Quote of the day by Gabe Newell: "Piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue" — Sony just proved why digital storefronts are broken

Never feel bad about stealing back what was stolen from you.

Convenience is a huge factor, Valve has clearly gotten that.

I still pirate a lot of media, even though I pay for streaming simply because my own "service" isn't as crap. Many people will happily pay for good service, not for the constant enshittification they throw at us.

Valve have a long history of ensuring that games purchased are still downloadable for customers who purchased them even after publishers have pulled their game off the store, or of providing refunds.

Sony has done neither and that’s a core part of the problem.

Part of this is Valve’s agreements with the publishers.

Sony could easily do this but they’re poisoned by the music and movie industries.

As far as my account goes, even when publishers remove games, I still have access to my files.

This is crucial for community led projects that revive game servers, like The Crew, Hawken or Blacklight Retribution.

Sony is remotely deleting stuff (or more accurately, threatening to do so)

Just to clarify: I still prefer buying on GOG but the catalog there is slimmer. Steam so far has been more aligned with their users' rights.

The fact that a company loses a license to something in a game disallows them to keep selling them, not stealing them back from their customers.

because Sony is clearly absolute garbage...

name something valve has done that's horrendously stupid and anti consumer...

Nah Sonys is significantly worse. Microsoft was going to have digital trade-in/re-selling and loaning.

I used to pirate, don't anymore.

1. I was young, it was convenient, and satisfying. Eventually, I relented to the idea that I was doing it more for personal reward than for any kind of "fuck the establishment" message.
2. I got a good-paying job, and felt the satisfaction of buying a good game on sale with my own money.
3. I still maintain, as do most people, that tons of publishers are scummy and anti-consumer, but I also built more positivity towards developers that don't exhibit such behaviors.

Even if Steam were to somehow go down for a month, by now I've learned about other storefronts and methods of purchase that provide a place to move to. There's a devoted centrism to the way people consume most media franchises that basically guarantees they can flip prices to infinity, control purchases, and never suffer consequences, and piracy absolutely feeds into that; helping them to paint themselves as victims to policymakers while they rake it in.

I was traveling across the us without a car about a year ago. Long story. Was stranded, pulling a long night til the next bus instead of sleeping rough. Only place to get fluids nearby was a McDonalds.

It was painfully expensive, and genuinely felt like I was being fucked with and screwed over when I ordered. I just wanted a cup full of caffeinated sugar-water and someplace warm to sit. It sucked so fucking much. It was fucking unpleasant. Eventually I hydrated, pissed, and just left to wait outside for the last few hours.

I looked through food. I couldn't justify paying those prices for that shit. It genuinely didn't seem like food prices. I couldn't. The next day I found a more reasonably priced 7/11.

It's not only one user - people are talking and one guy finding out and learning about piracy can totally bring his friends to piracy, too. There is no downside to letting your friends stream from your jellyfin or to send that cracked copy to the guy from your soccer club

Sony are doing this precisely because people have already voted with their wallets. Physical sales are non-existent. Everyone is already all digital on PlayStation and Xbox.

You have to double check if your external hd isn't wifi enabled these days. I made sure not to get a wifi enabled one.

Nintendo blowing up about ROMS didn't help a fuckin' thing.

Well, you can also give up video games. Fuck those companies.

I hate to be that guy but did you try changing which version of proton its using? I know for some games you gotta change it for it to boot properly.

I do agree though it should just work, but you gotta remember unlike consoles PCs are made of many different parts and not all agree with eachother. Developers can only test so many configurations.

I remember when no man's sky came out, so many people had issues while mine booted and worked properly. Thankfully steam does offer refunds.

Especially with wage stagnation, I think Gabe was correct a decade ago, but not so much now...

Okay we'll fix this one by making an open source software that loads all the files into a 7zip before its runs the downloaded content. That way it has to compile everything before it runs essentially breaking it down before it gets, "repaired," in a 7zip which holds the, "files to be compiled" but can still be ran separately.

So, it would have no choice but to export everything to a 7zip.

If someone made a web extension it could be used to do it to movies you purchased on streaming sites and it would rip the movies and compile it into a digital format the, "copyright," would be broken by removing traces of copyright by coding said program to remove the encryption but also having it set to identify any company logos so it'll convert the video into loading whatever you ripped into the format you want And it would remove logo's or identifying markers from it.

In a sense you're correct but in reality it's slightly different because Valve has competition with other digital storefronts as well as the rare physical PC release. Even though Sony are also the ones manufacturing PlayStation discs, they were sold by third parties, and even had the used market for their digital storefront to compete with, keeping prices and sales comparatively in check. If you can only get PlayStation games from a single place, price fixing is going to be easy because customers have nowhere else to go.

Because they didn't even wait a week since they showed that they can take away your purchases from you library. At least Valve to my knowledge never pulled a gane from libraries, even if the game was pulled from the store.

