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owsf2000Shock of shocks, yet another prediction I've had long ago is starting to come true. While this isn't the first admission I've seen, it's the latest.
Essentially you're starting to see previous pro-digital-only people realize that they don't actually own anything! That once the servers are shut off they have no way to regain (legally) the games they bought! That even if they went pro-physical, all they'll be left with is a cartridge/card/disc holding an incomplete, buggy, barebones game! That in the cases for most digital games, once it's gone, it's GONE.
Now, there are hopeless people out there that will never care about such things as game preservation, or being able to collect for a console, etc. Those are lost causes sadly. But in some cases we have people like that being bred to be that way because of the way reviewers actively treated physical media in the past - showing all it's negatives and showing only the positives of digital. Like this particular reviewer admits to having done for years until they finally woke up.
It's reviewers like this that I end up hating more than the average Joe Sixpack running their mouth about how physical distribution is the past along with barrages of ill intended age jokes. When it comes to the average Joe out there, we can dismiss it mostly. When it comes to a reviewer/editor on a game website however, their ill informed (or biased) opinions end up swaying a lot more people.
As a result by the time they realize that all the things we pr-physical 'fanatics' were worried about with regards to digital were 100% spot on, it's too late. They've already educated an entire generation of people to not give a fuck about preserving the things they've spent shitloads of cash on.
(Mind you, given the quality of AAA titles over the last decade, I can totally see how pro-digital people can dismiss even the 100 dollar purchases as disposable toilet paper.)
Anyway, the reviewer in the link is going on about all the things he's suddenly become afraid of, that he only became aware of once Nintendo announced the impending closure of the Wii's eshop.
The only problem is, this is all things he should have realized 10 years ago when the eshops were first launched. After all, there were plenty of people like me back then screaming that the shops would eventually be closed and everything you had would end up disappearing once the systems died.
Sure, you could lose a game if the disc got scratched on physical media, or if someone came in and stole a bunch of your discs while you weren't home. At least on the physical side there's a chance, even decades later, to try to track down another copy of the games in question. Or if our system dies, we can try to get a new system and carry on with our existing discs/cartridges/etc. That's not going to be a thing in a digital-only future. Which is exactly what developers/publishers want. Anything that doesn't sell, will disappear, and anything sure to sell can be resold for full price on new systems.
To be crystal clear: ALL of these drawbacks to a digital only future were seen back when digital first started to become a thing. To say it's a surprise or that you didn't realize this is how things would turn out is a matter of denial. Common sense would tell you no company would keep a console's digital store open forever. (And there are plenty of people that would swear to me that they believed the stores would always stay open. You'd see it countless times even when Microsoft first shut down the original Xbox's access to live and it's store.)
So welcome to the party Mr. Editor. You're late and at this point not many of us left thanks to you wooing everyone to the other party for a decade. Sadly, there's no way you'll undo the damage you've done as the people you convinced to ditch physical will just assume you've gotten too old to be a real gamer.
(Yeah, I know over 60% in the poll on that article claim they'll 'fight digital to the very end' but come on, we know damned well that's not how the average gamer feels these days thanks to people like this across all fandoms in the industry. :P)
Essentially you're starting to see previous pro-digital-only people realize that they don't actually own anything! That once the servers are shut off they have no way to regain (legally) the games they bought! That even if they went pro-physical, all they'll be left with is a cartridge/card/disc holding an incomplete, buggy, barebones game! That in the cases for most digital games, once it's gone, it's GONE.
Now, there are hopeless people out there that will never care about such things as game preservation, or being able to collect for a console, etc. Those are lost causes sadly. But in some cases we have people like that being bred to be that way because of the way reviewers actively treated physical media in the past - showing all it's negatives and showing only the positives of digital. Like this particular reviewer admits to having done for years until they finally woke up.
It's reviewers like this that I end up hating more than the average Joe Sixpack running their mouth about how physical distribution is the past along with barrages of ill intended age jokes. When it comes to the average Joe out there, we can dismiss it mostly. When it comes to a reviewer/editor on a game website however, their ill informed (or biased) opinions end up swaying a lot more people.
As a result by the time they realize that all the things we pr-physical 'fanatics' were worried about with regards to digital were 100% spot on, it's too late. They've already educated an entire generation of people to not give a fuck about preserving the things they've spent shitloads of cash on.
(Mind you, given the quality of AAA titles over the last decade, I can totally see how pro-digital people can dismiss even the 100 dollar purchases as disposable toilet paper.)
Anyway, the reviewer in the link is going on about all the things he's suddenly become afraid of, that he only became aware of once Nintendo announced the impending closure of the Wii's eshop.
The only problem is, this is all things he should have realized 10 years ago when the eshops were first launched. After all, there were plenty of people like me back then screaming that the shops would eventually be closed and everything you had would end up disappearing once the systems died.
Sure, you could lose a game if the disc got scratched on physical media, or if someone came in and stole a bunch of your discs while you weren't home. At least on the physical side there's a chance, even decades later, to try to track down another copy of the games in question. Or if our system dies, we can try to get a new system and carry on with our existing discs/cartridges/etc. That's not going to be a thing in a digital-only future. Which is exactly what developers/publishers want. Anything that doesn't sell, will disappear, and anything sure to sell can be resold for full price on new systems.
To be crystal clear: ALL of these drawbacks to a digital only future were seen back when digital first started to become a thing. To say it's a surprise or that you didn't realize this is how things would turn out is a matter of denial. Common sense would tell you no company would keep a console's digital store open forever. (And there are plenty of people that would swear to me that they believed the stores would always stay open. You'd see it countless times even when Microsoft first shut down the original Xbox's access to live and it's store.)
So welcome to the party Mr. Editor. You're late and at this point not many of us left thanks to you wooing everyone to the other party for a decade. Sadly, there's no way you'll undo the damage you've done as the people you convinced to ditch physical will just assume you've gotten too old to be a real gamer.
(Yeah, I know over 60% in the poll on that article claim they'll 'fight digital to the very end' but come on, we know damned well that's not how the average gamer feels these days thanks to people like this across all fandoms in the industry. :P)
no subject
Date: 2018-03-08 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-03-08 03:27 pm (UTC)As one example, Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures from Telltale Games. This is because of an "expired agreement" between Telltale and Aardman Studios or whatever dumb bullshit. These games don't even have Steam pages at all, anymore. I still have them in my Steam library for now, but if Steam ever decides to no longer make them available for download, there is basically shit-all that I can do about it.
Here is a list of other titles that are no longer available on Steam, for a variety of reasons. I'm not sure how complete it is, and some games are on there for other reasons (like the fact that they apparently were never released despite being listed on Steam), but even if you hide everything except for "Delisted" and "Purchase disabled", the list is still depressingly huge. Granted, too, some of those were delisted because they were replaced with "definitive editions" or whatever, but many, like the above mentioned Wallace and Gromit games, are just straight up gone.
no subject
Date: 2018-03-08 03:45 pm (UTC)