Everything went downhill when they closed Rogers and Blockbuster stores. Going to those stores and renting movies or games, and buying used games was the best. Its too bad so many people wont experience that.

Law212 wrote on Today, 15:09:

Everything went downhill when they closed Rogers and Blockbuster stores. Going to those stores and renting movies or games, and buying used games was the best. Its too bad so many people wont experience that.

yea going to blockbuster and renting n64 games like demo derby or quake 1. Whats the different when you rent you didnt own anyway so when you license a game that the companys servers can shutdown and leave you with a disc coaster uh drink coaster. I think we dont own the means of production anymore.

We never owned the means of production. Though with old games you couldnt get locked out when a dev got greedy.
As long as you have the hardware and the game cart you can play until you die, then your kid can play those games too. Modern games not only are mostly bland and terrible these days, but will your kid be able to play his favourite 2026 game 30 years from now? Probably not.

Law212 wrote on Today, 15:51:

We never owned the means of production. Though with old games you couldnt get locked out when a dev got greedy.
As long as you have the hardware and the game cart you can play until you die, then your kid can play those games too. Modern games not only are mostly bland and terrible these days, but will your kid be able to play his favourite 2026 game 30 years from now? Probably not.

hehe a remaster of a remaster of a remaster in 2060. of course not but then again will people still work on quake source ports or porting doom to new things? maybe not even if the code is free for all

twiz11 wrote on Today, 15:59:

Law212 wrote on Today, 15:51:

We never owned the means of production. Though with old games you couldnt get locked out when a dev got greedy.
As long as you have the hardware and the game cart you can play until you die, then your kid can play those games too. Modern games not only are mostly bland and terrible these days, but will your kid be able to play his favourite 2026 game 30 years from now? Probably not.

hehe a remaster of a remaster of a remaster in 2060. of course not but then again will people still work on quake source ports or porting doom to new things? maybe not even if the code is free for all

Well Doom is eternal.

Law212 wrote on Today, 16:01:

twiz11 wrote on Today, 15:59:

Law212 wrote on Today, 15:51:

We never owned the means of production. Though with old games you couldnt get locked out when a dev got greedy.
As long as you have the hardware and the game cart you can play until you die, then your kid can play those games too. Modern games not only are mostly bland and terrible these days, but will your kid be able to play his favourite 2026 game 30 years from now? Probably not.

hehe a remaster of a remaster of a remaster in 2060. of course not but then again will people still work on quake source ports or porting doom to new things? maybe not even if the code is free for all

Well Doom is eternal.

thanks to carmack freedoom is eternal

Law212 wrote on Today, 15:51:

We never owned the means of production. Though with old games you couldnt get locked out when a dev got greedy.
As long as you have the hardware and the game cart you can play until you die, then your kid can play those games too. Modern games not only are mostly bland and terrible these days, but will your kid be able to play his favourite 2026 game 30 years from now? Probably not.

of course physical media offline is very static, and i guess the world wants hyperinterative dynamic content that they cant get from offline physical media. i mean if you play halo 1 many times it wont change so you look to the internet for mods and stuff. Plus what about lets plays and the video is there so you can imagine the experience but all games invove pushing buttons moving pawns and hand gestures. Im boiling down games to their parts. Theres no way to preserve the experience of what it was like day one anymore.

twiz11 wrote on Today, 16:05:

Law212 wrote on Today, 15:51:

We never owned the means of production. Though with old games you couldnt get locked out when a dev got greedy.
As long as you have the hardware and the game cart you can play until you die, then your kid can play those games too. Modern games not only are mostly bland and terrible these days, but will your kid be able to play his favourite 2026 game 30 years from now? Probably not.

of course physical media offline is very static, and i guess the world wants hyperinterative dynamic content that they cant get from offline physical media. i mean if you play halo 1 many times it wont change so you look to the internet for mods and stuff. Plus what about lets plays and the video is there so you can imagine the experience but all games invove pushing buttons moving pawns and hand gestures. Im boiling down games to their parts. Theres no way to preserve the experience of what it was like day one anymore.

Not really "let's plays" in the common sense, but in the 90s some PC game magazines had video reviews on their cover CDs.
This dates back to at least 1994, I think. Video files were stored in either *.avi, *.mov or *.mpg.
Just saying, because I basically grew up with multimedia/shareware CDs before the internet became so mandatory.

bitzu101 wrote on Yesterday, 14:57:

Shponglefan wrote on Yesterday, 14:52:

bitzu101 wrote on Yesterday, 14:48:

How on earth do you put a 150 gb game on dvd's?

