What’s interesting here is the EU supreme court disagrees with that. I don’t know that the US supreme court has ever ruled on it. The EU court ruled that provision of software through either physical media or a download constituted a sale and thus the first-sale doctrine applies to it. Basically, once I buy a thing I…

Steam definitely needed a legal agreement to sell me a product. That is 100% correct. Nvidia isn’t selling anything.

My only problem with this is that it doesn’t seem to quite work.

Well that I actually understand. I just fail to see how it’s my problem.

It’s hard to imagine EULAs I agreed to for games I bought 10 years ago would cover prohibiting a technology that didn’t exist when I did that. It’s also hard to imagine such a prohibition holding up in court.

Interesting. Except that game streaming isn’t broadcasting anything. The media comes only to me. Not to me and my apartment building. Hell even if it did stream to my entire building, all my building would get to do is watch me play Borderlands or something. A thing they can already do on Twitch.

But so what? Theoretically if I wanted to rent a machine from someone and use it to play games I have full license to play, why does that make it different?

Maybe. But they aren’t using their goods, they’re using mine. So this is a license I have every legal right in the world to use. Why does it matter that I’m renting the computer hardware that’s running the game I have full license to?

Maybe someone can explain to me why these publishers can actually do this.

You understand this virus kills people right? Especially more vulnerable people? You get that right?

Generally yes, that’s exactly the reason. People want their games spread among as few places as possible.

Ignite is EXACTLY what I was picturing when I was writing that description. Haven’t been there in a long time, but I still remember it quite fondly.

That’s interesting. I didn’t know that. The last time I went to one of these places was in the early 2000s before all-digital gaming was really a thing. I could see that being a huge problem for the business model for sure.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean there? Do you mean the initial price point for the PS3? Because I could see an argument for that just being pure hubris.

Fun fact: the standard quarantine period for COVID-19 is 2 weeks. The incubation period for the virus is 25 days, and you can be contagious both without showing symptoms and AFTER overcoming symptoms.

Same reason Blockbuster didn’t think streaming was going anywhere. Arrogance.

Internet cafes centered around gaming have been a thing for a long time now. The issue with them tended to be that they were insanely expensive, generally charging customers by the hour. But if you could afford the fees they were pretty cool. Usually hosting a few dozen gaming PCs loaded with all sorts of things you…

Best not. We don’t have decent healthcare yet.

The final level of that is that by the time the player has no choice but to fix the problem, the problem can no longer be fixed.