No portability, either, though that’s kinda irrelevant if you’re using a steam deck in the first place.
More importantly, no ownership. Steam, or any other digital media outlet, can just invalidate the licence, change the terms of the license, invalidate the account it’s under, etc.
While physical media has risks of its own, you are as much in control of those risks as you want to be. You only really have to worry about theft and catastrophic damage to the media, as those tend to be beyond complete individual control. With proper care, even discs can last a lifetime at least. Cartridges can last longer in theory.
We haven’t run into it yet problems with it, but what about inheritance? There are people today that inherited games and consoles. That’s not an exaggeration, there were adults around for the first gen consoles that bought them, and have died in the last ten years. Their kids or grandkids now have them.
There’s zero way to prevent inheritance of physical media. But licenses? Once some of the accounts get old enough, I guarantee that there’s going to be a wave of those accounts being shut down for bullshit reasons that are just an excuse to prevent anyone from passing the games down (and I’m as confident that, unless legislation occurs, Google and apple and whatever other companies use digital sales will find a way to ban inheritance of digital media).
I’m not saying I object to the lack of physical media in every case, and a portable unit is a reasonable thing to not add the extra ports to (unlike a larger console, imo). There’s a use case for that. But the attempt to kill physical media sure as hell isn’t a good thing, it’s driven by what benefits the companies, not what’s best for customers.
Yes I’m sure there are dozens and dozens of users looking to give their msdos games to their 50 year old kids. For the rest of the folks, most don’t even finish the game. Fewer replay the games beyond a ng+. The vast majority buy the game in the first few weeks, and demand drops over a 5 year period.
If ownership that’s important to you, then by all means purchase it. But that’s not the feature most people care about.
In my opinion, if valve and publishers respected first sale doctrine you’d see large game libraries shrink quite a bit. Most people would rather play and pay for the remake 15 years later. I think sales numbers, steam achievements, peak online stream numbers pretty clearly mirror my opinion.
I’m pretty sure there are no cartridges for PC games at all
Yas. ThatsThePoint.txt. No discs. No cartridges. No resale. DRM single license only.
No portability, either, though that’s kinda irrelevant if you’re using a steam deck in the first place.
More importantly, no ownership. Steam, or any other digital media outlet, can just invalidate the licence, change the terms of the license, invalidate the account it’s under, etc.
While physical media has risks of its own, you are as much in control of those risks as you want to be. You only really have to worry about theft and catastrophic damage to the media, as those tend to be beyond complete individual control. With proper care, even discs can last a lifetime at least. Cartridges can last longer in theory.
We haven’t run into it yet problems with it, but what about inheritance? There are people today that inherited games and consoles. That’s not an exaggeration, there were adults around for the first gen consoles that bought them, and have died in the last ten years. Their kids or grandkids now have them.
There’s zero way to prevent inheritance of physical media. But licenses? Once some of the accounts get old enough, I guarantee that there’s going to be a wave of those accounts being shut down for bullshit reasons that are just an excuse to prevent anyone from passing the games down (and I’m as confident that, unless legislation occurs, Google and apple and whatever other companies use digital sales will find a way to ban inheritance of digital media).
I’m not saying I object to the lack of physical media in every case, and a portable unit is a reasonable thing to not add the extra ports to (unlike a larger console, imo). There’s a use case for that. But the attempt to kill physical media sure as hell isn’t a good thing, it’s driven by what benefits the companies, not what’s best for customers.
Yes I’m sure there are dozens and dozens of users looking to give their msdos games to their 50 year old kids. For the rest of the folks, most don’t even finish the game. Fewer replay the games beyond a ng+. The vast majority buy the game in the first few weeks, and demand drops over a 5 year period.
If ownership that’s important to you, then by all means purchase it. But that’s not the feature most people care about.
In my opinion, if valve and publishers respected first sale doctrine you’d see large game libraries shrink quite a bit. Most people would rather play and pay for the remake 15 years later. I think sales numbers, steam achievements, peak online stream numbers pretty clearly mirror my opinion.