Digital Decay Of 2000's PC Game DRM
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- Опубліковано 11 кві 2024
- I'm tired of modern video games being shut down from pointless server requirements and wanted to help the cause to spread the word that we might be able to do something about it. It also made me wonder, how many of my physical games are now dead? It was a lot more than I thought it would be.
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Will do.
Hey man, I love the idea but it looks like there really isn't much for me to do... I don't own the crew 2.
@ 2:58 your claim online DRM is the single worst thing to happen to PC gaming.
Everyone that uses steam will wholly disagree with you & claim that steam which is a DRM/platform saved PC gaming.
No one will accept the truth that *Steam is arguably the second worst thing to happen to PC gaming* By Monopolizing pc gaming with steam being the only way to get an absolutely high amount of certain PC games. Next Steam has been around for 20 years now, & I'm sure there a plenty of games that no longer work with Steam because they've already stopped supporting older OS's Not mention they have habit of removing/delisting/editing games. They will take away games & then give you the crappy updated buggy RE-mastered version that you didn't ask for nor did you probably want in the first place. It is nothing more than bribe to keep you happy after they've taken away what you owned in the first place.
Yeah. As someone else said would love to add my name but I don't own The Crew 2, however as this video points out this problem reaches far beyond just that game. Wish there were more that I could do other than just tweet a link of this video to the FTC.
Kudos for boosting Ross' message. Great to see the community come together.
In my country, Ross and his network have organised a petition for those who didn't buy The Crew 2 and can't directly dispute the closure of the game. So highly encourage everyone to check the site out and see if there's anything they can do at all, no matter how small.
I will always say it. If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't theft or wrong.
The federal Bureau of investigation would like to know your location
piracy can't be theft by definition
Came here to say this. You literally haven't stolen anything. @@PhobosTK
Only issue is you can be thrown in jail for doing so. Ross is trying to change that so nobody has to rely on piracy.
It isnt even by law. It is only Copyright infringement
"Don't pirate our games!"
"Okay then let us play it"
"No!"
Remember all those PC Master Race memes now lmao later suckaaa, you guys were played by your own egos. My offline PS2 and PS3 games will always rock!
Nintendo is like that
@@Kyle_Rielhoists the skull and crossbones flag. We can still pirate the old games to keep them alive. Running them on our new hardware. Eventually your consoles will become irreparable.
@@Kyle_Rielemulator goes brrr
@@Kyle_Riel Yeah emulating PS2 and PS3 games in 4k on my PC sure is tough 😢
If Piracy is theft
Then blocking access to games you've purchased should be equally criminal.
Piracy is unauthorized duplication of a copy written product. The law dates back to the 70's a long while before the internet became a thing and even longer before it became plausible to share music or videos. It was written to deal with bootleg VHS makers selling unauthorized copies for a profit often without the consumer even knowing. It's not illegal to download something from what I understand but I'm no lawyer and this isn't advise lol. It is illegal to upload, it's a tort to download though so you can be sued. The thing is most companies that try get so much backlash it just isn't worth it for them. Not to mention it can be difficult with VPN's and blocklists (cough or so I'm told).
However SELLING something then bait and switching the sale for a lease is in my opinion wrongful enrichment which is also a tort. We should be allowed to class action compel them to release a patch once they shut off the DRM. Because by shutting off the DRM they are admitting to withdrawing their commercial stake anyway. They should be required to pay attorney fee's and a fee for the time we spend deprived of the goods we purchased. A firm slap on the wrist plus force them to make it right.
It's not like you can't pirate literally every video game within a year. Forcing customers to use such tools to regain access should be some sort of government action by the attorney generals or FTC IDK.
@@GeorgeWashingtonLaserMusket it is illegal to download
On the subject of VHS tapes, it is not illegal to record a broadcast TV show or movie, its not even illegal to share it this is called time shifting, it is however illegal to mail it to someone, re-broadcast it, or make a profit from the recorded media in any way, weather it be through trading the media itself, or charging admission (this would also be illegal for live broadcast) The re-broadcast and mail portions are the two parts of the court case that would apply to dowload and upload.
Now what is not technically illegal, but breaking contract law, is recording something from a cable, satellite, or streaming provider, because as part of your usage agreement there will be a section covering recordings, time shifting, and format shifting, Generally only allowed on authorized devices if at all. Also of note, if you need to break encryption, even for over the air broadcast, that IS illegal and why everyone should lobby hard against ATSC 3.0
This is literally what NFTs were invented for.
Then these monkey idiots had to completely corrupt the plan.
Now we're delayed, possibly forever, from accessing this incredible solution. I hate it.
Fight fire with fire
Only 11% of films from the Silent Era survive intact. They were stored on a physically volatile media and their artistic significance was unknown.
A hundred years later, with the advantage of historical hindsight and digital storage, its estimated that only 13% of all videogames are playable without resorting to piracy. This number will only shrink with dying mobile games and games only hosted on official servers.
Game. Piracy. Is. Art. Preservation.
And after industry leaders keep pushing to kill off x86 architecture it will be worse after mainstream desktops becomes ARM.
@@iecasper But you can run x86 apps and whole OSes on ARM. Apple Silicon (M series) also support that.
@@last8exile through emulation. And most classic games suck in emulation.
There's even private servers kept up by dedicated fans for some multiplayer games. Games should really be open source after a certain time.
@@TheUmbraSol maybe a published Game should become public after 20 years.
Piracy is preservation
Always has been
@@LocalAitch (picture of that astronaut pointing the gun at the other astronaut. the meme of 2020)
Nope
@@ryanyoder7573 What do ya mean "Nope?" Would you care to write a more intelligent comment on why?
Yeah but we can't pirate always online game servers if there's never a leak or any intention of giving the public the files.
"You'll own nothing, and you'll like it"
"No, I don't think I will"
We are not Goyim. We are humans that deserve respect.
same here, sir, same here
They just changed it to "You'll own nothing".
I hear this term thrown around all the time but do you kniw who said this?
You beat me to it lol.
Thanks a bunch for the mention! For the record, everything we're doing would cover any DRM that requires internet access also. It wouldn't end DRM in itself, but make it so it would be a legal liability to the company if it needing to dial out made the game unplayable when support ended. The advantage of focusing on international consumer law is the reasons WHY companies make your game stop working don't actually matter much, just that they did it to titles you bought from them. The more attention this gets, this better!
