TwilightVulpine

Copyright is not “use it or lose it”, but as it is, it is unworkable for digital media. Computer hardware doesn’t last a century and with no other measures being taken to preserve that content, it’s effectively doomed by the law. It also doesn’t reflect a world where average people make edits of copyrighted content as a means of expression without seeing any problem with that.

Trying to never disrupt the Economy when the Economy is based on materially impossibly extracting ever growing profits out of a finite world is itself a futile self-destructive endeavor.

It must have been even longer for the Kickstarter backers who initially were told Silksong would be a stretch goal DLC

I get the risks of putting all eggs in one basket, but whenever people argue for competition using Epic as an example, a company that is demonstrably more anti-competitive and anti-consumer, it shows that they just think of the matter of theoretical ideals of evenness as opposed to benefits to the customers. I don’t see any good coming from Epic having as much or more marketshare than Steam.

Unlike GOG which only offers DRM-free games, a substantial advantage compared to any other store.

Right? I don’t know how to express any more clearly for the people who already are here that being here right now is the proof that there are people will choose a better platform over the most popular one. Unless they are admitting they are personally one temptation away from returning to Facebook.

I’ve seen people bringing this up, but while they talk of EEE and XMPP, it seems like the analogy here is not being quite finished and formulated.

If we apply that to this, it seems like people are saying “if Meta changed the ActivityPub protocol to favor them and become incompatible with the rest of the Fediverse, Fediverse users would choose to return to Meta-owned platforms.”

And that’s what I’m questioning. Would you? Would you think others here would? I wouldn’t. I’d rather go to whatever fork Fediverse devs favor instead. If anything, all the fear being expressed every time Threads integration is brought up only emphasizes that this is not how it would play out

How would they even extinguish a whole ecosystem of independent instances? What does that even look like?

They could very well make some feature or requirement and demand that every single ActivityPub instance uses their version to remain compatible…

…and instance hosts can just say no, fork it and keep going unbothered.

Even buying up some big Lemmies and Mastodons is not going to get them the whole Fediverse.

And who knows what will happen when the next console comes out and the Switch heads to obsolescence…

Frankly emulating on other systems is simply better by all the improvements you can do over the base experience. Especially when it comes to 3D games. Not to mention the libraries are much more expansive. I think the only advantage of NSO is the integrated online multiplayer being more seamless and easier to find other players in.

I just might. Some fights were infuriating but so was Hollow Knight and I love that game. As long as the conclusion makes it worth it.

With the means that we have, that anywhere in the world a dozen people can figure out how to get very niche things adapted in one way or another into different systems, and countless people can keep media on thumb drives rather than needing entire climate controlled libraries, something has to be very, very, extremely obscure for it to be completely lost, and even then there are people for which the obscurity of something is the very thing that makes it appealing.

I don’t think you are technically incorrect to some extent that some things will inevitably disappear, but I would still scratch it far more to imposed legal and technical restrictions than to the futility of fighting time.

Say, every single online or mobile game that closes and is completely lost? It’s 100% on the erosion of customer rights, exclusively. We have today the technology to keep them running and people willing to do it. It’s just that business and contracts defined that, no matter how much people have spend on them, they don’t get access to essential server files necessary to keep it running. This is not “time coming for us all”, it’s selfish businesses enabled by a law with no regards for cultural preservation.

Meanwhile the MAME project year after year figures out how to run incredibly niche arcade titles from decades ago. Even with all the challenges and obstructions.

Really, take a moment to really admire, that with all the struggles and limitations that we have, you as an individual human being, can with a handheld device, access and personally store thousands of Public Domain books from the Gutemberg Project, the entirety of Wikipedia, several full collections of every single game released for multiple consoles, including prototypes, hacks and homebrew. A single person can do that much. Ozymandias’ statue may crumble to dust but his history lives on, in someone’s pocket.

