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.

> 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.

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.

> Lock in isn't about physical versus digital.

I fully disagree with this statement, it equates very unequal scenarios.

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

Disks can't be locked-in - the OEM console that runs them can. Platform emulators can't be locked-in: MAME, Dolphin, RPCS3, Eden, etc offer user freedom, and all depend on access to the game's physical media in order to dump, rip, or play directly off of.

You need an exploit and/or decryption key to archive a game on a locked-down, downloads-only disk-free console. Something valuable is lost when there is a forced physical to digital transition.

When represented on a quadrant wirh physical/digital on one axis and locked-down/open on the other, the locked-down + disk quadrant can be nullified by user-controlled emulators. Until recently, this quadrant had a lot of games, while digital+open is nearly empty, save for GoG, old non-steam, Humble Bundle games, quirky Indie games, and old game DVDs on a shelf.

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

Well it can't because how can they check if you're licensed to play the game? Connect to the internet first, then it'll let you start the game.

Ironically, Xbox One support for true offline play was gutted when Xbox gutted a lot of planned Family Sharing support when Sony claimed the Xbox One was not going to allow you to play games offline and made that a marketing campaign with pawn shops like GameStop. (The same campaign that also called in-box Kinect a mistake and complained that the Xbox One was too "media focused" and "not for real game players".)

The resulting early Xbox One pivot removed features that would have been useful when systems were down and replaced them with "offline capable theater" instead. (The same pivot that also killed the Kinect and Xbox One multitasking and host of other useful media features.)

You wouldn't be able to.

GTA VI is not being released on the Xbox One. Game discs aren't DVDs and haven't been for well over a decade, they use Bluray discs, which won't even matter since GTA VI isn't shipping with a physical disc, only a code.

You need internet to access this product. You need updated system firmware.

I obviously made a typo and meant GTA V.

An offline console would have no access to patches for any game (including the mandatory day one patch that kills off enough remaining bugs to make a modern game playable), downloadable content, or the all-important multiplayer.

> An Xbox owner who did the right thing by buying physical copies

That's not the right thing. According to Stallman, that's the opposite of the right thing.

To be fair, I don't think Stallman is against buying or selling software, I think he just feels that the source code should be provided with it (and that you can share it afterwards...)

He doesn't seem to care whether its paid for or gratis. My understanding is that he's against using non-free software because it limits the ways in which you can use it, by the definition of "free" he and FSF subscribe to.

Under the GPL you could have bought your copy of the game knowing that you could retrieve the source code, make the changes necessary for the software to function and distribute the changes under the same license. Or just retrieve someone else's changes to that end.

Might seem very impractical for a commercial game, but Id software released the source code of a bunch of their engines within a few years of the initial release of the games based on them, meaning you would only need to supply the still-proprietary game data to have a functional game. As a result there are still rather recent commercial releases based on free software derivatives of these engines.

It's not the buying or selling part that's the issue, but the closed-source, locked-down software on an even more locked-down computer (a.k.a. a console).

>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?

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.

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...

How many games do you need in your life, though? I'd say the top 500 games on the GoG catalog would be more than a lifetime of gaming. That's not even including open source or rom sets.

Factorio. And… yep.

How movies do you need in your life, how many books, how many paintings, how many plays? And yes it might be true for you that you never need to play more than top of 500 gog games but new games sell millions of copies which means millions of people do see the value in new games. You can disagree with that on principle but advocating people should only play top 500 gog because "that's all you need" is not a serious position.

Well if all I had were the best movies before 1998 I would still have a really awesome movie collection. Books fall into a different category in mind. They're leisure but are also deep personal enrichment and education.

all of this is your subjective view though, some people see and enjoy games as art, peesonal enrichment and even education. We cannot assume everyone shares our exact values.

Thank you. I had previously assumed that everyone did share my exact values, and that I could merely introspect and then successfully understand the perspective of any person on earth.

You're welcome but your comment is proof that you did not and the fact that you resort to sarcasm when getting called out shows you do have a fair bit of ego. Hope it works out for you

I'm also not advocating for this. I strongly believe that there's not much we can do about a lot of these things. The world is going to move on an be worse, and most people will boil themselves like frogs. They already own TVs that spy on them and serve them ads. If you try to point out that this is bad they say "but it's inconvenient to buy one that does not!" I guess a lot of people's liberty is worth very little.