You're doing good work mate. First it's games then this week extend to computer software and who knows where it'll end? Maybe they'll shut down your car or household appliances after 10 years. Your rights don't disappear overnight, they're usually eroded away over time...
Respect for what you're doing
The Crew Motorfest is currently getting review bombed on steam for requiring an anti consumer always online internet connection 😂 Lol. People are tired of this.
hi ross
Well allow me to drive down this rabbit hole
IMO, every online game that shuts down should take the Club Penguin Island route. Not only did they release an offline mode, they also included a debug mode, that encourages the users to find a way to bring back the game via private servers
Unless the Goddamn company gets fussy and demands the fan project shutdown . 😤
@@cadjebushey6524 OG CPPS dont get shut down as much, and a CPI CPPS never got shut down by disney afaik
Need something like that for webkniz before they shut down too
@@camwha5904 yeah, but its probably a good idea for the community to make their own backups of the games files, because while Club Penguin Island got an offline mode, OG CP wasn’t so lucky and is still around thanks to fan back ups
Won't happen in this corporate age, what with publishers with copyright ownership willing to kill or sit on beloved IPs forever just so we'll be forced to consume the next product.
The irony of the "official patches" released by some game studios to bypass DRM is that a lot of them weren't even produced by the studio, they just took cracks from the warez community and slapped an "official" label on it...
Like how rockstar did that for manhunt 2, but they tripped their own copy protection, which causes the game to activste a bunch of troll anty piracy mesures. This makes the official still for sale Steam copy unplayable, unless you install a proper crack
@@JukoYT anty is spelled anti and mesure is spelled measures :] English is hard as hell but I hope this helps!
@@JukoYTit's actually just the first manhunt game, and the crack worked originally, same with Max Payne 3, but they changed it after they were caught, and didn't fix Manhunt after.
@@tristanraine oh
@@tristanrainewoof, perchance is the original bootlegged anti-DRM executable for MP3 still around?
Whenever it reaches this point, piracy becomes saving and rescuing.
It’s not piracy if it is abandoned. Totally agree with you.
If a company goes out of it's way to prevent you playing a game that you PAID FOR with YOUR money, it is your moral obligation to preserve it
@@Odinsday this is my case with many games by FX Interactive such as the entire Imperivm Anthology and the Drakensang games. I paid hard money for those games and now their shop and the entire company is out. How can I play my games if it isn't by pirating them? I refuse to just buy them a second time from someone who just happens to have a digital copy.
The one piece is real. Luffy saved dresssrosa.
So much of videogame history would be lost already if it weren't for piracy. It's not only justified in many cases, it's also crucial for media preservation.
Modern gaming is a sham - but do not lose hope. We have more games behind us than we could play in a hundred lifetimes.
In a tech seminar on a local university here in Indonesia, a professor said that there are exabytes worth of entertainment content today that you will not be able to consume them all even if you can stay awake for 100 years non-stop. That was 5 or 6 years ago.
AAA executive: "You're still playing old stuff? You're not playing this brand new thing we just made?"
You should try making fun games again then i will give it a shot
@@fireworkstarterexactly, Im playing diablo 2 classic, im using my wii u to play virtual console games, AND ive still got all my old hardware, snes to wii. Ps1-ps2, xbox, xbox 360. The last of the genuine greats.
That sounds funny but also a serious issue. Another guy made a video on that, forgot who that was, as in why a publisher wants you to stop playing Shooterman 2 and move on to Shooterman 3.
and again the only ones not suffering from all this crap are pirates.
Just like the xkcd comic "Steal This Comic", except replace music with video games.
I don't think we have any solution for pirating always online stuff like The Crew.
@@i64fanatic WoW private servers are a thing so technically it would be possible, just not feasible
@@TheBackyardChemist Or desirable. Some games just aren't worth the effort.
You mean intelligent people?
I think it should be a requirement to make the Server Tools accessible once the official server service gets shut down
That would satisfy what many of the complaints.
Personally I hate the move from player owned servers to matchmaking. Like my friend a few years ago installed Battlefield 1942 and while it didn't have a lot of players or servers you were still able to find a game.
Plus with dedicated Servers it was always nice finding one where you had a good connection, with cool people on it, making friends and becoming a regular. The move to matchmaking has just made people more toxic, they don't need to worry about an admin kicking or banning them.
@@YTKeepsDeletingAllMyComments100%, Ive never liked matchmaking. Loved finding a few servers with good vibes and frequenting them.
@@TRDiscordian Yeah. I tried to go back to Team Fortress 2 and it just wasn't the same. I only played on a custom map server that had friendly fire enabled (sounds hectic but it helped improve my aim so much). We also had certain nights where we would all go sniper and have to take a shot if you got a headshot. I miss it, miss finding a cool server and becoming a regular on it.
@@YTKeepsDeletingAllMyComments heyyy my dad still plays battlefield 1942 regularly!!
Another example of this happened to me recently. I bought a copy of Super Smash Bros. for the 3DS only to find out it wouldn't work. From what I read, it seems a system update made it where the game would no longer work on the system. I ended up returning the game to the store.
20-25 years ago we didn't have to worry about consoles and handhelds requiring system updates. All the games just work on those systems.
If you go back far enough to when DOS, Amiga, ZX Spectrum were relevant, it could and still can be a headache to get them to work at all. Modern games at least fixed those issues mostly. But hey, the oldies are all still playable, while it's a dice toss for modern games.
Thank God piracy exists.
Har har!
For real… I know I’m getting old when I can actively remember a time when DRM did not exist and games were freely traded between friends.
I only wish piracy cost these companies half as much as they claim it does.
recently i asked on the steam subreddit about how to make games like half life 2 work on a windows XP mashine now that the support has been dropped
my post was promtly removed and i was swiftly banned from the subreddit for "promoting piracy"
merely for asking if there is a way to make these games work on the hardware that they came out on
Edit: please stop telling me about Linux, you are missing the point so hard it hurts my brain
I think G.O.G frequently does this for some games. They usually make them playable on new OS's too.
It is at least doable for HL2 and other source engine games, more of a worry for less popular and newer stuff on steam that may end up getting orphaned without the same workarounds and continued support
its a reddit moment they just assume things about you
That's just Reddit moderators
They probably assumed you voted for Trump.
