I was surprised to come back to my XBOX account after 10 years in the US and see that very old digital purchases from previous console generations were not only still available, but actually playable on the latest console through transparent emulation! They did a pretty good job with that.
Whatever you think about Microsoft, they are a good steward of their platforms and go to extremes to maintain backwards compatibility -- even if they are always moving your cheese in the UI.
But life is more than financial transactions. Those people wasted hours and hours curating their personal libraries with books they loved.
Considering how the price and availability of ebooks fluctuates, the refund value is not necessarily equal to the replacement cost, plus more hours finding replacements, if replacements are even available.
Except for the hundred thousands if not millions of people who lost their Minecraft account due to the way Microsoft handled multiple successive account migrations, also including the many accounts that were stolen due to lax security.
And since digital ownership legislation is a joke consumers have pretty much no recourse.
Beat me to it. I am still incredibly salty about losing my “lifetime” license to Minecraft. I really am curious to see some of the changes that have happened since I last played (when still owned by Notch), but I refuse to repurchase it.
I don’t know what to say. I went to the migration site, entered my information-no dice. Contacted support and got no assistance. There are others with a similar experience.
Microsoft could have gone above and beyond to manage the forced migration. Instead there was a convoluted process which left many cheated. They could have just punted and automatically emailed brand new entitlement codes to all of the original purchase emails. Yes, people who switched emails would have been missed, but that would have covered 95%+ of customers in a single action.
Modded, yes. The Minecraft mod scene is incredible. The Create mod ecosystem is my favorite.
Pirated? Really? How cheap are you guys? It’s a $30 game with all ~15 years of content updates included.
I’m not trying to be some kind of corporate bootlicker here but I think you have to have apathy toward taking care of the stuff you own to have failed to get your Minecraft license converted from the Mojang account.
Saying 15 years of content updates feels disingenuous when most of those years, at least lately, feel like minimal updates from a company that's out of ideas and doesn't want to change anything that might have a chance at annoying some people.
It seems like every year is "a new mob and a new biome", which is... not much. If you sign into Minecraft from five years ago I doubt you would notice many changes at all.
To be fair, Minecraft is a huge thing to be a steward of, and they're doing dual-development across Bedrock and Java, but... it's obvious that this isn't what they want to be doing and I think at some point they just need to make a decision what they want to be, let everyone know, and start making it work.
Also, with regard to Mojang account - I tried to get mine converted. I followed the steps, they didn't work. I opened a ticket, no one responded. I worked on it for six months and couldn't get any reply from them until it was too late. Now I've lost that account, not because I didn't care but because they didn't seem to.
As far as the approach to content updates, I think what you describe is exactly the right one. Mojang knows that anything more opinionated belongs in a mod. Minecraft is more of a platform than a game.
I’ve seen the debate come up often about software that should just be a one time purchase, it’s “done” and that we don’t want to be paying a subscription for every little thing, so my feeling is that for a buy-once game like Minecraft having so many content updates for so long is a real plus.
As far as your loss of your license, that’s really unfortunate, and hopefully a rare circumstance. I’m disappointed that support wasn’t able to help you.
Pragmatically, if I liked the game enough, I’d probably just buy it again. Most of my most-played old games have been purchased multiple times for some kind of reason like a format change or something along those lines. I’ve definitely bought Morrowind multiple times. I owned Oblivion on a disc, then bought the steam version, then bought the remastered version.
I absolutely realize how you absolutely shouldn’t have to buy the game again.
If I was too busy building my startup while my Starbucks Frappuccino melted, Starbucks didn’t “steal from me.”
I understand living by your principles but in my experience, the process of running a pirated server/clients is enough of a pain that it’s not worth $30 of anyone’s time, even if it’s the second time you’ve had to pay it in the span of multiple decades.
Ah, yeah...that's exactly the same thing. Great point. Totally changed my mind!
Edit: Your edit clarifies things a bit. Eh, I got my start in software development working on an emulated Lineage 2 server ~20 years ago, and eventually building my own server from the ground up which extended the game in ways that the normal servers / client didn't support. I think tinkering is fine if that's what interests you.
I don't spend much time these days with games (compared to the past) regardless.
Microsoft has never revoked a Minecraft license (fraud/abuse notwithstanding). You just have to do basic account maintenance like keeping your email up to date and you had to respond to emails to complete one single account migration in 15+ years. Microsoft asked you to do one 5-minute thing in the span of 15 years.
I am a little surprised that someone who built their own startup is so opposed to the idea of personal agency. This seems like you’re taking a victim’s mentality.
If I stored my Myst CD-ROM in a moldy basement for 30 years and it got ruined that way I don’t get to complain about having it stolen from me. Clearly by my lack of action I didn’t care about that possession that much in the first place.
If you didn't transfer it from your Mojang account to your Microsoft account in time (before the account was shut down) you just straight up lost access to it.
Microsoft accounts being an absolute pain in the ass to set up and manage, and the new launcher being aggressively terrible, are salt in the wound even if you finally gave in and migrated your account.
Also, good luck running Microsoft’s Minecraft launcher on a kid’s computer with allowlist-only internet access. It connects to like 20 apparently-random IP addresses every time it launches, will not work if any of them fails, and the pool of addresses is evidently huge. I never did find anything like a list of IP blocks to allow. Maybe they keep a file with them all in it somewhere, never looked, but I have a feeling they hit one address that gives them their list of the others for each session, and only that list, like if I had to bet on it I’d go with that (if they had a larger list, why aren’t they re-trying with different addresses when one fails?). I guess they just don’t care about that use case. (“Why don’t parents just police their kids’ internet access?” yeah look some of us really try but shit like this is everywhere and makes it stupidly difficult)
Both had a 3-year deadline. If you failed to do either before their deadline, then your "lifetime" Minecraft account is completely dead with no possibility of recovery.
I didn't lose it per se but it was kind of an ordeal to migrate it from Mojang to MS back then and I had to actually involve support, but in the end it worked.
Have not logged in for years so maybe I have lost it meanwhile ;)
Or when they decided to wipe people's Hotmail accounts. Now some random person has my original hotmail that I had since the 90s through to the 2010s... Presumably, this person now indirectly has a ton of my original accounts for different services I can no longer access... thanks Microsoft.
I'm so happy I managed to transfer everything important over to my own domain before anything like that happened. I still have my old Hotmail and Gmail, and while nothing important shows up there, there's still a trickle of non-spam email coming in there, even after 5 and 10 years since I transferred everything I could remember at the time.
Haha, I was one of these people. I'm unreasonably salty about this (given the monetary loss is not high and I got a lot of playtime out of the game back then), especially because I also had one of those Alpha keys unused as well!
I lost my original minecraft account because I wasn't able to get in contact with them. I had the original purchase information as required, but it wouldn't accept it. I contacted the e-mail address they said to get in touch with but heard nothing. No matter what I did nothing happened and now my old account is gone forever.
Yeah i belong to them i have an ancient account that was connected to a shitty mail hoster that deleted mail accounts after not use and i paid back then with a paysafe card. So i had no way to rpove ownership and got shafted. Abit of my fault I guess but i was like 14 when I bought it.
Is two years period supposed to be a lot? What if a person haven't played the game for five years (which happens quite often) then comes back and sees that it's gone?
You know, all those people making new n64, playstation, and gameboy titles might be onto something. Apart from steam, I don't think I've heard anything but bad news from modern consoles.
Talk to console gamers and they still think the PC is sweaty and playing on the PC is like putting your hands in the toilet. I mean, I remember the 1990s when kids were playing flight simulators with this huge plastic joysticks that were always falling apart and needed to be calibrated every five minutes. It's not like that anymore, with Steam Big Picture and either an XBOX ONE or PS4/5 controller your PC is a better console.
The main problem is that, ex. the Steam Controller, nobody can make a decent game controller except for console vendors and when the console vendors go down somebody will have to step up.
I just can't believe the PS5 has sold as many units as it has with just 15 exclusive games, many of which are remakes, even remakes of remakes. That reputation that the PC platform is too sweaty has taken a long long time to die and it doesn't help that ACER and such are coming out with handhelds that are maximum sweat (boot into a Windows Desktop with 10x too small fonts) compared to the consumer electronics experience of the Steam Deck.
> The main problem is that, ex. the Steam Controller, nobody can make a decent game controller except for console vendors and when the console vendors go down somebody will have to step up.
I used to only play on DualShock 4s and even skipped the DualSense because I just loved my DualShock that much.
I use an 8bitDo now and it is better in every way I care about. 8bitDo does not make consoles.
> ex. the Steam Controller, nobody can make a decent game controller except for console vendors
Reading this feels feels like you are the one that is still in 1990s.
Third party controllers have long surpassed the ones from console vendors. Standard console controllers still continue to use potentiometers for sticks. Even pro versions that cost over a hundred euro still use them.
Fair but the form factor is completely different. Dreamcast/xbox I’d consider the real base for modern controllers. But my original point is that once the 360 controller came out everyone (except Sony) has basically 90% copied it. Everything before is pretty distinct.
