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Steam Now Warns Consumers That They're Buying a License, Not a Game During a Purchase
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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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Before Steam you bought a physical disc and it didn't matter that you technically only purchased a license, the disc was yours and nobody was coming to your house to take it away if the publisher started fighting with the developer or whatever.
True, with some modifications:
Some games had online activation built in. Some games would simply not install on a second or third machine without getting permission from the publisher.
Regular CDs have a lifespan of 5-10 years, shorter if not stored ideally. Almost all games had sophisticated mechanisms to prevent backups being taken.
Even if you could take a backup, record associations and publishers lobbied to make it illegal and punishable by severe fines in many countries.
Sony shipped fucking root kits on their CD that would hijack your PC and screw with backup software. EA shipped CDs with autoexexuting software that would actually delete CloneCD and other CD copying software and prevent new installes from working. My copy of Sims 2 came with that bullshit and OH MAN I was not happy about it.
I've got CDs I've had for 25+ years and they're still fine
Yeah good ones allegedly last 200 years if stored correctly. Cheap ones are 5-10. 20 can be expected for quality CDs stored correctly.
But no matter the claimed quality, it's a gamble. Our local library had a lot of 10-20 year old CDs that had developed microbubbles.
5 years is low range for CDs, but common enough that you should be taking backups for anything you keep longer.
Don't conflate a mastered CD with an aluminum data layer with a recordable CD-R or CD-RW, which use organic dyes that have a significantly shorter lifespan.
A properly manufactured CD can last 200+ years if it's stored in a dry environment free of UV exposure and high levels of moisture.
Even a quality CD-R can't really be expected to retain all of its data integrity for much more than 10 years.
Sorta doubting whatever study found proof that a CD can last 200 years...
Obviously no one's seen it happen first hand. It's a projection based on what's known about the materials and how they're made. Burned CD-R's have definitely been out in the real world for people to learn how short their lifespans can be, though.
Nobody could "prove," for instance, that the Voyager 1 could stay operational in deep space for 47+ years when it was launched in 1977, but the engineers could still predict and they launched it anyway, and it did. I don't think your argument really holds water.
That's what I think when I read endurance/mtbf of hard/solid state drives of like 100+ years. Bitch you released this last week and I know for a fact that you didn't withhold sales for 100 years for validation of your claims. Also funny how I should reasonably expect 100 years out of it, but you will only provide a warranty for the first three...