Lies!

Donald’s adult diapers stop his PP from reaching his pants.

I’m 100% sure the dam wall is not North-facing.

Mind you, this a great idea for a Dam facing the right way (ideally South).

Alternativelly, multiple subgroups within the power elites can support some of the same things for different reasons.

It’s perfectly logical that, for example, intrusive tracking under the excuse of Age Checks “to protect the children” is supported by the Pedophiles in the Elites because it helps them detected early and suppress attempts to change the very system which gives them immunity for their crimes, non-Pedophile people in positions of power support it for very similar reasons only they want the system protected so that they can stay in power, maybe because they like power or because of the money and priviledges they get from their position in that system, and big companies selling media to users support it because it lets them more strongly bind copies of that media to specific users hence people can’t share it (for example, two sibblings in the same house using the same device can’t share a single copy of a game) so those companies sell more copies hence make more money.

Reducing most people’s choices can serve different stakeholders who have different desires and for whom that reduction of the choices of consumers serves different objectives and yields different returns.

Trying to come up with a Theory of Everything for it is excessivelly reductionist and even simplistic - just because it’s easier to get one’s mind around a “they’re all the same” explanation than around something like what I’m putting forward, doesn’t mean the former is the right explanation.

This is about removing any and all ownership rights of buyers.

Not just of selling you copy second hand but also things like lending (even to your own family), gifting and even playing it in a different device

Mandatory Age Checks on the device also helps with stopying lending even to members of your family that live with you and use the same device to play the game: if the hardware (with the excuse of Age Checking) identifies the user, then the copy can be bound to a specific person in a specific devive rather than the device alone, so for example two siblings in the same household need to buy two copies to play it even at different times rather than just one copy as the “age check” identifies the user and only allows a specific user for a specific copy.

The fewer rights buyers de facto have, the more copies publishers sell as users can’t get the games by alternative legal means, and whilst at first there might be some backlash from taking those rights away, in my experience not only are most gamers sheeple or at best dogs that bark a lot but don’t bite, but usually they over time get used to not having those rights (especially as new, younger people, who grew up without having had them become gamers), so pretty much all backlash from taking those rights away eventually dissapears and those companies end up making more money than before.

I’ve had a similar experience, but for even longer (piracy of ZX Spectrum games was pretty common where I lived back in the 80s).

In my experience, the ebb and flow of piracy very much depends on the media - music was pretty easy to pirate from very early on the internet age as soon as decent sound compression methods were invented (most notably those used in MP3) because each track is a pretty small file then stuff like Spotify reduced it, video piracy actually took off with faster Internet and better compression methods (starting with MPEG) and then fell with cheap streaming, game piracy took increased with faster Internet (though there it was weirder - games sizes and internet speed kinda went up more or less in parallel) and then fell thanks to stores like Steam and GOG.

That said, I personally never switched from piracy to streaming because I saw it back then as “not really owning anything” with all the associated risks (which we’ve seen materializing with the enshittification of the last decade) plus I’m averse to subscription models since financially they tend to end up adding up to more money than just buying because you’re paying subscription to access a ton of mediocre stuff and a handfull of good stuff vs just buying the handful of good stuff.

(I suspect that, because I became familiar with and started working in Tech during the transition to the Internet Era, much earlier than most here, I was more keenly aware of the risks of what you supposedly “owned” not really being in your hands and the real overall financial returns for the user of subscription models, hence I always saw it as a trap).

The funny bit is that when I could just buy the digital media in an unlocked format, I switched away from piracy, which is why I pretty much didn’t pirate games during the DVD era, then games started coming with phone-home DRM and I went back to pirating again and later I discovered GOG and stopped pirating again.

Had I’ve been able to legally just buy and download videos in an open format, I would’ve gladly paid for it, but instead they’ve stopped getting money from me ever since locked-down region-locked Bluray became the norm.

Seems weird that they would want to help the US.

It’s about who controls it.

Because if one side controls it and does something with it they’re not legally entitled to do do, they still get away with it if it’s not worth it for the other side, even being in the right, to take it to Court.

So if you have in your hands the files for the installer for a game which doesn’t do phone-home validations and you’ve actually explicity rented it for a limited time yet carried on using it past that point, the other side would have to take you to Court to stop it, and in the absence of a streamlined and very cheap Judicial process to do so for that kind of thing (like there is for things like loans) it’s generally not worth it for them because it costs more than they gain.

Similarly, if they control if and when you can install and run a game (which is possible even if you have the physical media - all it takes is for the game to have phone-home DRM that checks if you’re authorized) and they stop you from using it, even if you’re in the right with zero doubts (so, there was no clear upfront information that you were paying for a unilaterally revokable license and you live in a jurisdiction where Justice isn’t a joke, like Germany, so the unilaterally imposition of further contractual conditions after the sale - i.e. EULAs - aren’t at all valid), it’s generally not worth it to take it to Court to force the other side to restore you access to the game or compensate you (a few euros) for it because it costs more than you get back from it.