If a platform tries to take advantage of you, it's worth trying to change the platform. If you have no chance of changing the platform, you should cut the platform out of your life. I'm not saying "oh, just don't buy new video games" I'm saying "you may be faced with a choice where you either acquiesce to Microsoft's business model, or you do not buy new video games." If you were really faced with that choice, what would you do?

Then if you really want to do something yourself instead of waiting for leet hackers to do it, buy one, reverse engineer it thoroughly, write a protocol emulator so you can buy the game from the store and download the bits to your PC, and then develop a method to store those bits to as many compatible consoles as you want.

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...

I generally agree, but I don't think it's wrong to mourn what is lost or to try and advocate politicians regulate and restore what was lost. Especially since the policy of "the customers own nothing" has been extending past video games in ways that are unavoidable. For example, John Deere locking down their tractors. Car manufacturers increasingly trying to turn everything into a subscription.

I agree, the right action as a consumer is boycotting rent seeking products and pestering politicians. But it does feel hopeless as too few of our politicians seem to care about these sorts of seemingly minor grievances.

The right action as a hacker is to liberate your products and open a service where you liberate other people's products.

I don't even own a playstation. And yes, we are all slaves by that definition unless you live in the wilderness and do not rely on anyone or any state but the fact that you use a device and hackernews makes you as much a slave as someone who plays gta 6 by that definition. One should not engage with anything in the modern world lest they be a slave is a naive and impossible standard to hold, morally speaking.

I personally disagree that you must control your desires or get controlled by them. You can wish to change the world instead of being like "NO NOT THE BOX. MAMA DIDNT RAISE NO SLAVE" also.

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.

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.

Oh no! GTA6, the 2026 simulator, may not be accessible?

If the death of physical media locks me into playing whatver is forcefed to me by AAA studios, I will reject that bargain and engage in the decades of backlogged media I haven't gotten to yet. If every studio stopped making music, movies, and TV today, there is still so much I haven't seen/listened to/played that it won't even move the needle.

Lastly, going against the grain here, but GTA 6 looks about as unappealing as it possibly could. I don't want to play 2026 Simulator, no matter how good it looks. Really it just looks like parody version of current politics and society and that's what games are helping me escape from.

Read a book instead. It is not like you have to consume audiovisual media to survive.

No, you go play a video game instead. If we can just tell people what to do and expect them to follow, the world will be a dull place.

The Sony step is also interesting. I have noticed that digital games keep the original price even after a few years while the physical ones, if you search for a bit, you can always find them discounted (the reason may be physical inventory management?). This is excluding memberships. The important point is that prices are probably better behaved if we include stores as a third party sellers, instead of having Sony the only player controlling prices.

Yet, Plaion and SNK are re-releasing the original Neo Geo AES with old big cartridges and they managed to be the best selling console on Amazon for a few weeks. They plan to release new games on 1:1 replica cartridges that will work on a 1991 console. The pre-orders are massive.

Consumers are actually pushing back. Consumers show that even an 35 years old console and 90€ games can sell easily if it comes in a big beautiful box and with the assurance you'll be able to play in 15 years.

> 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...

"If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing."

We've all heard this. But let's not forget that recently, some important representative of Microsoft went and told some important politicians, that buying is stealing.

Yes. She said that buying is stealing. Buying the game and playing multiplayer on your own server is stealing, more specifically.

So if buying is stealing, why not pirate?

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.

They can't come after us all. We outnumber them. Also we have disk encryption now. Admit to nothing.

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.

You seem to have missed this part:

> digital copies sourced from the high seas

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

That doesn't seem to have stopped any prosecutions for piracy in the past

It actually did. There weren't that many, they were just high profile news at the time. And most of them either lost or recovered minimal damages. There was no actual $250,000 payment for downloading an MP3. That's why the industry stopped doing it and now only targets distribution sites.

The RIAA/MPA still goes after individuals, but they target them with settlement offers to avoid going to court. 3k and an admission of guilt is a lot less than it would cost to get a lawyer and fight back in court so people do pay them, including completely innocent people since the companies who spam out DMCA notices don't care all that much about accuracy. They've also been going after ISPs and extracting money from them for no reason, but after losing the Cox case, that might not end up being worth it to them.