It worked fine when games were like 500mb to 10 12 gb.... but 150gb...?

Bluray disks can store in excess of 100 gb.

Freaking aye... did not even know them things existed. Thought there were no more blu ray players/disks for years now....

i also thought that both xbox and ps5 have done away with the optical drives...

Petabit glass dvd like disks exist in a lab.

Portable Physical media started getting less and less investment as dvd released.
AKA if proper investment had continued we likely would have had 200tb physical media 10 years ago, but already before that manufacturers were skimping on the creation of increasingly more massive consumer non-writable media

Sony and Panasonic controlled the optical media industry with an Iron Fist, in a Velvet Glove. There were innovations coming out of smaller players, but the Dynamic Duo veto'd or stifled all of them, to protect their own investments and patent royalties. Now, the industry is all but dead and exists in name only, with the majority of recordable discs coming out of Chinese replication factories and offering nothing special, while drives are getting rarer by the year.

twiz11 wrote on Today, 15:25:

Law212 wrote on Today, 15:09:

Everything went downhill when they closed Rogers and Blockbuster stores. Going to those stores and renting movies or games, and buying used games was the best. Its too bad so many people wont experience that.

yea going to blockbuster and renting n64 games like demo derby or quake 1. Whats the different when you rent you didnt own anyway so when you license a game that the companys servers can shutdown and leave you with a disc coaster uh drink coaster. I think we dont own the means of production anymore.

think the issue is slightly bigger than that.

the problem is mainly with the optical drive. yes , u can get triple layer blu ray , etc , but the actual storage is and will not be enough for the future. also , optical disks scratch , and become unusable.

flash disks may be a solution , maybe make READ ONLY usb flash drives. u get better storage , terrabytes if needed , they are much faster than optical diks... dunno how long they last unpowered...

BaronSFel001 wrote on Today, 13:35:

wierd_w wrote on Yesterday, 20:58:

[In past ages, we determined that mega-companies like these were bad, and we created laws that broke them up to make them smaller again, made it substantially harder for them to form, and that penalized the practices they got up to very intensely. But we've spent the better part of the century deluding ourselves that those kinds of things would never happen again, and that the consumer protection laws of the past were onerous barriers to growth and 'innovation'. And here we are.]

As a capitalist whose portfolio is benefitting BIGLY from American capitalism, I must submit that the upsides of lifting barriers to growth and innovation are very much true. I could not care less how much the rich get richer [or the big get bigger] so long as it grows the size of the pie for the rest of us too; Americans, at least, certainly have the opportunity to accomplish this (I am not speaking on behalf of anyone else: nation-by-nation policies are a major factor). If a player like Sony decides it has the clout to be predatory enough to deny fundamental choice to its customers (a move similar to that pulled by Nintendo in the 80s), then as far as I am concerned there is nothing stopping consumers from taking their money elsewhere.

I have already done this: as I said earlier, ALL my gaming is retro now.

Under ordinary conditions, I am 'ambivalent' about people being successful.

When it comes to government, though, the duty they are assigned to do is the protection of its citizens, and the protection of their liberties and rights.

Not the assurance of future profitability of commercial ventures.

Where these two collide, is where regulation is necessary.

bitzu101 wrote on Today, 17:14:

think the issue is slightly bigger than that. […]
Show full quote

twiz11 wrote on Today, 15:25:

Law212 wrote on Today, 15:09:

Everything went downhill when they closed Rogers and Blockbuster stores. Going to those stores and renting movies or games, and buying used games was the best. Its too bad so many people wont experience that.

yea going to blockbuster and renting n64 games like demo derby or quake 1. Whats the different when you rent you didnt own anyway so when you license a game that the companys servers can shutdown and leave you with a disc coaster uh drink coaster. I think we dont own the means of production anymore.

think the issue is slightly bigger than that.

the problem is mainly with the optical drive. yes , u can get triple layer blu ray , etc , but the actual storage is and will not be enough for the future. also , optical disks scratch , and become unusable.

flash disks may be a solution , maybe make READ ONLY usb flash drives. u get better storage , terrabytes if needed , they are much faster than optical diks... dunno how long they last unpowered...

Games on multiple disks was never really an issue. Yes they can scratch but I have had games since the 90s that still work because they were taken care of . I have floppies from the 80s that still work.

wierd_w wrote on Today, 17:37:

When it comes to government, though, the duty they are assigned to do is the protection of its citizens, and the protection of their liberties and rights.

Not the assurance of future profitability of commercial ventures.

Where these two collide, is where regulation is necessary.