While Switch is 360-esque now, the Wii Classic Controller had symmetrical sticks at the bottom, Wii U Pro Controller and GamePad had symmetrical sticks on top. So Nintendo wasn't totally committed to the 360 design even if the GameCube controller was almost there before. (Not gonna count the Wiimote as it's a little too different) Steam Deck and Steam Controller have symmetrical sticks as well. I don't think it's as clear cut as you say. 8BitDo and GuliKit have controllers in both form factors also (released in the last 2 years even).
Also worth noting that XInput has been holding back PC controllers so that anything more ambitious than a 360 controller is hard to get working. Microsoft is also the only controller manufacturer to not put gyro in their controllers.
You’re getting too nitty gritty. The general shape/form factor for all controllers, as well as 90% of the button/stick layout, was basically locked by the 360. Every diversion is either Sony or window dressing.
>Talk to console gamers and they still think the PC is sweaty and playing on the PC is like putting your hands in the toilet.
Eh, as someone who owns and plays on both pc and console, the simple truth of the matter is that playing on console is, for the most part, better 'bang for the buck'. You can reliably purchase a console and a budget linux laptop and both will reliably fill their respective niches for the next decade. PC gaming, in my experience, requires a much higher budget, and this was even before the modern pricing madness.
Consoles also had much wider support for couch coop than PC did, so it was a more social experience, and to be blunt, PC gaming has a pretty bad problem with cheating that I simply never experienced on console.
Like I said, I play and enjoy both. I can afford to do so now, but I do feel bad for teens today because even consoles are getting crazy expensive.
> Apart from steam, I don't think I've heard anything but bad news from modern consoles.
Gabe is in his mid 60s, I'm prepared that in the next decade or so there will be a change of guard at Valve and the slow train of enshittification will get moving.
P.S. There's been a lot of groupthink and bandwagoning for Valve, ignoring all the dirt under the rug. But at the end of the day, by comparison, they are the best behaving in the field.
The company that gave up making games because there was more money to be had from inserting itself as a middleman into a previously open platform does not deserve any adoration.
The true answer here is that people went where the games went. And those AAA distributors preferred a middleman doing everything for them in exchange for getting a cut. From there, AA and indies went to the middleman because they more or less had to to compete. Whether or not you consider market capture the whims of the consumer or a natural consequence of capitalism is a more philosophical question to ask.
On a more fundamental level, it seems like people will pick convenience over security and freedom every time the choice pops up. In the land of media, this comes down to choosing to put all your eggs in one basket in exchange for having less control over the products you bought. We've seen this across Netflix, Steam, and Spotify as the largest modern examples.
It is market capture, and you don’t get to just hand wave it away with how it’s only philosophical. It has real world ramifications, it is a real consequence that can put consumers under duress (distorting the market) and/or leave them with no viable alternatives (which a free market is allegedly supposed to prevent)
>It is market capture, and you don’t get to just hand wave it away with how it’s only philosophical.
I don't get to declare it one way just because I think it's true either.
If people truly want all their eggs in one basket, is it market capture if you are 100% upfront (which these companies aren't, but lets suppose), and people come into it anyway? I suppose my philosophy here comes down to "you can only protect people from themselves for so long before exploitation simply becomes business". Why try and spout freedom to those who actively seek someone or something to be controlled by? Why spout principles of ownership to those who will relinquish it every time for a "cheap" subscription?
Now the real answer is another scary word to this community: regulation. It's been beyond time we had proper digital ownership laws. But we're a very long road away from that in the US.
Gabe is off forming a cult which I assume will consume his focus for the remainder of his life. I'm dead serious he is basically straight up copying Ron L Hubbards, cult on a boat playbook. (related but kinda mean, he is not really health conscious so he is not gonna live to be 90 or anything.)
IDK what this means for the steam platform but I'm guessing it will mean change of some sort.
Honestly, there's never been a better time to be writing games for those platforms. The SDK's are much improved from the proprietary stuff available at the time and the hardware is very well understood. People have been pulling off some utter witchcraft on the N64.
The N64 is never going to get any faster, and emulators can run on just about any potato these days. People have realistic expectations of what the platform can do, so there's no need to spend insane effort making the graphics look better. It's always going to look kinda crappy, and that is Just Fine.
This lets game developers focus on the actual gameplay itself. No "Generic Shooter vol. 26 - now with slightly prettier water!", but innovative stuff focusing on the narrative and on novel gameplay elements.
Kaze and James Lambert are amazing. Kaze's new Mario game looks better than a first party Nintendo title, and James's engines pushes the console to its absolute limits.
I've been thinking about giving it a go myself. It's such a fun and nostalgic console, and the limitations are fun constraints.
The code archeology is really cool too. Seeing Rare's Dinosaur Planet boot up and play after being a lost title. Decompiling all the original titles. Building sequels to Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. It's such a fun scene.
Then there's Analogue 3D and ModRetro too, which make it fun to play as physical hardware.
It was last night, after seeing Linux on the Atari Jaguar, I was just pondering over that whole scene.
Then I decided to throw on Metal Slug X, a classic of the Neo Geo. Then it struck me, "Could I attempt porting this to Jaguar?!".
It would be a great start project to familurise myself with this older stuff again. They both have a 12MHz 68k, it is just that the graphics and audio cores are different. Would probably have to base it off the CD version so that the memory addressing is already handled (it loaded all assets into 1MB RAM - twice the jaguars storage).
It doesn't sound impossible. But the Jags RISC chips were notorious for being a little slow due to limited cache space, so it might not be so straight forward.
While Microsoft may not be as bad on this as Sony so far, they have certainly shown a willingness to revoke access to digital games. For example- in an effort to push users to the newer fifa titles with microtransactions, they quietly removed the ability to redownload purchased digital copies of older fifa games. For anyone who might've temporarily uninstalled the game to free up space, there was suddenly no way to get the game on your machine again.
That's almost certainly due to EA's licensing agreement with FIFA rather than Microsoft's decision. Similar to how you can no longer purchase older Forza games due to the licensing for use of the cars expiring.
But it was bought on Microsoft's Store (a walled garden) on a Microsoft platform, so the ultimate responsibility towards the customer lays on Microsoft.
Also as a part of forcing Minecraft users onto Microsoft accounts they threatened, and carried out deleting everyone's Minecraft and Mojang accounts.
If you refused to comply or happened to take a break from the game during that time, now you have to buy the game again and you lost anything on any multiplayer tied to your old account.
I'm not in the EU, but had 2 accounts with Sony/Playstation (I'm pretty sure both sat unused for more than 3 years). I tried to delete one and it seemed impossible. The FAQ said to call support. I called, waiting for 45 minutes, and they said they couldn't help me and hung up before I could respond.
While I believe they would delete a user's games, I don't know if they would actually willingly give up holding on to customer data.
My guess is this is more of a CYA incase they want to clean up accounts at some point, rather than something they actively do.
And on top of that, Sony will probably get hacked again, as has already happened a couple times. That was a primary reason why I actually wanted my account gone, not just inactive.
This isn't surprising given how different businesses may value a payment against an ongoing obligation to customers. @patio11 had a good podcast about this "Cash received is not revenue earned" last April.
What the GoDaddy CEO said in many interviews and investor presentations is:
"Look, since we're not going out of business, and since the cost of serving
domain names is essentially the same whether we're serving a million of them
versus a hundred million of them, you should really treat this as a
cash-and-carry business. So all of the money that comes in this year is our
revenue, regardless of this massive balance sheet item that says deferred
revenue." What sophisticated investors looking at GoDaddy said was, "Well,
no. You do have to still keep running the business. And so from my
perspective, it looks like GoDaddy is incredibly levered. You've got so much
debt on the books. The debt isn't to a bank or to a private credit fund–it's
just to your customers. But oh goodness, is there a lot of debt. And since
that debt must get satisfied before US equity holders get the residual value
of the company, we are not willing to extend equity investment at the
valuation you think you're worth."
what debt does the comapny owe, given his observation that the marginal cost of serving another customer is zero? sure, if they stopped serving them, theyd have a problem, I agree there. But when you try to value the liability here, its surely not very big? Thats what he's saying.
Same here with these games. All sony has to do is not delete your games. They still keep your account, and your payment info and a hundred other things. but the cost of keeping a binary "owns/doesnt own" on their database is suddenly too much?
Maintenance isn't cost-free. As an example, the operating system and other software dependencies of the game depends will eventually be depreciated and not supported.
If a security vulnerability is discovered in software still available from company servers but the teams that built it have moved on, what is the company's liability for recomposing teams in order to make a fix that does not negatively affect other aspects of the software?
right, but if a game no longer works and you don't assign resources to fix it, thats way more understandable than removing access to a game that others can play perfectly fine because your account is old or some other reason
I bought the Orange Box years and years ago and to install this Steam launcher to play Counter-Strike, what a pain in the a$$. Stop playing, promptly forgot about it.
