I was surprised to come back to my XBOX account after 10 years in the US and see that very old digital purchases from previous console generations were not only still available, but actually playable on the latest console through transparent emulation! They did a pretty good job with that.
Whatever you think about Microsoft, they are a good steward of their platforms and go to extremes to maintain backwards compatibility -- even if they are always moving your cheese in the UI.
Except for the hundred thousands if not millions of people who lost their Minecraft account due to the way Microsoft handled multiple successive account migrations, also including the many accounts that were stolen due to lax security.
And since digital ownership legislation is a joke consumers have pretty much no recourse.
Beat me to it. I am still incredibly salty about losing my “lifetime” license to Minecraft. I really am curious to see some of the changes that have happened since I last played (when still owned by Notch), but I refuse to repurchase it.
I don’t know what to say. I went to the migration site, entered my information-no dice. Contacted support and got no assistance. There are others with a similar experience.
Microsoft could have gone above and beyond to manage the forced migration. Instead there was a convoluted process which left many cheated. They could have just punted and automatically emailed brand new entitlement codes to all of the original purchase emails. Yes, people who switched emails would have been missed, but that would have covered 95%+ of customers in a single action.
If you didn't transfer it from your Mojang account to your Microsoft account in time (before the account was shut down) you just straight up lost access to it.
Microsoft accounts being an absolute pain in the ass to set up and manage, and the new launcher being aggressively terrible, are salt in the wound even if you finally gave in and migrated your account.
Also, good luck running Microsoft’s Minecraft launcher on a kid’s computer with allowlist-only internet access. It connects to like 20 apparently-random IP addresses every time it launches, will not work if any of them fails, and the pool of addresses is evidently huge. I never did find anything like a list of IP blocks to allow. Maybe they keep a file with them all in it somewhere, never looked, but I have a feeling they hit one address that gives them their list of the others for each session, and only that list, like if I had to bet on it I’d go with that (if they had a larger list, why aren’t they re-trying with different addresses when one fails?). I guess they just don’t care about that use case. (“Why don’t parents just police their kids’ internet access?” yeah look some of us really try but shit like this is everywhere and makes it stupidly difficult)
Or when they decided to wipe people's Hotmail accounts. Now some random person has my original hotmail that I had since the 90s through to the 2010s... Presumably, this person now indirectly has a ton of my original accounts for different services I can no longer access... thanks Microsoft.
I'm so happy I managed to transfer everything important over to my own domain before anything like that happened. I still have my old Hotmail and Gmail, and while nothing important shows up there, there's still a trickle of non-spam email coming in there, even after 5 and 10 years since I transferred everything I could remember at the time.
Haha, I was one of these people. I'm unreasonably salty about this (given the monetary loss is not high and I got a lot of playtime out of the game back then), especially because I also had one of those Alpha keys unused as well!
While Microsoft may not be as bad on this as Sony so far, they have certainly shown a willingness to revoke access to digital games. For example- in an effort to push users to the newer fifa titles with microtransactions, they quietly removed the ability to redownload purchased digital copies of older fifa games. For anyone who might've temporarily uninstalled the game to free up space, there was suddenly no way to get the game on your machine again.
That's almost certainly due to EA's licensing agreement with FIFA rather than Microsoft's decision. Similar to how you can no longer purchase older Forza games due to the licensing for use of the cars expiring.
But it was bought on Microsoft's Store (a walled garden) on a Microsoft platform, so the ultimate responsibility towards the customer lays on Microsoft.
Also as a part of forcing Minecraft users onto Microsoft accounts they threatened, and carried out deleting everyone's Minecraft and Mojang accounts.
If you refused to comply or happened to take a break from the game during that time, now you have to buy the game again and you lost anything on any multiplayer tied to your old account.
You know, all those people making new n64, playstation, and gameboy titles might be onto something. Apart from steam, I don't think I've heard anything but bad news from modern consoles.
> Apart from steam, I don't think I've heard anything but bad news from modern consoles.
Gabe is in his mid 60s, I'm prepared that in the next decade or so there will be a change of guard at Valve and the slow train of enshittification will get moving.
P.S. There's been a lot of groupthink and bandwagoning for Valve, ignoring all the dirt under the rug. But at the end of the day, by comparison, they are the best behaving in the field.
The company that gave up making games because there was more money to be had from inserting itself as a middleman into a previously open platform does not deserve any adoration.
Talk to console gamers and they still think the PC is sweaty and playing on the PC is like putting your hands in the toilet. I mean, I remember the 1990s when kids were playing flight simulators with this huge plastic joysticks that were always falling apart and needed to be calibrated every five minutes. It's not like that anymore, with Steam Big Picture and either an XBOX ONE or PS4/5 controller your PC is a better console.
The main problem is that, ex. the Steam Controller, nobody can make a decent game controller except for console vendors and when the console vendors go down somebody will have to step up.
I just can't believe the PS5 has sold as many units as it has with just 15 exclusive games, many of which are remakes, even remakes of remakes. That reputation that the PC platform is too sweaty has taken a long long time to die and it doesn't help that ACER and such are coming out with handhelds that are maximum sweat (boot into a Windows Desktop with 10x too small fonts) compared to the consumer electronics experience of the Steam Deck.
> The main problem is that, ex. the Steam Controller, nobody can make a decent game controller except for console vendors and when the console vendors go down somebody will have to step up.
