloading a pirated one that didn't need a CD.
You wouldn't have to figure it out yourself. They didn't need a hex editor. But they did understand "download this file, go to this part of Program Files, move the downloaded file here and agree to overwrite". You'll find similar guides online. They already exist, because it's the same as if you're trying to pirate a Steam game!
People will do anything for the dancing bunnies. Both good and bad.
No my point here is that you have to download and install Steam before you can download and install any games. Now if I’m non-technical why would I want to make the extra effort to go Drm free if I have to use Steam anyways?
I know technical people can do it, but I do not believe this is a path for the non-technical user.
The proposed steps are:
- buy game on steam marketplace (no client)
- download and install games (client required)
- uninstall steam client and paste in fake dll file
But now I want more games… so rinse and repeat? This is a lot of work.
The premise of this hypothetical is Steam's servers going away. Ping me about this if and when it ever happens and I'll write you a tool where you can select the steamapi.dll you downloaded and have it copied to where your games need it. There's a fair chance you might not even need to because someone else will have made it before me.
You download it with Steam, then run Steam's backup function to back up the games you care about to physical media. Or in the vast number of cases you can just copy the game folder
Obviously if you buy it with steam you need Steam. But you only need it at the time of purchase, for the vast majority of titles
Steam's backup function creates some kind of proprietary and licensed archive files. Reality: you download it with Steam, then go to Steam's folder and copy the game folder.
I sort of get it. Every competitor, except maybe GOG, has come down hard in hyper-capitalist value-extraction mode quickly after pretending to do any good-will. For Valve, being a somewhat decent company is part of their ethos, for their competitors it's a means to an end.
I trust Valve not to screw me over, even though I know they totally could. Their own DRM is pretty weak (just put a modified DLL in the game directory and the game will launch), luckily.
It allows you to play your games offline though, so if Steam's servers go down you can still play your games. I'm not sure if that's permanent or if you need to reactivate your DRM / license every once in a while though.
Around a decade ago i had to move to another city and spent a few months without internet. I had all my favorite games downloaded on Steam and was able to play them offline with no issue for all that time. Not sure if it still like that, but it was possible back then.
Steam has some backup feature. I do backups of my games. Compressed to slow HDD dedicated to backups. Faster to install than downloading again from network. Don't know though how much will that help
Yeah, if the game is set up to not use steam as drm. You can check by going to the installed files and running the exe directly - in most cases it'll still launch even if you're signed out.
If steam goes down you can play offline. They have a portable game console that doesn't need to be connected to play. They have big warnings on the store page of games that require online drm.
There's a surprising amount of games on my Deck that refuse to run without internet. It's not even marked anywhere which sucks because you find out when you have no connectivity.
They don’t let you resell games, if you die your library is gone, if said steamdeck (or steam machine) breaks those games are gone, the list goes on. It is a digital store with the exact same limitations of any video game console full of digital purchases.
I use Steam but I also know I’m vulnerable to a rug pull. We all are. That’s why I’ve been shifting over to GOG and making sure to back up my library in an organized fashion. I wish I had done it sooner, but hey, today’s the best day.
As for warnings, I mean…come on man. That’s like hiding behind ToS. Let’s be realistic here: how many people here (including yourself) see a game they really want, see it has a little DRM note on the uttered store page, then decide never to buy it? Few people let that stop them from getting a game they actually want.
Seeing the little DRM note kills my joy entirely. I have used steam, but the runtime anti-tamper malware has no place on my system. I don't use the word malware lightly. I trust it about as much as a random "overdue" invoice pdf from my spam folder. Maybe less.
The deck and machine are not going to delete your account if it breaks? Theyre just PCs what are you on about?
I don't buy games that require third party launchers ever. Been burned losing my Ubisoft account or w/e a few times. The warnings are helpful and steam doesn't have to say anything at all.
If steam shuts down and all your games are on a valve device. I only addressed that because it seemed it was being used as an example in the prior comment, as if that protects them more than an Xbox does.
You keep bringing up devices because the threads about xbox, but valve devices are fundamentally different where they will keep working without any valve services. They can even play games.
One consideration I have on every purchase I make is that I own it, like actually own it (with exceptions where necessary, of course). Internet access in something that shouldn't need internet access is a downside. It's a way to mess with the purchase you made.
If my e-reader had a bad battery after years of use, I should be able to replace that battery myself without issue (personal skill allowing). I purchased it. Why wouldn't you be able to? I haven't yet found reason for this in consumer devices, except because they want you to send it in or buy a new one from the manufacturer.
Every time we see something like this, it doesn't get enough eyes or care from those who use these platforms. Sony takes your movies away, Xbox requires you be online, Amazon updating your books automatically without asking you, etc. My favorite that I repeat constantly is all of the BS that BMW has done over the years: heated seats subscription, proprietary bolt heads, ads in the infotainment. If you buy a BMW at this point, I'm sorry, but you had alternatives and I don't feel bad. The scary part is when enough people accept it that everyone else in the industry follows suit and then the outliers are the ones that respect you.
If I purchased a physical disc, I'm not even asking for the source code (which I'd love), I'm just asking that I can run the damn software I bought, but you can't even do that now. Viva open source and right to repair. Make the educated choice when purchasing software and hardware, to your benefit, where appropriate. Of course, the proprietary system is what you need/want sometimes, but I bet most of us don't most of the time.
People focus too much on discs and cartridges, but too little on licensing and drm. The disc is meaningless if you cannot run it after drm servers died. Also, very often the game on the disc is unplayable because of lack of day-1 patch. Meanwhile you can burn games you bought from GOG on a cd and play it 10 years later without internet connection. So the physical vs digital discussion is completely irrelevant to the problem.
After weeks of discourse where the physical token of the Compact Disc had become the all-important object of the fight, it's reassuring to see that we're back at the beginning, where it was clearly understood that you don't meaningfully "own" a game if you need to be online to use any of it.
The internet money thing aint gonna work. Look at the pyramid on the back of the dollar. It's esoteric. They will make you disappear and make it look like an accident. Look what happened to Ross.
They did this in California. Solution: stores don't use any of the words now. Now the buttons say "add to cart" and "proceed to payment". Sometimes the button just says the price.
I wonder if it's legal to build a completely scam store like this. You pick a game, you click on "$7", you pay $7, you don't get anything at all, and if you try to sue them, they point out they never actually sold you anything, you just voluntarily clicked on the button to donate $7.
One obvious way to tighten such loopholes would be to ban indefinite licenses. It is either permanent or has a fixed, stated term. A permanent license must either entail no DRM or the entity must have a trust/endowment in place to ensure availability until copyright expiration. Copyright is contingent on a DRM-less version being placed into escrow for copyright expiration. Failure to ensure availability of a permanent licence allows access to escrow as recourse.
It makes it a little bit more visible. So it isn't nothing. I can't wait for the first lawsuit to hit the news where the company claims because the button didn't say buy, they didn't have to sell.
I think Valve is just going to kill Xbox in a couple of years. Basically Microsoft is planning to make the next Xbox an "ordinary" Windows computer with a different UI as well as vendor-locked hard- & software. So essentially you'll get a (maybe) slightly discounted small form-factor PC for the living room that only runs games from the Xbox store, which will be more expensive than the same games on Steam.
Now, everyone laughs about the "ridiculous" pricing of the Steam machine but once hardware prices come down they will make a second generation that will be an unlocked PC in the same form factor and probably just as powerful as the next-generation Xbox. They might even pass on some of their supply side bargaining power to the end user. Then you will have the choice between a fully locked down Windows PC that only plays Xbox games for 1,000 USD or a fully unlocked Steam machine that plays everything from the Steam, Epic, GOG store, can install regular games and even lets you do work on it, for probably around the same price. Built by a company that has the highest gamer trust of any company we know. Guess this will be a no-brainer for most folks! They have everything to pull this off as well, the brand, the trust, the gamers, the store, the platform, the money, the market power as well as experience with hardware. My take is that they wanted to pull this move already but the AI craze made that impossible so they are using the first-gen Steam machine to learn about the market, but I predict that once prices come down we'll see an announcement, they can time it to match the new console generation by Microsoft and Sony as well. The market should be in a great state by then as well, lots of folks were essentially priced out of the GPU market and NVIDIA won't even release a new generation of gaming cards anytime soon, so all those people that have the buying power but don't know where to put it would flock to a new Steam machine if it can deliver good performance for a reasonable price. And the thing is Valve will have the power to make sure studios optimize games for the Steam machine as well.
Really don't know what Microsoft is doing here, they turned one of the most profitable and beloved gaming platforms into something that seems to be in a death spiral, people are already speculating they might sell the whole thing off eventually.
Clearly parent poster meant 'policy'. 'The policy isn't about stealing', referring of course to the Terms and Conditions being something to ignore when they cover anti-piracy but don't sell you anything.
HN is the propaganda arm of a billionaire enrichment company, so it's understandable that someone might be unsure whether you're allowed to say that word here.
We all know what the word was, it was a joke to replace it with another word that has the same first/last letters that obviously wouldn't fit here. A joke about how words are censored all over the internet as a way to appease advertisers on various platforms.
If said billionaire enrichment company was really upset about it, they would be able to detect forbidden words like piracy even when replaced. It's not that difficult, it's a problem that was solved decades ago.
I buy games via Humble Bundle when possible. They give you a link to download a DRM free copy, which I store away in a large drive.
In practice, I often end up playing those games on the Steam Deck, but I know that in 20 years (if I keep that drive alive), I'll be able to easily spin up wine and play those games just fine.
For most modern software, you are not buying a product, you are buying a window of service. You are entering into an agreement that the software will be supported for a reasonable amount of time. Bugs will be fixed, you might get some additional 'free' content. Games got to the point of being so large and expensive, they crossed this threshold long ago. A single player offline game like The Witcher 3 has had what, about 30 updates? And those games are constantly being dwarfed by seasonal, micro-transation games. The single release game was an endangered species a long time ago.
This is why I only purchase digital games at high discounts. It might be worth $60 to own a piece of physical media that can be played at any time without internet. However, to me the value of a DRM license that can possibly be taken away at any moment is very little. It is ridiculous that they attempt to sell digital games at the same price as a physical game.
TBH can't wait for consoles / console exclusives to die, as long as there is piracy (and steam) pc gaming prices stay reasonable, hardware pricing will eventually sort itself out.
I encourage folks with a PlayStation 5 (or 4) to participate in the blackout by unplugging their console for the week of August 23 at 7:00 PM your local time and run to August 31 at 7:00 PM your local time. Hopefully that helps send a message. We should irrevocably own our games, not rent a revokable license. And we should have price competition from multiple store fronts.
What message are you trying to send? "Oh look, a bunch of people who have already given us money aren't using the thing they paid for for a week, and we can maybe even save a bit of money by reducing our server load"? Am I missing something? Why should they care? If you really want to send a message, don't buy a PlayStation. If you own one already, don't buy anymore games. That's the only message corporations care about.
Even if the games are played off the internal hard drive with updates, there's a bit of "legal grey area" where enthusiastic fans of the game rebuild the code, and run the game with assets from the original media. "Technically" only folks with the original media in their possession will be able to play the original game.
For example the Ship of Harkinian PC port of Ocarina of Time. This requires a legal or illegal copy of the original game to run, so the copyright authorities don't crack down on it yet.
Are we sure that this is the reason the authorities aren't cracking down on it, and not that a game released in 1998 that also has a newer release on the 3DS just isn't financially valuable enough at this point to try to protect now? And it's getting an even newer remake, which is where Nintendo's concerns would be, I'd assume.
Nobody can be sure, but there is a consistent pattern here: decompilation projects can include as much code as they want and not get punished, but if they include assets they are taken down.
I suspect it's actually because the authorities don't know what the project is, if it's only code, or they can't be sure it's an infringing derivative work (it is).
Haha say you want to play co-op with your buddy or girlfriend or something and you just shelled out 59.99 or whatever for the latest microslop product..
You just connect a controller right?
Nah, on ps5, you need to setup a whole ass sony account, and then login to it, and then you need a new microsoft account to link that sony account to, and then maybe, you might be able to play couch co-op.
>But owning a game on a disc today isn't really the same thing.
This is an important point distinction that many people of physical media are missing or being distracted by. All this backlash could be put to better use by supporting game ownership.
You can't play the game you own if the product has to phone home. I'm not getting why people are up in arms about the physical product while DRM is in place that prevents you from playing it.
I don't have a console other than an old PS4 rarely used and I was going to buy a PS5 until the recent news. Now I don't want to buy xbox because of this post. So, what's left? I have a kid and little time and I haven't been a "gamer" since I was a teenager but I want to be able to play maybe 5 or 6 games (co-ops, FIFA, GTA) without downloading anything.
It's even more annoying for me because I often have phases of only playing every 2 months, so it's always true that I would need to update first.
Emulation. Tons upon tons of games just sitting there.
Your kid isn't going to know what it was like to play it back then, throw them the classics and sigh in relief knowing that's he's not being tricked in to corporate exploits such as loot boxes, skins and the likes.
"When Sony announced that they were discontinuing physical discs for PlayStation, I was less outraged than many. The reason I felt this way wasn't because I loved what Sony was doing. I think it came from an understanding that physical media ain't what it used to be."
But you are mixing Sony and Microsoft here. Sure, both are bad, but many PS disks are totally playable without internet connection.
Nintendo Switch cartridges don't have this problem, mostly. It's the reason I buy physical for the family library. Nintendo's digital licensing is terrible (slightly less so with Virtual Cartridges, but miles away from Steam Family) and doesn't really work for a multi-Switch household.
But, I was traveling for work and brought the non-"home" Switch with me along with a copy of Breath of the Wild on cartridge. I fired it up on the airplane, ready to go. And then discovered that because I had bought the DLC and the DLC license check couldn't pass, I was locked out of playing at all. It's given me pause on buying any other DLC on a Nintendo platform.
...huh, do the online license checks only happen if you have the cartridge sharing stuff enabled? Wondering when/if I would run into this, I haven't yet. But I never use their "virtual game card" system, I only have one Switch and I think the whole thing is overcomplicated and too limited.
Says how originally people played arcade games and didn't own them at all, since you were constantly putting in quarters to play more of the game.
It's an interesting point, though not 100% accurate due to how there were early video game consoles at the same time as arcade games. Pong clones were common for home play in the early 1970s, and things like the Fairchild Channel F and Atari 2600 date from the mid to late 1970s.
For a golden decade or so, piracy was less convenient than paying: Xbox had subscriptions offering on tap games, there was only really one streaming service to speak of that had high quality content, music came from Spotify or YouTube, etc.
We are back to where we are in the 2000s: the gatekeepers of large tracts of culture are behaving so badly that piracy is probably going to end it's lull. It is a shame for artists, developers, and anyone else who needs to get paid that companies running genuinely very good services have chosen to behave so badly.
The services aren’t really that great IMO. They don’t always get you the quality you pay for. They hide their libraries either to keep you engaged with their app or to convince you it’s larger than it is. Most of them charge you even when you don’t use the service that month. But they’re doling out seasons an episode or three at a time to make sure you don’t unsubscribe during any given month. Some have renegged on their previous statements regarding password sharing. You pay for “screens” but those screens have to be for your household only. Their UIs and apps are often broken and are inconsistent between devices. Even when you pay for ad free sometimes there are ads “due to licensing issues” and almost all of them advertise their own shows or apps or podcasts before the content you want to watch.
I never upgraded beyond the PS2 (and I was a heavy console gamer back in the days), because all the "needs network", "needs account", "needs certificate to be valid", etc. stuff is entirely scaring me off investing my money in any of that.
Now, my motto is: if I can't run it safely in an emulator and download the files from some "abandoned wares" site then I don't care. And I have zero moral problems with that.
Physical is mostly a lie once you go past PS2, 3DS etc. It confers a few benefits over digital, like trading and selling, but those are illusory as well, as we see here.
Seems Microslop forgot the #1 rule of selling bits and bytes: buying from you needs to be easier and less painful than opening thepiratebay (and possibly installing an emulator)
> But owning a game on a disc today isn't really the same thing. It's still just a license, and Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo can either intentionally or, in this case, unintentionally prevent you from playing that game, even if you own the physical copy.
I am pretty certain that there are different legal requirements nonetheless. The author kind of tries to mitigate the danger of big corporations forbidding physical media. Does he think that these corporations have the good of the people in mind? Or are they more interested in milking their cash cows?
Thankfully I am not the target audience anyway. I don't give my money to these greedy corporations to begin with. Them disowning people further here, by killing physical media, would just have been another stepping stone towards a movement away from these big corporations anyway. I don't have time to play games anymore anyway due to old age, but if I would I'd much rather support Indie games - with physical media.
The death of the used games market is still a big deal, even if said used games still depend on the manufacturers' networks and licenses being valid. A digital only world where Sony and Microsoft have the only say about pricing and used games are no longer available is a downgrade for users even from the already-bad status quo
Normalize usage of "have been granted a limited license for" instead of "own." The word "own" implies all manner of things that don't exist for things like Xbox games, Kindle titles, etc.
thats why i never bought a game in my life and never intend to... if i want to see how a game works, i could download an emulator and run it via the emulator from a public rom under linux. If I am really interested, i could download a 512GB retropie torrent/magnet and then copy it to a microsd card and run 70k games on a raspberry pi 4...
historically, at least for me, games never worked... i spent more time fixing why they didnt work or debugging them in memory to patch them to get the game to actually run then actually playing a game. This is circa 1983-1987 too so maybe we have progressed from there, but obviously not much.
If you where to start gaming again (at least, as the current vendors intend) you'd find that the bugs you had to account for in the 80s have been (generally speaking) resolved as a byproduct of the DRM/Cloud streaming propagation we're all complaining about.
IE; consolidation of vendors, locking down the way a game propagates, restricting the lifetime of a game, made it "easier" to play games the absolute one way the vendor intends. This gives them the excuse of "Well, we designed the game to be played via perpetual license through only this platform, we can't support or claim responsibility anywhere else".
Which is to say, your comment made me think that the reason the industry is the way it is isn't because money/lawyers, but more because some product managers decades ago began pushing for consolidating/defining video game lifecycles.
This is why I don't really understand the outrage with Sony getting rid of physical discs. I guess the argument is you can sell you disc later, but at the end of the day, owning a the disc isn't the same as owning an NES cartridge. Once the servers are down, that's it.
Every modern media disk since DVD has had revocable DRM . That means you have never owned the disks. (Only Audio CDs and laser disks were owned digital media). With games, a synchronous right’s check is made every time you insert the disk, and if you haven’t played recently, the entire game installation is downloaded. The disk is only used for rights, not for playback. With movies, thankfully the rights check is done offline on your player, but a background online check can revoke your player’s keys, and revoke your entire collection. What’s more, a revocation can ship via another disk. So you can unplug your Blu-ray player for 2 years, insert a new disk, and lose your entire collection.
I own everything I've learned. I also own some hardware on which I sometimes deposit this information for later retrieval. I own all of it, keys to nuts.
In general, two kinds of solutions to political problems exist: those that don't work, and those that are illegal. Because why would politicians want something that worked to be legal?
But that's all products, and even if it wasn't, consumer choice is mainly driven by marketing spend, which lock-in companies will always have the most of, because they extract the most money.
