We already see this problem with other streaming media services; just because something is available today doesn’t mean it will be available tomorrow.

I don’t want to give that much control over to someone else. I don’t need all-you-can-eat content. Just let me pay for the music/movie/book/game that I want and enjoy it for what it is, and know I always can just use my copy without needing to be plugged into the internet.

I guess this view probably makes me look like an old man yelling at a cloud, but I’ve managed to find a way to survive without signing up for Netflix, and I hope I can still play games in the future without needing to sign up for a streaming service.

I have lost dearly held content to the internet deciding to not host it anymore, including spotify.

At this point, I trust my backup 2x SSD mirror more than some cloud. So I guess we're two old guys yelling at clouds.

And this will just go even more fucked once the article 13 of the EU goes weaponized in 2 years.

I remember an xkcd that was basically saying if you really want your files to be portable and available reliably until the end of time, the only solution is to pirate it

Yes, it really sucks when you add a movie to 'my list' and then you think about watching it tonight and poof, it's as if it was never there. It's adding insult to injury that it just vanished off '_my_ list' too.

It’s not all doom and gloom, that sort of mentality is still alive and well in the indie scene. Specifically people who make games like FTL (Rimworld and Factorio are two more recent examples of fantastic games that don’t require internet connectivity) are keeping the dream alive. My rule of thumb is to never buy games on Steam and only get them through GoG or directly from the developer. Sometimes there are a few titles that I really really want to play but are too tied to Steam and not on any other platform (I’m looking at you, Tabletop Simulator!) but for the most part as long as you are ok with staying away from AAA titles you can avoid always-online lock in and still have an amazing gaming experience.

I am not so worried about games and movies — having access to them is a plus but I wouldn’t be too upset over not being able to revisit a specific game or rewatch a specific movie. Music bothers me a bit more because I like to listen to a lot of my favorite music again.

What worries me the most about this trend is what impact it will have on the computers we use.

Today you can buy a powerful laptop or desktop. You can write software on it, for it, for any purpose at any time. You can distribute that software to others freely, and you can permit others to run your software for any purpose under permissive terms of your liking that still protect the rights you have over your intellectual property, the software that you wrote.

I might be falling trap to the “slippery slope” fallacy here, but the way I see it, once the majority of new games, movies, music and other entertainment is all accessed via streaming, and all of the big players in software move the applications that are used in business and in education to the cloud, the computers we use may easily:

1) Become too weak to do intensive work locally, because everyone are using them as thin clients only, for interacting with software that is run in the cloud.

and/or

2) Become so locked down that we lose the ability to distribute software outside of cloud delivery mechanisms controlled by corporate entities.

I am not anti-corporate. But we cannot allow the corporations to be in control over the software that we use, in this way. Not because they are corporations or because they are capitalists or anything that. The same would be true of any entity, whether that entity be a business, a state, a body of the government, a non-profit organization or even just a person.

When we allow someone else to gatekeep access to the platforms we use, we are handing our freedoms over to them.

I use an iPhone that is running iOS. I can afford to allow my phone to be this restricted because I have other computing devices that allow me to develop software for them on them, and to run software written by others on the operating systems that those other devices are running.

But if none of my devices allowed me to do this, and no devices on the market allowed me to do it either, then where would that leave me?

And where would it leave us? The humanity.

In my opinion, the ability to develop software freely, to distribute that software to others freely, and for them to be able to run that software freely, is so essential to our society and to the future, that if we lose this then we need to take drastic measures to regain the control that we lost as quickly as possible. We would need to crowdfund the development of computers that allow us to do what these future locked down computers don’t. And we would need to ensure that these freedom-friendly computers become used by so many people that we could continue to develop these machines and be able to continue to produce them, at a reasonable price. So that the ability to develop and run any software for any purpose will always be possible.

I can understand that you dislike the idea of being beholden to a 3rd party in order to run your game but you lost me with

>At this point, what difference is there to an interactive movie?

What is an interactive movie and how does having a game stream from a remote server change a video game into one of these things?

This has been a complaint especially in the adventure game community. If I go to the cinema to watch the endgame or a john wick movie, I pay 10 bucks for 2 hours of movies. A lot of AAA games are a bunch of boring filler with some interactivity, but you end up with a much worse money per minute ratio. If you discount cutscenes, I've spent 60 bucks on less than two hour of gameplay on some games.

Now, I could replay those games after some time. That improves my overall cost-benefit ratio from 60 bucks -> 2 hours of gameplay to 60 bucks -> 4 hours of gameplay. Or, if the game is good, even more. I have a bunch of adventure games I paid 10 bucks for, and I have replayed them a lot and I will replay them a lot.

