Hi everyone!
For my gaming needs, I have a Steam Deck and a Playstation 5 for now. They’ll probably be joined by a Steam Machine in the next year if the price is under 1000$ with 2 controllers.
For my admin needs, I have a few Linux computers running Fedora.
For my movie needs, I have an HTPC running LibreELEC.
Whenever possible, I’ll get my games on GOG from now on.
A lot of games aren’t on GOG though, so I have to choose between getting physical discs for my PS5 or through Steam.
For now, I can’t get demanding games on Steam since the Deck isn’t powerful enough, but with the arrival of the Machine, I’ll almost have power parity with the PS5.
I don’t plan on selling the PS5 as my son plays some Roblox, the NBA app works better on it than on my TV and I could want some games that Sony won’t release (anymore) on PC.
One day, once my switch to Linux gaming is over I might even give it to my son when hés gonna be old enough to game in his room.
So my question is should I buy physical games on Playstation, with the ability to resell them and get them on GOG one day for cheap, or should I get the games on Steam where they could just be taken away if Steam becomes evil?
I’d say GOG --> Steam. Physical media isn’t real anymore. Most PS5 games download an entirely new set of binaries at initial launch and refuse to run unless they have been updated. So the disc is mostly useless.
Many games are sold on 1st party storefronts. Sometimes even indie ones, like Rimworld. I’d say they are less likely to yoink the game since they own all the rights, and they’re often downloaded as DRM-free executables.
So I’d check, in order:
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GoG
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The game dev/publisher storefront.
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Some storefront with a DRM-free download. I noticed EGS (for example) does this for many of their giveaways.
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Steam, as a last resort.
I wouldn’t trust PS5 discs though.
…But you should consider practicality, too.
In practice, your PS5 is going to be your most powerful machine until you get a bigger PC with a GPU. And FYI, the Steam Machine will not be $1000, not even close.
That, and launching less intense games on your Deck is way more convenient if bought through Steam. Otherwise you have to deal with some intricacies of Proton and controller remapping to get them running.
So the PS5 discs aren’t impractical. Steam isn’t impractical. They should launch for a reasonably long time.
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There is no need to be so strict so just mix it up and do it all.
Yeah but I’m kind of psychorigid and I like to establish guidelines😅
Just get them on Steam and then if the day ever comes that Valve yanks them away from you it’ll be morally acceptable to pirate everything you’ve already bought.
Some games on Steam are actually run without DRM; so if you find that out for some set of them, you can likely back them up as files.
This is the way. I buy games primarily to support game developers, not because I don’t know how to pirate. GoG is generally preferred when possible, but I buy games on Steam primarily because of convenience and the other services they provide, not because I blindly trust those games will always be accessible, and I think for the services they provide they do deserve their cut, so I’m supporting them as well. I do also happen to trust them, and I believe those games will be available to me for the foreseeable future and if I didn’t, my buying strategy would shift quite promptly, but I’m not blindly trusting that, it’s a calculated risk.
I absolutely do know how to pirate games. This is not my first rodeo. But it’s mildly inconvenient, especially for updates and sometimes multiplayer, and I trust that process even less than I trust Steam. If Steam were to take my games away that I’ve already paid for (and supported) you’d better believe most of them are going into the download queue. Some I might choose to support again on a different platform, some have certainly earned it. But I know what I’m doing, and I’m doing it with intention. I decide who deserves my money and who doesn’t, and so far, Steam has earned what they get from me.
Steam Machine in the next year if the price is under 1000$ with 2 controllers.
Zero chance.
Tinfoil hat thoughts: at this point, I wouldn’t trust Sony to honour the ownership of a physical copy forever. There’s nothing stopping them from implementing a system that checks whether your account owns a license for the game that’s on the disk, or prevents the console from launching a delisted game. All it takes is a firmware update.
If preservation is the main concern, I’d check whether the game is available at a 100% peg leg discount (as insurance against corporate-sanctioned theft), then buy it on Steam. Even if Gaben turns to the dark side, PC will always be a more open platform than PS. People love pretending that Sony is still the company that released this epic burn, but that was over a decade ago.
I don’t think there’s a mechanism for them to tell if you’ve got a license for a disc without putting CD keys in the box. OP only needs them to honor ownership long enough to resell the copy.
It would be trivial to implement on Sony’s centralised infrastructure, without using unique CD keys. All you need is an account identifier, a game identifier, and a record in Sony’s system that indicates whether the specific account is permitted to start the game with that specific identifier. CD keys could still be used for initially associating the game with the account, but after that, Sony could take full control of the account’s access to the game.
This would be how a business commits suicide, not to mention upset their retail partners that sell their hardware.
I’d love to believe that, but I’ve lost count of how many businesses were declared by the internet to have committed suicide, only for people to keep buying their stuff. People at large don’t give a shit, unless a change has immediate negative effects on them, and often, not even then.
The type of change you’re talking about would have immediate negative effects on their customers, and they’d never recover from that. Even with more than half of their game sales coming from digital now, they’d immediately alienate the 20-30% that still buy physical, and they need every customer they can get right now as they bleed market share to PC.
Not sure I would commit to GOG that much. They’ve shown some transphobic and Nazi colors often enough.
I never sold any of my oldies goldies, so, physical copies just take space.
My prefered method is to generally buy games on Steam and if I consider one of them a classic that I might want to return to in the distant future, I’ll buy then again from GOG and store them on an external drive.
I’ve been a gamer since 1985 and all games that still work from 1980-2000 are mostly ones that were pirared, had no copy protection, or had a really simple protection that just checked if you had the manual of other peripheral. i.e. the ones that can be transfered from one storage media to another.
GOG copies probably have the greatest longevity.
PS5 physical and sell if you are on the fence or only play on playing them once
GoG if there’s an option
Steam otherwise?
None of us can predict the future, so we don’t know which games will end up on GOG one day, but your plan seems solid enough based on what we know now and what you value.
Is Sony still releasing as physical releases, vs. download codes in a box? Can you resell download codes? And do you actually resell Playstation games, or do you just want to have the option?
For me, Steam games are so much cheaper than console games that I think that it’s worth it to always pick Steam over console even if Steam turns evil eventually and makes my entire library disappear. I’m also not planning on buying separate gaming hardware, I just add a GPU to my main desktop PC. But who knows, maybe a Steam Machine is actually a better deal the next time I need to upgrade my PC for gaming.
I should probably pick GOG over Steam more often.