I've been wondering about this, in some sense we might hit a big cultural black hole where all these cool things that we've created in the last few decades just are functionally lost and all the amazing things of the previous generation that could be found on archive, roms, stuff on CD's / DVD's etc are what actually have cultural value going forwards
Everything else is in this position of "actively at risk" where if someone isn't "keeping it up" it may just disappear, at least until it gets orphaned, in which case I suppose reverse engineering is back on the table
Thank God for Fitgirl doing so much archival work with high quality highly compressed game releases. If you know where to look everything is available somewhere.
Fitgirl is a packing group. They take what other people have already done, and compress it (to a ludicrous degree). They should not be credited for anything besides the compression.
> If you know where to look everything is available somewhere.
Until CPUs only run "approved" operating systems → mandatory age verification == government ID required to use any OS in a non-crippled form → browsers refusing to open "illegal" sites.
I agree, but I feel like pointing out that any game that was distributed without DRM or that was successfully 'cracked' by pirates can also be found on archive and therefore might be carried over to future generations. Physical media isn't the only way.
The real risk, IMO, is live service games that don't function at all without the server being online. There are games where fans have reverse-engineered and made their own server, but there are definitely ones that will slip through the cracks and be forgotten too.
There are three categories of live service games for which fans have reverse engineered a server:
1) The server doesn’t do much other than connect the players, and most of the logic is either client-side or trivial.
2) The server contains a fair bit of game content (such as drop and spawn rates, maybe even NPC dialogue) and the community has done extensive packet captures while the server was online.
3) The server binaries were leaked at some point, and everyone agrees to keep it a secret and pretend they’re doing a clean-room reimplementation from packet captures. They are, but against the leaked server, not the production server.
Having worked on a few of these projects, you’d be surprised at how many of the successful ones are actually #3.
This is problematic because we can’t rely on data breaches for game preservation.
I agree that live service are the main threat, but even so you should not have to rely on pirated software to keep using something you paid for. Also not all game ends up being cracked
Recently got a big fancy TV with 4k + Dolby Vision
It’s a lot of work figuring out what movies support the format. And all the premium upgrades to Netflix, etc get them to stream premium formats. Then it doesn’t work and you’re spending 30 minutes debugging your TV, wondering why you’re not getting the amazing new restoration of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I totally understand why people just buy physical media.
Games may be harder given software updates. But I’d pay a premium for a physical copy of mature games I love (like Halo Master Chief collection)
Oh, you pay for 4K? Sorry, the CDN is a bit too overloaded to send you this movie today. I hope you’re happy with 1080p, randomly dropping to 360p on and off for a dozen frames at a time during an immersive sequence.
It's worse. All hardware and software in the chain must be approved for you to be allowed to watch 4K. Your browser, OS, CPU, GPU, HDMI cable, and TV must all be whitelisted before you get 4K. Very few people meet the requirements.
And the 4K video is compressed to lower bitrate than a 1080p Blu-Ray anyway.
The whole "make it harder for pirates to watch in 4K" makes no sense to me, like it comes out of the psychology of people who couldn't possibly understand the psychology of other people at all.
My experience is that people don't care about quality. Like there was that time I found a torrent for a movie that had 3000 seeds and found that it was shot with a camcorder in the theater and the soundtrack was in Russian but it didn't matter because the sound quality was so bad I don't think I could have understood the dialog if I knew Russian. Thing is, pirates want to watch a crap copy of a movie that's in the theater and won't even wait for a DVD quality rip, never mind something better.
Maybe it’s because theaters are terrible in some places? No sessions at times people aren’t working, expensive food, restrictions on what food you can bring in, 3D conversions no one asked for, and most importantly, no one to kick out the obnoxious talkers and people on their phones.
> "But owning a game on a disc today isn't really the same thing. It's still just a license..."
Here's the crux of the problem in their own sentence and they don't even realize it.
Owning and Licensing are not the same thing. If I own something, I own it outright. If I license something, I am leasing it.
It does get fuzzy with media, I will admit. But we need the same protections as physical books and game cartidges. If I buy it, it is mine to use as I please and even resell or transfer. If that's not what the transaction is, then don't call it buying or purchasing, call it leasing or licensing.
Require stores and publishers to use language that reflects the nature of the transaction.
The issue with owning discs now is they tend to not even have the full game on them. They either shipped the discs before the game was done so there's something practically unplayable on the disc, or sometimes it's a demo and you have to download the remaining 95% of the game. The one advantage it has over digital for the time being is you can resell it, assuming they didn't lock a bunch of content behind a one-time-use download code in the box.
And this isn't anything new. Mortal Kombat X came out 11 years ago and the disc had 2 characters and a basic tutorial on it. To get the rest of the game you had to download it.
Owning and licensing is bullshit propaganda they feed you so you'll feel better about not owning, and you lapped it right up. For consumer products there should be no distinction.
The right word for a consumer product is "rent". As in I'll "rent" this game. For $2 every week until I return it.
I keep seeing article like this, that look like they have been written by these companies to push the opinion.
People saying "who cares because you cannot play it anyway" instead of "discs should be less dependant on network to gain another advantage".
But the case for physical disk is not (only) about playability, it's mostly about ownership and the fact that you can actually lend it to someone or resell it.
It's also about retail, and it's about collectors. About people with a slow or limited connection having access with that much less to download.
Another thing is also that if I have a physical copy, I have the right to a digital copy. So a non-working disc might not always be the end. But if I have a digital copy and they take it off the table, I do not have this right and it is gone forever.
I wanted to show my gf the halo 1 campaign, so I downloaded the 30GB Masterchief Collection via steam. When I launched it, I was greeted with a black box. After 1 Minute it was a microsoft login screen that looked eerily like a browser inside the game. Since I couldn't do anything else, the game was stuck at a sub 720p resolution. I said fine Ill just create an account. Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email and email verification code later I had to do captcha which is clicking and holding down a button. "Help us against the bots" it said. I unironically spent 5 minutes clicking that button, then being stuck in a loop with "please try again" while my gf just sat there watching me.
Well I turned off MCC and gave up.
I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware
This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
There's something seriously wrong in Redmond.
At least with linux, you can search on the web and find a forum post telling you the magic incantation. With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged, barely workable, edge case until it might or might not work.
Office on the web is a horror show this way.
It is strange to me that people are re-discovering this today, in 2026. Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ years ago) by running a business fixing problems with Microsoft products for their clients.
I was able to take a 25 year break from Microsoft, from 2000 to 2025. Yet I was drawn back in because my son wanted to play Minecraft. This was the worst account process of any system ever invented, as far as I can tell. Plus in 2025 I had some interesting clients that are large corporations that use Microsoft as their core IT practice. The escape to the relative simplicity and consistency of AWS interfaces, from MS land, was the best part of the IT experience with that client. (With how much I've moaned and complained about AWS over the years, that last sentence is the most damning thing I can possibly say about Microsoft's products.)
I started writing a long rant about my experience with Microsoft accounts, Minecraft and Microsoft Family whatever they call it. Parental controls and stuff. But I think I'll just agree with you. It sucks, it's confusing and is designed to suck as much money out of you as possible.
Just pirate it. Minecraft is really easy to pirate if you don't want to play multiplayer, or want to play on pirate-compatible servers (which is one boolean flag in the official server configuration file and doesn't require a pirated server).
Make sure to get Java Edition. The other one is just an ad-riddden slopfest where they also ban you if you say swear words.
That is my plan, I have (had, you have to let it go) an old account from when it was a just username, never bothered "updating" it to the email account, I tried to convert when Microsoft said they were dumping all the old accounts, but the process was not working and I quickly decided I don't actually want a Microsoft account. At which point I decided that if I ever wanted to play again I would just do so sans account.
Which raises an interesting question, If I legally have a license for the game but they shut off the license servers, is it actually copyright infringement? (or piracy as people like to call it because copyright infringement sounds lame)
They will certainly argue, and win, by saying that for legal mumbo jumbo reasons, you only have permission to play it in the exact ways they say you can, and if you already bought the game, but they say you can't play, then it's illegal to play.
Which is why coming at this from a legal perspective a farce. Most of the world is like this, actually. You can assume that if some action brings money to large corporations then it's legal and if it takes away their actual or potential revenue then it's illegal. Go with what you feel is morally correct.
It isn't if you can afford enough lawyers to make microsoft's legal department blink at the cost of prosecution. If you can't drop $10K+ on a lawyer at the start though I would not put any money on winning.
The point of the account was multiplayer, unfortunately. Wanted a locked down account to play the game with a closed group of friends.
Ended up on Minecraft Education on the computer, eventually.
Closed group of friends works fine in offline mode (pirate friendly mode).
If you can get a group of other parents to also pirate...
Not really in the cards, though I can appreciate your dedication to pirate advocacy.
The referenced config setting is apparently literally just whether to have the server authenticate accounts with Microsoft, so pirate and nonpirate players can play together on a server with checking off.
This is basically my experience.
I switched to Mac with the Intel change around...2006 maybe? Converted my entire family.
I personally switched to various flavors of linux around 2016-2017 because I wanted more hardware options.
Eventually, my son got into gaming and eventually we let him get an Alienware laptop maybe 2-3 years ago. Then my wife had to get one for work this year. It's like nothing has improved in 20 years.
If ever there was a case study in the complexity of "market forces", it's Microsoft's Windows' resilience to pressure from clearly superior options like MacOS. As a life long Linux user, I'd like to believe it's the year of desktop Linux, and Linux is a clear threat, but...maybe next year.
Naively one would think that the single greatest market force on Windows would be its users making informed decisions and migrating to better OS options. But continually they don't. So it's clear that Windows' own merits are not what shapes those market forces, but a complex ecosystem of gaming, IT departments, and a long tail of other things difficult to enumerate.
what a shame; I only played minecraft when it was an alpha, and the .jar file ran just fine on my linux machine at the time.
There were problems, but they were problems of a distinct and different kind.
Back in the early 1990s you'd get Microsoft Office from the store, as a box containing 10 floppy disks. And they had to put a lot of effort into testing it, because patching was impossible. And of course it was fully offline. Perpetually licensed, with paid upgrades.
The problems were instead things like "this notionally multi-user OS is just a single-user OS with a decorative login screen" and "any application can crash the entire OS" and "spreadsheets auto-run macro viruses" and things like that.
'always online' has created a whole new set of buggy from a lot of companies. For example cyberpunk is NOW a playable game. Launch date was a very mixed bag. 'fix it after launch' ugh.
> cyberpunk is NOW a playable game
I never had problems with cyberpunk but I think I know why: I built a new PC right around its release and it was good enough to play it smoothly on 4K medium or HD ultra.
When I checked to see what 4K ultra looked like, the graphics latency caused a bunch of scripting to fall apart and the game glitched really bad.
IIRC the console release was notorious for bugs, so I assume consoles were not performant enough to run the game buttery smooth nor could they be easily upgraded.
I encountered bugs when it first released even with a decent PC. IIRC there was a mission where you were running away in a truck, and it would crash every time at a certain point so I could never complete it. Also the whole save file size limit debacle, where they never actually removed deleted items from your inventory and the save file would reach a certain size that the game could no longer read (10mb or something like that)
I guess it’s surprising because how ubiquitous their products are. You’d expect them to be of better quality considering everyone is using MS software one way or another.
Their products/services are ubiquitous not because they are good but because they got where they are today by abusing monopoly power and shady tactics.
On the business side, with M365, they use lock-in tactics and extremely aggressive bundle pricing. The only competitor is Google Workspace, and it's missing features you get bundled with something like an E5 license. So your choice becomes: just pay Microsoft $60/user/month and get Identity, Office, Intranet, MDM, EDR, DLP, ZTNA, the works. Or, buy Google Workspace and then also buy Slack, Okta, JamF (or Jumpcloud or similar), some ZTNA product, etc. and you are now at double or more the price of an E5 license.
On the consumer side with Windows, they secured their monopoly via internet explorer, and predatory OEM contracts to prevent machines being sold with anything else. Now Windows is just an ad-delivery network disguised as an OS. People don't leave Windows because its still, through those shady backroom deals, the default OS on every off the shelf PC, and because of existing software.
Microsoft has zero incentive to build a good product now, they already won. People use it because they have to not because they want to.
Don't agree at all. Microsoft originally hoped that other vendors office type offerings would be good enough, they weren't (lotus notes) so Microsoft did it themselves.
Bill gates also understood the value great programmers. The whole business revolved around this premise. this was different from other software companies at the time. Read the likes of Gabe Newell and Joel spolsky said about their time there. It was in a league of it's own.
There are a lot of great things we got from Microsoft, a zero fee platform to target, a platform that would run on what ever cobbled together pc parts you threw at it. An unbelievable attention to backwards compatibility. Compare that to what we have now in the app store and play store.
> by abusing monopoly power and shady tactics
> Google Workspace, and it's missing features
Sounds like Microsoft got there by having the features.
>extremely aggressive bundle pricing
I mean it's a good deal. As you say, when a company goes above a certain size, it does not make sense to pay for GSuite + Slack + Zoom + RMM/MDM + Zscaler
Windows is still good for gaming PCs, and it will now handle and update itself reliably. No I don't need to hear anecdotes, I work in the IT desktop space. IT janitor monkey if you will. There is no way an enterprise will convert laptops to linux or chromebook.
You see it as malicious, but well, even Google have trouble in this space. Because it is hard.
I suppose the argument is in reverse. They are so ubiquitous, they don’t really have to be good anymore to capture the market.
And they got that position of dominance more via shady deals and sketchy practices than by producing excellent software. Microsoft has done some good engineering, but that's not what made them what they are.
I disagree. Microsoft software was some of the best. Maybe not because their quality was excellent but because their competition was easily worse.
I haven't opened Office in years.
They haven't supported Office in years. You're only supposed to use the web app version now. And it's not called Office any more, it's called Copilot 365. Not joking.
They haven't added a feature I needed since 2003.
Well yeah, but I've been involved with like 6 universities in different European countries and all of them use MS email.
>considering everyone is using MS software one way or another.
I don't think I've used a MS product in at least a decade. At least that I was aware of.
Edit: did some research and I have used LinkedIn. Other than that, nothing.
No GitHub at all?
Product quality has nothing to do with ubiquity. Its all about shady business deals that locks you into products where the migration cost is much higher.
Microsoft products are no longer ubiquitous. That's an early 2010s view. In 2026 most clients are running Android, followed by iOS, followed by Mac, and use Google Docs for their office work. Windows is only used on a per-company basis. If your company uses it it uses it, otherwise it doesn't.
Only small companies here (North EU - Sweden) use Mac + Gsuite + Slack + Zoom as a stack.
Companies over 20 staff are on Windows laptops + Office 365 E3 or E5.
Android and iOS? Sure on the phones...
What "clients" are you talking about? Edit: Re-reading I think you mean clients as in general computers, not business clients. Yes, more of the world is on phones but that is due to cost and society (ipad/iphone kids or third world on android). Real work is all done on PCs/Macs.
Schools are on chromebooks for the kids and Windows or Mac for teachers.
That's the same for the vast majority of the United States.
You got it mostly right. It's Android, then iOS, then Windows. It is still the number one PC OS, in terms of active users and sales. MacOS is a distant second. Of course in 2026, if you want to make money as a developer selling directly to consumers, your best targets are probably iOS and macOS. Android and Windows are rife with users who'll never buy anything and pirates.
You're confusing number of people with percentages. There's still a large share of people who'll pay to use software on windows or android provided your software is good enough. This wrong impression comes from the fact that many users are from 3rd world countries who can't afford anything else. Steam made their entire business selling stuff on windows. And not just proprietary software. Many blender and godot addons are paid and nobody complains. Apart from developing software, where linux and osx are far ahead, in terms of industry software such a autodesk, solidworks, rhino, flstudio, etc, windows is THE platform you want to target of you are planning on monetization. And I'm saying this as a exclusive linux user of 3 years. You know who won't pay money? Linux users. Not out of lack of it, but mostly because of principle of FOSS software. And yes, I'd rather use a inferior FOSS alternative than a slightly better proprietary one
Everyone I see who doesn't use Linux uses a Mac.
well that only means there's a lot of people you do not see. The large majority, according to every available stat.
> ... considering everyone is using MS software one way or another.
This used to be the case when Apple was in dire straits and MS abused their monopoly position to gain 95% of browsers market share. Grim days.
But those days are thankfully long done and there are plenty of people who are completely Microsoft-free.
The one thing people are using one way or another is Linux, because it's now in just about everything. Even those in the Apple ecosystem, with an iPhone and Mac computers, very probably have a Linux router and Linux TV at home.
The number of devices in the world running one version of Linux or another outnumber Windows devices by something like 10 to 1. Maybe more.
Microsoft is a despicable company producing turds since forever. I hate them and the crap they produce with a passion since the DOS days.
As the saying goes: the day Microsoft shall produce something that doesn't suck is the day they'll start selling vacuum cleaners.
Google of the 2020s is the new Microsoft of the 2010s.
They're ubiquitous because everyone else fucked up during the 80's and 90's charging too much for everything. MS was affordable. It's really just Apple gaining economy of scale by manufacturing in China and Linux being free while being higher quality that make MS look bad.
Also MS stuff has always been slop. Hate their business practices too. But without Linux we'd be choosing between MS, Apple and Oracle Solaris or something...
Since some time around 2024, the problems started to grow way more numerous than they already were; the workarounds started to be disallowed; and more broken software started to be pushed as necessary for basic functionality. People were adapted to a certain level of breakage, but are seeing a different one.
Last time I remember them doing something similar was on the last days of XP / earlier Vista time. But it wasn't so bad at the time.
This is why Microsoft is good, there is an entire industry around fixing their nonsense. They are being a job creator!
A very very limited defense of Microsoft and their whole "support vendor" "ecosystem": if you are selling a complex product, there is value in having a robust knowledge base of known problems with known solutions, and a huge base of people who know all the right workflows. A buggier product that's well known and understood is maybe even preferable to a less buggy product with poorly understood failure modes. At least back in the heyday of the NT kernel times, it seemed like there were "MVP"s or whatever that knew the right way to do everything.
(Not that I would know, I don't touch Microsoft's shit with a 10-foot-pole)
I remember that back in the mid 80s the Application group was not happy about the quality of work so someone circulated a memo about software quality, which I read from Steven Sinorfsky’s blogs. Adding NT on top of it, I’d say they definitely treat software quality a lot more serious than today.
I think they completely let it go when they laid off the testers and let users pay $$ to be testers, starting from 2010s perhaps. Maybe earlier.
I remember windows 2000 being pretty rock solid. I used it as my gaming os for years while folks struggled with windows me and windows xp (IIRC, xp did eventually become pretty good)
XP and 7 were only good because it was based off of 2000/NT.
Literally everything that came after Windows Me both in the consumer and server space is based on NT, to this day. So I'm not sure this argument weighs much.
P.S. My personal opinion is that Windows could be a great OS but MS keeps intentionally saddling it with more and more shit in the name of getting more from the user, instead of giving more to the user.
The kernel is solid, its all the userspace software where they are fumbling hard.
The kernel is okish. But compared to Linux it is surprisingly bad at a number of things. Handling lots of tiny files in huge directory trees is much slower on Windows than Linux for example. I dont know if that is due to NTFS vs ext4/btrfs/xfs, or if it is some broader issue in the NT kernel.
Some other things have been baffling over the years (but I belive they are now at least somewhat solved). For example in Windows 7 and older Windows would spend tens of seconds on "installing drivers" for a USB stick every time a new stick was inserted (or even an old stick inserted into a new port). I don't remember seeing this on Windows 10 (or 11), but I barely used those.
