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this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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This is where our lazy lawmakers need to step in and protect consumers. Make it illegal to revoke these types of licenses over greedy, lazy, exploitative business mergers and acquisitions. If corporations want to fight that, then they shouldn't be able to "sell" digital movies or games anymore: Any time you go to "purchase" digital content, it must plainly tell you that you're renting said content for an undetermined amount of time.
Funny how so much recent talk has emerged yet again about how companies like Microsoft want to get rid of disc drives on their next Xbox... It's almost like companies don't actually want you to ever truly own anything. A rent economy is toxic and rotten, and it's infuriating that it's literally becoming our entire economy.
While I will freely admit that the lack of a physical drive is a huge way to drive downloaded (and licensed, revokable) content controlled by the company, it's worth noting that physical media is really not all that great a medium for transferring things like games or movies anymore. Blu-ray discs can hold, in ideal situations, around 50GB of data. A lot of games -- especially AAA games, are well beyond that. I think Spider Man 2 came in at like 85GB? The internet says Hogwarts Legacy is ~75GB on XBox.
Network connectivity, and downloading content to our devices is almost certainly going to be the way a lot of the world works going forward. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to back our content up elsewhere, or offload it to some other device.
Your right in noting that the laws and regulations need to keep up and protect consumers' right to the content they've purchased.
edit: Here, I'll bold the important part.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray#BDXL
Even normal UHD BRDs can and do hold upwards of 100GB, as those can have 4 layers (~25GB each layer).
A lot of game size bloat is due to lazy optimization. Lords of the Fallen on PC--while it had questionable game performance for some folk--the game looked gorgeous and was quite a massive world, yet the download for it was around 40GB.
There are very few games I can think of that warrant being 100+GB. And even if they're more than 100GB, what's stopping them from just using 2 Blu-rays? Remember the PS1 days when games like FF7 had 4 discs? Or when WoW came out, it came with like 8 installation discs or some other absurd number? Blu-rays are more expensive, sure, but I can't imagine games getting to be more than 2 discs long during the lifespan of Blu-ray as a storage medium anyway.
Except that games are broken at release and need day1 patch in order to work. Although you will ship BD, the day update servers are taken down, your physical copy won't allow you to play the game either.
The only question I have is : Is torrenting game patchs / updates concidered piracy as well ? If it is, we are definitely doomed.