Short Form:
If Digital Distribution is the Future, We’re All Screwed
We all know the drill: pull out an NES cartridge, blow it off and relive a little piece of your childhood. Or since the system is more than a quarter century old now, your older brother’s childhood. But I digress.
More than 25 years later you can still play the same copy of the same game, more or less the same way you played it back then.
Digital distribution is changing this. While Steam certainly looks to be on solid ground, who can say how many of their competitors will be around five years from now? Will services that go under be bought out, or simply cease to be? And if they do get absorbed by the little black square that could, will Valve honor games on those accounts?
There are so many unknowns in this new economic model it’s hard to embrace it blindly. This is coming from a man who has, as of this writing, 281 games on his Steam account. Send help.
Some services like Good Old Games are a little easier to root for. Not only do they have the always popular lack of DRM, but without an overarching client long-term back ups are easy to make. Just break out the installer and play.
It’s fair for companies to sell new copies of their old games. I just hope they can’t find a way to remove access to the copies I already bought just because the calendar is a couple digits further along that when I bought the game. Remember the kerfuffle with Gears of War for PC a while back? The game had only been out a year and a half, and because a registry signature was given an expiration date the game became unlaunchable.
That time it was a bug or oversight, but what’s to stop a publisher from doing that on purpose? Do you think EA would really shy away from the prospect of auto-breaking every copy of Madden around the time the next one comes out? The multiplayer servers already have about a two-year lifespan at most.
It’s not even just PC games though. Have you ever tried to play a 360 without internet access? It won’t even let you boot some downloaded games, and games like Rock Band 3 won’t let you use any song that isn’t on the disc, making all your DLC worthless.
Next time on your trip to a used game store (gasp!) look for those Korean-made knock-off NES units. (Or even cooler, the combo NES/SNES/Genesis ones.) Wonder how they get away with selling those? Simple: the patents expired. Meaning that as long as they don’t steal the BIOS code or use the exact parts, they’re in the clear to make a system that plays NES/Famicom media.
I don’t think anyone can build a machine to access an account on a service that no longer exists.
Image via an overpriced t-shirt
Editorial, Short Form Tags: digital distribution, DRM, gog.com, old school, Steam
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I own an FC3 Plus! I think my big gripe with the digital distribution is the price. It should be way cheaper to get a digital copy of something than a real copy, but it’s not, because most people are fools.
Long term backups are trivial on Steam, too, though.
If Steam collapsed completely tomorrow, the only thing that would change was you couldn’t redownload things – if you’re concerned about steam dying tomorrow, then storage space is *not* a concern. The money you’ve saved using Steam could likely buy several 2TB hard drives.
This argument really stops holding water for me when you consider that physical media doesn’t *not* have this problem. Try and find a copy of a game that’s a few years old – you probably can’t. It’s exactly the same problem.
With a few rare exceptions I can find any PC game from the last 25 years and have it shipped to me for a couple bucks on eBay.
Physical media degrades over time a CD has about 25 years in it or so I’m told, cartridges like Metroid have their save state batteries dying around about now; but business agreements can sour in a matter of hours, look at the PR company 2K Games just fired.
If Publishers wanted to, they can remove your ability to do whatever with your whatever because you only have a licence to use their code in a single, prescribed function. I sat and read the legalese in a PC game recently, Civ V to be specific, and they withhold the right to remove your access to the game if you so much as sneeze on the disc. DD is scary but something which so far is being handled with the care it needs where it counts.
But this isn’t a new concept – read the license for ANY game, they withhold the right to do whatever, whenever, whyever. That still doesn’t mean they can break into your house and erase the data from your drives. Most non-valve steam games don’t actually use steam as DRM at all, and can be launched from the executable like it was meant to be.
Digital Distribution has problems, but sensationalizing issues that are either not issues, or have exact parallels in physical media, makes it much harder to focus on the real issues.
None of these things will happen. This is either crazy scaremongering or untempered guessing.
There are really only a few things that bother me about Steam and DD. The main one is that I cannot, and probably will never be able to change my steam account name. The issue of price bothers me, but Valve are generally quite good with their prices – the base price is usually cheaper, they take off 10% for preorders, frequently release free stuff, and they use the service to its full potential. They do things with the money, is what I’m getting at. But other publishers, I can’t speak for.
DD is actually solving all of the things you mentioned, not making any of them worse.
It’ll go the same way as music is starting to go, where publishers are realising it is to their advantage to make their stuff as easy to get as possible. We are going through the beginning of a revolution in intellectual property and rights holders will be dragged kicking and screaming, but in as soon as 10 years, maybe a little longer I reckon this conversation will seem completely alien.
“and games like Rock Band 3 won’t let you use any song that isn’t on the disc, making all your DLC worthless.”
False. As long as the console is the one the DLC was originally purchased on, you can play it offline.
@Timothy It’s happened to me before. Maybe they fixed it in a patch or something, but I know I’ve seen it happen.
I will just say: Piracy will find a way. Piracy always finds a way.
If you are seriously scared, that your old games might be lost forever in the future, you are crazy.
@ParaParaKing: Oh, I know. And if we ever do a Weekly Nuke on that topic I’ll have plenty to say.