But yes, compared to the userspace the kernel is way less jank. (Like how Windows Updates takes minutes to run to conclude that there are updates, and dozens of minutes to install them, while pacman -Syu on Arch can be done in second if there are no updates, and maybe 2-4 minutes in the worst case of a kernel update with dkms modules being rebuilt.)
At least it has async I/O, unlike Linux.
not sure if I'm missing something, `select` seems to work just fine on my machine
but `select` is not async I/O
> I remember windows 2000 being pretty rock solid.
Windows NT (including Windows 2000) was considered to be a workstation OS by Microsoft. From Windows XP on, the NT-based Windows operating systems (except for the server ones) were targeted to consumers.
I would argue that Microsoft had a solid run for some years in the middle where their software was pretty good quality. I think it started with Windows 2000 and certainly lasted through the XP era. Windows 7 was pretty decent too. Their operating system was straight up trash before win2k and has been in steady decline for some years now. It doesn't surprise me that younger people are only now (re-)discovering that Microsoft operating systems are bad.
> Microsoft has always been half-baked, even in the 80s and 90s. Heck, my parents basically raised me (20+ years ago) by running a business fixing problems with Microsoft products for their clients.
I don’t see that as support for the claim that Microsoft’s products were half-baked in the 80s and 90s.
If Linux had sufficient market penetration in small business, I bet you could run a successful business fixing problems with Linux products, even today.
(It may be a bit of a stretch but you could even argue Amazon is making serious money supporting big companies with their Linux problems)
counterpoint: in my experience, the low level Windows OS primitives are less buggy than low level MacOS primitives.
They're weird to this unix-head, but generally not as buggy as in MacOS.
But I don't think it contradicts your point. This is just a rare exception to the true general rule.
Windows 2000,XP,7 may not have been perfect, but they were leagues better than the state of the art today.
That isn't true. Microsoft has made some genuinely good software over the years.
Like what
As someone else stated earlier, the NT kernel is actually great.
I find Windows 10 and 11 really good once you tweak it a bit and remove some cruft and tweak regedit/GPO settings. Both for modern software. Not to talk about backwards compatibility, Steam games from 2009 run just fine. Windows is also the standard for online games with anti-cheat. Also, for companies, Excel is a must. Yes, still is.
The whole ecosystem of AD+GPO+ Exchange since 2000 is unparalleled, Novell had something like AD but AD won. That continues with Office 365 where it's not just an office package. It is Identity/accounts/SSO (Entra), MDM (Intune), EDR/"antivirus", Storage (OneDrive), Sharepoint (docs + storage), Teams (Slack + Zoom).
You can buy Okta, Zoom, Slack, Gsuite, an EDR, an MDM but at that point you are paying a lot more for your stack...
I understand if you are a smaller company, then Gsuite + Slack and Zoom is a good choice. But go over 100 people and it starts to not make sense.
I also hear developers liking their IDEs, both full VS and VS Code.
/IT admin
> Steam games from 2009 run just fine.
I'd say somewhat fine depending on the title, they broke a lot of backward compatibility recently
> You can buy Okta, Zoom, Slack, Gsuite, an EDR, an MDM but at that point you are paying a lot more for your stack...
I'd also say that's where they won, because it looks like an attractive option for the executive and people in power who can purchase these.
As if you're asking me, sure it's cheaper but these MS products are nowhere near as good as any of the alternatives you listed and you'd have to factor the productivity loss.
It's kind of a cheap all-in buffet, sure it's cheap but quality isn't there.
The NT kernel was actually an IBM project, which got divorced from IBM because of contract stuff and Microsoft got to keep a copy. It grew out of VMS which was a heavyweight OS for DEC VAXen, which IBM acquired.
That is not correct at all.
Part of the revisionist history these days is making IBM out the be hero that was crushed by Microsoft but nothing could be further from the truth. IBM was the lumbering giant that evaluated developers by lines of code produced, had 14 levels of management, and wanted to protect their hardware interests more than anything. Microsoft hated working with them because they sucked. OS/2 was so buggy that the first patch was almost as big as the entire original install.
Well, somewhat.
It has been a while since I read a book on NT kernel - "Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft"
NT kernel was "supposed" to run OS/2 apps and Windows apps. But the NT kernel is of MS making, NOT IBM.
The connection to VAX/VMS is due to MS hiring Dave Cutler, who worked there before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Cutler
No. You are thinking of the ibm Mach-kernel “workplace OS” which descended from the os/2 interaction once IBM and Microsoft broke up.
NT was entirely a Microsoft project. They hired the prism team from DEC and started completely from scratch.
Mach and microkernels were hot at one point despite having many issues with performance.
Spider solitaire
Here's a list of MS software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_software
You cannot find a single one that was good, or better than whatever was the alternative at the time?
I actually went into reading this thinking I'd agree with you that "yeah that's such hyperbole they must have made something good", and to my shock the good things they have shipped they eventually ruined.
Examples: Edge (bloated with ads and Copilot), Office (now a subscription, hasn't evolved, annoying integration with copilot), Skype (dead), Halo (virtually dead), Doom (studio gutted), Visual Studio Code (locked down marketplace, replaced plugins with their own, now a giant GitHub copilot ad), Flight Simulator (massive regression with 2024)
Looked through it. I'm only considering things while they owned it. For example, Github was pretty good until Microsoft made them migrate to Azure. Uptime has been bad since.
Several of the games are good, but those were mostly made by game studios they own (or later bought). Those are not really part of the core Microsoft culture.
Old versions of Office (pre-ribbon UI) were perfectly usable (if you ignore the years of Clippy, or you disabled that). But in recent years, not.
VS Code was good but it has been getting worse. Every new release is 90% AI features rather than useful things. And it is an open source project anyway, so they aren't the only contributor.
I guess Minesweeper and Solitare are still pretty good (unless they messed them up in Windows 11, which I have stopped using entirely).
But that is pretty damming isn't it? Pretty much everything on that list is bad currently. And the majority was never great.
Evidently you can't, or you would have named it
You're digging yourself a bigger hole. Keep digging.
It really became a problem only with Windows RT attempting to merge mobile OS with desktop. All the non-sensical UX compromises are still from that.
Later they abandoned consumerware after losing the mobile space but that's a different story. Microsoft isn't really a consumer software company any more so there's no point judging it on that basis.
microslop before invention of slop
To bring it back to Xbox a little. I recently picked up an Xbox one X, the late performance boost to their last generation. Firstly, the performance to price ratio is brilliant nowadays, when you get title at native 4K it is a really neat little thing to see.
It can throw around a decent amount for a machine that is almost a decade old... except Halo 2 anniversary, the framerate is cooked on that one but does resolve a native 4K image, so there is that.
But the system software quality is absolute rubbish. I have never seen any other system just trip over itself for just random reasons, it can be UI hang ups, installation issues, network connection issues, that it is constantly pinging their servers just to do basic things, endless random crash outs or any manner of similar problems. I never had that issue on their previous consoles or any other console for that matter. I mean once the software is going in a straight line, you can see the magic but the amount of junk to get to there is comical.
an aside, the only game I can consistently have fail on Switch and PS4 nowadays is Quake 2 when you use their own hand picked mods, and yes, Microsoft owns Bethesda who releases it. Something is very wrong in Redmond. Yeah MS has always had a history of software quality problems but this feels very different. It is like they are just stacking abstraction layers on top of others and ending up with a rat-king of technology debt. Not just that but there seems to be a vibe of just general complacency, that is dragging it all down.
Oh and their online web potart is some of the slowest most bug riddled trash I have ever seen online.
> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
Whoa! Now hang on a minute. That's not fair. They've only been developing software for 51 years! It takes time to get good at these things, you know?
Azure is also such a mess.
10 redirects to get to the portal, when creating an account/etc. if you do one thing wrong it might just disappear from a tenant or not bind properly or something and then you gotta do it all over again (happened last year)
I just don't know how this is possible, why is everything so broken?
Compared to the old Win32 apps and settings menus of Windows Server, the Azure web interface is a disaster.
And the official auth URLs are always such random crap that I'm surprised people don't get phished left right and centre.
No owners, no responsability, no incentive to fix it. Ticket grabbers and checklist markers.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
This is why.
TLDR: complete incompetence at all levels
It’s actually impressive just how badly Microsoft fcuked the online experience in Minecraft.
It’s so bad that Occam’s Razor should suggest malice; because an organisation that large and that profitable surely cant be that incompetent at managing the sign in process for the world’s most popular game. Yes here we are.
Back in the early 00s I coined the phrase “everything Microsoft touches turns to shit”. A reverse Midas touch. And unfortunately this is still proving true even into the 2020s
You know whats the cherry on top? I got it working today and you have to download the actual halo 1 campaign as a DLC from inside or outside the MCC game. Even if I got it working yesterday, I'd have to wait for another download. What the 30GB MCC does initially is still a mystery to me.
I looked into it and apparently just the launcher itself is 16GB because it's filled to the brim with extremely oversized videos and sound files, on top of an already overweight base.
All this is supposed to be the peak of game dev prowess. We've had like 50 years of game dev just to evolve to this. It's not just huge launchers - almost everything AAA that's made today feels like it was designed to appear flashy at first glance in some meeting for people who have no idea what they're looking at, while performance, technical features, and the most basic user experience considerations are thrown out of the window.
I mean yeah, just wait until you hear about Ark survival ascended: A game with a single 188gb ucas file extracts itself during update, taking over 400gb just to patch 2gb and then rezips itself.
Why don't you literally just pirate it.
You already own it, so it's not even immoral.
I've always felt the elimination of their QA department once the current CEO came in is what really started the decline in quality. Now they are being called Microslop for good reason.
Microsoft is basically Oracle Lite. Oracle is not a software company, it is a government contract fulfilment company with a specialisation in software. Its function is to get money and the engineering department is only an excuse to tick all the boxes on a given contract so it can get paid. Microsoft is the same but also does corporate clients. The rest of us get the scraps.
The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry, and that was somewhat extended to Xbox. But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!"
> But they laid off their QA team a year or two ago because "AI will change everything!"
They gutted QA in 2014, ending their software development engineer in test positions, and suggesting the developers should test their own code to get velocity.
Subsequent releases were worse than before, and things have compounded since then. Hard to say that laying off the rest of the team made a noticable difference.
Oh thanks for the correction/supplemental information. The gutting you're referring to might be the huge lay offs that I'm thinking of. Possibly conflating the recent AI driven layoffs with those from 12 years ago.
>The bad part is that Microsoft (generally) used to have some of the best QA in the industry
Blame Satya Nadella. He fired testers and turned customers to helpless beta testers.
Yeah based on your comment and the others, it seems he did an initial purge in 2014.
QA doesn't get enough love :(
QA got laid off all decade ago. It's been 10 years of bugs like this weeks breaking boot on Dell's.
Thank you for the correction! I think I was conflating the two (having heard about the one from 2014, and then also hearing about the more recent rounds, and not recognizing they were different)
I've edited my comment to correct this. Cheers!
This definitely does not extend to games. I remember microsoft games having terrible UX over a decade ago (not the game, the account garbage around it).
So, I've had a pretty shit time with Microsoft products over the last ten years, but it wasn't quite as bad 5-7 years ago. Our disagreement on that might be that I'm only in my late 20s, so if you're older than I am, or had newer consoles than I had around that time, I might be a little more tolerant of jank.
But according to the other replies, it seems Microsoft has been purging QA for years now.
I don't have much to add except that people have the idea that this is a new low from microslop thanks to vibe coded Devs but it's really not. There has been for so long a culture of contractors being treated as printers. Then never given a long enough contract to receive any benefits because it is cheaper. Way and repeat. Nothing is fully understood and nobody knows where the focus needs to be. No wonder everything is in a state that it is. Garbage.
There are stories of MS bringing in high school students to code core features on Windows 95/98 as a part of their summer intern programming.
And you wonder why that system would to freeze up when ever you put a CD in and it had to spin up.
They have always tried to cheap out on this stuff.
>With Microsoft, you will be forced to consume some second-rate engineer's unmanaged,
Or, you'll find the official Microsoft documentation, but will just be out of date, or wrong, or otherwise will not reflect the actual Microsoft product in front of you. It's baffling that people say Linux is hard when I never need to work so hard to get basic things to work as I do with a normal Microsoft product.
>> There's something seriously wrong in Redmond.
Is it? People are buying this crap, why should MS spend more money to increase quality? They will receive the same quarterly revenue but with lower profits. Shareholders will not be happy!
It’s like they dump “bad at programming and don’t care about it” juice right into the water supply.
All problems with Microsoft products are design and intent problems, not engineering.
The design and intent are bad, but let’s not discount the large amount of bad engineering too.
There is some brotherhood of coders who will not acknowledge programmers are anything less than perfect. All bugs and errors are the fault of project managers.
If an engineer executes on bad intent and design goals and builds a bad bridge, that's also a bad engineer.
Engineers are not serfs, they have enough income and agency to be responsible for the fruits of their labor.
Is it 2019 again?
Can you explain this to me? I think it's far more 2000s, when we were having debates about whether software engineers were actually engineers, with professional responsibility, or not.
WinUI 3 was upgraded to stable/release when it had literally thousands of outstanding issues, including stuff like [fully replicable] 'using drag and drop causes the program to crash.' That was about the time I started opting out of the entire MS ecosystem after investing decades in it.
I can't even imagine the chaos they must have going on inside for them to be failing the way they are on the outside. I'm also curious what started it. They've never been a pinnacle of engineering, but things went really went downhill hard in more modern times.
There's a reason why people either stick to Win32 or go with something like Electron when it comes to making Windows apps.
> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
Their PM motto is "quality is a feature", and obviously not everybody needs all the features.
> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
> There's something seriously wrong in Redmond.
I'd say: There is something seriously wrong with the people buying this shit since over 40 years.
It's not like Microslop products weren't pure utter trash already decades ago. They got worse over time, especially lately with "AI", that's true, but nothing ever changed substantially.
I pretty much doubt it's incompetence.
It all has been looking like a deliberately ill intent for quite a while.
This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
When you try to save a short-term buck by offshoring your workforce, you end up with long-term problems and brand damage.
And now vibe coding is the new offshoring, so we can make things worse at scale!
When did the offshoring happen, because Microsoft has been bad for a long time. Even in the 90s there were so many BSODs.
Well, the classic BSODs were not all Microsoft's fault, many of them were on 3rd party driver developers.
I think the worse thing here is all the subtle breakages and inconsistencies in Windows, as well as in the MS Office suite of products, constant redesigns of things that worked, adding layers upon layers of "make-up" on top that obscures functionality, etc etc.
I think “The Operating System is fundamentally Unstable” is a much bigger problem than “First party applications are redesigned too frequently.”
Microsoft in the 90s was doing things that hadn't been done before with Windows. And the NT line, converging to consumers at XP, solved many of them, and by now they don't have an excuse any more.
I’m genuinely confused about exactly what Microsoft was doing for the first time.
Not the first gui.
Not the first web browser.
Not the first spreadsheet/word processor/slideshow.
Edit: I’ll give credit, NT is good kernel, and had some novel qualities.
I would argue that they where tge first to try and do all that at once while on non-specified hardware systems. Yes Apple, Amiga etc will similar stuff but they at least had set target hardware.
Microsoft tried to do everything for better and worse on wildly varied commodity hardware.
The first one that pretty much anyone could use and was useful for them. We credit Apple for popularizing the GUI, too, even though they stole it from Xerox.
> This is my experience with all Microsoft software. The worst thought out, buggy, untested pile of crap.
AKA: Slop. Microsoft was publishing slop before LLMs were even a thing, it's no wonder they were so eager to jump on the AI bandwagon once it showed up. Their company is uniquely set up to take advantage of a slop generator.
Microsoft stole my copy of Minecraft.
I had bought Minecraft before Microsoft bought Mojang, and eventually I was forced to migrate my Minecraft license to a Microsoft account.
After I had successfully created the account, logged in, and transferred the license, and ONLY after I had transferred the license, I was suddenly locked out of my account until I provided a phone number.
I will never buy a Microsoft product again, and I think I've done a decent job reducing the amount of their stuff that other people have bought, as well.
I tried to simply purchase some Minecraft thinggy for my kid and Microsoft sent me through what seemed to be a 70 step process of logging in, captcha, authenticating, verifying, logging in again, trying to buy, getting blocked, captcha, authenticating again, E-mail verification, online verification, blocked again, contacting support, authenticating, talking to their fraud team, re-logging in, captcha, authenticating, E-mail verification... All the while, the browser is redirecting between Microsoft and Xbox websites (I don't even fucking own an Xbox--this is on the PC).
Anything that touches a Microsoft account is fraught with horror and pain. Which is why the idea of requiring one in order to turn on your PC is ludicrous.
As they say, the day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck will be the day they start making vacuum cleaners.
My original Minecraft account got lost in all these shenanigans as well.
Bought Minecraft on one of the first survival mode releases back when Notch was streaming himself making the game and Microsoft stole this from me. I'm not particularly sad about the digital access itself but this low-key meant something to me :|
Happened to many people. The system claims it's because of some suspicious activity but everybody who gave in to this blackmail and submitted personal details said that after logging in there was no notice of anything suspicious.
since this is a game it's probably mostly kids whose identifying information Microsoft is hunting for. I can't believe it's legal and the company was not sued yet
me I just pirate it now, never played on servers anyway.
My friends and I play on a private server that I run in offline mode because some of us got locked out of our accounts.
And this is why you know age verification is not done to make sure kids are protected.
If it is through collecting phone numbers, yes
I've had this happen with at least three accounts, the most recent one for the purpose of playing Grounded with a friend. IIRC, between registering and trying to log in, my account was flagged for suspicious activity and required a phone number.
> Microsoft stole my copy of Minecraft.
Microsoft stole two of my accounts.
I bought Minecraft in the alpha days when all you needed was a username and password. At some point they mandated an email in the years I wasn't playing and later found out I could no longer sign in.
I bought a new "copy" and lost it because I didn't migrate to a Microsoft account. I didn't migrate because I assumed it was just a scare tactic and I wasn't playing at the time anyway. When I later wanted to play they stopped allowing me to log in.
When I look at the top selling games[1] and see Minecraft in second place with 400 million, I wonder how many of those are the same people buying it again. I'm sure nobody bought Super Mario because it would stop letting them sign in to play offline.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
If you bought during Alpha you're entitled to play it for free forever including all future editions (currently Bedrock) and you could go to small claims court to get your account back, maybe.
"Give us your phone number or we will hold your minecraft account ransom"
You don't get in even with the phone number
Happened to me every time I ever made a Microsoft account. It works for one day, then some fraud process runs overnight and if I try to use it the next day I need a phone number. Good thing I first discovered this on a throwaway account.
Remember when people were allowed to share phone numbers? Like it was actually the norm
Remember when we didn't live in a panopticon? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Same here
This is the same effect of wanting to watch an old film... If you want to do it the legit way, you will have to face all kind of hurdles, starting from finding a service provider that might have the film, then forget about all the modern audience "edits" they put on these things, at times the quality isn't even good, the audio tracks are messed up...
So you either give these jackals at least 30 to 60 minutes of your life (plus money) for the luxury of using their crap services and obtaining a half-assed version of what you want, or you just go to good old Forum McTorrent and get what you actually want for free.
The streaming service is a Cathedral: You've paid your tithe to the temple of HBO Max? Marvelous, please come in, my child and gaze upon our wonders! What? James Cameron's True Lies? It is not in our collection, please remain here and we can watch Commando together! It's just as good!