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

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?

I replied to you because my point is that it's established law that they cannot come after you for a backup of a title you own, and even the rights holders admit that.

Selling machines that require subscriptions to operate doesn't change the settled law about having backups of things you bought.

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

Buy a generic one from China.

... That is my point

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

Rip them to a hard drive and they're yours forever.

I've never seen this for CD or DVD players, and only the shittiest printers are sold with a subscription plan. Plenty of unencumbered printers available, and CD and DVD players even more so

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

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

Really? You cracked Denuvo?

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/

To add to this, the obfuscation used for their anticheat seems to be… kinda bad? Worse than Epic’s virtualizer/Griffin probably

https://k0mkc.hatenablog.com/entry/2026/08/06/032440

Mind you, odds are their anti-tamper/DRM is a different case.

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

Because the system itself has been thoroughly defeated. Apparently GGP did that, because they think it isn't hard.

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

Or for cheaper, you can sail the high sea. You build a collection of music, movies and games that will last you a lifetime for free. Then you can spend the saved money on supporting artists you like, studios you respect or buy a locked on guilty pleasure once in a while.

No reason to play by the rules if decency is not in the picture anymore.

I can buy and own legal copies of movies and music. But I often really can’t with games.

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. It is just accepted with movies, music and books that people just 'have' them. The publishers seriously know what a huge outrage there would be when they did the same to those forms of media like they did with games, but they would if they could get away with it.

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.

> And every Blu-Ray player can brick itself if you insert a disk with a player blacklist update.

That seems to be somewhat of a myth.

Discussion here, 37 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48698374

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.

Player license keys have been revoked in the past.

https://www.eetimes.com/The-real-casualty-in-high-def-DVD-re...

Automation has its drawbacks.

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

You can resell a movie (dvd/blu-ray) and music (cd, tape, etc) like you can resell a physical book. But if the license you have actually agrees on that, i don't really know. Back then i had several dvd's that granted watching it in a family environment but did not grant you reselling.

> 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.

I read you and i agree.

I wish Gog made a Steam Deck.

You can install GOG games on a normal Steam Deck already. What you want is better integration with their store but Heroic also works great on Deck and can automatically add your GOG games to Steam as well.

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

It’s slowly improving, though.

I might be crucified for saying this, but I actually have a Claude skill file for that. I have SSH turned on for the Steamdeck, I use Lutris so all the configs are in a database, so I just point Claude to the MD file and the game files and tell it to set it up for me. The main purpose of the skill file is really just to save the SSH, rsync instructions and give it lutris config examples like which version of proton works, etc.)

Wouldnt' crucify you for that at all, that's a clever setup and I'm gonna steal it :D

It’s a little jank to switch to Heroic to install the game but I haven’t had problems once it’s added to Steam (automatically, I might add, just tick the checkbox in Heroic preferences).

What's the issue? Its just an ultrabook with a screen and controller peripheral attached.

Me too. It’s coming to Linux though. https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/07/gog-confirm-they-are-w...

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

If you have the rig already, you could also use Sunshine and Moonlight for streaming. https://moonlight-stream.org/

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.

They haven’t even made a Linux client yet. They are about 13 years behind steam

Do you really need a Linux client? just download the installers. They announced a Linux client, and I honestly can't see a reason I would want to install it...

I don’t want to have to go to a website and download every update manually. I want my saves synced between my PC and steam deck, I want achievements, I want to invite people from my friends list to games.

There’s such a massive list of things the steam client does that makes the experience better.

Why not an actual Steam Deck? You can install any software you want on it.

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.

Out of curiosity, why not use desktop mode without an external mouse and keyboard for that?

You could write a game store interface that works on whatever its normal mode is.

Not saying this is a great solution either, though it beats the trackpad + on screen keyboard. I like to VNC into the deck and do these things.

Set up SSH!

In twenty years it doesn’t matter if Rockstar delists GTA6.

The DRM will be cracked. You will be able to play and you WILL have a better experience playing a cracked DRM free version than any official version.

You can play an emulated Mario Kart Double Dash on a Steam Machine (or any PC) today and get a better experience than playing it on a Game Cube.

