I was surprised to come back to my XBOX account after 10 years in the US and see that very old digital purchases from previous console generations were not only still available, but actually playable on the latest console through transparent emulation! They did a pretty good job with that.
Whatever you think about Microsoft, they are a good steward of their platforms and go to extremes to maintain backwards compatibility -- even if they are always moving your cheese in the UI.
Except for the hundred thousands if not millions of people who lost their Minecraft account due to the way Microsoft handled multiple successive account migrations, also including the many accounts that were stolen due to lax security.
And since digital ownership legislation is a joke consumers have pretty much no recourse.
Beat me to it. I am still incredibly salty about losing my “lifetime” license to Minecraft. I really am curious to see some of the changes that have happened since I last played (when still owned by Notch), but I refuse to repurchase it.
Or when they decided to wipe people's Hotmail accounts. Now some random person has my original hotmail that I had since the 90s through to the 2010s... Presumably, this person now indirectly has a ton of my original accounts for different services I can no longer access... thanks Microsoft.
Haha, I was one of these people. I'm unreasonably salty about this (given the monetary loss is not high and I got a lot of playtime out of the game back then), especially because I also had one of those Alpha keys unused as well!
You know, all those people making new n64, playstation, and gameboy titles might be onto something. Apart from steam, I don't think I've heard anything but bad news from modern consoles.
Talk to console gamers and they still think the PC is sweaty and playing on the PC is like putting your hands in the toilet. I mean, I remember the 1990s when kids were playing flight simulators with this huge plastic joysticks that were always falling apart and needed to be calibrated every five minutes. It's not like that anymore, with Steam Big Picture and either an XBOX ONE or PS4/5 controller your PC is a better console.
The main problem is that, ex. the Steam Controller, nobody can make a decent game controller except for console vendors and when the console vendors go down somebody will have to step up.
I just can't believe the PS5 has sold as many units as it has with just 15 exclusive games, many of which are remakes, even remakes of remakes. That reputation that the PC platform is too sweaty has taken a long long time to die and it doesn't help that ACER and such are coming out with handhelds that are maximum sweat (boot into a Windows Desktop with 10x too small fonts) compared to the consumer electronics experience of the Steam Deck.
> The main problem is that, ex. the Steam Controller, nobody can make a decent game controller except for console vendors and when the console vendors go down somebody will have to step up.
I used to only play on DualShock 4s and even skipped the DualSense because I just loved my DualShock that much.
I use an 8bitDo now and it is better in every way I care about. 8bitDo does not make consoles.
>Talk to console gamers and they still think the PC is sweaty and playing on the PC is like putting your hands in the toilet.
Eh, as someone who owns and plays on both pc and console, the simple truth of the matter is that playing on console is, for the most part, better 'bang for the buck'. You can reliably purchase a console and a budget linux laptop and both will reliably fill their respective niches for the next decade. PC gaming, in my experience, requires a much higher budget, and this was even before the modern pricing madness.
Consoles also had much wider support for couch coop than PC did, so it was a more social experience, and to be blunt, PC gaming has a pretty bad problem with cheating that I simply never experienced on console.
Like I said, I play and enjoy both. I can afford to do so now, but I do feel bad for teens today because even consoles are getting crazy expensive.
> Apart from steam, I don't think I've heard anything but bad news from modern consoles.
Gabe is in his mid 60s, I'm prepared that in the next decade or so there will be a change of guard at Valve and the slow train of enshittification will get moving.
P.S. There's been a lot of groupthink and bandwagoning for Valve, ignoring all the dirt under the rug. But at the end of the day, by comparison, they are the best behaving in the field.
The company that gave up making games because there was more money to be had from inserting itself as a middleman into a previously open platform does not deserve any adoration.
Honestly, there's never been a better time to be writing games for those platforms. The SDK's are much improved from the proprietary stuff available at the time and the hardware is very well understood. People have been pulling off some utter witchcraft on the N64.