I remember a time when you'd go to an arcade and your favorite game was simply replaced by a new one. Sometimes you'd never see the game again. That was something you had to live with it, until emulation brought them all back from the oblivion.
And now we're reliving this nightmare.
Only a problem if you don't have a crack
Interesting observation. 🧐 *nods*
You speak of emulation as though it's some new phenomenon.
It's been pretty common for oh say... 20 years now?
lmao nightmare chill
Arcades are quite fascinating. It's possible to switch between many different game versions on one cabinet. When an entire machine is removed, though, it's often very sad, because that game can't be played there any more.
If buying isn't owning, than piracy isn't stealing
Omg, how are you everywhere..
My lord. I don’t think I’ve ever had such an intense blast of nostalgia as when you showed Sim Theme Park. I haven’t thought about that for at least 20 years.
And then you showed Red Faction Guerrilla as well? You have good taste my friend.
“Don’t ask questions. Just consume product and then get excited about next product”
Jay Bauman
Red Letter Media
Your entire identity is based on consuming this specific product tho, its just the distribution method is whats in scrutiny.
@@pudznerath6532 the distribution method being scrutinised doesn’t exist in isolation though? Customers *are* still willing to pay, despite the gotchas and fine print details about withdrawal of service in the future. RLM are not wrong in this context.
@@pudznerath6532 Damn you don't get it
My pet peeve surrounding discussions with all the bad things around gaming is the people who plug their ears and repeat "I'm having fun though!" and "let people have fun!".
Seen a few of those weird individuals show up to defend blizzard after OW1 was killed off and OW2 was pushed with terrible microtransactions and battlepasses.
Like woah alright, go have your short-term fun at the expense of everything and let us talk about how horrible the publishers are. I'll never understand it. I guess maybe they feel as if pushback against shitty practices will somehow ruin their fun, which just makes zero fucking sense.
@@StereoBucket Those are the same people who don't care about throwing away money, and these often overlap with people who don't pay for stuff AKA teenagers who live with their parents still.
It would be great if similar to books, where a publisher has to send copies of the book to the Library of Congress, publishers of software had to put a copy of each release without DRM into a public library archive that is opened to the public after, say, 20 or 30 years.
That wouldn't be a full solution to digital decay but it would prevent a whole section of history from being effectively deleted.
Or force them to release a patch and to release their server software if it is a Multiplayer game
I know that piracy is wrong, but piracy is the reason why hundreds of video games have been preserved over the years. Ironic, isn't it?
They should all do what Carmack did with Doom and Quake and release the source code for the engines of games that became "old tech", and also design games that are not dependent on some service from the publisher.
You can still play the quake3 multiplayer on the dreamcast to this day because Carmack knew how to futureproof the game.
I think we agree on what they *should* do but we cannot expect all publishers to do that. Our legislators need to codify a reasonable minimum of what software publishers *must* do.
Unfortunately, Software is deemed copyright covered, not patent protected, and it's author's life+20 to some minumum years at present in the US, where much of the software is copyrighted.
We're now facing the consequences of capitalism + software as copyright. And even if the copyright law changed today, nothing already copyrighted would be affected.
The issues raised in the video aren't exclusive to games, but software as a whole. I appreciate efforts to raise awareness on these issues.
I loved how pausing didn’t take you to a menu, but actually pulled your character into a sanctuary where you could walk around, rearm, and observe your treasury.
The destruction of ownership of personal media is by design.
Can play any game overblown fear, internet keeps everything alive more or less.
That is why piracy is good. No matter what some middle class american say.
@@southcoastinventors6583 currently. Who knows what will happen if the copyright hoarders get their way.
@@SammEaterwhat’s funny is that “middle class” Americans will fight tooth and nail to defend their billionaire overlords.
@@southcoastinventors6583OK cool go play Overwatch 1. Go play any previous version of "live service" games. I'll wait
The future of gaming looks dark but the past has never looked brighter. You are exactly right when you mentioned that there is more than a lifetime's worth of classic games we can spend our time on.
Exactly my thought. It's like cinema: you can simply stop watching new movies and have a lifetime of enjoyment watching amazing past films, specially 90s ones.
@@persona83just watched Total Recall(1990) the other day. It was a fucking masterpiece. There really is a treasure trove of dope old school stuff
@@jaykelley103 Cool! Keep diggin' you'll find really great stuff.
I think the same but the golden age to me is 2000-2015 games and movies are just hard to get used to with outdated graphics and visual quality.
Last modern game I played was Elden Ring. Other than that, yeah, it's all been past releases. The future of gaming doesn't interest nor worry me at all.
I have photos of me finding a copy of the Sims Online being sold on a physical shelf, unsold, as of 2022. They finally removed it during renovations, or somehow sold it when I returned in 2023. the game died in 2008. I used to shop there all the time as a child for games, as it was the only place in the entire town that sold them there. I saw that copy of the game sitting there from 2005 till 2022, they also had a copy of Zoo Tycoon 2 there until around 2023,
Nailed it, man! I agree 100% about the decline of games and how corporate greed has greatly affected the quality of the user experience.
This is the end result when you let copyright holders dictate how protected works are preserved. I consider it *literal theft* in a way that copyright infringement can never be. It's theft from the eventual public domain that all works are supposed to enter.
Yeah. I refuse to play by their rules to be able to participate in our own damn culture. Everything is derivative. Everyone's ideas are tacked onto a previous idea someone else had. It's like they are using a ladder made of everyone else's cultural contributions then pull it up behind them.
lmao
Anyone who wants a copyright to commercialize a work that’s based on ideas from the public domain should in my opinion have to pay a licensing fee to the public for as long as they want to keep the privilege.
@@piercebros riveting and thought-provoking response bro
And the most deliciously ironic part? By committing literal theft, as you so adequately put it, these corporations are doing the very thing they accuse the pirates of doing. This is literally scorched earth levels of pettiness.
This is why I love buying older PC games on GOG as they remove DRM on majority of titles available & even allows you to download offline installers for the games you purchased through GOG.
GOG is the GOAT
@kylespevak6781 Sometimes, their sales can be even better than the ones Steam has!
GOG is cool but their service only supports modern computers. It's a crapshoot if any updates they may have had to apply to fix things for modern computers don't break it on computers the game was originally targeting.
