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.
thats why you hack your old consoles and you play games forever free!
That’s the trade-off right there 😅 Convenience is great, but owning your games just hits different when servers go down or licenses change.
I’ll never do cloud gaming/computing.
If a cloud server becomes the only way to play the newest releases, I’m never playing the newest releases again. That’s fine. There are more games between 1980 and 2025 than I have years of life available to play.
If you can’t build a desktop and must rent an Amazon computing instance, I’m not doing computing anymore. That’s fine, people lived for thousands of years without computers, I don’t need computers to eat.
Playstation Plus was the last streaming service I used. The titles were garbage and so was the quality. I don’t know why I ever bothered when I’ve got thousands of games archived locally. I’ll go back to dumpster diving office PCs before I ever use a virtual instance again.
This is me with everything right now because of AI. There is a thousand of books, music, videogames, comics, movies that are before 2020 that I haven’t read, listen, play and so on.
I don’t need computers to eat.
Yet.
I continue to use GamePass because you can download the games to your console, but if/when they go fully cloud-only, I’m out. That will be the death knell for mainstream consoles for me. I’ll stick to my Steam Deck and modded classic consoles.
If cloud gaming is all that’s available, read books, go for walks, hang out with friends instead. Do what we did before the internet. Do not let them win, stop using it.
I said the same for Amazon (personally ordered 1 item from Amazon, received maybe 5 items from Amazon as gifts, I otherwise do not use them but I am 1 insignificant point well outside the graph) and expect the same results
Certain hobbies just aren’t supported locally anymore. And if they are they’re at ridiculously inflated prices. I always check nearby first but 90% of the time I end up ordering online. Half the time when I do, the place I order from charges 10-15 dollars for shipping, or redirects to Amazon to complete the order anyway.
I put a lot of work in to not using Amazon, and frequently find myself with little else in the way of choice. I fucking hate it.
I feel you there. I have said this from the beginning but everyone said I was overreacting and here we are, and they are in it up to their eyeballs. Even my gf orders a ton from there, thankfully I have few needs and am a bad capitalist
read books, go for walks, hang out with friends instead
Still time to learn.
You of today can’t help being illiterate today, but you can make it so you don’t stay illiterate. Unless you’re like blind or something, in which case get rekt by us deaf folks
But how will they ready this uplifting message?
Dunno, how they on a text based site?
You wouldn’t be suggesting they’re a damn dirty no good liar, would you? :P
I just have questions…
They can’t understand what you’re saying
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 don’t think it’s just the ignorance of consumers. Big tech knows a lot about how to activate our endorphine centers. Things seem to be great and then gradually enshittify. It’s a bit like the metaphor of the frog in hot water.
Oh, most definitely. They have teams of people with degrees in psychology for this exact purpose.
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.
Exactly this
It’s not the informed customer that is in control.
The sheeple that will shill out money endlessly are the ones in control. The ones buying lootboxes instead of paying their mortgage are the ones in control. The idiots are in control.
Cynic opinion: Once it becomes bad enough the sheeple get punished by the market until they eventually run out of money… the rest of us has most probably a mountain of already bought yet unplayed games at their hard drive.
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.
Steam is cool and all but I think I’m going to go with GOG a lot more going forward.
And I’ll never stop buying discs for consoles
I wonder what percentage of disc-based games for this console generation are unplayable without at least a one-time Internet-connected update.
This is a fair point.
A lot of console games won’t let you play, even offline unless you sign in to Activision/Epic/whatever.
And then yeah, a lot of them are broken on day 0.
So yeah, so much for the joys of physical media.
Not to mention how careful you have to be when actually buying the games…if you aren’t paying attention, it’s easy to buy a case with boxart and a voucher inside.
Gamepass was a good value for me, because I rarely replay games and usually only am playing one game at a time. But since they jacked up the price a couple months ago, it’s no longer worth it.
Much better just to watch dekudeals for sales and get games cheap when I feel like playing.
Many of them are just a key to download the game.
11%-49% depending on platform and qualifiers https://www.doesitplay.org/
Don’t forget a good chunk of them are borderline unplayable without an internet update.
If I cant own it, then I cant steal it.
Yar har.
I’m never using a cloud to play games, that’s just stupid.
Something to be said about ttrpgs and board games with friends and family. Corpos can’t sequester that into a rental only model.
Despite Hasbro’s best efforts with its pet lifestyle brand lol.
cough Dnd Beyond coughcough*
Fortunately they still sell the books and fortunately if you wanted to sail the 7 seas…
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.
I also regret going with 64GB 3200 instead of 128GB 3600, which I thought I would just save up for.
GPUs were already hardly available.
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.
There’s a couple of nice safeguards you can buy for your 12VHPWR connection now. There’s even load balancers. I just wouldn’t leave my PC on and unattended with one of the new cards.
I can’t lie, I saw some eBay listing for 4090s when the 5090 came out for like 1300 and was tempted.
The only reason you should ever cloud gaming is building your own cloud, e.g., with Moonlight, Steam Link.
Im a late 80s early 90s gamer so I don’t know what any of that means
Imagine accessing your own PC remotely from a different machine like tech support does occasionally but instead of fixing stuff you do it to play games. That way you can use your gaming rig in another room or on the go without physically moving it as long as you have fast internet on both ends.
Think: X-Server forwarding over LAN
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.
