Who here actually like digital downloads

As someone who doesn't like being dependant upon being online to play my games (the house I'm moving to is unlikely to have internet for year+), I'm not a fan of digital distribution. I'll pass on purchasing games for the inability to acquire physical copies. That, and the fact that you usually can't get cloth maps or anything cool with digital distributions.

I bought a copy of FATE: Undiscovered Realms on disk... only to find out that the disks don't actually work, and you have to go online to play the game now. When I explained that was why I bought the disks, they told me to go ask the seller for a refund.

 

The disks didn't work? In what sense? I mean... how? Software doesn't degrade - if the copy burned on a disk worked when it was published then it should still work now.

 

I actually don't like digital downloads, bout since i'm almost never home, the only chance i have (had) is to play my favorites in a netbook, and i just can't put disks in it (now i can't play at all because an idiotic physicist stepped on my screen)
In Mexico is really rare to find a boxed copy of any PC game, the last two boxed games i saw were really battered boxes of unsuccessful strategy games, i gave one of my friends the money to buy skyrim and it seems that the only boxed copies that came here were for preorder, so boxed games are not the choice.
The internet here is also pretty slow, so downloads take years, also, if you're paying for 10mb internet, they say you're paying for up to 10mb so expect 200kb/s.
If i had it my way i would buy physical copies.

 

My copy of Vampire: the Masquerade ~ Bloodlines stopped being able to install the game after a while when the discs were in perfect condition, which is why the copy I own now is a digital one. I always assumed it was because the game was so buggy, but the fact remains it did stop working after a few installs. So, shows what you know!

 

Yeah, but why? What error? "Stopped working" is pretty vague. Does the disk not spin up? Does it spin up but can't be accessed? Does it spin up and launch the installer but the installer complains about your system because it was written for Windows XP, and you're using this newfangled Vista whatsits?

 

I think the disc installed the game in a few distinct parts, lets call them "packs" (which may have been the actual name - I can't remember). On the installer bar the installation would always start to have problems on pack 3, slowing right down in progess (making the installation take over an hour) and eventually having an error. This problem seemed to get worse on successive attempts to install the game (it would get less far into pack 3 before slowing to a snail's pace and eventually having the error), but as I said the discs weren't damaged and other games installed on the system just fine. I can't be more specific than that as it was probably over 5 years ago now and I don't have the discs with me.

 

Sounds like the disks were damaged.

Well, it sounds like they were.

HOW CONVENIENT LOL

 

With solid state memory, there's not a reason to continue using discs anyway. besides, imagine the reaction of someone discovering Crysis on a usb drive.

More on topic, I like digital media. It's also much harder to lose something I bought on Steam or GOG.

 

What kind of discs get more damaged in the space of a day inside a disc drive? There's some serious flaws in your logic!

 

They used an older version of SecuRom to protect the software... a version that isn't compatible with Windows Vista* or newer. It only was supported by XP. So you literally can't install it.


*Fuck you, I can't afford to upgrade.

 

All my cds have dissolved under cups of coffee and such.

Nowadays, my laptop doesn't have a disc drive because it's the 21st century, man.

I couldn't care less where the software sits, but I do love a good manual and it must be an actual book with paper and pages. Mmm, hardcopy game manuals.

 

Re:

You might be able to run it in XP backwards compatibility mode. Or else in an XP virtual machine, which is kind of like DOSBox, but more like an XP virtual machine.

I don't really know much about the compatibility options though, because I still use XP. With a Vista virtual machine. So I'm simulating the future, in the past. Or rather I'm simulating the less distant past in the distant past.

Actually, I recently used DOSBox to play Magic Carpet II, on my XP machine. So that was simulating the ancient past in the distant past.

Damaged ones.

 

I'll damage you in a minute, with cruel and demeaning language! How'd you like that?!

EDIT: Also, why are some exclamation marks ordinary and some rapemarks?

 

Exclamation marks turn into rapemarks only when they are flanked by nothing but spaces and/or punctuation marks and/or symbols. They remain normal exclamation marks when they're adjacent to at least one letter or digit.

Hence why your recent rapemark was the first one I noticed, even though the substitution has apparently been in effect for three months now.

 

That's some nice deduction, I don't think I'd have spotted the pattern.

 

Re:

Well Steam at least doesn't require you to be online to play games. As long as you've run something once while online, you can use it in offline mode. If you don't have them installed then you're boned I guess.

I don't miss CDs. As a relevant example, I went through three physical copies of Arcanum due to discs being damaged, lost or stolen and lost by idiot friends. Guess how many times I've had to repurchase it through GoG. :lol:

I don't miss packaging and physical junk but that's subjective - I only ever buy collector's edition things from people I really want to support. I'd rather not have cloth maps and figurines that I'll likely also lose because I'm not a collector and just don't care enough about them. Art books and things almost always ship in PDF form with digital downloads.

As for this mystical freedom you speak of, a significant number of games (should I say publishers) nowadays require some form of online activation even if it's a one-time affair, so that you can't share games with friends any more. For a while that was a cornerstone of console gaming, but with the proliferation of Xbox Live and PSN, you can't pass those games around now either. We're now approaching the point where any game that's old enough to not feature any kind of one-time single-use activation is old enough to be sold DRM-free on GoG - which means you can share them still, and often a lot easier and faster than on a physically large, slow CD.

Anyhoo, I live in New Zealand, where even with our moderately crap internet, Steam still ends up significantly cheaper in most cases (and for publishers who enact regional pricing (those fags) I have a reliable friend in the USA who buys them for me.) The last game I ever bought on a disc was the Final Fantasy XI: Wings of the Goddess expansion in 2007, which I got duped on by both the retailer and Square-Enix (long story short: the physical copy I bought wasn't compatible with my game with no warning on the store or packaging.) I've been using Steam since January '05, and now and apparently have 218 games on it. along with about 22 on GoG. I don't have room in my house for 240 games worth of discs, let alone the packaging.

Now, back to my occasional lurking for another year.

 

Re: Re:

Smuel, the issue is that it won't install. The game does, but then the Securom installer launches and goes "oh, you can't install this revision of SecuRom on this system," and the game requires that version of SecuRom.

That said, I didn't find anyone reporting functioning experiences of SecuRom in a Virtual Machine, and so I decided not to bother. I contacted WildTangent and they 'replaced' both games for me, but now I've to be online for them to work. Which is why I'd bought the disks. It's a giant, $5 catch-22.

^ All of this aside, I just bought myself six new PC games, and don't terribly care about Fate anymore.