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Comment by aylmao | Hacker News Reader

This is actually a great point, and one thing that has me skeptical of Stadia and other upcoming game-streaming services.

People who never got rid of their NES can still play their games. If it breaks, they could buy another one, or maybe even try to fix it themselves.

Once a service shuts down, you don't really have anything to keep or to revisit. If there was a Stadia-only game in the future, could you somehow get a copy and run it on local hardware to keep playing if Stadia shut down? Could you do it easily.

Super Mario Bros, Classic Tetris, etc. they still have active communities of speed-runners, tournaments, etc. It's kind of weird that something with the level of cultural impact a videogame can have could all of a sudden disappear because it doesn't exist anywhere but in a centralized space outside the control of the people who experienced it.

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You don't even need to imagine it!

Satellaview [1] was a "game streaming" service for SNES games in Japan way back when. Sure, it was more like the "game passes" of today, in that you paid a subscription to be able to access games for limited time.

Back then the games were actually sent and stored to the user's device, and played from there, with additional content in the form of high-quality music and audio streamed if you played in the correct times of day.

Now, since the games themselves have been backed-up by conscious individuals, the streamed data was inaccessible, which renders a bunch of the games practically unplayable since the company shut the service down.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview#SoundLink

Sometimes I feel like removing ownership from the consumer is the goal of moving everything into a subscription service.

The goal is to extract more revenue from the consumer, losing ownership is largely a byproduct of that.

It is, because you can't get a continuous stream of payment with ownership.

Services have been profitable partially because it eliminates volatility in the amount of demand.

Software developers have discovered that people are bad at measuring value and they are bad at delivering additional value over time. Subscriptions always cost more and force a decision every year.

I play Super Mario brothers on my old Nintendo every couple of years. No revenue has been realized since 1986 or whatever. Just a payment for the NES and game.

Today, you can get unlimited access to virtually all music made in the last century or every show made by Disney ever for less than a subscription to some goofy text editor.

And even better they can grab a pile of FOSS software, hide it behind their paywalls and don't give a neither a dime, not code back.

See "Games as a service is fraud":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw

If you have an hour, I'd highly recommend giving this a watch. It is really sad to see any form of media die forever at the whim of a corporation. Games are especially prone to this unfortunately

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