Oh look, Sony revoking more licenses for video content that people “bought”.

    • Chriswild@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Pirating isn’t stealing because it’s addition not subtraction. You’re creating more of a thing not taking a thing away from someone who had a thing. Actually what Sony is doing here is closer to stealing as people had a thing they purchased and now they don’t.

  • bassomitron@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    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.

    • evatronic@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      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… […]

      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.

      • Instigate@aussie.zone
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        9 months ago

        Then put the games onto high-storage solid-state cartridges like Nintendo does. There’s no reason to be limited by existing technology like Blu-Ray except for laziness. Hell, they could even just put an SD card reader in as the physical game tray and put games onto SD cards if they’re that lazy and don’t want to spend on R&D.

        Removing the capacity to have physical copies of games at all is always a bad move that is disingenuously masked with a “but the world is going all digital!” all the while knowing that this gives them greater control over things we’re supposed to own.

        • Firestorm Druid@lemmy.zip
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          Would the reading speed of those SD cards be as fast as the reading speed of Blurays? Or is the reading part of using Blurays unnecessary in the first place because most of the game is loaded onto the console itself?

          I imagine you could write-protect the SD cards the same way you do with Blurays, so if the question above is a non-issue, then that’d be quite a cool solution. SD cards pushing terabytes easily now, they’d be large enough for sure.

          But then again, afaik, the discs are not really needed and don’t need to accommodate that much space in them except for licensing and DRM stuff, I think, since the majority of the game is downloaded regardless, right?

          • Saik0@lemmy.saik0.com
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            9 months ago

            Would the reading speed of those SD cards be as fast as the reading speed of Blurays?

            Disc speeds are notoriously slow. PS vs N64, Cartridge based systems were instant where as discs had to be loaded into a ram space/buffer and had terrible load times. The difference back then was that disc’s had a boatload more storage where cartridges were very expensive to get any significant capacity. That’s still kind of true today, but at scale not nearly as much as it used to be, and max capacity of sd cards are WAY bigger than discs overall.

            6x Bluray drives (which is what is in the PS4 for example) read at about 27MB/s. I don’t know what speed the PS5 is, but bluray supports up to 72MB/s as a standard and has it’s highest capacity at ~100/128 GB.

            Meanwhile… You can hop on amazon and buy 200MB/s sd cards no problem. I’ve seen them as “fast” as 300 MB/s, and as high capacity as 1TB. So easily 3x more bandwidth, and significantly more capacity. Usually costs more though. Some weird side-benefits though… You can actually update the game that lives on the card. You can leave some assets on the card that get called less often when you install to SSD to save space on internal storage. Or if you’re live loading assets from the sd card to an internal SSD, any load times will be significantly faster. You CANNOT do these things on spinning disc, it’s too slow.

            The real difference here is latency though. A disc has to spin… You have a physical laser head that has to seek to a particular sector. That’s slow as hell and at the density of tracks that you have to do on BD-XL disks, you can actually overshoot tracks if they’re laid out poorly which increases the delay of getting the data. SD cards don’t care at all, everything is nearly instantly responsive.

            So yes, sd cards are significantly faster than bluray discs in a number of ways.

            Edit: Minor edit to make it more clear.

            • Firestorm Druid@lemmy.zip
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              9 months ago

              Thanks for the detailed response. Lots of interesting new information!

              SD cards rule, then lol

        • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
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          9 months ago

          Nintendo’s drives are tiny, capacity wise. And expensive enough that publishers won’t pay for the “high capacity” (that’s still not big enough for games anywhere except the switch, due to how low res assets are) ones.

      • essteeyou@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I bought a 1TB micro SD card recently, it cost less than a new AAA game. Almost any individual AAA game would fit on a quarter of that.

      • bassomitron@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        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.

        • jyte@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          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.

    • gian @lemmy.grys.it
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      9 months ago

      A rent economy is toxic and rotten,

      Not always. I would gladly pay to rent something I need only every now and then instead to buy it.

      • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
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        9 months ago

        But that is the concept of renting rather than a rent economy.

        An industry or economy based entirely around renting with 0 other options is almost always rotten to the core.

  • Jaysyn@kbin.social
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    9 months ago

    I’ve been boycotting Sony since the CD rootkit debacle & haven’t regretted my decision yet.

