It became a metaphor back around when they released Empire, Total War, (edit: 2012 ish maybe,) and the disk meant nothing and just sent you to Steam to download it, forcing you to keep steam on your computer that tried to run at all times, and make you ask for permission every time you wanted to play the game, revocable at any moment I presume.

It's a metaphor in the sense that if they didn't get rid of physical disks, they would still be putting games on them that don't work without an internet connection and cannot be resold.

It really makes me worried to be fair.

I'm not one to subscribe to conspiracy theories, I try to think myself as someone who can process information in an objective^1^ , level-headed, reasonable (scientific) manner. Occam's razor and all - and pretty much every theory fails these simple tests of logic.

(^1^Objective in thinking, not in opinion. Opinions are by definition subjective)

But I can't help coming back to the "forced no local computing" theory that's been going around for about two years, where people theorised that the entire DRAM/NAND/chip shortage is just a ploy to move computing power away from ownership by people and towards corporate hosted services.

Which is obviously dumb because what company would say "you know what, B2B is enough for us, why should we sell for B2C?", what company would axe half its market just so the other half can sell a service instead of a product?

Especially when you consider some of the heaviest computing dependent things: gaming being the foremost leader, followed by various other 3D rendering requisites (from artistic through engineering modelling, physics test frameworks for about a dozen major industries that use them indirectly, including construction, aerospace, radio technologies and so on), compute heavy processing of data, hell, code compilation or even complex map rendering...

But then all of a sudden the big gaming giants began faltering. Xbox had three layoffs from Xbox and a new one is rumoured as they're "restructuring" the department from gaming-focused work to 'digital media creation'... Sony is doing their best to lose customers, and Nintendo... well they didn't change a bit.

Every single major gaming studio/publisher seems to be running straight into the forest of dicks with a wide open mouth. And it can't just be greed and stupidity. Some companies doing this, I'd agree, but all the major ones, at the same time? This looks more and more like an intentional attempt at destroying the primary consumer market for high end computer hardware. Destroy the demand, wait 5-10 years, restart game studios (consolidated into 2-3 megacorps of course), and sell games as a service. No ownership, no modding, no piracy, no need for "loud and hot local hardware", just a display and a controller. Wet dream of business execs...

Correct, thats what I thought as well.

They are really asking for it.

I think GTA, and this most anticipated release of a game in perhaps ever, really fucked up in screwing over their union right before the release, (last I heard, in passing,) and are similarly just asking to be pirated.

No one is trying to claim they own the IP, and no one is claiming they own the source code to the game either.

That seems to be the way all these fucking companies try to frame things to justify telling you to pay them and then fuck off. They're trying to justify having you pay them for nothing, and then enforce it legally.

And nobody struggles with this for books. Not one soul.

That cannot be revoked arbitrarily by fuckheads like this piece of trash.

You mean the same guy that told people to work two jobs for the honor of buying his five hundred and ninety nine dollar console in 2006? Oh yeah, he's an asshole.

We are fools each time to expect any different :(

All of them are, especially when you get anywhere near the size of Sony.

He'd probably argue you couldn't legally do that with the disc copy you had though.

Lend

Naw man, that's just what they want you to believe because it benefits them.

We've de facto owned copies of whatever was purchased until the Internet changed the way ownership functions.

Laws are written by people. Traditionally, greedy people.

I think everyone understands just fine, we just won't be able to change that until the people who write laws are changed.

It's always pathetic when these super old guys dye their hair constantly, like Steven Seagall, he's like 80 without a single grey hair, and not grey roots even, meaning he is dying like all the time.

Everyone ages, at some point, just embrace it. After 60, 70 tops, just go with the grey.