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Comment by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | Hacker News Reader

I thought the intent was, "We should make the service trustworthy enough that customers are comfortable not owning things"

e.g. Lots of gamers trust Steam. I don't hear of high-profile games going missing from Steam. And unlike a console or streamed game, at least you can back it up and try to crack the DRM in the future. Can't say that about basically any video platform.

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Generally when a game goes missing from Steam you can still play it, they just stop selling new copies due to licensing agreements on things like music expiring.

But The Crew is making news recently for planning to pull the plug on their servers. This will also kill its single-player components because Ubisoft are dicks who made the single-player still require servers.

https://www.ign.com/articles/the-crew-delisted-from-all-digi...

My household has simple rules: no Ubisoft, no Sony, no Blizz/Activision.

It helps that all three have been getting progressively worse over the years.

Just out of curiosity, why Sony? Only negative thing I can recall hearing about them is blocking cross play to protect their console lead, which didn't seem too unreasonable to me.

The Funimation shutdown is Sony

Going back further, installing a rootkit on to customer computers to prevent ripping audio CDs

I think there was a Discovery snafu as well? Like if you bought titles from the Discovery Channel on PSN, you don’t have access to those anymore. But I do think Sony should get a pass here. Or you have to blanket ban all digital goods but that seems detrimental. I understand the feeling though, as I too don’t buy anything digital outside of Steam.

>Like if you bought titles from the Discovery Channel on PSN, you don’t have access to those anymore.

That was cancelled.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011168/sony-playstatio...

I know somebody who has been boycotting them since the rootkit scandal

That was such a terrible move. For people who don’t know: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo...

Well, there was the rootkits, the carpet-pull with regards to the PS3 and OS compatibility promises, the lawsuits against geohot, the SWAT raids and lawsuits against graf_chokolo, and now the digital library shit that's going on with Funi just adds to the history.

The games regularly get pulled from Steam by the publishers, usually when a license for some ingame music expires, but the customers who already own the game typically retain the access to it.

The latest high profile case was the removal of Spec Ops: The Line just last week. Which is especially troubling, because it’s an important part of the gaming history, and it happened with no warning.

Wow, wtf. The music industry really is a disease.

How can a license to use a song in a game lead to the game not being sold any more.

Why would you ever use such a song in a game…

Especially for a AAA release, licensing music seems like little to be gained.

Music games (eg Rockband), I can understand. People want to play music they know. There are very few musical tie-ins in a video game that seemingly make the difference.

GTA Vice City is one where I can think of where the 80s soundtrack makes the game!

I always found it odd how VC and SA had much more recognizable licensed music, while 4/5 went with less known stuff.

Or maybe I'm getting old :)

I think it's also why games with licensed vehicles are way stricter on how they're presented now (no damage models, etc.). As the big brands became more away of video games as a big thing, they held closer control and pricing compared to it being "ehhh, whatever" remnant income

All of the music used in that game is used so perfectly. The game opens to its title screen with an American flag being flown upside down, with Jimi Hendrix shredding out a scratchy, distorted, echo-y, far-off rendition of The Star Spangled Banner on his electric guitar.

Honestly, they should've licensed more music. Could've used Free Bird too.

Here's a list I found of the non-original songs used in Spec Ops: The Line:

01. Jimi Hendrix - Star Spangled Banner

02. Mogwai - R U Still in 2 It

07. Deep Purple - Hush

09. The Black Angels - Bad Vibrations

10. The Black Angels - The First Vietnamese War

14. Giuseppe Verdi - Dies irae

24. Mogwai - Glasgow Mega-Snake

25. Inner Circle - Bad Boys

26. Black Mountain - Stormy High

27. Martha And The Vandellas - Nowhere to Run

30. Björk - Storm

36. Jimi Hendrix - 1983 ... (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)

37. Groove Addicts - Shellshock

38. Methodic Doubt Music - Half The Man

39. Alice In Chains - Rooster

It is much, much, much cheaper to license something for a set time as opposed to perpetual.

The game with Penny Arcade characters and whatnot playing poker is no longer available to be sold because the licenses expired.

It's far from perfect though as some games to able to be sold again are modified to remove certain licensed content like music. This is in detriment of who ever owned the game before that as the game gets a forced update which caused the previous owners to lose access to the original version.

In this case you actually did get a physical copy, the digital one was just a bonus. Nothing stopped you from selling the physical copy and keeping the digital one either.

I think Ubisoft’s intent was more to make customers comfortable with the idea of paying for short-term or ongoing access to content. Their shutdown of online services and DLC for some of their Steam games a few years ago did not exactly inspire confidence.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ubisoft-titles-pulled-from-ste...

When you think of 90%+ of your (PC) customers as thieves then it's easy to be scummy?

I think a large part of steams success is that they have not messed up... Yet. The other online game marketplaces look at steams success and want their piece of the pie yet forget this critical fact. It takes a long time to trust a company to guard the keys of the digital items you "own". sarcastiquotes because ownership is very weak with these services.

Anecdotal evidence.. myself, It took me 5 years of steam behaving itself before I bought anything on it. I am perhaps not a reference customer. I am a bit paranoid, I really dislike this "half" ownership that online purchases grant you, drm makes me nervous. yet still because steam has remained a stalwart reliable service, it has faded into the background, unobtrusive, and most of my games are on it. I still get a bit sick to my stomach when I think what I will lose when, not if, steam management starts "messing up"

Nope. It simply meant "We like owning things and renting them out indefinitely." It has nothing to do with trust.

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