I used to only play on DualShock 4s and even skipped the DualSense because I just loved my DualShock that much.
I use an 8bitDo now and it is better in every way I care about. 8bitDo does not make consoles.
> ex. the Steam Controller, nobody can make a decent game controller except for console vendors
Reading this feels feels like you are the one that is still in 1990s.
Third party controllers have long surpassed the ones from console vendors. Standard console controllers still continue to use potentiometers for sticks. Even pro versions that cost over a hundred euro still use them.
>Talk to console gamers and they still think the PC is sweaty and playing on the PC is like putting your hands in the toilet.
Eh, as someone who owns and plays on both pc and console, the simple truth of the matter is that playing on console is, for the most part, better 'bang for the buck'. You can reliably purchase a console and a budget linux laptop and both will reliably fill their respective niches for the next decade. PC gaming, in my experience, requires a much higher budget, and this was even before the modern pricing madness.
Consoles also had much wider support for couch coop than PC did, so it was a more social experience, and to be blunt, PC gaming has a pretty bad problem with cheating that I simply never experienced on console.
Like I said, I play and enjoy both. I can afford to do so now, but I do feel bad for teens today because even consoles are getting crazy expensive.
Honestly, there's never been a better time to be writing games for those platforms. The SDK's are much improved from the proprietary stuff available at the time and the hardware is very well understood. People have been pulling off some utter witchcraft on the N64.
The N64 is never going to get any faster, and emulators can run on just about any potato these days. People have realistic expectations of what the platform can do, so there's no need to spend insane effort making the graphics look better. It's always going to look kinda crappy, and that is Just Fine.
This lets game developers focus on the actual gameplay itself. No "Generic Shooter vol. 26 - now with slightly prettier water!", but innovative stuff focusing on the narrative and on novel gameplay elements.
Kaze and James Lambert are amazing. Kaze's new Mario game looks better than a first party Nintendo title, and James's engines pushes the console to its absolute limits.
I've been thinking about giving it a go myself. It's such a fun and nostalgic console, and the limitations are fun constraints.
The code archeology is really cool too. Seeing Rare's Dinosaur Planet boot up and play after being a lost title. Decompiling all the original titles. Building sequels to Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. It's such a fun scene.
Then there's Analogue 3D and ModRetro too, which make it fun to play as physical hardware.
It was last night, after seeing Linux on the Atari Jaguar, I was just pondering over that whole scene.
Then I decided to throw on Metal Slug X, a classic of the Neo Geo. Then it struck me, "Could I attempt porting this to Jaguar?!".
It would be a great start project to familurise myself with this older stuff again. They both have a 12MHz 68k, it is just that the graphics and audio cores are different. Would probably have to base it off the CD version so that the memory addressing is already handled (it loaded all assets into 1MB RAM - twice the jaguars storage).
It doesn't sound impossible. But the Jags RISC chips were notorious for being a little slow due to limited cache space, so it might not be so straight forward.
I'm not in the EU, but had 2 accounts with Sony/Playstation (I'm pretty sure both sat unused for more than 3 years). I tried to delete one and it seemed impossible. The FAQ said to call support. I called, waiting for 45 minutes, and they said they couldn't help me and hung up before I could respond.
While I believe they would delete a user's games, I don't know if they would actually willingly give up holding on to customer data.
My guess is this is more of a CYA incase they want to clean up accounts at some point, rather than something they actively do.
And on top of that, Sony will probably get hacked again, as has already happened a couple times. That was a primary reason why I actually wanted my account gone, not just inactive.
I hope they send warning letters to log in. Mine been idle for over a year and I don't have it right now.. but I paid for those games so it would be scammy to remove without warning.
Does it cost them money to keep my purchases logged? I don't think so.
I am not sure, but I feel that many of these "Sony bad" type of conversations appear close to something unfavorable being discussed about Xbox. Am I imagining it? The Playstation issue discussed here is certainly not new, but the timing is interesting.
Closing inactive accounts in the EU is due to (interpretation of) certain provisions set in the GDPR (e.g. article 5 - https://gdpr-info.eu/art-5-gdpr/) and Sony is not alone, many services in the EU automatically close and delete orphaned accounts after a given amount of time, and if they are international ones even when they don't outside of the EU.
If implemented correctly the affected person is also warned/notified several times by email before this is going to happen, so you have enough time to log in at least once and prevent it (and also extend the time frame again).
Those articles don't require deletion in this case, in my non-lawyer opinion. There is still a purpose to keeping the user's personal information here. Sony needs that information to be able to grant the user access to the content they bought.
There's a difference here between an account that hasn't been used and doesn't hold anything of value and an account like this that holds items that were bought.
Good, customer data should be a liability and they should be incentivized to delete it as early as feasible, or not store it at all when possible. It's your data, not theirs.
The problem with email is that it's an email address from 3+ years ago, which means there's a much higher chance of it being out of date - are you still using XxCoolDude67xX from high school?
Consoles area also marketed heavily towards older teenagers and younger adults, who are exactly the ones unlikely to maintain a consistent email address.
And of course if your email provided decides to cut you off, or goes out of business, or you used a university email...
This isn't surprising given how different businesses may value a payment against an ongoing obligation to customers. @patio11 had a good podcast about this "Cash received is not revenue earned" last April.