Years passed, and wanted to play something else that was on sale on this Steam thing that seemed familiar so reinstalled it. To my surprise, my old Orange Box games were still there.
That has led to an unhealthy 20 years of hoarding on-sale games like Smaug.
And consumers will cry about it for about 5 minutes, then go back to reward the company.
When HP started making printer cartridges that expired even when they were still full, people complained—then bought more.
When Microsoft let the web stagnate with IE6, people complained, then turned around and did the same thing with Chrome.
When Apple deliberately put a bug in the iPhone that caused the Home button to fail, pushing people to buy the next model, people got upset—and then bought the next one anyway. I'm amazed nobody remembers that one; it was such a huge deal at the time. And there is not a single link to articles about it anymore.
When Adobe switched to mandatory Creative Cloud subscriptions, plenty of users protested, but most professionals stayed.
When Amazon remotely deleted books from people's Kindles (including 1984), it was a scandal for a month, and then... nothing.
When we found out PRISM existed, users were worried for a few months, then went right back to filling those platforms with their personal data.
When Google allowed fraudulent DMCA takedowns, shut down accounts with no appeal, and censored its search engine, there was a brief outcry, then it was back to business as usual.
When Sony put a bloody ROOTKIT on its music CDs (!!!!), people grumbled for five minutes and kept giving them money.
These companies have no reason to stop. We never make them regret anything.
I should make a website to save those for posterity, so that at least we have a track record of all the things they get away with because we let them.
I've avoided buying any Lenovo product ever since their SuperFish fiasco.
At the beggining it surprised me that people still seriously recommended Lenovo products (even hackers). Now, my brain automatically "adblocks" the entire brand out when I'm looking to buy a new laptop or monitor, as it knows I can't buy it.
Same for me on Lenovo. And likewise, once upon a time ago I told myself I was never going to use another Microsoft product ever again, and I've also mostly stuck to that and even changed jobs over it. Unfortunately, I can't escape github for now but I'm Microsoft free everywhere else at home and at work.
We need more people willing to vote with their wallet over stuff like this.
Microsoft dragged their heels hard when Firefox 3 came to the scene. IE6 was the browser at the time. Chrome was a concept and Opera at least pushed to keep up but surrendered and went to Chrome.
Here here. 100% in agreement, people seem to have forgotten that the majority hold the bargaining power. You'll always have people who cross "strike lines", but by and large if the entire user base simply said; no, and walked; the world would definitely be a better place, in so many ways.
I don't hold France as a shining example of humanity; but by-christ if they get upset they actually take those feet, one in front of the other and fight tooth and nail against `$thing`. Even if they don't "win", they /don't go quietly/.
There is a strike or demonstration of sorts every other day in France. Or so it seems living there. It’s become so frequent that it has little to no meaning anymore. The government is scared to implement any meaningful change because it’s guaranteed there’ll be a strike or demonstration of sorts. And so we continue towards the wall pedal to the metal.
A democratic government should exist only by the consent of the governed. The government should be terrified of the people. Of course you have to be able to filter out the signal from the noise and majority vs minority desires, but by and large if a change is majorly unpopular, they should be terrified of trying to push it through.
That’s not how it is there though. Any change whatsoever, justified or not, is opposed. So the government goes for bust and makes changes that help the biggest companies, the richest in the country, friends of the president (whoever they are, different presidents same joke) because it’s going to be a struggle anyway so it might as well payoff for their friends. Plus they need the wealthy’s support (they own the newspapers and media)
And so we’ve given up on the train for instance because when it’s not striking it’s broken down for some reason.
Retirements and social security, same thing, the only changes made was for the industry not for the people. And we’re careening into the wall.
The sad thing is that for many of these examples, people got a better deal out of it.
The HP printer ink subscription makes a lot of sense if you print a certain number of pages each year. Many consumers who only print occasionally are better off with cheap subscriptions for getting their money's worth, even if from an environmental point of view the cartridge DRM is absolute bullcrap.
Adobe switching from making people pay thousands and charging them again for updates was a lot more expensive than the ridiculous yearly subscription they charge (per month, to keep the advertised price down, surprising people who thought they could cancel after a few months).
IE6 was awful at replicating what other browsers did, but it introduced a lot of features that reshaped the web. The XmlHttpRequest that moved the web from static pages to basic interactivity was a Microsoft invention.
Many if these cases didn't work out of course, but for many business decisions that cause outrage on the internet, it's worth reconsidering the options on offer after the outrage has died down. Unpopular decisions aren't often the unbridled conspiratory evil that the internet would like you to believe.
When Apple deliberately put a bug in the iPhone that caused the Home button to fail, pushing people to buy the next model, people got upset—and then bought the next one anyway. I'm amazed nobody remembers that one; it was such a huge deal at the time. And there is not a single link to articles about it anymore.
That one, I don't remember either. Are you sure you aren't confusing it with Batterygate?
But yes: point taken, these companies have absolutely no incentive to behave any better than they have in the past.
Oh no, I remember well. At some point, everyone at the software home button on their phone setup, because the physical button was sometimes working and sometimes not.
Apple issued a statement saying it was a hardware failure and there was nothing they could do.
A hacker later on proved they were lying by patching the software and showing the problem went away.
That's why I'm scrapbooking every article about the trump administration right now. This time period is so wild people will doubt it really existed.
I will not be gaslighted again. This world is crazy, and people have a terrible memory.
>That's why I'm scrapbooking every article about the trump administration right now. This time period is so wild people will doubt it really existed.
On one hand, I think there will be entire subgenres of literature and media dedicated to this time, the way we spend entire units in the US on WWII.
On the other hand, I also know there will be a lot of "not-MAGA" people who will say they didn't vote for Trump (they did) but defend to death how these times weren't that bad with all the same soundbites you hear today. We're way too connected (and Trump way too loud) to reasonably do Trump denialism, so the next best path will be Trump sympathizing
Switch to Brother laser jet printers - I hear about them every time HP comes up, I've had mine for years, it is a lovely solution
Tons of people switched from IE6 to Chrome; IE is a dead browser. These days I'd recommend Firefox.
Is there something wrong with the iPhone as of today? It sounds like the bug got fixed in response to outcry, especially if they went and scrubbed all traces of the event - that seems like a good outcome?
Adobe stock is down almost 50% (42.24%) in the past year - I dare say a lot of people got sick of their shit. I have no clue what professionals use, but GIMP works fine for my amateur edits.
Like, c'mon, change very clearly does happen. It's just slow and uneven.
If you actually cared about change, I feel like you'd maybe list a few of the cool alternatives out there and actually help people make that transition. https://xkcd.com/1053/ - people do actually have to be taught about these things, not everyone knows what the alternatives are!
It’s not only their printers. Their computers and peripherals are also very low quality nowadays. Enterprise buys them because they’re cheap not because they’re good. The bar they have to clear is to keep working for the lease’s duration (3 years typically).
I’ve been burnt a few times now I run away when I see HP (even their “enterprise” line, which used to be good)
I hope they send warning letters to log in. Mine been idle for over a year and I don't have it right now.. but I paid for those games so it would be scammy to remove without warning.
Does it cost them money to keep my purchases logged? I don't think so.
I am not sure, but I feel that many of these "Sony bad" type of conversations appear close to something unfavorable being discussed about Xbox. Am I imagining it? The Playstation issue discussed here is certainly not new, but the timing is interesting.
>many of these "Sony bad" type of conversations appear close to something unfavorable being discussed about Xbox.
Both console makers released some devastating news this week. Perhaps by design (But probably not. It's a new financial quarter, the usual time for big news anouncements, good and bad). And this is coming all the backs of rising memory prices driving speculations of 4 figure next gen consoles, GTA 6 costing $80 for part of the game for a case which does not contain a disc, and alleged reports of digital dynamic pricing.
It hasn't been a good few months for anyone in the games industry. Even Nintendo is begrudgingly increasing prices by end of summer.
Closing inactive accounts in the EU is due to (interpretation of) certain provisions set in the GDPR (e.g. article 5 - https://gdpr-info.eu/art-5-gdpr/) and Sony is not alone, many services in the EU automatically close and delete orphaned accounts after a given amount of time, and if they are international ones even when they don't outside of the EU.
If implemented correctly the affected person is also warned/notified several times by email before this is going to happen, so you have enough time to log in at least once and prevent it (and also extend the time frame again).
Those articles don't require deletion in this case, in my non-lawyer opinion. There is still a purpose to keeping the user's personal information here. Sony needs that information to be able to grant the user access to the content they bought.
There's a difference here between an account that hasn't been used and doesn't hold anything of value and an account like this that holds items that were bought.
Good, customer data should be a liability and they should be incentivized to delete it as early as feasible, or not store it at all when possible. It's your data, not theirs.
The problem with email is that it's an email address from 3+ years ago, which means there's a much higher chance of it being out of date - are you still using XxCoolDude67xX from high school?
Consoles area also marketed heavily towards older teenagers and younger adults, who are exactly the ones unlikely to maintain a consistent email address.