Holding physical media is highly correlated with controlling it, but (as per my example above) in a World of always on Internet access were phone-home DRM is easy to have, it’s no guarantee at all of actually controlling it - you might have the bytes in the stablest imaginable storage medium in your hands and you still don’t control it because you can’t actually access the game without external authorization - and that in practice means that you can get shafted even though you’re entirely in the right as long as the monetary amount you being shafted out of isn’t too large.

Converselly, whilst digital distribution is highly correlated with not controlling it, as stores like GOG show it’s perfectly possibly to sell games digitally in such a way that you get control of it (if you want - you have to actually download GOGs offline installers) by which point the cost of trying to control what you do with it is on the other side and the same monetary logic applies - it’s not worth it for them as long as the monetary amount they would gain from doing it isn’t too large.

Curiously, this also means that for PC games GOG can actually be a better way of getting de facto ownership of a game copy than physical media (if you make sure you download the offline installer) because GOG enforces the rule that their games have no DRM, whilst plenty of PC games in physical media have phone-home DRM.

Well, you see, Ju$tice is expensive and unreliable.

So the decision of using or not the Justice System for enforcing one’s rights isn’t purelly “am I likely to win”, it’s also about “is it worth it bringing it to Court”, which is especially important when the damages one is entitled to get are low (like the price of a game).

At which point “who controls the thing under dispute”, which is theoretically unimportant in a perfect Justice System, becomes the main deciding factor.

Maybe an example will make it clear:

• You have a game which the publisher wants to take away from you. They’re actually in their right to do so: you actually read through and accepted BEFORE PURCHASING (this is important in jurisdiction which aren’t legal jokes, unlike the US) a set of terms and conditions that gave them that right and it was clearly that this wasn’t a sale but a time limited licensing. However you have the actual installer for a single player game (in your computer, physical disk, whatever), totally free to install, no phone-home DRM authorization check - you control that copy. They have to actually take you to court to force you to delete that game from your system and destroy all copies. This is a $50 game. Are they really going to do it for a $50 game?!
• Similarly but reversed: you bought a physical disk with a game, it cost $50, it has phone-home DRM to install and to run. You didn’t agreed to anything before the purchase and you’re in a legal jurisdiction (such as Germany) which is not a joke so the implicit rights from a sale cannot be altered unilaterally post sale by a forced change of the contract terms of the sale (i.e. EULAs aren’t valid there). You’re in the right yet they block you from installing or running that game. To get back what you’re entitled to or compensation (all of $50) you have to take them to court. Are you really going to do it for a $50 game?!

Anyways, the point I’m making here is that well before a Court of Law actually goes through the whole thing and determines who is in the Right and orders a certain action in favor of and/or compensation for the injured side, de facto the outcome is often decided by the actual stakeholders deciding “is it worth it taking this to court?” and in a system where Justice has costs (the bigger the costs the more that’s the case) “who controls it” is pretty much the single biggest factor in that decision.

In simple terms, unless there is some kind of streamlined Judicial process for that kind of case (like there is around things like loans) bringing a case to court to force the side in control of something to act in a certain way with it is only worth it for large monetary amounts, and generally the price of a game is below that.

It just so happens that at the moment for console games having the installer for it in a physical medium in your control is having control of that copy but, as my example above illustrates, if the game does phone-home DRM authorization checks like some PC games go, it’s actually not really under your control even if you have it in physical media.

You do understand that’s logically “keep looking differently towards a certain kind of people because murderous aggressors who looked differently towards them did horrible things to them because of it”?!

You’re literally justifying the continuation of a discriminatory perspective towards people with minority sexual orientations by using the actions of the aggressors had and acted on said discriminatory perspective.

At best that’s circular logic, or maybe Stockholm Syndrome (since you’ve accepted the perspective of the aggressor even if you disapprove of their actions)

You’re making my point on why the “it’s all normal” perspective of the Dutch is so refreshing compared to the perspective of Anglo-Saxon countries.

The English Law Act 1962 stipulates that English common law will apply to Gibraltar unless overridden by Gibraltar law. This means that amongst others the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 as well as earlier and later laws around surveillance, apply in Gibraltar by default.

I supposed one would need to find legal counsel in Gibraltar to determine if Gibraltar has passed laws that nullify English laws on surveillance powers, and until proven that Gibraltar has passed said laws the most logical expectation to have is that the same surveillance laws that apply in Great Britain also apply in Gibraltar because that’s the case for most laws.