Similarly, this ever shifting support puts the XP/ Vista/ Win7 computers I purchased my early GOG games on in a precarious position. I'm starting to wish I had kept multiple releases of my GOG installers instead of updating them over time. Only the latest installers are available for download. :(
GOG's business model definitely highlights the full potential of digital ownership. Being able to update your game and put it right back onto external storage. So it doesn't matter much if the game was released in a broken state.
The games are truly repairable.
I'm not sure if it was my bank or GOG but years ago when I tried GOG the transaction failed when absolutely nothing should have been amiss and I've just never looked back.
Is GOG really worth my wallet?
This video made me sub to your channel, you said the same thinng I told my friends for years, they all were saying "why do you have games on disks when can get them online and why aren't you OK with internet connection requirement because almost everyone has internet".
In the grand scheme of things, gaming subscription fees are basically a gaming tax.
"Torture for Windows Live" is a much better name
GFWL still works fine. Use it all the time for my achievement hunting. The service wasn't that bad, the pc community just likes to complain way too much
windows live more like George Orwell live
oh gods. I remember GfWL. Fallout 3 was buggy, true. But finding out a good half of it's performance issues was GfWL's achievement system still makes me sigh and laugh. ANd cry.
@@JJop123 ok , try to play Dirt 2 , try to play Need for speed Pro street or literally in the video Fable 3 . and there are many other games broken cause of it .
@@JJop123well, try and play the gfwl version of GTA4 then.
"Breaks social contract, acts indignant when folks go pirate", is indeed the Propellerheads/Reason labs way.
Great video! Thank you for that! I am greatly appreciate the effort and level of clarity of your speach and arguments.
People collecting Retro classic consoles and you my guy has collection of Retro PC of generations such of awesomeness and greatness, it's so rare to see someone make these kind of Lovely videos ❤ Thank you so much i hope you have a good day always!
It is not only a problem of computer games, but rather whole computer software.
One of the many reason I learned to code.
It's also a problem of principles, "Why offer support for ancient software if I can just retool it later and resell it?"
@@computernerd8157 I am seriously considering the same.
Starting to feel a bit like James Halliday ...
Lost Planet 2 was “de-listed” (page still exists but can’t be purchased) from Steam years ago because of GFWL, and Capcom just outright abandoned it.
While it’s still perfectly playable on both Xbox 360 and Xbox One (and probably PlayStation), it’s been unplayable for years on PC.
They claim they’ll keep us informed about their investigation about GFWL causing issues, but instead they left us in the dark and abandoned it.
Such a shame…
Scene groups released cracks for that game.
@@edstar83 did any of them ever fix the game not running on 6 and 8 core cpu's?
This is not entirely correct. It is still possible to install and play Lost Planet 2 if you already own it on steam. ..
HOWEVER... it is extremely fucky trying to install it and then play it if you're new to this. You have to manage installing GFWL on 2024, then make sure you have less than 9 physical cores active on your PC (yup, disable in bios!) Or it simply won't launch. And then when the game starts, you need to have already created a Microsoft account to sign into the gfwl window because you can't create a gfwl account through the game anymore.
THEN you have to wait several minutes for it to update because the progress bar is broken and will not display. Then you have to restart the game 2 or 3 times for the patches to download and install. FINALLY you can get into the game and saving will work, however if your Xbox account has ever changed its username from the original one you've had, you can no longer have working private lobby invites! Fantastic.
I still got it working. There is an actual patch you find in pcgamingwiki, where you just drop in a single file and it works. As for GFWL, Microsoft went about it an interesting way. If you still have the game in your library and run it, it needs the service. However, Microsoft turned the 'DRM' system into more of a peer to peer system. So instead of servers like it did back then and instead of relying on Steam servers or Steamworks, it uses peer to peer connection. So whoever is the host is the server.
There are literally guides on how to get set up, using Microsoft's official downloads of the program. Their literal last download of the program is the peer to peer version. They kept a server alive just for authentication reasons, but that's it and they are Microsoft. As long as Windows exist, that server exists. It contains all the GFWL games that needs keys. It would even take repeat keys as I installed Lost Planet 2 many times and used the same key that Steam gave me.
So yes, if you bought Lost Planet 2 on steam before they took it off buying it, you are lucky in that regard and I still enjoy playing it and it's nutso story that I have a guilty pleasure enjoying.
Oh, and to set up GFWL, download, run, sign in once, once you are at the 'empty' library page, exit, run game, sign into game with your xbox account or Microsoft account, enter key, authenticate, play.
This is one of the best videos I have seen on this issue. you break it down nicely for those that may not realise just how much of a problem this really is.
Also thank you for talking about this topic so literally and level headed. Most people make it come across like gaming is completely ruined but its just preserving them at this current time thats impossible
It's also revoking access to the games for paying customers. It's like if you put in quarters at an arcade machine then the owner pulls the plug before you can start. Repeat for millions of players.
Another issue are Steam games that only run on older versions of Windows. Since Steam no longer supports older Windows versions, these games (that you can still buy now) are completely unplayable legally.
I hear that compatibility layers on Linux maintain functionality even for some 16-bit applications
@@yalldrinktea Yeah, cause Linux Proton will preserve even the oldest games. It's the future.
@@yalldrinktea the wine 16/32 bit stack can be installed on windows machines to. look up wined3d.
What are some games like this?
@@DreamyAbaddonExcept that Proton doesn't work with my setup. Spent hours troubleshooting it and I can't even get games to launch.
WINE sometimes works, but God help you if you have a game that wasn't particularly popular, because it's going to be an unplayable mess.
Thank God for cracking scene
a shame we have to resort to that but at least its an option
@@jimiphillips1170it's legally questionable but at least it's preserved
It's only questionable if you didn't pay for the game otherwise I'd say you're totally entitled to hacking your games and making them playable forever on whatever hardware you have. There's no shame in it. If devs and publishers don't care about you or their games then why should you.
@@AJ-po6up Yes agree strongly on this. But what if a game is marketed cheap say $4.99 but is provided as SaaS then are you paying for a lease on the game but never actually own it so don't have the right to crack it for future use when the auth servers don't exist? Is this where it's all headed, so everyone will just play games via login terminal, via a browser?
The base Sacred game (without Underworld) uses a disk check for drm. The problem is that the drm version won't work on a 64 bit cpu, even though the game runs perfectly fine. Before they went bankrupt, I got approval from Ascaron to post in the forums about using a no-cd crack as a workaround. When Deep Silver took over, they started deleting my posts. Sad since at the time, adding the Underworld expansion solved the 32 bit drm issue and Sacred 2 had already been released.
