this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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the whole point is to stop you from owning physical media so they can arbitrarily raise prices by creating artificial cause and demand through artificial scarcity.
anyone remember when the argument for digital goods was " We wont have to waste money on boxes, printing, media, storage, or shipping! So your goods will be cheaper than ever, and everyone will still get a more profitable cut!"
Pepperidge farm Remembers, because Pepperidge farm called bullshit on the argument back at the very start, and said they would get rid of physical media, not lower prices, and that we would lose ownership of our purchases... and the internet poopoo'd me to hell in back calling me paranoid and stupid for it.
and look where we are.
and its so goddamn fucked up I don't even get a single molecule of serotonin from being right about it.
The internet is chock full of idiots who piss all over Cassandra
who?
Not sure if joking, but just in case:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra
I would not in a thousand years have guessed greek mythology reference, lol
Now you know: you (and I) have the Curse of Cassandra
It fits.
Considering thats how its been my whole life.
Someone in my family once got severe burns on their hands cause i told them a pot was hot (It had been sitting on a grill, not like..a turned off stove where it had time to cool), to not touch it, and they rolled their eyes at me and said "what do you know" and picked it up.. And yet it was my fault their hands were in bandages afterwards.
I dunno. Steam did it well enough. I was buying cheap games for years. I could get a kick ass GOTY game for like $5 while GameStop was still selling it used on consoles for $20.
You do realize you don't "own" anything on Steam right? Every dollar you give them is towards a "subscription" to play the game.
While companies like Nintendo continually kill off game accessibility, Steam doesn't really take away games from anyone. Digital distribution may not be ownership, but Steam in particular hasn't given reason to worry.
For now but one day some corporation will buy Steam and turn into the endshitcation like all the rest.
Until that time will try to enjoy it while we can.
This is why I buy from GOG
While true for some games that require their online services. There's nothing keeping you from downloading a game and backing up the install files on your own media to play later... A lot of games will run without steam open if you just run the executable...
That makes this even more depressing. Sailing the high seas is the life for me.
But where to store it all now?
More hard drives. RAID, rotate them out when they fail, more backups too. lol
Sounds pricey. Discs are cheap.
I've never had a CD/DVD R last more than a year anyway, even when using expensive media and slow burn speeds. So its not exactly archival.
? Have disc qualities been declining? Most of mine last 5-10 years easy, but I also avoid the cheapest option if I can. I also am talking from 10-15 years ago, as practically speaking I rarely burn things to disc anymore.
Agree its not great for very long term storage though.
What would be?
Right now, probably typical computer SSD disks. Anything lasting more than that usually steps in office/corporate solutions, like magnetic tape backups
Googling around, I found out there are some "archival grade gold" DVDs, and a M-DISC (available as DVD or BluRay) that claims to last "centuries". Haven't seem anything on scratch or dust resistance about either
Magnetic disks. The person who said ssds hasn’t tried it. Spinning magnetic disks lose their data much more slowly than any ssd cell.
Even 3.5” floppies do better than ssds.
Which brand do you use? Not a single Verbatim has ever failed me, neither DVD nor Blu-ray. I also use a full-size burner with 12V SATA-USB adapter, not those stupid "slim" ones.
Thank your deity that M-Disc exists.
Jokes on Sony, they stopped getting my money years ago.
Damn, that's some Qanon-level shit.
I mean, except it's not a conspiracy. The death of physical media is an actual tragedy because digital media is nowhere near as free.
It's to the point where much of the media I love is actually not available legally and officially for physical ownership, in some cases becoming actual lost media physically, and not available for purchase or even download anymore.
Companies absolutely want to control the consumption of media in more restrictive ways that they can control, it's not a conspiracy, it's the actual truth.
DRM, always online, digital only, subscription services - they are all designed to remove you further and further from being an owner.
Everything from video games, music, movies...all entertainment media is moving in this direction and it's an actual tragedy.
Reminded me of that Cowboy Bebop episode where they so hunting for a VCR.
and the fact that they've already done it with the disney vault.
Or... they're stopping production because there's very little demand. Nah, that can't be it.
If you think the demand isn't there, you're out of touch. It's certainly true that many consumers are choosing digital content, but it's largely driven by it not having inconvenienced them so far too.
Everyone I'm seeing who lost the 3DS and Wii U stores, or lost access to all the games in their account, or even people who purchased media they can't download and access again is realizing how big this problem is.
I found 8 brands of DVD±R discs—none of them Sony—before I stopped counting. If you think one company stopping production is going to stop people from using physical media, or that demand hasn't been falling for years, YOU are the one who's badly out of touch.
Let me spell it out for you: as long as there is demand, someone will find a way to make money filling it. No company, no matter how evil it is, can remove a product category from the market just by leaving the market. Suggesting that a company choosing to stop making a commodity product is an attempt to prevent you from having access to said product is nonsense no matter what company and product you're talking about, because such a plan could never work.
How many headphone jacks do you see today? All it takes is one big player, and adoption can fall just like that.
And yet you can still buy phones with headphone jacks. Because there is demand for them. The reason you didn't see many is because the demand is a lot less than what Lemmy users would have you believe.
But adoption has fallen so significantly that you have to rely on listicles to find what you're looking for. The same could very easily and quickly happen with optical discs, and if I may be afforded an anecdote, I've seen exactly one optical disc brand in the last decade (Verbatim). And that's when shops have them available, which is extremely rare nowadays.
They might not go away completely, but just like with headphone jacks on phones, you'll have to scrounge for them. Same with if you want a display that's less than 6", or a physical keyboard. (Or a floppy disk...!)