slothfulspectre

what the sneef? I'm snorfin here

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Gay Goth Girl Gamedev - mid 20s - might post 3d models sometimes


jeruyyap
@jeruyyap

I'm kind of tired of physical media being presented as a more ideal alternative to digital distribution or live service, because it completely misses the root of the problem. The problem is NOT digital vs. physical, it's the lack of rights you have to use the product and the practices associated with that. The fact that the game, movie, book, or whatever is being distributed digitally would not be an issue if your right to use it wasn't so restricted.

Take for example a service like Itch or GOG that offers "DRM free" downloads for games you've purchased. I would argue that setup is better than physical copies in just about every respect. Not only can you download the game you've purchased and back it up however you want, the service essentially provides you with an "offsite backup" of what you've purchased that requires no effort on your part. On top of that, making more backups of said games takes even less effort than if you had to rip a physical disk.

It bothers me that folks keep presenting physical media as an ideal for preservation, when the physical media being implied (usually optical disks) were never a good way to preserve those works to begin with. I feel like this shows an unfortunate tendency to approach the problem via nostalgia rather than via an understanding of what the problem actually is.


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in reply to @jeruyyap's post:

100% correct. There's no reason to waste plastic to ship software around when you can just, send it digitally but without DRM nonsense.

There are upsides to physical media, it's neat to have around and for some people the extra money + space limitations help them focus their library and avoid choice paralysis, but people saying it's "preservation" are lying or misinformed.

I agree with your post, but want to add a couple notes. Physical, offline-capable copies of software can't have DRM added to them later, which is in some ways superior to services like gog or itch, where a game could get unlisted, the service dies, or the service experiences a hostile takeover and doesn't uphold their original promise.

There are also issues of runtimes not being preserved, even if the original software is. Halo 2, for example, is basically impossible to play in it's original form offline on PC due to the esoteric runtime associated with it.

Meanwhile, Freespace 2, Warzone 2100, and Marathon (among others) are playable on modern machines with little finagling because they've been maintained. They won't remain so forever as computer operating systems and desktop windowing systems change, so I suspect we'll need to solve the "runs on my computer" problem that containerization runtimes like Docker have solved but for desktop applications.

There are some efforts that do that sort of thing, like snaps, appimages, and flatpaks try to solve, and emulators fill a similar niche, but for more modern software, the challenges get much harder due to the demand of modern visuals (and the apparent death of Moore's law).

These are all solvable problems, though. The more challenging problems are preserving the software that we're never given. Increasingly, "DRM" has been replaced by always-online games like Diablo 3 and 4, engineered to attempt to add value to the gameplay experience (sometimes less successfully than others) in other to justify never actually giving the user the real brains that make the game tick - because that's a really good way to avoid getting your game pirated.

And that's basically impossible to preserve.

But to get serious for a moment, I want to address this bit:

Meanwhile, Freespace 2, Warzone 2100, and Marathon (among others) are playable on modern machines with little finagling because they've been maintained. They won't remain so forever as computer operating systems and desktop windowing systems change, so I suspect we'll need to solve the "runs on my computer" problem that containerization runtimes like Docker have solved but for desktop applications.

I think this is coming sooner than we'd like to think. The push for ARM with NVIDIA, Apple Silica, and other players in the market is gunning for the x86 architecture now, and will slowly cause a lot of issues to come with legacy software. On top of that, there are rumors that Microsoft is looking to move parts of the Windows operating system "to the cloud" which is probably not good for consumers, but especially not good if you are an enterprise user. Who knows what that will do to the operability of the legacy software.

TRUE.

And we do have (rare) instances of software companies going out of business and the server-side software being made available, as well as groups of people re-implementing servers for old games (which isn't really preservation, but still neat).

I'm kind of confused as to where the first part of this is coming from because Itch or GOG adding DRM or unlisting a game wouldn't affect backups any more than suddenly printing disks with DRM or stopping the printing entirely.
The installers from both services are already offline-capable as that's kind of the point (heck, my backups are always slightly out of date because my backup cycle for games is every few months and it's kind of annoying).
The only way this isn't the case is if the game itself calls home for updates though that becomes a whole other can of worms.

That said I very much agree on the issue of runtimes as there are a lot of games that are a pain to get working on modern systems (Mechwarrior 3 being a ongoing thorn in my side), and more general solutions involving emulating the game's intended environment are going to eventually be needed rather than case-by-case ones.

My main point about the offline backups and services that provide DRM-free downloads is that users have to make sure that they actually maintain those backups in the event that that service goes down. I certainly don't maintain offline backups off all my GOG game installers, and it's easy to get lulled into a sense of security since there's a promise (that, TBF, has been largely well-kept) that they'll exist tomorrow.

In the case of my physical games, the questions of if they'll be there tomorrow is more related to if my home burns down.

On a collective level though, someone is gonna have DRM-free copies, probably. 🤷‍♀️

This 100%, great take. That's why I love an album I ordered its vinyl version through Bandcamp:

  • I got a beautiful special edition vinyl I can physically play, look at and decor my house with because it looks rad
  • I can stream the album digitally at home via the web app anytime
  • I can download the album in HQ or LQ to my phone and take it to trips where I want to be offline

win win