0:19 Shelby, I LOVE how, in this follow-up video, you show the flux layout on the disk itself from HxC, AND how you say "extremely difficult" to duplicate, instead of impossible to duplicate...well said! We will be celebrating (and yes, duplicating!) this very flux layout on future disks thanks to YOUR work here!
Thanks for making a video on this.. We need to go back!
RIP The Chronicles of Riddick. A single player AMAZING action stealth game with DRM servers shut down in 2015.
Yup I'm still playing it today and assault of dark athena on PC. This is GoG by the way.
There is a crack. I'm replaying it recently.
Now I wish I had been able to play it. Sounds like my cup of tea
@@Nomadmandude Good news on that at least
You can still play it, mate. But you have to sail the seven seas for that, savvy?
Agreed. Not only should this be illegal, this should even be criminal. This is theft. This is fraud. And it's disgusting.
So happy to see you put light on this issue that has bothered me for quite some time.
And it's not just video games. It's software. It's hardware peripherals. It's happening to physical goods too, not just software.
WE DON'T OWN ANYTHING ANYMORE, even after straight buying them.
They know it is theft, sony is refunding "The crew" whenever asked after ubsoft delisted the game, just to escape the legal backlash that is coming.
The algorithm has blessed me with this fine channel this night in May.
I shall look forward to watching more
So much nostalgia and frustration in one video, excellent work!
One of the first UA-cam videos I watched was LGR’s review of Darkspore, a single-player ARPG spin-off of Spore. Since it’s was EA, they structured it like an MMO, so it was never “patched” by fans and I never got to play it because I didn’t have Internet until it was already offline. There’s a reason teenagers are actively moving towards retro games.
I do want to shout out Cyan Worlds, the guys who made Myst. They had an MMO-puzzle game called Uru Online in the 2000s, and after they had to take it offline they open sourced the servers and game for anyone to run their own servers. Incredibly cool of a developer to do, and anyone can still spin up an instance and play Uru Online today, along with making new content.
the game looked shit but the art style and soundtrack was amazing, would be worth playing again just for that.
Minor correction: Cyan Worlds has never open-sourced the server (and due to licensing, likely never will). They did open-source the client, but the servers are all written by us fans, and were made by reverse-engineering the protocol before the open-sourced client was even released.
Cyan runs an official server themselves, kept running by fan donations, and the client running on that server is now based on the Open Source client with improvements and new content submitted by fans. There are also numerous fan servers as well.
It is a great example of a company not letting the game die after their publisher pulled the plug on it.
I almost forgot about product keys.
I remember losing the product key for some of my games, but fortunately those didn't actually use a central server but rather just had a list of valid keys, so you could just use random keys from the internet.
I also had a disk that was damaged and could no longer install, but would still validate the DRM. So I pirated a copy and just didn't download a crack.
OMG. Your credits sequence is GENIUS!
great video, i was so bummed when the quake3 servers went away
It's insane that guild wars released in 2005, with no sub fee's and you can still play that original trilogy on those exact same original accounts.
Fuck them. NCsoft closed down city of heroes to get an extra couple of servers for Guildwars 2.
im still playing that game!
i no longer have my old account but bought the trilogy over steam last year and that worked out great
LF Runner to Droks
Good times
I'm still sad I got my account pirated in 2010. Lots of good memories of GW.
Well... Guild wars 2 is paying for that. If by chance that GW2 dies or GW3 ends up not as successful I'd start worrying.
I can't imagine how hard it would be trying to build a 90s 2000s computer
I am so glad I clicked on this video. I still have my Antec Super Lanboy case! It is currently where my home Linux server lives. Though, I did cut the blue LEDs out from the front fan.
Without piracy, i would literally only have experienced %10 of the games I've ever played either due to scarcity, DRM, or region locking.
Ive never understood why people have such moral qualms about pirating games that have not been in circulation for 10+ years, and publishers knowingly remove without giving a us legal way to experience them. Regular people “pirating” games and making them available to the public again have done more for preservation than companies ever can or will.
Shout out to magipack games and my abandonware ;)
I used to pirate games aggressively as a kid because we were poor. Years later, I’ve gone back and bought copies of games at full retail directly from the developers to make up for it. Piracy isn’t an issue of people wanting to steal, but being unable to obtain the game legitimately
@@Sentralkontrol The big issue is that loads of people do want to steal or simply think "yea, I can use my money elsewhere if I get a pirated copy". Quite a lot of games see a noticeable drop in sales when a pirated copy is released, even if it's a poor scene release. And the same happens with pre-orders when leaked copies get leaked, the drop and a notable number are cancelled.
I think the thought mistake a lot of "ludophiles" make is that the average consumer is like themselves, most of them aren't. The average consumers buys a shit load of microtransaction stuff, a lot of "ludophiles" don't. Same with piracy, the "ludophiles" often has no issue with purchasing a copy (though even there you get into murky "what ifs" but the average consumer doesn't. And are they buying all games they pirated? Probably not. Piracy was famously a giant issue on the DS for that reason, for the average consumer the options where "buy game for 40" or "buy R4 with SD card for 40 and download a bunch of games". And one option has a significantly higher bang for your buck.
Same with music, do you think that every kid with a 500MB MP3 player full of music fresh from Limewire in the mid 2000's bought all the music they regularly listened to? Realistically speaking, unless they became some audiophile, they more than likely never did. (more than likely they just ended up buying a subscription to spotify, at the cost of around 2 songs in the mid 2000's (1 song if you adjust for inflation) a month while in the modern era music piracy is significantly harder for the average consumer)
Craptendo has its ass so strict about playing 30+ years games on emulators that you would need a crowbar to pry open that ass
@@Sentralkontrol i used to do the same, now that i am a grown up and i have a job, i can afford to buy a game once in a while, but if the game in question is only single player and yet requires me to be online all the time, and everything unlockable is already on disc but requires me to pay, then to the high seas it will be
@@relo999but the other consideration is whether they'd have bought that piece of software to begin with. I'm sure there are lost sales but assuming every pirate was even a potential sale to begin with is a big assumption, some were and some weren't, estimating potential losses due to piracy is very murky territory. Though as far as lost sales are considered even publishers are only interested in preventing piracy in the launch window and in the weeks or months following it, more or less that financial quarter and at best that financial year, at least that's how companies like denuvo originally marketed themselves (first 100 days or whatever), I doubt removing the copy protection after that would impact their sales that much. It'd be great if there were some studies looking into drm free releases (gog release) and whether it increases piracy vs just having a drm riddled release.
