[mikepurvis]

Hopefully emulation and piracy will continue to provide a reasonable check valve on this getting too far out of control. I don't personally engage in either at present outside of an old homebrewed Wii U, but I feel like the existence of those is important to remind the digital storefront/platform owners that at the end of the day they aren't actually the only game in town.

Either that or eventually we'll have to get some antitrust stuff happening to open these things up, though Epic's App Store lawsuit does not give me much hope in that direction.

[theK]

Don't requirements like online server based verification and advancing crypto make it almost impossible to pirate these games?

[mikepurvis]

Yes, for play-online titles for sure, but I think everything up to Xbox 360 / PS3 era has robust emulation and wide distribution of the whole library.

Obviously it's gotten harder over the years, but PS4 and PS5 jailbreaks do exist so that means there's a vector for dumping games that were only ever distributed digitally (at least ones released up to the point where the jailbreaks got patched, as the stores will refused to serve new content until you update your system).

[saghm]

There's a bit of a hit-or-miss situation for them, from what I can tell. I recently spent some time trying to figure out which MLB The Show titles worked for emulation, and somehow after the 2010 entry, all of the remaining PS3 ones have a notorious noticeable bug where the middle (from right behind the pitcher going all the way down to the center field fence) the field is covered with random fans or other "debris", for lack of a better world. As far as I can tell, it's been known for years (I think it's an instance of the general problem of Z-fighting), but either no one knows the exact solution, or the people working on the emulators have so many other things to work on that it's not a priority.

On the other hand, the fact that people have spent enough time to write down which entries have this bug and which don't (and potentially even which stadiums have it and don't in the entries that do have the bug, since it's apparently not consistent across them) does lead credence to the idea that the library is pretty widely distributed.

[mikepurvis]

Definitely another case where Nintendo platforms benefit from everyone having a shared understanding of which are the marquee, must-work titles; like every Mario and Zelda and Pokemon game will emulate flawlessly and after that is the long tail playable-but-maybe-buggy ones.

[giwook]

Current-gen console jailbreaks may exist but are inaccessible to the vast majority of the public so I really doubt they will factor into any decisions made by Sony, Microsoft, etc.

[mikepurvis]

Yes, fair, and that matters if the discussion is "I want to buy someone's physical copy of a game released a few months ago that they are finished with". Digital distribution with robust hardware security does in fact completely destroy that market, though notably Switch and Switch 2 physical games tend to keep their value, suggesting that maybe it has less to do with physical media itself and more than the second hand market follows the pricing set by the digital marketplace, and consumers know that Nintendo doesn't really do discounts, even years later.

All that said, I think my main argument with respect to emulation and root access was less about individuals having that access, and more that so long as someone gains that access even through extraordinary measures, the games can be dumped and distributed, at which point true ownership becomes possible (even if it takes a while for them to become playable on emulation or hacked hardware).

[giwook]

Fair point.

There is diminishing importance of ownership as time passes though because there is less and less desire to own such assets as they get older and newer titles come out.

There are exceptions to the rule, but I'd imagine less than 1% of the population cares about owning/emulating PS3 or even PS4 games at this point.

So yes, there is an eventual vector for "ownership" (though illicit, at least in this hypothetical) but I doubt that moves the needle much if at all.

[bredren]

I would attribute Disney's use of scarcity as a primary means to drive film and TV box office and streaming dollars in the Star Wars franchise.

This is already under threat due to the Star Wars AI videos being released on Youtube, seemingly without constraint as of yet.

The videos are not Hollywood quality [0], however they circumvent rules Disney can't easily break like using the likeness of any actor at any age in any circumstance.

These fan made videos get lots of views. Even if they were all removed from YouTube, this will be a difficult thing to stop.

I believe a generally accepted "good" or even "great" unofficial, Star Wars film built without sets or actors using AI is inevitable. And that this will be true for any popular franchise.

The natural corollary to this arc is into games, where using AI to code most or all of a AAA-competitive title would be considered inevitable.

I suspect Disney and Sony have at least someone pointing at this outcome.

[0] I suppose idealized Hollywood quality. They are better than some films.

[saghm]

> The videos are not Hollywood quality [0], however they circumvent rules Disney can't easily break like using the likeness of any actor at any age in any circumstance.

> [0] I suppose idealized Hollywood quality. They are better than some films.

Not only that, but Disney has diluted the the average quality of Star Wars by a huge amount over the past decade. It used to be a big deal culturally every time something official came out in theaters or on TV. Nowadays, there has been enough stuff that even the hardcore fans don't enjoy (even if not everyone agrees on exactly which ones are the worst, overall very few people like everything).

It's a lot easier to make something set in the Star Wars universe that's a realistic level of quality (and potentially competitive with whatever happens to the current iteration of shows/movies) when the bar has also been lowered towards what the current level of AI tooling can produce.