Deviate said:
Therumancer said:
Let me be honest, nobody with half a brain likes digital distribution even a little bit.
Not exactly true. There's quite a lot of us out there that find Steam (and digital distribution in general) very handy and practical. Physical media on the other hand is far less practical considering the inevitable decay of the medium in question (scratched discs or whatever else) and requiring physical space. Digital distribution on the other hand means that anywhere there's internet, there's access to your entire library. Even if HDDs go tits up or any other calamity strikes, you'll still be able to download what you want when you want it.
Hell, most of those services allow you to make offline backups. Some of them don't even have any kind of DRM, like Good Old Games. It's also highly practical from a customer point of view. In the case of Steam it's one single client containing a games manager, a downright amazing shop with a veritable cornucopia of features including but not limited to demos, wishlists, massive sales and so on and so forth. There's the social network and there's the fairly decent support.
All of this for (often) less money than the physical copy costs and you often get so much more as well. As for control, I have just as much control (and more) of my products as I ever did over any physical copy of games requiring activation of any kind. Which is pretty much all that are released these days.
So yeah, your derogatory little statement up there does not hold very true.
Actually it's quite true, the bottom line is in your last comment about "requiring activation, which is all that are released these days". Given that little development services like STEAM are the best option, but a gilded cage is still a cage. In the end you wind up having or controlling nothing. If a service like STEAM goes down, it takes all of your property with it, and as untouchable a juggernaut as some of these services seem right now, nothing lasts forever. I can take a disc of a 20 year old game, pop it into an old computer, and play it any time I want to. STEAM goes the way of the dodo, even if they removed the requirement to run through them I won't be able to access my media anymore.
In general, acceptance of digital downloads is largely due to a younger generation that has known nothing else, and honestly does not know any better.
Likewise, we've already seen that those running services can cut people off from their content on a whim. We've had people banned outright from their digital libraries due to accusations of cheating in a single game. If someone like Gabe decided to ban you from STEAM entirely, he could potentially cost you thousands of dollars. I'm not saying he'd personally do that, but the fact remains that he COULD do it, and we've already seen situations where things like this happening though services run by companies like Microsoft and EA, which demonstrates how little control you have over your own digital property, and that control is a big part of why the industry has decided to push this technology so heavily.
As far as GOG goes, I've done more than a bit of business with them, but I will say they aren't quite what a lot of people think. What GOG basically did was decide to run an Abandonware site as a business. They came up with the idea of buying the rights to some otherwise abandoned games up in bulk, tinkering with them to get them to run on never machines, and then selling them. Basically GOG is giving you what sites like Home Of The Underdogs and others have been providing for free in exchange for money, your basically paying $5-$10 at a pop for them to get Dosbox or whatever running for you (which is admittedly a pain), and admittedly they are doubtlessly making the people who originally developed those games and abanddoned the titles pretty happy since they are probably
getting paydays off of them again.
This is not to say there is anything wrong with GOG (there isn't) but the thing is that their generosity has to be interpeted in the light of most of their product actually having been out there via abandonware sites without any kind of DRM for years before they even bothered to come along. Sticking DRM on an old game is kind of pointless when there are established cracks without it that had been in circulation (more or less legally, since the titles were abandoned, which is why Abandoware operated publically) for years.
It can also be argued that while GOG is good for some of the developers who had a reason to renew liscences and such, it's been bad for a lot of users and abandonware sites who now again have to pay for what was basically public domain before they came along. You can insist I'm ignorant all you want, but a lot has been said about this already, and while Abandonware still exists, it's actually taken a hit from GOG. GOG isn't doing anything wrong (to repete this), quite the opposite in fact, but again, their apparent generosity has to be taken with a grain of salt.