The digital copy is a Bazaar: You wander the booths of Prime Video, iTunes, and... Fandago!?! They assure you their copy of True Lies is the best! Ignore that other booth... you may save $2 but are you certain that video will still exist in a year?
And the whole time you know that just under the bazaar is the Underground/Black Market where all is preserved and all can be had, but you'll need to work for it.
Just a minor correction: Commando is superior to True Lies ;)
It is, but it's not much consolation if you want to watch True Lies and not Commando.
From a moral PoV pirating old movies isn't a big issue, especially in cases where the original makers are already dead. At that point you're only feeding Hollywood bosses, shareholders and decendants. Same as torrenting music from dead artists. I don't care for Jimi Hendrix' greedy sister or 'Authentic Brands Group', which owns the rights to Elvis Presley's music. These people can create their own art instead of living off other people's work.
but enough about anthropic
Well played.
What if Jimi Hendrix wanted for his sister to benefit from his work?
Hendrix has been dead for twice the length that copyright originally lasted, and for longer than the copyright period at the time he was alive (i.e. during his life when he was assessing the economic fairness of creating his music, he would've expected his work to already be public domain today). My daughter is older than her grandmother was when that music was written. Why would we care any more than e.g. what Francis Scott Key wanted?
A decent proxy for the maximum appropriate length of copyright might be when the next generation starts making those edits or disclaimers for changing culture (so the original is no longer considered appropriate for current markets), so at most ~20 years or so. One generation, and then it is history/heritage to pass on (or critique, as the case may be).
Who made his guitar? It seems like he made all his art on the back of someone else’s work… they should be getting royalties for every track made with their product
(I’m pointing out the absurdity of trying to assign ownership within a system of shared creation)
I don't think that the guitar manufacturer asked for royalties.
On the other hand there are video cameras that you can't use for commercial purposes because they lack the appropriate video codec license from MPEG-LA :-) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42735824)
Too bad because she isn't either way. It's all going to shareholders and top executives.
If we had a sane copyright system everything older than 10 years would be in the public domain
Physical DVD is the way. Praise Criterion
yeah good idea, I'll just pop it into my xbox -- oh.
You can play the DVD without your Xbox being online.
Well!, thank God for small mercies.
Praise Criterion
The whole collection, mostly on Blu-Ray, was 50% off at Barnes and Noble when I was there a couple of weeks ago.
There was a huge display right at the entrance of this huge chain retailer, so in spite of the online streaming hype, there must be a non-niche audience for optical media.
Blu-Ray is risky from the DRM side of things. Those disks can be disabled at anytime and can just stop working if the players are offline too long or the manufacture's servers go down. Rip them to your hard drive if you want to keep being able to watch them without begging for permission.
I don't know if I agree with you with this example. Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works. Usually true with a film or TV show through the "forums" too, but not always. Sometimes it's the wrong episode, sometimes it's the wrong language, sometimes one particular show keeps buffering even for no obvious reason. And even though it's quite rare, you never know until you're sat with your wife or friends watching it, because who checks the show in advance?
How would a downloaded file buffer? That sounds more like streaming sites, which yeah are bad. But if you download a movie or season of a show in advance I don't think you'll have the same issues. Language ones or missing subtitles maybe - you gotta check those as the download finishes and before you put it on a media server.
> How would a downloaded file buffer
I've no idea. It happens sometimes and only seems to happen with certain fils. In this case I'm sure it's a jellyfin issue, but this just comes down to having to debug while someone is waiting to watch - which is exactly the time I don't want to.
As for language/subtitles it's true if it happens from the start (which I agree, is usually true) but occasionally the downloads get weird midway through.
At that point you’re not playing the downloaded file. You’re either playing a transcoded version of it which will buffer as a computer tries to convert on the fly. Or you’re dealing with a network throughput issue related to the bitrate of the file you’re trying to remotely play.
If you're talking about those random malvertising-supported streaming sites then sure, but torrenting is not like this at all.
No, I'm talking about downloaded files. It happens maybe 2% of the time. You can't be sure the indexers are giving you the correct one.
> Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works.
On streaming services shows get silently censored or edited, or episodes are just outright removed (and get re-numbered so you don't even realize what was removed), and episodes get put out in the wrong order, or they aren't released at all in the right language, and there are no subtitles, only closed captions. Neither streaming or piracy are perfect, but only one them allows you to save a show to your hard drive so you know it will be there the next time you want to watch it unlike streaming where they constantly pull shows offline
> Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works.
Well that's hilariously untrue. Movies getting pulled out of streaming services is why I started to buy physical DVDs again.
> Sometimes it's the wrong episode, sometimes it's the wrong language, sometimes one particular show keeps buffering even for no obvious reason. And even though it's quite rare, you never know until you're sat with your wife or friends watching it, because who checks the show in advance?
Yes, those things do happen with commercial streaming platforms; Paramount is especially bad IME, but hardly unique.
> Movies getting pulled out of streaming services is why I started to buy physical DVDs again
Me too, but sadly more and more shows aren't getting physical releases at all anymore.
> Sure it's annoying to find a streaming service but once done it generally works.
I have 2 words for you: "soon leaving". You may have seen them on Netflix.
And in the US you have the advantage it's generally leaving to go somewhere. In many smaller countries this is not true.
I've never those words in File Explorer.
"who checks the show in advance?"
Maybe I'm old school, but the primary lesson Limewire taught me was to always check the media before you show it to someone else.
Every 'issue' that you mentioned about wrong episode, wrong language, etc. If those are the costs to ride the ride then so be it. No CEO gets paid in 'had to redownload a different version'.
> Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email and email verification code later I had to do captcha which is clicking and holding down a button. "Help us against the bots" it said. I unironically spent 5 minutes clicking that button, then being stuck in a loop with "please try again" while my gf just sat there watching me.
From 2013
PLEASE DRINK A VERIFICATION CAN
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632877-halo-4/66477630
Yep... It gets a little less funny by the year.
I think some of the most prophetic writing in terms of specifics came from Richard Stallman that basically called it all out in the late 1980s, including social media.
You may not always like what he has to say but he did think through how this stuff can be leveraged against the users.
Most interesting part of this for me is the lukewarm response it gets from the initial replies. The sense of humor here was ahead of its time.
the original was 4chan[1] , then it circulated around. It had better reactions elsewhere at the time.
[1] https://copypastatext.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Doritos...
What an absolute gem, thank you
Not related to the Microsoft gaming division, but yes, Microsoft products are a mess. I am forced to use Office 365 to do some slides for work, and I decided to use Office for macOS so I could use Claude extension.
All went relatively well, until I needed to share the slides with others using Office 365: my first try of sharing the slides by clicking the Share button inside Office for macOS caused it to upload to SharePoint as read-only: not even myself (the document owner) could edit it.
I said "fine, I will just upload the .pptx file manually", and it worked well enough, until the file came back with some comments for fixes: now if I clicked the "Open on desktop" button, it kinda created a local copy that I could never sync with the remote one, but they're still clearly the same file because it did show as the same file when I went to properties on both desktop and web versions.
At that point I was getting really pissed off, so I started editing locally and copying my changes to the remote version. Office still had one more surprise: I could copy whole slides remotely, but copying part of a slide (say a rectangle form with some text) would instead convert that part to an image. Seriously, what the f*ck Microsoft?
In 2023, spent multiple hours setting up a Microsoft account for my GF just so she could play Minecraft. The process involved HTTP 4xx, 5xx, missing emails, activation codes that were "expired" even though they were less than 30 seconds old, countless instances of HTTP 302 (or JS / HTML based redirects?) that simply went to a landing page instead of redirecting to the "You've been authenticated" thingy and tons, tons and tons upon tons of captchas. Audio-based ones even, at some point! Some of the voices I could easily understand, others had like a thick accent or something - and English is not my mother tongue. The only thing driving me forward was a boiling hatred towards Microsoft.
It's wild cause it was so easy circa ~2010, back before Mojang was purchased.
Microsoft makes a web login seem like some kind of lost knowledge like Roman aqueducts.
Mojang was username+password later email+password, following industry trends (username is easily seen in-game so you only have to guess a password which for many people is easier than guessing their email).
It continued to be so, and then Microsoft forced everyone to switch to a Microsoft account, deleting the account of anyone who didn't do so (in complete violation of Notch's original sales contract with players). If you watch the progress bar of Prism Launcher logging you in to a Microsoft account you see it logs into Microsoft, goes through a bunch of indirection, logs into Xbox (!!), bunch of indirection, then logs into Mojang. And then you get to launch the game.
It used to be a simple endpoint with username+password -> auth token. Not any more with Microsoft!
As far as i am concerned they stole my Minecraft account by force migrating it and me cannot being bothered doing all that, all the time again.
Thank you for sharing. MCC is nice when it works. I’ve also found that running the original Halo in Xemu emulator makes for an extremely lightweight, fast, and performant experience. It’s remarkable how heavy weight MCC is compared to the original games.
In Xbox's defence, pretty seamless. I am signed into my xbox account, which is a Microsoft account. When launcing a game all that account auth bullshit is taken care of.
My wife has her own account, and our accounts are bound to our controllers. When you press the xbox button you are immediately signed into your profile, and it's instant. When she launches a game with her controller, she sees her saves and vice versa for me. With Baldur's Gate 3 it even keeps all her mods separate from my mod-free setup.
Some game publishers (activision, ubisoft et al) require their own accounts, and that's usually also taken care of automatically. The xbox goes and sets up a profile on that publisher's system on first game launch.
No idea why this is being downvoted, because it accurately describes the Xbox experience.
I have a 10 years old Xbox One, and every fucking time my family and I want to play a game, maybe once in a few months or so, it's always a struggle. Oh, let me download a few gigs of a system update. Oh, and the game you want to play needs an update too. Oh, and you are now logged out so go remember your password and type it using the controller. It's never a seamless experience that you would expect of a game console, which has one job: let the users play games.
You can use the Xbox app on your phone as a keyboard for the console. Or you can connect a physical keyboard.
Do you work for Microsoft by any chance? :)
I mean, come on. The vast majority of services that have apps running on TV implemented QR code based login workflow ages ago, and it just works. For Xbox, logging in is always a struggle.
Does the XBox not have an option for doing those updates in the background or when you aren't playing?
If you haven't played a game recently it will punt it out of the auto update queue.
It does but it's not reliable. The update process is also the slowest imaginable other than Windows update. It takes several minutes at times just to discover which games need updates.
It probably does, but it's turned off the majority of time. It's still plugged in, so I wouldn't mind if it updated itself silently, but no, it does not do it when it's turned off.
When I see Microsoft, I run away.
No one is perfect but Microsoft is really efficient at making me lose my mind.
They ruined Minecraft in the same way. Microsoft login tied, emails, captchas, losing auth, losing purchases because it can’t tie auth to the system.
Microsoft is a joke.
And that's just the login system, not even mentioning the glacial pace of updates which end up consisting mostly of slop anyway (though I like the nether and aquatic update. Those areas were sorely empty before.)
Reminds me of the fact that I lost my Xbox account because they shutdown hotmail. My account is working on my Xbox but the password reset options are not supported by the OS on the Xbox. And I can’t change the email of the account from an Xbox. The support wasn’t helpful either. I read that somebody with the same issue got them to change the mail by logging in and out while on the phone. I don’t have the energy to jump through these hoops.
There's more to this story, you've forgotten your password or something. Hotmail accounts moved to outlook.com, just reset it on a PC.
Rather than download the 30GB Master Chief collection, you might try downloading the Xemu OG XBOX emulator plus the original game on archive.org.
https://xemu.app/
Ha! This is pretty much what happened to me on my steamdeck the night before last. Login via GitHub or something nonsense. I was too tired, I turned it off. I tried a few years ago and I ended up in and endless loop of login redirects. Totally broken.
Why on earth does this it require a login in to play!? I'd prefer to emulated the OG box version, but that is one emulator I've never got working.
Average Ubisoft game experience on Steam.
I was gonna say, this is every time the gang feels like firing up a round of Uno.
I had a similar experience this weekend. Some friends got together, one got the new Halo campaign, and we looked forward to playing co-op, like the good ol' days.
Well, adding a screensplit co-op now requires a log-in, which requires a phone to register via a QR code, which, after about 5 minutes of trying, completely failed. So we just turned it off and played Catan.
Meanwhile, an illegal pirate version from torrents works flawlessly after installation and double-clicking on the exe file.
I hope you refunded it.
Had the same thought but with the new Halo remake which I own on PS5.
On booting the game, you're presented with the text "Press X to join" in the second player slot. That's a lie, pressing X just makes the screen flash.
Had to search online what to do. Turns out you need a Playstation account AND Microsoft account, AND they need to be linked just to join as a split-screen player. However, no prompt or UI is implemented to explain or do any of those for a second player.
Ok, setting out to do this BS. Feeling nostalgic about Halo CE LAN parties with 0 internet connection or accounts needed. She logs in with the PS account which she had to make to play another couch co-op one time a year ago. That itself was for no reason other than to boost Sony's MAU metrics but I digress. MS account made. I assume you need to create an Xbox gamer tag too, so we do that. Back to Halo, same flashing screen issue. No prompt appears to link the PS account to the MS account. I have a hunch that MS is incompetent and didn't implement the linking process except for the primary player. I'm right. You have to force close the game, switch the primary PlayStation profile to the second player, then relaunch the game. Finally got the prompt to link accounts. Now "Press X to join" works. Truly egregious how poorly implemented and communicated this is.
At this point we're 45 min in and have lost interest.
>I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware
For several years, you've been forced to login with a MS account on first boot.
Been there as well. You just want to play a game you own and end up making new accounts and sharing personal details, and even then might not even succeed.
This is a big reason I try to keep my old consoles alive. My OG Xbox is queued up ready for a clock capacitor replace so I can fire up real Halo CE any time I want!
> Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email
Does anyone even provide real information? What is the point of even asking for a name?
Don't be such a racist troll.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49171881
xbox hardware
I had one I received as a gift. Every week or two it would boot up to its green Welcome screen and then just sit there animating itself gently, without being interactable in any way. This is how it does software updates. Apps that have problems with things like server outages tend to just sit there failing silently, eventually taking the whole machine down. Sometimes It complains that wifi is too unstable to install an update and demands a wired ethernet connection instead.
Every month or two my unit started locking up at random forcing a system reset and reinstallation. I'm not sure why, mainly it runs youtube, netflix and crunchyroll; I've never enjoyed the feel of the xbox controller for gaming. You can't get any sort of technical information out of it unless you want to pay $30 or so for a developer pack, which provides some basic OS utilities and lets you run your own unsigned apps. I briefly considered doing the latter so I could make dashboards and browse them on the sofa, but I grew to despise the xbox design ethos so much that I just bought a PS5 instead.
I also have a ps3, which has been going strong for >15 years and only ever hiccups if the power is cut suddenly and it needs to do a disk check/repair on its next boot - in which case it informs me clearly about what's happening and why. The only reason it's not my main console is that companies like Netflix and crunchyroll stopped supporting the platform. I still boot it up sometimes so I can watch things I paid for via Amazon prime without ads, because Amazon stopped updating their ps3 app some years ago but it still works.
I started out with MS-DOS back in the 80s... errr, the 20th century and was technically invested in Microsoft's way of doing things for years, as it balanced technical depth and accessibility with an approachable user interface, without the constant tinkering and driver annoyances of Linux. Nowadays you would need to pay me to use it. The only gripe I have with Sony hardware is that there isn't any way to self-sign software if you want to make your widgets or apps to run on your own machine. The closest you can get is installing Roblox and then using their free developer tools (engine + a Lua derivative).
> I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware
Fortunately, it's nothing like what you experienced at all.
the hardware is good
but it is so hard to give them money on it
i dread buying new games as it is a game of chance what way might work this time
I don't know and let me spice this up with another story:
I have a ps4 and I undusted it a couple of weeks ago, then after a couple of os and game updates that took 2h to finish, they asked me to subscribe to playstation plus to play online and to basically use my internet.
What exactly is the point of a console at this point?
The point of the console is to make you only buy games that are compatible with the console. For example if you have a PS5, you'll give a cut of your games to Sony instead of giving a cut to Microsoft.
> What exactly is the point of a console at this point?
Anti-cheat. Knowing that if you get into a match with other people they won't be running software on their system that gives them an unfair advantage.
In 2026 a console is a streamlined PC that can't be used for anything else but games - but the gaming experience is easier and less frustrating.
> but the gaming experience is easier and less frustrating
??? It's not the early 1990s anymore where you had to fiddle with autoexec.bat and assigning IRQs to get your DOS games to run. The only "downside" of PC gaming is that the hardware isn't subsidized like game consoles are, so you're upfront investment is a couple hundred bucks more. But then you don't need a subscription for multiplayer gaming, and PC games are cheaper (80 Euros for a game? come on...)
None of this sounds easier or less frustrating than Steam.
Microsoft harder is good? Relative to what?
Xbox, the topic of discussion, is literally famous for a 'red ring' hardware failure.
I am not sure it's fair to equate the xbox 360 with the current generation which is the Xbox Series X/S, which was preceded by the Xbox One X/S, so the 360 is two base iterations old at this point.
Not that I am defending M$FT here. I'm just clarifying so we don't drift into calling everything a "Nintendo" like my parents did.
I tried to login to Microsoft's account this week to play Sea of Thieves, and I literally couldn't log in for 30 minutes because it kept going on a redirect loop. Enter email, enter password, "we're checking your information", logged into into the account dashboard, but as soon as I clicked any button [1], got sent back to the login screen.
Tried two browsers to no avail. Found someone on Reddit that suggested resetting the password and finally managed to make progress. Utterly loathsome software, how the hell does a tech company exist when they can't even get their login system working properly?
1: all because I needed to change the country, now that I'm not in UK any more, as the game required age verification just to allow access to the multiplayer functionality. Thanks, Starmer.
> Since I couldn't do anything else,...
Sail the high seas my friend.
> I don't want to know what life is like having xbox hardware
It was pretty great up to the 360, but with the Xbox One everything went to shit. Game consoles were meant to be plug-and-play, today they are more hassle to setup than a PC with Steam (ok, I guess Playstation isn't quite as terrible yet).
Note "up to the 360" is only two different consoles! The Xbox, and the Xbox 360.
Nothing infuriates me quite like an additional gaming account inside of a dedicated gaming platform. Running under a Steam/PSN/Xbox account and want to play the game you just bought? Sucks to be you. First create a Ubisoft/Blizzard/indie-studio-with-one-game login so we can better monetize something.
I've lost count of the times my buddy and I wanted to play coop, and I was forced to log in to my ms account for a split screen game. I remember back on the original xbox, and x360, using 'guest' just worked. Forcing people to login for couch coop is asinine.
I wonder if this one is actually deliberate as a slop-pushing thing, or if it's actually a developer level thing where some devs assumed every player has an account.
It definitely depends on the game. Some allow second (or third or fourth) players to play as "guests" (not signed in to any particular account), and some don't. Party games, or games designed primarily for co-op, are definitely more likely to allow guests.
Weirdly, in my limited experience it seems that 'premium' / AAA games are more likely to require an account - I suspect it's because they want to be able to save unlocks/progress for those players. Perhaps they think it will incentivize those players to buy a copy of their own.
I would bet that Microsoft is 100% composed of vibe coded slop these days. Everything they touch these days turns to shit.