And of course if your email provided decides to cut you off, or goes out of business, or you used a university email...
The solution to that is to allow people to set an additional email address for the account and then maybe allow them to disable the original after a period of time.
It’s as if they were working super hard to obliterate their domination of the consoles market.
Xbox is in shambles but if Sony keeps pulling these braindead moves and annihilating any goodwill they have, Xbox might come out on top despite their best efforts.
That is not how gdpr works. If you have a legitimate reason to hold the data. You can. Ensuring people have access to purchases is a very legitimate reason.
Is there evidence that European courts have sided with that? “We’re holding onto all your data indefinitely just in case you log in again several years from now” seems to be the antithesis of GDPR and I can’t discern the difference between that and what you’re suggesting.
I believe EU has dug their own hole here. And the best move would be to pass more legislation to explicitly require the retention (and transfer, ideally) of purchased digital goods.
> Is there evidence that European courts have sided with that?
Is there evidence of the contrary? Maybe any store can just delete your personal data right after charging your card and claim GDPR prevents them from shipping your product.
Silly arguments work both ways. You just picked the one that confirms your bias.
GDPR under no circumstances forces processors to delete everything, it defines legitimate interest. Retaining a person's purchases is as legitimate as it gets so the data can be retained for as long as the purchase is valid. And the license itself isn't even the user's personal data, it's just a license, so Sony could give the option to export that license to be used later - even in a cryptographically secure format that can only work if e.g. the account is created with the same email address. If they delete the personal data and throw out the baby with the water, it's not GDPR forcing them to do it.
It's like the cookie banner all over again. This law never, ever required a cookie banner.
The big companies are master in malicious compliance that benefit them, and let them blame the EU for it.
Rules of thumbs, international billion dollars company should be assumed to be the ones being the bad guys until proven otherwise. They have lost the benefit of the doubt decades ago.
Because if enough idiots do it, stupid managers think it's the standard. The EU Commission is unlikely to know anything about their website, it's made by some department that blindly follows a manager's order that just looked at what others did and copied it.
We could all have used the DNT header as a bypass when the GPDR came out, and you can still use cookies for non tracking purposes without any banner.
So the EU commission put out a rule that you say has been widely misunderstood and implemented via malicious compliance. Where is the EU statement and education on this? Why aren’t they louder in explaining this isn’t what they wanted? And they allow their own websites to do the very thing that they supposedly don’t want?
Do you maybe want to reconsider? Perhaps instead companies are putting in a good faith effort to comply. I have been invoked in discussions around legal compliance of all sorts of regulation and trust me: no one has ever ever expressed “let’s do some terrible thing because we disagree with regulation”. It’s conspiratorial thinking.
The general council (lawyers) at companies are making the decisions around cookies banners and the like, not the folks trying to make money. Regardless of how you might interpret the law and requirements around GDPR, the legal profession as a whole seems to think the crap we live with today is necessary. If it isn’t, it’s on the EU technocrats to clarify in communications, written rules, and on their own damn website what it is supposed to look like.
And clearly, you think billion-dollar companies making dark patterns, ignoring web standards and choosing to track people left and right are less to blame the inconvenience of a banner (that warns you they do) than the people trying to protect your privacy and did it imperfectly.
I have made enought web sites and app that don't have a banner to know it's perfectly possible, even today.
I have implemented DNT support and know it was a great solution before it was taken away.
I have worked with enough clients to know why they chose the banner anyway.
Unlike you I actually read the law, and worked at implementing it. Including with and without a banner.
So I have to conclude you are not an honest actor in this debate, and you are clearly angry as well.
You bet I am angry. I am tired of people defending a law by saying “that’s not what it was meant to do!” As if the intent matters one bit. What matters is the result of the law. And the result of this regulation is to make the web universally crappier than it was before. It did basically nothing to improve things in the real world.
In practice most of the purposes you'd encounter in the wild are directly linked to user activity, so account deletion means most of the reasons to keep it disappear.
You still need to keep it if there's a law saying that you need to have that data, of course, but that's the exception.
No need to wait for the courts’ opinions: controllers must keep the data for a limited amount of time (which can be something like “3 years after the last connection”) under GDPR article 5(1)e.
"kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed"
Keeping "account X purchased game Y" forever is necessary for the purpose of tracking ownership.
Based on how big companies typically behave, I assume that they are storing a metric buttload of other data on their users, which is not necessary for that purpose, and which they aren't inclined to separate out.
This is just like the cookie popup nonsense. You don't have to ask for permission to store necessary cookies. Cookie popups are ubiquitous because sites would rather bother every single visitor so that they can store unnecessary cookies.
> Personal data shall be: kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed. (..)
Note that this does not say "it must be stored for a limited amount of time" - it says "no longer than necessary".
Your basic account data (such as username and password, or an email for password recovery) is still necessary to log in to the platform and make use of your purchases. As long as there is no clear indication that the user will never log in again (such as due to death, or because they explicitly deleted their account), it would be reasonable to keep it around.
On the other hand, it may make sense to delete some data. For example, it may make sense to store your full name and address info to make checkout more convenient. If a user hasn't bought stuff in a while, it makes sense to delete it and have them re-enter it in the future.
There might be a bit of a gray space for things like game achievements (especially when there's a public profile) or savefile backups, but reading it as "you MUST delete all digital purchases because GDPR" is just not true.
I'd consider keeping the other personal data to be still easily justifiable, as you might want to support various account recovery options. And the odds that a user forgot their password only increases for old accounts.
5(1)c seems far more relevant than e. “Data minimization” is what’s relevant here. And the article is sufficiently vague that the onus is on companies to decide what is absolutely minimal - that includes, implicitly, removing inactive accounts. Unless the courts have made a judgement to the contrary.
I was surprised to come back to my XBOX account after 10 years in the US and see that very old digital purchases from previous console generations were not only still available, but actually playable on the latest console through transparent emulation! They did a pretty good job with that.
Whatever you think about Microsoft, they are a good steward of their platforms and go to extremes to maintain backwards compatibility -- even if they are always moving your cheese in the UI.
Whatever you think about Microsoft, they are a good steward of their platforms and go to extremes to maintain backwards compatibility
This is the same company that closed its e-book store, and everyone lost the libraries they'd worked so hard to curate.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I recall they did give a full refund when they shut down the ebook platform.
A refund for the price paid.
But life is more than financial transactions. Those people wasted hours and hours curating their personal libraries with books they loved.
Considering how the price and availability of ebooks fluctuates, the refund value is not necessarily equal to the replacement cost, plus more hours finding replacements, if replacements are even available.
Except for the hundred thousands if not millions of people who lost their Minecraft account due to the way Microsoft handled multiple successive account migrations, also including the many accounts that were stolen due to lax security.
And since digital ownership legislation is a joke consumers have pretty much no recourse.
Beat me to it. I am still incredibly salty about losing my “lifetime” license to Minecraft. I really am curious to see some of the changes that have happened since I last played (when still owned by Notch), but I refuse to repurchase it.
> I am still incredibly salty about losing my “lifetime” license to Minecraft.
I kept my Minecraft license after migrating to a Microsoft account. Unsure how it got messed up for you.
I don’t know what to say. I went to the migration site, entered my information-no dice. Contacted support and got no assistance. There are others with a similar experience.
Microsoft could have gone above and beyond to manage the forced migration. Instead there was a convoluted process which left many cheated. They could have just punted and automatically emailed brand new entitlement codes to all of the original purchase emails. Yes, people who switched emails would have been missed, but that would have covered 95%+ of customers in a single action.
Also have a version purchased back when Notch owned. Not played since and have no access. Oh well.
Pirated and modded scene is the place to be anyway - so I hear.
Modded, yes. The Minecraft mod scene is incredible. The Create mod ecosystem is my favorite.
Pirated? Really? How cheap are you guys? It’s a $30 game with all ~15 years of content updates included.
I’m not trying to be some kind of corporate bootlicker here but I think you have to have apathy toward taking care of the stuff you own to have failed to get your Minecraft license converted from the Mojang account.
Saying 15 years of content updates feels disingenuous when most of those years, at least lately, feel like minimal updates from a company that's out of ideas and doesn't want to change anything that might have a chance at annoying some people.
It seems like every year is "a new mob and a new biome", which is... not much. If you sign into Minecraft from five years ago I doubt you would notice many changes at all.
To be fair, Minecraft is a huge thing to be a steward of, and they're doing dual-development across Bedrock and Java, but... it's obvious that this isn't what they want to be doing and I think at some point they just need to make a decision what they want to be, let everyone know, and start making it work.
Also, with regard to Mojang account - I tried to get mine converted. I followed the steps, they didn't work. I opened a ticket, no one responded. I worked on it for six months and couldn't get any reply from them until it was too late. Now I've lost that account, not because I didn't care but because they didn't seem to.
As far as the approach to content updates, I think what you describe is exactly the right one. Mojang knows that anything more opinionated belongs in a mod. Minecraft is more of a platform than a game.
