Video games will be digital only within 5 years, says report

[Ttaskmaster]

If we had internet that was faster and more reliable then it wouldn't be such an issue but so many people have download limits and even more have poor speeds that take an age to download, also robbing anyone else in the house of the use of any bandwidth intensive internetness.

Download big things overnight or when you go out.
I have 0.7Mbps and I manage just fine that way.
I also learned early on, when I first got internet as was only playing Freelancer, that any gamer would have to be stupid not to go for the Unlimited Downloads package from their ISP... or rich enough to pay the £5 per GB excess fines every time they go over their limit.

Mandatory patching for single player games (I don't do multiplayer, too much frustration) also drives me nuts, especially when it breaks what was a perfectly functioning game.

Unpatched glitches in single player games drives me nuts... Just because you may not have encountered the problem (yet) doesn't mean there isn't one.

Almost as nuts as downloading a game through Steam, having to log on to that and update Steam

Would you rather they left it as a buggy, unsecured mess and causing however many other people however many other problems, just so YOU don't have to spend a maximum of 2 minutes updating something?
Maybe it'd be better if your antivirus wasn't eating up your download cap with all these crazy security updates?

then uPlay demanding you update it and log in with a stupidly long password that I keep forgetting and then be forced to update the game before I can play it OFFLINE. On MY OWN.

You're supposed to come up with a password that you will remember.
They did tell you to do that....

Latest Far Cry can sod off as can the new COD games. There's just too much hassle involved in playing them when you only have half an hour here and there.

I haven't ever bothered with either of those franchises anyway. Clearly moneyspinners ripe for bogging down with excess guff.... except Blood Dragon. That seemed fine.

Oh and of course Steam loves to shove ads in my face whenever I use it, disguised as "news", which is also nice.

What, the little pop-ups each time you open the app?
Can you not just.... I dunno.... click on Close?

[Saracen]

AFAIK, all my Steam games get installed wherever I specify...?

Online authentication - Cheaper and easier than issuing manuals from which you need to enter Page 17, Line 26, Word 3 in order to play each time... Besides, with the authentication, it does help combat both piracy and people who create multiple accounts to go griefing and the like.
But then, I tend not to pay £90 for the absolute latest FPSMMORPG anyway, so it's not my kind they're worried about. By the time I come to try your 'Battlefield of Honor of Medal of Duty' thing, if I try it at all, it will be a fiver in a Steam sale and not worth pirating... and most of the haxorz, cheaters and griefers will have long since grown up gotten jobs and had children that keep them too busy to play games!!

There were some, years ago, that wanted online check to permit installation. No approval, no installation. Maybe they don't do that anymore.

Physical authentication, be it word check, some fancy cide-wheel gizmo, or "CD in to play" are all a bit of a pain, but ultimately, under my control wherever I install. Almost all of my games playing takes place on my air-gapped network. How do I online authenticate that, without compromising the air-gap? So, I can't install where I want. Or, at the PC I keep at the mum-in-laws, where due to her health, I sometimes end up staying for up to 6 weeks at a time. She has no broadband. Again, how do I install, or play, there with online auth required?

My point, really, is having paid £40, £50 or more for a game, I am not making myself subject to permission from Steam to use it, if I decide to play it 5 or 15 years later.

Clearly, that means games I can't play until de-DRM versions appear, and some I probably never will play. So be it. But Steam? For me, not 'then', not now and not ever.

[Ttaskmaster]

There were some, ysars ago, that wanted online check to permit installation. No approval, no installation. Maybe they don't do that anymore.

I believe a fair few still do that, but mainly for reasons of authentication - It's them checking you have bought a genuine copy, not a dodgy Penguin CDKeys one (or whatever the place is) off a dealer from 4Chan/Reddit.
I do not begrudge them trying to combat piracy in the slightest.

My point, really, is having psid £40, £50 or more for a game, I am not making myself subject to permission from Steam to use it, if I decide to play it 5 or 15 years later.

Dunno about every game, but any online games (such as Elite, which kinda needs the FD servers to house 400 billion star systems) and especially competitive/PvP ones would be very stupid if they didn't keep checking to make sure their players hadn't installed cracks, hacks and general cheating methods.
It's also not your game - It's the Dev's game in their yard, and thus you'd still need their permission just as if this were a real life football game - They just get Steam to use their superior cheat detections and stuff, because it's better/cheaper and already in place.
Again, I don't really begrudge them trying to combat cheating and unauthorised modding, either.

[shaithis]

Steam family sharing effectively allows you to share games, add your friend as a family member and they can play your games as long as you are not at the time.