Digital only games sounds bad at first but preservation of video games will be done digitally more effectively than physically. How many full rom sets of Super Nintendo games are just sitting there on millions of PCs around the world? It is trivial to preserve them: copy paste to a new machine. Done.

Disks will rot. GameCube optical lasers will fail. One day, maybe not soon, but it is it inevitable that all disk based games will become unplayable and lost one day. Maybe if we’re lucky an independent company will create an accurate FPGA based GameCube for people to play their games but emulation is just better.

Prices on the second hard market will be astronomical making physical copies innaccessible - this has already happened for arcade PCBs and it will happen for disk based games. PCBs that used to go for a few hundred now go for tens of thousands. I personally believe that this push for physical preservation is largely driven by speculators that know this. You see insane prices for things like sealed copies of Super Mario Bros already. PCB prices were driven up by speculators hoarding supply and they’ll do it for console games too.

If buying isn’t owning then piracy isn’t stealing.

Preservation needs to be about accessibility FIRST.

Physical Videogame Preservation Makes No Sense: https://youtu.be/3rM1jaFvM58

This assumes the game isn't designed from the beginning to be entirely reliant on the operation of servers. For instance there never has been and never will be any form of offline function for Destiny 1 or 2, even if all the person wants to do is play the single player campaigns.

Do we know any of the technical details of that? Is the SPC just instanced multiplayer with all game logic on the server, or is it just getting some encryption key?

First, SPC, at least in Destiny 2, required you to do Strikes. Second, you get item drops. Technically there is no SPC in either Destiny because it's an MMORPG. There are just plenty of things you can do all by yourself and things that you meant to do alone, and those things usually come with item farming, so you need server-side to make it fair.

Destiny 1 partially ran on consoles, though. It was mostly p2p: https://gist.github.com/nessus42/55c1260d88e2028689de0c49381...

Yes, but never in the absence of the Bungie servers. It did have a full sequential single player campaign, but parts of the single player campaign took place in shared instances where the user could see other players running around the map. The single player campaign could also be played cooperatively with other players in the same 'fireteam' if desired, but that was optional.

Sure, but SPC still took place in the same shared world. It wasn't like there is a single-player vs multiplayer in CoD or BF. The only way to make those campaigns work offline is to remove all drops from them and remove co-op pieces that aren't optional. Doing a strike and joining right at the end of it, missing the entire story of that strike, was like a mandatory experience for D2.

This assumes a large portion of the game doesn’t rely on servers.

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.

And, in my mind, there’s a real difference between providing a hosted service and layering on DRM.

Though it would be nice if more game makers ultimately provided a server. That used to be more common.

This is why Stop Killing Games exists.

Eh, I'd probably leave music off that list. Even mainstream music releases are still pretty easy to buy DRM-free via services like Qobuz, even if the majority of people are using streaming platforms these days. Although I wonder if that's maybe just because music seems like it would be pretty easy to sidestep DRM, even if they do come up with some kind of innovation (heck, even my friend told me he pirated my album... WHICH IS FREE, BTW).

But e-books? Holy crap the drm on those things is soooooo annoying to avoid.

If I want an e-book, I buy it from bookshop.org and then pirate the DRM-free version. It clears my conscience: the author gets paid, a small bookshop gets the sale, and I can read my book anywhere.

That’s fair about music. I didn’t even know about Qobuz. I do wonder how long big labels will permit that, but I’m glad it’s here now.

E-book DRM is crazy, I agree. I should have included that.

That's the one reason I don't use Steam. I'm not saying Valve is evil or anything like that. But GOG's transparency and commitment to DRM-free games should be the market standard.

DRM-free was a nice idea 20 years ago, the problem is that it doesn't scale. 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.

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.

On top of that, those updates can be kind of useful. 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.

Either way, I just don't think DRM-free is the proper solution for media management today or in the future. The olden days of static media are largely gone and the modern world is just way more fluid. So far none of the proposed solutions are able to capture that properly.

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.

> If GOG went down tomorrow, those games would be gone just the same as the Steam ones

Absolutely not. Libraries and archives are able to keep digital copies, with limits imposed on how they may share them, not on what they're allowed to keep. They're not allowed, without a convoluted exemption, to break DRM. So if Steam disappears, we're all collectively dependent on our ability to break DRM to maintain our culture accessible. Games that use draconian authentication could simply disappear. With GOG, the only thing stopping us from having easy access is our ability to walk to our local library.