The N64 is never going to get any faster, and emulators can run on just about any potato these days. People have realistic expectations of what the platform can do, so there's no need to spend insane effort making the graphics look better. It's always going to look kinda crappy, and that is Just Fine.
This lets game developers focus on the actual gameplay itself. No "Generic Shooter vol. 26 - now with slightly prettier water!", but innovative stuff focusing on the narrative and on novel gameplay elements.
Kaze and James Lambert are amazing. Kaze's new Mario game looks better than a first party Nintendo title, and James's engines pushes the console to its absolute limits.
I've been thinking about giving it a go myself. It's such a fun and nostalgic console, and the limitations are fun constraints.
The code archeology is really cool too. Seeing Rare's Dinosaur Planet boot up and play after being a lost title. Decompiling all the original titles. Building sequels to Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. It's such a fun scene.
Then there's Analogue 3D and ModRetro too, which make it fun to play as physical hardware.
While Microsoft may not be as bad on this as Sony so far, they have certainly shown a willingness to revoke access to digital games. For example- in an effort to push users to the newer fifa titles with microtransactions, they quietly removed the ability to redownload purchased digital copies of older fifa games. For anyone who might've temporarily uninstalled the game to free up space, there was suddenly no way to get the game on your machine again.
I'm not in the EU, but had 2 accounts with Sony/Playstation (I'm pretty sure both sat unused for more than 3 years). I tried to delete one and it seemed impossible. The FAQ said to call support. I called, waiting for 45 minutes, and they said they couldn't help me and hung up before I could respond.
While I believe they would delete a user's games, I don't know if they would actually willingly give up holding on to customer data.
My guess is this is more of a CYA incase they want to clean up accounts at some point, rather than something they actively do.
I am not sure, but I feel that many of these "Sony bad" type of conversations appear close to something unfavorable being discussed about Xbox. Am I imagining it? The Playstation issue discussed here is certainly not new, but the timing is interesting.
Closing inactive accounts in the EU is due to (interpretation of) certain provisions set in the GDPR (e.g. article 5 - https://gdpr-info.eu/art-5-gdpr/) and Sony is not alone, many services in the EU automatically close and delete orphaned accounts after a given amount of time, and if they are international ones even when they don't outside of the EU.
If implemented correctly the affected person is also warned/notified several times by email before this is going to happen, so you have enough time to log in at least once and prevent it (and also extend the time frame again).
The problem with email is that it's an email address from 3+ years ago, which means there's a much higher chance of it being out of date - are you still using XxCoolDude67xX from high school?
Consoles area also marketed heavily towards older teenagers and younger adults, who are exactly the ones unlikely to maintain a consistent email address.
And of course if your email provided decides to cut you off, or goes out of business, or you used a university email...
Those articles don't require deletion in this case, in my non-lawyer opinion. There is still a purpose to keeping the user's personal information here. Sony needs that information to be able to grant the user access to the content they bought.
There's a difference here between an account that hasn't been used and doesn't hold anything of value and an account like this that holds items that were bought.
Good, customer data should be a liability and they should be incentivized to delete it as early as feasible, or not store it at all when possible. It's your data, not theirs.
And consumers will cry about it for about 5 minutes, then go back to reward the company.
When HP started making printer cartridges that expired even when they were still full, people complained—then bought more.
When Microsoft let the web stagnate with IE6, people complained, then turned around and did the same thing with Chrome.
When Apple deliberately put a bug in the iPhone that caused the Home button to fail, pushing people to buy the next model, people got upset—and then bought the next one anyway. I'm amazed nobody remembers that one; it was such a huge deal at the time. And there is not a single link to articles about it anymore.
When Adobe switched to mandatory Creative Cloud subscriptions, plenty of users protested, but most professionals stayed.
When Amazon remotely deleted books from people's Kindles (including 1984), it was a scandal for a month, and then... nothing.
When we found out PRISM existed, users were worried for a few months, then went right back to filling those platforms with their personal data.
When Google allowed fraudulent DMCA takedowns, shut down accounts with no appeal, and censored its search engine, there was a brief outcry, then it was back to business as usual.