I’ve seen the debate come up often about software that should just be a one time purchase, it’s “done” and that we don’t want to be paying a subscription for every little thing, so my feeling is that for a buy-once game like Minecraft having so many content updates for so long is a real plus.
As far as your loss of your license, that’s really unfortunate, and hopefully a rare circumstance. I’m disappointed that support wasn’t able to help you.
Pragmatically, if I liked the game enough, I’d probably just buy it again. Most of my most-played old games have been purchased multiple times for some kind of reason like a format change or something along those lines. I’ve definitely bought Morrowind multiple times. I owned Oblivion on a disc, then bought the steam version, then bought the remastered version.
I absolutely realize how you absolutely shouldn’t have to buy the game again.
Not a player, but at one stage I believe there were mods that only ran on older, pirated builds.
I think that’s pretty rare these days, if not entirely unheard of.
It’s common for mods to not work on the latest release, though.
Thanks; I’m ten plus years out of date!
People get busy... I was building my startup around that time period, and didn't really play games for ~5 years.
Why would I reward a company that already stole from me with another purchase?
If I was too busy building my startup while my Starbucks Frappuccino melted, Starbucks didn’t “steal from me.”
I understand living by your principles but in my experience, the process of running a pirated server/clients is enough of a pain that it’s not worth $30 of anyone’s time, even if it’s the second time you’ve had to pay it in the span of multiple decades.
Ah, yeah...that's exactly the same thing. Great point. Totally changed my mind!
Edit: Your edit clarifies things a bit. Eh, I got my start in software development working on an emulated Lineage 2 server ~20 years ago, and eventually building my own server from the ground up which extended the game in ways that the normal servers / client didn't support. I think tinkering is fine if that's what interests you.
I don't spend much time these days with games (compared to the past) regardless.
Is it not the same thing?
Microsoft has never revoked a Minecraft license (fraud/abuse notwithstanding). You just have to do basic account maintenance like keeping your email up to date and you had to respond to emails to complete one single account migration in 15+ years. Microsoft asked you to do one 5-minute thing in the span of 15 years.
I am a little surprised that someone who built their own startup is so opposed to the idea of personal agency. This seems like you’re taking a victim’s mentality.
If I stored my Myst CD-ROM in a moldy basement for 30 years and it got ruined that way I don’t get to complain about having it stolen from me. Clearly by my lack of action I didn’t care about that possession that much in the first place.
> Unsure how it got messed up for you.
If you didn't transfer it from your Mojang account to your Microsoft account in time (before the account was shut down) you just straight up lost access to it.
And sometimes, like in Sharepoint, the process could not be completed.
Microsoft accounts being an absolute pain in the ass to set up and manage, and the new launcher being aggressively terrible, are salt in the wound even if you finally gave in and migrated your account.
Also, good luck running Microsoft’s Minecraft launcher on a kid’s computer with allowlist-only internet access. It connects to like 20 apparently-random IP addresses every time it launches, will not work if any of them fails, and the pool of addresses is evidently huge. I never did find anything like a list of IP blocks to allow. Maybe they keep a file with them all in it somewhere, never looked, but I have a feeling they hit one address that gives them their list of the others for each session, and only that list, like if I had to bet on it I’d go with that (if they had a larger list, why aren’t they re-trying with different addresses when one fails?). I guess they just don’t care about that use case. (“Why don’t parents just police their kids’ internet access?” yeah look some of us really try but shit like this is everywhere and makes it stupidly difficult)
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There were two migrations:
1. Minecraft account to Mojang account
2. Mojang account to Microsoft account
Both had a 3-year deadline. If you failed to do either before their deadline, then your "lifetime" Minecraft account is completely dead with no possibility of recovery.
I didn't lose it per se but it was kind of an ordeal to migrate it from Mojang to MS back then and I had to actually involve support, but in the end it worked.
Have not logged in for years so maybe I have lost it meanwhile ;)
Or when they decided to wipe people's Hotmail accounts. Now some random person has my original hotmail that I had since the 90s through to the 2010s... Presumably, this person now indirectly has a ton of my original accounts for different services I can no longer access... thanks Microsoft.
I'm so happy I managed to transfer everything important over to my own domain before anything like that happened. I still have my old Hotmail and Gmail, and while nothing important shows up there, there's still a trickle of non-spam email coming in there, even after 5 and 10 years since I transferred everything I could remember at the time.
Haha, I was one of these people. I'm unreasonably salty about this (given the monetary loss is not high and I got a lot of playtime out of the game back then), especially because I also had one of those Alpha keys unused as well!
I lost my original minecraft account because I wasn't able to get in contact with them. I had the original purchase information as required, but it wouldn't accept it. I contacted the e-mail address they said to get in touch with but heard nothing. No matter what I did nothing happened and now my old account is gone forever.
Yeah i belong to them i have an ancient account that was connected to a shitty mail hoster that deleted mail accounts after not use and i paid back then with a paysafe card. So i had no way to rpove ownership and got shafted. Abit of my fault I guess but i was like 14 when I bought it.
You had years to move your Minecraft account
Is two years period supposed to be a lot? What if a person haven't played the game for five years (which happens quite often) then comes back and sees that it's gone?
Yup. Too bad the lead executive of such initiatives got laid off.
https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/xbox/xboxs-backwards-c...
Not that this person couldn't have retired years, if not decades ago on his stocks from 1989. But a real shame nonetheless.
Glad to hear this - I bought a bunch of things on the Xbox 360 shop years ago but haven't had a new Xbox of any sort since then.
You know, all those people making new n64, playstation, and gameboy titles might be onto something. Apart from steam, I don't think I've heard anything but bad news from modern consoles.
Huge capital overhead. Exhausting mid-lifecycle crunch that makes or breaks the next gen. Multiple giants.
Meanwhile Steam just casually absorbing everything. It doesn't matter that it's porous.
And now suddenly - hardware costs you can't tip toe schedule around.
The console business is shitty.
Talk to console gamers and they still think the PC is sweaty and playing on the PC is like putting your hands in the toilet. I mean, I remember the 1990s when kids were playing flight simulators with this huge plastic joysticks that were always falling apart and needed to be calibrated every five minutes. It's not like that anymore, with Steam Big Picture and either an XBOX ONE or PS4/5 controller your PC is a better console.
The main problem is that, ex. the Steam Controller, nobody can make a decent game controller except for console vendors and when the console vendors go down somebody will have to step up.
I just can't believe the PS5 has sold as many units as it has with just 15 exclusive games, many of which are remakes, even remakes of remakes. That reputation that the PC platform is too sweaty has taken a long long time to die and it doesn't help that ACER and such are coming out with handhelds that are maximum sweat (boot into a Windows Desktop with 10x too small fonts) compared to the consumer electronics experience of the Steam Deck.
> The main problem is that, ex. the Steam Controller, nobody can make a decent game controller except for console vendors and when the console vendors go down somebody will have to step up.
I used to only play on DualShock 4s and even skipped the DualSense because I just loved my DualShock that much.
I use an 8bitDo now and it is better in every way I care about. 8bitDo does not make consoles.
Meanwhile to play PS5 games like TMNT you can't use PS4 controllers. This is not a customer focused approach.
> ex. the Steam Controller, nobody can make a decent game controller except for console vendors
Reading this feels feels like you are the one that is still in 1990s.
Third party controllers have long surpassed the ones from console vendors. Standard console controllers still continue to use potentiometers for sticks. Even pro versions that cost over a hundred euro still use them.
Xbox’s stock controller since the 360 is hands down the best controller out there. Every other good controller is basically a variation of it lol
Modern controller DNA goes back to the PS1, first to have 4 shoulder buttons and two analog sticks.
Fair but the form factor is completely different. Dreamcast/xbox I’d consider the real base for modern controllers. But my original point is that once the 360 controller came out everyone (except Sony) has basically 90% copied it. Everything before is pretty distinct.
While Switch is 360-esque now, the Wii Classic Controller had symmetrical sticks at the bottom, Wii U Pro Controller and GamePad had symmetrical sticks on top. So Nintendo wasn't totally committed to the 360 design even if the GameCube controller was almost there before. (Not gonna count the Wiimote as it's a little too different) Steam Deck and Steam Controller have symmetrical sticks as well. I don't think it's as clear cut as you say. 8BitDo and GuliKit have controllers in both form factors also (released in the last 2 years even). Also worth noting that XInput has been holding back PC controllers so that anything more ambitious than a 360 controller is hard to get working. Microsoft is also the only controller manufacturer to not put gyro in their controllers.
You’re getting too nitty gritty. The general shape/form factor for all controllers, as well as 90% of the button/stick layout, was basically locked by the 360. Every diversion is either Sony or window dressing.
> Talk to console gamers and they still think the PC is sweaty and playing on the PC is like putting your hands in the toilet.
The kind of ridiculous sweeping generalization that discredits the rest.
>Talk to console gamers and they still think the PC is sweaty and playing on the PC is like putting your hands in the toilet.