There are some major caveats with steam sharing though......I can't loan a game, only the entire library, locking you out of everything if someone starts playing a game from your library (and visa versa)
Also, if the person you are sharing with is playing one of your titles and gets VAC banned, you can too.

[DanceswithUnix]

My point, really, is having psid £40, £50 or more for a game, I am not making myself subject to permission from Steam to use it, if I decide to play it 5 or 15 years later.

I expect like many others I installed Steam when Half-Life 2 came out in 2004. That game is about to hit it's 14th birthday, and I can still go play it almost meeting your 15 years later mark. OTOH, I have tried installing old games from CD and they don't play well with recent versions of Windows or PC hardware, they aren't updated so ironically the ones without DRM are better described as "abandoned" and unplayable. I'm not enthusiast enough to keep a Win95 PC, A Win 98se PC, a Win XP pc so I have different levels of hardware and software available just in case.

My son has just bought the steam sale bundle where for about £11 you can get every Valve title they made, and is playing Counterstrike. That game is almost as old as he is, it works, he is thoroughly enjoying it.

There seems to be a "play offline" option, though I haven't used it. Occasionally the client asks if it can send my hardware details to Valve so they know what gamers are using, I can say no if I want.

[Saracen]

....

I do not begrudge them trying to combat piracy in the slightest.


Dunno about every game, but any online games (such as Elite, which kinda needs the FD servers to house 400 billion star systems) and especially competitive/PvP ones would be very stupid if they didn't keep checking to make sure their players hadn't installed cracks, hacks and general cheating methods.
It's also not your game - It's the Dev's game in their yard, and thus you'd still need their permission just as if this were a real life football game - They just get Steam to use their superior cheat detections and stuff, because it's better/cheaper and already in place.
Again, I don't really begrudge them trying to combat cheating and unauthorised modding, either.

I don't begrudge them blocking piracy, either. If I put all my boxed games in a pile, it'd reach floor to ceiling ..... several times.

As for online games, that's a bit different. If it requires a server to play, then it requires a server to play. But I buy/bought mainly single-player, or multi-local-player games, that would require online connections ONLY for authentication. I also like to go back to old games and replay them, often years later. With the varying types of authentication on those, I can decide to replay anything in my repertoire, just so long as I have workjng hardware for it. That includes classics lije the original Wizardry, or Tigers in the Snow (WW2 turn-based sim for those unfamiliar. Both are for Apple II and date back to late 70s and, yes, I can still run them.

I don't expect others to agree, but that's what I expect when I buy a game - that I can run it wherever, and whenever, I wish without needing permission from some US corporation.

I am NOT, under any circumstances, spending another fortune on games only to risk Steam deciding that I've somehow contravened with T&Cs and banning my account, thus rendering those purchases useless. I am simply not now, and not ever, putting myself in that situation, that risk.

Will it change Steam? Of course not. Does it prevent, or at least delay, me playing some games? Absolutely. That is a price I'd rather not pay, but my objection to the entire principle on which Steam operates gives me no choice.

I said this when Steam first appeared and I say it now, it I never buy any game that requires Steam, or similar online authentication. By a pleasant coincidence, the money that has saved me upgraded my stereo, bought me a couple of nice lenses and has paid for more than one holiday. In part, because of far fewer purchases, and in part because what I do buy tends to be £2-£8 each on GOG, not £40-£80 in high street games stores .... if they still exist.

[johnroe]

I prefer digital copies through Steam. I just don't want to own all that junk(any of the old media formats). All music on a usb, all games digital. No letters, all email. The Future, and no more plastic waste.

[Saracen]

I expect like many others I installed Steam when Half-Life 2 came out in 2004. That game is about to hit it's 14th birthday, and I can still go play it almost meeting your 15 years later mark. OTOH, I have tried installing old games from CD and they don't play well with recent versions of Windows or PC hardware, they aren't updated so ironically the ones without DRM are better described as "abandoned" and unplayable. I'm not enthusiast enough to keep a Win95 PC, A Win 98se PC, a Win XP pc so I have different levels of hardware and software available just in case.

My son has just bought the steam sale bundle where for about £11 you can get every Valve title they made, and is playing Counterstrike. That game is almost as old as he is, it works, he is thoroughly enjoying it.

There seems to be a "play offline" option, though I haven't used it. Occasionally the client asks if it can send my hardware details to Valve so they know what gamers are using, I can say no if I want.

As I'm sure you know, the 5 or 15 years were picked arbitrarily. It could equally well have been 5 or 35 years. My oldest personal computer game, that I can still play, dates to around 1979/80 .... that being an Apple II game.

The oldest game I have on hard copy dates to late 60's, but unfortunately I don't have the IBM S360 mainframe I'd need to run it.