MCC and Xbox Live on Windows have been exactly this jank at least since MCC's Windows release in 2019.
I recently bought far cry 3 on steam and spent 20 minutes post-install trying to log into my ubisoft account between forgetting an old password, 2fa across multiple devices and a badly broken captcha system.
uConnect and the various 3rd party storefront/DRMs are a travesty on the Steamdeck - the Decky plugin Junkstore goes some way to remedying it, but Far Cry 3 is harder to get working than any number of tempermental Switch emulations with pre-cached shaders and other graphics hacks.
Silly, you should've paid $60 for the re-re-remake of halo one (which would still need a login i guess...)
Sorry though, i just reinstalled MCC yesterday to play Halo 1 myself, and lucky me my Microsoft account worked fine
And the Steam version is distinctly better to boot. The XBox Store version last I tried just straight up didn't work.
Microsoft's gaming division was in an absolute shambles and that was before they gutted it.
Eh. Recently I invited a friend over to play games. I have Linux so it's normal that shit doesn't work but I came across a bug where Steam would just casually take 300% of CPU when Steam Controller was connected and even if I managed to start the game, controllers wouldn't work. I couldn't debug the issue on time, so we did not play games. After she left I figured out that if I first connect the Xbox controller and then the Steam controller then it works, but if it's the other way around then it doesn't. Or in reverse, I don't remember and I'm away from my PC.
sounds tough. have you considered showing her an actually good game? just spitballing here
Hope you didn't preorder GTA 6 then :)
Or any Rockstar game on PC since Max Payne 3, for that matter...
Or Ubisoft titles etc etc.
Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. It’s a shame. I can invite my friends over, boot up my GameCube to play some Mario Kart Double Dash. As long as the console and disc are okay, I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away.
These days? Not so much. I’ll never be able to be sure I can play GTA VI in twenty years. It just sucks not owning anything anymore. I know why they do it, it’s a massive profit difference.[1]
On the PC end of things, it’s not as bleak. Services like GoG let you download the standalone installer, DRM free. I try to get any single player games I can from GoG, you should too.
Support the corps that give you ownership. Buy those Blu-rays of your favorite films. Either to support physical media or to ensure you will have it until data degrades.
1: https://youtube.com/watch?v=sESfDf0My84
General principle: It is way easier to avoid lock in by not being locked in in the first place then to extricate yourself later. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming video service because I had a DVD collection that predates them, and I maintained it instead of being on a streaming service, so I've got a personal collection. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming music service because I have a CD collection started decades before they came into existence, ripped digitally, and I've got music I own already.
There's more entertainment of every kind, including video games that don't lock you down, then you could consume in a lifetime anyhow. If you limit yourself to just what doesn't lock you in, yeah, you may not be playing GTA VI, but it's not like you'll lack for good games.
On the one hand, buying a subscription service for $20/month does give you instant, temporary access to a lot of things... on the other, consistently putting that money into media acquisition over the same period of time will build up quite a collection in a few years. Remember that you don't just have to buy blockbusters... you can raid garage sales, you can buy used, you can pick up surprisingly cheap collections like [1], you can hit the Salvation Army... what you find may be haphazard but you can bootstrap a collection cheaply, and may find some surprising stuff on the way.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006LOC01G - but look at the used prices, not the new. There's a lot of things like this on Amazon where someone thinks they can get a lot of money for it "new" where the used market reflects the more accurate market reality.
> An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening hasn’t just caused issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from playing their disc-based games, too.
First line in the article. An Xbox owner who did the right thing by buying physical copies is still unable to play their games.
I don’t play on Xbox, but my kids do, and Overwatch worked fine yesterday (which is a Microsoft property). So I’m not sure what the outage is, but not being able to play discs is a real punch to the gut.
Lock in isn't about physical versus digital. This came up a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49138750
Disks can be locked in and digital can be completely free.
I would hope an old Xbox One disconnected from LAN and WiFi, with a GTA VI DVD inside, could start the game just fine.
Well it can't because how can they check if you're licensed to play the game? Connect to the internet first, then it'll let you start the game.
Ironically, Xbox One support for true offline play was gutted when Xbox gutted a lot of planned Family Sharing support when Sony claimed the Xbox One was not going to allow you to play games offline and made that a marketing campaign with pawn shops like GameStop. (The same campaign that also called in-box Kinect a mistake and complained that the Xbox One was too "media focused" and "not for real game players".)
The resulting early Xbox One pivot removed features that would have been useful when systems were down and replaced them with "offline capable theater" instead. (The same pivot that also killed the Kinect and Xbox One multitasking and host of other useful media features.)
> An Xbox owner who did the right thing by buying physical copies
That's not the right thing. According to Stallman, that's the opposite of the right thing.
To be fair, I don't think Stallman is against buying or selling software, I think he just feels that the source code should be provided with it (and that you can share it afterwards...)
>and I maintained it
How do you plan on maintaining your CD and DVD players when the new ones will be sold with a subscription plan like printers?
You don't get in the locked box in the first place. That's the whole point.
A day may come where it is the only option. In which case, personally, I will still advocate for not getting in the box. If they're going to hold "music" and "movies" hostage tell them to go fuck themselves. It's your money they're using to lock you in. And the day that I have nothing left that can play MP3 files is too far in the future to be sure about anyhow.
If you're really concerned that that is a likely future, you need to be joining with me now, not trying to discourage me about the hopelessness of the task. The only reason it's hopeless is your apparent willingness to pay other people to lock you in. If you don't accept that bargain, you won't be locked in.
Further helping is that these closed ecosystems tend to collapse anyhow. If you're locked in, why spend money on giving you good content? Even if they are appealing today, they won't be tomorrow.
With the planned death of physical media for games, it will soon become impossible to do so. Like, Sony literally plans to stop making discs starting in 2028, and all games you buy will have to be digital only. GTA 6 is just giving a code in a box. It's really the end of times for physical media in a few years, maybe something can change if consumers push back but they likely will not if we are being realistic.
https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/physical-disc-produc...
I don't think you're quite getting it. I'm saying, don't get in the box.
"But the bait looks so nice!"
Yes. Yes it does.
Yes, you may have to sacrifice and not get some things you want in the moment. Our capitalistic overlords have demonstrated that they will absolutely abuse you to the maximum extent you permit. If you are willing to give everything to play GTA 6, then they will take it.
The compensation is that there is already more than you could possibly do available in spaces where they are not locking you in a box, or you can break out of the box with minimal moral quandaries and technical difficulties.
This isn't really news. Control your desires or they will control you is not new wisdom. Though the modern ability to exploit other's inability to control their desires certainly does have some new twists on it.
"Each man's master is the person who has the authority over what the man wishes or does not wish, so as to secure it, or take it away. Whoever, therefore, wants to be free, let him neither wish for anything, nor avoid anything, that is under the control of others; or else he is necessarily a slave." - The Encheridion Of Epictetus, second century AD
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3ADiscourses_of_Epictetu...
I generally agree, but I don't think it's wrong to mourn what is lost or to try and advocate politicians regulate and restore what was lost. Especially since the policy of "the customers own nothing" has been extending past video games in ways that are unavoidable. For example, John Deere locking down their tractors. Car manufacturers increasingly trying to turn everything into a subscription.
I agree, the right action as a consumer is boycotting rent seeking products and pestering politicians. But it does feel hopeless as too few of our politicians seem to care about these sorts of seemingly minor grievances.
How many games do you need in your life, though? I'd say the top 500 games on the GoG catalog would be more than a lifetime of gaming. That's not even including open source or rom sets.
Then if you really want to do something yourself instead of waiting for leet hackers to do it, buy one, reverse engineer it thoroughly, write a protocol emulator so you can buy the game from the store and download the bits to your PC, and then develop a method to store those bits to as many compatible consoles as you want.
Not the OP, but when the physical media for games dies, I will still be playing games I already own.
That's what collection is for.
Then just stop playing games if that happens. They’re not necessary, it’s not worth getting fucked over by the corpos.
Or make your own games or play ones made by indies that you can actually own.
Oh no! GTA6, the 2026 simulator, may not be accessible?
If the death of physical media locks me into playing whatver is forcefed to me by AAA studios, I will reject that bargain and engage in the decades of backlogged media I haven't gotten to yet. If every studio stopped making music, movies, and TV today, there is still so much I haven't seen/listened to/played that it won't even move the needle.
Lastly, going against the grain here, but GTA 6 looks about as unappealing as it possibly could. I don't want to play 2026 Simulator, no matter how good it looks. Really it just looks like parody version of current politics and society and that's what games are helping me escape from.
Read a book instead. It is not like you have to consume audiovisual media to survive.
> How do you plan on maintaining your CD and DVD players when the new ones will be sold with a subscription plan like printers?
If you buy physical media, you should rip it to FLAC and put the original disc in a safe place.
remember that time all of the frontier AI labs trained their models on copyrighted material and no one batted an eyelid? If they can do that, I don't see why I can't back up my CD's and DVDs or digital purchases with digital copies sourced from the high seas. If buying isn't owning...
"If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing."
We've all heard this. But let's not forget that recently, some important representative of Microsoft went and told some important politicians, that buying is stealing.
Yes. She said that buying is stealing. Buying the game and playing multiplayer on your own server is stealing, more specifically.
So if buying is stealing, why not pirate?
The obvious risk is that you don't have nearly as much budget to spend on lawyers if someone does come after you for it. The copyright system tends to disproportionately punish small players and not punish larger ones.
How and why does anyone “come after you” for backing up your own BluRays, though?
Assuming you’re not redistributing, of course, which is another thing entirely.
You seem to have missed this part:
> digital copies sourced from the high seas
They can't come after us all. We outnumber them. Also we have disk encryption now. Admit to nothing.
The lawyers cost a lot more than what you are going to get back from GP in a copyright lawsuit.
That doesn't seem to have stopped any prosecutions for piracy in the past
It actually did. There weren't that many, they were just high profile news at the time. And most of them either lost or recovered minimal damages. There was no actual $250,000 payment for downloading an MP3. That's why the industry stopped doing it and now only targets distribution sites.
The RIAA/MPA still goes after individuals, but they target them with settlement offers to avoid going to court. 3k and an admission of guilt is a lot less than it would cost to get a lawyer and fight back in court so people do pay them, including completely innocent people since the companies who spam out DMCA notices don't care all that much about accuracy. They've also been going after ISPs and extracting money from them for no reason, but after losing the Cox case, that might not end up being worth it to them.
Personal backup copies are fully legal, RIAA and MPA admit as much on their own websites; this was settled back in the VHS and cassette tape era
The part I was responding to was "with digital copies sourced from the high seas". The premise that they were responding to was if the only domestically available media playing devices required subscriptions. It's not clear why the assumption would be that getting content from arbitrary international online sources would be something that isn't also sanctioned in this scenario. That doesn't mean the entire scenario is likely, but if that's the objection, then why reply to me and not the original comment proposing it?
I've never seen this for CD or DVD players, and only the shittiest printers are sold with a subscription plan. Plenty of unencumbered printers available, and CD and DVD players even more so
Rip them to a hard drive and they're yours forever.
Plenty of dumb CD and DVD players on the market, and flea market for that matter.
It's genuinely hard to imagine commodity USB DVD-ROM drives being sold with subscriptions? There's millions of them, they cost nothing, they're built by a dozen no name Chinese factories
Buy a generic one from China.
Citation needed for this, as this makes no sense.
However, content shifting (i.e. ripping from CD to digital) is a thing, and that's what I do with my physical media.
Good luck making my record player dial into the DRM server
Or for cheaper, you can sail the high sea. You build a collection of music, movies and games that will last you a lifetime for free. Then you can spend the saved money on supporting artists you like, studios you respect or buy a locked on guilty pleasure once in a while.
No reason to play by the rules if decency is not in the picture anymore.
And it's very hard but fame-inducing and illegal to defeat locks.
1. Hard. No. 2. Fame-inducing. No. 3. Illegal. Maybe where you live.
Really? You cracked Denuvo?
back.engineering folks seem to imply that Denuvo is another case of virtualization based obfuscator being vulnerable to a symbolic execution/optimization approach.
> As AI assisted static deobfuscation continues to improve we will see more virtual machine based obfuscators fold away. In an upcoming article we will publish details on how we fully statically devirtualized Denuvo anti(tamper/cheat). One of the most attacked pieces of software second only to anticheats.
…or you can not bother with analyzing at all and just feed correct CPUID/shared data/whatever values to Denuvo, like the hypervisor thing does.
https://back.engineering/blog/31/07/2026/
Denuvo doesn't exist in a vast majority of games. It's not even used in all modern games.
Denuvo cracks have sped up a lot lately, and usually take two months or less.
Because the system itself has been thoroughly defeated. Apparently GGP did that, because they think it isn't hard.
That's the one reason I don't use Steam. I'm not saying Valve is evil or anything like that. But GOG's transparency and commitment to DRM-free games should be the market standard.
GOG's storefront backend is also much nicer than Steam's. The latter is a dungeon crawl through like 3 different UIs, I still don't know how to navigate to the depot page reliably despite using it for years.
DRM-free was a nice idea 20 years ago, the problem is that it doesn't scale. There is just way to much media out there to keep track of and especially with games you are looking at frequent updates and patches, that your DRM-free backup won't get, unless you turn backup up a full time job to keep track of it all.
If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones, since I gave up trying to back them up a decade ago.
On top of that, those updates can be kind of useful. None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux. Also annoying: None of the GOG games run on a genuine Win9x either, as what you are getting is an updated version for modern Windows, not the original game.
Either way, I just don't think DRM-free is the proper solution for media management today or in the future. The olden days of static media are largely gone and the modern world is just way more fluid. So far none of the proposed solutions are able to capture that properly.
I'm a pretty heavy GoG customer and I disagree with a lot of this premise. Most games aren't getting updates past a year or two after their release, and the ones that are aren't DRM-free. And even if they weren't, I'd rather be able to play an older revision of a game I own than not own it at all.
Your Steam games run on Linux run due to Valve's (truly excellent) work on their compatibility layer. However, that work is not exclusive to Steam. I can play my DRM-free GoG copies of big budget Windows games just fine on Linux. There's an extra step you have to invoke, but they still run superbly. Supporting DRM-free is the best we have in an increasingly hostile customer market.
> There is just way to much media out there to keep track of and especially with games you are looking at frequent updates and patches, that your DRM-free backup won't get, unless you turn backup up a full time job to keep track of it all.
I don't want to write a redo of the infamous Dropbox comment, but if you really want to go /r/datahoarders on it, you can simply have a GOG downloader running in a monthly (or whatever) cronjob.
> None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux.
That's funny, I don't have that issue at all. I have whatever GOG 3rd party client running on Bazzite do the downloading & updating for me, and the only game with which I had an issue was Timberborn.
>If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones, since I gave up trying to back them up a decade ago.
That's a you problem. I keep mine backed up. GOG even makes it easy to just go grab the latest patch if you downloaded the base game years ago.
>None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux. Also annoying: None of the GOG games run on a genuine Win9x either, as what you are getting is an updated version for modern Windows, not the original game.
Solvable with Wine/Proton (or a Proton fork). If you want to be lazy Heroic launcher makes it easy and even logs into GoG if you don't have them backed up locally. Heroic launcher lets you pick what you want to use to run the game whether it be Proton/Wine/Etc, this even works with Game-Porting-Toolkit on MacOS.
> If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones
Absolutely not. Libraries and archives are able to keep digital copies, with limits imposed on how they may share them, not on what they're allowed to keep. They're not allowed, without a convoluted exemption, to break DRM. So if Steam disappears, we're all collectively dependent on our ability to break DRM to maintain our culture accessible. Games that use draconian authentication could simply disappear. With GOG, the only thing stopping us from having easy access is our ability to walk to our local library.
DRM is a software layer that restricts your ability to run a given program, in this context it's specifically a form of access control. It has nothing to do with anything you just said.
DRM-free gets confused with wrapper-free or launcher-free in games. This is probably triggered by the observation that many Steam games won't run if Steam isn't running. However, this is a basic check in steamapi.dll which can be easily replaced.
> None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux.
Stop spreading misinformation. Even if you're a non-techie you can add non-Steam games to Steam's launcher (my extremely tech illiterate friend just did this) and they'll run with Proton.
It comes down to a game by game basis, and it's still extremely rare (outside of recent 2025/2026 anticheat AAA title stuff) that any game would have a Linux specific/impacting patch.
You mean Windows games thanks to Proton.
For games that require online services, this will always be an inherent issue. But for games that don't, I'm betting on emulation continuing to save the day. When the PS3 was released with its complex/novel architecture, it seemed like an emulator was highly unlikely, but look at how good RPCS3 is now.
On the Microsoft side, they've been incredibly good about first-party backwards compatibility. I bought most of my Xbox 360 games digitally, and I have been able to play them on my Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and now they are even bringing them to PC. My son and I were just playing the timeless classic NBA Jam: On Fire Edition (a 15yo game) a couple of days ago.
Emulation development will probably be significantly enhanced by the ability to use LLMs as well.
This idea that you should have to log into an online account, in order to use a device that is otherwise entirely offline, is the root of all evil in consumer electronics today. Not just game software and game consoles, but PCs, TVs, smartphones, home automation... Everything requires a totally unnecessary tether to the manufacturer, and only allows you to use it if the manufacturer is 1. still listening to the connection, and 2. is satisfied that you tethered properly.
I shouldn't need an online account to use 99% of the things that I have that currently require an account.
>Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. I
It's much worse with Gaming. At least with TV/Movies/Music there are standards-based 'offline' formats that one could preserve the content. Games, on the other hand, may be intrinsically tied to proprietary hardware and online 'live' services for patches and content. The recent hubbub about Sony removing disk access was somewhat of a red-herring as most disk-based games you buy today have incomplete games.
well there is a way
The Steam DRM is trivially bypassed and they don't seem to be interested in playing the cat/mouse game with it at all. It's not a great argument that you can crack things you already legally purchased, but I'm conflicted. If digital software could be reasonably/legally transferred, then it'd probably put most software companies out of business simply because the digital domain would enable efficient reselling of 'used' copies with an exponential decline in price.
This isn't a problem with physical copies because there's a lot of friction to selling stuff, and there's also something quite nice about having a physical collection of games, music, or whatever else. But with digital stuff there's no friction, and much less incentive to collect. The efficiency of the digital domain really messes with a lot of things we take for granted in the real world.
I can buy and own legal copies of movies and music. But I often really can’t with games.
Not staying this to be pendantic or to annoy you, but you really do know that at the bottom line, the same sort of license applies to movies and music that as of games. It is just accepted with movies, music and books that people just 'have' them. The publishers seriously know what a huge outrage there would be when they did the same to those forms of media like they did with games, but they would if they could get away with it.
They already did though. Sony removed your movies from your PlayStation. And every Blu-Ray player can brick itself if you insert a disk with a player blacklist update.
> And every Blu-Ray player can brick itself if you insert a disk with a player blacklist update.
That seems to be somewhat of a myth.
Discussion here, 37 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48698374
What I really mean is a difficult to revoke license. Not dependent on a server or DRM. I realize I do not actually own copies.
Player license keys have been revoked in the past.
https://www.eetimes.com/The-real-casualty-in-high-def-DVD-re...
Automation has its drawbacks.
A lot of games are not sold with re-sellable licenses at all while almost all movies are.