> Libraries and archives are able to keep digital copies, with limits imposed on how they may share them

Share them by bundling them with DRM[1]? Like archive.org does with books and games that you can't download, but only virtually borrow to watch in your browser (trivial to work around, but it's there nonetheless). DRM-free in a word with current Copyright isn't the solution unless you want to wait 90 years to be able to access anything.

> So if Steam disappears, we're all collectively dependent on our ability to break DRM to maintain our culture accessible.

Piracy has been preserving games since the dawn of time, so yeah, that'll continue as usual. The games that are hard to preserve are the dynamic ones, the MMORPGs that get updates every week and where large parts of the game are the player communities within it, none of which fits neatly into a DRM-free .zip file.

[1] https://help.archive.org/help/borrowing-from-the-lending-lib...

Your discourse assumes two things: piracy will maintain the archival part without fail and that universal access is the natural end goal. None are true.

Counting on piracy means we will lose stuff. By definition, piracy has adversaries whose job it is to stop it. We cannot count on pirates never to lose any single cultural artifact because their existence is adversarial. Archives and libraries do something legal, they keep culture alive for future generations. Waiting 90 years to obtain the right to make copies is a tradeoff. The point of libraries and archives is not to give you web access to every rom with a single click, it's to preserve culture. Access is a bonus, not the point. That's why most of a museum's collection is in their vault. What Archive.org is doing is with their collection is a compromise, and is actually criticized by many other archives who see their adversarial stance with copyright owners as detrimental to the mission of preservation.

> Waiting 90 years to obtain the right to make copies is a tradeoff.

That's a little more than a trade off, it means nobody alive today will ever experience those games. And those people 90 years in the future, probably won't care. There is no culture kept alive here, burring it all in a landfill would do just the same.

DRM-free by itself really doesn't help here. DRM-free ala GOG doesn't even allow used sales, as your game ownership is still tied to an account and can't be relinquished or transferred. And buying DRM-free games from random people without ownership track record, ain't exactly a desired good to begin with.

As far as I know, there is no used marked for DRM-free games.

You need a proper copyright reform to actually addresses all of this. Or step outside the law and go the pirate route, which actually keeps old games alive and playable.

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.

DRM-free gets confused with wrapper-free or launcher-free in games. This is probably triggered by the observation that many Steam games won't run if Steam isn't running. However, this is a basic check in steamapi.dll which can be easily replaced.

> 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.

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

Stop spreading misinformation. Even if you're a non-techie you can add non-Steam games to Steam's launcher (my extremely tech illiterate friend just did this) and they'll run with Proton.

It comes down to a game by game basis, and it's still extremely rare (outside of recent 2025/2026 anticheat AAA title stuff) that any game would have a Linux specific/impacting patch.

Yeah, of course you can, but that isn't exactly an argument for DRM-free GOG if you need the evil Steam to get your games running, or mess around with DOSBOX, Wine, Heroic, Lutris or whatever else is the workaround of the week. If you want to jump through extra hoops you can strip Steam DRM with a few clicks too.

Meanwhile with Steam you click once and the game runs, since they jumped through all the hoops for over a decade to make that work, while GOG sat around and still hides their MSDOS games in a self extracting Windows executable, that neither runs on DOS nor Win9x.

Anyway, back to the point: DRM-free is just a teeny tiny fraction of what might prevent you from running a game.

Also it's not like GOG is digital rights management free in the purest sense: You still have to have an account and they still track what you own, it just isn't enforced at the .exe level, but it makes things like used games sales still impossible, since you can't relinquish or transfer your ownership.

Overly focusing on DRM-free just misses how the soft landscape has changed in the last two decades and what things actually matter.

This is nonsense; GOG has a very simple API to list and download games you own, and all you have to do is run a downloader script (many are available online, including mine) in a cron job to keep the latest versions of games on your disk.

GOG's storefront backend is also much nicer than Steam's. The latter is a dungeon crawl through like 3 different UIs, I still don't know how to navigate to the depot page reliably despite using it for years.

Someday that GameCube will break and so will all the others. And someday that PC capable of running open source emulators will also break. And all that will be left is corporation controlled hardware running corporation controlled software. Maybe we'll be lucky and be allowed to rent a few of the old games.

