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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

Do not buy console titles you think are good enough to replay later on consoles except on disc.

That's for games. For video content, i'd say do not "buy" anything digital. The video content industry has Kafkaesque licensing agreements and a pathological fear of "piracy" so you're guaranteed to lose access either because someone's agreement thrice removed from whoever you "bought" the content from expired, or because the latest copy protection that was in fashion when you "bought" it is now unsupported.

Edit: hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.

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Buying discs doesn't protect you anymore. Almost everything requires a server connection and they can require you to upgrade to play.

I have a physical copy of Overwatch 1. When Overwatch 2 came out, it was an "upgrade" to Overwatch 1, and they simultaneously killed all Overwatch 1 servers. Nobody can play Overwatch 1 anymore.

Maybe Nintendo Switch is the way. It seems physical copies only protect you on platforms where offline use is standard.

I'm talking about single player games. Multiplayer used to be fun but now they're all IAP fests so I ignore them and have no opinion on them.

Edit: and duh. When you buy a game that's only played online you're dependent on the servers staying up. It's logical.

There are other kinds of games though.

>I'm talking about single player games.

This means nothing, there have been piles of single player games that have required a connection check before working. Sim City 4 was an example of this.

And, even buying it and not having that check doesn't mean that it won't be updated to require a server (you have an actual disk to reinstall right, because the original installer may disappear too).

SimCity (2013), not SimCity 4. SimCity 4 was the last beloved SimCity game, released in 2003.

You're talking about EA, Ubisoft and Rockstar titles there. Case closed.

Incidentally, if you must get something from those 3, they're forbidden to require an account on at least the PlayStation. Not sure about XBox.

do they need to list every single player game that has a day one patch not included on a physical disc? I guess we haven't gotten so far in game patching that some retro gamers buy a new copy of a game and can't update to 1.0.0 now.

The companies I listed require an account with them, not day one patches.

Both affect the ability to play a game out of the box, should servers be down.

Only multiplayer online games. For single player, especially on consoles that still have a bit of QA left, you can live with 1.0.0.

And look on the bright side. If you're stuck on 1.0.0 you're missing the microtransactions they introduced in 1.0.1 after the reviewers finished publishing their reviews.

Edit: why do I get the feeling most of the people disagreeing with me only play PC games from the big 4-5 names? In which case I completely agree with them.

You can still play Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament (1999) online, because third-party game servers used to be the normal way online games worked. Hell, Team Fortress 2 is only playable on third-party servers, as the official servers are full of cheaters.

Many modern games that have only a single-player mode are still intentionally dependent on the servers staying up, and games that have both single-player and online modes will prevent you from playing the offline mode if they can't connect to the servers.

> Almost everything requires a server connection and they can require you to upgrade to play.

This is overstating the (very real) problem. While there are certainly classes of games for which this is true, the majority of games work totally fine offline forever.

Your example, Overwatch, is an online-only multiplayer game. Yes, it's bad you bought a disk that's now just a coaster. But, I don't think it's representative of the vast number of single-player games for which servers don't even exist. There are certainly single-player exceptions (GTA V, the recent Hitman trilogy, etc), but.

There's also a set of PC games from the early aughts that depended on the now-defunct Gamespy servers to run. There's a fairly complete list here (https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/22fz75/list_of_games...). While that's certainly not 0, it still doesn't strike me as "almost everything".

Also worth noting that I'm not defending these systems - just nothing that it's not as bad as you make it out to be.

>While there are certainly classes of games for which this is true, the majority of games work totally fine offline forever.

not necessarily. The prevalence of day one patches means certain single player games may legitimately not work properly because they expect users to at least home in once to get the content they couldn't ship on disc. But they rely on those last minute content to not have major bugs.

The problem is that so many games ship with day-1 updates since they ship on disc buggy and in some cases unplayable. If you need to play the game on a different console that hasn't downloaded the updates and the servers have been shut down then you're doomed to a worse experience.

Piracy (and a PC) is the only option at that point.

To me, this pretty much makes the physical disc a hardware dongle proof of purchase type of item more than a source of code for the game.

Funnily enough the Nintendo Switch actually fixes this. Consoles can share updates peer-to-peer, and it's actually super nifty for local multiplayer groups.

I'm really surprised by that, but that's neat. The next step would be allowing users to export the (probably signed and encrypted) update packages onto their own media for backup on their own terms.

> Edit: hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.

With arrival of the holiday season I brought out my Christmas CDs and records from storage. I use these exclusively for music in the house/car/etc., and part of why is that I have kids and I want them to be able to inherit these some day. I understand that physical media degrades and they may not be able to "use" these at some point, but they'll still have the objects and know exactly what versions they "grew up with" and could potentially track down / make replacements. (See also: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/217710-this-milord-is-my-fa...)

