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Comment by mrits | Hacker News Reader

I don't see Facebook alone in this. The whole gaming industry is headed this direction. Most of my game purchases are in Steam. PS5 has a digital only version.

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There's a difference between forcing you to use a gaming account for a gaming service, and forcing you to use a social media account entirely irrelevant to gaming with your entire real-life identity (and web history, ad profiling, and in-store purchases) to use a gaming service.

I don't see too much that Facebook collects about you that Steam doesn't. If you aren't using a Facebook desktop app Steam probably knows quite a bit more about you actually.

If you are really concerned about your "real-life identity" I'd recommend not publishing it in a service that is made for public consumption

An Xbox now requires a Microsoft account, which also has associated web history, ad profiling and purchase history.

But you can make a separate one just for Xbox and they won’t ban you, unlike Facebook. And you don’t have to use your real name.

It may not be enforced, but the Microsoft ToS states "You agree not to use any false, inaccurate or misleading information when signing up for your Microsoft account." (https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/servicesagreement/), and the signup flow does require a full name.

In addition many physical copies, if not most or all, mostly are either straight up a redemption for an online key or are functionally telling your system to go download it.

Optical drives haven’t been standard issue in PCs for a while now.

We need to allow multiple app stores with DRM per store, it's the only solution to avoid a monopolistic store that I see. It won't happen except through the legal system, I think.

I mean, on PC we already have that, plus a few DRM-free stores like GoG

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