I’ve been a Steam customer for a very long time, having spent a few thousand dollars over the years with them. Like many of you, I’ve got a (small?) group of games that I bought and barely-if-ever played, and I’m cool with that. As they say, piracy is a service problem, and Steam is just… easy.
That was until I bought my Deck. Suddenly, I had two devices on which I could play my games: my proper gaming rig upstairs and my Deck plugged into the TV downstairs.
I also however, have a kid that likes video games, so sometimes I let her play a few games on the TV… and that’s where everything breaks down. If she’s playing Lego Marvel on the Deck, my copy of Dyson Sphere Program flakes out upstairs with a warning that “someone else is playing a game, so this game will have to shut off” or some nonsense like that.
I’m suddenly face to face with the fact that I don’t actually own my games and those few thousand dollars weren’t spent on what I expected. It’s… enraging to put it gently.
I can appreciate that there would be an attempt to prevent me from playing the same game on two devices (though I think that’s bullshit too), but to prevent me from playing two different games on two different machines when both are legally purchased running on my own hardware is not ok.
I had never thought about this but this is a great argument in favor of digital vs physical.
Still I prefer owning my games when given the choice.
One issue is that, unless you (can) back them up yourself, digital goods can be changed. If I bought The Twits on Kindle, it literally wouldn’t be the same book that I read as a child because they decided that words like “ugly” are too much for children. Even if I bought it before they censored it - it would be “updated”.
Good argument too.
I guess they’re adavantages and inconvenients in every situation.
What you’re talking about could even happen on a physical game receiving an online update.
It’s a great argument for backups. I don’t think clod/DRM based services are the best backup - certainly they’re not a complete backup system.
If you have a local system and/or communication failure, or bandwidth limitation; how long to restore the backup?
A backup on a local storage should be possible to plug into another computer and access fairly easily.
Ideally your backup system will give some resilience against many types of risk scenario, especialy for the data you care most about or can’t go for a long time without. The fact that it’s harder to backup DRM stuff is a limitation - so I’d avoid DRM unless i don’t care about the thing.