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by paulryanrogers 23 days ago
Why carry water for billion dollar companies?

I can still play my brother's old PlayStation games on his OG PlayStation. They cannot be revoked arbitrarily, nor their music dropped or swapped out. This a feature, and we'd feel quite cheated if that happened. In fact we still go back to old games from time to time.

1 comments

I can still play the games I bought on the nintendo switch 8 years ago.

> Why carry water for billion companies?

All companies at a certain scale are billion dollar companies. Also, how much money a company has is unrelated to whether they violated consumer rights or not. But, tangentially, I do generally respect entities that fund creative endeavors moreso than I respect gamers who go online to bemoan how persecuted they are

> I can still play the games I bought on the nintendo switch 8 years ago.

If those were digital copies you might have chance, otherwise don't count on them to keep working for long. The carts Nintendo used were made with memory that degrades when just sitting on a shelf and people are already reporting that their DS games are failing. I've got an Atari 2600 that still works and plays games fine though. Never even had to replace the joystick, which easily beats the joycons which drift after 400 hours

> I can still play the games I bought on the nintendo switch 8 years ago.

Good luck! I cannot play any of the digital Wii games I bought. And that's kind of my point. You pay the same price as a physical copy, using the same verb, and yet are actually renting for an undisclosed amount of time that may at any point be cut off.

Blockbuster never said I was 'buying' a game which they could take away at any moment. So why do we let these companies use contradictory or obtuse language at our expense?

> how much money a company has is unrelated to whether they violated consumer rights or not

Billion dollar companies are less sympathetic. As a consumer I might take a worse deal if it meant supporting a small creator whom I knew was sacrificing a lot for art.

> As a consumer I might take a worse deal if it meant supporting a small creator whom I knew was sacrificing a lot for art.

do you see how you and people who buy skins have something in common? you are writing about this, you will PAY for people to NOTICE that you support indie game developers. okay, and 13 year olds will pay for people to notice their cool skins. there are many ways to monetize, you are telling us that you would be monetize in the same category of monetization as freemium games, so are they really so bad? is ownership really important, or does it really belong to the same "noticing" category of monetization?

I'm not talking about freeware games with paid cosmetics. I'm talking about paid products that are sold using words like "buy" which in reality are being rented out.