Actually they used to be pretty good back in the 80s and early 90s when they were a hardware maker and the company was always headed by somebody from the Engineering division - they made high quality consumer electronics at reasonable prices.

This is how they built quite the brand name.

Then in the late 90s (if I remember it correctly) they bought a major movie studio in the US and after a few years the top job went to somebody from the Media division.

After that all their electronics (such as Bluray and the MiniDisk) was locked down by design, quality fell a lot, they started lobbying heavily for things that would make Intellectual Property more valuable such as extending the duration of Copyrights, the DMCA and Anti-Circumvention legislation, and became so anti-consumer that they even put out music CDs with rootkits for people who listened to it on a PC.

But yeah, for over 2 decades Sony has been pretty much Evil.

That is not informing the potential buyer in a simple way, that’s hiding the information in a different page, one which is a long text made up of legalese which one need Legal Training to fully understand.

You’re just making my point.

You know what would be a simple, obvious, honest way of in that page of telling the purchaser that they’re buying a license?

• To the left of the discount and the price put the text “BUY A LICENSE FOR:”

“Strangely” Steam chooses not do any such thing or similar and instead chooses to “inform” buyers with a link to a different page which is a wall of legal text.

I’m just correcting that incorrect statement of yours that:

Nobody is saying you cannot do on Steam, the big difference is that you can do that on 100% of Gog games, on Steam only on a very small percentage. (emphasys mine)

What the previous poster described is in fact possible with much more than “a very small percentage”.

Mind you, I agree with you on what you just wrote in this last post of yours and in fact made the exact same point in response to the previous poster.

It’s just that “very small percentage” part that I disagree - if you’re technically proficient you can “hack” your way around Steam’s closed system for most games since it’s not really closed tight.

Then again a total impossibility of installing and running most Steam games independently of Steam if one has the right technical knowledge is not really the problem with Steam. The problem with Steam is threefold:

• It’s designed so that only people with a certain level of knowledge can actually do that, those being a minority of Steam users.
• Even such “hacked” access is unreliable - maybe it will work easily, maybe it will be hard, maybe it won’t work at all.
• There is no way to, before buying a game in Steam, know if that’s one of those games which can be installed and run independently of Steam in that way or not, so one cannot make an informed purchasing decision on a game being possible to install and run without Steam or not.

The whole “it’s not totally impossible” thing is just a trick that the previous poster and other such Steam fanboys try to pull when confronted with people pointing out that GOG is open and Steam is not: they misleadingly equate “the dependency of games on a central system can usually be hacked around in Steam” like to like with “GOG’s is a purposefully open system that sells games guaranteed to not dependent on a central system” which is something very different in terms of intention of that feature being there, how well informed a potential buyer is of it before a purchase, the ease of use of it and how guaranteed it is for that to be the case. That’s deeply deceitful, not even an apples and oranges comparison but more an apples and ghosts one.

Long document full of legal language than can only be truly comprehended by those with Legal Training isn’t at all the same as BIG FAT TEXT INDICATING IN A SIMPLE WAY THAT THIS IS NOT A PURCHASE.

Absolutely, in the absence of actual Pro-Consumer Regulatory Obligations, the whole “Agreement” is a valid way for sellers of digital media such as Steam to legally cover their asses and not actually saying to prospective buyers the true nature of what they’re buying.

It is, however, not a means to help a purchaser make an informed purchase, rather it’s a way for Steam and other such stores to, in the current legal and regulatory environment, legally get away with doing the very opposite and obfuscate the true nature of what the purchaser is purchasing.

Think about it this way: if the intention of Steam was to be honest and make sure purchasers were making informed purchases, then why not inform purchasers upfront in the product page in a simple way that what they would be buying was a REVOCABLE LICENSE rather than ownership of a PRODUCT, and even explain the difference, rather than hide it in a long document that requires Law training to fully understand?

The fact that it’s legal to have a purchase flow that looks like you’re buying things without the seller being legally obliged to have a disclaimer in big fat letters that says something like “THIS IS NOT A PURCHASE, IT’S A LICENSING AGREEMENT. LICENSING AGREEMENTS CAN BE REVOKED AT ANY TIME AND YOU WILL LOSE ACCESS TO THIS MEDIA YOU ARE LICENSING” is the actual problem.

IMHO, Corruption amongst Lawmakers and Regulators is the actual problem.

People should be avoiding like the plague any stores whose media they can’t actually download and keep in an open DRM-free format in their own devices, but they don’t because they’re not aware of it as the whole thing is one big bloody mess of expert legal domain and the fraud of misportraying a sale to be one things whilst it is a different thing being totally legal when it comes to digital media.

