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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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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/

Average Ubisoft game experience on Steam.

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!

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).

> Yea so mail, firstname, lastname, birthday, country, email

Does anyone even provide real information? What is the point of even asking for a name?

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.

> 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 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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

I can buy and own legal copies of movies and music. But I often really can’t with games.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wish Gog made a Steam Deck.

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

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.

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.

Didn't you hear? Buying is not owning, according to these corporate criminals.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

The same thing that happened with all the Denuvo games so far: some hackers remove the DRM.

Hasn't Microsoft had a good track record of enabling playing old generation games on new hardware?

e-waste is the last of the problems.

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.

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.

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

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.

Also there is a vibrant retrogaming community, with lots of games much more interesting than yet another COD or FIFA.

You need to be online to prove you own it, which now means you don’t?

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.

You can say pussy on the internet

Just go two routes at once

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Error: Forbidden

Your client does not have permission to get URL /comic/2026/07/03/returnal-3 from this server.

What does it say?

Most physical games currently are fully playable offline: https://www.doesitplay.org/

What would stop me from playing it, outside of the hardware dying?

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.

It has, but recent events have shown that people need a reminder.

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.

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.

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.

It's shown again and again and again that nagging representatives doesn't actually work.

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

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.

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

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.