I think he’s referring to all those times you dig out your physical media 15 years later to play your games.
Which hardly anyone ever actually does. But hey, in principle you can if you want. If you can find a way to make your ancient game run on your modern pc. But in principle, yes.
Not just physical media; we’ve still got GOG.
Define “hardly anyone”. Relative to gamers in general, it’s a smaller percentage, yes.
GOG takes care of us hardly anyones pretty well.
And if they ever disappear, I’ve still got my games I got from them.
Along with a few vintage (and still functioning) gaming rigs going back to my first 486. And I will concede that hardly anyone goes quite that far. :)
(A very small number of) Games disappear from sale on online services all the time that are much younger than that.
“wine game.exe” usually works pretty well for me. Google, with it’s ever increasing number of deprecated APIs, has no reason to keep supporting old enough games, leaving you with nothing that you can do about it. And copying Apple shitiness once again, cough.
I had a similar reaction when Steam came out. I wanted to own my games, have the ability to resell them, etc. Shrug.
If the experience is good and the price is right, I’ll stream games too. So will you.
I love how the people who want this to succeed tell us that we will stream our games.
No. I won’t. It’s a bridge too far. There’s no way I could be less interested in this bullshit attempt to control ownership of videogames. If this is “TEH FUTURE”, then gaming is dead for me personally.
You already don’t own your games, unless you buy everything in physical copies.
Wait, so GOG is your answer to someone who laments not owning games anymore? That seems like the exact opposite of helpful to me.
Edit: I don’t know a ton about GOG, but it does appear that it’s DRM-free. But if GOG went out of business tomorrow, could you continue playing all those games forever? If so, then yeah, it’s a good solution for those folks.
Which, again, isn’t going away when Stadia launches.
yes45
Only if you download them all first.
GOG is great, but even they haven’t figured out a way to let you own something unless, you know, you own it. So, yes, the laws of physics still apply. ;)
Yup. And I would bet that most customers do not in fact keep archives of their game downloads from GOG.
“Any company might stop letting you download what you paid for” is, in my view, the best argument against DRM.
Never been to the GOG forums I take it?
I confess that at roughly 600 games on GOG, I have lapsed behind and have only archived about 400 of those. But you can bet most of us do download and archive our favorites.
The point is that it’s up to us if we want to archive those games, not some third party.
The way I look at it, if Steam goes under tomorrow it would be largely trivial to “pirate” any game I want. So I don’t stress about it.
I never got into the reselling of games but when they shrank the store shelves to a couple of Blizzard games and Sims with all their expansions and almost nothing else, I went to Steam because there be games to purchased there. It had little to do with what I wanted and all pretty much everything to do with what I could get.
Also, I went through D2D, Impulse, Gamergate, Paradox, probably at least a half dozen eventually unsupported options until it turned out Steam was the only game in town that seemed willing to actually stick it out.
We’ll see what streaming can do but let’s not mistake why Steam got into the position it did even if people wanted to own games.
Well sure, but that’s another thing Stadia will put a stop to with any games exclusive to that platform.
And when it succeeds, and it will, you can bet there will be exclusives.
Yes, that’s a very good point. Exclusive titles will be lost forever.
I don’t think we’ll see any exclusives outside of a studio’s own platform without being paid off, though, and I don’t see all gaming moving to streaming for a long time, if ever.
Forums have never represented the majority of any subject.
If you were planning to play Stadia games on your computer or phone while using its official controller, you’ll have to get used to being tethered to your device with a USB-C cable. The Google Stadia controller’s wireless capability will only work on TV with a Chromecast Ultra at launch, the tech giant has revealed in a fine print on a Stadia video. A Google Community Manager handling the Stadia subreddit has confirmed the information and also clarified that you’ll need the official controller to play games through Chromecast Ultra.
I think the wording on that article is a bit off - that limitation is specific for Chromecast Ultra users since it has no bluetooth capability. You can use any compatible controller on the other devices, including PS4/Xbox controllers in wired/bluetooth mode.