Crono1973 said:
Hiphophippo said:
Amishdemon said:
On downside is you don't own the games though and you need internet.
To be totally honest, you don't legally OWN any game you buy these days. Mind you, if you buy retail you have a physical copy so it's pretty easy to lie to yourself that you do own it but you don't.
And I've always got internet. Well, 95% of the time. And Steam will let me play whatever I want offline so I don't sweat it much. There will come a point, probably in both of our lives where everything is always online. Everything. Always. Games are just trying to get there a little early.
No, you legally own the games you BUY and the only thing standing in the way of that is DRM. So you legally own what you buy DRM puts limits on it. You can see that when you compare PC games (physical copies) with console games where the only difference is in the DRM and how that changes everything.
Not exactly. DRM is a bit of a misnomer that people have the tendency to misuse or mislabel. Traditonally people view DRM as things like Steam or online passes, things of that nature. Wherein effect it actually encompasses anything used to manage digital media, hence the name digital rights management.
When you buy a console game, what you're buying is the license to use it. Not the game itself. Case in point: Some games come with day one dlc already loaded on the disc that still must be purchased for use. If you OWNED the game on purchase legally everything on the disk would be yours but that is clearly not the case. Mind you, not EVERY publisher uses this sort of shrink-wrap EULA (google it) but nearly all large ones do.
Buying a game in the store does not mean you own it. It means you've purchased a license to use it. Semantics perhaps, but the publisher retains all rights of the product hence why you're not allowed to do with it as you like, IE bundle it up and make it available on torrent sites online. They own it.
You do not.