I believe there will be still data horders alive who will have a running copy of any game you want. Until the Sun burns the Earth.

Greetings to /r/datahorder bunch :)

There are already perfect FPGA emulators of N64 out, why not GameCube.

The MiSTer is already struggling to fit the N64 core, and the GameCube is more than 10 times more complex than the N64. Just the CPU cache and the GPU embedded RAM would be prohibitively expensive to implement on an FPGA, it would require one of the very top of the line FPGAs in the market to even attempt it.

FPGAs are improving exponentially so it is only a matter of time.

Time will tell, but I don't think big enough FPGAs will be affordable any time soon.

And in any case, software emulation is already incredibly advanced, with emulators like Dolphin and PCSX2 arguably being superior to original hardware (4k rendering, anti-aliasing, high resolution textures, etc). Honestly I can't see the benefits of FPGA emulation for 6 gen consoles and onwards.

This. My old GameCube is already broken, the optical drive decided to die. Fortunately some Swiss magic still allows it to run games, otherwise it would just be an expensive paperweight.

My son and we as his parents really love Bluey, but it's impossible to buy a DVD set here in Germany, with German dub, because Disney distributes it exclusively through their plus platform.

There are many more examples like these. Very sad state of affairs.

Netflix does that too. It’s very annoying to know some things will never have a Dvd/Blu-ray release.

You can download a DVD set, for free.

Optical media capped out at 4 layer blu-ray (~128gb) which I'm not even sure that consoles can reliably read.

So my theory is that GTA 6 is somewhat larger and they really didn't want to invest into engineering a solution for multiple-disc or something when ~everyone downloads their games nowadays anyways. So in some sense, the true physical release "can't" exist.

This doesn't apply to most anything but GTA 6 is the one example I think could very realistically be unable to be stored on a disc at all, or unable to be stored on a 3-layer and the supply chain just isn't there for 4-layers in 2026.

Baldur's Gate 3 is already there. It's over 120GB and IIRC PS5 games only use up to triple layer. There was no disc release.

The current Gran Turismo is around 140GB. I think it has a disc, but it'll only have like half the game on it.

Final Fantasy XIV is around 200GB now, and they're talking about dropping PS4 support because drive capacity is going to be too low during the patch cycle for the next expansion.

Also, median US internet is over 100Mb/s now, so downloading a game is faster than installing it from a BluRay reader. And then you don't have to get up and change discs to change games...

Regardless, most console owners buy their games online. Otherwise there would be more games than Funko Pops at GameStop. They also have frequent sales, unlike retailers.

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!

Please, it’s nothing to do with any of this nonsense.

They know people will buy it regardless of format and price, so not having to spend money to print those pesky little discs is a major net profit.

GTA VI is a cancer slowly metastasising. It will signal to all other game companies that they can charge whatever they want for their pos games and people will just swallow it all down because their favourite nobody with a YouTube channel told them to.

We were already heading for an even darker age in gaming, but mark my words, GTA VI is the torchbearer of an altogether darkerer.

Games don't need to be 1TB, it's just that companies no longer invest in trying to make games smaller.

A number of games (for example the new Halo) aren't actually on the disc or otherwise have mandatory download requirements. The disc is just used as a DRM mechanism. Rockstar is not shipping discs for completely non-technical reasons. Likely some combination of saving a few bucks, stopping people camping out at retailers, and blocking the secondary market.

"Some game discs don't contain the game and are only used for DRM, therefore Rockstar won't be shipping discs for non-technical reasons"? That's a non sequitur.

> So my theory is that GTA 6 is somewhat larger and they really didn't want to invest into engineering a solution for multiple-disc

Metal Gear Solid did this 1998

> I can (hopefully) do that until I pass away.

At least there are already extensive ways to get a game cube running games off an SD card using a pi pico and some hardware that uses the expansion port.

So even once disc rot takes away the original copy you can keep going.

You'll be dead before disc rot takes effect on almost any disc kept out of direct sunlight and in a climate controlled environment.

Saturn, 3DO, and Dreamcast collectors beg to differ. Some folks even finding sealed games to be unplayable. Could be the way it was stored, could be manufacturing defects like Sega cheapening out materially on Dreamcast discs.

Always good have backups and/or modded consoles for longevity.