As I said, I am a capitalist: I see those two factors as supposed to be complementing instead of in conflict, as did those who founded America 250 years ago. It is we the consumers endowed with the power of choice, to take our money where we choose when a company (in our freedom of judgment) starts being bad. This is no different: I dislike this change, but it is not the only reason I have already exercised my liberty to cease patronage of Sony's products [in fact I own no Sony console newer than PS3].

Apologies if I got off-topic. I specialize in helping people prosper in a free market economy; the notion that government ought to step in and regulate just because people dislike the course a business chooses to take (which IS the case here, NOT some sinister monopolistic bullying or anything that crosses the line into infringing on people's rights) is toxic to that prosperity because such undue intervention only increases cost of business (and lowers opportunity) for EVERYONE. Anyways, digression over.

BaronSFel001 wrote on Today, 17:58:

wierd_w wrote on Today, 17:37:

When it comes to government, though, the duty they are assigned to do is the protection of its citizens, and the protection of their liberties and rights.

Not the assurance of future profitability of commercial ventures.

Where these two collide, is where regulation is necessary.

As I said, I am a capitalist: I see those two factors as supposed to be complementing instead of in conflict, as did those who founded America 250 years ago. It is we the consumers endowed with the power of choice, to take our money where we choose when a company (in our freedom of judgment) starts being bad. This is no different: I dislike this change, but it is not the only reason I have already exercised my liberty to cease patronage of Sony's products [in fact I own no Sony console newer than PS3].

Apologies if I got off-topic. I specialize in helping people prosper in a free market economy; the notion that government ought to step in and regulate just because people dislike the course a business chooses to take (which IS the case here, NOT some sinister monopolistic bullying or anything that crosses the line into infringing on people's rights) is toxic to that prosperity because such undue intervention only increases cost of business (and lowers opportunity) for EVERYONE. Anyways, digression over.

Exactly. Well said

The real issue was resale of licenses tied to physical discs.

It came up in the 90s, where software makers wanted (THEN!) to assert nontransferrability.

They were shut down by consumer friendly courts and legislators, who said the software was a durable good, manifested in the form of the distribution media.

Microsoft however, was undaunted, and created their infamous shrinkwrap license methodologies.

These were initially successful, but suffered numerous legal challenges, ending in the requirement for users to tracibly agree to the user license agreement (that forbids transfer), before installing it.

The durability verbiage continued to hold sway in courts though, for things that were embedded in durable forms, like games inside game cartridges. At the time, games were not 'installable', and played directly from the game media.

I would argue that the game industry's push away from persistent, physical media has much less to do with updates and patches, and much more to do with the prevention of transfer of functional software to additional parties, aka, second hand markets.

By fully eliminating discs, they fully eliminate all sources of prior legal challenge.

Its not about cost savings or any of that shit. It's purely profit and platform control oriented.

It seems that Sony has been sending PS+ discount offers to people who canceled their subscription in protest.

Meanwhile, the online petition against abolishing physical games just surpassed 225k verified signatures. So yeah, it looks like Sony underestimated the number of people who don't approve of their all-digital dystopia.

I would say their tolerance of the existence of the WinWorld library shows Microsoft doesn't care much anymore about the transferability issue; they only continue asserting their copyright over more recent editions of Windows & Office. Today it only stymies vendors (NOT individual resellers, lest eBay would've been forced to crack down LONG ago) attempting to [re]sell old-stock disks and components, while those who just download the software from online "redistribution" channels have no license but a de facto passiveauthorization for use. Not that the House of Gates needs it anyway: Windows 10 & 11 were offered for free to consumers because their subscription-based business model now carries the weight of their profits (BTW, this is also something I work around by using LibreOffice at home, eschewing internet multiplayer on consoles altogether, and buying Xbox games solely with accumulated Bing points).

Also keep in mind that the business side has licensing issues of their own to deal with, hence games getting delisted due to expirations. Anyone remember the big spiel with the RIAA going after MP3 players at the turn of the millennium? Back then music was going through a format transition phase much like games are right now, the crackdown on file distribution and DRM angle which could only go so far because it got to the point of stifling fair private use of what buyers had rightfully purchased.

And yet, there is no getting past that this is where markets, not just technology, have led. Like it or not, most passive media is streamed today: like old-fashioned radio & TV all over again, with the plus of tailoring playlists and the minuses of having to deal with ad deluges and server issues. Those of us who pine for "the good old days" are in the minority, but on that note I must say how much I appreciate being a part of the VOGONS community as we help each other recapture those experiences that require no connection to the internet.