Movies: I like to playback raw video files with a desktop video player. I settle for nothing less. I would gladly pay a few doubloons in exchange for a movie video file download but nobody offers this, (except for GOG that one time with a paltry selection of films).
Games: “Hey we released this new game buuuuut you’re going to need to purchase an entire separate computer system we call a ‘console’ because we refuse to compile the game binary for PC OSes, nor provide the source for you to do so yourself”
I interpret distributors and publishers treating me as a second (or third) class citizen as carte blanche to acquire your content and make the necessary changes to make it work on my environment of choice.
You can get the files if you want, they’re just very expensive and to the tune of hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars. Also they’re typically encrypted and can only be played back on an approved projection system and you have to buy decryption keys every time you want to watch the movie. This is why theaters suck by the way, they have to pay for the movie, the ability to play the movie, the ability to take money in exchange for people seeing the movie, etc.
I don’t think OP is asking for DCPs, they just wish that you could purchase an mp4 file of a movie
I know, I’m kinda complaining by illustrating how difficult it is to get official movie files nowadays; especially if you want lossless, master-quality files.
Why would they give you lossless files? There is almost no market for that. Those files would be at least hundreds of gigabytes in size
Mhm, as a former projectionist I can confirm that those files average 200~300gb.
Why would they sell them? Cinemaphiles. Your average person won’t spend $200 on a 500gb drive containing The Room, but a hardcore cinemaphile might. My boss at the theater I was working at was the kinda person who would have bought that. Well, maybe not The Room, but he probably would have spent the money for something like The Godfather trilogy.