because they didnt learn, in order to make more profit per sale on your platform, you either:

make a platform consumer friendly enough that people are willing to use it (the part that is most important)

or

make a game thats “good enough” that people will use your platform as a service (e.g Riot)

EA and Ubisoft (mostly) failed at both.

That’s why I think it has to be someone who owns a bunch of publishers, like Microsoft. Like how Disney is not just Disney, but also Pixar, Marvel, ABC, ESPN, etc… It’s why people shit on Paramount+. There’s just nothing there worth watching.

The game I always think of checking out is Assassin’s Creed Mirage, just to find it hasn’t been cracked.

I know assassin’s creed is a bit of a crap franchise but I have a love / hate relationship with the game and think mirage looks made for me. Every few months since release I’ve looked up it’s crack status and not just has it not been cracked but generally the comments around it are that it’s from the new era of uncrackable games.

Maybe, maybe not. As equity holders get older they may be looking to cash out so they can fuel their retirements.

I don’t think that’s something Gabe is interested in, but we’re talking about what will happen when he dies.

Terraria does not rely on steam features in order to engage with its core functionality. Perhaps you are trying to imply that the error is in the developers having integrated their publishers features into their release in such a way that a hard dependency on the runtime is formed when it shouldn’t be.

This is not a valid argument because whatever calls terraria is making to the runtime should have a fallback in place for when the runtime is not being used. That fallback should be implemented by a small dummy runtime or something. It shouldn’t be on the devs to ensure their single player game works when the publisher’s adware bloated garbage runtime stops working.

You never own a game unless you buy the holder of the IP. Read your TOS. You buy a licence to use a software and to obtain the necessary data to use it. Nothing more. Even when you buy a hardcopy in a shop you don’t own the software.

If you own a physical cartridge/disk on an old console, you own permanently playable physical copies of the games. No publisher is able to stop you from playing it. It is a permanently usable piece of tangible property which you legally own. This is what people talk about when they say they “own” games. IDGAF if the GoG ToS says I don’t “own” a game if they have no ability to revoke my ability to play it once I’ve downloaded it. It’s as playable as any physical game, for as long as I keep my hard disks intact. This is what it means to “own” a non -service based game, by any sensible definition of the word.

No one here claimed you become, or deserve to become the IP holder of the software. This is just a strawman that you made up because the idea of someone not making the same idiotic purchasing decisions as you personally offends you.

You can downgrade games in the setting as long as the publisher (!) allows/support it. It is done by a lot of games.

Publishers should not be able to deny you the right to modify the software you downloaded after you downloaded it. If they have a different opinion on the matter then I won’t be a consumer of their services.

It’s all just Stockholm syndrome and copium for you. Maybe one day in your 40s steam will decide to bleed you dry for everything you think your library is worth. They’ll force you to pay a subscription fee just to access single player games purchased many years ago.

And you’ll be able to do nothing about it, because you never own a game unless you buy the holder of the IP. Read your TOS. You buy a licence to use a software and to obtain the necessary data to use it. Nothing more.

Keep defending your abuser though I guess.

For all the non opti game who take more than 100Go of space ? Multiple DVD/Blu-ray ?

Yes. That’s how it was done before, no reason to not do this now. Wing Commander 4 came on 6 CDs. As you progressed through the game, you kept advancing through them.

Update: actually if a game need a update how to do this ? Download a zip file to apply the patch ? Possibility to directly write the patch on the DVD/Blu-ray for future install ?

As Blu Rays are read only, you obviously can’t apply the patch there. The patches were always downloaded and applied to the game parts you had on your hard drive. What was wrong with that?

If we use DVD/Blu-ray we need a player to install the game

You need a device to read physical media to actually read physical media, yes.

it’s not how things work now

It’s not how things work because games that came on physical media had literally no advantage anymore at some point. With physical media just being used to speed up the first install in your always-online environment and bandwidth being no longer an issue, they just became obsolete. If I could have played half life 2 without steam using my disc, it would have been worth keeping. With the box being essentially just a bulky envelope for a product key, it turned out to be just a hassle.

At some point, steam will enshittify or shut down. That’s when we will realize that online only distribution might not have been such a great idea.

I remember the physical media PC game days before those days when CDs had a copy protection that barely worked and nothing else. I got a game, headed home, installed it and played the whole afternoon without being online once.