I've had family members pass and I've appreciated having physical things I can hang onto, especially things like tools, music, and books where I can use/listen/read and feel a connection with them.

(Full disclosure I also prefer physical games, music, and books in general both for my own consumption and for ownership rights reasons.)

This doesn't have to be an either/or situation: You can have the physical CDs, and use them for as long as they last, and also rip them to have the digital files that you own.

Sure, the HDDs and SSDs you store them on will degrade over time, too—but you can transfer the digital files to new ones, with perfect fidelity, as many times as you want.

it's actually a reasonably cost-effective way to collect music by going to used book stores and buying used CDs, then ripping them and serving them to yourself with something like Navidrome so that you have the convenience of streaming w/ the physical disk on a shelf somewhere

I can't stand the stupid streaming "But not on THIS service" model of movie watching, so this is how I do movies. $5 on ebay gets you pretty much any DVD you want, $100 or so for a box set of some television show, and ripping DVDs is literally one click. I've wanted to switch to BluRays lately, because HD, and they are barely more expensive than DVDs on ebay, but ripping blurays is NOT trivial.

Standard Blu Rays? Are you sure about that? I started ripping my blus at the beginning of the year and don't remember it being more difficult than buying any random Blu ray drive, downloading MakeMKV and clicking the start button.

Now, I'll 100% agree about 4K Blu rays. I got lucky in that I bought one of the handful of drives that supports ripping 4k disks (since its encryption keys were leaked?) but even after that it required finding and flashing custom firmware that was a hassle. But I got it working which is cool.

I used to be in the physical disk camp until during a move my ps4 and media collection was stolen. Bought a new ps4, deactivated the stolen ps4 from the account, activated the new ps4 and was able to download all the digital games. The disk games I had to repurchase which in many cases I never bothered. There were only a handful of games that were worth it. No system is perfect...

Yes, but in this case whoever stole your stuff wasn't the person that sold it to you :)

On the other hand they did replace what was stolen from me unlike the vendors of physical versions...

Sadly, for video content there's not likely to be any physical ownership within a few years.

At this point, I'd say ever. Not sure what you think will happen within a few years that will change.

Right now there's bluray still, but my understanding is that that's likely to go away too in a few years.

why? There are still DVDs being sold of new movies.

It's definitely a niche instead of the default at this point, but I don't see Blu-Rays going away entirely for at least a decade.

It could be longer, but for example Best Buy is stopping stocking bluray in the US. I believe manufacturers are stopping making players too. If streaming can further close the quality gap then it's hard to imagine it'll last a decade.

I've found Amazon Video to be fairly consistent. I don't buy many movies, nor rewatch them often, but they have done well by me. But the video game companies are fond of planned obsolescence and have happily abandoned their customers for decades. Buying a video from Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony is just asking to have it disappear when they build their next "Store."

Amazon is no safer in this respect.

https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490#:~:text=Ava....

"Availability of Purchased Digital Content. Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service, as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming."

I think every service that doesn't allow you to download the video in MP4 will have something like this. Amazon just seems to not have exercised this option on me yet.

I can't say the same for the Playstation store. In the future I would love to have a digital collection of DVDs and BluRay backed up to Glacier or something.

On you, yet. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010912

> Do not buy console titles you think are good enough to replay later on consoles except on disc.

The Xbox store has been great for me. And their backwards compatibility is amazing; I've bought and played Xbox 360 Lego games with my son on the Xbox One.

>For video content, i'd say do not "buy" anything digital.

the streaming wars more or less solved that problem already. No one is even pretending to sell you content on Netflix, D+, Hulu, Paramount, etc. And that is what's reigning surpreme.

>hey, can your kids inherit your "digital content"? They can inherit your disc collection.

in theory, sure. They can take control of your accounts. I'm guessing a kid that far off is about as likely to log into my old PSN as they are to hunt down an ancient PS3/4 to play an old disc though.

> The video content industry has Kafkaesque licensing agreements

Isn't the same happening with video games? I've seen video games remove some music from their soundtracks as their limited-time licenses lapsed.

It's not just video games and music. Adobe Lightroom 6 was sold with a perpetual license, but its mapping and object detection libraries did not have a perpetual license, so even though you can run Adobe Lightroom 6 with your perpetual license today, those features no longer work unless you fiddle with your system clock.

Why is this my problem? Personally, I think companies should simply not lie about what they're offering for my money.

To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if this Playstation move ends in a lawsuit.

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