>Gaming is heading in the same direction that TV, movies and music are. I

It's much worse with Gaming. At least with TV/Movies/Music there are standards-based 'offline' formats that one could preserve the content. Games, on the other hand, may be intrinsically tied to proprietary hardware and online 'live' services for patches and content. The recent hubbub about Sony removing disk access was somewhat of a red-herring as most disk-based games you buy today have incomplete games.

well there is a way

Pitacy is back in the menu for me.

That "if buying is not owning then piracy is not stealing" sounds corny and is legally void, but hell if morally it is not justifiable at this point.

When I want to support the creator I go and "buy" the thing, but I also go and pirate anyway.

> That "if buying is not owning then piracy is not stealing" sounds corny and is legally void, but hell if morally it is not justifiable at this point.

A law isn’t by default just, so when it turns from a safeguard into a manacle it is only logical, fair and correct that we rebel against it.

If buying does not imply ownership, then piracy cannot mean theft.

for me these games are too large to pirate

i went back to recomps and emulation

This idea that you should have to log into an online account, in order to use a device that is otherwise entirely offline, is the root of all evil in consumer electronics today. Not just game software and game consoles, but PCs, TVs, smartphones, home automation... Everything requires a totally unnecessary tether to the manufacturer, and only allows you to use it if the manufacturer is 1. still listening to the connection, and 2. is satisfied that you tethered properly.

I shouldn't need an online account to use 99% of the things that I have that currently require an account.

i don't own or use anything that requires me to log in to use it other than games. So it is possible. I don't even use apps or give my cellphone number to corporations.

The Steam DRM is trivially bypassed and they don't seem to be interested in playing the cat/mouse game with it at all. It's not a great argument that you can crack things you already legally purchased, but I'm conflicted. If digital software could be reasonably/legally transferred, then it'd probably put most software companies out of business simply because the digital domain would enable efficient reselling of 'used' copies with an exponential decline in price.

This isn't a problem with physical copies because there's a lot of friction to selling stuff, and there's also something quite nice about having a physical collection of games, music, or whatever else. But with digital stuff there's no friction, and much less incentive to collect. The efficiency of the digital domain really messes with a lot of things we take for granted in the real world.

Again. We need a storage medium that is reliable, has roughly 200GB of capacity, small in size, relatively affordable to press.

Otherwise, there is only one option left, make it illegal to do certain things and ensure the ownership belongs to customers.

Meh, perhaps games from big studios, but the majority of games work fine without DRM. I find indie games and games from small studio a lot more fun and have a lot more soul than most "big studio" games.

For games that require online services, this will always be an inherent issue. But for games that don't, I'm betting on emulation continuing to save the day. When the PS3 was released with its complex/novel architecture, it seemed like an emulator was highly unlikely, but look at how good RPCS3 is now.

On the Microsoft side, they've been incredibly good about first-party backwards compatibility. I bought most of my Xbox 360 games digitally, and I have been able to play them on my Xbox One, Xbox Series X, and now they are even bringing them to PC. My son and I were just playing the timeless classic NBA Jam: On Fire Edition (a 15yo game) a couple of days ago.

Emulation development will probably be significantly enhanced by the ability to use LLMs as well.

>look at how good RPCS3 is now

My understanding is that it's nowhere near the state of, say, PSX emulators around the turn of the century. There's still swaths of late 2000s and 2010s releases that are unplayable without the original hardware.

RPCS3 has come a long way in the last few of years, both in performance and compatibility. Even Metal Gear Solid 4 is supposed to be playable (albeit using game patches) now. And emulating the PS3 architecture, with those weird Cell SPUs, has to be one of the most difficult emulations to implement.

I'm continually impressed by the emulation scene's passion for maintaining access to older games. LLMs/agents will be a force multiplier for that kind of skill and passion.

I guess I view 75% compatibility of the most oddball console architecture ever to be fairly successful. And it is still meaningfully gaining. It was 70% at the start of the year.

Yeah, but I wouldn't put it forward as an example of a great success of game preservation. It may reach that point some day, but it's not there yet.

The part that bothers me is that preservation has become the customer's problem while continued access remains the vendor's decision

Even if you will be able to play "GTA VI" in twenty years it won't be the same game as you grew up with because everything is a constantly changing live service now.