Eh, as someone who owns and plays on both pc and console, the simple truth of the matter is that playing on console is, for the most part, better 'bang for the buck'. You can reliably purchase a console and a budget linux laptop and both will reliably fill their respective niches for the next decade. PC gaming, in my experience, requires a much higher budget, and this was even before the modern pricing madness.
Consoles also had much wider support for couch coop than PC did, so it was a more social experience, and to be blunt, PC gaming has a pretty bad problem with cheating that I simply never experienced on console.
Like I said, I play and enjoy both. I can afford to do so now, but I do feel bad for teens today because even consoles are getting crazy expensive.
To me, the Steam Controller feels like holding a rectangle, not nearly as ergonomic as, say, an Xbox controller. It is otherwise decent though.
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> Apart from steam, I don't think I've heard anything but bad news from modern consoles.
Gabe is in his mid 60s, I'm prepared that in the next decade or so there will be a change of guard at Valve and the slow train of enshittification will get moving.
P.S. There's been a lot of groupthink and bandwagoning for Valve, ignoring all the dirt under the rug. But at the end of the day, by comparison, they are the best behaving in the field.
Gabe has been hands off managing Valve for precisely this reason, so that at least management wise nothing would change when he goes.
He's been scuba diving and IIRC even discovered new species and doing marine biology. Very impressive as far as CEOs/presidents go.
The company that gave up making games because there was more money to be had from inserting itself as a middleman into a previously open platform does not deserve any adoration.
This is categorically untrue. In addition to the games listed below, they are actively developing "Deadlock" which is a pretty rad game in my opinion.
What do you think it means to say "categorically untrue"?
Then don't buy it through steam. Just buy it through a third party like greenmangaming. Valve gets zero cut there.
The market demanded a middleman. Would you prefer an Epic or Microsoft monopoly?
> The market demanded a middleman
Says who?
The market.
If you're an indy game developer, it turns out that just posting .exes on your website gets you a limited reach.
I understand my question was a bit flippant but truly, this doesn’t answer it.
The true answer here is that people went where the games went. And those AAA distributors preferred a middleman doing everything for them in exchange for getting a cut. From there, AA and indies went to the middleman because they more or less had to to compete. Whether or not you consider market capture the whims of the consumer or a natural consequence of capitalism is a more philosophical question to ask.
On a more fundamental level, it seems like people will pick convenience over security and freedom every time the choice pops up. In the land of media, this comes down to choosing to put all your eggs in one basket in exchange for having less control over the products you bought. We've seen this across Netflix, Steam, and Spotify as the largest modern examples.
It is market capture, and you don’t get to just hand wave it away with how it’s only philosophical. It has real world ramifications, it is a real consequence that can put consumers under duress (distorting the market) and/or leave them with no viable alternatives (which a free market is allegedly supposed to prevent)
>It is market capture, and you don’t get to just hand wave it away with how it’s only philosophical.
I don't get to declare it one way just because I think it's true either.
If people truly want all their eggs in one basket, is it market capture if you are 100% upfront (which these companies aren't, but lets suppose), and people come into it anyway? I suppose my philosophy here comes down to "you can only protect people from themselves for so long before exploitation simply becomes business". Why try and spout freedom to those who actively seek someone or something to be controlled by? Why spout principles of ownership to those who will relinquish it every time for a "cheap" subscription?
Now the real answer is another scary word to this community: regulation. It's been beyond time we had proper digital ownership laws. But we're a very long road away from that in the US.
Ain’t scary to me. Regulation all the way.
I just don’t generally agree with variations of “caveat emptor”
The results?
By random googling I found that they have 200 million active users, who bought 16 billion in gross merchandising value?
18 thousands of games launched there per yer?
Arguably if someone is in PC gaming, they at least know what Steam is?
>the results?
Would you say the market demanded Ticketmaster based on the results?
That is actually a really good point.
However Ticketmaster is a monopoly. There are (still) alternatives to Steam.
But yes, it is getting into a monopoly, or oligopoly position.
Counter Strike and DOTA aren't games?
DOTA 2 came out 13 years ago. Counter Strike is more valid
Also Half-Life: Alyx!
One day I will be able to afford the hardware to play that game.
They still make and support games :)
Gabe is off forming a cult which I assume will consume his focus for the remainder of his life. I'm dead serious he is basically straight up copying Ron L Hubbards, cult on a boat playbook. (related but kinda mean, he is not really health conscious so he is not gonna live to be 90 or anything.)
IDK what this means for the steam platform but I'm guessing it will mean change of some sort.
So that make all of the games that release for consoles good news, right?
Honestly, there's never been a better time to be writing games for those platforms. The SDK's are much improved from the proprietary stuff available at the time and the hardware is very well understood. People have been pulling off some utter witchcraft on the N64.
Best of all: there's no hardware rat race.
The N64 is never going to get any faster, and emulators can run on just about any potato these days. People have realistic expectations of what the platform can do, so there's no need to spend insane effort making the graphics look better. It's always going to look kinda crappy, and that is Just Fine.
This lets game developers focus on the actual gameplay itself. No "Generic Shooter vol. 26 - now with slightly prettier water!", but innovative stuff focusing on the narrative and on novel gameplay elements.
The makers of Super Mario 64 said 3D graphics greatly increased game development costs.
Kaze and James Lambert are amazing. Kaze's new Mario game looks better than a first party Nintendo title, and James's engines pushes the console to its absolute limits.
I've been thinking about giving it a go myself. It's such a fun and nostalgic console, and the limitations are fun constraints.
The code archeology is really cool too. Seeing Rare's Dinosaur Planet boot up and play after being a lost title. Decompiling all the original titles. Building sequels to Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. It's such a fun scene.
Then there's Analogue 3D and ModRetro too, which make it fun to play as physical hardware.
It was last night, after seeing Linux on the Atari Jaguar, I was just pondering over that whole scene.
Then I decided to throw on Metal Slug X, a classic of the Neo Geo. Then it struck me, "Could I attempt porting this to Jaguar?!".
It would be a great start project to familurise myself with this older stuff again. They both have a 12MHz 68k, it is just that the graphics and audio cores are different. Would probably have to base it off the CD version so that the memory addressing is already handled (it loaded all assets into 1MB RAM - twice the jaguars storage).
It doesn't sound impossible. But the Jags RISC chips were notorious for being a little slow due to limited cache space, so it might not be so straight forward.
Regardless, the scene is jumping.
Wait, someone actually brought N64 Dinosaur Planet to life? I gotta check this out...
Yeah based on a ROM leak from a while back. The game was almost entirely complete before they moved over to the GameCube.
Even crap emulator handhelds are getting pretty dang good (if you can get the right software stack).
Seconding this. Look for something with ROCKNIX support and put that on there.
While Microsoft may not be as bad on this as Sony so far, they have certainly shown a willingness to revoke access to digital games. For example- in an effort to push users to the newer fifa titles with microtransactions, they quietly removed the ability to redownload purchased digital copies of older fifa games. For anyone who might've temporarily uninstalled the game to free up space, there was suddenly no way to get the game on your machine again.
That sounds like deletion by proxy. If there is no way to redownload it, seeing the title listed on your account does little good.
That's almost certainly due to EA's licensing agreement with FIFA rather than Microsoft's decision. Similar to how you can no longer purchase older Forza games due to the licensing for use of the cars expiring.
Ultimately it’s the same thing. If it can be taken away, you didn’t buy it.
But it was bought on Microsoft's Store (a walled garden) on a Microsoft platform, so the ultimate responsibility towards the customer lays on Microsoft.
Also as a part of forcing Minecraft users onto Microsoft accounts they threatened, and carried out deleting everyone's Minecraft and Mojang accounts.
If you refused to comply or happened to take a break from the game during that time, now you have to buy the game again and you lost anything on any multiplayer tied to your old account.
I'm not in the EU, but had 2 accounts with Sony/Playstation (I'm pretty sure both sat unused for more than 3 years). I tried to delete one and it seemed impossible. The FAQ said to call support. I called, waiting for 45 minutes, and they said they couldn't help me and hung up before I could respond.
While I believe they would delete a user's games, I don't know if they would actually willingly give up holding on to customer data.
My guess is this is more of a CYA incase they want to clean up accounts at some point, rather than something they actively do.
> While I believe they would delete a user's games, I don't know if they would actually willingly give up holding on to customer data.
So basically you get worst of both worlds, great.
And on top of that, Sony will probably get hacked again, as has already happened a couple times. That was a primary reason why I actually wanted my account gone, not just inactive.
This isn't surprising given how different businesses may value a payment against an ongoing obligation to customers. @patio11 had a good podcast about this "Cash received is not revenue earned" last April.
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/cash-received...what debt does the comapny owe, given his observation that the marginal cost of serving another customer is zero? sure, if they stopped serving them, theyd have a problem, I agree there. But when you try to value the liability here, its surely not very big? Thats what he's saying.
Same here with these games. All sony has to do is not delete your games. They still keep your account, and your payment info and a hundred other things. but the cost of keeping a binary "owns/doesnt own" on their database is suddenly too much?
