At $700 you could build a pretty decent PC that would last a lot longer (3060 12gb, Ryzen 5 5600, 16gb of DDR4), and build a steam library that you’ll have 20 years from now. I’ve had the same monitor, keyboard and mouse for an easy 10; controllers don’t last that long. They’re reaching a point where there’s less and less of an actual argument for owning one.
It comes pretty close to feature parity in terms of ownership. My kids can play my steam library on their own computers, I can play it on any machine I own, I don’t have to pay them any kind of rental fee, and they maintain my software for me.
Only thing I can’t do is what…sell my games to someone else? I don’t do that anyways.
I’m not betting on Steam disappearing in the next ten years. I probably wouldn’t even bet that they’ll disappear in my lifetime. But, they could, anything could happen, and then you don’t have that library anymore. Physical is the only way to truly own.
But, they could, anything could happen, and then you don’t have that library anymore. Physical is the only way to truly own.
That’s exactly my point. Steam has allowed me to OWN Half Life longer than I would have been able to with physical media. Those CDs don’t last that long. I’m not that careful.
So the balance is “own my own stuff and all the problems that come with keeping it pristine so that it continues to work, taking up space in my house” - or the infinitesimally small chance that STEAM goes belly up. Steam has allowed me to own my games for a lot longer than I could have kept them myself. So the argument of “oh they could go away!” doesn’t really hold any water for me. Especially for games with an online component (which is all of them now) – What’s the use of physical media when the game requires some servers that vanished long ago anyways?
That’s a strange point, imho. We disagree on what own means. You being bad with your physical media doesn’t mean you didn’t more truthfully own it. We will have to agree to disagree, have a nice day.
Well then you don’t own your home. With that argument, nobody does. Because the government has the ability to take your home from you, then you don’t own it.
Ownership has granularity to it. You’re failing to see the grey spaces in between, and only seeing black or white.
Replace the 3060 with an equally-priced AMD card and you’ll actually get something decent for your money. Nvidia is horrible at these “lower” price points.
I mean, if you like horrible driver stability; sure. There’s a reason NVidia has like 75% of the market share, and it’s simply because they have a better product. Drivers are more stable, everyone develops for CUDA processing, lots of games only support DLSS for frame-gen, all of the GPU accelerated AI stuff is all NVidia centered, etc.
I’ve had the same monitor, keyboard and mouse for an easy 10;
I guess it depends on frequency of use, but I’ve never had a mouse last ten years. I wear through the switch on the mouse button in less than that, starts to act unreliably.
At $700 you could build a pretty decent PC that would last a lot longer (3060 12gb, Ryzen 5 5600, 16gb of DDR4), and build a steam library that you’ll have 20 years from now. I’ve had the same monitor, keyboard and mouse for an easy 10; controllers don’t last that long. They’re reaching a point where there’s less and less of an actual argument for owning one.
It’s kinda rich to plug Steam, where you also don’t own your games.
Well for Steam at least the library is independent of the hardware
It comes pretty close to feature parity in terms of ownership. My kids can play my steam library on their own computers, I can play it on any machine I own, I don’t have to pay them any kind of rental fee, and they maintain my software for me.
Only thing I can’t do is what…sell my games to someone else? I don’t do that anyways.
I’m not betting on Steam disappearing in the next ten years. I probably wouldn’t even bet that they’ll disappear in my lifetime. But, they could, anything could happen, and then you don’t have that library anymore. Physical is the only way to truly own.
That’s exactly my point. Steam has allowed me to OWN Half Life longer than I would have been able to with physical media. Those CDs don’t last that long. I’m not that careful.
So the balance is “own my own stuff and all the problems that come with keeping it pristine so that it continues to work, taking up space in my house” - or the infinitesimally small chance that STEAM goes belly up. Steam has allowed me to own my games for a lot longer than I could have kept them myself. So the argument of “oh they could go away!” doesn’t really hold any water for me. Especially for games with an online component (which is all of them now) – What’s the use of physical media when the game requires some servers that vanished long ago anyways?
That’s a strange point, imho. We disagree on what own means. You being bad with your physical media doesn’t mean you didn’t more truthfully own it. We will have to agree to disagree, have a nice day.
Well then you don’t own your home. With that argument, nobody does. Because the government has the ability to take your home from you, then you don’t own it.
Ownership has granularity to it. You’re failing to see the grey spaces in between, and only seeing black or white.
Replace the 3060 with an equally-priced AMD card and you’ll actually get something decent for your money. Nvidia is horrible at these “lower” price points.
I mean, if you like horrible driver stability; sure. There’s a reason NVidia has like 75% of the market share, and it’s simply because they have a better product. Drivers are more stable, everyone develops for CUDA processing, lots of games only support DLSS for frame-gen, all of the GPU accelerated AI stuff is all NVidia centered, etc.
And something that can run PS3, PS2 and PS1 games!
I’m sorely disappointed that none of that fancy AI-powered Sony upscaling can be put to use to any of those old games.
I guess it depends on frequency of use, but I’ve never had a mouse last ten years. I wear through the switch on the mouse button in less than that, starts to act unreliably.