People who cared about physical games haven’t been PC gamers for 20 years. You could still care about physical games on consoles until about last week.

Valve is also good to gamers with consumer friendly pricing and their client extends the gaming experience rather than running in the background, mostly useless like the console features and the other store fronts.

I also don’t care for steam but I’m not upset about it because I just stopped playing on PC for years. The games I do play, still came out on disc. I remember that CoD MW2 was the game that broke the camels back, even though you installed it off the disc, it still wouldn’t launch without steam. (Same with HL2 but I knew that going into it and didn’t buy it)

There was a reason people bought consoles. One of those was physical media and the fact you actually owned your copy, could resell it and lend it out. So this has nothing to do with Valve who has almost always been digital. If you want to compare it, you'd need a hypothetical like "Valve always sold digital games but will now switch to disk only games."

It's more than the discs. It's about the fact that you're not owning what you purchase and you can spend as much as you like on digital and one day, poof, it'll be gone and so will your money. Discs aren't able to be deleted. Even if a format goes obsolete, there's media players like vlc that will play them.

That's what it's about.

Like video games

You can buy all the games you want on steam if goes away after 90 days that's just how it is but when you buy a game for a system at a what 80$-120$ a game you expect to play it forever be able to play it when the wifi goes out, be able to play with your friends, be able to save your data but all that is online and they're able to use that against the consumer.

They took split screen, they forced us to use internet, they took memory cards, they dissolved servers. What more can they do oh yeah make it so we don't actually own the game.

Besides what others mentioned (Valve being kept in check, barely, and offering more service as a platform), I think Sony can't afford to do what Valve does, because on equal footing they lose.

Sony saves you a bit of money on the hardware purchase, a small benefit if you buy a lot of games. Maybe some exclusives.

Steam lets you mod the game, play it on whatever device you want (PC now, PC you get in 10 years, Deck, Windows, Linux, likely even some Android devices in the future), and twink the settings to whatever you want, for whatever resolution, quality, or framerate you want. (Edit: also, your device doesn't become a useless box if Valve becomes evil)

Physicals and exclusives are just about the only thing consoles have going for them, and Sony just lost one. (Oh, and they lost couch gaming too, because SteamOS is opening up)

I remember when street fighter 2 was released for the SNES. Our store had it at 64.99 and that's in 1990-something dollars.

Games have always been expensive, especially when hyped and already popular

But I still have an SNES and SF2 and can play it whenever I want. No chance a licensing server rejects me or a lic is flagged invalid in the future.

That's the difference. I know as long as the hardware works, I can always use that game.

Well there are games where I absolutely cannot justify paying for unless there is a sale or waiting for it to go on discount due to being super old.

However I still don't pirate them just because they are priced too high if they are steam because I know eventually I will still have easy access I just need to be patient.

Cae in point this summer sale a game that came out 2-3 years ago I finally bought because it was 50% off its original $100 price tag (CAD). Finally felt it would be worth it.

Never pirates it became I knew steam would provide easy access and an eventual sale.

Piracy is necessary. I remember back in the days in school that you had to turn in essays in Word and do presentations with PowerPoint. Like how the fuck would a kid from a family that could barely afford a used PC be able to get Office without piracy.

Same with Photoshop, Illustrator, Maya etc. Basically the entire workforce for entire industries exist thanks to piracy.

Part of the problem is the Big Software crushing any hobbyist software. I used to be big into 3D design. 20 years ago there were dozens and dozens of different programs of different quality available to people wanting to do 3D design, along with top tier programs like 3DSMax and Maya, and even they had “learning editions” with stripped down features for free non-professional use.

Now? Most all 3D design software is proprietary, subscription-based, and stupid expensive. Very, very few programs are available to anyone wanting to do hobby work or learn, and plenty of them are “freemium” with better features paywalled.

Point being, choice has been restricted or eliminated. 20 years ago there was a lot more to choose from both skill and price-wise. Now it’s $200/month/seat, or a couple paywalled freemium programs.

We used to pay full price for something to have it forever. Now we're trained to pay full price to "pay for access."

We've been trained to pay more for less guaranteed. :(

I have a PS4, there's enough games to pirate that I haven't played yet that I don't need to get a PS5 yet.

I personally don't get the fixation on physical media. Like sure, you may put it on the shelf, which can be nice. But realistically digital is the way to go for most people. I just want what GOG is doing, where you gat a real installer that just works without internet connection, without steam/gog installed, same today as in 20 years, even if GOG goes under.

DRM-Free files that the user can archive on their own media, in their own format, as they wish.

The ability to distribute media without shipping physical goods allows for much smaller productions to have wide releases and in some cases to make their games cheaper than otherwise required (cough, switch tax). The issue is the DRM preventing the user from making their own backups, rather than the physical product (although steam does allow you to make backups and copies of your library folder which is cool).