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).