reddit: nico_is_not_a_god pokemon romhacks: Dio Vento
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Physical games aren’t the whole game anymore and haven’t been for over a decade, is the main thesis. A DRM-locked (encryption and copy protection on the cart/disc are also DRM) physical copy that needs DRM-locked downloads to be complete is equal in preservation weight to a DRM-locked fully digital game. Once both releases are DRM-locked and download-reliant, I do consider the DRM-locked download that’s still acquirable 10 years later to be better than the one that isn’t. Both are shit, but like you said - spectrum. Disregarding piracy, The Old Hunters is better preserved than Champion’s Ballad (Wii U).
Meanwhile outside of console land, DRM-free digital exists. That’s the holy grail gold standard, not 60% of pokemon sword on a flash drive. DRM-free digital survives the CDN end-of-lifing. It survives my PC exploding, because unlike even complete physical games like a SNES cart, I can copy my DRM-free digital installer to as many devices as I want. DRM-free digital installs the version of the game I downloaded, without any connection to the internet. DRM-free digital survives the music license for a David Bowie track expiring. Even if every physical console release eventually got the “final cut GOTY” disc with everything on it, it’s worse than DRM-free digital by virtue of being a physically destructible copy (though I do consider physical a relevant form of preservation for all the patchless console gens). Everything less than DRM-free (or DRM-stripped) digital is ephemeral. PC is the only platform that’s DRM-free by default, and fully abandoning physical copies a decade ago didn’t change a thing for preservation.
Consoles will never give us DRM-free digital, because the only reason consoles exist now is to be DRM. So the only relevant preservation of console games is dumping and cracking and emulating, because that makes them DRM-free digital, even though they’re not legally such.
What I’m antagonistic towards is console manufacturers selling incomplete games on their DRM boxes.
Nintendo’s the good side of the curve? Nintendo shut down the 3ds and wii u eshops when the console was half a generation out of date. If we lived in a world with no piracy and no emulation (and no buying secondhand consoles with paid DLC installed, because that’s against TOS), and I threw my PS4 and Wii U into a wood chipper, I’d be one used PS4 away from playing my digital or disc copy of Bloodborne complete with the Old Hunters DLC. I don’t even have to buy it again because Sony is sane and ties purchases to an account instead of a console. Meanwhile on the Nintendo side, I’m never gonna play as Cloud in Smash 4 again, with or without my disc.
How about the situation where Nintendo and Sony both stop operating CDNs for old consoles? In that case, they’re equal at worst - I can play stuff I have installed until the console breaks, same with discs/carts. If the console breaks post-CDN apocalypse, and I buy a new one that can’t access game updates, I’m stuck with infinite loading screens in Bloodborne and whatever the heck v1.0 of Mario Kart 8 was. Rhythm Heaven Megamix was never released physically in the US, and the 3DS is region locked, so if you want to get your hands on that, up yours I guess. Wanna experience the weirdest port of The Binding of Isaac to ever exist? Nope.
Nintendo released a limited run digital purchase (Mario 3D All-Stars), for Christ’s sake! What’s MS or Sony done that’s even close to that? Pulled a free trailer for a canceled horror game? I can still buy PS3 games on Sony’s store if I want to. On the PlayStation 3! From 2006!
Nintendo, MS, and Sony do not deserve any grace when it comes to this topic. They’re all bad. It’s just easier to overlook how bad Nintendo’s preservation of digital content (including significant portions of games that also got carts) is when it takes half an hour to hack a 3DS, Wii U, or launch model Switch.
Preserving the shit very few people care about is absolutely a more important thing than preserving the popular thing. BOTW’s latest version will never disappear, neither will Mario 64, but the most ephemeral media in the modern landscape is always interstitial versions. You might be able to find the first cut of Star Wars before it was “A New Hope”, but what about all those recuts and edits that happened between the original release and whatever the latest CGI-filled release is? you might not care about watching the “worst” version of Star Wars, but the definition of “niche” is “most people don’t care”. A speedrun glitch that existed for a week (without being pressed to the cartridge, even!) before being patched is absolutely something worth preserving, because unlike Ocarina of Time it’s actually in danger of being lost (and would be lost almost certainly if the Switch wasn’t hacked. You had to have the game for that week and then permanently leave an entire console offline to keep it)
I’m not “mad” about anything new to the Switch 2. I’m pointing out that anything “new” that indicates physical copies aren’t complete games anymore or that physical copies will not outlive server end of life in a meaningful way Isn’t new. Cartridges and discs have been glorified DRM keys ever since the first patch-enabled consoles came out - “the game” is always delivered in some part via patching, so “the game” is never preserved in any meaningful way by someone having a cart/disc. The only meaningful game preservation is DRM cracking and loadable backups of “all-digital” content.
