[Crinus]

Yes, i am biased against losing control over my computer and the games and software i can run on it and mess around with (be it modding, programing, custom patches or whatever). And i do see it through the potential of things going bad because if things go perfect then everything is fine.

I focus on the bad side because i do not want the bad things to happen and i see the bad things way worse than the good things.

[sangnoir]

> Yes, i am biased against losing control over my computer and the games and software i can run on it and mess around with

I share your sentiments, but this battle was already lost a decade ago when Steam won - Apple is just twisting the dagger with it's App Store and their unceasing march to turn OS X into an appliance (limiting 'root', and with catalina, what you can put in '/')

[Crinus]

While i'm not a fan of Steam, with it you can still keep the files around and some games are DRM free or rely on a DLL that you can easily replace. See Scott Ross' recent video about Trackmania 2 Nation for an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulp99wSUNgk

But personally i prefer GOG where i have hundreds of games (though it isn't the only store i use - any that give me DRM-free games, like Humble Store or GamersGate - is fine) and i keep my own offline copies (including games from stores that have long gone - another reason i dislike DRM schemes and prefer to have control over my files).

[blfr]

I run Linux and LineageOS because I care about controlling my computers and data. But I don't care about games.

They're games. They're not important. They're not art worth preserving. It's just a little entertainment. A risk of "losing" a game that I would probably not play again anyway is a perfectly reasonable trade-off for a hassle free gaming experience.

[catalogia]

When I play a game, I sink hours of my finite life into it without any possibility of ever getting that time back. When I "preserve" a game, what does that cost me? Less space on my bookshelf than a typical mass-market paperback novel. Virtually nothing. The cost of preserving a game is far less than the cost of playing it.

Ergo, any game not worth preserving is not worth playing.

[suby]

I'm sure a lot of people feel the same as you, but I very much disagree.

If games aren't art worth preserving, then neither is television, movies, music, etc. I don't see how one can claim those mediums are art but games are somehow not.

[ativzzz]

> If games aren't art worth preserving, then neither is television, movies, music, etc

They're not, unless you're willing to pay extra for them to be.

Netflix is not preservable, DVDs are.

Spotify is not preservable, CDs/MP3s are.

Most of the stuff we watch/listen to is on non-preservable media, and for the most part, we don't care.

If you really love a certain movie or song/album, you will buy it separately. Why not the same with games?

[xg15]

You're aware that DVDs are older than Netflix and MP3s are older than Spotify?

They absolutely used to be preservable until an enormous technological effort was made to make them non-preservable. The amount of people curating their CD (or later MP3) collections showed they cared very much.

> If you really love a certain movie or song/album, you will buy it separately. Why not the same with games?

Because it's not clear at all that this option would still exist. From a publisher's perspective, it's vastly preferable to just sell access to your game and keep the actual binary under wraps. So if there is a way how they could realistically do that, I don't think there will be much motivation to also offer the game as standalone software.

Or, to be more precise, you'll able to "buy" the game alright, but what you're buying is just access to the game on a streaming service, not an actual copy.

[cookiecaper]

> Or, to be more precise, you'll able to "buy" the game alright, but what you're buying is just access to the game on a streaming service, not an actual copy.

Which, to be fair, is also the desired effect of something like Steam. If Valve turns off your account, you lose access to all the games you've bought.

The last resort of tricking the DRM to retain access to the stuff you "own" is only possible due to the technical limitations that mandate distribution of the files to a user's local system. I'm sure publishers would love to be able to just stream blobs, making this type of thing much more difficult.

[suby]

My worry is that some games will be distributed exclusively through these streaming services and people will be unable to even obtain a local copy. There's certainly incentive for publishers to do so since it'd eliminate piracy, and perhaps Google will give exclusivity deals to various titles.

Due to this I'm actually kind of hoping for this service to fail to catch on.

[jowsie]

The issue with this is that Netflix/Spotify are pay once monthly, and consume whatever you want whenever you want.

With Stadia, you pay once monthly, and then you pay for the game on top of that cost. The same price you'd pay if you bought the game for any other platform, which also has the benefit of letting you own the game (physical copies, files downloaded to hardware you own).

You're comparing apples to oranges.

[Androider]

That's just the current payment model, but that is orthogonal to the underlying technology. I can imagine a Spotify Free version of Stadia (yes, with ads or other limits) and a Premium all-you-can-play version. Game demos can be replaced by "Play now" buttons on YouTube, literally dropping you into the game in seconds.

What the platform promises is to match the ease of use of YouTube or Netflix. If it can actually deliver on that, I'm sure we'll see a lot of different business takes on the same technology. As someone who started gaming on an Atari and still maintains a top-of-the-line PC, I see a streaming model as inevitable since games need to compete with the Netflixes of the world for your attention. As a new dad, the barrier (timewise) to actually playing something these days is prohibitive, so Netflix wins by default for me when I have an hour.

[xg15]

> They're games. They're not important. They're not art worth preserving. It's just a little entertainment. A risk of "losing" a game that I would probably not play again anyway is a perfectly reasonable trade-off for a hassle free gaming experience.

The people for eho games were a major part of their childhood as well as the profession of game designers would like a word with you.