What the GoDaddy CEO said in many interviews and investor presentations is:
"Look, since we're not going out of business, and since the cost of serving
domain names is essentially the same whether we're serving a million of them
versus a hundred million of them, you should really treat this as a
cash-and-carry business. So all of the money that comes in this year is our
revenue, regardless of this massive balance sheet item that says deferred
revenue." What sophisticated investors looking at GoDaddy said was, "Well,
no. You do have to still keep running the business. And so from my
perspective, it looks like GoDaddy is incredibly levered. You've got so much
debt on the books. The debt isn't to a bank or to a private credit fund–it's
just to your customers. But oh goodness, is there a lot of debt. And since
that debt must get satisfied before US equity holders get the residual value
of the company, we are not willing to extend equity investment at the
valuation you think you're worth."
And consumers will cry about it for about 5 minutes, then go back to reward the company.
When HP started making printer cartridges that expired even when they were still full, people complained—then bought more.
When Microsoft let the web stagnate with IE6, people complained, then turned around and did the same thing with Chrome.
When Apple deliberately put a bug in the iPhone that caused the Home button to fail, pushing people to buy the next model, people got upset—and then bought the next one anyway. I'm amazed nobody remembers that one; it was such a huge deal at the time. And there is not a single link to articles about it anymore.
When Adobe switched to mandatory Creative Cloud subscriptions, plenty of users protested, but most professionals stayed.
When Amazon remotely deleted books from people's Kindles (including 1984), it was a scandal for a month, and then... nothing.
When we found out PRISM existed, users were worried for a few months, then went right back to filling those platforms with their personal data.
When Google allowed fraudulent DMCA takedowns, shut down accounts with no appeal, and censored its search engine, there was a brief outcry, then it was back to business as usual.
When Sony put a bloody ROOTKIT on its music CDs (!!!!), people grumbled for five minutes and kept giving them money.
These companies have no reason to stop. We never make them regret anything.
I should make a website to save those for posterity, so that at least we have a track record of all the things they get away with because we let them.
I've avoided buying any Lenovo product ever since their SuperFish fiasco.
At the beggining it surprised me that people still seriously recommended Lenovo products (even hackers). Now, my brain automatically "adblocks" the entire brand out when I'm looking to buy a new laptop or monitor, as it knows I can't buy it.
Here here. 100% in agreement, people seem to have forgotten that the majority hold the bargaining power. You'll always have people who cross "strike lines", but by and large if the entire user base simply said; no, and walked; the world would definitely be a better place, in so many ways.
I don't hold France as a shining example of humanity; but by-christ if they get upset they actually take those feet, one in front of the other and fight tooth and nail against `$thing`. Even if they don't "win", they /don't go quietly/.
The sad thing is that for many of these examples, people got a better deal out of it.
The HP printer ink subscription makes a lot of sense if you print a certain number of pages each year. Many consumers who only print occasionally are better off with cheap subscriptions for getting their money's worth, even if from an environmental point of view the cartridge DRM is absolute bullcrap.
Adobe switching from making people pay thousands and charging them again for updates was a lot more expensive than the ridiculous yearly subscription they charge (per month, to keep the advertised price down, surprising people who thought they could cancel after a few months).
IE6 was awful at replicating what other browsers did, but it introduced a lot of features that reshaped the web. The XmlHttpRequest that moved the web from static pages to basic interactivity was a Microsoft invention.
Many if these cases didn't work out of course, but for many business decisions that cause outrage on the internet, it's worth reconsidering the options on offer after the outrage has died down. Unpopular decisions aren't often the unbridled conspiratory evil that the internet would like you to believe.
Switch to Brother laser jet printers - I hear about them every time HP comes up, I've had mine for years, it is a lovely solution
Tons of people switched from IE6 to Chrome; IE is a dead browser. These days I'd recommend Firefox.
Is there something wrong with the iPhone as of today? It sounds like the bug got fixed in response to outcry, especially if they went and scrubbed all traces of the event - that seems like a good outcome?
Adobe stock is down almost 50% (42.24%) in the past year - I dare say a lot of people got sick of their shit. I have no clue what professionals use, but GIMP works fine for my amateur edits.
Like, c'mon, change very clearly does happen. It's just slow and uneven.
If you actually cared about change, I feel like you'd maybe list a few of the cool alternatives out there and actually help people make that transition. https://xkcd.com/1053/ - people do actually have to be taught about these things, not everyone knows what the alternatives are!
When Apple deliberately put a bug in the iPhone that caused the Home button to fail, pushing people to buy the next model, people got upset—and then bought the next one anyway. I'm amazed nobody remembers that one; it was such a huge deal at the time. And there is not a single link to articles about it anymore.
That one, I don't remember either. Are you sure you aren't confusing it with Batterygate?
But yes: point taken, these companies have absolutely no incentive to behave any better than they have in the past.
Oh no, I remember well. At some point, everyone at the software home button on their phone setup, because the physical button was sometimes working and sometimes not.
Apple issued a statement saying it was a hardware failure and there was nothing they could do.
A hacker later on proved they were lying by patching the software and showing the problem went away.
That's why I'm scrapbooking every article about the trump administration right now. This time period is so wild people will doubt it really existed.
I will not be gaslighted again. This world is crazy, and people have a terrible memory.