Pirates: Not stealing
Publishers: Blatantly stealing
Legal system: Help people who are stealing, threaten people who aren't stealing
Depends on the publisher and gaming has never been cheaper so only problem for people who buy playable beta new games.
Sir is that Nox on your shelf. Nobody remembers that game. God I loved that game. I lost so much sleep playing multiplayer on dial up. I had to wait for no phone calls guaranteed.
Congratulations for the video man! That was really elucidating
I agree 110% with everything you said.
As a kid growing up in the late 90's/early 00's I've witnessed the sheer amount of greed in the games industry and witnessed the slow decline and death of gaming, but it's even worse, it's also music and movies/TV. Only difference is you can copy music/movies and TV,
But without a risky, potentially malicious crack you cannot play or copy your games. And like you said as soon as those games went to online only they were running on borrowed time, with a guaranteed death sentence.
Modern gaming is a disgrace.
Not only do you lose your games and you don't get a box, manual, disc, etc.. but now games also release completely broken or unfinished with the promise of being better in the future... After you pay more money.
That would've been inconceivable in the previous decades! No one would've bought the damn game if it came in a buggy, unfinished state. People would've returned it instantly or sued.
In the previous decades buying a game meant you bought a fully-functional, fully playable, fully ownable game, that you could enjoy as long as you lived and it could even outlive you. Now some games are lucky to survive even a year! Insane to think about.
We truly live in the generation of "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy" how dystopian and 1984 of us... And the bigger problem is that younger generations born into this can't be F*cked to care because they've been slowly taught to accept this and that it's normal.
We don't know how good we had it, but we do know how absolutely warped and greedy the industry has become.
It's truly heartbreaking to bear witness to.
you are right, except in the 1990s ms-dos and windows games were already buggy at launch very often. I have a bookcase full of old PC and Amiga magazines from those years where the reviewers complain about the unplayable state of tons of games. So you are bit too optimistic here.
However, if you bought the game a few months later you would usually get a working version, as the publishers had to update it fast or risk not selling much , from bad reviews, these magazines were the only source of info for most gamers , before the internet
I'm sorry, I can't resist, but... Daggerfall. Good ol' Daggerfraud.
True DOS gaming classic. Buggiest game I ever loved. First one I played with mountains of essential patches, and those were not practical to get without internet.
Well said man. I've felt this way for at least a decade. I'm literally stuck on 360 / ps3 / old PC games because I plain refuse to shovel my hard earned money into black holes like games as a service such as these.
There's just no love from the developers any more, it's pure toxic greed and I'm done with it.
Well, games degrading to online only subscription/microtransaction based service is a logical conclusion of making games for profit, as that is currently the "best" (highest ROI) way to monetize games.
Also, I don't know how widespread it was, but you likely heard of a horror from 00s: starforce. Modern DRMs just can't compare, and to be frank, good riddance.
Support GOG. All GOG games are DRM free.
Having fully set-up ready to go multiple period correct machines on dedicated space is so cool.
Agreed.
Pretty sure you would love my retro game room, got pretty much every popular console from 1977-2001 hooked up to a big widescreen CRT, few switches to flick and your ready to play whatever.
@@theTF2sniper You're right. In the meantime, I will be at a local retro-gamer event on May 5th. Keep preserving the game culture!
Shoutout to Capcom for their mobile game Mega Man X Dive which ran on free-to-play and when they eventually shut down, they rereleased it as a separate paid purchase that runs entirely offline.
It is the best way to save it? Probably not at all, but its an effort that was made at all and at this point, its more than a lot of others are doing.
Perfectly said. Thanks for bringing the issue to light
As an active PC player in the 90s and 2000s, I was warning people of this shit as soon as it started being rolled out, but nobody cared back then.
Unfortunately a lot of people that play games only care about newer releases. Once the new shiny thing comes out they completely forget about the stuff that came before.
A lot of people cared, there just wasn't anything you could do about it, except not to buy. And that was never really an option.
They still wouldn't care now, too many people only care about now. And want to just play now, then maybe they'll care about preservation later
Maybe wearing the sandwich board with the doom of DRM spelled out, and running up to random people, waving your hands and yelling in their face was not the right way to do it.
I did the same but I was told get with the time grandpa. We get the industry that the mass deserve.
Switched from Win7 to Linux last summer when Big Steam forced my hand and suddenly discovered built in emulation support for every generation in the packaged software manager. I went from barely being able to run PSX on windows to running PS3 discs in the drive on Linux with the same hardware. Suddenly my online libraries started looking a lot smaller and more restrictive compared to my extensive physical library of dump-able carts and discs.
Hey, that’s great! I heard not all PC BD drives like PS3 discs so that part is a big bonus.
That multi power tap just gave me huge nostalgia trip. RIP dad
Legally questionable third party tools from sketchy websites are my favourite kind of party tools.
One of the DRMs is documented to kill CD/DVD drives, the company denies it of course, but my DVD drive died after playing that game. The problem was attempting to read sector 0, if I remember correctly.
StarForce. There's a damn good reason a lot of people hated those Russian fraudsters.
Starforce?
What game? Why not name it?
@@AliciaGuitar The DRM is called StarForce. I dunno what happened to my comment above, but this is the DRM he refers to. It's completely incompatible with modern HDDs and SSDs, as it attempts to block SATA drives from functioning.
StarForce's developers were infamous for attempting to force people to use their DRM. They once posted a pirate site link to a GalCiv 2 torrent after Stardock rebuffed them.
Among the games that had StarForce were Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, GT Legends, Xpand Rally, and pre-2.0 versions of X3: Reunion.
That's also why I buy games on GOG. No DRM is awesome, I can archive games as I want. Sadly, GOG library doesnJt contain all games.
I wish gog did something with its offline installers and made them easier to download. Having to download 20 4GB binary files to install cyberpunk is tedious. I think Galaxy can queue them but I use linux and thus have to use solutions not made by cdpr (Lutris allows me to queue and install offline installers)
GOG still tries to force you thru the launcher system, makes features such as multiplayer unplayable without it, and many of the games in GOGs library are, as the name implies, old games that can already be bought second hand.
