Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Valve seems significantly closer to a reasonable compromise between our ideology and the opposing ideology, especially compared to Sony and Microsoft.

Part of the reason Valve gets away with it is that PC is an open platform. If you don't want to buy from Valve you don't have to buy directly from Valve. If you find a better deal elsewhere you can buy the game elsewhere. That's not true for consoles. When it comes to digital only on Playstation you pay the price Sony tells you to pay because nobody except Sony is allowed to sell on Playstation. If Sony decides to jack up the price you just have to deal with it. If Sony refuses to put their games on sale you just have to deal with it.

The argument about removing your library is true for Valve (less so for GOG because you can just download all your installers and store them locally) but I think that's a problem of the law. I think the law should catch up to digital media and give it the same rights as physical media. I hope SKG movements makes enough headway to lay the groundwork for someone else to come along and establish actual ownership of digital media.

so wait, is valve supposed to sell physical CDs? is that what you’re getting at?

I do have that childhood nostalgia for cartridges, but that aside the modern joy of physical media is usually something like works offline, works 20 years from now, can't be remotely disabled. But I've found that once you're paying $599 for a brick with a 5 year expiration time bomb built-in, $70 per game, 20GB downloads before you can start playing, the dark patterns don't end there, and the whole ecosystem just isn't worth all the hassle.

When it comes to Playstation, you can either buy from PS Store or buy a disk somewhere else where it can be cheaper. Without physical media you only have one store, a full monopoly. I think that's the main issue.

My view is that with a physical copy I own it for life and there's no way for Sony to come and take it away after they decide to "end support" or something. I can (and do) still plug in my ps2 and boot up any of my games from back then perfectly fine, and barring age/wear and tear I can continue to do so as long as I want. I'm also able to go buy old ps2 games from anyone who's selling them, I don't have to hope Sony has Mercenaries 2 on sale for $69.99 even though it's older than a decent chunk of PlayStation users.

I agree with you. I have zero need for plastic boxes and circles. They make NO sense to me at all.

I have never bought a game and thought: "is it worth it because I could sell it later?"

I remember when game stop's dumpsters were full of used games, do we really want that to happen again?

At the same time: I would never buy a console. That seems ridiculous to me too.

I like being able to touch the things. The tactile feedback of something in my hands is nice.

Also: Don't have much digital storage.

I don't want it either, but look at this and look at gog.