When Sony put a bloody ROOTKIT on its music CDs (!!!!), people grumbled for five minutes and kept giving them money.
These companies have no reason to stop. We never make them regret anything.
I should make a website to save those for posterity, so that at least we have a track record of all the things they get away with because we let them.
Switch to Brother laser jet printers - I hear about them every time HP comes up, I've had mine for years, it is a lovely solution
Tons of people switched from IE6 to Chrome; IE is a dead browser. These days I'd recommend Firefox.
Is there something wrong with the iPhone as of today? It sounds like the bug got fixed in response to outcry, especially if they went and scrubbed all traces of the event - that seems like a good outcome?
Adobe stock is down almost 50% (42.24%) in the past year - I dare say a lot of people got sick of their shit. I have no clue what professionals use, but GIMP works fine for my amateur edits.
Like, c'mon, change very clearly does happen. It's just slow and uneven.
If you actually cared about change, I feel like you'd maybe list a few of the cool alternatives out there and actually help people make that transition. https://xkcd.com/1053/ - people do actually have to be taught about these things, not everyone knows what the alternatives are!
When Apple deliberately put a bug in the iPhone that caused the Home button to fail, pushing people to buy the next model, people got upset—and then bought the next one anyway. I'm amazed nobody remembers that one; it was such a huge deal at the time. And there is not a single link to articles about it anymore.
That one, I don't remember either. Are you sure you aren't confusing it with Batterygate?
But yes: point taken, these companies have absolutely no incentive to behave any better than they have in the past.
That is not how gdpr works. If you have a legitimate reason to hold the data. You can. Ensuring people have access to purchases is a very legitimate reason.
Is there evidence that European courts have sided with that? “We’re holding onto all your data indefinitely just in case you log in again several years from now” seems to be the antithesis of GDPR and I can’t discern the difference between that and what you’re suggesting.
I believe EU has dug their own hole here. And the best move would be to pass more legislation to explicitly require the retention (and transfer, ideally) of purchased digital goods.
> Is there evidence that European courts have sided with that?
Is there evidence of the contrary? Maybe any store can just delete your personal data right after charging your card and claim GDPR prevents them from shipping your product.
Silly arguments work both ways. You just picked the one that confirms your bias.
GDPR under no circumstances forces processors to delete everything, it defines legitimate interest. Retaining a person's purchases is as legitimate as it gets so the data can be retained for as long as the purchase is valid. And the license itself isn't even the user's personal data, it's just a license, so Sony could give the option to export that license to be used later - even in a cryptographically secure format that can only work if e.g. the account is created with the same email address. If they delete the personal data and throw out the baby with the water, it's not GDPR forcing them to do it.
No need to wait for the courts’ opinions: controllers must keep the data for a limited amount of time (which can be something like “3 years after the last connection”) under GDPR article 5(1)e.
> Personal data shall be: kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed. (..)
Note that this does not say "it must be stored for a limited amount of time" - it says "no longer than necessary".
Your basic account data (such as username and password, or an email for password recovery) is still necessary to log in to the platform and make use of your purchases. As long as there is no clear indication that the user will never log in again (such as due to death, or because they explicitly deleted their account), it would be reasonable to keep it around.
On the other hand, it may make sense to delete some data. For example, it may make sense to store your full name and address info to make checkout more convenient. If a user hasn't bought stuff in a while, it makes sense to delete it and have them re-enter it in the future.
There might be a bit of a gray space for things like game achievements (especially when there's a public profile) or savefile backups, but reading it as "you MUST delete all digital purchases because GDPR" is just not true.
I'd consider keeping the other personal data to be still easily justifiable, as you might want to support various account recovery options. And the odds that a user forgot their password only increases for old accounts.
5(1)c seems far more relevant than e. “Data minimization” is what’s relevant here. And the article is sufficiently vague that the onus is on companies to decide what is absolutely minimal - that includes, implicitly, removing inactive accounts. Unless the courts have made a judgement to the contrary.