  • Sanctus@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Its barely the second month of the year and these companies are nose diving to the fucking bottom.

    • laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      9 months ago

      Does OBS even work with all the DRM they’ve put on things? I thought that’s the whole point why it’s there, to keep people from screen capturing or restreaming videos

    • bruhduh@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Android smart TV can use some foss screen capture apps while being undetected by PlayStation, of course there’s trouble with sound capture, but since tv is yours, it can be bypassed

  • paddirn@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    If what they’re doing isn’t theft, then digital “piracy” isn’t theft either.

  • Clbull@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    And with the unrelated rumours of Microsoft potentially leaving the console business and going multiplatform, it begs serious questions.

    Do you really want Sony to have a monopoly on console gaming when they can’t even respect ownership rights for digital goods?

    • Kedly@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      Tbf I left the console market a decade ago and haven’t really felt like going back. Computers do everything I need in the gaming sphere

      • OminousOrange@lemmy.ca
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        9 months ago

        Without extortionate extra fees either. I recently wanted to crossplay Overcooked on my PC with a couple friends on my PS4. “Buy PSPlus for only $100+ to play this game online!” Yeah, fuck off.

        • Corhen@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          still think its crazy that online match making is a paid service on consoles.

          remember when microsoft tried to do the same with PCs?

      • Agrivar@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I fear we are rapidly approaching (or have already reached) the point where the definition of “begs the question” is going to be changed to include “raises the question,” much the same way “literally” now also means “not literally.”

        I am not pleased by this development, but I was also not consulted.

  • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    if you can take it from me, I can take it from you. piracy has become a moral imperative to stop valuable art being flushed down the memory hole.

        • bort@feddit.de
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          9 months ago

          You vote with your wallets. Each time you buy a phone without SD cart, you are submitting a ballot.

          Seriously. phones are 99% identical anyways. It’s not so hard to filter for the 2-3 criteria you actually care about.

          • aksdb@lemmy.world
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            I would also like a great camera, a non-locked-down bootloader and a non-customized OS with updates for at least 5 years. I can’t vote with my wallet aside from “not buying any phone”, which isn’t a vote.

            Oh I would also like small smartphones back. But there are simply no good ones on the market; nothing I could vote for.

            “Vote with your wallet” only works if there is a good enough set of choices on the market.

            • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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              9 months ago

              Like regular voting, you pick the best one of the bunch; even if it’s only marginally better than the rest. Even if it’s still terrible.

              Repeat. Repeat again.

              • aksdb@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                True, and that’s why you can only marginally change anything on the market with that. If no player on the market offers what you want, your only choices are to punish everyone (which they won’t notice) or reward one of the least-bad players.

                Both can set the wrong incentives for companies to change or continue.

                So it’s ok to bitch a shitty choices.

            • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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              This is a cop out. I have a 2023 Motorola phone that has everything but ir blaster and removable battery. Why lie like this??

              There is a good enough set of choices on the internet you’re just a spoiled baby. Who needs green chat bubbles 🙄

          • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
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            9 months ago

            There is a triangle of camera quality, software support, and peripheral support. You can have 2.

            Fairphone is the close, but they removed the headphone jack when they upgraded their camera in order to push their shitty earbuds that they only sold/supported for 2 years I think before scrapping them and are continuing the cycle with their new headphones (directly contrary to their mission). They also refuse to add simple wireless charging.

            Sony has camera quality (only their photo pro, not in their shitty default camera app) and peripherals, but no software support (2 years max).

            Voting with my wallet is buying no phones ever, apparently.

            • Resonosity@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              There’s also Shiftphone out of Germany, but it looks like they’re still securing funding for their next round of phones.

              Messed up world out there

            • bruhduh@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              Search for camera and peripheral support, as for software support, search models which have open source kernel code and bought alot, they usually have best community support, I’m saying this as current owner of poco x3 pro, and i learned my lesson when i bought redmi note 4 mtk 4/64, they didn’t released source code for mtk model, so only way to support it is to make Frankenstein from source code of snapdragon note 4 model, some smartphone kernel code with that mtk cpu support, and cherry pick updates from Linux 3.18 to current, while testing and fixing bugs from one lts version to another till you reach current one

          • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
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            I want to buy a fairphone, but they refuse to add wireless charging (even as an add-on) and they also removed the headphone jack so that they could pish their Bluetooth earbuds which they discontinued after barely a few years, now they have Bluetooth headphones where they will likely do the same. Completely contrary to their ethos.