Maybe to you all that effort is pointless. Maybe it’s be easier to just let it go. But there’s a whole world of other people who might be interested in it. Maybe you just care about one single game. But a different person cares about a different single game. In a world of billions, how many different things might people care about?

If you talk to me about the inexorable advance of time, I’ll still be on the side of the indomitable human spirit.

Sure but still today there are people who say it is too shallow and dull, and at that point I think they are just expecting it to be fundamentally different.

Absolutely

To be fair, originally it utterly failed to do most that they promised and I don’t blame anyone who felt burned because of that and gave up on it,

But today, it does some of the craziest stuff that it promised that at the time sounded like pipe dreams. The planets are some crazy and different some of them seem downright surreal. I made a base on a planet with a landscape made of stained glass crystals. The animals are wild and weird. Getting to learn to communicate word by word with multiple different alien species is pretty cool. The dynamics of trading are pretty interesting. Raiding derelict freighters is creepy. And you can play all of it with your friends.

When people say it’s shallow, I wonder if they didn’t even try to bite into it or they are expecting custom story content in every planet. I have played it for hundreds of hours and I didn’t even finish the main story quest. Each aspect of the game has a lot to offer.

Because of that I’m also really looking forward for their new game.

Tunic has such an unique vision and it executes it expertly. On the surface it’s a zelda-like but it’s so much more than that, and it’s best experienced blind. In fact, that’s the whole idea. The developer wanted to replicate the experience of being a kid picking up a game in a different language that you had to figure out little by little.

Toribash is an indie classic. It was mentioned fairly often among indie fans around the time of Cave Story’s rise. But back then there weren’t so many indie fans.

It can go however far you want. Even if you say you’ll play these games for the rest of your life, at $2/mo buying it only becomes more economically worthwhile if you entirely quit getting games entirely. I emphasize, economically. Now, if we take Game Pass, depending on where you live buying might be more worthwhile if you get 2 or less full-priced games a year. In my country Game Pass is cheaper than 2 games

That said there are no guarantees they won’t raise prices.

Yup. You just want to argue and decided you’ll be doing it at me for whatever reason. This is literally on my first comment that you replied to.

You convinced yourself I’m advocating for subscription as The Future, rather than just conceding one point on economic grounds. Meanwhile in this thread you could find me arguing that DRM-free backups is the only true guaranteed way to own digital media.

You really seem to want to argue with me but I don’t think you understood what I was saying to begin with. I’m not saying subscriptions are better, I’m saying they are more economical but unreliable, and I am saying that you, who listed 10+ great games you played a lot, didn’t get only a single one. It also doesn’t mean there won’t ever be any new game you like.

You know, 10 games × $60 > $2 × 12mo × 3y

Though Ubisoft is $18/mo and games are $70 now. Ubisoft Club is a bad deal but Game Pass is still ends up cheaper at $10/mo. But I digress,

This sort of argument is just a way to cope with the erosion of customer rights and the overreach of corporations over digital media as if that’s some inevitable entropy of the universe type of thing. We still have books that are thousands of years old, but even though we have better technological means to store and reproduce media than ever, arbitrary legal hurdles are leading people to treat cultural loss as an inevitability.

You got your answer in your own response. Emulators are a thing. Virtual Machines are a thing. Proton is a thing. We figured out how to recover games going as far back as the Atari. Unless actively and fiercely obstructed people will figure out how to keep these things available out of sheer passion and goodwill.

A DRM-free installer/executable for a game, when properly backed up, will still be playable most likely indefinitely.

Unfortunately, as the mention of DRM itself indicates, obstructions are plentiful and ever increasing. This is why supporting DRM-free media and open platforms is valuable. Can you imagine what people could do if they were empowered instead of obstructed?

The confusion is that the implied conclusion is

To be fair nobody plays just one single game for 3 years (they play multiple)

rather than

To be fair nobody plays one game for 3 years (they are too old)

The former complements the following argument regarding how costly buying vs subscribing would be. The latter doesn’t work with the following paragraph that lists the unreliability of subscription libraries as a downside.