alt Hacker Newsthats why i never bought a game in my life and never intend to... if i want to see how a game works, i could download an emulator and run it via the emulator from a public rom under linux. If I am really interested, i could download a 512GB retropie torrent/magnet and then copy it to a microsd card and run 70k games on a raspberry pi 4...
historically, at least for me, games never worked... i spent more time fixing why they didnt work or debugging them in memory to patch them to get the game to actually run then actually playing a game. This is circa 1983-1987 too so maybe we have progressed from there, but obviously not much.
I appreciate your experience/take on gaming.
If you where to start gaming again (at least, as the current vendors intend) you'd find that the bugs you had to account for in the 80s have been (generally speaking) resolved as a byproduct of the DRM/Cloud streaming propagation we're all complaining about.
IE; consolidation of vendors, locking down the way a game propagates, restricting the lifetime of a game, made it "easier" to play games the absolute one way the vendor intends. This gives them the excuse of "Well, we designed the game to be played via perpetual license through only this platform, we can't support or claim responsibility anywhere else".
Which is to say, your comment made me think that the reason the industry is the way it is isn't because money/lawyers, but more because some product managers decades ago began pushing for consolidating/defining video game lifecycles.