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Comment by WaxProlix | Hacker News Reader

This is a good take. Ownership is one of those things that I feel intuitively is important, and I experience frustration around losing it incrementally. But I struggle to put my concerns into concrete, relatable examples that the everyday user might appreciate. The 'access until it is no longer' narrative seems to fit that pretty well.

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This is something I think we have been hit hard by with video games. The first wave of online enabled games has now had their servers shut down and the games rendered unplayable. One of my favorite childhood games from about 2006 (Viva Pinata) is now unplayable on windows because it used Games for Windows Live which has now shut down. The game is basically entirely offline and single player but is now unusable unless you use the xbox 360 version which works fine because it could be used entirely offline.

Maybe, broadly speaking, that's just the way life is. Things exist for awhile and then they don't. Bands eventually stop touring and seeing them live is a thing of the past. The character of your city is likely quite different as compared to a generation ago. That amazing restaurant went out of business. If those servers were still up, would there be anyone on them to play against?

I can still play all of my c64 games and will be able to in 20 years. Some game I buy today not so much.

I don't expect a band to live forever to keep doing live shows, but if I buy their CD I don't expect someone to break into my home and take it at any point in the future, but plenty of people have lost their music because of shitty DRM schemes and for those who are entirely dependent on streaming their music they will very likely not be able to find some of their favorite songs later, especially for more obscure stuff. I'm glad that I was able to pass some of my favorite games and music and books to the next generation and that they can pass them on to their kids. My collection of favorites will outlive many of the new things they enjoy today.

Maybe that's how people think life is. It didn't used to be like that. It used to be better.

The 7" I bought when I was 10 still plays. So do the tapes I copied in school, though I've moved on from tape. The flacs and mp3s will be around as long as I have a server. I can still play Morrowind - I don't need a server up, and most -not all - online games spoil the game by being online. Quite happy with a LAN mode to play with partner or kids, or ad-hoc server mode to play WAN with friends.

Most online games have been updated so they aren't remotely the same game as they were - especially for things like MMOs, Spotify is an ephemeral radio station, Netflix is reducing what they have every month. Whether it's down to company closing, getting bored of keeping service up for an old game, or stopping your monthly sub, the rate of attrition is frightening.

>If those servers were still up, would there be anyone on them to play against?

It was a single player game. There was never anyone to play against. The online aspects were for DRM only.

I think this happened to many early movies. There are many lost films where we only have written descriptions and still images left. A whole system for film archiving was put in place to prevent this from happening as it was deemed too important to be left into hands of producers. I believe in order to put something out nowdays you are required to provide a copy to archive. Not sure if it is world wide requirement or local though.

Yes, that's the primary reason why I stopped playing most new games. I value the ability to fire up games that I bought 20 years ago (and I do this regularly), and I'm not willing to invest in any that depend on external services.

Same here. I even make a point to grab a cracked copy of any game I buy on steam so that if the service goes under, or they decide to remove it from my library (like when amazon secretly removed copies of "1984" from people's kindles) I'll still have access to the games I paid for.

That goes double for games that come with obnoxious required software like uplay, origin, denuvo, etc.

Check out Good Ol' Games, which includes modern gems like Witcher 3, Hollow Knight, Factorio, Stardew Valley, Indivisible.

Everything on GoG is DRM-free, simple .exe installers that should work without any servers.

Oh, yeah, GOG has quite a lot of my money!

I think a lot of these games are actually drm free on steam as well, gog just only lists drm free games so you can be sure its safe to buy.

I often run games outside of steam so I can let my bf use steam family share at the same time.

You are correct. Being on steam doesn't necessarily mean that a game has DRM. It's up to a game developer to implement steam's DRM or not. Check out the big list of DRM-free steam games:

https://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_DRM-Free_Games...

GoG also provides prebuilt DOSboxes and configurations to allow me to easily run older games, and games on Linux (I only use Linux at home, so that's a big win).

I'm not a fan of Steam, so that's not a real alternative for me.

GoG is run by the developers of Witcher, CD Projekt Red, they are eating their own dogfood.

I really hope someone is maintaining a list somewhere of games we've lost because of DRM or just short sighted design like in the case of Missing (https://www.amazon.com/Missing-PC/dp/B000271MCG) which was dependent on websites and email accounts that the company is either no longer around to maintain or no longer feels it worth maintaining.

Not just online games. Imagine if tomorrow Steam shuts down, you can bet we will lose access to thousands of games forever (as in, some of them are not actively maintained out of Steam anywhere).