            Though I don’t see how it relates to my comment in the slightest. Showing that 1 phone that has an SD card slot is just my point. There are few good phones being made currently with SD card slots.

            There is a Venn diagram of camera quality, software support, headphone, and SDcard where you can have 3 but never all 4.

            • ulterno@lemmy.kde.social
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              but they refuse to add wireless charging (even as an add-on) and they also removed the headphone jack

              I discounted the headphone jack because your comment included the Pixel, but I feel the same. My current phone has a jack and I tend to use it quite often. Also, I don’t see a good reason to require another batteried device that I need to worry about, on top of it potentially not working in high interference environments.
              This has been one of the 2 main reasons why I haven’t taken one yet. The other being non-availability.

              I am still unable to understand how important wireless charging might be.

              I really just wish I could get a handheld pocketable computer with a cellular radio and GPS navigation related sensors, with some version of UEFI on which I could install whatever Linux I wanted.

              • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
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                9 months ago

                I guess I am really rough on my USB C ports? I just plug them in at night and lay my phone on the bed, but after just 2.5 years my Sony 5ii is already getting loose. I clean it out with a toothpick occasionally, but I will probably have to replace the port next year. Everything else about wireless charging is shit to me, but not stressing the port is worth it.

                My nokia (HMDGlobal) 7.1 the charging port literally stopped charging after 8 months and then every 2-3 months for the 2 years I had that one. That was the lowest of the low quality phones lol.

                What you seem to want is a a PMOS phone with with Plasma Mobile

                • cujo@lemmy.world
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                  9 months ago

                  An anecdote, I insisted on getting wireless charging with my last phone change because my Sony Xperia XZ premium (that I loved) became a brick after the usb c port failed about 18 months in

                • ulterno@lemmy.kde.social
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                  9 months ago

                  What you seem to want is a a PMOS phone with with Plasma Mobile

                  You got that right. And TIL that the Fairphone 4 support for that is less than what I would require. i.e. GPS, Mobile Data, SMS, Calls …

                  Perhaps, if some day I can justify buying a phone with that price tag just for testing purposes, I’ll try helping with the support of those features…

            • Resonosity@lemmy.world
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              9 months ago

              There are Qi adapters out there for phones without wireless charging built in. See this CNET article. It’s not perfect, but a simple Google search says it’s possible. Plus, adding this adapter and hiding it inside your phone case has the benefit of protecting your phone’s charge port from dust and other ingress. I use wireless chargers for all my phone charging, so this is a viable option in case I ever want to go with a Fairphone or a Shiftphone (maybe even a Cube).

              The headphone jack thing is annoying. I’d buy their Fairphone 4 to have the option between wired and wireless.

              • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
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                9 months ago

                Yeah those adapters are handly except that they damage the case and leave a large cable buldge with the bend radius. I might still get one for my current phone, but not a great solution.

                • Resonosity@lemmy.world
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                  There are models out there that I’ve seen that have designed the cables to act more like bus bars that bend at sharp 90° in a flat strip profile, where the bend is less pronounced. But I agree that would be a failure point as time goes on to watch. I don’t really remove my phone case all that often, so I don’t think it’d be that big of a deal. They’re like $10 total for a replacement off of Amazon, so price nor schedule is an issue either.

                • Resonosity@lemmy.world
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                  9 months ago

                  Just came across the Pinephone. Looks like they’ve figured out how to do modular wireless charging for their platform that still allows free access to the USB-C port, but this isn’t compatible with phones that don’t have pogo pins.

            • KptnAutismus@lemmy.world
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              the headphone jack is unforgivable for many users. as an audiophile i often use external DACs anyways, but it still sucks ass to carry around an “emergency audio adapter” which stops working after like a year (even the expensive ones) compared to a built-in one.

              fuck you fairphone, but the upsides of the 4 outweighed the downsides for me.

        • Firestorm Druid@lemmy.zip
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          9 months ago

          Wow, I knew that Apple devices don’t, but I hoped that they’d be the only ones. Major oofs right there

        • Matriks404@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          It’s far from being perfect solution, but you can buy a miniature USB microSD card Reader very cheap these days.