That is not how gdpr works. If you have a legitimate reason to hold the data. You can. Ensuring people have access to purchases is a very legitimate reason.
Is there evidence that European courts have sided with that? “We’re holding onto all your data indefinitely just in case you log in again several years from now” seems to be the antithesis of GDPR and I can’t discern the difference between that and what you’re suggesting.
I believe EU has dug their own hole here. And the best move would be to pass more legislation to explicitly require the retention (and transfer, ideally) of purchased digital goods.
> Is there evidence that European courts have sided with that?
Is there evidence of the contrary? Maybe any store can just delete your personal data right after charging your card and claim GDPR prevents them from shipping your product.
Silly arguments work both ways. You just picked the one that confirms your bias.
GDPR under no circumstances forces processors to delete everything, it defines legitimate interest. Retaining a person's purchases is as legitimate as it gets so the data can be retained for as long as the purchase is valid. And the license itself isn't even the user's personal data, it's just a license, so Sony could give the option to export that license to be used later - even in a cryptographically secure format that can only work if e.g. the account is created with the same email address. If they delete the personal data and throw out the baby with the water, it's not GDPR forcing them to do it.
No need to wait for the courts’ opinions: controllers must keep the data for a limited amount of time (which can be something like “3 years after the last connection”) under GDPR article 5(1)e.
> Personal data shall be: kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed. (..)
Note that this does not say "it must be stored for a limited amount of time" - it says "no longer than necessary".
Your basic account data (such as username and password, or an email for password recovery) is still necessary to log in to the platform and make use of your purchases. As long as there is no clear indication that the user will never log in again (such as due to death, or because they explicitly deleted their account), it would be reasonable to keep it around.
On the other hand, it may make sense to delete some data. For example, it may make sense to store your full name and address info to make checkout more convenient. If a user hasn't bought stuff in a while, it makes sense to delete it and have them re-enter it in the future.
There might be a bit of a gray space for things like game achievements (especially when there's a public profile) or savefile backups, but reading it as "you MUST delete all digital purchases because GDPR" is just not true.
I'd consider keeping the other personal data to be still easily justifiable, as you might want to support various account recovery options. And the odds that a user forgot their password only increases for old accounts.
5(1)c seems far more relevant than e. “Data minimization” is what’s relevant here. And the article is sufficiently vague that the onus is on companies to decide what is absolutely minimal - that includes, implicitly, removing inactive accounts. Unless the courts have made a judgement to the contrary.
"kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed"
Keeping "account X purchased game Y" forever is necessary for the purpose of tracking ownership.
Based on how big companies typically behave, I assume that they are storing a metric buttload of other data on their users, which is not necessary for that purpose, and which they aren't inclined to separate out.
This is just like the cookie popup nonsense. You don't have to ask for permission to store necessary cookies. Cookie popups are ubiquitous because sites would rather bother every single visitor so that they can store unnecessary cookies.
It's like the cookie banner all over again. This law never, ever required a cookie banner.
The big companies are master in malicious compliance that benefit them, and let them blame the EU for it.
Rules of thumbs, international billion dollars company should be assumed to be the ones being the bad guys until proven otherwise. They have lost the benefit of the doubt decades ago.
In practice most of the purposes you'd encounter in the wild are directly linked to user activity, so account deletion means most of the reasons to keep it disappear.
You still need to keep it if there's a law saying that you need to have that data, of course, but that's the exception.
I was surprised to come back to my XBOX account after 10 years in the US and see that very old digital purchases from previous console generations were not only still available, but actually playable on the latest console through transparent emulation! They did a pretty good job with that.
Whatever you think about Microsoft, they are a good steward of their platforms and go to extremes to maintain backwards compatibility -- even if they are always moving your cheese in the UI.
Except for the hundred thousands if not millions of people who lost their Minecraft account due to the way Microsoft handled multiple successive account migrations, also including the many accounts that were stolen due to lax security.
And since digital ownership legislation is a joke consumers have pretty much no recourse.
Beat me to it. I am still incredibly salty about losing my “lifetime” license to Minecraft. I really am curious to see some of the changes that have happened since I last played (when still owned by Notch), but I refuse to repurchase it.
> I am still incredibly salty about losing my “lifetime” license to Minecraft.
I kept my Minecraft license after migrating to a Microsoft account. Unsure how it got messed up for you.
I don’t know what to say. I went to the migration site, entered my information-no dice. Contacted support and got no assistance. There are others with a similar experience.
Microsoft could have gone above and beyond to manage the forced migration. Instead there was a convoluted process which left many cheated. They could have just punted and automatically emailed brand new entitlement codes to all of the original purchase emails. Yes, people who switched emails would have been missed, but that would have covered 95%+ of customers in a single action.
> Unsure how it got messed up for you.
If you didn't transfer it from your Mojang account to your Microsoft account in time (before the account was shut down) you just straight up lost access to it.
And sometimes, like in Sharepoint, the process could not be completed.
Microsoft accounts being an absolute pain in the ass to set up and manage, and the new launcher being aggressively terrible, are salt in the wound even if you finally gave in and migrated your account.