The offline versions are often stuck at versions that dont have updates to fix bugs either.
They should just go back to the way things were. Release the physical game and online patches.
@@user-oj7uc8tw9r You missed a huge point in the video. Games being physical changes nothing because they can still contain an online DRM.
Also, for all its faults, GOG is still the best option we have and is still measurably better for game preservation on PC than any other storefront currently available.
@@ChadVulpes I didnt miss a huge point at all. That is pretty much what I said. What is the point of preserving a buggy, unpatched version?
Yeah its better, but it suffers from the same problems. Digital storefronts are the problem.
Physical actually changes a lot because it prevents publishers from forcing you to buy a game at a certain place and it gives you a fighting chance to revive the game because all the files are on the media in theory.
@@user-oj7uc8tw9r GOG can't solve the issue for all IPs, some copyright holders are just cancer. Go easy on GOG.
Thank you for talking about this very important issue!
An amazing rundown of digital restrictions management!
Tech tangents really living up to the name on this one.
You’re right, the way modern games and even games consoles become obsolete because they can’t phone home is crap.
As he said it's been an issue since the 2000s. One game I love, Dirt 2, is impossible to play outside of Piracy just because of Windows For Live
Crack these single player games. That is the ONLY solution. Or find a solution to be able to sue the game companies because they have stolen money from the people buying them.
they settle pay everyone 2$ and keep doing it.
Sorry but you agreed to the terms upon purchase. Read the fine print! Yes they are sucky terms but law is law. That's not holding up in court
@@OzzyTheGiant Laws can change tho.
@@DreamyAbaddon And they should change the law, but hearing someone complain about something they agreed is like hearing a child throw a tantrum. It's hypocritical to both buy a game and agree to these terms, and then throw a fit about the terms. I don't understand how parents failed to correct this behavior at an early age. None of these complainers would ever survive my mother.
@@KonglomeratYT You should probably keep up with the times. Check out all of the work Louis Rossman does showing how frequently corporations are pushing updates bricking software/hardware if you refuse to accept the new terms. So you buy a product -> use product -> there's an update that says you can't sue them or they can sell all of your data > you say no > you no longer have product. And if you were to buy said product, you wouldn't even be able to see those terms before opening the box and setting things up and installing.
You're choosing the wrong hill to well actually people on, the future is looking real bad right now.
there's also something to be said about games with such obscure DRM code that they ONLY work on the OS it was released for.
Scrapland is one notable example, the DRM was so obscure and intricate that it only works on Windows XP, unless you can manage to track down the community patch that removes the DRM check then it will work just fine even on win 11
Thank you for spreading this message!
15:40 - I've been living this life since 2000. Three retro PCs, a Genesis and a NES at home. Thousands of hours of entertainment so long as I can keep the hardware going.
I have never seen a dead NES (seen hundreds, i own 7)😊 they will live longer than us
@@JonasWEBnorge They last a long time true, but not forever. Silicon does degrade over time, takes decades, but there will be a day when the last working nes dies, same thing with the game carts. Same with games on CD, you have "disk rot". Over time the disk layers degrade and become un-readable, its already starting to happen to games from the PS1/Sega Saturn era. Of course the upside to that is CD images are easy to make, so old games like that are all over the internet and can be used in emulators or just burned to a new disk to be played again.
@@jonesy7650 I actually think that it can be preserved by encapsulating the boards in epoxy. Anyway, it will for shore outlive any online service
Who cares about the original hardware dying… we have endless preservation with flashcarts coupled with roms and Analogue systems that kick out widescreen perfection for almost all of the major retro systems.
They’re working on the N64 atm, and that only leaves the Saturn and the Dreamcast left to be redone.
The NES, SNES, Genny, SMS, GBA (all three of ‘em), and the TG 16/PC Engine have been redone.
Retro will never die.
@@ghfjfghjasdfasdf That's not the retro experience - putting in the carts repeatedly, the feel of the original gamepad - what you're promoting is a lightweight alternative, an incomplete substitute to the full experience. You can have your spam and decaf, that's on you, I'll take the bacon and arabica beans.
well said. Gaming has always been the centermost aspect in my life. I live in a place far from a town in the middle of the mountains and my only internet options are dial-up and satellite. I tried satellite but not once ever got my computer to connect. I don't even get cell service at my house. I've been nearly completely ostracized from my favorite hobby. It takes a lot of time for me to take my desktop somewhere an hour away, to set it back up again, install games that I purchased, and set it back up at my house, only to be unable to play them because I need to connect to a server to boot up. Even after I launched the game where there was internet so it could read the keys, suddenly I can't anymore.
I know you probably tried, but Starlink is amazing
....Was it a struggle to watch this video? Genuine question
@@netherworldfiend I use my phone to watch UA-cam when I'm in service.
@@netherworldfiend I use my phone to watch UA-cam when I'm in service.
You're living around mountains and you really made gaming the one hobby you have...there's much more you'd be able to do there that doesn't require computers.
Great video.
You bring up some very important points. We need to advocate for better laws to protect the consumer.
Fantastic video. Definetely didn't know about this.
I love video games as an experience, but I respect them as a massive collection of human effort. There is something disgusting about taking the distillation of years of peoples lives and tossing it in the bin for the sake of profit
This has been happening for years in the mobile game space too. So many old iOS and Android games delisted, or their CDN/auth servers indefinitely shut down with zero recourse.
For me this was call of duty zombies RIP
I bought a couple final fantasy games that I can't play anymore on mobile because they were replaced with the pixel remasters. I wouldn't mind playing those instead, but I don't feel like paying for them again for some mysterious reason :/
gameloft and glu games, lots of MMOs, DRM protection for older version of the game etc.
what a mess...
I signed the UK petition whilst watching this. A few days ago I actually made a list of all my steam 'linux ISOs' with the intention of getting alternate copies. I'll just be keeping them archived on an HDD. It's a shame that the linux iso version of a game tends to have better service, especially single player - which I normally play.
Thanks for reminding me how much I loved the big boxes PC games used to come in
The most hilarious part of DRM in the 2000s to me? The fact that many steam releases of these games are taken directly from pirates who cracked the originals. DRM is such a hassle that even the original publishers can't be bothered to pay devs to remove it.
