That’s not it.
It’s how they’ll:
Charge more for the service whenever they feel like it.
You have to subscribe to each gaming service separately if you want access to their games. Just like Netflix or Prime Video, except there’s no way to sail the high seas for these games as they’ll all be cloud based.
Unbundle your access – you now get unlimited hours for one game or pay more for all games with top tier, pay for every DLC unless you pay for top tier, etc.
Pay for skins, upgrades, mods, your “own” server, the ability to record yourself playing for your social media, voice chat…
Pay for top tier lobbies so you load in faster.
Pay for the best maps.
And of course the service will enshittify. Dropped and slow connections, shittier game quality, glitches and exploits go unpatched, etc.
The ability to exploit and extort gamers is almost endless once they take away our PCs and consoles.
That’s the trade-off right there 😅 Convenience is great, but owning your games just hits different when servers go down or licenses change.
thats why you hack your old consoles and you play games forever free!
Meanwhile me playing on linux
The death of Stadia was so enjoyable for me
IMO the only thing the cloud is useful for in this context is maintaining and syncing saves. Other than that I want my games running locally, thank you.
Imagine paying some rando to rent their computer. You can totally trust them, right? They’re not in the Epstein files, right?
Before we even say what company, I know I’m not betting a single penny that they’re not.
You will own nothing and you will be happy. 😀
Wasn’t that what the capitalists claimed communists wanted to do?
At least that was happy - seems now it’s “you will own nothing and it’ll keep getting worse, so number go up”.
There’s more old, retro and indie games out there than you could ever finish. If the situation will get worse people will start sharing install files on offline media like decades ago with movies. Don’t worry, it’s going to be great.
My backlog is so large that it would take forever to get through. I have no need to upgrade my setup to play more modem games.
Some new consoles don’t offer physical media anymore, and some games aren’t able to be played without an Internet connection and a yearly account charge? I just won’t play them, then.
For everyone being all fatalistic and the whole ‘there is nothing you can do’ approach. Vote with your wallet. No money for them means no power for them.
We are the customer, not their bitch. If they don’t provide value, they receive none in return. They go broke and someone else will provide the service we all want.
No way the junkies will quit playing early-access AAA titles at any point, no matter the cost.
So there remains a market for that content, just like there is a giant market for free low effort mobile games with micro transactions.
Can still seek out and reward passionate projects that clearly actually care about their output. Those projects may not get the same obscene revenue, but they frequently get a viable amount and consistently get recognition for just how well done they are.
My biggest regret is going with 32 of instead of 64GB of DDR5, when I built a new Ryzen 7000 PC in 2022 to replace my aging 4th gen i5.
But what I don’t regret is ignoring everyone telling me not to do all sorts of unspeakable things to snag a $1600 4090 at launch, especially given that it was never sold that cheaply ever again. It’s a beast of a card and I’ll easily get a decade of gaming out of it. Saw 4090s going for over $3K used on eBay lately, so yeah I’m happy with making what was a dumb decision at the time.
Unfortunately, 4090 is already going into the obsolescence by power cable fire hazard territory. Keep your eye on it as it ages.
It’s been over 3 years now and I haven’t had a single issue. I made sure to plug in the 12VHPR cable all the way and avoid bending it. I also made sure to buy a top tier PCIe 5 PSU.
The issue was vastly blown out of proportion. Don’t be an idiot and you have nothing to worry about.
As a fellow owner, that’s what they want us to think. Feel safe, but then out of nowhere your house burns down and then you have to buy a new card.
Sorry, to busy going to my local game shop and buying Xbox 360 games. So many games to play
Do not give in. If you can’t play it on your machine, do not play it. There are other games, and if all else fails, other hobbies that do respect you.
Remember, things got this shitty because most people were fine with Big Tech gradually making things shittier. I look back and realize I’ve been waiting for the One Enormous Dealbreaker for over a decade, but consumers keep moving the red line.
I’d rather play only board games and TRRPGs for the rest of my days.
I miss having people that I can play board games with
What happened to them?
most of them have spouses and kids now.
Can you pull off the thing where families interact commonly? Like close family friends or whatever?
I know making friends is hard, but that’s all the more reason we should work hard to keep the ones we’ve known for a long time.