Also, good luck running Microsoft’s Minecraft launcher on a kid’s computer with allowlist-only internet access. It connects to like 20 apparently-random IP addresses every time it launches, will not work if any of them fails, and the pool of addresses is evidently huge. I never did find anything like a list of IP blocks to allow. Maybe they keep a file with them all in it somewhere, never looked, but I have a feeling they hit one address that gives them their list of the others for each session, and only that list, like if I had to bet on it I’d go with that (if they had a larger list, why aren’t they re-trying with different addresses when one fails?). I guess they just don’t care about that use case. (“Why don’t parents just police their kids’ internet access?” yeah look some of us really try but shit like this is everywhere and makes it stupidly difficult)
Or when they decided to wipe people's Hotmail accounts. Now some random person has my original hotmail that I had since the 90s through to the 2010s... Presumably, this person now indirectly has a ton of my original accounts for different services I can no longer access... thanks Microsoft.
I'm so happy I managed to transfer everything important over to my own domain before anything like that happened. I still have my old Hotmail and Gmail, and while nothing important shows up there, there's still a trickle of non-spam email coming in there, even after 5 and 10 years since I transferred everything I could remember at the time.
Haha, I was one of these people. I'm unreasonably salty about this (given the monetary loss is not high and I got a lot of playtime out of the game back then), especially because I also had one of those Alpha keys unused as well!
You had years to move your Minecraft account
Whatever you think about Microsoft, they are a good steward of their platforms and go to extremes to maintain backwards compatibility
This is the same company that closed its e-book store, and everyone lost the libraries they'd worked so hard to curate.
Glad to hear this - I bought a bunch of things on the Xbox 360 shop years ago but haven't had a new Xbox of any sort since then.
While Microsoft may not be as bad on this as Sony so far, they have certainly shown a willingness to revoke access to digital games. For example- in an effort to push users to the newer fifa titles with microtransactions, they quietly removed the ability to redownload purchased digital copies of older fifa games. For anyone who might've temporarily uninstalled the game to free up space, there was suddenly no way to get the game on your machine again.
That's almost certainly due to EA's licensing agreement with FIFA rather than Microsoft's decision. Similar to how you can no longer purchase older Forza games due to the licensing for use of the cars expiring.
But it was bought on Microsoft's Store (a walled garden) on a Microsoft platform, so the ultimate responsibility towards the customer lays on Microsoft.
Ultimately it’s the same thing. If it can be taken away, you didn’t buy it.
That sounds like deletion by proxy. If there is no way to redownload it, seeing the title listed on your account does little good.
Also as a part of forcing Minecraft users onto Microsoft accounts they threatened, and carried out deleting everyone's Minecraft and Mojang accounts.
If you refused to comply or happened to take a break from the game during that time, now you have to buy the game again and you lost anything on any multiplayer tied to your old account.
You know, all those people making new n64, playstation, and gameboy titles might be onto something. Apart from steam, I don't think I've heard anything but bad news from modern consoles.
> Apart from steam, I don't think I've heard anything but bad news from modern consoles.
Gabe is in his mid 60s, I'm prepared that in the next decade or so there will be a change of guard at Valve and the slow train of enshittification will get moving.
P.S. There's been a lot of groupthink and bandwagoning for Valve, ignoring all the dirt under the rug. But at the end of the day, by comparison, they are the best behaving in the field.
The company that gave up making games because there was more money to be had from inserting itself as a middleman into a previously open platform does not deserve any adoration.
This is categorically untrue. In addition to the games listed below, they are actively developing "Deadlock" which is a pretty rad game in my opinion.
Then don't buy it through steam. Just buy it through a third party like greenmangaming. Valve gets zero cut there.
Counter Strike and DOTA aren't games?
DOTA 2 came out 13 years ago. Counter Strike is more valid
Also Half-Life: Alyx!
The market demanded a middleman. Would you prefer an Epic or Microsoft monopoly?
> The market demanded a middleman
Says who?
The market.
If you're an indy game developer, it turns out that just posting .exes on your website gets you a limited reach.
I understand my question was a bit flippant but truly, this doesn’t answer it.
The results?
By random googling I found that they have 200 million active users, who bought 16 billion in gross merchandising value?
18 thousands of games launched there per yer?
Arguably if someone is in PC gaming, they at least know what Steam is?
They still make and support games :)
Huge capital overhead. Exhausting mid-lifecycle crunch that makes or breaks the next gen. Multiple giants.
Meanwhile Steam just casually absorbing everything. It doesn't matter that it's porous.
And now suddenly - hardware costs you can't tip toe schedule around.
The console business is shitty.
Talk to console gamers and they still think the PC is sweaty and playing on the PC is like putting your hands in the toilet. I mean, I remember the 1990s when kids were playing flight simulators with this huge plastic joysticks that were always falling apart and needed to be calibrated every five minutes. It's not like that anymore, with Steam Big Picture and either an XBOX ONE or PS4/5 controller your PC is a better console.
The main problem is that, ex. the Steam Controller, nobody can make a decent game controller except for console vendors and when the console vendors go down somebody will have to step up.
I just can't believe the PS5 has sold as many units as it has with just 15 exclusive games, many of which are remakes, even remakes of remakes. That reputation that the PC platform is too sweaty has taken a long long time to die and it doesn't help that ACER and such are coming out with handhelds that are maximum sweat (boot into a Windows Desktop with 10x too small fonts) compared to the consumer electronics experience of the Steam Deck.
> The main problem is that, ex. the Steam Controller, nobody can make a decent game controller except for console vendors and when the console vendors go down somebody will have to step up.
