Quoting: sub

Quoting: ObsidianBlk

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: ObsidianBlkI get this... and I'm not saying I don't have digital games myself, but still... I have CDs I bought in the early 90s that I can still read data off of. How many hard drives can you say the same for?

Consider yourself lucky, but don't think it's a reliable method of storage. Optical discs deteriorate with time, and are a lot more error prone than hard drives which in contrast are built to last for many years.

I'm not sure how you treat your optical media, but all I do is keep them in their cases, on a shelf, and they all still work for me. In fact, I don't think there's a single CD/DVD I've attempted to use in recent years that failed to read. No media is 100% fool proof... especially if treated roughly... but, yeah, I do not see how you think optical media is worse than hard drives. I've rarely heard of a drive lasting much longer than a decade (and, that's actually a pretty solid amount of time).

Doesn't matter if your discs all still work.
Shmerl is right.
CDs and DVDs printed detoriate and should never be used as backup media.

In case of printed CDs/DVDs it's the reflection layer that detoriates.
For writable discs it's even more problematic due to the dye layer.

This is called "Disc rot".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot

Why shouldn't my 20 year old disks count? I have several dozen optical disks, and, as said, I have yet to see a single one as unreadable and decades. I see the wiki article supplied by Shmerl, and I acknowledge it, but in it's own description... "The causes include oxidation of the reflective layer, physical scuffing and abrasion of disc, reactions with contaminants, ultra-violet light damage, and de-bonding of the adhesive used to adhere the layers of the disc together" ... so, basically normal wear and tear. That reflective layer isn't exposed to oxygen until it's outer layer is damaged, and that shouldn't happen if the disk is kept safe. Sure... shiz happens... and (to quote a quote from an article I'll supply shortly), "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everything drops to zero.", Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club... but, again, my collection has still readable disks over 20 years old. Not a single one of them has ever rotted on me (again, I just jewel case them, so no special protections). That's a LOT of evidence for me that while Disc Rot exists, it's not like suddenly, tomorrow, BAM! scores upon scores of my discs will suddenly all have Disc Rot, so long as I don't start leaving them out of there cases, or using them like coasters.

That said, look up the average life span of a hard drive...
https://www.prosofteng.com/blog/how-long-do-hard-drives-last/
https://www.recordnations.com/articles/hard-drive-lifespan/
These were quick google searches for "average life span of hard drives".

The TL;DR of it is, hard drive have an average life span of 3 to 5 years. If the alternative to optical disks is a NAS, which utilizes hard drives, I'm honestly not seeing what makes HDDs that much better. For a solid backup you would want a RAID setup (minimum of two drives). If one of those fails, you still have to buy a new HDD to reconstruct the RAID before the other HDD fails.

Now, let's take a quick look at optical media...
https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/sec4/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/246856696_Optical_Disc_Life_Expectancy_A_Field_Report
Again, these were quick google searches for "average life span optical discs"

The TL;DR here says +R, +RW, etc, etc discs have an average life expectancy of 20+ years, while regular, factory pressed CD/DVD disks have an estimated average life span between 25 to 100 years (some estimates suggest upwards of 200 years). This even with Disc Rot as a possibility.

Finally... let's even agree with each other. DVD/CDs AND HDDs are less than ideal for long term storage... create a new physical distribution media. One of my original posts on this thread suggested an SD card-esk physical media (at least in form factor). Much smaller than an optical disk, and no moving parts like a hard drive... hell... that's pretty much the distribution model of DS games.

((NOTE: I say "google search", but I use Duck Duck Go as my search engine... if that matters to anyone))

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: ObsidianBlkI get this... and I'm not saying I don't have digital games myself, but still... I have CDs I bought in the early 90s that I can still read data off of. How many hard drives can you say the same for?

Consider yourself lucky, but don't think it's a reliable method of storage. Optical discs deteriorate with time, and are a lot more error prone than hard drives which in contrast are built to last for many years.

I'm not sure how you treat your optical media, but all I do is keep them in their cases, on a shelf, and they all still work for me. In fact, I don't think there's a single CD/DVD I've attempted to use in recent years that failed to read. No media is 100% fool proof... especially if treated roughly... but, yeah, I do not see how you think optical media is worse than hard drives. I've rarely heard of a drive lasting much longer than a decade (and, that's actually a pretty solid amount of time).

Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: ObsidianBlkAlso, depending on the size of your collection (and the size of the games within your collection), that huge hard drive may still only store about a hundred or so (thinking ~50gb sized games these days).

Not all games are 50 GB. But let's say they are and let's say you have 8 TB hard drive (around $200 these days). That will fit 160 of such games? If you need more, you can get even bigger hard drives (14 TB for example), or get several. Still a lot easier than managing a whole pile of optical disks to hold the same amount of data. If you need backups, get a NAS.

