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This is literally already the case with GeForce Now - you're NOT allowed to play your whole library because the publishers sued nVidia for allowing you to play the GAME YOU OWN on the machines YOU PAY FOR in their cloud.

>GAME YOU OWN

You can't own games. You can only get a license to play one.

I own a game called "Project Rito". It's a VR prototype where your arms are wings and you use them to sail on updrafts, occasionally allowing yourself to drop freely to fire your bow.

I just need to improve the graphics a bit as it's mostly place-holder stuff for now.

It's not a great game(yet), but god's damnit it's mine!

.... Wait, it's made in unity, I don't really own that game either, do I?

You're also using concepts and tradmarks from Zelda and the Youtube channel for "Project Rito" appears to be for somebody else's cosplay, so it sounds like you own a little slice of a game.

I'd like to play it though. Maybe "Project Birdperson"? Nobody would name a character "Birdperson".

Heh, yeah, the name, much like most of the game, is place holder stuff at this point. I hope Nintendo won't sue me until I publish, if I ever even get that far!

A license with very specific terms and conditions, it appears.

It certainly feels like it's going that way now: subscriptions for everything! I much prefer buying legacy/retro games from GOG to be honest.

GOG sells new games, too! Just pointing it out so other readers know its an option.

I have no idea why you are being downvoted. As much as I wish otherwise, what you say is entirely correct.

In some limited sense it is kind possible to own some games, the ones that exist on physical media and play on devices that do not require online connectivity. But even in the case of GOG, which sells DRM free games you can download, you aren't really the "owner" of anything tangible - you have a license to use the software. The fact that you may have a copy of the files is not the same as owning anything.

Owning physical media is not the same. You still need a license to be able to play it.

Indeed, but on non-connected pieces of physical hardware that use physical media, the experience is similar enough to "owning" something that generally thinking about such things in terms of "ownership" makes sense (even if it's just a convenient fiction).

In the modern era though, with DRM and phoning home etc, it's much more obvious that you "own" nothing.

A man walks into a store, picks up a game, pays for it, and takes it home; he never agrees to a license or signs a contract.

He puts it in the game console, it starts up, and he plays it, and still hasn't agreed to any license or contract.

I'm not declaring that you're wrong, but I suspect these "publisher's wishlist" licenses and terms may not hold up in court in the event of someone violating those terms.

Just because someone writes something down doesn't make it true, and that describes a great many EULAs, too.

If someone doesn't have a license to use it, then wouldn't using it be copyright infringement.

We may be mixing up our terms, when you say "license", I don't generally think of the same kind of "license" as would be implied for e.g. a paperback. I think it's implied we're talking about software-style licenses.

I think of a long, rambling contract with made-up terms and obligations you never agreed to at purchase time, EULA style.

So yes, you get a license-to-use-and-lend-and-resell with your purchase as you do with books, music, and movies, but the EULA and TOS type stuff are probably fiction, I think. I'm no expert, but afaik it's not well-tested legally, and first-sale doctrine counts for a lot.

I think it's interesting - this is the opposite of "games trapped in the cloud", it's games trapped on your computer away from the cloud. I don't mean it as a simple quip, but what should be take from people protesting about this opposite thing too.

This is exactly what’ll happen. It’ll start as bring your own library with the odd exclusive, but eventually it’ll evolve into the only way to play AAA games.

The pricing isn’t great either. I tried the 3080 tier for $25 CAD per month. It was really cool, but not realistic for my gaming budget. To me the pricing looks bad even with the hyper inflated, unrealistic prices of GPUs right now. I can buy a 3080 for about 3 years worth of GeForce Now (3080) and after 3 years I still have a half decent card to hand down to someone else.

Personally I’ve always been a mid-range gamer at best, so the priority tier is closer to reality for me. That’s $13 CAD per month. I’m sure they used to advertise it as a 3060. If they hadn’t managed to hyper inflate GPU prices that would be a joke. Even now I paid $290 CAD for an RX6600XT (refurb, but seems brand new) which is less than 2 years of the priority subscription.