You can resell a movie (dvd/blu-ray) and music (cd, tape, etc) like you can resell a physical book. But if the license you have actually agrees on that, i don't really know. Back then i had several dvd's that granted watching it in a family environment but did not grant you reselling.
> Not staying this to be pendantic or to annoy you, but you really do know that at the bottom line, the same sort of license applies to movies and music that as of games.
You can not only buy music on physical medium (CDs or vinyls) but you can also buy, legally, DRM-free lossless music.
And once you own that music, your right to listen to it (privately) cannot be removed from you.
And for, say, a vinyl or a CD, both in the US and in the EU, your right, for example, to sell that CD at a garage sale cannot be removed from you.
And just as I can, today, boot a Commodore 64 from the 80s, I'll still be able, in 40 years, to boot a Raspberry Pi and play my music files from it. And play my CDs if I've still got a reader.
P.S: FWIW I rip my audio CDs to lossless files, in a bit-perfect way (which is automatically cross-checked with checksums of people who made the same rips, so we all know our rips are bit-perfect).
Eh?
I can still go to the store and buy some music on physical media, and (if history is any indicator) I can still play it forever until it or my playback equipment wears out.
As a practical matter: You do know that when I spin up an album at home, I simply do not care what limitations any licensing agreements may or may not apply, right? I'm going to play it anyway, and it will work when I play it -- free from outside influence.
I read you and i agree.
> I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away.
At least there are already extensive ways to get a game cube running games off an SD card using a pi pico and some hardware that uses the expansion port.
So even once disc rot takes away the original copy you can keep going.
You'll be dead before disc rot takes effect on almost any disc kept out of direct sunlight and in a climate controlled environment.
Saturn, 3DO, and Dreamcast collectors beg to differ. Some folks even finding sealed games to be unplayable. Could be the way it was stored, could be manufacturing defects like Sega cheapening out materially on Dreamcast discs.
Always good have backups and/or modded consoles for longevity.
Optical media capped out at 4 layer blu-ray (~128gb) which I'm not even sure that consoles can reliably read.
So my theory is that GTA 6 is somewhat larger and they really didn't want to invest into engineering a solution for multiple-disc or something when ~everyone downloads their games nowadays anyways. So in some sense, the true physical release "can't" exist.
This doesn't apply to most anything but GTA 6 is the one example I think could very realistically be unable to be stored on a disc at all, or unable to be stored on a 3-layer and the supply chain just isn't there for 4-layers in 2026.
Baldur's Gate 3 is already there. It's over 120GB and IIRC PS5 games only use up to triple layer. There was no disc release.
The current Gran Turismo is around 140GB. I think it has a disc, but it'll only have like half the game on it.
Final Fantasy XIV is around 200GB now, and they're talking about dropping PS4 support because drive capacity is going to be too low during the patch cycle for the next expansion.
Also, median US internet is over 100Mb/s now, so downloading a game is faster than installing it from a BluRay reader. And then you don't have to get up and change discs to change games...
Regardless, most console owners buy their games online. Otherwise there would be more games than Funko Pops at GameStop. They also have frequent sales, unlike retailers.
Hey just a correction, there was indeed a physical release of BG3 on PS5. It was released straight from Larian and came on 2 discs, dual-layer 100GB to be exact. Xbox Series as well, but it came on 4 discs due to capacity limits.
Your point stands, though. Games have grown so huge that downloading them isn't a hassle for most, but disc definitely is or has maxed out. That's not to mention how long it takes to install stuff, especially on PS5!
A number of games (for example the new Halo) aren't actually on the disc or otherwise have mandatory download requirements. The disc is just used as a DRM mechanism. Rockstar is not shipping discs for completely non-technical reasons. Likely some combination of saving a few bucks, stopping people camping out at retailers, and blocking the secondary market.
Games don't need to be 1TB, it's just that companies no longer invest in trying to make games smaller.
Please, it’s nothing to do with any of this nonsense.
They know people will buy it regardless of format and price, so not having to spend money to print those pesky little discs is a major net profit.
GTA VI is a cancer slowly metastasising. It will signal to all other game companies that they can charge whatever they want for their pos games and people will just swallow it all down because their favourite nobody with a YouTube channel told them to.
We were already heading for an even darker age in gaming, but mark my words, GTA VI is the torchbearer of an altogether darkerer.
My son and we as his parents really love Bluey, but it's impossible to buy a DVD set here in Germany, with German dub, because Disney distributes it exclusively through their plus platform.
There are many more examples like these. Very sad state of affairs.
Netflix does that too. It’s very annoying to know some things will never have a Dvd/Blu-ray release.
Eh, I'd probably leave music off that list. Even mainstream music releases are still pretty easy to buy DRM-free via services like Qobuz, even if the majority of people are using streaming platforms these days. Although I wonder if that's maybe just because music seems like it would be pretty easy to sidestep DRM, even if they do come up with some kind of innovation (heck, even my friend told me he pirated my album... WHICH IS FREE, BTW).
But e-books? Holy crap the drm on those things is soooooo annoying to avoid.
If I want an e-book, I buy it from bookshop.org and then pirate the DRM-free version. It clears my conscience: the author gets paid, a small bookshop gets the sale, and I can read my book anywhere.
That’s fair about music. I didn’t even know about Qobuz. I do wonder how long big labels will permit that, but I’m glad it’s here now.
E-book DRM is crazy, I agree. I should have included that.
Again. We need a storage medium that is reliable, has roughly 200GB of capacity, small in size, relatively affordable to press.
Otherwise, there is only one option left, make it illegal to do certain things and ensure the ownership belongs to customers.
Someday that GameCube will break and so will all the others. And someday that PC capable of running open source emulators will also break. And all that will be left is corporation controlled hardware running corporation controlled software. Maybe we'll be lucky and be allowed to rent a few of the old games.
I believe there will be still data horders alive who will have a running copy of any game you want. Until the Sun burns the Earth.
Greetings to /r/datahorder bunch :)
There are already perfect FPGA emulators of N64 out, why not GameCube.
I wish Gog made a Steam Deck.
You can install GOG games on a normal Steam Deck already. What you want is better integration with their store but Heroic also works great on Deck and can automatically add your GOG games to Steam as well.
I like Gog and use Heroic, but that has not been a smooth experience on Steam Deck.
It’s slowly improving, though.
I might be crucified for saying this, but I actually have a Claude skill file for that. I have SSH turned on for the Steamdeck, I use Lutris so all the configs are in a database, so I just point Claude to the MD file and the game files and tell it to set it up for me. The main purpose of the skill file is really just to save the SSH, rsync instructions and give it lutris config examples like which version of proton works, etc.)
Wouldnt' crucify you for that at all, that's a clever setup and I'm gonna steal it :D
It’s a little jank to switch to Heroic to install the game but I haven’t had problems once it’s added to Steam (automatically, I might add, just tick the checkbox in Heroic preferences).
What's the issue? Its just an ultrabook with a screen and controller peripheral attached.
Me too. It’s coming to Linux though. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/07/gog-confirm-they-are-w...
Until then we use this: https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
https://zoom-platform.sh/
If you have the rig already, you could also use Sunshine and Moonlight for streaming. https://moonlight-stream.org/
Meh I don't want another store app, I want an API that I can use from my store-agnostic open source game launcher / library. They should just officially support efforts like Heroic instead.
They haven’t even made a Linux client yet. They are about 13 years behind steam
Do you really need a Linux client? just download the installers. They announced a Linux client, and I honestly can't see a reason I would want to install it...
Why not an actual Steam Deck? You can install any software you want on it.
You can and it actually works ok. For the sake of the argument you would/could be more 'free to do with your games what you want', because GoG does not do DRM.
You can but having to hook it up to a mouse and keyboard and monitor every time I want to install new games from not-Steam would be a pain.
Out of curiosity, why not use desktop mode without an external mouse and keyboard for that?
You could write a game store interface that works on whatever its normal mode is.
Not saying this is a great solution either, though it beats the trackpad + on screen keyboard. I like to VNC into the deck and do these things.
Set up SSH!
Meh, perhaps games from big studios, but the majority of games work fine without DRM. I find indie games and games from small studio a lot more fun and have a lot more soul than most "big studio" games.
In twenty years it doesn’t matter if Rockstar delists GTA6.
The DRM will be cracked. You will be able to play and you WILL have a better experience playing a cracked DRM free version than any official version.
You can play an emulated Mario Kart Double Dash on a Steam Machine (or any PC) today and get a better experience than playing it on a Game Cube.
Digital only games sounds bad at first but preservation of video games will be done digitally more effectively than physically. How many full rom sets of Super Nintendo games are just sitting there on millions of PCs around the world? It is trivial to preserve them: copy paste to a new machine. Done.
Disks will rot. GameCube optical lasers will fail. One day, maybe not soon, but it is it inevitable that all disk based games will become unplayable and lost one day. Maybe if we’re lucky an independent company will create an accurate FPGA based GameCube for people to play their games but emulation is just better.
Prices on the second hard market will be astronomical making physical copies innaccessible - this has already happened for arcade PCBs and it will happen for disk based games. PCBs that used to go for a few hundred now go for tens of thousands. I personally believe that this push for physical preservation is largely driven by speculators that know this. You see insane prices for things like sealed copies of Super Mario Bros already. PCB prices were driven up by speculators hoarding supply and they’ll do it for console games too.
If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.
Preservation needs to be about accessibility FIRST.
Physical Videogame Preservation Makes No Sense: https://youtu.be/3rM1jaFvM58
This assumes a large portion of the game doesn’t rely on servers.
We can reverse engineer those too, by looking at what the game client expects. Its harder, obviously. But far from impossible.
I started writing my own world of warcraft server about 20 years ago by disassembling the WoW binary. I got to the point that you could log in to the game and run around in a big empty world. I even found a couple mistakes in wow's in-game encryption in the process. Lots of teams have gotten much further than I did. There's whole communities who play wow on private servers.
If we can do that for MMOs, we can do that for just about anything. Especially with LLMs. LLMs are incredibly good at this sort of work.
The online portions will be reverse engineered and there will be community servers or the online checks will be replaced with offline stubs. You think in twenty years they won’t be able to do this in minutes for practically nothing using GPT 15 or whatever?
Sure, but that's orthogonal to discs. Nothing prevents a game developer from making "check the server" the first thing that happens when the game on a disc loads.
And, in my mind, there’s a real difference between providing a hosted service and layering on DRM.
Though it would be nice if more game makers ultimately provided a server. That used to be more common.
This is why Stop Killing Games exists.
This assumes the game isn't designed from the beginning to be entirely reliant on the operation of servers. For instance there never has been and never will be any form of offline function for Destiny 1 or 2, even if all the person wants to do is play the single player campaigns.
Destiny 1 partially ran on consoles, though. It was mostly p2p: https://gist.github.com/nessus42/55c1260d88e2028689de0c49381...
Yes, but never in the absence of the Bungie servers. It did have a full sequential single player campaign, but parts of the single player campaign took place in shared instances where the user could see other players running around the map. The single player campaign could also be played cooperatively with other players in the same 'fireteam' if desired, but that was optional.
Sure, but SPC still took place in the same shared world. It wasn't like there is a single-player vs multiplayer in CoD or BF. The only way to make those campaigns work offline is to remove all drops from them and remove co-op pieces that aren't optional. Doing a strike and joining right at the end of it, missing the entire story of that strike, was like a mandatory experience for D2.
Do we know any of the technical details of that? Is the SPC just instanced multiplayer with all game logic on the server, or is it just getting some encryption key?
First, SPC, at least in Destiny 2, required you to do Strikes. Second, you get item drops. Technically there is no SPC in either Destiny because it's an MMORPG. There are just plenty of things you can do all by yourself and things that you meant to do alone, and those things usually come with item farming, so you need server-side to make it fair.
Pitacy is back in the menu for me.
That "if buying is not owning then piracy is not stealing" sounds corny and is legally void, but hell if morally it is not justifiable at this point.
When I want to support the creator I go and "buy" the thing, but I also go and pirate anyway.
> That "if buying is not owning then piracy is not stealing" sounds corny and is legally void, but hell if morally it is not justifiable at this point.
A law isn’t by default just, so when it turns from a safeguard into a manacle it is only logical, fair and correct that we rebel against it.
If buying does not imply ownership, then piracy cannot mean theft.
for me these games are too large to pirate
i went back to recomps and emulation
The fight should never have been about physical vs digital, but about ownership.
If I buy a game/movie/book/song, regardless of where or in what format, I should be able to:
1. Keep it forever without the risk of remote deletion.
2. Use it while offline, unless internet connectivity is strictly required for the experience.
3. Move it between my devices.
4. Backup and archive it.
5. Resell it.
6. Pass it on to my children.
Beyond that I don't really care what the container for the bytes is. If the game isn't sold on a disc I can easily burn my own.
Every publisher can offer all of this today, but they choose not to. And proprietary devices/formats means the free market isn't going to work in the consumer's favor. The only thing that can fix the problem is legislation.
It is basically about physical vs digital because these ownership problems are tied to the copy being digital, including on Steam. In theory you could have a digital copy that guarantees transferability like with Nintendo, but even then it'd be a promise they have to keep along with more technical complexity that could break it.
The problem is that the technology [1] to do this simply doesn't exist. I'd say the core of the problem is that copying a digital artifact is easy, is a solved problem. You simply copy the data that represents the artifact, and now you have another copy.
*Deleting* data (and its cousin, *moving* data) is a nearly intractable problem. How can you verify that someone no longer has access to data that you gave them?
The best we have is to have some sort of ownership token that is maintained in a shared store, and build a requirement that possession of that token is required to use the data. Even this is practically nearly intractable; you have to have some sort of "trusted" hardware or software that is responsible for validating the current possession of the ownership token before using the data.
Physical media is another way of trying to solve this problem, especially if the physical media can somehow be verified and is exfiltration-proof.
[1] I say "technology" here but really I strongly suspect that this is actually impossible given reasonable theoretical assumptions around what data means.
You're trying to solve with technology a problem that lives in the abstract human world. Even the simplest possible case, you make a physical unique object that you define as conferring ownership to the person who possesses or controls it. Someone steals the object, now the person in possession of the object isn't the owner. There's this allure of trying to tie this abstract notion of ownership to a physical thing but it's breaks down immediately. It doesn't even work for physical objects.
Automated enforcement of ownership rules is completely tangential to the actual problem you're running into. You own a physical book, you make a copy then sell the book. That's a copyright violation, no "verification" or whatever nonsense needed. What happened in regards to ownership in this case is already clear. Companies sure do like DRM but it's as much a pale imitation of ownership as anything else.
Didn't you hear? Buying is not owning, according to these corporate criminals.
In fact they said that buying is stealing. They also said piracy is stealing. So if there's no difference I'll go with the cheaper one, thanks.
You know there's something wrong with the system when the version you obtain for free is a superior product to the one you pay for.
Just plain old artificial scarcity, a.k.a. capitalism.
because you are not buying software. You buying rent
Nintendo Gamekeys check all of these boxes save one. Namely 1,2,3,5 and 6.
1. Keep it forever without the risk of remote deletion.
2. Use it while offline, unless internet connectivity is strictly required for the experience.
3. Move it between my devices.
5. Resell it.
6. Pass it on to my children.
No backup and archive is the exception. I can live with that. We'll see if Sony and Microsoft follow Nintendo or not.
I mean can't you see why 4 and 5 are irreconcilable?
I am all for 1-4 and 6. But reselling digital copies is silly.
> I mean can't you see why 4 and 5 are irreconcilable?
I really can't. The only argument I see is "we can't allow it because every customer is a potential thief". What will enabling resale cause? Piracy? Well piracy is happening regardless. People who want to illegally download games can do it today in one click. Instead the piracy excuse is being used to restrict legal resale so you have no option but to pay the publisher's inflated sale price.
Yeah but there is really no way to enforce a single resale other than extensive DRM measures, which is the whole thing we want to avoid.
By allowing resale of digital copies outside of platforms all you get is essentially the complete repeal of intellectual property rights for digital media.
But, on the other hand, without IP, DRMs lose a lot of their power. Once the DRM is cracked, the protected data can be freely shared once more. The only usefulness for DRM in most industries would be preventing unauthorized copies in the first days.
I agree with you in principle, but from a practical perspective if you make piracy that trivial you'll get a lot more pirates, maybe even accidental pirates.
I think as a compromise I'd be okay with some kind of license database (maybe blockchain-based, maybe not) that keeps track of who owns a legal copy of what. People reselling digital copies of copyrighted material would have to transfer ownership of that license to prove they're conducting legit business and not just minting new copies out of thin air.
I read 5 as reselling the singular copy one owns similar to how a disc or cartridge can be resold.
Yes, we all know it, but good luck finding a jurisdiction that will agree with you on this.
One of the more galling aspects of the inevitable US-NATO[0] trade war is the fact that nobody is willing to reevaluate the legal underpinnings of US tech hegemony - namely, copyright and anticircumvention law. All the proposals for sovereign tech are really just "let's build more AI data centers". People like Cory Doctorow who have the actual way to play hardball with Trump - "let's get rid of anticircumvention and declare open season on AppleMobileFileIntegrity.kext" are sidelined as "IP thieves". Hell, even the Stop Killing Games people got brushed off by the European Commission with an excuse almost like "we can't mandate your game purchases work offline, that'd be stealing".
The reason for this is pretty straightforward: the moves done in the 90s to ensure digital purchases meant no ownership were as much a product of Europe as it was the US. Actually, the vast majority of international copyright law is actually a European invention, and the US was the last holdout on things like copyright registration and fixed (as opposed to life-plus) terms. Europe spent centuries binding the world to the most extreme version of copyright imaginable, specifically to ensure developing countries would never be able to actually economically develop.
Every country that has economically developed itself does so through a subsidy of IP theft. The Industrial Revolution was owned by England but stolen by America; and America itself wound up being stolen from by China, Japan, and South Korea. Economic development is not a game you win by playing by the rules, because the rules are designed to keep the winners on top. The entire debate over games preservation and ownership is downstream of the fact that the big American and European cultural industries are not financially viable without you renting your culture.
The reason why the fight has focused on physical vs. digital is that it's the one battle we've been somewhat victorious on. Physical ownership has generally been treated as sacred: Microsoft tried using the Xbox One launch as a way to massively restrict discs, and it created a backlash so large Xbox never actually recovered from it. Sony in contrast had to boil the frog[1], and Nintendo wound up doing so more or less by accident[2]. And when game consoles have problems loading physical discs, it's still treated by console manufacturers as a bug rather than a feature.
[0] In practice, the US vs. all of it's allies, including non-NATO ones.
[1] They were clearly intending to kill off discs with the PS5, just from the industrial design alone, but didn't actually do it until mid-cycle when everyone's actually bought their consoles and thus the impact would be minimized.
[2] It has been Nintendo policy since the 3DS to ban anyone who goes online with a duplicate cartridge ID. I don't think this was intended to poison the used market, but once cheap Switch flashcarts and means to clone cartridges became available, it absolutely did. The people using 3DS homebrew to load pirated games at least had to know what "public headers" meant in order to avoid getting banned.
Circumvention is, in practice, legal as long as you don't get caught. Nothing except your own patience stops you from REing Apple's kexts right now. Or taking an always-online single player game and making it work offline. I suggest you don't publish the results on your own website, but find a group that specialises in hosting politically sensitive material.
The absurdity is that back in gen-7 we had everything figured out: PS3 used the (free) servers only for matchmaking and all online games were hosted on the consoles themselves. The matchmaking servers are still up and working, and everybody plays with better latency thanks to the prominence of fast fiber.
