Comment by m463
1 day ago
We should give our money to folks like GOG (www.gog.com) who provide DRM-free games, all downloadable and playable offline. no need to be online. No need to create an account. no need to play (heh) by someone else's rules.
1 day ago
We should give our money to folks like GOG (www.gog.com) who provide DRM-free games, all downloadable and playable offline. no need to be online. No need to create an account. no need to play (heh) by someone else's rules.
You are still purchasing a license. Definitely an improvement, but you cannot pass your game collection to your children, which I find horrible.
With gog? of course i can. I have the files and i can give them to my family. They can then play them.
The fact that I'm "buying" a license holds as much weight in this issue as the countless eulas and privacy policies i supposedly agreed to.
We "endusers" live in a world were we are compelled, yes compelled, to enter legal agreements to do anything, and where these terms are dictated and changed unilaterally. Terms like these should and are meaningless yo everyone except for courts that foolishly hold them valid. For everything else, they should and are ignored.
You can technically but not legally. You can share your steam credentials too, just not legally
You can pass your game collection to your children. Just download them and put them on a USB drive. I guess you won't get updates that way, though.
That's illegal. You can technically but not legally
You mean legally? Because technically in GoG you can.
Legally. Technically you can just share your password with any of your family
Technically legally no.
"Your GOG account and GOG content are personal to you and cannot be shared with, sold, gifted or transferred to anyone else."
5 replies →
I think this solves the problem at the wrong level. Ultimately, if you can make the licensing model work (and you can), it is far more profitable than an ownership model. As such, in a system where the scoring function is profit, the system will naturally tend toward a licensing model. An example of this would be operating at a loss for a while to outcompete competitors operating on an ownership model, to the point where they become negligible, so you can crank up the prices in a market that has become dependent on a licensing-based oligopoly, and rake in the profits.
To disrupt this natural tendency, you need an external influence which is not beholden to this scoring function. A good example (but not the only one) of such an external influence would be government regulations.
You could try to influence the cycle as consumers, but there are two significant roadblocks for this approach. Firstly, consumers are highly decentralized, and heterogeneous in their beliefs and actions. Sure, _you_ may understand and believe that a licensing model is bad, but how about the billions of others who are less politically engaged? The second is that consumers operate largely in the same profit driven system as the corporations we're trying to change. It takes a very principled individual to buy gta 6 at a 50% markup just so they can -own- the game rather than just rent it indefinitely.
I don't know of any instances in history of consumers making any meaningful impact in this way. Tons of examples of government regulation effecting meaningful change though.
No, we should codify things like "when I buy software then I own it fur future re-sale and copying as I wish" in law so everyone is like GOG.
Why would you just give money to an entity which is bound by bad laws, no matter how good it is right now?