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‘Grand Theft Auto VI’ Going Digital-Only Is a Car Crash for Physical Media (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

But it wasn't too different as a concept: It installed everything on the local drive, then used the first CD exclusively as a DRM. Didn't optimize the install size to leave the useless FMV on the optical media as the earlier PC games were doing

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    True story: as a kid I had a k6-400 MHz with 20gb HDD. Space was a constraint. I purchased state of emergency, it took 550 mb of space on the HDD AND it required the disc on the drive. I was shocked, what? All my previous games occupied a tenth of that, Virtua cop 2 was like 30mb. And installers usually asked if I wanted minimal or full install. Then I found out that there was a 500 mb intro.bik file. The useless intro video, the one that I would skip every single time was occupying 10x of the actual game and I was forced to have the CD in the drive as a DRM anyway... Why not load it from there?? Anyway, at the time they didn't do file checksum, so I copied rockstar.bik (1mb spinning rockstar logo video) as intro.bik and enjoyed my game.

    Then later when playing on a much newer computer with windows 7 it wouldn't install anymore. It wasn't the game itself that was incompatible, but the DRM. Found a no-cd patch on gcw, then the game didn't require to be installed at all! I had copied the old drive on a DVD-r and the game would run very fine directly from the optical disc with ZERO install size....

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    While I am nostalgic for those days, they were also marred by the ilk of DRM like SecuROM. We discovered my disc drive was literally scratching our discs - the longer we played them, the more they deteriorated until the drive could no longer detect the disc. We purchased a new drive and still had to buy some of our games a second time. Paying twice for the same object was so abhorrent to me as a kid, that if I ever somehow lost access to a digital piece of media I had purchased, I'd just go sailing instead.

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