Maintenance isn't cost-free. As an example, the operating system and other software dependencies of the game depends will eventually be depreciated and not supported.
If a security vulnerability is discovered in software still available from company servers but the teams that built it have moved on, what is the company's liability for recomposing teams in order to make a fix that does not negatively affect other aspects of the software?
right, but if a game no longer works and you don't assign resources to fix it, thats way more understandable than removing access to a game that others can play perfectly fine because your account is old or some other reason
I just checked the drawer where I keep my NES games. Haven't played in a long time, but they're all still there.
I'm getting at the top of my browser window:
> Your browser is not Javascript enable or you have turn it off. We recommend you to activate for better security reason
It's reassuring to know that their copy is not AI-generated.
I bought the Orange Box years and years ago and to install this Steam launcher to play Counter-Strike, what a pain in the a$$. Stop playing, promptly forgot about it.
Years passed, and wanted to play something else that was on sale on this Steam thing that seemed familiar so reinstalled it. To my surprise, my old Orange Box games were still there.
That has led to an unhealthy 20 years of hoarding on-sale games like Smaug.
Thanks, gaben!
P.S. Sony is screwing their fans.
And consumers will cry about it for about 5 minutes, then go back to reward the company.
When HP started making printer cartridges that expired even when they were still full, people complained—then bought more.
When Microsoft let the web stagnate with IE6, people complained, then turned around and did the same thing with Chrome.
When Apple deliberately put a bug in the iPhone that caused the Home button to fail, pushing people to buy the next model, people got upset—and then bought the next one anyway. I'm amazed nobody remembers that one; it was such a huge deal at the time. And there is not a single link to articles about it anymore.
When Adobe switched to mandatory Creative Cloud subscriptions, plenty of users protested, but most professionals stayed.
When Amazon remotely deleted books from people's Kindles (including 1984), it was a scandal for a month, and then... nothing.
When we found out PRISM existed, users were worried for a few months, then went right back to filling those platforms with their personal data.
When Google allowed fraudulent DMCA takedowns, shut down accounts with no appeal, and censored its search engine, there was a brief outcry, then it was back to business as usual.
When Sony put a bloody ROOTKIT on its music CDs (!!!!), people grumbled for five minutes and kept giving them money.
These companies have no reason to stop. We never make them regret anything.
I should make a website to save those for posterity, so that at least we have a track record of all the things they get away with because we let them.
We're screwed—and we deserve it.
I've avoided buying any Lenovo product ever since their SuperFish fiasco.
At the beggining it surprised me that people still seriously recommended Lenovo products (even hackers). Now, my brain automatically "adblocks" the entire brand out when I'm looking to buy a new laptop or monitor, as it knows I can't buy it.
Same for me on Lenovo. And likewise, once upon a time ago I told myself I was never going to use another Microsoft product ever again, and I've also mostly stuck to that and even changed jobs over it. Unfortunately, I can't escape github for now but I'm Microsoft free everywhere else at home and at work.
We need more people willing to vote with their wallet over stuff like this.
I never bought an HP product ever again. My laser is a Brother. Scanner is Epson. But yeah, for the most part all that is true.
> When Microsoft let the web stagnate with IE6, people complained, then turned around and did the same thing with Chrome.
How so? I see more complaints about Chrome implementing things that Firefox and/or Safari do not than complaints the other way around.
Microsoft dragged their heels hard when Firefox 3 came to the scene. IE6 was the browser at the time. Chrome was a concept and Opera at least pushed to keep up but surrendered and went to Chrome.
There is 15 years of documentation of this. This is explained in countless threads in HN.
I'm tired boss.
Here here. 100% in agreement, people seem to have forgotten that the majority hold the bargaining power. You'll always have people who cross "strike lines", but by and large if the entire user base simply said; no, and walked; the world would definitely be a better place, in so many ways.
I don't hold France as a shining example of humanity; but by-christ if they get upset they actually take those feet, one in front of the other and fight tooth and nail against `$thing`. Even if they don't "win", they /don't go quietly/.
There is a strike or demonstration of sorts every other day in France. Or so it seems living there. It’s become so frequent that it has little to no meaning anymore. The government is scared to implement any meaningful change because it’s guaranteed there’ll be a strike or demonstration of sorts. And so we continue towards the wall pedal to the metal.
A democratic government should exist only by the consent of the governed. The government should be terrified of the people. Of course you have to be able to filter out the signal from the noise and majority vs minority desires, but by and large if a change is majorly unpopular, they should be terrified of trying to push it through.
That’s not how it is there though. Any change whatsoever, justified or not, is opposed. So the government goes for bust and makes changes that help the biggest companies, the richest in the country, friends of the president (whoever they are, different presidents same joke) because it’s going to be a struggle anyway so it might as well payoff for their friends. Plus they need the wealthy’s support (they own the newspapers and media)
And so we’ve given up on the train for instance because when it’s not striking it’s broken down for some reason.
Retirements and social security, same thing, the only changes made was for the industry not for the people. And we’re careening into the wall.
The Sony one led to legal action and penalties. Also Microsoft themselves released an update that kicked the rootkit out.
If illegal actions are just reverted and compensated by a fine, then they are just legal for a fee
The sad thing is that for many of these examples, people got a better deal out of it.
The HP printer ink subscription makes a lot of sense if you print a certain number of pages each year. Many consumers who only print occasionally are better off with cheap subscriptions for getting their money's worth, even if from an environmental point of view the cartridge DRM is absolute bullcrap.
Adobe switching from making people pay thousands and charging them again for updates was a lot more expensive than the ridiculous yearly subscription they charge (per month, to keep the advertised price down, surprising people who thought they could cancel after a few months).
IE6 was awful at replicating what other browsers did, but it introduced a lot of features that reshaped the web. The XmlHttpRequest that moved the web from static pages to basic interactivity was a Microsoft invention.
Many if these cases didn't work out of course, but for many business decisions that cause outrage on the internet, it's worth reconsidering the options on offer after the outrage has died down. Unpopular decisions aren't often the unbridled conspiratory evil that the internet would like you to believe.
When Apple deliberately put a bug in the iPhone that caused the Home button to fail, pushing people to buy the next model, people got upset—and then bought the next one anyway. I'm amazed nobody remembers that one; it was such a huge deal at the time. And there is not a single link to articles about it anymore.
That one, I don't remember either. Are you sure you aren't confusing it with Batterygate?
But yes: point taken, these companies have absolutely no incentive to behave any better than they have in the past.
Oh no, I remember well. At some point, everyone at the software home button on their phone setup, because the physical button was sometimes working and sometimes not.
Apple issued a statement saying it was a hardware failure and there was nothing they could do.
A hacker later on proved they were lying by patching the software and showing the problem went away.
That's why I'm scrapbooking every article about the trump administration right now. This time period is so wild people will doubt it really existed.
I will not be gaslighted again. This world is crazy, and people have a terrible memory.
"Error 53" from 2016, maybe?
* Error 53: Exposing An Apple Scandal -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWE4mwhjNY4
* ‘Error 53’ fury mounts as Apple software update threatens to kill your iPhone 6 -- https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple...
* Apple apologises for iPhone 'error 53' and issues fix -- https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35611756
It's another one, I actually didn't know about this one. Saving.
>That's why I'm scrapbooking every article about the trump administration right now. This time period is so wild people will doubt it really existed.
On one hand, I think there will be entire subgenres of literature and media dedicated to this time, the way we spend entire units in the US on WWII.
On the other hand, I also know there will be a lot of "not-MAGA" people who will say they didn't vote for Trump (they did) but defend to death how these times weren't that bad with all the same soundbites you hear today. We're way too connected (and Trump way too loud) to reasonably do Trump denialism, so the next best path will be Trump sympathizing
Switch to Brother laser jet printers - I hear about them every time HP comes up, I've had mine for years, it is a lovely solution
Tons of people switched from IE6 to Chrome; IE is a dead browser. These days I'd recommend Firefox.
Is there something wrong with the iPhone as of today? It sounds like the bug got fixed in response to outcry, especially if they went and scrubbed all traces of the event - that seems like a good outcome?
Adobe stock is down almost 50% (42.24%) in the past year - I dare say a lot of people got sick of their shit. I have no clue what professionals use, but GIMP works fine for my amateur edits.
Like, c'mon, change very clearly does happen. It's just slow and uneven.
If you actually cared about change, I feel like you'd maybe list a few of the cool alternatives out there and actually help people make that transition. https://xkcd.com/1053/ - people do actually have to be taught about these things, not everyone knows what the alternatives are!
It’s not only their printers. Their computers and peripherals are also very low quality nowadays. Enterprise buys them because they’re cheap not because they’re good. The bar they have to clear is to keep working for the lease’s duration (3 years typically).
I’ve been burnt a few times now I run away when I see HP (even their “enterprise” line, which used to be good)
I did, but that doesn't change AT ALL my initial point.
People still buy HP printers.
It's still a popular brand.
