>>321959
>Games for Windows Live has rendered half a dozen titles unplayable
Bullshit!
My copies of
Halo 2,
GoW,
MS Flight, and
Lost Planet work perfectly fine despite M$ axing the service several years ago. The only thing I cannot access is the multiplayer features. The only game I have that's an exception to this is
GTA4. However, that's
NOT because of GFWL. The reason I cannot play that title is because of
Rockstar's DRM. There's the disc DRM, the release date DRM, and the R* launcher DRM, with the biggest irony of the matter being that R* eventually released patches to the latter two that either break them entirely or remove them because they're
that bad and prevented people from even playing the game when it launched 15 years ago.
>and a recent study from the Video Game History Foundation estimated that 87% of digital games released before 2010 are “critically endangered.”
That's not even close to what the study said. What VGHF was concerned about was that you cannot "acquire" 87% of games
from an online storefront. To put it in perspective, it doesn't matter whether or not you can buy a copy of
Bujingai or
Rygar straight off of Mercari, what "matters" is that you cannot buy them from the Switch eShop, the Xbox store, PSN, Steam, Origin, Uplay, nor GoG. I don't need to explain how retarded this notion is.
>but there’s a larger conversation here about what platforms are doing to protect the thousands of dollars gamers spend on digital software
To put it simply,
it's not their problem. The people that should be concerned about this being an issue is the customer as it's their responsibility to secure their ownership of their games. I did this several years ago when I emailed every company who I bought games from on Steam, and many were happy to oblige with providing a DRM-free copy of the game for my own personal use. If I can do that, so can everyone else.
>It may seem like we’re on solid footing now, but what happens in a decade or two? Will you still be able to access the games you’ve purchased on half a dozen different storefronts?
It's a rather simple issue to solve on consoles because all you need to do is jailbreak the system, and then backup a copy of the software you bought on your PC.
>It’s a fair question to ask, and one that is unique to PC as a platform.
PC is a whole
other issue because
every game released on PC since 2012 does not exist as a physical disc, it's an install disc for an online storefront with a CD key on a card that grants you access to download the game from said storefront. That's the situation that exists with my copies of
Star Trek D-A-C and
Modern Warfare 2.
>There are ways around this — Bethesda’s launcher shut down last year, and you’re still able to migrate your licenses over to Steam
How about modding the game like I did with my physical copy of
Assassin's Creed 2, to remove Uplay entirely from it?
>Earlier this year, I wanted to catch up on Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which I had purchased on Steam. I was blocked for around six hours from playing because I hadn’t signed into the new EA App
Why didn't you refund the game
immediately when it asked for you to sign up for another service?
>The backlash against Ubisoft for a support response showcases the fear PC players have when it comes to the ownership of their games.
Not me. I own all of my shit. Or, found a way to own them for others.
>there hasn’t been an effort from publishers like Ubisoft, EA, and Rockstar to allow players to actually own the things they’ve purchased
Then, don't buy games from those companies.
>We have a solution, though: DRM-free games. Platforms like GOG allow you to actually own a game you purchase.
Isn't GoG currently in the process of implementing their
own DRM?
>The problem, of course, is piracy.
No, it's not. A major part of the reason why many works have survived the test of time was entirely due to piracy. Even then, the pirates are not going to be buying the game anyway, regardless of how many layers of DRM your enforce, so why waste time trying to stop that?
>The company’s end user license agreement reads in capitalized text: “This product is licensed to you, not sold.”
That's
NOT what that means. What the "license, not sold" part of the EULA is referring is the company is selling you that individual copy of the game you own, but
NOT the rights to the entire game itself. For all all intents and purposes, that copy of
Spyro for the PS1 sitting on your shelf is your and yours alone, that you can do whatever you want with (Including making backups), until you give that copy away to someone else. What you
don't have a right to is the unlimited rights to
Spyro for the PS1, as those still belong to Activision. To put it another way, you're buying the "license" to own that one copy
Spyro in your possession, but not acquiring the "license" to someone else's copy of
Spyro, nor the overall "rights" to
Spyro that are still retained with Activision.
In addition, I wonder if this is the author of the article throwing a red herring into the matter. The "license, not sold" part of the EULA is a part of
EVERYTHING ever sold. Hell, pull up the manual to a refrigerator, and you'll see something along those lines. So, no, that doesn't grant the company the ability to do whatever they want to your games. What
DOES, however, is the section in the EULA where it says, in plain English, that the company can revoke you access to your game at any point in time. Here's the section Steam's EULA:
https://archive.li/R6rtc#9
<Valve may restrict or cancel your Account or any particular Subscription(s) at any time in the event that (a) Valve ceases providing such Subscriptions to similarly situated Subscribers generally, or (b) you breach any terms of this Agreement (including any Subscription Terms or Rules of Use). In the event that your Account or a particular Subscription is restricted or terminated or cancelled by Valve for a violation of this Agreement or improper or illegal activity, no refund, including of any Subscription fees or of any unused funds in your Steam Wallet, will be granted.
In other words, Steam plainly says you own nothing when you use their store.
>So, Ubisoft, or any other major publisher on PC, go ahead and delete my games. I don’t have much of a say in that process anyway.
Yes, you do. You don't use those platforms. You don't buy games from companies that prevent you from owning the game you just bought.
TL;DR: The author's trying to declare that "you own nothing", there's nothing you can do to prevent it, so just shut up and learn to live with it.