Humble Bundle, Steam, and most app stores solve these problems for gaming.
Still, there's another unit of currency in play that the app stores and subscription services don't offer. It's $VPO or Value of Proud Ownership and it's a currency you get instead of spend. You only get $VPO from buying while these centralized stores are more like renting.
I've written many times that the desire and ability to own something is an inherent motivation to buy it. If I like the band and the album, I buy the cd-or-equivalent because I want to own it. And to own means investing in something that belongs to you to the degree that you can resell it. That's my tribute to the creators, because it's human nature to try to liken yourself to what you admire. Owning a copy is flattery. Even owning a pirated copy is flattery because the price isn't a major factor there: owning it is.
I've been playing games in this decade that I bought in the 90's. Granted, I use an emulator and I often download, from abandonware sites, the ports most suitable for my emulator: I might have originally bought the game for Amiga but now I'm playing the PC version under DOSBox. Other games I've salvaged in time from 3.5-inch disks to my hard drive as images. But I still own the games I bought and nobody has taken it away from me.
This is why I'm not into app stores either.
While I might be a hermit retrogamer and certainly not a fan of the bleeding edge releases, and while I realize that for many people services like Steam might be a exact best solution, the underlying fundamentals don't change. There's a significant motivation factor buried in it.
If I really loved a game made this year I would want to buy it, not rent it. If I smelled it's a classic I would want to be able to play it in an emulator in the 2030's or even later. This means I need an "internet-age hardcopy", i.e. something that I can stash somewhere and unpack later for use with an emulator or original hardware. This would not be possible when I can't be sure any of the app stores is online after the next five years. This is the same reason Spotify doesn't speak to me at all.
They have figured these additional costs out - they sell old games (ans some new games - mostly their own ) on-line like Steam, but without any DRM, and with nice installer and preconfigured dosbox when needed. So you can redownload the game any time, and because there's no DRM - you can make copies/use the game on many computers, etc.
So the cost in four currencies is sth like
5-10 USD + 0.1 $T + 0.1 $P + 0 $I
You're pretty rare. I don't know of anyone who would still play ancient games or abandonware. The closest thing that I know of are people who still keep the Dreamcast, and I can count how many times they've played it over the last 10 years: 0. I don't feel that $VPO is a cost for most gamers as long as they can still access their game within at most a 5 year period. I would also argue that with services like Steam, players will be able to access their games for a longer period of time after changing machines.
Isn't $VPO equivalent to the situations where the author stated that you might have -$I, that is the value of proud ownership is a credit to your integrity?
Still, there's another unit of currency in play that the app stores and subscription services don't offer. It's $VPO or Value of Proud Ownership and it's a currency you get instead of spend. You only get $VPO from buying while these centralized stores are more like renting.
I've written many times that the desire and ability to own something is an inherent motivation to buy it. If I like the band and the album, I buy the cd-or-equivalent because I want to own it. And to own means investing in something that belongs to you to the degree that you can resell it. That's my tribute to the creators, because it's human nature to try to liken yourself to what you admire. Owning a copy is flattery. Even owning a pirated copy is flattery because the price isn't a major factor there: owning it is.
I've been playing games in this decade that I bought in the 90's. Granted, I use an emulator and I often download, from abandonware sites, the ports most suitable for my emulator: I might have originally bought the game for Amiga but now I'm playing the PC version under DOSBox. Other games I've salvaged in time from 3.5-inch disks to my hard drive as images. But I still own the games I bought and nobody has taken it away from me.
This is why I'm not into app stores either.
While I might be a hermit retrogamer and certainly not a fan of the bleeding edge releases, and while I realize that for many people services like Steam might be a exact best solution, the underlying fundamentals don't change. There's a significant motivation factor buried in it.
If I really loved a game made this year I would want to buy it, not rent it. If I smelled it's a classic I would want to be able to play it in an emulator in the 2030's or even later. This means I need an "internet-age hardcopy", i.e. something that I can stash somewhere and unpack later for use with an emulator or original hardware. This would not be possible when I can't be sure any of the app stores is online after the next five years. This is the same reason Spotify doesn't speak to me at all.