No internet? Games work offline and support LAN if you have a switch and a couple of consoles.
In 2026 I can still insert any used disc I bought in my ps3 and it will generate a (offline) client-side license for me and let me play and update the game with the disk inside just as a "proof" of still owning it.
If I'm online I'll get patches, else I'll just get served the version on the disc.
(Btw, ps3 also has a print spooler and can natively rip CDs and serve them while acting as a NAS. Or, you can stream games to your psp with remote play. It was truly a "let's cram everything we can inside" era and more like a proper pc with a mediacenter interface)
I remember PS3 Call of Duty online play being very unreliable compared to Xbox Live. It didn't use relay servers, so the host needed port-forwarding or upnp, which is a dubious situation to be in.
> PS3 used the (free) servers only for matchmaking and all online games were hosted on the consoles themselves. The matchmaking servers are still up and working
That's not true. Naughty dog shutdown online servers for their ps3 games in 2019:
https://www.naughtydog.com/blog/uncharted_the_last_of_us_mul...
Rockstar games shut down gta online for ps3 in 2021:
https://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/51989315o2aa3...
To be fair, there are private servers for these games, thanks to reverse-engineering efforts, but those are community efforts.
I wanted to play an old call of duty game to reminisce about my childhood. I tried Modern Warfare II and Black Ops, but it’s impossible. You get into a game fine, but every single game is just full of cheaters - not just cheaters with fairly benign (yet unfair) things like wall hacks, cheaters that literally change the physics of the server for all users in a completely unworkable way.
I’m not sure whether this is because of the PS3 client-hosted server model, or just poor coding from COD.
Either way, I gave up eventually. It was a brief passing thought one evening; I’m sure if I really wanted to I could figure out a way to play properly. But you can’t just put the disc in and play online, at least in my experience.
Worse: there's unpatched RCEs for Modern Warfare II: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2018-10718
We can't really expect public multiplayer experiences to remain the same across time, but surely you can play it in a LAN style.
Seems like ps3 was kind of the sweet spot in terms of decent graphical capability, being allowed to actually own your games, patching, and online capabilities. Given the backlash we’re seeing towards the console giants and their desires to kill off physical media, I wonder if a console with the features mentioned above could be released today with any chance of being competitive? Does anybody know of any projects like that?
Yea, but there are bigger problems coming, this outage is just a temporary preview of the future. What happens to game preservation in 20 or 10 years when the authentication servers for this generation are permanently shut down? Millions of physical discs will instantly turn into e-waste.
The same thing that happened with all the Denuvo games so far: some hackers remove the DRM.
That would be possibly illegal, requires someone highly specialized to care about each and every one of your games, and assumes there won’t be a crackdown on the openness and anonymity of the Internet that currently allows the distribution of pirate software.
We need to have this right codified into law before we lose it.
Not just possibly, the DMCA makes it a felony to remove or bypass any copy protection measure, even if it doesn't work very well.
Not every jurisdiction has the DMCA, so that’s why I said possibly. It’s definitely illegal in the US.
Every jurisdiction was bullied into adopting this provision as part of every trade deal the US ever makes. Cory Doctorow wrote about it. Look for the keyword "anticircumvention".
Couldn’t find it. I know for a fact it isn’t illegal in my country.
It's coming. https://www.iipa.org/files/uploads/2026/01/BRAZIL-2026-COPYE...
(Search "circumvention")
There’s a huge difference between the US bullying us into making this illegal, and the US throwing a fit in a report suggesting we should do it.
We’ve been on this watchlist before.
There’s no such law being proposed right now.
Removing DRM is all fun and games until single player titles start requiring constant internet access in the future.
Denuvo requires internet access. It's been cracked anyway.
Do you know about this tool called Ghidra? It makes most programs open source. Not the ones with DRM, though.
The next step they want to take is not have you use your own hardware at all and just stream it to you, so you don't even have a copy.
Hasn't Microsoft had a good track record of enabling playing old generation games on new hardware?
Not really. They left games broken when they shut down Games for Windows Live.
Xbox kinda, windows no
e-waste is the last of the problems.
Figuratively and literally!
> All I'm saying is it's all digital on the PC side of things, and has been for ages, but we have means of maintaining access to the games we love over here, and it's one of the reasons I've gravitated to the PC for quite a while now.
It all depends on where you buy your games of course; GOG will let you download DRM-free installers, but if Steam goes down, your libraries goes down with it. They have made a vague promise that they would prevent that if the company ever went out of business, but who knows if they will keep that promise.
Guarantees about playability went out the window the day free, easily-obtained updates came out on PC as much as consoles.
At least on the PC side, there's a vibrant piracy community.
Even if you get all of your games via Steam, provided you have them downloaded, you can still run them without Steam if you know where to look. Obviously GOG is far better in this regard, but preservation is not a concern on PC, outside of games that are reliant on a server.
Starting next generation when prices are going to be obscenely high, I'm really struggling to see why anyone should invest in a console as opposed to a (mini-)PC.
Depends. Steam is not DRM itself, you can open the game folder and copy the game to another computer and steam doesn’t care. The game often has its own DRM though which will stop you.
GOG is different in that they ban DRM outright.
Some games won't start if Steam isn't running but you can work around that with a fake steamapi.dll, it's not a deep DRM check.
> The game often has its own DRM though which will stop you
I think you missed the "know where to look" part. It's called a Steam emulator, for starters. Note that I speak about this strictly for preservation purposes, as people who raise Steam DRM as an obstacle to preservation have not done their homework.
Realistically, if Steam closed down tomorrow, within 4-6 hours there'd be a megathread on Reddit explaining how to get the games running without Steam. Within 48 hours there'd be an auto-crack tool floating around on GitHub.
Steam for some reason gets a pass even though it normalized the use of DRM for PC games over 20 years ago.
Good customer service and mostly benevolent for the last two decades, it buys them a lot of goodwill they otherwise wouldn't have.
That and people simply trust steam because it has always been trustworthy (on the whole).
Yeah, I’ve been on Steam for about 20 years now and I can’t recall many bad moments with Valve.
The only one that comes to mind is the “outrage” when they decided to release L4D2 just a year after L4D back in 2008 instead of making this a free upgrade. Times have definitely changed. looks at yearly COD with barely any changes
Most Steam games don't actually have any DRM. They just link to steamapi.dll for things like achievements, and that makes you think you can't run them without Steam.
Some have DRM, of course.
What is the command I can use to run them without Steam then? If the game links to a dll that launches Steam and won’t play without it, then that is effectively Drm.
Before I even play the game without Steam: how do I download it without Steam?
There are DLLs that remove any check of Steam running. Just keep a copy of one and use that on other games.
Regarding the download, it's the same issue with physical media. If I don't have the DVD, how can I acquire the game?
This is just piracy. This is no different than downloading a crack. This is not some great service offered by Valve/Steam, it's just a cracked binary.
Yeah pretty clearly falls under 'bypassing a digital lock' according to the DMCA. they got you when you clicked ok on the license agreement. Movies and music is a different thing: you don't need to agree to a license when you buy a disk but I'd be surprised if we don't start seeing little pamplets thrown in there saying "by keeping this disk you agree to _____..."
Oh there are Dlls? And as a non-technical consumer I just know this do I? I know how to dig deep into my file system and copy+paste a dll file into software I can’t/don’t understand? How do I download and install a copy without Steam?
Has the barrier for non technical consumer gone down? Back in the 90s when some game didn't work because of some weird issue (we had two CD drives and it would refuse to detect the CD in either drive) my parents had no problem downloading a pirated one that didn't need a CD.
You wouldn't have to figure it out yourself. They didn't need a hex editor. But they did understand "download this file, go to this part of Program Files, move the downloaded file here and agree to overwrite". You'll find similar guides online. They already exist, because it's the same as if you're trying to pirate a Steam game!
People will do anything for the dancing bunnies. Both good and bad.
No my point here is that you have to download and install Steam before you can download and install any games. Now if I’m non-technical why would I want to make the extra effort to go Drm free if I have to use Steam anyways?
I know technical people can do it, but I do not believe this is a path for the non-technical user.
The proposed steps are:
- buy game on steam marketplace (no client) - download and install games (client required) - uninstall steam client and paste in fake dll file
But now I want more games… so rinse and repeat? This is a lot of work.
No you don't, you just have to plug in this USB drive and copy the files to your hard drive.
The premise of this hypothetical is Steam's servers going away. Ping me about this if and when it ever happens and I'll write you a tool where you can select the steamapi.dll you downloaded and have it copied to where your games need it. There's a fair chance you might not even need to because someone else will have made it before me.
You can download a fake steamapi.dll from a pirate site. It will fill in all the function stubs and it isn't even illegal.
Or so I assume. I have Steam installed, so I wouldn't know.
You download it with Steam, then run Steam's backup function to back up the games you care about to physical media. Or in the vast number of cases you can just copy the game folder
Obviously if you buy it with steam you need Steam. But you only need it at the time of purchase, for the vast majority of titles
Steam's backup function creates some kind of proprietary and licensed archive files. Reality: you download it with Steam, then go to Steam's folder and copy the game folder.
If you are on Windows, you navigate to the folder that the game is installed to and double click the .exe to launch it.
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/0/5540051992994...
Depends on the game. Stardew Valley can be run outside Steam, and I do it to be able to add mods.
How do you run an application? Depends on the application, as they all have different filenames...
I got Kerbal Space Program to run by just copying the entire folder then deleting the Steam dlls. Not sure how many games that will work for though.
I sort of get it. Every competitor, except maybe GOG, has come down hard in hyper-capitalist value-extraction mode quickly after pretending to do any good-will. For Valve, being a somewhat decent company is part of their ethos, for their competitors it's a means to an end.
I trust Valve not to screw me over, even though I know they totally could. Their own DRM is pretty weak (just put a modified DLL in the game directory and the game will launch), luckily.
> Steam for some reason
Currently probably because of Valve's work on Proton, and before because Steam just worked and didn't seem to exploit players.
Steam games are not required to have DRM, it's entirely up to the game developer/publisher.
It allows you to play your games offline though, so if Steam's servers go down you can still play your games. I'm not sure if that's permanent or if you need to reactivate your DRM / license every once in a while though.
Around a decade ago i had to move to another city and spent a few months without internet. I had all my favorite games downloaded on Steam and was able to play them offline with no issue for all that time. Not sure if it still like that, but it was possible back then.
It’s not possible with any Denuvo game which will require you reactivate with a drm server every so often.
Which has nothing to do with Steam...
Steam has some backup feature. I do backups of my games. Compressed to slow HDD dedicated to backups. Faster to install than downloading again from network. Don't know though how much will that help
Can one download a backup first, then install (using usb drive) into an "offline" machine first (without steam/online?)
Yeah, if the game is set up to not use steam as drm. You can check by going to the installed files and running the exe directly - in most cases it'll still launch even if you're signed out.
If steam goes down you can play offline. They have a portable game console that doesn't need to be connected to play. They have big warnings on the store page of games that require online drm.
There's a surprising amount of games on my Deck that refuse to run without internet. It's not even marked anywhere which sucks because you find out when you have no connectivity.
Is that generally caused by Steam, or by the game itself needing an online connection?
They don’t let you resell games, if you die your library is gone, if said steamdeck (or steam machine) breaks those games are gone, the list goes on. It is a digital store with the exact same limitations of any video game console full of digital purchases.
I use Steam but I also know I’m vulnerable to a rug pull. We all are. That’s why I’ve been shifting over to GOG and making sure to back up my library in an organized fashion. I wish I had done it sooner, but hey, today’s the best day.
As for warnings, I mean…come on man. That’s like hiding behind ToS. Let’s be realistic here: how many people here (including yourself) see a game they really want, see it has a little DRM note on the uttered store page, then decide never to buy it? Few people let that stop them from getting a game they actually want.
Seeing the little DRM note kills my joy entirely. I have used steam, but the runtime anti-tamper malware has no place on my system. I don't use the word malware lightly. I trust it about as much as a random "overdue" invoice pdf from my spam folder. Maybe less.
The deck and machine are not going to delete your account if it breaks? Theyre just PCs what are you on about?
I don't buy games that require third party launchers ever. Been burned losing my Ubisoft account or w/e a few times. The warnings are helpful and steam doesn't have to say anything at all.
If steam shuts down and all your games are on a valve device. I only addressed that because it seemed it was being used as an example in the prior comment, as if that protects them more than an Xbox does.
Well, the device works fine if valve shuts down. It's a PC. The games are gone, sure.
>the games are gone, sure
That’s the entire thing this conversation revolves around…
You keep bringing up devices because the threads about xbox, but valve devices are fundamentally different where they will keep working without any valve services. They can even play games.
Also there is a vibrant retrogaming community, with lots of games much more interesting than yet another COD or FIFA.
One consideration I have on every purchase I make is that I own it, like actually own it (with exceptions where necessary, of course). Internet access in something that shouldn't need internet access is a downside. It's a way to mess with the purchase you made.
If my e-reader had a bad battery after years of use, I should be able to replace that battery myself without issue (personal skill allowing). I purchased it. Why wouldn't you be able to? I haven't yet found reason for this in consumer devices, except because they want you to send it in or buy a new one from the manufacturer.
Every time we see something like this, it doesn't get enough eyes or care from those who use these platforms. Sony takes your movies away, Xbox requires you be online, Amazon updating your books automatically without asking you, etc. My favorite that I repeat constantly is all of the BS that BMW has done over the years: heated seats subscription, proprietary bolt heads, ads in the infotainment. If you buy a BMW at this point, I'm sorry, but you had alternatives and I don't feel bad. The scary part is when enough people accept it that everyone else in the industry follows suit and then the outliers are the ones that respect you.
If I purchased a physical disc, I'm not even asking for the source code (which I'd love), I'm just asking that I can run the damn software I bought, but you can't even do that now. Viva open source and right to repair. Make the educated choice when purchasing software and hardware, to your benefit, where appropriate. Of course, the proprietary system is what you need/want sometimes, but I bet most of us don't most of the time.
People focus too much on discs and cartridges, but too little on licensing and drm. The disc is meaningless if you cannot run it after drm servers died. Also, very often the game on the disc is unplayable because of lack of day-1 patch. Meanwhile you can burn games you bought from GOG on a cd and play it 10 years later without internet connection. So the physical vs digital discussion is completely irrelevant to the problem.
After weeks of discourse where the physical token of the Compact Disc had become the all-important object of the fight, it's reassuring to see that we're back at the beginning, where it was clearly understood that you don't meaningfully "own" a game if you need to be online to use any of it.
You need to be online to prove you own it, which now means you don’t?
Unless the party you prove it to is obligated to stay up forever and has service guarantees, yeah
Something something, cryptography.
Come on crypto bros - we need you!
The internet money thing aint gonna work. Look at the pyramid on the back of the dollar. It's esoteric. They will make you disappear and make it look like an accident. Look what happened to Ross.
This isn't even a reply anymore, sorry knollimar
You need to be online to prove they currently will let you play it.
I should at least get equity on each login.
After 1000 logins I get the source code.
This is too much like rent, it's not fair.
The symbol of ownership doesn't hold much value without any of its benefits.
First, we need to make it illegal to say you are buying something when you are actually renting. Words mean something.
They did this in California. Solution: stores don't use any of the words now. Now the buttons say "add to cart" and "proceed to payment". Sometimes the button just says the price.
I wonder if it's legal to build a completely scam store like this. You pick a game, you click on "$7", you pay $7, you don't get anything at all, and if you try to sue them, they point out they never actually sold you anything, you just voluntarily clicked on the button to donate $7.
One obvious way to tighten such loopholes would be to ban indefinite licenses. It is either permanent or has a fixed, stated term. A permanent license must either entail no DRM or the entity must have a trust/endowment in place to ensure availability until copyright expiration. Copyright is contingent on a DRM-less version being placed into escrow for copyright expiration. Failure to ensure availability of a permanent licence allows access to escrow as recourse.
Judging by other comments, this hypothetical Scam Store sounds very much like trying to buy Minecraft from Microsoft already.
Yeah, did anyone really think that language policing would fix the issue?
It makes it a little bit more visible. So it isn't nothing. I can't wait for the first lawsuit to hit the news where the company claims because the button didn't say buy, they didn't have to sell.
I think Valve is just going to kill Xbox in a couple of years. Basically Microsoft is planning to make the next Xbox an "ordinary" Windows computer with a different UI as well as vendor-locked hard- & software. So essentially you'll get a (maybe) slightly discounted small form-factor PC for the living room that only runs games from the Xbox store, which will be more expensive than the same games on Steam.
Now, everyone laughs about the "ridiculous" pricing of the Steam machine but once hardware prices come down they will make a second generation that will be an unlocked PC in the same form factor and probably just as powerful as the next-generation Xbox. They might even pass on some of their supply side bargaining power to the end user. Then you will have the choice between a fully locked down Windows PC that only plays Xbox games for 1,000 USD or a fully unlocked Steam machine that plays everything from the Steam, Epic, GOG store, can install regular games and even lets you do work on it, for probably around the same price. Built by a company that has the highest gamer trust of any company we know. Guess this will be a no-brainer for most folks! They have everything to pull this off as well, the brand, the trust, the gamers, the store, the platform, the money, the market power as well as experience with hardware. My take is that they wanted to pull this move already but the AI craze made that impossible so they are using the first-gen Steam machine to learn about the market, but I predict that once prices come down we'll see an announcement, they can time it to match the new console generation by Microsoft and Sony as well. The market should be in a great state by then as well, lots of folks were essentially priced out of the GPU market and NVIDIA won't even release a new generation of gaming cards anytime soon, so all those people that have the buying power but don't know where to put it would flock to a new Steam machine if it can deliver good performance for a reasonable price. And the thing is Valve will have the power to make sure studios optimize games for the Steam machine as well.
Really don't know what Microsoft is doing here, they turned one of the most profitable and beloved gaming platforms into something that seems to be in a death spiral, people are already speculating they might sell the whole thing off eventually.
I am so glad i jumped out of the Xbox ecosystem back when I did.
I was such a loyal fan, but the Xbox One made me go from an avid gamer to a casual gamer.
I thought I was done with gaming until I picked up a Nintendo Switch back in 2018 and I rediscovered the joy.
I gave Xbox one more chance with the Series X and that was the final nail in the coffin.
I only play on Switch 2 and Steam OS nowadays.
If buying ain't owning, then p****y ain't stealing.
You can say pussy on the internet
Yarr
Clearly parent poster meant 'policy'. 'The policy isn't about stealing', referring of course to the Terms and Conditions being something to ignore when they cover anti-piracy but don't sell you anything.
The word was "piracy"
HN is the propaganda arm of a billionaire enrichment company, so it's understandable that someone might be unsure whether you're allowed to say that word here.
We all know what the word was, it was a joke to replace it with another word that has the same first/last letters that obviously wouldn't fit here. A joke about how words are censored all over the internet as a way to appease advertisers on various platforms.
If said billionaire enrichment company was really upset about it, they would be able to detect forbidden words like piracy even when replaced. It's not that difficult, it's a problem that was solved decades ago.
Just go two routes at once
I buy games via Humble Bundle when possible. They give you a link to download a DRM free copy, which I store away in a large drive.
In practice, I often end up playing those games on the Steam Deck, but I know that in 20 years (if I keep that drive alive), I'll be able to easily spin up wine and play those games just fine.