So no, you don't need to give up on actual ownership. You should just use the right tools for it.

To each their own.

Your side has the downside of having to purchase the hard drives (let's go with $200 a piece) and the NAS (not always a cheap option in and of itself). Those have moving parts (unless you do SSD, but then you're driving up the cost of the drive) which I can virtually guarantee will fail at some point and then you'll need to buy replacements to get things up and running again. Furthermore, even with low power components, you are still paying money just to keep that NAS going. Not everyone has the money to run and maintain that sort of equipment. If you can, wonderful! But a solid NAS is not an inexpensive item even without hard drives, if you want it to be fast, reliable, and not need maintenance every couple of years.

My side does have the downfall of having to maintain physical objects... and if each and every one of my games were physical, that would be 150+ optical discs to have to manage. Yes, cumbersome. But my greatest expense for maintaining them is perhaps a $200 book/display case (if I want to get really fancy). Again, I have not encountered an optical disk to date that (barring it having been manhandled by children or used as a coaster) failed to read for me, including, but not limited to, a 1995 copy of Doom II for Windows 95 (23 years and still going. Not bad).

To bring this back to the original topic of this whole thread being the ability to resell your games... digital media nearly strips you of that right. You will either have to relinquish ANY chance of even being able to use that NAS for storing your games and only sell them (the license to use them, anyway) on the storefront in which you purchased them, or you will be allowed to "back them up" as encrypted data blobs which can only be unencrypted by the store front you backed them up from. Going to the argument that these storefronts can take your games away from you as they see fit (See PT), there's no guarantee that even if you backed up your game in an encrypted file, the service would allow you to unencrypt it to play again or sell if *they* no longer "have" the game. With optical media there's no such worry. Buy a game. Play it. Give it to your friend and/or sell it. It is now *YOURS* to do with as you please. The storefront, developers, publishers, etc have no control over what you do with your physical media! (BTW... yes, piracy, but that's ever present, so I'm only arguing purely legal situations).

One last thing... This is all about being able to control what you put your money into. Digital distribution is extremely convenient (and, again, I use it just as heavily as the next gamer), but you own nothing! You're not buying anything! You have no control! You can't trade it. You can't resell it. Your money goes into a hole.

And let me be clear... games are *NOT* a service! You're not renting your copy of Monopoly. You're not being told what to do with your copy of Settlers of Catan, or Magic the Gathering... why should we allow publishers to dictate that video games are really any different?

Physical games (that're not just glorified download codes) can be traded. They can be resold. There is a chance with physical media that the value (when reselling) could remain or even go up as they age (don't bank on it, but it's far more possible with physical media than digital only)!

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Quoting: Shmerl

Quoting: ObsidianBlkAgain, I highly doubt any of this will really happen... But, call me old if you'd like, but I do like physically owning my games.

Hard drive is physical, and can hold a ton of your backed up games, without requiring any individual physical media. Buy the game on GOG, back it up, use it and you are set. No need to sell it on physical disks or cards. They don't offer anything useful if you can download it.

I get this... and I'm not saying I don't have digital games myself, but still... I have CDs I bought in the early 90s that I can still read data off of. How many hard drives can you say the same for? Also, depending on the size of your collection (and the size of the games within your collection), that huge hard drive may still only store about a hundred or so (thinking ~50gb sized games these days). My Linux specific game library on Steam is 157 games. Ok... so let's say you store all of that on a SINGLE hard drive. Great. You didn't really, though. If you're worried about integrity of your data, you'll probably want to put them in RAID... so, at minimum you need two hard drives. Might at well offload those files to a third part data storage service... but that brings us back to controlling the purchases you make because you can't guarantee those services will remain, or that, if they do go under, that give you enough warning they're doing so for you to rescue your files. At least if I backed up my physical game to a hard drive and the same event happens, my physical copy is still in my hands.

Honestly... I get why digital distribution is king. I really do. Its instant gratification, automatic patching, and you can reduce the amount of physical space needed to store your games. Yes... but you give up your actual ownership, and there is no way you can be sure your game won't be simply taken from you because of some IP dispute between two companies that could honestly care less that you put your hard earned money into their product. Does this happen often? Right now, not really, but it ~~*does*~~ happen.

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Quoting: ShmerlWhy would you want to go back to physical distribution? It's surely step backwards.

The ability to actually physically have in your hands the product you pay for? Sure, they take up physical space, but that could be mitagated by using smaller distribution media (SD cards, instead of CDs). Then again, even digital content has its own issues in that, if you want to track all of the games yourself, you use a lot of storage space.

Also... Maybe not a concern for the younger generation, or casual players, but I still have a lot of my games from a decade or more ago, and I still go back a play a large number of them. It's nice to know they're still accessible.