But, it's likely that I'll still have working Apple II hardware in 20 years, which will make my 1979 games nearly 60 years old. Will Steam still be running servers in 60 year old games? Who knows.

It's not the point, though. The point is that Steam means I fork out the money now, and my ability to use or not use what I paid for rests with Steam, who could render it all useless, in an instant. I've spent , oh I shudder to think, how much on games over the years, but it'll be many, many thousands. The notion of putting my ability to access it in some foreign, or even UK for that mattet, company's control is absolute anathema to me. With all my existing games, it's possible some might develop faults over the years. None have yet, that I've found, even those relying on 1970s-era floppy disks, but it could happen .... which is why most of it is backed up. But I won't lose it all ib a blink because Steam suddenly decide, for whatever reason, to close my account.

There's another way to look at it, which reflects my buying decisions - I like to know what Im going to get from software, especially when it isn't used regularly. So, for instance, MS Office is of zero interest to me in '365' version. I have several boxed versions going back to Office 97, etc. Hell I still have both Wordstar and Wordperfect for DOS. Similarly, I had nearly every version of Photoshop for nearly 20 years, but I am not paying a monthly subscription. Why? Because I might use it intensively for several days, then not touch it for months.

By buying versions, I know I'll have that version indefinitely, but if I start renting, many months I'll be paying, but not using. So with games, I'll buy when I spot a deal, but might not get atound to installing for months. I've even got several games, still sealed, that Ive had for 5+ years. As soon as I put authentication ihto Steam's hands, I lose control over what I paid for, and like software by subscription, I'm not doing it.

I'm not saying Steam doesn't have advantages. Clearly, it does. And for some people, so do software subscriptions. I'm saying that, FOR ME, they are nowhere near enough.

[Saracen]

I prefer digital copies through Steam. I just don't want to own all that junk(any of the old media formats). All music on a usb, all games digital. No letters, all email. The Future, and no more plastic waste.

That's fair enough. If it works for you, it works for you. It doesn't work for me. Each to his own.

[grimmy58]

I love digital games, I have a decent sized Steam collection (thanks to Humble Bundle etc.) and pick up the monthly PS4 and Xbox games, however I actually prefer to buy hard copy games. First and foremost they hold a resale value, whereas you can't really sell on digital copies. I also think there's something nice about cracking open a new game - though I miss the days of 'proper' instruction books.

[spacein_vader]

I love digital games, I have a decent sized Steam collection (thanks to Humble Bundle etc.) and pick up the monthly PS4 and Xbox games, however I actually prefer to buy hard copy games. First and foremost they hold a resale value, whereas you can't really sell on digital copies. I also think there's something nice about cracking open a new game - though I miss the days of 'proper' instruction books.

I thought the console makers were trying to make hard copies unsaleable too, by tieing the copy to the Sony/MS/Nintendo account it's first attached to? You can still sell the disc but it'll fail activation for anyone else?

The vanishingly few pc box copy games (can't remember when I last saw a boxed pc game in a shop,) work like this.

[DanceswithUnix]

I'm not saying Steam doesn't have advantages. Clearly, it does. And for some people, so do software subscriptions. I'm saying that, FOR ME, they are nowhere near enough.

I do get all that, and to demonstrate the perils of DRM I have an old Nook e-reader. I bought a Sci-Fi book on there for a few quid which is a compendium of old stories and about 14000 pages in total (fourteen thousand, not a typo). Barns and Noble dropped out of the market in this country and sold my account to Sainsbury's, who then dropped out and sold the account to Rakuten. Rakuten said they didn't have rights to that book and refunded me the cost of the book, yet the infrastructure for the Nook is gone so the book still remains on there. I'm not sure where I stand with that, other than I am only on about page 9000 and some year maybe I will finish it, but in the mean time that Nook has been a real bargain for what it cost vs the entertainment it has bought.

I'm guessing you haven't played most of the half-life or Portal games if you don't do Steam. For under £12 you can currently play the lot. I shall be going out for dinner at a nice restaurant this evening, if the service is good (and it is usually excellent) then I expect I will tip for that sort of money. I don't see how I could expect to get physical media for all those games at that sort of cost.

Then I think you are assuming an outcome of a problem that hasn't happened yet. If Valve were to somehow collapse, they could just leave things be and the games would stop working, or they could unlock to DRM free as they collapse. I haven't seen anything that makes me think Valve are particularly immoral, I really don't know what they would do but assuming the outcome would be bad seems wrong.

[Saracen]

@DwU ....

Halflife? Yeeees, certainly HL1, and I think HL2, plus an add-on or two (all PC, all part of that mountain of boxes). They count among my favourite games, top-10 categories. But since then, and that must be .... ummmm .... 15 years? Nope.