I used to only play on DualShock 4s and even skipped the DualSense because I just loved my DualShock that much.
I use an 8bitDo now and it is better in every way I care about. 8bitDo does not make consoles.
Meanwhile to play PS5 games like TMNT you can't use PS4 controllers. This is not a customer focused approach.
> ex. the Steam Controller, nobody can make a decent game controller except for console vendors
Reading this feels feels like you are the one that is still in 1990s.
Third party controllers have long surpassed the ones from console vendors. Standard console controllers still continue to use potentiometers for sticks. Even pro versions that cost over a hundred euro still use them.
Xbox’s stock controller since the 360 is hands down the best controller out there. Every other good controller is basically a variation of it lol
>Talk to console gamers and they still think the PC is sweaty and playing on the PC is like putting your hands in the toilet.
Eh, as someone who owns and plays on both pc and console, the simple truth of the matter is that playing on console is, for the most part, better 'bang for the buck'. You can reliably purchase a console and a budget linux laptop and both will reliably fill their respective niches for the next decade. PC gaming, in my experience, requires a much higher budget, and this was even before the modern pricing madness.
Consoles also had much wider support for couch coop than PC did, so it was a more social experience, and to be blunt, PC gaming has a pretty bad problem with cheating that I simply never experienced on console.
Like I said, I play and enjoy both. I can afford to do so now, but I do feel bad for teens today because even consoles are getting crazy expensive.
To me, the Steam Controller feels like holding a rectangle, not nearly as ergonomic as, say, an Xbox controller. It is otherwise decent though.
Honestly, there's never been a better time to be writing games for those platforms. The SDK's are much improved from the proprietary stuff available at the time and the hardware is very well understood. People have been pulling off some utter witchcraft on the N64.
Best of all: there's no hardware rat race.
The N64 is never going to get any faster, and emulators can run on just about any potato these days. People have realistic expectations of what the platform can do, so there's no need to spend insane effort making the graphics look better. It's always going to look kinda crappy, and that is Just Fine.
This lets game developers focus on the actual gameplay itself. No "Generic Shooter vol. 26 - now with slightly prettier water!", but innovative stuff focusing on the narrative and on novel gameplay elements.
The makers of Super Mario 64 said 3D graphics greatly increased game development costs.
Kaze and James Lambert are amazing. Kaze's new Mario game looks better than a first party Nintendo title, and James's engines pushes the console to its absolute limits.
I've been thinking about giving it a go myself. It's such a fun and nostalgic console, and the limitations are fun constraints.
The code archeology is really cool too. Seeing Rare's Dinosaur Planet boot up and play after being a lost title. Decompiling all the original titles. Building sequels to Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. It's such a fun scene.
Then there's Analogue 3D and ModRetro too, which make it fun to play as physical hardware.
It was last night, after seeing Linux on the Atari Jaguar, I was just pondering over that whole scene.
Then I decided to throw on Metal Slug X, a classic of the Neo Geo. Then it struck me, "Could I attempt porting this to Jaguar?!".
It would be a great start project to familurise myself with this older stuff again. They both have a 12MHz 68k, it is just that the graphics and audio cores are different. Would probably have to base it off the CD version so that the memory addressing is already handled (it loaded all assets into 1MB RAM - twice the jaguars storage).
It doesn't sound impossible. But the Jags RISC chips were notorious for being a little slow due to limited cache space, so it might not be so straight forward.
Regardless, the scene is jumping.
Wait, someone actually brought N64 Dinosaur Planet to life? I gotta check this out...
Yeah based on a ROM leak from a while back. The game was almost entirely complete before they moved over to the GameCube.
Even crap emulator handhelds are getting pretty dang good (if you can get the right software stack).
I'm not in the EU, but had 2 accounts with Sony/Playstation (I'm pretty sure both sat unused for more than 3 years). I tried to delete one and it seemed impossible. The FAQ said to call support. I called, waiting for 45 minutes, and they said they couldn't help me and hung up before I could respond.
While I believe they would delete a user's games, I don't know if they would actually willingly give up holding on to customer data.
My guess is this is more of a CYA incase they want to clean up accounts at some point, rather than something they actively do.
> While I believe they would delete a user's games, I don't know if they would actually willingly give up holding on to customer data.
So basically you get worst of both worlds, great.
And on top of that, Sony will probably get hacked again, as has already happened a couple times. That was a primary reason why I actually wanted my account gone, not just inactive.
I'm getting at the top of my browser window:
> Your browser is not Javascript enable or you have turn it off. We recommend you to activate for better security reason
It's reassuring to know that their copy is not AI-generated.
I just checked the drawer where I keep my NES games. Haven't played in a long time, but they're all still there.
I hope they send warning letters to log in. Mine been idle for over a year and I don't have it right now.. but I paid for those games so it would be scammy to remove without warning.
Does it cost them money to keep my purchases logged? I don't think so.
I am not sure, but I feel that many of these "Sony bad" type of conversations appear close to something unfavorable being discussed about Xbox. Am I imagining it? The Playstation issue discussed here is certainly not new, but the timing is interesting.
The timing surely is due to Sony’s recent announcement that they’re retiring physical media.
Just like how Mojang deleted my Mojang account taking away my copy of Minecraft I legitimately purchased.
Don't think these ToS are just theoretical.
