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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

This is why I still try so hard to buy physical copies of games, and if there is a GOTY Edition, to have the DLC be on-disk, as opposed to being a bunch of download vouchers.

I wanna be able to play the freaking game in ten years without worrying about whether the game/console's online service is still available to do some mandatory authentication or version check.

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Unfortunately, a lot of new releases need a 0-day patch to be playable. It's basically an anti-piracy/anti-early release measure.

So if you really want to preserve a game on disk, you pretty much have to pick up another copy stamped at a later date to include all of the patches.

GOTY editions rarely need 0-day patches.

Right, that would be the "copy stamped at a later date which includes all the patches" version I was mentioning that you'd want to pick up if you own a new release copy.

For non-Nintendo Switch games, I buy from GOG whenever possible. It does require different taste in games (I grew up on Quest for Glory, Space Quest, and King’s Quest). You get a tried-and-true game, DRM-free, usually for dirt cheap, and it probably doesn’t require an RTX video card. It’s not for everyone, but it’s worked great for me.

Calling it anti piracy is a bit of a stretch. It's just that companies realized that the printing of the physical media is no longer the point of no return from a development standpoint.

> This is why I still try so hard to buy physical copies of games

Aren't these also subject to disk rot?

Disk rot is slower than online service rot. The other day I tried FC3 blood dragon and it had an error because they shut the servers down. It hasn't even been 10 years.

It's certainly a possibility, but anecdotally, I have audio CDs from the late 80s that still play.

Meanwhile, I have games I played 3-4 years ago on the PS3 that are severely hampered because the online components no longer work--the servers were either shut down, or in one case the company completely went under.

I stopped this the day I had to try an emulate a DOS environment to run a simple game.

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