Comments 14

Re: This Dying Street Fighter II Cart Is A Sobering Reminder That Physical Doesn't Mean Forever

buzzdennis

A good reminder that nothing is forever. This, however, serves as a good opportunity to distinguish between ownership and preservation. Those are two different things here. The two often overlap but they each have different outcomes for gamers. Preservationists, like Frank Cifaldi at the Video Game History Foundation, do not really care about who ultimately owns or has ungated access to games, so long as the games are preserved in a way for study and analysis. Ownership is about what we as consumers have the right to do with the games we spend money on. The games we believe we own on physical media will someday wither away. But ownership is about what rights we have in doing something about that. In a digital leasing model, we have no say and no rights in what happens to the game. In a physical model, we at least have a chance to try and fix the issue or back up copies of the game to mitigate when things inevitably fail. I’d much rather be in control of what happens than allowing a company to make the decision for me.

Re: "You Might As Well Play On A Raspberry Pi" - The World Of MiSTer FPGA Remains Divided Over "AI Slop" Cores

buzzdennis

@RupeeClock yeah that person has a fundamental misunderstanding of open source. People are certainly free to take the source and do with it they want. But if someone is trying to share back changes to that code, the project manager is not required to accept them. “Hey I took your code and made it 0 bytes long by deleting everything. Accept my changes or else this isn’t really open source.”

Re: I'm Really Not Sure How I Feel About Sony Killing Physical Media

buzzdennis

The fundamental flaw in your “which side” debate is that physical media enthusiasts are not asking for a physical-only future. None of us are saying “you can’t have the conveniences you’ve grown accustomed to.” As someone who is devastated by this news, I’m fine with anyone who decides that a digital only future is their preferred way of consuming this medium. But I’m not ok with the option of physical being taken away. It’s not a physical vs digital debate. It’s a both vs digital only debate. And framing it as a physical vs digital debate does a rather large disservice to the outcome most of us want, which is to have options in how we play our games. We want the option to keep playing the games as long as we desire, not on the terms of some legal agreement. We want the option to trade our games. We want the option to lend our games to a friend. We want the option of going to what we individually consider is the most convenient place to buy a game. All of those options get taken away in a digital only model.