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by jrm44 hours ago |
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upvoteby jchw4 hours ago|
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Sony can only take it away because you didn't own it.

I digitally own SimCity 3000 Unlimited from Gog. The copy lives on my NAS. The NAS could break, sure, but so can a CD.

Can I hold it? Well, sort of. The same way I can back up my physical CDs to a hard disk, I can also back up digital things I truly own to a CD/DVD/BD or other media.

As long as the thing I'm holding in my hand is all I need to be able to make use of what was given to me at the point of sale, I see no issue.

On the other hand, Valve, who I think most would agree is a company that has been on the less bad side of digital distribution for the most part, has sold "physical" copies of games that actually still required Steam to install and use. And in that case, from the layperson's perspective, it sure seems like you can hold it, and yet you don't own it.

So IMO this argument just doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

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upvoteby mnahkies2 hours ago|
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When I brought half life 2 there was a lag of about 2-4 years before I could play it for the first time - I didn't read the fine print, and on a dial up connection I couldn't get past the steam client updating in a reasonable amount of time, mind you I was able to download much larger Linux ISOs over time frames of a month+ through resumable downloads.

Not really an issue these days but it certainly was back in the day

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upvoteby autoexec2 hours ago|
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Steam's DRM is still an issue today and it means that you have to get cracked copies of most of the games you paid for in your library if you expect to ever own them. I spent some months without an internet connection only to find the steam games I'd been playing offline just fine suddenly refused to launch until I allowed steam to phone home to grant me permission to play the games I paid for. Steam could go out of business at any time and all your games would simply stop working.
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upvoteby mnahkies51 minutes ago|
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I'm aware, and I'm choosing GOG when I can now, though even then I see phoning home (or attempts to) happening (opensnitch is useful for that https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch) - I've paid for some titles 2-3x over which is frustrating, admittedly I don't have the physical media from the first time which is on me, but it's frustrating seeing single player games wanting to phone home
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upvoteby galleywest20023 minutes ago|
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Steam's DRM is entirely optional. It is up to the game publishers to use it.
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upvoteby thfuran4 hours ago|
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>you're confusing legal ownership with physical ownership and only one can be guaranteed with reasonable certainty.

You mean legal ownership, right? Because people can illegally take your physical belongings.

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upvoteby tshaddox1 hours ago|
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I think you’re confusing your own file backup practices with ownership. If you purchase a DRM-free piece of software (say, a game from GoG), I’d say you own it just as much as if you bought the same game on a CD (assuming the CD was also DRM-free).

If you don’t keep a copy of the game yourself, and one day you can no longer access it because GoG ceases to exist, that doesn’t mean you never owned it. It just means you failed to back it up. You could also fail to backup a CD when it inevitably stops functioning.

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