It's like the cookie banner all over again. This law never, ever required a cookie banner.
The big companies are master in malicious compliance that benefit them, and let them blame the EU for it.
Rules of thumbs, international billion dollars company should be assumed to be the ones being the bad guys until proven otherwise. They have lost the benefit of the doubt decades ago.
In practice most of the purposes you'd encounter in the wild are directly linked to user activity, so account deletion means most of the reasons to keep it disappear.
You still need to keep it if there's a law saying that you need to have that data, of course, but that's the exception.
And since digital ownership legislation is a joke consumers have pretty much no recourse.
Meanwhile Steam just casually absorbing everything. It doesn't matter that it's porous.
And now suddenly - hardware costs you can't tip toe schedule around.
The console business is shitty.
The main problem is that, ex. the Steam Controller, nobody can make a decent game controller except for console vendors and when the console vendors go down somebody will have to step up.
I just can't believe the PS5 has sold as many units as it has with just 15 exclusive games, many of which are remakes, even remakes of remakes. That reputation that the PC platform is too sweaty has taken a long long time to die and it doesn't help that ACER and such are coming out with handhelds that are maximum sweat (boot into a Windows Desktop with 10x too small fonts) compared to the consumer electronics experience of the Steam Deck.
I used to only play on DualShock 4s and even skipped the DualSense because I just loved my DualShock that much.
I use an 8bitDo now and it is better in every way I care about. 8bitDo does not make consoles.
Eh, as someone who owns and plays on both pc and console, the simple truth of the matter is that playing on console is, for the most part, better 'bang for the buck'. You can reliably purchase a console and a budget linux laptop and both will reliably fill their respective niches for the next decade. PC gaming, in my experience, requires a much higher budget, and this was even before the modern pricing madness.
Consoles also had much wider support for couch coop than PC did, so it was a more social experience, and to be blunt, PC gaming has a pretty bad problem with cheating that I simply never experienced on console.
Like I said, I play and enjoy both. I can afford to do so now, but I do feel bad for teens today because even consoles are getting crazy expensive.
Gabe is in his mid 60s, I'm prepared that in the next decade or so there will be a change of guard at Valve and the slow train of enshittification will get moving.
P.S. There's been a lot of groupthink and bandwagoning for Valve, ignoring all the dirt under the rug. But at the end of the day, by comparison, they are the best behaving in the field.
The N64 is never going to get any faster, and emulators can run on just about any potato these days. People have realistic expectations of what the platform can do, so there's no need to spend insane effort making the graphics look better. It's always going to look kinda crappy, and that is Just Fine.
This lets game developers focus on the actual gameplay itself. No "Generic Shooter vol. 26 - now with slightly prettier water!", but innovative stuff focusing on the narrative and on novel gameplay elements.
I've been thinking about giving it a go myself. It's such a fun and nostalgic console, and the limitations are fun constraints.
The code archeology is really cool too. Seeing Rare's Dinosaur Planet boot up and play after being a lost title. Decompiling all the original titles. Building sequels to Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. It's such a fun scene.
Then there's Analogue 3D and ModRetro too, which make it fun to play as physical hardware.
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It's reassuring to know that their copy is not AI-generated.
While I believe they would delete a user's games, I don't know if they would actually willingly give up holding on to customer data.
My guess is this is more of a CYA incase they want to clean up accounts at some point, rather than something they actively do.
So basically you get worst of both worlds, great.
If implemented correctly the affected person is also warned/notified several times by email before this is going to happen, so you have enough time to log in at least once and prevent it (and also extend the time frame again).
Consoles area also marketed heavily towards older teenagers and younger adults, who are exactly the ones unlikely to maintain a consistent email address.
And of course if your email provided decides to cut you off, or goes out of business, or you used a university email...
There's a difference here between an account that hasn't been used and doesn't hold anything of value and an account like this that holds items that were bought.
Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745456
When HP started making printer cartridges that expired even when they were still full, people complained—then bought more.
