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Comment by Volundr | Hacker News Reader

As much as I hate to defend Ubisoft on basically anything... Yeah reading that article it's very clear he's discussing this in the context of their subscription service. It's no crazier than someone wouldn't own their games through acquired via Ubisoft subscription than movies via Netflix or music via Spotify.

Is the trend of non-ownership a good thing? I don't think so. And yet I also begrudgingly admit that I listen to a much wider variety of music via streaming than was ever available in my cd/mp3 collection...

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I don’t mind steam, but it’s not like you really “own” your library even on that platform. So it has probably been a while since most of us actually owned a video game the way it was 30 years ago.

Sure, the subscription services are taking it even further, but as long as you’re not in total control of the stuff you own, it’s not really yours. At least in my opinion.

As a practical matter, if I had a 30+ year old game still up in my attic, it would probably take more time/knowledge/money in many cases to get it running usefully than most people would reasonably put in.

That would be in the realm of Total Annihilation (middle 1990s). I installed that a few weeks ago from the CDs provided on archive.org

It took a few minutes to download AND install.

What it really boils down to is the ever-downward trend to destroy ownership by converting as much as possible to a service or hidden rental.

Me? I prefer to own games that work now or 30 years from now.

> What it really boils down to is the ever-downward trend to destroy ownership by converting as much as possible to a service or hidden rental.

The phrase I use for that is "erecting toll-booths".

Not if you still had the original system as well. I imagine it is not the norm though.

Yes you do. You can backup and run (most[0]) games without steam.

[0] when you can't its because of publishers purposefully blocking it.

Yeah tons of games on Steam have zero DRM, many have trivially weak Steam DRM, and a handful have serious third-party DRM.

Whatever the specific license may say about your rights, it's usually easy to make a completely portable backup.

Honestly, as talking about "ownership" in terms of the law I find to be an argument that just goes round in circles. Like yes, you don't own the game because the EULA says so, but no EULA's aren't legally binding, but yes because they can revoke the game without recourse, etc etc.

What's more interesting is ownership in practical terms, in my opinion. And I don't think you can really blanket all the game in Steam under one rule here - some have absolutely 0 DRM and you can back them up and run them just fine anywhere and some have Steam DRM which is trivial to crack; these games you practically own. And then there are games which use Denuvo or other DRM means, where unless its one of the rare games that get a crack.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that, regardless of anything else, digital ownership to me boils down to "Can I copy these bytes to a hard drive, and then 20 years later still use them?"

You're really talking about digital possession not ownership.

> Is the trend of non-ownership a good thing?

I would argue, on average, it actually is. Because it's not that we are getting nothing in return: We are getting stewardship.

Let us at least acknowledge this part of the equation: Hosting things securely and reliably is only naively easy and cheap, and on top only like drawing a picture is easy, if you are Picasso. Sure, you can put those years of professional devops experience to use to maintain a private data haven – but that's not something that will work for most people and it is fairly obvious that, on average, our collective data would be a lot less safe if rolling hosting became everyones favorite passion project.

That is certainly a convenience that is gained by renting something, but (1) the significance of that convenience is minimal compared to the threat of the company taking away what you've bought, intentionally or not, and (2) paid backup services exist.

It is far from obvious that people renting things instead of owning them makes our collective data a lot more safe. It seems to me that the data would be a lot more vulnerable to companies deciding to make (more) money.

> It is far from obvious that people renting things instead of owning them makes our collective data a lot more safe.

You would probably reconsider if you spent more time around the, to this day, ocean of outdated and unmaintained-until-physical-failure-windows-2000ish-servers sprinkled throughout fairly touchy parts of our society, connected to the, gasp, internet.

> It seems to me that the data would be a lot more vulnerable to companies deciding to make (more) money.

If I have to chose between Google and a free ticket to built vast botnets on perpetually legacy, unmaintained infra, I will, until further notice, gladly have the former every time and let legislation take it from there.

I'm confused. We're talking about video games and other digital media. You would put those on an external drive or similar. Why would the vulnerabilities of such a solution have any overlap with windows 2000-era servers used for infrastructure? What does infrastructure have in common with personal backups?

Except that I can control whether the server I run is up to date, or internet-connected, or has appropriate NACLs, whereas I know firsthand that most large companies do not meet patching SLAs, or have properly-configured security controls.

This is a tech space; if you work around security, you know that someone's home computer is going to usually be harder to hack than a big corporation that has an attack surface a million miles wide.

Maybe I can phish you and get on your machine, but maybe not. But I can definitely phish at least one person at a big company, and usually many more. Your home machine doesn't have an ssh key buried in a git repo's commit history, or in a public S3 bucket, etc.

Most large-scale botnets running on consumer machines target either IoT or routers, both of which are difficult for consumers to patch, so that's more bad business security once again, than bad consumers.

> choose between Google and a free ticket to built vast botnets on perpetually legacy, unmaintained infra

My god, what a false dichotomy. Yes, every computer not run by Google is running freshly-installed, never-been-updated Windows 95, but Google is totally absolutely positively doing better than all the others in the same space. /s

That's a false dichotomy. Bandcamp will sell me music I can download _and_ let me stream it.

But separately, I don't want stewardship for my data to rest with whoever I transact with to acquire that data. Why not a digital locker standard, where you sign in with your digital locker when purchasing digital content, and that content is saved to your locker, with whatever metadata? You can then search and play your purchased content through whatever client you like, regardless of where you got it from. You can sort of do that today (to the extent that you can still purchase digital content--there's music that's available to stream that I have not been able to find for purchase) with files, but you lose the stewardship and it's a lot of work.

You can argue that the subscription model pays for the stewardship in a way purchases would not, but surely digital content is easier to work with than CDs and DVDs.

I think most consumers don't really care, though, and I'm guessing content platforms don't really see the point of supporting something like that.

> It's no crazier than someone wouldn't own their games through acquired via Ubisoft subscription than movies via Netflix or music via Spotify.

Which doesn't say it is not crazy :-).

> Is the trend of non-ownership a good thing?

At least with movie/audio it's easy to download. I tend to be okay paying their subscription if I can download it on BitTorrent later. For games it may be a bit harder? Not sure.

Streaming does let you discover lots of new music which I like.

But musically for my "daily driver" playlist I want to go way down a particular rabbit hole and find new stuff. It is less good for that. I am happy streaming exists.

On PC I am totally digital download. Consoles, I am more of a collector, so I prefer physical games which I actually own. Eventually having a disc will be the only legal way to play those games if you did not download them. (Some not even then like Destiny)

If streaming were a better deal for consumers than ownership do you think streamers would push it so hard? Every time I try to buy an MP3 I hit a bunch of anti-patterns trying to get me to click on get this with a subscription.

People think of it as the price of a subscription today vs the price of ownership today. The problem is that every service model business has learned to boil the frog slowly.

It's not a non-ownership tend. There never was ownership of the content. It was a dillusion. Content was licensed. The thing that's changing is the licensing model, from, arguably, perpetual to a short term with indefinite options for renewal.

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