Someone else mentioned how DVDs may become obsolete (and it's possible), but then the distribution media will change. Regardless, enthusiasts will always keep games alive. I'm still able to load and play old 8bit games (nes, c64, etc, etc), so the games will always be around if they are in user hands.

Again, I highly doubt any of this will really happen... But, call me old if you'd like, but I do like physically owning my games.

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Honestly, I like that this is happening. We've become a culture where we're more than happy "buying" games knowing full well they can be stripped from us without warning at any time (this has happened to a few games on the Playstation store... ex. PT). Given the industry is also in some very hot water with lootboxes *cough* I mean "surprise mechanics" *cough*, as well as microtransactions in general, we ~~may~~ see a radical shift for the industry.

I'll admit, a digital distribution store allowing "resale" of their games is tricky. There is *no* inventory at all. There's no supply and demand because the supply is infinite and there's nothing lost buying a "used" copy of a game (like, the disc could be worn, or you may not get the nice box, or you might not get any of the "extras" [often included with games in the 80s and 90s]), so you don't miss out on anything from a used copy.

I don't know... I kinda like the idea of potentially forcing the industry into physical distribution once more, but I'm not so naive to think that would actually happen.

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Quoting: CyrilNow we know a lot of alternatives that don't require any skill at all. Tell me what skills you need to start using communication softwares like Tox or Riot.im for example.

I don't know because until this particular thread, I never even heard of those applications before, and I consider myself generally well versed in most FOSS software. Perhaps I just missed them... but if I missed them, I can virtually promise you, most everyones friends and family have never even heard of them!

Quoting: CyrilTell me how is it difficult to create an account on Mastodon instead of Facebook/Twitter...

Creating an account? Not too hard. Figuring out how to find people to follow, and getting your mind around how federated networks can cause a bit of lag... I can see a good majority not wanting to figure that out.

Quoting: CyrilA lot of people are just lazy, they don't need to be especially a geek guy.

Depends on your definition of lazy, though. How hard is it to change the oil in your car? Yet so many people would rather go to a mechanic and have them do it.

Quoting: CyrilWhen some say "all my friends and my family are on Facebook", in 2019 sure I believe you, but some ~10 years ago, "nobody" was on it, so why did they register at that time?

Because the younger generation was moving to it. The generation coming out of college and realizing MySpace was way too juvenile found this new service that, generally, treated everyone like adults. No glitter bombed pages, just clean, clear pages for information and communication... for friends and (shortly after initial release) family. You could find multiple groups with similar interests without having to sign in to multiple forums (assuming the users even KNEW what forums were).

Sure, all of the core services could be done by others, but let's not bury our heads here... for the filth Facebook has become (corporately), it brought the services people wanted to use into a single place and made them ridiculously easy by the standards of the day.

Quoting: CyrilFacebook has nothing to offer for people, but Facebook profits a lot what people share with it. People who use Facebook are not the clients, they're the product.

I agree that Facebook profits off people and their information and that the 'users' are being exploited.

Quoting: CyrilAnd guess what? Some people are great to find excuses to stay on these services, even when a lot know it's shit, they stay on it.

Again... friends and family. You can call that an excuse all you want, but you can't beat that! Only the young are willing to change, and they try all the things. They don't have years upon years of history with their friends yet, and they don't really care yet about the detailed comings and goings of their adult family. As such, they are the ones most likely to leave Facebook and cause a change... BUT... they're young. They're going to be attracted to the loudest new communication/social system. As great as many of these alternatives are, they have virtually no presence. Most people that find them are the jaded ones that are already sick of the mainstream (for whatever reason). Ultimately, even the young will flock to the service all of their friends are using, and, will probably stay their for the majority of their lives or until their children convince them to move.

(I'm being general here, but I believe this to be the vast majority)

Quoting: CyrilI mean it's not having a perfect solution in 2 seconds, but willing to tend to the best not the worst.
Ah... sorry for the harsh comment. :S:

They aren't harsh comments... and when I'm being particularly flippant about the world, I say much the same, or worse about people (I work in IT... gah! The stupid!) None-the-less, IMHO, to simply call people stupid for using the big named services is, ultimately, reductionist. History and society is far more complicated than "people are just too lazy".

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Quoting: commodore256

Quoting: ObsidianBlkTL;DR Would love to be exclusively decentralized and open services or host my own... but I like to stay social with my friends, and they use Discord, not Mumble, sadly.

This is why this issue persists, apathy. Tell your friends Discord is for Boomers that install spyware.

It has nothing to do with apathy, it has to do with community. If you can't convince your family and/or friends to use these alternate services (and calling them stupid is FAR from effective in doing so), what's the point? Who wants to be in an empty forum or a dead chatroom? People aren't (totally) stupid, but most have neither the skill set, nor time to manage hosting all of their own services, and, for those of us that might, !great!, but your friends are still going to congregate where all of their other friends are, whether that be Discord, Facebook, Twitter, etc, and you're left being a lonely, smug, know-it-all screaming into the wind.