Closing inactive accounts in the EU is due to (interpretation of) certain provisions set in the GDPR (e.g. article 5 - https://gdpr-info.eu/art-5-gdpr/) and Sony is not alone, many services in the EU automatically close and delete orphaned accounts after a given amount of time, and if they are international ones even when they don't outside of the EU.
If implemented correctly the affected person is also warned/notified several times by email before this is going to happen, so you have enough time to log in at least once and prevent it (and also extend the time frame again).
Those articles don't require deletion in this case, in my non-lawyer opinion. There is still a purpose to keeping the user's personal information here. Sony needs that information to be able to grant the user access to the content they bought.
There's a difference here between an account that hasn't been used and doesn't hold anything of value and an account like this that holds items that were bought.
Good, customer data should be a liability and they should be incentivized to delete it as early as feasible, or not store it at all when possible. It's your data, not theirs.
The problem with email is that it's an email address from 3+ years ago, which means there's a much higher chance of it being out of date - are you still using XxCoolDude67xX from high school?
Consoles area also marketed heavily towards older teenagers and younger adults, who are exactly the ones unlikely to maintain a consistent email address.
And of course if your email provided decides to cut you off, or goes out of business, or you used a university email...
I'd just be happy if companies were required to call them licensed and forbidden to call them sold or owned by the buyer.
This isn't surprising given how different businesses may value a payment against an ongoing obligation to customers. @patio11 had a good podcast about this "Cash received is not revenue earned" last April.
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/cash-received...Related:
Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745456
And consumers will cry about it for about 5 minutes, then go back to reward the company.
When HP started making printer cartridges that expired even when they were still full, people complained—then bought more.
When Microsoft let the web stagnate with IE6, people complained, then turned around and did the same thing with Chrome.
When Apple deliberately put a bug in the iPhone that caused the Home button to fail, pushing people to buy the next model, people got upset—and then bought the next one anyway. I'm amazed nobody remembers that one; it was such a huge deal at the time. And there is not a single link to articles about it anymore.
When Adobe switched to mandatory Creative Cloud subscriptions, plenty of users protested, but most professionals stayed.
When Amazon remotely deleted books from people's Kindles (including 1984), it was a scandal for a month, and then... nothing.
When we found out PRISM existed, users were worried for a few months, then went right back to filling those platforms with their personal data.
When Google allowed fraudulent DMCA takedowns, shut down accounts with no appeal, and censored its search engine, there was a brief outcry, then it was back to business as usual.
When Sony put a bloody ROOTKIT on its music CDs (!!!!), people grumbled for five minutes and kept giving them money.
These companies have no reason to stop. We never make them regret anything.
I should make a website to save those for posterity, so that at least we have a track record of all the things they get away with because we let them.
We're screwed—and we deserve it.
I've avoided buying any Lenovo product ever since their SuperFish fiasco.
At the beggining it surprised me that people still seriously recommended Lenovo products (even hackers). Now, my brain automatically "adblocks" the entire brand out when I'm looking to buy a new laptop or monitor, as it knows I can't buy it.
Here here. 100% in agreement, people seem to have forgotten that the majority hold the bargaining power. You'll always have people who cross "strike lines", but by and large if the entire user base simply said; no, and walked; the world would definitely be a better place, in so many ways.
I don't hold France as a shining example of humanity; but by-christ if they get upset they actually take those feet, one in front of the other and fight tooth and nail against `$thing`. Even if they don't "win", they /don't go quietly/.
The sad thing is that for many of these examples, people got a better deal out of it.
The HP printer ink subscription makes a lot of sense if you print a certain number of pages each year. Many consumers who only print occasionally are better off with cheap subscriptions for getting their money's worth, even if from an environmental point of view the cartridge DRM is absolute bullcrap.
Adobe switching from making people pay thousands and charging them again for updates was a lot more expensive than the ridiculous yearly subscription they charge (per month, to keep the advertised price down, surprising people who thought they could cancel after a few months).
IE6 was awful at replicating what other browsers did, but it introduced a lot of features that reshaped the web. The XmlHttpRequest that moved the web from static pages to basic interactivity was a Microsoft invention.
Many if these cases didn't work out of course, but for many business decisions that cause outrage on the internet, it's worth reconsidering the options on offer after the outrage has died down. Unpopular decisions aren't often the unbridled conspiratory evil that the internet would like you to believe.
The Sony one led to legal action and penalties. Also Microsoft themselves released an update that kicked the rootkit out.
If illegal actions are just reverted and compensated by a fine, then they are just legal for a fee
I never bought an HP product ever again. My laser is a Brother. Scanner is Epson. But yeah, for the most part all that is true.
Switch to Brother laser jet printers - I hear about them every time HP comes up, I've had mine for years, it is a lovely solution
Tons of people switched from IE6 to Chrome; IE is a dead browser. These days I'd recommend Firefox.
Is there something wrong with the iPhone as of today? It sounds like the bug got fixed in response to outcry, especially if they went and scrubbed all traces of the event - that seems like a good outcome?
Adobe stock is down almost 50% (42.24%) in the past year - I dare say a lot of people got sick of their shit. I have no clue what professionals use, but GIMP works fine for my amateur edits.
Like, c'mon, change very clearly does happen. It's just slow and uneven.