Can’t blame people for not understanding this and thus not navigating it in an informed way, but I sure can blame Politicians and Regulators for not doing their jobs which is to make sure that sales are fair and the consumer can make an informed choice when evaluating a potential a purchase.

Actually, FYI, you can do that for a large percentage of Steam games, maybe even most, if you use the Goldberg Emulator that replaces the steamapi DLL.

Steam DRM is one of the easiest to bypass around, and I like to think that’s very much a purposeful choice.

However, the entire thing is designed for it not to be easy to do for somebody with the technical know-how of the average gamer, plus it’s not reliably possible and there’s no way to know upfront if it will work or not when making a purchasing decision on a game in Steam.

Meanwhile “No DRM and with downloadable Offline Installers” is literally the Unique Value Proposition of GOG as a games store - access to download offline installers is there in the games page after purchase and that installer is guaranteed to work forever and ever if you still have the hardware and OS version supported by the game.

Not reliably as there is no contractual limitation on games having their own phone-home DRM plus some games are tightly integrated with Steam features (which Steam incentivizes) and don’t work well offline, plus you need to known were the installers are cached as you can’t just download them to a location of your choice and how to use stuff like the Goldberg Emulator otherwise only games which have ZERO integration with Steam will fully install and run offline.

In GOG, access to download the offline installers is right there in the product page in your library and contractually the games can’t have any DRM as “No DRM” is GOG’s unique value proposition as a games store.

Steam doesn’t make it too hard to go around the phone-home DRM they put in place (making it better than just about all other phone-home DRM out there) but that’s not at all the same as “here are the installers for you to use whenever you want online or offline and they’re guaranteed to have no DRM”.

Do not worry, Sony is not at all known for taking away from people digital media which they keep in their servers for those people

/s (just in case)

In most countries Management is not Meritocratic - people whose job is Organizing, Tactical Planning and even Strategical Planning are in practice selected on Networking (the social kind, not the tech kind), Social and Image Management skills as well as Knowing The Right People (which often is Coming From Well Off Families And Attending The Right Posh Schools) instead of concrete metrics on the skills they’re supposed to have and apply on the job.

Since performance measuring in that domain is often pretty nebulous (especially in IT), it’s a lot easier to get away with being mediocre at the job than it is in more strictly measurable domains where results are clearly PASS/FAIL.

So you get tons of Shoot From The Hip, Make It Up As You Go and generally insufficient problem space analysis, none of which conducing to reliable, sustained and robust outcomes. Since generally the management pyramid is people like that all the way up, the higher ups just see the inevitable problems that emerge later as “just the way things are” because they themselves did the exact same thing, and often even promote such people because they’re like them:

The

• Some manager does insufficient upfront analysis and preparation, and then, when things needlessly blow up because of that, in a “superhuman effort” “saves the day” by avoiding catastrophe, hence is seen as a hero and gets promoted.

is very common exactly because upper level management themselves work in the same way and are thus unable to spot the causal relationship between not doing something they themselves don’t do and the later crisis when a “unknown unknown” that should’ve been a “know unknown” for which there was already some defensive planning turns into a near catastrophe for which in their eyes “nobody could have seen coming” is a valid justification.

Mind you, this actually varies quiet a bit from country to country as the overall management culture is not the same - in my own professional experience it’s not at all the same thing in Northern Europe and Scandinavia as it is in Western Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries and in turn between those and Southern Europe and Latin America.

Well, the upside of PCs is that you can keep on upgrading just parts of it, whilst console upgrading is generally just buy a new one, something that has become even more so around the late 00s when the upgrade cycle slowed down quite a lot, even for gaming PCs.

I think (but am not sure) that as long as you didn’t aim for top of the range parts and instead used the ones just below (generally much cheaper for only a little bit less performance) all in all it was cheaper to just keep upgrading one’s PC than keeping on replacing one’s console with a new one as they came out.

Mind you, I’ve jumped out of the “keep up with the latest titles” threadmill over a decade ago since, with the notable exception of Indie titles, I don’t actually find them as entertaining (they’re generally very “guided” linear experiences whilst I like lots of freedom and high complexity) plus I discovered that I derive far more enjoyment from great gameplay than I do from great graphics: the latter can indeed be amazing and impressive for the first couple of hours, but it’s the former that gets me back to a game again and again and again, even years later.

PCs and Patient Gaming is way cheaper than consoles, though I guess that by now there’s also a lot of Patient Gaming in consoles since people keep on using the older one rather than buying the new on.

Further, upgrading one’s PC or even just knowing what kind of things are better to upgrade at any one point and how to chose the right parts for upgradeability (such as enthusiast motherboards instead of just cheap ones and the kind of CPU socket that was recent enough that was likely to keep getting new CPUs for a while) requires quite a lot of technical expertise and is beyond most people. even gamers.