The latest version of the game is not guaranteed to remain the latest version when it’s getting rereleased on a new console. “No mandatory downloads besides DLC and patches” means yes mandatory downloads. They’re free (or you-already-paid) mandatory downloads, but them being mandatory downloads at all are a bullet in the head of preservation - a banned console or end of service or a whole lot of things can lock someone out of the eShop.
Updates are never downloadable to cartridges on the Switch, and won’t be on the Switch 2. Nintendo can rewrite a cartridge, the user cannot.
As for what happens if you try to load a save from a patched/DLC-installed version of the game on an unpatched/no-DLC version, the game tells you that the save is incompatible and won’t let you load it. This is verifiable on the Switch 1 and Wii U versions of the game. I don’t think we have concrete information on if Switch 2 will cross-save to Switch 1 via a Nintendo Account, so it’s safe to assume it won’t and Nintendo will do the same one-way System Transfer song and dance they’ve been doing since the Wii.
Here’s a fun wrinkle to what Nintendo thinks about physical cartridges preserving downpatched game editions: the console firmware of the Switch 1 has a version whitelist. If you have the latest firmware on your Switch 1 and insert a 1.0.0 BOTW cart without being online to install the game updates, the system will not allow you to boot the game until you update it. This is because Nintendo fears exploits like Smash Stack on the Wii or OOTHax on the 3DS.
There’s a new “DLC” that gives the game Switch 2 specific upgrades. Buying the fancy $80 cartridge includes this “DLC” on the cart, but not the existing DLCs. If you already have the Switch 1 game (as an install or a glorified access key cartridge) and its DLC, you’ll be able to play that on Switch 2 and also able to buy the $20 “generation upgrade” as DLC for it.
The physical copies “have the game on them” but not the software updates and DLC, and once you’ve played on the updated version once, your save file is no longer compatible with downpatched versions. You’re loading part of the game from system memory with or without a cart, so there’s not really a functional difference between a physical and digital copy unless you plan to resell.
Hollow Knight also felt like it was in dialogue with the Souls series, because the Souls series iterated on a ton of Metroid’s mechanics in a new space. So it took Souls’ “what if Metroid mapping, lonely mysterious vibes, backtracking and key/locks, but slower paced 3d combat and the keys aren’t weapons” and went “Ok but what if we used the lessons we learned from you to improve the Super Metroid formula that inspired you?”
Symphony of the Night is, in fact, the origin of the term Metroidvania but not in the way you might think. Castlevania pre SotN was a very different series with none of the elements associated with “metroidvania”, so people started calling SOTN a “metroid-vania” derogatorily, as a Castlevania that was trying to ape Metroid. The term had staying power for the genre because what the fuck else are you gonna call them, it was before slapping -like on everything was popular but after calling stuff “clones” had fallen out of favor. No, “search action” will never be a thing. And you’re not just gonna call them Metroids because that’s one specific series. So after future Castlevanias had Metroidy stuff in them, it became a genre name.
I do 100% see where you’re coming from too. I just think that people shouldn’t include Elden Ring when listing trend-chasing games that lazily slap “it’s a big open wooooorld!” onto an existing linear franchise. Elden Ring’s systems were designed really well around the bigness and openness of its world, unlike something like Sonic Frontiers or any of the MMO-single-player UE5 stuff coming out of AAA studios. And they even had the decency to build a whole IP around this new, distinct gameplay formula instead of making it Dark Souls 4: This Is What Dark Souls Is Now.
Like, maybe you don’t like red wine, fair enough, but at least Elden Ring is serving the red wine alongside a steak instead of alongside a bowl of Lucky Charms or fettuccine Alfredo.
But you could always run past enemies in Dark Souls, and it was a much more relevant gameplay pattern in those games that didn’t put a Stake of Marika right in front of the boss door. I think the open world adding nonlinearity to the Souls system was really elegant, since getting stuck on a boss meant you usually had something else interesting to do while improving your skills and/or grinding for stats. You still can bash your head into the boss over and over until you finally solve the skill issue, of course, and Stakes of Marika make that a lot less frustrating. But if you were in the situation in DS1-3 and decided “no, I want better numbers before I try again” you just had to go grind trash to level up and that’s it. At least the “go fuck off and farm souls” option in Elden Ring is fun when doing so is clearing minidungeons and evergaols and maybe seeing new loot.