If you actually cared about change, I feel like you'd maybe list a few of the cool alternatives out there and actually help people make that transition. https://xkcd.com/1053/ - people do actually have to be taught about these things, not everyone knows what the alternatives are!
I did, but that doesn't change AT ALL my initial point.
People still buy HP printers.
It's still a popular brand.
When Apple deliberately put a bug in the iPhone that caused the Home button to fail, pushing people to buy the next model, people got upset—and then bought the next one anyway. I'm amazed nobody remembers that one; it was such a huge deal at the time. And there is not a single link to articles about it anymore.
That one, I don't remember either. Are you sure you aren't confusing it with Batterygate?
But yes: point taken, these companies have absolutely no incentive to behave any better than they have in the past.
Oh no, I remember well. At some point, everyone at the software home button on their phone setup, because the physical button was sometimes working and sometimes not.
Apple issued a statement saying it was a hardware failure and there was nothing they could do.
A hacker later on proved they were lying by patching the software and showing the problem went away.
That's why I'm scrapbooking every article about the trump administration right now. This time period is so wild people will doubt it really existed.
I will not be gaslighted again. This world is crazy, and people have a terrible memory.
"Error 53" from 2016, maybe?
* Error 53: Exposing An Apple Scandal -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWE4mwhjNY4
* ‘Error 53’ fury mounts as Apple software update threatens to kill your iPhone 6 -- https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/feb/05/error-53-apple...
* Apple apologises for iPhone 'error 53' and issues fix -- https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35611756
You will own nothing and be bitterly unhappy.
Maybe.
"Sony correctly implements GDPR requirements in the EU" is a less exciting headline I guess.
That is not how gdpr works. If you have a legitimate reason to hold the data. You can. Ensuring people have access to purchases is a very legitimate reason.
Is there evidence that European courts have sided with that? “We’re holding onto all your data indefinitely just in case you log in again several years from now” seems to be the antithesis of GDPR and I can’t discern the difference between that and what you’re suggesting.
I believe EU has dug their own hole here. And the best move would be to pass more legislation to explicitly require the retention (and transfer, ideally) of purchased digital goods.
> Is there evidence that European courts have sided with that?
Is there evidence of the contrary? Maybe any store can just delete your personal data right after charging your card and claim GDPR prevents them from shipping your product.
Silly arguments work both ways. You just picked the one that confirms your bias.
GDPR under no circumstances forces processors to delete everything, it defines legitimate interest. Retaining a person's purchases is as legitimate as it gets so the data can be retained for as long as the purchase is valid. And the license itself isn't even the user's personal data, it's just a license, so Sony could give the option to export that license to be used later - even in a cryptographically secure format that can only work if e.g. the account is created with the same email address. If they delete the personal data and throw out the baby with the water, it's not GDPR forcing them to do it.
No need to wait for the courts’ opinions: controllers must keep the data for a limited amount of time (which can be something like “3 years after the last connection”) under GDPR article 5(1)e.
To save everyone a click:
> Personal data shall be: kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed. (..)
Note that this does not say "it must be stored for a limited amount of time" - it says "no longer than necessary".
Your basic account data (such as username and password, or an email for password recovery) is still necessary to log in to the platform and make use of your purchases. As long as there is no clear indication that the user will never log in again (such as due to death, or because they explicitly deleted their account), it would be reasonable to keep it around.
On the other hand, it may make sense to delete some data. For example, it may make sense to store your full name and address info to make checkout more convenient. If a user hasn't bought stuff in a while, it makes sense to delete it and have them re-enter it in the future.
There might be a bit of a gray space for things like game achievements (especially when there's a public profile) or savefile backups, but reading it as "you MUST delete all digital purchases because GDPR" is just not true.
I'd consider keeping the other personal data to be still easily justifiable, as you might want to support various account recovery options. And the odds that a user forgot their password only increases for old accounts.
5(1)c seems far more relevant than e. “Data minimization” is what’s relevant here. And the article is sufficiently vague that the onus is on companies to decide what is absolutely minimal - that includes, implicitly, removing inactive accounts. Unless the courts have made a judgement to the contrary.
"kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed"
Keeping "account X purchased game Y" forever is necessary for the purpose of tracking ownership.
Based on how big companies typically behave, I assume that they are storing a metric buttload of other data on their users, which is not necessary for that purpose, and which they aren't inclined to separate out.
This is just like the cookie popup nonsense. You don't have to ask for permission to store necessary cookies. Cookie popups are ubiquitous because sites would rather bother every single visitor so that they can store unnecessary cookies.
The GDPR does not say that controllers must always delete personal data on request. Article 17(1)(a) — erasure is required only when:
"the personal data are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed"
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr
It's like the cookie banner all over again. This law never, ever required a cookie banner.
The big companies are master in malicious compliance that benefit them, and let them blame the EU for it.
Rules of thumbs, international billion dollars company should be assumed to be the ones being the bad guys until proven otherwise. They have lost the benefit of the doubt decades ago.
If it’s malicious compliance and not required why does the EU Commission website have it?
https://commission.europa.eu
In practice most of the purposes you'd encounter in the wild are directly linked to user activity, so account deletion means most of the reasons to keep it disappear.
You still need to keep it if there's a law saying that you need to have that data, of course, but that's the exception.
And that data must be held for a limited amount of time under GDPR article 5(1)e. Sony’s policy is very much a consequence of this.