Mahvel, Stockholm syndrome... potayto, potahto.

Ah, yes, paying a fee for limited access to things. The one business model.

I feel like I’m on crazy pills. Some guy is going nuts arguing that subscriptions are fine because games going away don’t matter because nobody plays old games anyway and here we are, arguing that since games are too long to work on a subscription service, subscription services aren’t a threat. You guys should just…

That is hilariously revisionist. Doom was built from the ground up as an episodic game where you got the first bit as a free to play release and paid to unlock the rest (just, you know, using dollar bills and envelopes and stamps). SF2 was an arcade game that was sold in a professional circuit on boards that were…

Last time Capcom decided to go full-on thematic on a fighting game soundtrack pepole ended up having to endure “I’m gonna take you for a ride” for twenty years like it’s not the worst thing to happen to ears this century.

I couldn’t tell if you’re joking, so I clicked on the track.

You don’t subscribe for specific items because you don’t know what’s gonna be on the service when you subscribe. I didn’t know what was gonna be on Netflix when I bought a year of Netflix a year ago. That’s the whole point of the subscription, you pay a recurring fee for a black box and it doesn’t matter whether you…

No, streaming is a subscription service that replaces renting with something different.

What the hell are you going on about there? Many live service games offload the live service support to external studios as well. How does being made by an external studio make shooter expansions “not count”? That makes no sense. And of course SF2 wasn’t “developed with the intention of post-launch support” since it…

No, here’s the correct analogy.

Based on what?

I’m complaining about the conversion of gaming into a service detached from ownership. Partially with live games that exist on the server and depend on support to exist and partially with the funneling of players towards subscriptions where single player content behaves in the same way despite not having any server…

I think so. You could definitely already get what GOG is giving away for free before, but it took some tinkering. This is just a prepackaged version of what is in effect the “current” version of Daggerfall for people who still care about Daggerfall.

Yes. It’s almost like Netflix changed practices in ways that are nonstandard for rentals because Netflix didn’t do rentals. And in fact the differences are so impactful and important that none of the rental services exist anymore and everybody even remotely connected to video content now has their own version of…

They aren’t effectively the same because a rental is a one-time fee to use a discrete thing that you select for a period of time while a subscription is a recurring payment to access a service with no control over what is contained in the service.

By that metric EVERY game is a live service. Doom got tons of expansions, some actually made up of user maps. Half Life? Expansions all over the place. They re-released The Secret of Monkey Island like four times with different feature sets. Not every game with a multiplayer feature is a live service game. And many of…

That’s fair. My gripes with it aren’t that it’s inconvenient. For certain use cases it’s aggressively convenient, in fact. That’s part of the problem in the big picture.

Yeah, that’s a big deal. It’s just that it’s at the core of it and the thing everyone knows, I think they don’t get enough credit for the work they do at releasing the games in a complete and functional state. You often get a whole other version of the game that will run under native DOS if the emulated version…

Oh, by the way, the weird tangent made me forget your first point, so sorry for double posting (please only respond to one of them), but no, fighting games aren’t “live service games”. People still play Street Fighter 2 today and that came out before the frickin Internet. And yes, people do revisit single player…

This is really cool. Bethesda was giving away the vanilla version for a while, but getting some of the versions they dropped set up with Unity was always a hassle. It’s great that DF Unity is now available as a straight download from a platform. Good job GOG.