Problem with that is, if the xbox is a PC with sideloading capabilities (instead of being a much harder thing to engineer: a true “console experience” that just adds Steam), then all Sony’s current games can be pirated on the thing. Future titles would have whatever lock and also probably Denuvo, for sure, or Sony could just stop putting their games on PC. Sony probably wasn’t seeing a future where anyone but “sweaty PC nerds” would be playing Steam games in their living room with controllers, and Microsoft has the perfect opportunity to say “alright, whatever. We lost the exclusives arms race to Nintendo and Sony so let’s just do what we do best and maintain the biggest gaming platform in the history of the medium but make it as easy for Joe Rando to use as an Xbox 360 was”.
Microsoft has such an opportunity to learn the right lessons from the Steam Deck - make good convenient hardware with a lot of compatibility, slap a user-friendly interface on it, and do nothing to stop tinkering and customizing other than making it easy to restore back to stock.
The comparison to GeForce Now is wild, because that’s a service running “your” games on someone else’s hardware. Of course Sony can walk up to NVIDIA and say “fuck off, we don’t authorize you to run God of War for your users” and NVIDIA will say ok we won’t run God of War anymore.
Steam distributes game installers. Sony can’t make Valve produce a special version of Steam for the Xbox that tells its store that it’s on an Xbox, especially if the Xbox in question is literally a windows PC with a UI skin and a lock on administrator access. I can run Steam right now on my android phone via winlator and download+install a Steam game.
What Sony could do is patch restrictive DRM software into all their games that checks the hardware info and fails to boot if you’re on “an xbox”.
It’s FOSS at least, but when a Discord replacement kinda needs all the users on the same server (one of the subtler evils of discord is using “server” to mean “chatroom”), you’re still in the hands of the master company’s decisions regarding their instance. The only theoretical protection from corporatization on Revolt is that when they do start shilling Revolt Ultra (and locking features behind it), someone else can fork their codebase but must still convince “the community” to migrate - including new accounts, reconnecting to all friends, communities moving to the new fork (likely without their history coming along for the ride)…
Matrix is feature-bare at the moment, but as a federated platform it is more tolerant of Matrix Dot Org going corpo. It’s the same situation as what’d happen if Lemmy.world or Mastodon.social started piping in ads and subscriptions - bad, but not platform-killing. Revolt is basically analogous to Bluesky, with Matrix as Mastodon. Bluesky obviously won the fight over Twitter refugees. I think Mastodon would have had a chance if they had polished up onboarding and focused on ease-of-transition a couple years before Twitter imploded. Hopefully Matrix devs do that push before Discord finally gets to the tipping point where people are willing to actually go somewhere else. It needs to have Discord-level convenience and quality on screenshare and group audio/video rooms on day one of Discord imploding to have any chance. To have a good chance, it needs to be as good as or better than Discord Nitro, for free, on that day.
I think one thing Matrix does better than Discord and Revolt is allowing p2p file sharing as an option, in addition to serverside hosting. File size limits in a chat client are a lot more tolerable when it’s “whoops, we don’t want you uploading a 2gb video file to our servers… But would you like to send it directly? Your contact will need to accept the download.” As a general rule, chat apps being more p2p means they’re more sustainable (because the servers don’t have ballooning storage requirements) and more private (because with p2p e2ee communications, nobody but one of the peers can share your data with anyone). P2P is notoriously hard to wrangle for group chat situations though, or validating 5 clients per user like how people use Discord. Also, resilient data is often considered a downside in social situations- people like being able to delete and edit their messages. Yes, someone could already be screenshotting/archiving their Discord chats but a p2p system would have everyone automatically doing it.
And the thing is… Because Steam is better for the user, it becomes better from the developer. 70% of your game’s Steam revenue will always be bigger than 100% of your Epic revenue. It’s probably bigger than 300% of your Epic revenue. That’s why Steam doesn’t need to buy exclusives or run loss leaders or try to lock you in with “free!” promos. Epic needs to pay developers up front to get them to not go to Steam, because in every case a dual Steam/whatever-else release is better than a whatever-else release. So Epic needs to pay the indie game studio that made a $10 game a million dollars for timed exclusivity, which allows the studio to not worry about losing their Steam revenue from selling 130,000 copies. Then they release it on Steam later anyway.
If it was as simple as “cutting out middlemen” or using cheaper middlemen, devs would just be selling you exe files. CDN costs wouldn’t come close to 30% of revenue, after all. People like buying games on Steam. People buy games on Steam that are cheaper and DRM-free on GOG or Itch. People buy games on Steam that are free downloads like Dwarf Fortress. People buy games on Steam that are free browser pages like Cookie Clicker. Epic wants people to be invested in their “free!” libraries enough to actually be like “oh I mean I’ve got the Epic account, may as well buy this game here because it’s cheaper or more of my money goes to the devs or because it’s a timed exclusive…” And people simply aren’t doing it.