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Comment by brokenmachine | Hacker News Reader

True.

I recently "bought" Titanfall 2, on DVD. I put "bought" in quotes because I wonder how much I actually own it, if at all.

It wouldn't run at all without first connecting to the internet and downloading multiple gigabytes of updates.

I wonder what would happen in the future when EA decides to shut up shop or change their DRM platform. Will I ever be able to play it again?

This is why I often feel like pirates "own" the content more than legitimate buyers.

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Yeah. Compare this to the 90s games I've been playing: I can still take a copy of Q3A or UT from '99 and install it on my computer (although why you wouldn't use the IOQ3/UTPG patches is beyond me). Ditto for Doom and Descent (although you need a src port). Thief, Deus Ex, System Shock 2, and Baldur's Gate are a little harder to get running (you have to use wine, and in the case of Deus Ex, figure out how to get the shoddy programming to work with modern hardware), but it's still doable.

Will that be true of FTL, Bastion, Shadow of Mordor, Limbo, or Assassin's Creed?

Deus Ex works fine on my PC - though I have (I think) the New Vision mod as well.

It works, all right, but they bind game logic to framerate, and then don't lock the framerate, so you have to go in and set a framrate lock or the whole thing will be unplayable.

I know that I've got Bastion and Limbo as DRM-free downloads through Humble Bundle. I don't have FTL, but they sell it (likewise DRM-free). Does FTL have some kind of online component, or something? Any reason that it couldn't keep working in the future?

I get the point, though. I've got dozens and dozens of games from the 90s and 2000s, and the earlier ones are much less likely to have a reliance on some external authentication server, or something.

Better yet, the Q3A engine is open-source and is still maintained in the form of ioquake3. Just look at how many architectures it's compiled for on Debian. It's going to stay forever with us without emulation.

https://packages.debian.org/sid/ioquake3

I did mention that...

In general, id Software games (at least up to Doom 3) will be around the longest, since the engine's code is available under the GPL.

And Descent, because that's GPLed too.

That's why I've been buying GoG versions over the steam version of games where possible, they're DRM free. Only real issue is the selection isn't as vast and generally doesn't get a lot of the latest games (due to them having all sorts of draconian DRM e.g. Doom 2016).

I play my games through steam, but often buy through Humble or GOG when I can. Mind, I can't always do that (and will buy through Steam when there's a sale on), but it's insurance when I can.

For really old games, I usually just buy the disks outright.

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