My GPU before that was an RX480 for $200 CAD (new). That was a decent entry-mid range card 5 years ago, so the $150-$300 per year as pricing while buying market share makes me think the goal is a massive increase in the cost of gaming. Nvidia is out of touch IMO.

Also factor in that Nvidia probably only needs 1 card per X subscribers and it’s obvious there’s already huge margin. With AMD as the only GPU competitor we’re destined for some serious price gouging. I’m rooting for Intel ARC.

> I can buy a 3080 for about 3 years worth of GeForce Now (3080) and after 3 years I still have a half decent card to hand down to someone else.

Yeah but you need to have a desktop PC to start with. And also don’t forget to add the energy prices.

You need a PC anyway the price differential is nearly exactly the price of the GPU over the useful life of the GPU given that most users keep their hardware for about 6 years its 700 to buy once, 1200-1400 if you intend to buy the next best thing in 4 years and potentially sell the old one, or 2160 to rent something that can play a tiny fraction of the total games if they don't decide to take it away because its not economical at a moments notice.

If you game 10 hours a week the difference in power usage is probably about $30 a year kind of a rounding error.

Hell, the RX480 is still holding up absolutely fine in 2022 (I guess it helped that the GPU manufacturers keep distracting themselves with "This time we'll find a use-case for path tracing!"?). These subscription prices are crazy.

Attachment to games will change. If you go in with the knowledge that the experience is epheremal (as all experiences are by their very nature!), it will be easier to let one go (not pay the rent anymore) and go into the next. Network effect of course will be horrible, if everyone plays something, surely many will pay the rent just to not feel the fear of missing out.

The second point, indie games will absolutely exist, even if AAA will go in this rent extracting direction. The next Stardew Valley will come along, just as it did in the age where AAA is $60. SV is $12 in my region on Steam.

I don't want literature, film, or music to be "ephemeral", and I don't want to be unable to show these things to my friends and family.

I don't want games to be ephemeral either. They are a form of art as valid as any of those others. Often, games combine all those forms into one magnificent modern whole.

I want to be able to examine and study games as a form of art, the same way film & lit students study those things; I can't do that if they get pulled from the streaming service to get a tax cut, ala HBO. The only option is offline.

I think we can discuss two things here, what will happen and what should happen.

For the "should" part, I think it'd be great if software would somehow expire, and then become free software, as in, code and assets too. I'm not a lawyer or anything but as artwork goes public domain after a while, so should software and its assets. It would be great "for the people" so that the experience wouldn't go away as abandonware and I'm sure projects would spring up that would make them playable again on current architecture - similar to how GOG started out originally.

For the "will happen" part, streaming services will go the Netflix way, work great for a short while (we're at this part I think), then the games would be pulled from third party services only to be played exlusively at specific services, while the first streaming only gaming sensation would spring up... so rent seeking basically, for gaming.

I'll add to what should and what will happen a third category: what could happen. But first:

The problem with public domain is that there's no legal requirement for the publisher to give it away once the copyright expires (if they are the sole possessor). If something is legally public domain but no one has a copy, then it doesn't matter.

If we had a library of deposit (publishers legally have to provide a copy to e.g. the library of congress) for commercial software like we do for books, that would fix that.

Another thing that could happen is that consumers could just reject game streaming like they did in the 80s (GameLine) 90s (Sega Channel) and 00s (OnLive)... I think those were technical, not consumer rejection problems though, but I'd be glad to be wrong. Nevertheless, I'll do my part by never paying for a cloud game. If consumers reject it, it'll die off and games will continue as before. I also hope the PS5 digital fails; already I can't use a bunch of PS3 game features (gran turismo track editor, dlc, etc) since the servers are shut down.

One more thought: mods and custom servers can do special things that people love, and that will always be viable, and worth a lot of money. If Arma II were a cloud only game, DayZ wouldn't have been made, which means neither would PUBG or Fortnite have arisen. Maybe the concept of mods will always keep the local game alive?

The library plan sounds fantastic.