It’s easy: when you don’t own anything, you’re at the mercy of your lessor. This is why tenant laws exist (sort of, depending on your location). There’s an inescapable power imbalance involved. Except now more and more goods and services are being leased, and the dwindling middle class means fewer and fewer people can properly own things.

If we intend to continue into a future of perpetual renting, we at least need stronger renter protections.

Europe is heading this way. There was recent news that a country in Europe was planning to require steam to allow users to transfer and sell their games to other accounts.

I feel counter-intuitively enough that music is likely the way many people will relate to in a concrete way. It’s all well and good to trust your service provider until at some point you get nostalgia for a song you “had” or even “owned”, go to queue it up, and find it completely missing. Maybe the record company even took it off YouTube and all the other free platforms, locking it behind their own service.

What tasted and smelled like ownership is suddenly revealed in moments like this.

I experienced this fairly abruptly this year. My toddler loved listening to the Thomas & Friends albums. They were "added to my Library" and an almost daily listen. One day, NONE of these were available. Same thing happened earlier when Disney bought Big Block Singsong.

It's funny, because I'm grateful to have an excuse not to listen to these anymore. But in both cases it was quite disappointing to my kid (and irritating on principle).

Kids love to consume the same thing over and over again. Netflix has a similar effect: beloved tv or movies are suddenly gone without a trace, and no warning that they will be disappearing.

Definitely a low-stakes relatable example.

And nothing is out in the open.

"We just won't tell them this netflix show is going away, it will just upset people. Maybe they won't notice."

(although they do say something about your queue a short time before it disappears)

Just to complete the picture - I recently found a box of VHS tapes at my parents' house of all of the cartoons I watched over and over again as a kid. It was fun seeing them again, and of course they still played fine 30 years later.

Youtube kinda gave me a taste of this, a few days ago. They didn't pull the music, but they pulled all the relevant recommendations. So where I used to listen to a song or album and get a long list of relevant recommendations of music from the same artist, label, uploader, or musical style, I suddenly got nothing but local youtubers' nonsense and gaming streams. After I blocked those (not interested & don't recommend this channel again), I got literally no recommendations at all anymore. It was depressing to realize how reliant I am on a company to faciliate music discovery, knowing that they can change their algorithms and/or block certain content any day.

How about when Zune Pass shut down and obliterated the music collections of people who spent hundreds of dollars in subscription fees? Or when Google bought Revolv, shut down its servers, and turned thousanda of home automation systems into expensive paperweights?

To me every new service feels like another leech sucking at my wallet, of which there are far too many. I much prefer the collections of flacs and mp3s to Spotify and my personal media archive to having a dozen different streaming video subscriptions.

Also, it's not like it's totally either/or. You should be able to own your music and movies, but also be able to pay for a service that manages it - removing the logistics burden, while still ensuring the goods you bought will not disappear when the service goes down.

Plex perfectly encapsulates that philosophy.

Actually I would argue with this: Plex used to, but now find themselves trying to “legitimize” and sacrificing user control in order to do it.

E.g: All logins (including local LAN) go through their servers.

Considering the plethora of bullshit like news and podcasts I find littering my plex home screen, I agree with your point.

The occasional post on HN to the tune of "proprietary solution our company relies on just increased price by 10x - what can we do?" validates your feelings. When you rely on something you don't own, you are in someone else's control. And they tend to use that control to benefit at your expense.

> Ownership is one of those things that I feel intuitively is important, and I experience frustration around losing it incrementally.

I feel this too, but at the same time I wonder how much of this feeling is due to a scarcity mindset. It used to be you had a small, finite amount of music, movies, games etc. and so each one individually was valuable. Maybe people who've grown up in the Netflix/Spotify era just don't get personally attached to particular shows the way we do? There's an infinite amount of stuff to consume so if the thing you were looking for isn't there any more, just have something else.

I've always been one to make strong emotional bonds to the music I listen to. I don't think it's got that much to do with scarcity, it's more about what role the music fills in my life.

Having an endless stream of music just isn't quite as satisfying as picking out the tunes I resonate with and hearing them again and again. And this is exactly what happens when I listen to music streams: I get the urge to pick out the tunes I like. But only after I've heard the same song more than a couple times (it takes time to bond).

I think music becomes kind of an anchor you can (attempt to) rely on when everything else in the world around you is changing. Friends, home town, jobs, apartments, all change... that makes music that remains the same after a decade all that much more comforting.

It's hugely important - just look how the companies in possession of our cloud leverage it.

I'm hopeful creative solutions with decentralization will allow you to retain control even though the vault is in the hands of someone else.

decentralization or fragmented market.

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