Since he spent Euros, he must be somewhere on the EU. This is a GDPR violation and I bet he can reach actual people that are able to help by mailing their GDPR legal contact.
That's a compelling argument (or for how it should be but I bet it isn't) for local play I suppose, but surely the volume's in online multiplayer, where physical media really doesn't save you because you're reliant on server etc. anyway.
(And arguably why not download the game assets or whatever if you're going to necessarily play connected anyway.)
This has nothing to do with physical vs "digital" (CDs are digital anyway), but with owning. CDs can have DRM and only work with keys from whitelisted systems that might even have to authenticate online or trigger a time bomb and wipe their keys and downloads can be in a DRM free format that can be copied, archived and played on any capable device forever.
How're they gonna do that to an offline system like the PS2 or NES? Why should I simply just give up the rights I had on those systems because Sony and Microsoft want more money?
Modern disks are not the same as PS2 and NES disks. The difference between owning something and not owning it is not whether it's on a dedicated physical medium. The PS2 disks are irrelevant to Sony's decision to discontinue disks for future consoles.
Disks with games you own have already been discontinued. Arguing about the format (disk vs downloads) is a distraction.
People don't understand the difference. They talk about preservation, without acknowledging that a PlayStation can refuse to play a disc if servers say so.
That PS thing is so dumb. People really have trouble letting go of the illusion they've been living under for a long time now. Those disks might as well be random hunks of garbage. It be hilarious if PS starting shipping old AOL CDs from a dump instead. They'd probably be more useful and help reduce landfills.
Remember 15 years ago PSN was down for between 24 and 76 days (depending on region). But that stuff will never happen again. Nope... never ever again! It is bullet proof just like everything else online.
Personally I would much rather Google delete my files than hand them to an attacker. I can restore them from a backup. Tech companies need to do better at encouraging users to keep their own local backup alongside the cloud one.
#2 This is the personal version of what europe is going through now, with the realization that those cloudy cloudy services may be convenient, but don't bet your life on one.
Keep a local backup!!!
In fact, local backup first, with the cloud as a backup of your backup.
I could understand locking the files. Having this compromised would be devastating and you should have a backup of them elsewhere.
But locking the games out is unacceptable since you can not back these up and they are not sensitive data. At the very least Microsoft should either offer a new account with all the purchases included, or a full refund.
Back in college, I did a hackathon where I striped data across different clouds like OneDrive and Dropbox so that even if one of the providers went down you would still be able to recover your data. Had the additional benefit of no single provider being able to read your files because none of them had the full data set.
Ended up not pursuing it but every time I see a story like this I think I should have.
I truly hope you get this resolved if it is at all salvageable. The more stories I hear like this the less I am inclined to do any kind of backups with these companies because they are notorious for not giving a single fuck.
Have a TrueNAS server at home with a bunch of drives in a RAID-Z array. Backups go there. My pictures, which are probably my single most important item, are also there but get cross-backed up to a very good friend’s NAS in a different city. And his to mine.
My wife’s backups also go on BackBlaze because she would be much, much, much less tolerant of a local glitch than I would.
TL;DR local-first backups here. Time Machine makes it trivial except when it falls on it face and has to start over. Highly recommended if you can put up with replacing a hard drive every few years.
Yeah, of course you should keep your own backups of important files, but we’re in a time that tech companies—including Microsoft—are causing hardware prices to skyrocket.
Price out a beefy home NAS in 2023 prices vs today. It’s absurd.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 35.8 ms ] thread(And arguably why not download the game assets or whatever if you're going to necessarily play connected anyway.)
Disks with games you own have already been discontinued. Arguing about the format (disk vs downloads) is a distraction.
This amounts to "We deleted all your data in order to keep it safe." WTF.
#2 This is the personal version of what europe is going through now, with the realization that those cloudy cloudy services may be convenient, but don't bet your life on one.
Keep a local backup!!!
In fact, local backup first, with the cloud as a backup of your backup.
But locking the games out is unacceptable since you can not back these up and they are not sensitive data. At the very least Microsoft should either offer a new account with all the purchases included, or a full refund.
Ended up not pursuing it but every time I see a story like this I think I should have.
My wife’s backups also go on BackBlaze because she would be much, much, much less tolerant of a local glitch than I would.
TL;DR local-first backups here. Time Machine makes it trivial except when it falls on it face and has to start over. Highly recommended if you can put up with replacing a hard drive every few years.
Price out a beefy home NAS in 2023 prices vs today. It’s absurd.
Like, do people have to learn in such a needlessly painful manner?