This is long and ranty so just fyi

-snip tmi-

Fucking Rockstar. Delisting GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas for inferior cash grab "upgrades". I mean just fucking wow. LEGENDARY game changing GTA 3 treated like a cheap whore to slather makeup on and resale for a higher price. The trillions from GTA 5 isn't ENOUGH GUYS! THEY NEED MORE MONEY. So now if I want to have these original games, there are no legal options. I avoid piracy so someone can't just write me off as a pirate/thief and poison the argument well (and because it's arguably not legally available because the people who own the product don't want it accessed). But this ever escalating manipulative, throw away and rental society has got me wanting to step away from all entertainment media, from the art I used to love so dearly. I feel it dying in me.

-snip-

UPDATE: Yeah I was kinda moody when I wrote all this xD It pretty much is my hatred boiling over at AAA companies. Thanks for taking the time to read. Time to start searching for disc versions of like 50+ games LOL

retrospeticive update almost a year later: Thanks to ya'll that said my love clearly hadn't died when I was this upset about it. I felt that then and I feel it now. I still completely agree with my Rockstar rant lol fuck them, but I continue to find other games to play that do respect my mental health and are good games. All these other comapnies are doing is letting their greed run rampant. It'll bite them in the ass some day... or not? Who knows.

I can't tell whether it's your love for games dying or your hatred of big publishers just boiling over? Yeah, screw the big ones. They've always been all about the money. You don't want to know how many games were cancelled because the publisher or executives suddenly decided to can it, or became gargbage because the publisher insisted it on being such and such.. people being overworked and crunched for months and then immediately fired after project is out... good PC games being turned to dumbed down console garbage in an attempt to appeal to wider audience..

The big industry has always been a shitshow.

Hold on to what you have, give the big publishers a middle finger and just keep playing DRM free games. Looking at my collection on GOG alone, there is more games than I could possibly finish in a lifetime and it just keeps growing. Single player offline gaming isn't going away anytime soon.

Btw, as for legal options for obtaining GTA3 or Vice City: just buy second hand and laugh at the greedy fucks who can't make a dime on that sale.

The reason most people don't care about Steam or whatever else is because they "don't sweat the small stuff." There's much larger things to worry and care about in life. I'm not saying principles don't matter, even with video games, but you kind of have to be realistic about it and also pick your battles. Think of it this way... don't let them ruin games for you, and don't let them drive you crazy. Don't give them that power.

Video Gaming is not only a business,
its not only an entertainment,
its not only a hobby,
its not only art,
its not only music,
its not only narrative,
its not only a technology thing,
its not only a business...
it is culture and its huge.
And as such,
it feeds from every single one of us
participating of it:
developers, composers, writers,
designers, vgamers, reporters,
fans, sellers, pirates, spectators...
Please, never forget the importance
of our role on it. We are part of its fate

Just a thought :)

Anyway,
Your love hasn't died yet: Your post proves that
So dont waste the time
and go there to do your best on whatever is needed!

The reason we've all gravitated to DRM-free platforms is because the companies that have what we crave took things too far, and we wanted to recalibrate our relationship with them.

I'd argue we have a lot of options nowadays. Every now and then we get something really great, like when we got Deus Ex: Mankind Divided with the microtransactions stripped out. Recently we got seven games in the Yakuza series on the same day. These are quality games, unadulterated by draconian restrictions.

Taken as a whole, the state of gaming today might seem deplorable, but if you focus your attention to the good stuff, you'll see that there is a lot to take heart from. We have built a community that is quite viligant when it comes to verifying the DRM-free status of our games, and we're not going anywhere.

Dude, you sound exactly like the cynical depressed atheist fuck you always were :-D

And a bit of an emo teen that doesn't want to grow up, it seems :-D

Modern market conditions are a fuckload of crap and worthless digital goo, but that has nothing to do with gaming.

Gaming is fucking thriving now more than ever, you have incredible choice opportunities to get your games in digital format on both DRM-ed and DRM-less platforms, classic physical games are sold aplenty on eBay, LimitedRunGames can fucking suck life and blood out of you if you purchase all their physical re-releases, etc. etc. etc.

And if everything else fails, you can always purchase a digital release here on GOG, burn it on a DVD/BD-R, print a DVD cover and put your damn custom physical edition in your fucking library :-D

So stop whining, avoid mobile, don't get sucked in trendy, worthless bullshit like generative AI and get gaming :-D

P.S.Elden Ring works great off-line after you install it from Steam. I know it's not much, but this is a game that comes out only once in a decade (if any) and everyone should play it.