Just like how Mojang deleted my Mojang account taking away my copy of Minecraft I legitimately purchased.
Don't think these ToS are just theoretical.
I hope they send warning letters to log in. Mine been idle for over a year and I don't have it right now.. but I paid for those games so it would be scammy to remove without warning.
Does it cost them money to keep my purchases logged? I don't think so.
Is logging in from a browser good enough?
Related:
Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745456
I'd just be happy if companies were required to call them licensed and forbidden to call them sold or owned by the buyer.
I am not sure, but I feel that many of these "Sony bad" type of conversations appear close to something unfavorable being discussed about Xbox. Am I imagining it? The Playstation issue discussed here is certainly not new, but the timing is interesting.
The timing surely is due to Sony’s recent announcement that they’re retiring physical media.
>many of these "Sony bad" type of conversations appear close to something unfavorable being discussed about Xbox.
Both console makers released some devastating news this week. Perhaps by design (But probably not. It's a new financial quarter, the usual time for big news anouncements, good and bad). And this is coming all the backs of rising memory prices driving speculations of 4 figure next gen consoles, GTA 6 costing $80 for part of the game for a case which does not contain a disc, and alleged reports of digital dynamic pricing.
It hasn't been a good few months for anyone in the games industry. Even Nintendo is begrudgingly increasing prices by end of summer.
Closing inactive accounts in the EU is due to (interpretation of) certain provisions set in the GDPR (e.g. article 5 - https://gdpr-info.eu/art-5-gdpr/) and Sony is not alone, many services in the EU automatically close and delete orphaned accounts after a given amount of time, and if they are international ones even when they don't outside of the EU.
If implemented correctly the affected person is also warned/notified several times by email before this is going to happen, so you have enough time to log in at least once and prevent it (and also extend the time frame again).
Those articles don't require deletion in this case, in my non-lawyer opinion. There is still a purpose to keeping the user's personal information here. Sony needs that information to be able to grant the user access to the content they bought.
There's a difference here between an account that hasn't been used and doesn't hold anything of value and an account like this that holds items that were bought.
Good, customer data should be a liability and they should be incentivized to delete it as early as feasible, or not store it at all when possible. It's your data, not theirs.
The problem with email is that it's an email address from 3+ years ago, which means there's a much higher chance of it being out of date - are you still using XxCoolDude67xX from high school?
Consoles area also marketed heavily towards older teenagers and younger adults, who are exactly the ones unlikely to maintain a consistent email address.
And of course if your email provided decides to cut you off, or goes out of business, or you used a university email...
The solution to that is to allow people to set an additional email address for the account and then maybe allow them to disable the original after a period of time.
It’s as if they were working super hard to obliterate their domination of the consoles market.
Xbox is in shambles but if Sony keeps pulling these braindead moves and annihilating any goodwill they have, Xbox might come out on top despite their best efforts.
Sony is really motivated to turn away it's customers to other platforms.
You will own nothing and be bitterly unhappy.
Maybe.
[dead]
"Sony correctly implements GDPR requirements in the EU" is a less exciting headline I guess.
That is not how gdpr works. If you have a legitimate reason to hold the data. You can. Ensuring people have access to purchases is a very legitimate reason.
Is there evidence that European courts have sided with that? “We’re holding onto all your data indefinitely just in case you log in again several years from now” seems to be the antithesis of GDPR and I can’t discern the difference between that and what you’re suggesting.
I believe EU has dug their own hole here. And the best move would be to pass more legislation to explicitly require the retention (and transfer, ideally) of purchased digital goods.
> Is there evidence that European courts have sided with that?
Is there evidence of the contrary? Maybe any store can just delete your personal data right after charging your card and claim GDPR prevents them from shipping your product.
Silly arguments work both ways. You just picked the one that confirms your bias.
GDPR under no circumstances forces processors to delete everything, it defines legitimate interest. Retaining a person's purchases is as legitimate as it gets so the data can be retained for as long as the purchase is valid. And the license itself isn't even the user's personal data, it's just a license, so Sony could give the option to export that license to be used later - even in a cryptographically secure format that can only work if e.g. the account is created with the same email address. If they delete the personal data and throw out the baby with the water, it's not GDPR forcing them to do it.
The GDPR does not say that controllers must always delete personal data on request. Article 17(1)(a) — erasure is required only when:
"the personal data are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed"
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr
It's like the cookie banner all over again. This law never, ever required a cookie banner.
The big companies are master in malicious compliance that benefit them, and let them blame the EU for it.
Rules of thumbs, international billion dollars company should be assumed to be the ones being the bad guys until proven otherwise. They have lost the benefit of the doubt decades ago.
If it’s malicious compliance and not required why does the EU Commission website have it?
https://commission.europa.eu
Because if enough idiots do it, stupid managers think it's the standard. The EU Commission is unlikely to know anything about their website, it's made by some department that blindly follows a manager's order that just looked at what others did and copied it.
We could all have used the DNT header as a bypass when the GPDR came out, and you can still use cookies for non tracking purposes without any banner.
So the EU commission put out a rule that you say has been widely misunderstood and implemented via malicious compliance. Where is the EU statement and education on this? Why aren’t they louder in explaining this isn’t what they wanted? And they allow their own websites to do the very thing that they supposedly don’t want?
Do you maybe want to reconsider? Perhaps instead companies are putting in a good faith effort to comply. I have been invoked in discussions around legal compliance of all sorts of regulation and trust me: no one has ever ever expressed “let’s do some terrible thing because we disagree with regulation”. It’s conspiratorial thinking.
No need for a conspiracy. There was the DNT standard, companies made more money from not taking it into consideration.
That's it.
They chose the annoying banners, then they chose dark patterns on those banners.
It is a choice.
At best they were lazy and greedy. At worse they were malicious.
Don’t change the topic.
The general council (lawyers) at companies are making the decisions around cookies banners and the like, not the folks trying to make money. Regardless of how you might interpret the law and requirements around GDPR, the legal profession as a whole seems to think the crap we live with today is necessary. If it isn’t, it’s on the EU technocrats to clarify in communications, written rules, and on their own damn website what it is supposed to look like.
Two things can be true.
And clearly, you think billion-dollar companies making dark patterns, ignoring web standards and choosing to track people left and right are less to blame the inconvenience of a banner (that warns you they do) than the people trying to protect your privacy and did it imperfectly.
I have made enought web sites and app that don't have a banner to know it's perfectly possible, even today.
I have implemented DNT support and know it was a great solution before it was taken away.
I have worked with enough clients to know why they chose the banner anyway.
Unlike you I actually read the law, and worked at implementing it. Including with and without a banner.
So I have to conclude you are not an honest actor in this debate, and you are clearly angry as well.
So I'll leave you at that.
You bet I am angry. I am tired of people defending a law by saying “that’s not what it was meant to do!” As if the intent matters one bit. What matters is the result of the law. And the result of this regulation is to make the web universally crappier than it was before. It did basically nothing to improve things in the real world.
In practice most of the purposes you'd encounter in the wild are directly linked to user activity, so account deletion means most of the reasons to keep it disappear.
You still need to keep it if there's a law saying that you need to have that data, of course, but that's the exception.
No need to wait for the courts’ opinions: controllers must keep the data for a limited amount of time (which can be something like “3 years after the last connection”) under GDPR article 5(1)e.
"kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed"
Keeping "account X purchased game Y" forever is necessary for the purpose of tracking ownership.
Based on how big companies typically behave, I assume that they are storing a metric buttload of other data on their users, which is not necessary for that purpose, and which they aren't inclined to separate out.
This is just like the cookie popup nonsense. You don't have to ask for permission to store necessary cookies. Cookie popups are ubiquitous because sites would rather bother every single visitor so that they can store unnecessary cookies.
To save everyone a click:
> Personal data shall be: kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed. (..)
Note that this does not say "it must be stored for a limited amount of time" - it says "no longer than necessary".
Your basic account data (such as username and password, or an email for password recovery) is still necessary to log in to the platform and make use of your purchases. As long as there is no clear indication that the user will never log in again (such as due to death, or because they explicitly deleted their account), it would be reasonable to keep it around.
On the other hand, it may make sense to delete some data. For example, it may make sense to store your full name and address info to make checkout more convenient. If a user hasn't bought stuff in a while, it makes sense to delete it and have them re-enter it in the future.
There might be a bit of a gray space for things like game achievements (especially when there's a public profile) or savefile backups, but reading it as "you MUST delete all digital purchases because GDPR" is just not true.
I'd consider keeping the other personal data to be still easily justifiable, as you might want to support various account recovery options. And the odds that a user forgot their password only increases for old accounts.
5(1)c seems far more relevant than e. “Data minimization” is what’s relevant here. And the article is sufficiently vague that the onus is on companies to decide what is absolutely minimal - that includes, implicitly, removing inactive accounts. Unless the courts have made a judgement to the contrary.
And that data must be held for a limited amount of time under GDPR article 5(1)e. Sony’s policy is very much a consequence of this.