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Comment by jaylittle | Hacker News Reader

This is one reason I'm over and done with proprietary consoles. So tired of shitty company's like Nintendo being able to call any kind of shot. They may still know how to make fun games and do that on accessible and reasonably priced hardware, but beyond that they are an objectionable and ass-backward company on so many levels.

I vote with my dollar. I vote against Nintendo.

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Consoles are not the only place where this is happening. More PC games are requiring always-online access even for singleplayer content. User experience be damned.

I just had to refrain from a Steam purchase because I saw that it requires the Origin launcher, an EA account, and is always online. For a singleplayer game. Madness.

I remember when SimCity 2013 launched and caused a massive controversy because it required a constant online connection in order to play the game. The Xbox One also had to do calls home every few days to allow you to play games you purchased before Microsoft backtracked when it caused bad PR for them.

It only took a decade but now this stuff is just common practice and nobody cares about paying $100 for digital purchases that will be ripped away from them when some server is shut down in a few years.

Honestly, physical games are kind of a bust at this point too. Many games are shipped with incomplete versions of the game on the disc, and you're required to download some of, if not majority of the game when you insert it. Hell, some games are sold in physical cases but you open them up and instead of getting a disc/cartridge you get a piece of paper with a download code.

I don’t disagree in principal but what exactly is the alternative? Playing SuperTuxKart and Pingus or some other open source games all the time? I hate the “service-ification” of everything, but I think it’s a near-monopoly that’s kind of hard to avoid.

There’s sites like GOG that give DRM-free versions of games, and I like GOG a lot, but it’s still fundamentally a proprietary service that could shut its doors down tomorrow. I know that I personally do not have all my GOG games backed up, and I am one of the rare people that has enough disk space to actually do that, so I doubt I am weird here.

lots of steam games have no drm

They require steam to be running, don't they?

What happens if steam goes away?

Nope. Adding the "steam has to be running" check is an optional step the game developer performs before they upload their game to steam. The dev can go out of their way to wrap their .exe in the steam DRM.

If the dev does not do this, there is no steam DRM. lots of games dont use it, remember kenshi as an example.

A lot of games on Steam can run without running Steam

It's trivial to bypass that check using a Steam "emulator"

That's not the same as not having DRM

It's like a game only runs on Windows, but also run on Wine

There also often software to strip the drm out of direct purchase games.

The existence of drm removal tools does not make a product drm free, in the same way ms office isn't open source if you steal the source code.

Several run completely fine without Steam running (or even installed)

Vote with your dollar and support an open source game like 0ad then.

https://play0ad.com/community/donate/

Until there is a proven revenue model to pay people to work on open source games there won’t be many.

My partner and I decided to buy a Wii together for our first Christmas in 2009. We had a lot of fun playing online with our friends and strangers until the services went offline.

It looks like those servers went offline in 2014, but it felt like we didn't get this service for very long.

We pretty much decided from that experience we'd never buy a console again.

> They may still know how to make fun games and do that on accessible and reasonably priced hardware, but beyond that

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ

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