However, if you have a AAA studio, they will consider a game a failure shortly after release. You get one play-through for 60$ and that's all you get, because then they shutdown the servers for their next thing. And of course they will "charge less" and "run updates" and "keep expansions going" and such so it's less obvious. I'm jaded at this point.

> Now, I could replay those games after some time. That improves my overall cost-benefit ratio from 60 bucks -> 2 hours of gameplay to 60 bucks -> 4 hours of gameplay.

Or someone has modded it, and you can play it again with different content, or altered content, or altered gameplay, or some combination thereof. And if it's owned and local, there's nothing they can do to really stop someone from doing that definitively. The first mods for games weren't because developers decided they wanted people to be able to mod the games, they were from fans diving in, reverse engineering and making changes. Developers embracing modding came later.

With a cloud based game or digitally verified synced content, some level of consumer control is definitely lost, and that's a shame.

I do think it's possible that streaming game services and what you are talking about wind up a little different. I could imagine that streaming game services could spin up and down servers more dynamically depending on demand. There would be a lot of motivation to do this in a more automated fashion than regular game studios because the streaming service will be dealing with 1000's of titles not just a handful. I think generally you keep your saved game info locally and then it is fed to a server which starts you at the appropriate place? I'm making a lot of assumptions but I do think the basis of my argument 1000's of titles vs ~10 is a pretty good reason to think this won't be handled in the same way.

Also, games like GTA V have been supported for a crazy amount of time. Transitioned into online play. People have probably gotten 1000's of hours of gameplay from a $60 purchase. I play things like fallout and minecraft so I also get a huge gameplay time to cost ratio, so I'm not very sensitive to this from my personal experience.

What AAA $60 game only has 2 hours of gameplay?

I took it to be a comparison to Netflix. Cloud gaming is analogous to streaming movies with similar tradeoffs, the difference being that games are interactive.

Cloud gaming probably isn't targeted to people like you, then. When the choice is between not being able to play the game at all (due to lacking sufficient hardware) and cloud gaming, the potential downsides of cloud gaming are worth it.

You're right, it's not for people like him. It's not for people that have been around the block and have learned a thing or two. They're hoping to take advantage of the young and naive.

Some people don't care about hoarding game discs or cartridge. I have drawers full of Nintendo Cartdrige, playstation 1, 2 and 3 discs, a few older xbox games, that I can't play anymore because the required console died, or they are back in my childhood home where I grew up. To be honest, I don't even want to play any of those games anymore, but if for some nostalgia infused reason I wanted to, I'd much rather they just be automatically available to stream on my TV or my laptop than having to spend hours tracking down all the required hardware for me to play a game that I'll most likely get bored with within an hour or two.

The same thing happened with movies, with some people wanting to hoard boxes and boxes of dvd, vhs or blurays, thinking that they are somewhat smarter than people who just pay some subscription (or digital rental) to stream whatever movies they want to watch when they want it, on the device they want to watch it on.

How is it only for young and naive? If they don’t stop selling physical versions with the arrival of video game streaming (just like they didn’t stop selling boxed versions of movies), I will just stream a lot of stuff first and then buy boxed versions of the games i end up liking a lot. Just like I already do with movies, music vinyls, and digital versions of video games.

> "If they don’t stop selling physical versions with the arrival of video game streaming (just like they didn’t stop selling boxed versions of movies)"

They will once it becomes normalized. DRM for software has long been far more odious than seen in the movie industry.

Oh, they will stop selling physical versions if it gets successful enough.

What I meant by "people like tetha" is people who can't play games on their own hardware, don't want to buy their own gaming hardware, and/or don't care about these rights.

I know what you meant and I think you're whitewashing the intentions of these corporations. They aren't motivated by good will, but rather by greed. They want to seize more control from consumers and they are going to normalize this first with the youngest consumers who don't know any better. Once these systems have proven technically feasible and consumers become compliant, the option to download the software and run it yourself on your own hardware will be taken away. Before you know it, there will exist games that only exist in "cloud" form.

Agreed. If we go full in on game streaming we can kiss actually preserving the art goodbye entirely. At least with streaming of non interactive media we can rip it to a hard drive somewhere.

I agree with you. I dislike digital distribution in general, largely for this reason. I believe it's likely that as long as I can find (say) a working PS4, my physical media PS4 games will continue to work as long as I would like them to.

Unfortunately, the general public wants convenience over these benefits. Instant gratification.