Rockstar
Is that why there's a release of Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 on steam? I still have the disc version but I was so happy to see it on steam I actually paid full price for it.
This one hit pretty hard. As a teenager I was a rampant pirate, spending what little money I had on the hardware. once I had a "Proper Job", I was quite happy to go and get a physical game. the current hotness was GTA IV. I spent a whole afternoon trying to get it working. It was current, all the servers were up, I paid full price, with a physical copy in hand, and I just could not get it to authenticate. I finally gave up, went and found a torrent with a crack, and was into the game in about 30s. Strangely enough, thats about when I gave up on PC gaming.
I found the sweet spot to be targeting consoles that were 2-3 generations behind, old enough to be stupidly cheap yet plentiful, but not so far to be 'nostalgic retro' expensive. I lucked out and started collecting Xbox 360 titles about a month before Covid lockdowns hit, the going rate for a game was about $3. during lockdown prices skyrocketed, but I had a big box full by then. I went through more AA batterys then than when a gameboy was my main gaming platform...
That's funny because Rockstar games are what ruined PC gaming for me too. They always seemed flaky and hit and miss if they would even run.
Xbox 360 was truly one of the last great offline friendly consoles. As a long time PC gamer, it's kind of interesting to have one in the collection now. It stole so much AAA developer attention from the PC.
I gave a hacked PS3 to my cousins around the same time, they absolutely loved it!
The only modern games they seem to like are Fortnite and Minecraft, both run on phones now anyway.
Fantastic video, i have been trying to preserve my PC gaming collection i have gathered over the years and the amount of bullshit i have had to deal with when it comes to Safedisc, Securom, Starforce etc just to back up my discs has been a headache. Video game preservation when it comes to the PC platform is in a horrible state.
Ultima Online is still up and running since 1997. Subscription service works.
It should be illegal to define purchasing a game as purchasing a temporary license.
The gaming version of 'You Will Own Nothing, And Like It.'
All my old EA, Steam and Rockstar games, Bethesda, are in the cloud now, same key !
This guy ?
@@lucasrem😢 I am that you chose to do hard drugs, CAUSE WTF DID YOU EVEN TYPE?
@@lucasrem You need to get checked for brain damage
Great video, very informative. Though, I'm going to be real with you, chief--
I would really like to know where i can get one of those hats.
Cheers dude. Been worried about this for ages. I understand why they have DRM but my Switch collection is gonna have problems in ten to twenty years time.
This is exactly why I'm glad that I grew up with DOS/Win9x games... it can be a bit of work making them run sometimes, but they work. Outside of very rare and unique situations, I've not found a 90s PC game that I can't make run today on a modern PC (even if it requires a VM).
I feel bad for younger folks who might want to revisit their 00s or later games that they grew up with and find that those games may simply not exist anymore, or are so broken now that they may as well not exist. To me, half of the joy of gaming is revisiting the stuff you played as a kid.
The original Bioshock has the same issue, activation servers which are no longer online. Thankfully workarounds exist, as well as a DRM free version from Humble Bundle. But my steel book copy is essentially a glorified paper weight.
So Wise , Thank You . Now to check my collection
This has me concerned. I have a huge backlog of games(hundreds) that I bought on steam so if steam ever goes away, I could be screwed. I try to keep all of my games up to date on a machine where I can in theory play them offline but a lot of newer games won't work offline so it seems almost pointless.
That's why I buy games only on GOG since more than 10 years, or so. If you don't collect physical games, that's ok not to buy those, but if it is digital, than I want to be able to archive it and play in 20 years. The point is, that those games need to be archived for the case, that GOG shuts down the download services.
I also generally only buy games off GOG and I keep a local copy of all my GOG games. As decent as GOG seems to be, they are not going to stick around forever or new management may decide to mess it up somehow.
Problem is the archived versions are often not updated versions unless you tie the game to the launcher.
@@user-oj7uc8tw9r that's no different from how it used to be right? Two decades ago you had to download the patches from the site of the publisher. Just like how you can now download the patch files from GOG if you wish to update. No launcher needed.
@@user-oj7uc8tw9r There are patches available for download on GOG to update any games you install without the launcher. The same as games distributed on physical media are updated through patches you manually download from the website of the publisher.
The launcher comes with the bonus of being able to update the games automatically.
@@user-oj7uc8tw9r There are patches available for download on GOG to update any games you install without the launcher. The same as games distributed on physical media are updated through patches you manually download from the website of the publisher.
The launcher comes with the bonus of being able to update the games automatically.
World of Warcraft does not need online servers to run. One can make his/her offline server and run it at home. If they want to try it. My father ran one (LAN only)for the whole building we lived in. 256 homes. About 50 people playing. But he passed away 6 years ago, so his server was shut down.
But it does require tremendous effort to get the server to be accurate to the original experience. Most older expansions have really good open source server cores now but I'd say anything after wrath of the lich king is pretty hit or miss (other than in closed source private servers).
@@erxer1 my father was a programmer and he was a professional server maker, too. He tweaked and played the server day and night to make it work flawlessly.
This would enter the "legally questionable 3rd party software from sketchy sources" territory. Unless Blizzard releases the server source code/binaries which as far as I know they didn't. Yes it would be reverse engineering which is legal, but the point is that the companies would rather have their games die with them or have the option to kill them at will than allow existing customers to keep using them even out of support
thats becouse people have managed to code there own servers for warcraft. some games do live on that way but other the makers will shut you down for trying. city of heros is a good example. it was not untill this year 2024 ncsoft finnly let a server be a thing again. a game that died in 2012.
@@gogereaver349 our server was not public. Only in our house between the friends and family. About 50 players.
I was in Walmart a few years ago and I saw a copy of City of Heroes on the shelf. This was about 5 years after the servers closed down
Most online DRM games were cracked already, usually hours after release. So if the publisher drops authentication server due to running costs for your legitimate copy of game, you can use such a crack...
Spore was the most pirated game for a long time not because it was great, but because its DRM was a nightmare. Last SimCity game forced "always online" DRM, which didn't work because EA didn't have enough servers working. And they claimed there is no way to play it offline, until someone made offline crack - then EA released a patch for it.
Also literally an hour ago I purchased Bulletstorm Full Clip Bundle for 3 bucks...
the guy that cracked the online drm has been gone for like a year.