I don't think you're wrong with regards to past consumer rejection. I think people were now primed with the spread of internet and the SAAS / cloud culture that followed in the 2000s, then in the meantime smartphones happened, lootboxes / gacha became normal on phones then later in the wider gaming culture, music streaming gained steam and Netflix finally made a successful media streaming service... normalizing consumer behaviors which were previously alien to many consumers. But now the market is ripe for cloud gaming to become popular. Sometime in the 2010s maybe game passes on console also become a thing - the type of payment when as long as you hold the subscription, you have access to the downloaded game. I think that considering these changes in gaming and consumer behavior explain why cloud gaming is now acceptable enough to be profitable, or to be a thing at least.

Regarding Arma II and DayZ, and so on, I don't particularly like this type of thought experiment. I think if we allow the liberty, the opposite conclusion can also be drawn: think how much productive these people could have been if they haven't wasted their energy in these mods. Or what else could they have made - contributing to free software instead, or any other social good. And the ideas are also not original, I mean in general; the light bulb, the radio and the telephone all got invented independently in different parts of the world, so, Arma II being a cloud only game, we wouldn't have DayZ and so on, but we'd have something other that made battle royale a popular gaming phenomenon.

I think you're onto something with modders. I think local / non-cloud gaming will be alive as long as there are devices that run third party software without much issue. The games might not be very advanced or flashy, the AAA titles will surely go extract as much rent as possible, but I'm sure that the next Minecraft, Stardew Valley, or Teeworlds will get made, as these all began (or still are) passion projects of a single person, and sometimes, people just want to give. So I think passion projects will keep the local game alive - be it modding, an indie game or free software.

> P.S., thank god for indie developers who make games without input from accountants and psychiatrists who specialize in addiction, they may save us all yet.

Yes, I think indies (and AA studios before they inevitably get bought out) will always keep the art alive. Of course that means missing out on some types of games that are simply not feasible for smaller groups or without significant up front funding.

> There's also a glimmer of hope at gog.com where they still sell real games without DRM.

That is no longer true for all games on GOG unfortunately [0]. Similarly Steam does require games to have DRM once downloaded and there are many that you can just copy and run wherever you want (without a technical restriction anyways). I wouln't count on any distributor to have a significant effect on the keeping games clean.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24419237

This is all true… but GeForce now let’s you bring your own gaming library. If you ever decide you don’t want to stream - you can build a gaming PC like people already do.

Those games that come out to $1500 over a decade? Don’t forget that a decade is probably 2x $2000 for building gaming PCs.

> This is all true… but GeForce now let’s you bring your own gaming library.

Some of your gaming library, for example no Blizzard games are playable. Though this is not Nvidia's fault. I think a few publishers realized where this is going and pulled their games by threatening to sue so they could work towards a streaming service of their own.

They let you bring your own games for now, once they're entrenched, games will be locked in exclusives.

$1500 per subscription service, think, netflix apple disney yadda yadda, it might cost $5000 or more to play the half-dozen major games you like.

Don't be fooled by the temporal marketing, the long term strategy is in place, and it ends with them screwing you out of something you once loved.

Well, then when those streaming only games come out, I won’t play them. This isn’t a trap at this point, because they are renting a replaceable commodity.

There's a good chance it won't stay that way.

> ..you can build a gaming PC like people already do.

With the trend that the comment above you is describing, there wont be any option to build your own gaming PC because the market has shifted to streaming services by renting out both hardware and software through the cloud because that is more profitable.

This is where Netflix was 7 years ago. It was allowed access to the catalog until the IP owners finished building their own streaming platforms. It’s isn’t that much different in gaming except the very low latency requirement probably means much higher costs of entry.

I've historically got along fine with $600-$800 machined used for 6 years at a stretch. My current machine is a $700 affair with a Geforce 1080 which plays all games at 1080p and some at 4k. I guess the GPU is about half the value so I guess if you divided that by 72 months gaming on my hardware instead of someone else's costs about $4.86 a month. I shouldn't be surprised if more people are gaming on the cheap than building $2000 machines.

Disregarding this is comparing the cost of leasing or buying a Porsche while ignoring the fact that the Carolla exists.