Why I no longer buy modern Games.. - by Vipersan
Nameless Voice on 1/8/2019 at 12:38
Eh, with digital goods, people who buy used copies might as well just pirate anyway.
The only purpose of buying games is to give money to the developers, if you're not going to do that, why even bother buying?
icemann on 1/8/2019 at 12:52
True.
Vipersan on 1/8/2019 at 13:58
Hmmm ...perhaps my choice of words 'streamed and borrowed' doesn't really convey how I feel about this.
nonetheless I do feel that buying a digital copy of a game is more like it was 'leased' and not owned.
As I said ..I am of that generation that prefered to own a thing if I payed for it.
Much like some of my favourite movies ..which I own on DVD or Bluray.
..so you can assume from that I dont subscribe to Netflix etc.
rgds
VS
Nameless Voice on 1/8/2019 at 14:20
That's a bad metaphor.
You're comparing buying (Blu-Rays) with renting (Netflix).
The film industry is living in the past and it's not actually possible to buy digital copies of films.
With games, you do own the game. If you want a physical copy, download your installers from GOG and burn them to disc yourself.
That leaves you with the hassle of handling updates yourself, of course.
The cost of a blank disc is fairly negligible.
Vipersan on 1/8/2019 at 14:59
Yep quite so N V ..a bad metaphor ...but just trying to convey my feelings about not owning a 'thing'.
..and dye based discs dont last ...5 years plus gives you many CRC errors.
GOG does at least offer an alternative ..for now at least.
But not the same thing as buying a big box game with all that lovely artwork.
best rgds
VS
icemann on 1/8/2019 at 17:26
I used to only want physical release games. Then my room started looking like a hoarders den. Sold much of it, moved to digital and never looked back.
I love the physical stuff, don't get me wrong. Many of the 80-90s games had fantastic extras in the boxes (eg Crusader No Remorse's extra's were some of my all time favorites), but you only have so much room to put things. If games is to be a lifelong pursuit (as I fully intend for it to be) then there is a point where you just have nowhere to put anything new. At least with digital that isn't an issue.
Of course if the internet were to go down for an extended period of time, then I'd be confined to emulation and my smaller SNES cartridge collections of favorites for a good while. I remember back in the early 2000s having to go without the internet at home for 6 months, after my PC overheated and I couldn't afford the cost to rebuild it. Man that was hell. I'm not sure what was worse. Not being able to play any PC games, or not having the internet.
Starker on 1/8/2019 at 21:19
Up until late 2000s, I used to have physical copies of all my favourite things... games, music, TV series. I stopped for several reasons.
Physical space is limited and I have barely enough for books and board games.
Internet speeds are at a point where it takes mere minutes to download anything but the biggest games.
A digital service gives you easy access to all the updates/patches and DLC.
If either Steam or GOG ever goes belly up, I can just pirate the damn things.
Getting older, I get less and less attached to physical things as death creeps ever closer.
Pyrian on 1/8/2019 at 21:31
Old game I have on Steam or GoG:
Click Install. Wait. Play!
Old game I have on disc:
Look up the patches necessary to make the game work on modern computers.
Find said patches now that their original download locations are long gone.
Read extensive documentation on how to make the various patches work together.
Install that one product that has to go in before you install the game, so it can install at all.
Having acquired patches, put in disc.
...It won't read.
Buy on Steam or GoG.
Click Install. Wait. Play.
WingedKagouti on 1/8/2019 at 23:19
Quote Posted by Pyrian
Having acquired patches, put in disc.
...It won't read.
Buy on Steam or GoG.
Click Install. Wait. Play.
Alternatively:
Realize it's not available for sale on any digital store due to being the center of an unholy mess of licensing issues, split IP ownerships and code rights.
Fortunately for me, things went about as smoothly as one could ever hope when I recently installed Oni on my Win10 machine. Not only did the game install flawlessly directly from the disc on the first try (despite the guides saying Win10 might have issues with the installer), but both the Anniversary Edition and the Windows 10 Installer Fix were available from the links in the guides (even though the latter wasn't needed).
Gryzemuis on 2/8/2019 at 00:33
This year I decided to make my music collection a lot more accessible. I own a very nice stereo-set. And ~500 CDs and ~500 LPs. But I hardly ever listened to them anymore. Sometimes I feel like I can't be bothered to put a CD in, sometimes my cd-player was refusing to take CDs, I can't find a particular CD, I hadn't connected my turntable since I did some work on my house (dust) many years ago, etc, etc.
So I bought me a raspberry pi, using free software called "volumio" to play music. It does everything I want. (In particular: I want to organize my music in folders the way I like it, not have it organized it in some way someone else likes it). I bought a standalone (USB, NAD 1050 D) DAC, to connect the raspberry to my old (analog-only) amplifiers. I'm very happy with the result. A few weeks later I even bought a 2nd set for my bedroom (that has my "old" audio-set).
So then came the music itself. What to do ? People laughed at my face: "use spotify, like everyone else", "what are you, old ? the future is now, old man". Someone proudly yelling "I threw away all my old CDs, now me and my family only listen to spotify". Same deal with people who use iTunes. They're all happy happy all the time. I got a few problems with Spotify myself.
1) I have no control over the user-interface. Spotify doesn't only give you the music, they also give you the website or an app. I don't want that. I want my own software/hardware to play my music. So I can chose the software I like best.
2) Sound-quality is shit. Nobody seems to care. I do. Normal spotify quality is 160 Kbps. If you use the high quality (and pay for it) you get 320 Kbps mp3. On mobile you always get just 96 Kbps. For comparison: CD-quality is 1411 Kbps. That's 9x more information.
3) I already paid for my music ! For many albums, I even paid twice: once for the LP and once for the CD. I'm not gonna pay a third time for the music I already own. Fuck no.
So I started ripping my CDs. I have a friend with a huge CD/LP collection (tens of thousands old LPs). He gave my some LP-rips. Also some friendly Russians gave my some albums that are hard to come by. Anyway, the point is: I now have a large music collection, with all the music that I like, or once liked. I'm at 1400 albums now, 440GB. I can play it on my own two stereo-sets, whenever I want. No Internet needed. I control them via the browser on my tablet, phone or PC. My whole collection fits on a single USB-stick if I want. 95%+ is in cd-quality (flac). I spent a lot of time cleaning it all up: correct titles and artists, adding album-covers, correcting tags, categorizing according to my own opinion, etc. All this makes me really happy. Especially the realization that now I have all "my" music with me. Forever. When I'm 90 years old, in an old folks home, I can't go anywhere, nobody cares about me, poor me. :p But I will be able to listen to Throbbing Gristle and Mazzy Star and SPK and Coil and "I'm in love with a german filmstar" and old 50's rockabilly and everything else I like. In cd-quality. Forever. Without having to pay for it every month. Without advertisements. Without irritating web-pages. Without irritating "UX experiences". Without irritating "suggestions". Without "this music not in our collection anymore". Etc. My music. Forever. My way.
So yeah Vipersan, I can see where you are coming from. My story here is about audio, not games. But I like to "own" my audio too. I don't need cardboard boxes or physical pictures. But I like it to be close. I like it to be mine. I like to know where it is. I like it to be forever.