Lock in isn't about physical versus digital. This came up a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49138750

Disks can be locked in and digital can be completely free.

I would hope an old Xbox One disconnected from LAN and WiFi, with a GTA VI DVD inside, could start the game just fine.

You don't get in the locked box in the first place. That's the whole point.

A day may come where it is the only option. In which case, personally, I will still advocate for not getting in the box. If they're going to hold "music" and "movies" hostage tell them to go fuck themselves. It's your money they're using to lock you in. And the day that I have nothing left that can play MP3 files is too far in the future to be sure about anyhow.

If you're really concerned that that is a likely future, you need to be joining with me now, not trying to discourage me about the hopelessness of the task. The only reason it's hopeless is your apparent willingness to pay other people to lock you in. If you don't accept that bargain, you won't be locked in.

Further helping is that these closed ecosystems tend to collapse anyhow. If you're locked in, why spend money on giving you good content? Even if they are appealing today, they won't be tomorrow.

> How do you plan on maintaining your CD and DVD players when the new ones will be sold with a subscription plan like printers?

If you buy physical media, you should rip it to FLAC and put the original disc in a safe place.

remember that time all of the frontier AI labs trained their models on copyrighted material and no one batted an eyelid? If they can do that, I don't see why I can't back up my CD's and DVDs or digital purchases with digital copies sourced from the high seas. If buying isn't owning...

Plenty of dumb CD and DVD players on the market, and flea market for that matter.

It's genuinely hard to imagine commodity USB DVD-ROM drives being sold with subscriptions? There's millions of them, they cost nothing, they're built by a dozen no name Chinese factories

Citation needed for this, as this makes no sense.

However, content shifting (i.e. ripping from CD to digital) is a thing, and that's what I do with my physical media.

Good luck making my record player dial into the DRM server

1. Hard. No. 2. Fame-inducing. No. 3. Illegal. Maybe where you live.

I'm a pretty heavy GoG customer and I disagree with a lot of this premise. Most games aren't getting updates past a year or two after their release, and the ones that are aren't DRM-free. And even if they weren't, I'd rather be able to play an older revision of a game I own than not own it at all.

Your Steam games run on Linux run due to Valve's (truly excellent) work on their compatibility layer. However, that work is not exclusive to Steam. I can play my DRM-free GoG copies of big budget Windows games just fine on Linux. There's an extra step you have to invoke, but they still run superbly. Supporting DRM-free is the best we have in an increasingly hostile customer market.

DRM is a software layer that restricts your ability to run a given program, in this context it's specifically a form of access control. It has nothing to do with anything you just said.

> There is just way to much media out there to keep track of and especially with games you are looking at frequent updates and patches, that your DRM-free backup won't get, unless you turn backup up a full time job to keep track of it all.

I don't want to write a redo of the infamous Dropbox comment, but if you really want to go /r/datahoarders on it, you can simply have a GOG downloader running in a monthly (or whatever) cronjob.

> None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux.

That's funny, I don't have that issue at all. I have whatever GOG 3rd party client running on Bazzite do the downloading & updating for me, and the only game with which I had an issue was Timberborn.

>If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones, since I gave up trying to back them up a decade ago.

That's a you problem. I keep mine backed up. GOG even makes it easy to just go grab the latest patch if you downloaded the base game years ago.

>None of my GOG games run on Linux, while most of my Steam games run on Linux. Also annoying: None of the GOG games run on a genuine Win9x either, as what you are getting is an updated version for modern Windows, not the original game.

Solvable with Wine/Proton (or a Proton fork). If you want to be lazy Heroic launcher makes it easy and even logs into GoG if you don't have them backed up locally. Heroic launcher lets you pick what you want to use to run the game whether it be Proton/Wine/Etc, this even works with Game-Porting-Toolkit on MacOS.

You mean Windows games thanks to Proton.

They already did though. Sony removed your movies from your PlayStation. And every Blu-Ray player can brick itself if you insert a disk with a player blacklist update.

What I really mean is a difficult to revoke license. Not dependent on a server or DRM. I realize I do not actually own copies.

A lot of games are not sold with re-sellable licenses at all while almost all movies are.

> Not staying this to be pendantic or to annoy you, but you really do know that at the bottom line, the same sort of license applies to movies and music that as of games.

You can not only buy music on physical medium (CDs or vinyls) but you can also buy, legally, DRM-free lossless music.

And once you own that music, your right to listen to it (privately) cannot be removed from you.

And for, say, a vinyl or a CD, both in the US and in the EU, your right, for example, to sell that CD at a garage sale cannot be removed from you.

And just as I can, today, boot a Commodore 64 from the 80s, I'll still be able, in 40 years, to boot a Raspberry Pi and play my music files from it. And play my CDs if I've still got a reader.

P.S: FWIW I rip my audio CDs to lossless files, in a bit-perfect way (which is automatically cross-checked with checksums of people who made the same rips, so we all know our rips are bit-perfect).

Eh?

I can still go to the store and buy some music on physical media, and (if history is any indicator) I can still play it forever until it or my playback equipment wears out.

As a practical matter: You do know that when I spin up an album at home, I simply do not care what limitations any licensing agreements may or may not apply, right? I'm going to play it anyway, and it will work when I play it -- free from outside influence.

Hey just a correction, there was indeed a physical release of BG3 on PS5. It was released straight from Larian and came on 2 discs, dual-layer 100GB to be exact. Xbox Series as well, but it came on 4 discs due to capacity limits.

Your point stands, though. Games have grown so huge that downloading them isn't a hassle for most, but disc definitely is or has maxed out. That's not to mention how long it takes to install stuff, especially on PS5!

I like Gog and use Heroic, but that has not been a smooth experience on Steam Deck.

It’s slowly improving, though.

Until then we use this: https://heroicgameslauncher.com/

Meh I don't want another store app, I want an API that I can use from my store-agnostic open source game launcher / library. They should just officially support efforts like Heroic instead.

You can and it actually works ok. For the sake of the argument you would/could be more 'free to do with your games what you want', because GoG does not do DRM.

You can but having to hook it up to a mouse and keyboard and monitor every time I want to install new games from not-Steam would be a pain.

We can reverse engineer those too, by looking at what the game client expects. Its harder, obviously. But far from impossible.

I started writing my own world of warcraft server about 20 years ago by disassembling the WoW binary. I got to the point that you could log in to the game and run around in a big empty world. I even found a couple mistakes in wow's in-game encryption in the process. Lots of teams have gotten much further than I did. There's whole communities who play wow on private servers.

If we can do that for MMOs, we can do that for just about anything. Especially with LLMs. LLMs are incredibly good at this sort of work.

The online portions will be reverse engineered and there will be community servers or the online checks will be replaced with offline stubs. You think in twenty years they won’t be able to do this in minutes for practically nothing using GPT 15 or whatever?

Sure, but that's orthogonal to discs. Nothing prevents a game developer from making "check the server" the first thing that happens when the game on a disc loads.