General principle: It is way easier to avoid lock in by not being locked in in the first place then to extricate yourself later. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming video service because I had a DVD collection that predates them, and I maintained it instead of being on a streaming service, so I've got a personal collection. It's easy for me not to be locked in to a streaming music service because I have a CD collection started decades before they came into existence, ripped digitally, and I've got music I own already.

There's more entertainment of every kind, including video games that don't lock you down, then you could consume in a lifetime anyhow. If you limit yourself to just what doesn't lock you in, yeah, you may not be playing GTA VI, but it's not like you'll lack for good games.

On the one hand, buying a subscription service for $20/month does give you instant, temporary access to a lot of things... on the other, consistently putting that money into media acquisition over the same period of time will build up quite a collection in a few years. Remember that you don't just have to buy blockbusters... you can raid garage sales, you can buy used, you can pick up surprisingly cheap collections like [1], you can hit the Salvation Army... what you find may be haphazard but you can bootstrap a collection cheaply, and may find some surprising stuff on the way.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006LOC01G - but look at the used prices, not the new. There's a lot of things like this on Amazon where someone thinks they can get a lot of money for it "new" where the used market reflects the more accurate market reality.

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jonhohle an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening hasn’t just caused issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from playing their disc-based games, too.

First line in the article. An Xbox owner who did the right thing by buying physical copies is still unable to play their games.

I don’t play on Xbox, but my kids do, and Overwatch worked fine yesterday (which is a Microsoft property). So I’m not sure what the outage is, but not being able to play discs is a real punch to the gut.

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ragazzina 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>and I maintained it

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

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jerf 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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altmanaltman an hour ago | parent [-]

With the planned death of physical media for games, it will soon become impossible to do so. Like, Sony literally plans to stop making discs starting in 2028, and all games you buy will have to be digital only. GTA 6 is just giving a code in a box. It's really the end of times for physical media in a few years, maybe something can change if consumers push back but they likely will not if we are being realistic.

https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/physical-disc-produc...

	▲	lesostep 7 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Not the OP, but when the physical media for games dies, I will still be playing games I already own. That's what collection is for.
	▲	jerf 36 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I don't think you're quite getting it. I'm saying, don't get in the box. "But the bait looks so nice!" Yes. Yes it does. Yes, you may have to sacrifice and not get some things you want in the moment. Our capitalistic overlords have demonstrated that they will absolutely abuse you to the maximum extent you permit. If you are willing to give everything to play GTA 6, then they will take it. The compensation is that there is already more than you could possibly do available in spaces where they are not locking you in a box, or you can break out of the box with minimal moral quandaries and technical difficulties. This isn't really news. Control your desires or they will control you is not new wisdom. Though the modern ability to exploit other's inability to control their desires certainly does have some new twists on it. "Each man's master is the person who has the authority over what the man wishes or does not wish, so as to secure it, or take it away. Whoever, therefore, wants to be free, let him neither wish for anything, nor avoid anything, that is under the control of others; or else he is necessarily a slave." - The Encheridion Of Epictetus, second century AD https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3ADiscourses_of_Epictetu...
	▲	nkrisc 24 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Then just stop playing games if that happens. They’re not necessary, it’s not worth getting fucked over by the corpos. Or make your own games or play ones made by indies that you can actually own.

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trelane 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

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otaconjh 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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...

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saghm 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The obvious risk is that you don't have nearly as much budget to spend on lawyers if someone does come after you for it. The copyright system tends to disproportionately punish small players and not punish larger ones.

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dd8601fn an hour ago | parent | next [-]

How and why does anyone “come after you” for backing up your own BluRays, though?

Assuming you’re not redistributing, of course, which is another thing entirely.

	▲	saghm 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You seem to have missed this part: > digital copies sourced from the high seas

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Grimburger an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The lawyers cost a lot more than what you are going to get back from GP in a copyright lawsuit.

	▲	saghm 16 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That doesn't seem to have stopped any prosecutions for piracy in the past

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queenkjuul an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Personal backup copies are fully legal, RIAA and MPA admit as much on their own websites; this was settled back in the VHS and cassette tape era

	▲	saghm 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The part I was responding to was "with digital copies sourced from the high seas". The premise that they were responding to was if the only domestically available media playing devices required subscriptions. It's not clear why the assumption would be that getting content from arbitrary international online sources would be something that isn't also sanctioned in this scenario. That doesn't mean the entire scenario is likely, but if that's the objection, then why reply to me and not the original comment proposing it?

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pjmlp an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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queenkjuul an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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kop316 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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steveBK123 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Good luck making my record player dial into the DRM server

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inigyou 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And it's very hard but fame-inducing and illegal to defeat locks.

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flerchin 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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

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inigyou 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Really? You cracked Denuvo?

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not_a9 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

back.engineering folks seem to imply that Denuvo is another case of virtualization based obfuscator being vulnerable to a symbolic execution/optimization approach.

> As AI assisted static deobfuscation continues to improve we will see more virtual machine based obfuscators fold away. In an upcoming article we will publish details on how we fully statically devirtualized Denuvo anti(tamper/cheat). One of the most attacked pieces of software second only to anticheats.

…or you can not bother with analyzing at all and just feed correct CPUID/shared data/whatever values to Denuvo, like the hypervisor thing does.

https://back.engineering/blog/31/07/2026/

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nemomarx an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Denuvo cracks have sped up a lot lately, and usually take two months or less.

	▲	inigyou an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Because the system itself has been thoroughly defeated. Apparently GGP did that, because they think it isn't hard.

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goodmythical 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Denuvo doesn't exist in a vast majority of games. It's not even used in all modern games.