When Microsoft let the web stagnate with IE6, people complained, then turned around and did the same thing with Chrome.
When Apple deliberately put a bug in the iPhone that caused the Home button to fail, pushing people to buy the next model, people got upset—and then bought the next one anyway. I'm amazed nobody remembers that one; it was such a huge deal at the time. And there is not a single link to articles about it anymore.
When Adobe switched to mandatory Creative Cloud subscriptions, plenty of users protested, but most professionals stayed.
When Amazon remotely deleted books from people's Kindles (including 1984), it was a scandal for a month, and then... nothing.
When we found out PRISM existed, users were worried for a few months, then went right back to filling those platforms with their personal data.
When Google allowed fraudulent DMCA takedowns, shut down accounts with no appeal, and censored its search engine, there was a brief outcry, then it was back to business as usual.
When Sony put a bloody ROOTKIT on its music CDs (!!!!), people grumbled for five minutes and kept giving them money.
These companies have no reason to stop. We never make them regret anything.
I should make a website to save those for posterity, so that at least we have a track record of all the things they get away with because we let them.
We're screwed—and we deserve it.
Tons of people switched from IE6 to Chrome; IE is a dead browser. These days I'd recommend Firefox.
Is there something wrong with the iPhone as of today? It sounds like the bug got fixed in response to outcry, especially if they went and scrubbed all traces of the event - that seems like a good outcome?
Adobe stock is down almost 50% (42.24%) in the past year - I dare say a lot of people got sick of their shit. I have no clue what professionals use, but GIMP works fine for my amateur edits.
Like, c'mon, change very clearly does happen. It's just slow and uneven.
If you actually cared about change, I feel like you'd maybe list a few of the cool alternatives out there and actually help people make that transition. https://xkcd.com/1053/ - people do actually have to be taught about these things, not everyone knows what the alternatives are!
That one, I don't remember either. Are you sure you aren't confusing it with Batterygate?
But yes: point taken, these companies have absolutely no incentive to behave any better than they have in the past.
I believe EU has dug their own hole here. And the best move would be to pass more legislation to explicitly require the retention (and transfer, ideally) of purchased digital goods.
Is there evidence of the contrary? Maybe any store can just delete your personal data right after charging your card and claim GDPR prevents them from shipping your product.
Silly arguments work both ways. You just picked the one that confirms your bias.
GDPR under no circumstances forces processors to delete everything, it defines legitimate interest. Retaining a person's purchases is as legitimate as it gets so the data can be retained for as long as the purchase is valid. And the license itself isn't even the user's personal data, it's just a license, so Sony could give the option to export that license to be used later - even in a cryptographically secure format that can only work if e.g. the account is created with the same email address. If they delete the personal data and throw out the baby with the water, it's not GDPR forcing them to do it.
> Personal data shall be: kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the personal data are processed. (..)
Note that this does not say "it must be stored for a limited amount of time" - it says "no longer than necessary".
Your basic account data (such as username and password, or an email for password recovery) is still necessary to log in to the platform and make use of your purchases. As long as there is no clear indication that the user will never log in again (such as due to death, or because they explicitly deleted their account), it would be reasonable to keep it around.
On the other hand, it may make sense to delete some data. For example, it may make sense to store your full name and address info to make checkout more convenient. If a user hasn't bought stuff in a while, it makes sense to delete it and have them re-enter it in the future.
There might be a bit of a gray space for things like game achievements (especially when there's a public profile) or savefile backups, but reading it as "you MUST delete all digital purchases because GDPR" is just not true.
"the personal data are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed"
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-17-gdpr
It's like the cookie banner all over again. This law never, ever required a cookie banner.
The big companies are master in malicious compliance that benefit them, and let them blame the EU for it.
Rules of thumbs, international billion dollars company should be assumed to be the ones being the bad guys until proven otherwise. They have lost the benefit of the doubt decades ago.
You still need to keep it if there's a law saying that you need to have that data, of course, but that's the exception.