Something like legally required to offer a no-DRM version on all storefronts would be interesting. I don’t care about physical media much anymore but I do want to own what I buy.

Physical copies are kinda besides the point in terms of ownership and preservation. Just because you own the disk, doesn’t mean you have access to the software on it. DRM, as well as the laws that make it viable, have been around since well before media was sold digitally. Physical copies of the Crew are no more playable now than digital. If you want to be able to keep your games, you need to buy DRM-free, whether that limits you to digital-only or not.

On the other hand, if you want to actually own your games, we need to massively rework copyright law. The fact that a company can sell you a software licence, but add dozens of arbitrary restrictions on when, how and why you can use it is absurd, nonetheless the fact that its always non-transferable and revokable by the company for any reason. None of that should be legal.

I think “mandatory physical versions” kinda misses the point of the issue, tbh. It’s bad digital rights laws that are the cause of the problems that you’ve mentioned, not a lack of physical media. DRM has been around a lot longer than digital downloads of games, and shutting down a game’s online services affects purchasers of physical disks just as much as digital downloaders.

Besides, mass-producing physical media is expensive, and I’d rather not give publishers another excuse to make games even more expensive than they already are.

If we’re wishing for things that probably won’t happen, how about a government agency for game preservation? Source code gets submitted before release, approval for sale is conditional on them being able to successfully build and deploy it. Then 20 years later it gets automatically published to the public domain. That way even online only games will end up being preserved.

I would rather a law that extends many of the properties of physical ownership to digital sales.

Is this a law that specifically only applies to AAAs, or are we just shutting down literally all of indie gaming? If the former, how do you legally draw the line between who is and isn’t allowed to release digital-only titles? Even just basing it on the size of the company would effectively mean that large publishers may only release large projects and never smaller budget titles.

The Crew had physical copies.

Plastic cases, discs, etc are expensive and degrade over time. Consoles will break down. 50 years from now there’ll be too much history to keep making copies of everything worth saving. If we do want a video game preservation law, make it digital.

Emulation and piracy should be legal for games older than ~20 years, or if the parent company goes under. Online games should be required to make an offline mode patch before shutting down.

As a related example, my parents have a bunch of bookshelves packed with everything they bought over the years. And as a kid I never touched any of it because the books had become all gross and yellowed. Physical game archives will last a couple decades longer but in the end it’ll be the same result.

Is there another meaning to “PSA” that isn’t “public service announcement”? It confuses me being in the title as this entire post is written as a suggestion / CTA, not a PSA.

It’d be nice but would hurt indies because indies thrive due to not needing a physical port, and only releasing one once they are popular and successful enough to afford it.

I guess you could include some verbiage that would target AAA studios, but they’ll find a way around it like they do everything else.

And at this point, I’m not really fond of most AAA titles anyway so this won’t do much for people like myself to care anymore. Physical releases are something I care about less since other issues have arisen over the years, specifically in the quality of the game, itself.

I’m always pro to retail in arts, people should care more about digitalization into other fields. As a PC gamer I’m starting to collect some used console and blurays, they costs mostly the same as digital but you own something. Also don’t forget the preservation issue.

DRM-free is one thing, and it’s something that GOG offers universally, with an asterisk for some multiplayer games, and I wish that asterisk was handled better. You want DRM-free. Your physical copy quickly becomes out of date when new patches come out, and patch cycles are frequent for modern games, even when they ship relatively bug-free out of the gate. Speaking for myself, I have no desire to have physical games anymore. I have a bunch of old PC game boxes that I just put up on my shelves yet again after moving for the fifth time in 14 years. Many of them have GOG versions, and I’m looking to replace those games with the GOG equivalent during the summer sale so I can finally eBay my physical versions away and be done with them.

A mandatory physical version is a cost for a market that hardly exists anymore, but we could all benefit from DRM-free games.

I want the law to allow resales of digital game licenses, and the storage medium shouldn’t matter.

🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

I’d love to have and collect DRM free titles that last even after a platform is gone,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

M-DISC (Millennial Disc) is a write-once optical disc technology introduced in 2009 by Millenniata, Inc.[1] and available as DVD and Blu-ray discs.[2]

M-DISC’s design is intended to provide archival media longevity.[3][4] M-Disc claims that properly stored M-DISC DVD recordings will last up to 1000 years.[5] The M-DISC DVD looks like a standard disc, except it is almost transparent with later DVD and BD-R M-Disks having standard and inkjet printable labels.

Those will outlive you.

You can get an M-DISC-capable burner on Amazon for $35, and M-DISC media for about $3/pop, each of which will store 100GB.

GOG is probably more-suited than Steam for this, since it’s aimed around letting you download the installers, and they make a game being DRM-free a selling point and clearly indicate it in their store.

But you can just install a DRM-free Steam game — there are some games that don’t have any form of DRM on Steam, and don’t tie themselves to Steam running or anything, if you’re worried about Steam dying — and then archive and save the directory off somewhere. Might need a bit more effort if you’re on Linux and trying to save copies of Proton-using games, since there’s also a WINEPREFIX directory that needs to be saved. And then you can stuff that on whatever archival media you want.

I’ve copied Caves of Qud to my laptop, which doesn’t have Steam installed, for example. Just requires copying the directory.

Now, that’s not going to work if a game makes use of some kind of DRM, but you specified that you were looking for DRM-free titles, so should be okay on that front.