      • KptnAutismus@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        i have a total of 512GB of storage in my Phone already, but my dad has repeatedly run into the storage limit of his 256GB phone. he’s not even that into music, and he stores his music compressed.

        i can see all of the songs i listen to now taking up more than 300GB easily in lossles. plus i would be able to access the music from my phone as well as my PC without having to store duplicates, and having cross-platform playlists.

        there’s a lot of benefit with streaming, and self-hosting is becoming more accessible by the day. if you have the bandwidth, i see no problem as long as your provider doesn’t fuck you over (which is on the horizon for spotify, we aren’t getting lossless and the prices are going up regardless)

        • Marin_Rider@aussie.zone
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          9 months ago

          just photos and some videos and somehow my 256gb is always struggling for space. I’d kill for an SD slot

          • KptnAutismus@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            that’s the perks of a phone company who keeps good design decisions going, except for the headphone jack. i will never forgive Fairphone (still bought the 4, sooo…)

    • daniskarma@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I’m using jellyfin and it just works fine.

      There are others more specialized in music. But I kind of like only having to use one service for all my media.

      • anivia@lemmy.ml
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        Not compatible with Android 14, and doesn’t seem to receive updates anymore (the last one was 2 years ago). So that looks like a terrible choice.

  • Phegan@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Digital ownership is a real issue. We need to ensure we own when we buy, or we should not buy

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip
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      9 months ago

      Well, copyright proponents succeeded in persuading the majority of people that buying something you can’t copy or share is still ownership, despite it being against human instincts.

      Only instincts matter more, not less, than laws. Because instincts work first.

      So in fact they persuaded us that it’s normal to own less, rent more, buy a cat in a bag, buy something without any guarantees, buy something with unclear obligations, because everybody around does that and it’s socially shameful otherwise.

      Which is amusingly similar to what fraudsters do.

      So the next stage is the amount of obvious fraud from those big copyright-reliant companies increasing. Good night, sweet prince.

      • radicalautonomy@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Yes, I’d like one cat please. No, not that one…the dapper tabby gentleman in the back…yes, that’s the one. What’s that? No, no thank you, I don’t need a bag.

        …on second thought, yeah, go ahead and give me the cat in a bag. What’s the damage?

  • virr@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    This is why we prefer to buy physical media, getting a digital with it is nice, but physical is key.

    It wasn’t even me was pushing for us to get physical media, it was my spouse. Of course my plex server the house probably helped. But after a few “forever” is only until next month, or shows completely disappearing altogether from any streaming, they started pushing for more physical media.

    • Fisch@lemmy.ml
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      9 months ago

      I think I’m alone with that on here but I don’t really like buying physical media. I get that that way you own it but it’s still just a storage medium with data on it, putting that data directly on my hard drive achieves basically the same thing. Since I can pirate basically anything anyway, I just think that even if a company takes away my access to something digital I bought, I can always just pirate it and I have it again. To me, physical discs are kind of a waste of money, space and resources because of that. I don’t have it anything against people who buy physical media tho, I do get the point of that.

      • xantoxis@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Same, and I’ve already had to do this. Google started revoking things I “bought”. When they announced it I immediately went into Google Play, made a list of everything I “bought”, and pirated it onto my home media server.

        It’s mine, and it’s on “physical media”, which I call an SD drive in a NAS.

        I don’t need or want optical disks of things–they are subject to rot, more so than my NAS, and they are far far more fragile than the NAS+the backups. They take up space and collect dust. If I wanted cover art, I’d own the art and have it on my wall.

        You can truly own things, and you don’t have to have plastic covers on a shelf to do that.

      • Firestorm Druid@lemmy.zip
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        9 months ago

        I actually like that thinking, haven’t thought of it that way. Should the day come when Sony decides to kill all digital copies of games people have collected over the years, who’s stopping them from just jailbreaking/rooting/cracking/CFW-ing their console to just download the games they want from dedicated communities who have dumped those games on the internet ages ago?

        I did the same thing with my 3DS when the eShop was officially closed, and now I can’t imagine a 3DS without access to anything I could want on there.

      • gian @lemmy.grys.it
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        9 months ago

        I think I’m alone with that on here but I don’t really like buying physical media.

        I suppose it depend on what you buy. Some things are worth to have the physical copy, some not.