(BTW, when I say 'you' I'm not referring specifically to you)

In the end, host what your friends are willing to switch to or what you personally just want to use, and, for those other services, block what you can and be aware of what content you put up.

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On one hand, I very much understand the misgivings many of 'us' have about services like Discord (facebook, twitter, google, etc). I really would like to control my own content, files, and programs. I left Facebook over a decade ago. I have never joined Twitter. I run my own Mastodon server.

That said... hosting your own stuff is a massive job in and of itself! The cost for all of the storage, networking, and power consumption can grow very quickly! My single Mastodon server costs me $10 a month to host because I don't feel I can host it right from my apartment's network (which I can't upgrade / rewire, obviously). I use Amazon as a place to store the media files for my server and, while I'm running in the free tier, nearly every month I get a warning that I'm close to hitting the cap. All of this, and I'm barely even active on my Mastodon server!

And all of the above is just ONE service!
I'd love to be Sys Admin Master God Uber 1337, but I just don't have the time and resources to host everything (AND keep it all patched perfectly), and I'd venture to say the vast majority of us are in a similar boat.

Finally, even if you hosted ALL your own stuff... who are you going to talk to? Perhaps I'm just the most unlucky son-of-a-bish but none of my friend or family care about security or privacy concerns! Nobody I talk with could really care less about Facebook or Twitter or Google being able to see all of their information! The convenience trumps all of those concerns for them! I could argue the merits of decentralized, open source services until I'm blue in the face, but I can't give a good argument against, "but all of my friends are already on <service here>. They're not going to move, so why should I?"... and, I suppose, I'm stuck asking that same question.

TL;DR Would love to be exclusively decentralized and open services or host my own... but I like to stay social with my friends, and they use Discord, not Mumble, sadly.

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Quoting: SalvatosI disagree. I find them pointless and a waste of money, but the former is precisely why I'm not against their existence as a money-making mechanism.

To each their own, but here's the thing... both back in the day and even today, for some games, we would get expansions/DLCs that added not just a single JPEG image or even a model or two, but whole factions, territories, game mechanics, episodes, etc for the same price or only about double what some of these single item cosmetics are going for. By accepting these cosmetics, we are essentially telling developers/publishers that they can sit on their laurels and produce nearly nothing. In the end, we loose out on content!

Furthermore, if all the Devs/Pubs have to do is placate us with the odd JPEG or model every so often, how do you think that's actually helping the developers? They're not engaged in developing a full product anymore, only the cosmetics... so why should they keep all of their programmers? They only need one or two to patch issues. Why should they keep their all of their artists. They only need enough to put out two or three new cosmetics a month. Sure, you're "supporting" the company, but not the actual people who do the work.

Quoting: SalvatosI find it no worse than commissioning portraits or donating money to a streamer to hear a song of your choice during their show.

At least with a portrait, you are getting art work that is unique to you. That's your portrait and nobody else will ever have the exact same one. Also... you get to keep it forever! You only get to keep your cosmetics for the life of the game servers (which, arguably, is shrinking game upon game).

Quoting: SalvatosThe cost doesn't have to reflect a tangible value.

Again... to each their own

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Quoting: HadBabitsIf it was just the cosmetics I could accept that; they've been going for a while and you need to support the servers and devs, etc, etc. However they also sell DLC cars which have different hitboxes and stats, meaning they directly affect gameplay in a multiplayer game, so that's a bit dodgy.

Either way, getting rid of the predatory randomization is a big step in the right direction, and puts them ahead of a lot ""AAA"" games: I'd give it a solid B :P

Edit: Actually, let's make that a B- for having the gall to put in loot boxes in the first place

Just to play devils advocate here...
Cosmetics are not ok, especially at the price points most games sell them for and most especially for a game on a PC... a platform where user content was created! Now, I cannot speak to Rocket League. I don't personally play it, but I have seen how much other games are charging. These days, 5 dollars (us) seems to be the bare minimum for what amounts to a glorified JPEG image. In other games, if you even have access to directly buying items, instead of loot boxes, you could be charged 10 or even 20 dollars (us), once you convert around their 'premium currencies'. At those price points, you can go onto the Unity asset store and buy a model and several JPEG textures and do whatever the hell you want with it!

As far as servers and devs... that statement is a lie (IMHO) perpetuated by the AAA publishers. If the server cost is an issue, then these companies can charge a monthly fee to play the game... old MMO style. The only reasons they don't is, they've discovered they can sucker more people into buying JPEGs. As for the devs... even a successful game raking in millions in in-app purchases is no guarantee for developers. Look at Activision who, after claiming record profits, proceeded to lay off a large chunk of it's work force.

Anyway, that's just my two cents, and, even with all that, I still buy those glorified JPEGs on occasion myself.

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