For most modern software, you are not buying a product, you are buying a window of service. You are entering into an agreement that the software will be supported for a reasonable amount of time. Bugs will be fixed, you might get some additional 'free' content. Games got to the point of being so large and expensive, they crossed this threshold long ago. A single player offline game like The Witcher 3 has had what, about 30 updates? And those games are constantly being dwarfed by seasonal, micro-transation games. The single release game was an endangered species a long time ago.
This is false. You don't need an internet connection to play from disc:
https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/connect...
You can play digital titles, too, as long as your console is set to "Home".
I played Forza Horizon 3 for days without internet a couple of months ago.
If you are offline, it will work for a few days that’s right. If you are online, and the rights service is failing, it will revoke your key.
The trouble is, you would have to know about the outage first and go offline before attempting to play.
> If you are online, and the rights service is failing, it will revoke your key.
Do you have evidence of this? I've played Xbox for 25 years and never seen this.
i’ve tested it , that’s how i found out. If you run your dns it’s easy. Set licensing.xboxlive.com to 0.0.0.0 .
The entitlement only lasts a few days. If the online check fails and you’re otherwise online, it gets revoked .
Nearly all DRM systems are fail-Closed not fail-open.
TFA
This is why I only purchase digital games at high discounts. It might be worth $60 to own a piece of physical media that can be played at any time without internet. However, to me the value of a DRM license that can possibly be taken away at any moment is very little. It is ridiculous that they attempt to sell digital games at the same price as a physical game.
TBH can't wait for consoles / console exclusives to die, as long as there is piracy (and steam) pc gaming prices stay reasonable, hardware pricing will eventually sort itself out.
They proposed terms. You agreed. They act on them.
I encourage folks with a PlayStation 5 (or 4) to participate in the blackout by unplugging their console for the week of August 23 at 7:00 PM your local time and run to August 31 at 7:00 PM your local time. Hopefully that helps send a message. We should irrevocably own our games, not rent a revokable license. And we should have price competition from multiple store fronts.
What like le reddit blackout?
What message are you trying to send? "Oh look, a bunch of people who have already given us money aren't using the thing they paid for for a week, and we can maybe even save a bit of money by reducing our server load"? Am I missing something? Why should they care? If you really want to send a message, don't buy a PlayStation. If you own one already, don't buy anymore games. That's the only message corporations care about.
Even if the games are played off the internal hard drive with updates, there's a bit of "legal grey area" where enthusiastic fans of the game rebuild the code, and run the game with assets from the original media. "Technically" only folks with the original media in their possession will be able to play the original game.
For example the Ship of Harkinian PC port of Ocarina of Time. This requires a legal or illegal copy of the original game to run, so the copyright authorities don't crack down on it yet.
Are we sure that this is the reason the authorities aren't cracking down on it, and not that a game released in 1998 that also has a newer release on the 3DS just isn't financially valuable enough at this point to try to protect now? And it's getting an even newer remake, which is where Nintendo's concerns would be, I'd assume.
Yes, because Nintendo is constantly taking down projects that cross the unspoken line and redistribute assets.
Nobody can be sure, but there is a consistent pattern here: decompilation projects can include as much code as they want and not get punished, but if they include assets they are taken down.
I suspect it's actually because the authorities don't know what the project is, if it's only code, or they can't be sure it's an infringing derivative work (it is).
In this situation it's completely moral to go pirate the games on a different platform. Illegal, but moral
Haha say you want to play co-op with your buddy or girlfriend or something and you just shelled out 59.99 or whatever for the latest microslop product..
You just connect a controller right?
Nah, on ps5, you need to setup a whole ass sony account, and then login to it, and then you need a new microsoft account to link that sony account to, and then maybe, you might be able to play couch co-op.
>But owning a game on a disc today isn't really the same thing.
This is an important point distinction that many people of physical media are missing or being distracted by. All this backlash could be put to better use by supporting game ownership.
You can't play the game you own if the product has to phone home. I'm not getting why people are up in arms about the physical product while DRM is in place that prevents you from playing it.
I don't have a console other than an old PS4 rarely used and I was going to buy a PS5 until the recent news. Now I don't want to buy xbox because of this post. So, what's left? I have a kid and little time and I haven't been a "gamer" since I was a teenager but I want to be able to play maybe 5 or 6 games (co-ops, FIFA, GTA) without downloading anything.
It's even more annoying for me because I often have phases of only playing every 2 months, so it's always true that I would need to update first.
Emulation. Tons upon tons of games just sitting there.
Your kid isn't going to know what it was like to play it back then, throw them the classics and sigh in relief knowing that's he's not being tricked in to corporate exploits such as loot boxes, skins and the likes.
My eight year old nephew loves my old mega drive.
"When Sony announced that they were discontinuing physical discs for PlayStation, I was less outraged than many. The reason I felt this way wasn't because I loved what Sony was doing. I think it came from an understanding that physical media ain't what it used to be."
But you are mixing Sony and Microsoft here. Sure, both are bad, but many PS disks are totally playable without internet connection.
There's a good site for this: https://www.doesitplay.org/
Xbox is the worst about having a dependency on the internet to play your physical media.
I was recently surprised to see that AOE2DE captures my microphone on ubuntu even when I toggle the in-game settings to not do so.
I'll never buy one of these systems because I want to be able to play my games in 20 or 30 years.
I just bought a Nintendo 64 and a Wii and it's great just being able to play my games with my kids and know that in five years nothing will change.
Isn't this problem specific to Xbox and PC? I know for sure that first party Nintendo games are playable 100% offline, not sure about Sony?
Nintendo Switch cartridges don't have this problem, mostly. It's the reason I buy physical for the family library. Nintendo's digital licensing is terrible (slightly less so with Virtual Cartridges, but miles away from Steam Family) and doesn't really work for a multi-Switch household.
But, I was traveling for work and brought the non-"home" Switch with me along with a copy of Breath of the Wild on cartridge. I fired it up on the airplane, ready to go. And then discovered that because I had bought the DLC and the DLC license check couldn't pass, I was locked out of playing at all. It's given me pause on buying any other DLC on a Nintendo platform.
...huh, do the online license checks only happen if you have the cartridge sharing stuff enabled? Wondering when/if I would run into this, I haven't yet. But I never use their "virtual game card" system, I only have one Switch and I think the whole thing is overcomplicated and too limited.
Microsoft is software imagined by someone like Hegseth...
Buy games on GOG.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2026/07/03/returnal-3
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What does it say?
Says how originally people played arcade games and didn't own them at all, since you were constantly putting in quarters to play more of the game.
It's an interesting point, though not 100% accurate due to how there were early video game consoles at the same time as arcade games. Pong clones were common for home play in the early 1970s, and things like the Fairchild Channel F and Atari 2600 date from the mid to late 1970s.
At least the owners owned them.
It's not strictly true that all physical disks are just license keys - those are marked on the packaging.
Sounds more like a complicated subscription or renting scheme than ownership
Our only hope are the pirates.
I don't understand why anyone thinks that just because they own the disc, they will always be able to play it. It's still full of DRM!
Most physical games currently are fully playable offline: https://www.doesitplay.org/
What would stop me from playing it, outside of the hardware dying?
For a golden decade or so, piracy was less convenient than paying: Xbox had subscriptions offering on tap games, there was only really one streaming service to speak of that had high quality content, music came from Spotify or YouTube, etc.
We are back to where we are in the 2000s: the gatekeepers of large tracts of culture are behaving so badly that piracy is probably going to end it's lull. It is a shame for artists, developers, and anyone else who needs to get paid that companies running genuinely very good services have chosen to behave so badly.
The services aren’t really that great IMO. They don’t always get you the quality you pay for. They hide their libraries either to keep you engaged with their app or to convince you it’s larger than it is. Most of them charge you even when you don’t use the service that month. But they’re doling out seasons an episode or three at a time to make sure you don’t unsubscribe during any given month. Some have renegged on their previous statements regarding password sharing. You pay for “screens” but those screens have to be for your household only. Their UIs and apps are often broken and are inconsistent between devices. Even when you pay for ad free sometimes there are ads “due to licensing issues” and almost all of them advertise their own shows or apps or podcasts before the content you want to watch.
I mean yes, same with Steam. Same with PS. GoG is the only DRM free ones.
This stuff is turning me into a physical media pre-2010s truther more and more by the day
I never upgraded beyond the PS2 (and I was a heavy console gamer back in the days), because all the "needs network", "needs account", "needs certificate to be valid", etc. stuff is entirely scaring me off investing my money in any of that.
Now, my motto is: if I can't run it safely in an emulator and download the files from some "abandoned wares" site then I don't care. And I have zero moral problems with that.
Physical is mostly a lie once you go past PS2, 3DS etc. It confers a few benefits over digital, like trading and selling, but those are illusory as well, as we see here.
Something something layoffs?
Seems Microslop forgot the #1 rule of selling bits and bytes: buying from you needs to be easier and less painful than opening thepiratebay (and possibly installing an emulator)
Asha Sharma where are you? Keep up your reputation as a great new Xbox CEO.
Is this really newsworthy? This has been the case for over a decade.
It has, but recent events have shown that people need a reminder.
> But owning a game on a disc today isn't really the same thing. It's still just a license, and Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo can either intentionally or, in this case, unintentionally prevent you from playing that game, even if you own the physical copy.
I am pretty certain that there are different legal requirements nonetheless. The author kind of tries to mitigate the danger of big corporations forbidding physical media. Does he think that these corporations have the good of the people in mind? Or are they more interested in milking their cash cows?
Thankfully I am not the target audience anyway. I don't give my money to these greedy corporations to begin with. Them disowning people further here, by killing physical media, would just have been another stepping stone towards a movement away from these big corporations anyway. I don't have time to play games anymore anyway due to old age, but if I would I'd much rather support Indie games - with physical media.
The death of the used games market is still a big deal, even if said used games still depend on the manufacturers' networks and licenses being valid. A digital only world where Sony and Microsoft have the only say about pricing and used games are no longer available is a downgrade for users even from the already-bad status quo
Normalize usage of "have been granted a limited license for" instead of "own." The word "own" implies all manner of things that don't exist for things like Xbox games, Kindle titles, etc.
thats why i never bought a game in my life and never intend to... if i want to see how a game works, i could download an emulator and run it via the emulator from a public rom under linux. If I am really interested, i could download a 512GB retropie torrent/magnet and then copy it to a microsd card and run 70k games on a raspberry pi 4...
historically, at least for me, games never worked... i spent more time fixing why they didnt work or debugging them in memory to patch them to get the game to actually run then actually playing a game. This is circa 1983-1987 too so maybe we have progressed from there, but obviously not much.
I appreciate your experience/take on gaming.
If you where to start gaming again (at least, as the current vendors intend) you'd find that the bugs you had to account for in the 80s have been (generally speaking) resolved as a byproduct of the DRM/Cloud streaming propagation we're all complaining about.
IE; consolidation of vendors, locking down the way a game propagates, restricting the lifetime of a game, made it "easier" to play games the absolute one way the vendor intends. This gives them the excuse of "Well, we designed the game to be played via perpetual license through only this platform, we can't support or claim responsibility anywhere else".
Which is to say, your comment made me think that the reason the industry is the way it is isn't because money/lawyers, but more because some product managers decades ago began pushing for consolidating/defining video game lifecycles.
This is why I don't really understand the outrage with Sony getting rid of physical discs. I guess the argument is you can sell you disc later, but at the end of the day, owning a the disc isn't the same as owning an NES cartridge. Once the servers are down, that's it.
Every modern media disk since DVD has had revocable DRM . That means you have never owned the disks. (Only Audio CDs and laser disks were owned digital media). With games, a synchronous right’s check is made every time you insert the disk, and if you haven’t played recently, the entire game installation is downloaded. The disk is only used for rights, not for playback. With movies, thankfully the rights check is done offline on your player, but a background online check can revoke your player’s keys, and revoke your entire collection. What’s more, a revocation can ship via another disk. So you can unplug your Blu-ray player for 2 years, insert a new disk, and lose your entire collection.
Not sure why I’m getting downvoted. It’s true, and on topic? It’s also relevant, with all the discussions about owning your own media. Weird.
HN and other comment/article aggregation tools use votefuzzing to obfuscate the API to deter spambots.
Not saying that's happening here, but 99 times out of a 100 it's either a spambot or the autofuzz, not someone deriding your opinion.
Thanks I’ll look into that. The past few months I’ve had really suspicious downvoting so I’ve been suspicious.
Own? You don’t own someone else’s work. Even when it goes into public domain, you don’t own their creation. At that point, nobody does.
I own everything I've learned. I also own some hardware on which I sometimes deposit this information for later retrieval. I own all of it, keys to nuts.
Nag your representatives ad nauseam to make laws against this.
It's shown again and again and again that nagging representatives doesn't actually work.
There are more radical options involving representatives (and other figures for that matter) that could work, but those are generally frowned upon.
In general, two kinds of solutions to political problems exist: those that don't work, and those that are illegal. Because why would politicians want something that worked to be legal?
Don't buy golden cage BS products, which you don't really own.
Consoles, Apple, Google, etc.
But that's all products, and even if it wasn't, consumer choice is mainly driven by marketing spend, which lock-in companies will always have the most of, because they extract the most money.
not all products
Not which ones?
Part of the overall trend to eliminate in-person shopping and physical product ownership.
In the end, 1 guy owns everything and we’re all batteries.
Our kids are going to be so fucked..
I've been wondering about this, in some sense we might hit a big cultural black hole where all these cool things that we've created in the last few decades just are functionally lost and all the amazing things of the previous generation that could be found on archive, roms, stuff on CD's / DVD's etc are what actually have cultural value going forwards
Everything else is in this position of "actively at risk" where if someone isn't "keeping it up" it may just disappear, at least until it gets orphaned, in which case I suppose reverse engineering is back on the table
Thank God for Fitgirl doing so much archival work with high quality highly compressed game releases. If you know where to look everything is available somewhere.
Fitgirl is a packing group. They take what other people have already done, and compress it (to a ludicrous degree). They should not be credited for anything besides the compression.
Which is exactly what have been said:
> so much archival work with high quality highly compressed game releases
Cataloguing and vouching for releases is very useful.
I don’t have time or interest to figure out how to go on the Usenet and research the reputation of scene groups.
> If you know where to look everything is available somewhere.
Until CPUs only run "approved" operating systems → mandatory age verification == government ID required to use any OS in a non-crippled form → browsers refusing to open "illegal" sites.
Unable to open archive - copyright detected.
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I agree, but I feel like pointing out that any game that was distributed without DRM or that was successfully 'cracked' by pirates can also be found on archive and therefore might be carried over to future generations. Physical media isn't the only way.
The real risk, IMO, is live service games that don't function at all without the server being online. There are games where fans have reverse-engineered and made their own server, but there are definitely ones that will slip through the cracks and be forgotten too.
There are three categories of live service games for which fans have reverse engineered a server:
1) The server doesn’t do much other than connect the players, and most of the logic is either client-side or trivial.
2) The server contains a fair bit of game content (such as drop and spawn rates, maybe even NPC dialogue) and the community has done extensive packet captures while the server was online.
3) The server binaries were leaked at some point, and everyone agrees to keep it a secret and pretend they’re doing a clean-room reimplementation from packet captures. They are, but against the leaked server, not the production server.
Having worked on a few of these projects, you’d be surprised at how many of the successful ones are actually #3.
This is problematic because we can’t rely on data breaches for game preservation.
I agree that live service are the main threat, but even so you should not have to rely on pirated software to keep using something you paid for. Also not all game ends up being cracked
I never got into gaming. Never bought a console. Seems like I wasn't missing too much.
Recently got a big fancy TV with 4k + Dolby Vision
It’s a lot of work figuring out what movies support the format. And all the premium upgrades to Netflix, etc get them to stream premium formats. Then it doesn’t work and you’re spending 30 minutes debugging your TV, wondering why you’re not getting the amazing new restoration of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I totally understand why people just buy physical media.
Games may be harder given software updates. But I’d pay a premium for a physical copy of mature games I love (like Halo Master Chief collection)
Oh, you pay for 4K? Sorry, the CDN is a bit too overloaded to send you this movie today. I hope you’re happy with 1080p, randomly dropping to 360p on and off for a dozen frames at a time during an immersive sequence.
It's worse. All hardware and software in the chain must be approved for you to be allowed to watch 4K. Your browser, OS, CPU, GPU, HDMI cable, and TV must all be whitelisted before you get 4K. Very few people meet the requirements.
And the 4K video is compressed to lower bitrate than a 1080p Blu-Ray anyway.
The whole "make it harder for pirates to watch in 4K" makes no sense to me, like it comes out of the psychology of people who couldn't possibly understand the psychology of other people at all.
My experience is that people don't care about quality. Like there was that time I found a torrent for a movie that had 3000 seeds and found that it was shot with a camcorder in the theater and the soundtrack was in Russian but it didn't matter because the sound quality was so bad I don't think I could have understood the dialog if I knew Russian. Thing is, pirates want to watch a crap copy of a movie that's in the theater and won't even wait for a DVD quality rip, never mind something better.
This is out of touch with modern piracy. It's much easier to download the 4K Netflix version of any show than to get Netflix to deliver it to you.
Maybe it’s because theaters are terrible in some places? No sessions at times people aren’t working, expensive food, restrictions on what food you can bring in, 3D conversions no one asked for, and most importantly, no one to kick out the obnoxious talkers and people on their phones.
You can just pirate movies.
> I totally understand why people just buy physical media.
Not to disagree with your larger point, but physical media can also be a nightmare. Try watching a 4K Blu-ray on your computer
Because even the fucking cable needs to support DRM. I hate this tech era with a passion
> "But owning a game on a disc today isn't really the same thing. It's still just a license..."
Here's the crux of the problem in their own sentence and they don't even realize it.
Owning and Licensing are not the same thing. If I own something, I own it outright. If I license something, I am leasing it.
It does get fuzzy with media, I will admit. But we need the same protections as physical books and game cartidges. If I buy it, it is mine to use as I please and even resell or transfer. If that's not what the transaction is, then don't call it buying or purchasing, call it leasing or licensing.
Require stores and publishers to use language that reflects the nature of the transaction.
The issue with owning discs now is they tend to not even have the full game on them. They either shipped the discs before the game was done so there's something practically unplayable on the disc, or sometimes it's a demo and you have to download the remaining 95% of the game. The one advantage it has over digital for the time being is you can resell it, assuming they didn't lock a bunch of content behind a one-time-use download code in the box.
And this isn't anything new. Mortal Kombat X came out 11 years ago and the disc had 2 characters and a basic tutorial on it. To get the rest of the game you had to download it.
Owning and licensing is bullshit propaganda they feed you so you'll feel better about not owning, and you lapped it right up. For consumer products there should be no distinction.
The right word for a consumer product is "rent". As in I'll "rent" this game. For $2 every week until I return it.
I keep seeing article like this, that look like they have been written by these companies to push the opinion. People saying "who cares because you cannot play it anyway" instead of "discs should be less dependant on network to gain another advantage".
But the case for physical disk is not (only) about playability, it's mostly about ownership and the fact that you can actually lend it to someone or resell it. It's also about retail, and it's about collectors. About people with a slow or limited connection having access with that much less to download.
Another thing is also that if I have a physical copy, I have the right to a digital copy. So a non-working disc might not always be the end. But if I have a digital copy and they take it off the table, I do not have this right and it is gone forever.