I get the point about everything for £12 or so. Maybe I'm just being pig-headed but I detest the principle that they can decide to negate my purchase price, whether thousands or a few quid.

Has it happened yet? Not to me, for sure ... but then, it couldn't. I have read accounts (anecdotal eevidence, I grant you) of people whose accounts Steam have allegedly closed arbitrarily. I'm not willing to put myself in that position.

Bear in mind, I've been gaming on computers for, well, lets just say more than 50 years. I started in the days of drum drives and ASCII tape readers. I even wrote my versions of some early games, like Battleships, Star Trek and text-based D&D.

I was into gaming on personal computers in the very early days, from Apple II TO BBC, Sinclair ZX and so on. I followed Wizardy (and others) from the days of wandering down corridors comprised simply of geometrical line drawings, through the Doom Variants, Duke Nukem, Myst series, the 'adventure' games from Sierra from Kings Quest to good ol' Larry, Monkey Island and so on, to Myst etc. Oh, and racing Superbikes, MotoGP etc, not to mention Flight Sim, Wing Commander, Elite, and the other space war and war/trading games, and a myriad of 'sims'.


What I'm getting at is that I was in on the birth, childhood, adolescence, nd growing maturity of the entire genre.

But in recent years, there's been a huge dearth if anything innovative in gaming that truly excites me. Sure, online gaming has taken off but, personally (having dabbled) I'm not interested in that. And if another thread is any guide, much to my surprise, loads of people either agree or are coming around to that view.

Sure, graphics engines are greatly improved, sound is more .... immersive. VR (which is potentially genuinely revolutionary) us kinda coming, dorta here .... -ish.

But there's very, VERY little that truly grabs me. It's definitely been there, done that, got the T-shirt (literally, from several gaming conferences in the US) and though I haven't (yet) written the book, I've certainly written enough articles and reviews.

So, and I'm finally at the point, I feel no great need to play games, and certainly no need to buy any specific games, even newer HL versions. I can absolutely satisfy my gsming itch, such as it is these days, either by rrpkaying old games or from the GOG DRM-free selection.

If that means I never do play whatever the latest craze is, well, I think the acronym is DILLIGAD?

Which means, given my loathing for the principle behind Steam, if no more DRM-free games were ever released, and every new title in future was Steam only, I still wouldn't get Steam. If I got £100k of my choice of Steam games absolutely free, my answer would still be no thanks.

A bit like with Win10, I reject what it stands for, don't have to have it (other than one test system, in W10's case), and so won't have it.

[grimmy58]

I thought the console makers were trying to make hard copies unsaleable too, by tieing the copy to the Sony/MS/Nintendo account it's first attached to? You can still sell the disc but it'll fail activation for anyone else?

The vanishingly few pc box copy games (can't remember when I last saw a boxed pc game in a shop,) work like this.

Yeah, I heard that Microsoft were planning something like this prior to releasing the Xbox One. I hope it's not something that becomes more mainstream. I suppose with PC games these days, they mostly come with a steam (or other online platform) code that is single use, and if there is a disc included it's installation media only. I thought of another reason I like physical products - ridiculous in-store sales - I've been really lucky in the past and been able to get some games in sales / or closing down events - this likely wouldn't happen if it was all digital.

[spacein_vader]

I thought of another reason I like physical products - ridiculous in-store sales - I've been really lucky in the past and been able to get some games in sales / or closing down events - this likely wouldn't happen if it was all digital.

It does on the PC currently as there is competition between stores. The amount of games that were full price at launch a couple of years back that I've picked up for sub £5 is huge. That changes when you look at games from only 1 shop (so valves own stuff, EA and Blizzard mostly,) and imagine it'd be the same on consoles where you'd have to buy direct from the console makers.

A brilliant tool for PC games is www.IsThereAnyDeal.com. add games to a watchlist, set a target price or discount percentage and the site will email you when your conditions are met. It also compares price history (so tells you if a deal is the lowest price it's ever been sold for,) and supports pretty much all legitimate sites but ignores the grey CD Keys style ones.

[Ttaskmaster]

only to risk Steam deciding that I've somehow contravened with T&Cs and banning my account, thus rendering those purchases useless.

Then simply don't violate the T&Cs, surely?

I have read accounts (anecdotal eevidence, I grant you) of people whose accounts Steam have allegedly closed arbitrarily. I'm not willing to put myself in that position.

I've read similar anecdotes of people whose things like bank accounts and jobs have suffered similar fates... I bet you have at least one of those, though....?

But in recent years, there's been a huge dearth if anything innovative in gaming that truly excites me.

It's been like that since the 1980s, mate.... and not just in gaming.