Ugh Xbox drives me up the wall with their "ownership" scheme. A disc doesn't actually contain the game, It's a _license_ for the game. When you insert the disc, your Xbox downloads the entire game to its drive, but the game won't launch without the disc inserted.

It's the worst of both worlds. After the Xbox store shuts down, none of your discs will work because they don't _do_ anything. And you can't even launch the game without messing with discs because you can't rip the license from the disc- it MUST be in the machine to launch.

At least you can still sell the disc. For now...

This statement is not accurate. There are games that ship as licenses rather than binary blobs on discs.

What kind of numbers are we talking here? All of the 15 or so games I own have had the game on the disc.

Steam is already 18 years old, where is your confidence they won't make it another 20 coming from?

That's a good point but odds are gmail won't be around in 20 years. The most popular email 20 years ago was aol later hotmail. Most popular search yahoo, altavista are gone. ICQ is mostly gone.

Myspace is gone. Facebook is dying slowly hopefully to be replaced with some form in the meta world.

To make it 18 years is special but it's going to take a lot of reinvention to keep up for the next 20 years. They have the best odds but so did myspace

ICQ is very much alive, and popular in Russia for example.

Hotmail transitioned to Microsoft outlook.com, and you can still use your hotmail domain email, even if you can't register new ones.

As far as I know aol mail is still available.

Myspace is still live, including all the old pages and you can probably listen to music uploaded to it in the past as well.

Losing popularity does not mean shutting down.

Yahoo search and Altavista are not the same, since you did not upload information to them nor bought something. Though Yahoo search is still alive anyway.

Those services existed only for a few years before fb, google etc took over

AOL had been around since at least 1991 and was still extremely popular well into the mid 00's.

Hotmail launched in 1996 and GMail didn't get popular until at least 10 years later. (IMAP was added in 2007~ and the beta was lifted in 2009 iirc).

That's a lot of time to be relatively dominant, but they're reminiscent of zombies these days.

AOL still exists and still provides email accounts.

In that sense, Steam is not tied to a single hardware platform. They are a bit more platform agnostic and that means they can keep moving with the times. Steam doesn't require a custom steam PC using proprietary hardware.

A good example of these online store going down would be the Wii and Wii U/3DS stores. The Wii store is already gone - it lasted 13 years.

The Wii U/3DS stores will no longer accept any payments starting 18th January 2022 as a first step towards shutting the services down. Wii U is 9 years old, 3DS is 10 years old.

Only yesterday a friend of mine fired up his Xbox 360. While the online system is still running it is a question of how long until MS will simply drop the entire thing even if it is a very minor thing to run.

Nintendo is an interesting case, because while the stores are gone/going away (though there was a Wii->Wii U transfer period), a lot of the games themselves aren't gone, and what you already downloaded will continue to work so long as you don't delete it. More importantly Nintendo itself is still around (and will probably be in another 20 years -- there are many long-lived entertainment companies) it's just that they (and others who re-release on the new stores) want you to keep re-buying the same games over and over.

I have a similar desire to paxys in that I want to be able to play most of my games in 20 years, where such a concept is even valid (I do sometimes enjoy multiplayer games and other things "of the moment" where I have no expectations of playing the same game tomorrow due to a sweeping patch or upgrade or shutting down, let alone in 20 years). It's just that digital store risk, especially of Steam, is the least of my worries.

MS are a special case as they keep the Xbox 360 store & library up for BC reasons, even adding older games to the catalog when they get publisher rights. I would actually trust them to keep it online. (And Sony recently changed their mind on shutting down the PS3 store and are keeping the PS3 download CDN up)

As for Nintendo, I'm unsure but optimistic -- the Switch is their first console that seems planned to be (able to be) used with 100% digital purchases, I'm not sure if games will be buyable forever but I bet they'll be downloadable.

Is that even a guarantee though? In particular, I know that you could buy the Orange Box (HL2, TF2, and Portal) on DVD in retail stores, but you needed a Steam account to play anyway.

It isn't. Even discounting day 1 patches, every console assumes an internet connection. You're at the mercy of the game devs, and unless you are checking for "internet connection required" (and believing the lack of such on the box means you really don't need one), you can still end up with something that will refuse to boot unless it phones home.

> every console

Except the Switch.

Well, they're all -functional- without one. They also all have games that are only sold digitally, check in the background for patches for both the system and the games, and may refuse to start if you're running a version of the OS that is older than what is known to exist at the time of printing a physical copy. The Switch is no different there.

I think most console games will run without any issues even if you pop in the disc to the console without any kind of Internet access.

There's a Twitter account that documents if games work without having access to the console's network/stores: https://twitter.com/DoesItPlay1/status/1474819155173908484

For PlayStation it is, but I think it is the only one. The console can operate 100% offline.

Can you be sure your plastic disk will still be readable in 20 years? Without redundancy, you're just shifting the point of failure elsewhere

That is of course true, but nothing lasts forever. The disc may deteriorate, or be stolen, or their house might burn down, but that's life. At least by owning the physical disc, GP commenter can take full responsibility of its condition and accept the risks of "shit happens", rather than being at the mercy of arbitrary decisions or failures of a remote faceless organisation or of its future owners/creditors.

A few months ago I pulled my PS1 collection from storage to rip to ISOs, for emulation and backup. I was too late as the discs, despite being in fully opaque containers, were damaged and partly unreadable, one disc was 50% unreadable. And this is all for emulation -- if I wanted to play on a console I'd need a modchip to read CD-Rs, so if you backed up your Blu-Ray PS5 discs today, you wouldn't be able to play them on a legitimate console in the future.

The PS5's optical drive is paired with its motherboard[1]. If you replace it, even if you take the disk drive from another PS5, it will not be able to read your PS5 game.

I imagine that 20 years from now you are going to have a hard time finding a working PS5 with its original disk drive.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/PlayStation+5+Teardown/13828...

It's not just that, a lot of games today are assuming some server somewhere is up regardless of single-player vs multiplayer.

Between that and day-1 patches that made games playable, the data on the disk will almost certainly not be enough to play games in 20 years

Too bad you can't play most games offline anymore and I'd you're online they'll probably stop you from playing when your account isn't valid.

I hate to defend Sony in any way, but I can still download my PS3 games, that system is 15 years old now.

Funny that you mention it. Sony announced earlier this year that they would be shutting down the PS3 store permanently (including the ability to download past purchases), and only delayed the move due to public backlash. They did shut the PSP store though, so those games are unplayable now.

The email I got from Sony back in March said that they were only disabling new purchases, "You will still be able to download your owned PS3, PS Vita, and PSP content, including games and video content." Full text: https://paste.debian.net/1224883/

Now that they've backed down, I'm pretty sure you can buy new PS3 games as well.

You can, but they made it more difficult in that you need to add funds over the web or through a PS4/5 or gift card. Also that the prices now tend to be the original list prices which never go on sale but do for PS4/5.

I typically do the same. (Ps2-4). I wonder though since a lot of these games now (typically ps4 onward) have fairly large “patches” downloaded when you play them how well the un patched games will play.