I dunno, maybe you need to step back and play some of the old classics for a bit. Throw yourself at Tyrian for a bit instead of all this bloated AAA tripe. Or maybe Spiderweb software, so you can remember what software by a single guy is like.

There's tons of free games out there to try that date back to the late 1970s and I'm sure there's a classic you haven't discovered yet.

I will take your rant and turn it into my own rant. So Rockstar have delisted legendary games for defective cash grab. So what? It makes no difference! Digital version were already censored, especially Vice City, so nothing lost there. We can still go and buy used physical copies with all of the music and all of the original language. Buying used physical games is perfectly legal and lots of stores sell them. This is why physical media with disc-based DRM was far better than any form of digital distribution, even DRM-Free, like GOG or Zoom.

Delistings were publishers' problem, not consumers'. It didn't matter what happened to the store or the publisher. We used to own our games and we could lend them to friends, resell them, whatever. All legally. It wasn't until some ex-Microsoft schmuck decided to destroy PC game ownership forever with his steaming pile of anti-consumer garbage. Everyone knew it was anti-consumer, but people were not given a choice. Everything went digital and even the physical releases swapped disc-based DRM for stupid online-authentication, turning their own dics into paperweights. Overtime everyone grew to accept their loss of rights and even turned the man who took away their rights into some kind of a saint.

Old GTA Games, No One Lives Forever, Alice 1, etc, we can still buy those games with relative ease thanks to the amount of rights that physical media granted users. All of these rights were stripped from us with digital distribution. As a result I cannot legally acquire delisted Telltale games, because they were released in a post-steamy-dystopia world. Post-Steam games are the real tragedy, not old GTAs.

Consoles have held onto physical media for far longer, but even they are no longer safe. Once right to repair is sorted, hopefully people can turn their attention to digital ownership and game preservation. The way I see it, if a company is unwilling or unable to sell a game for whatever reason, they should be forced by law to turn it into shareware. Digital distribution was supposed to make things easier and yet it doomed thousands of games to death. These games can no longer be legally acquired thanks to digital distribution and outdated copyright laws. No game should be allowed to die. Diablo 3 doesn't have any cosmetic shop. Diablo 4 does. The always-online requirement is simply DRM for the sake of DRM, as it is more effective than even Denuvo. Console versions of Diablo 3 are all playable offline. Only Diablo 4 is always-online on all platforms.

The entire thread makes me ponder why so many people buy into AAA gaming at all. Im not saying its all bad. I am saying, there are game elements you enjoy and then there are the games that seem to ruin your day.

"Ask not what you can do for your game developer. Ask what your game developer, can do for you!"
- JFK....if he were a gamer......and ya know, still had a head intact
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Correction, your love of new games is dying, which is totally understandable in this day and age. Luckily the old ones are still around and sometimes DRM-free for all to enjoy.

I do feel you.

The GTA remaster cash grab by giving a subpar "remaster" that they didnt even program and quality control themselves and removing the original and actually superior versions from stores was a stupid move. Nevermind the excuse for cancelling a Red Dead Redemption remaster because people didnt like the GTA remaster, conveniently forgetting that people didnt like it because it was worse than the original.

But the fact that you can be angry about this means your love hasnt died. You still love games because you are angry in what the media has become. I would say someone who doesnt love games anymore either just doesnt play or doesnt think about them at all, just watch as the industry burns.

I do think gaming itself is still ok and has the possibility to thrive. The spread of game engines like Unreal has improved indie games to the point where they arnt so bad and even superior to some AAA games.

I do think steam and this movement to "digital only" is the worst thing to happen though. No ability to just lend out games to friends, sell and buy used games, or be able to still play a game after it gets delisted for some reason. Really hate how people say "steam" is great for destroying physical releases of PC games which wasnt that long ago.

Well, that happens. Interests change once in a while.

I used to be a big Star Wars fan. I still like it, but I stoped to "absorb" it, after the repeated disappointments in the cinema for the past few years.


I too don't play as much as I used to, but I still play and like it.
If at all I am a bit overwhelmed by the sheer amount of games which I own. It's hard to decide what to play next when I find the time.

Who could have predicted that that Disney would milk that franchise dry before leaving it a dry, rotting husk of its former self [/sarcasm]

To be fair, I also disliked the prequel trilogy, but it doesn't detract from the fact that everything that Disney have touched this side of the millennium has turned to... Well, let's just say it hasn't been good.

Agreed though - I sometimes take a break from gaming completely and read a few books instead. I also know that if nothing comes out in the future that I'm interested in playing, I've got a fairly extensive library of non-DRM'd pre 2010 games to revisit.

Disney has definitely turned Star Wars into a generic and boring franchise, which is crazy to me. Such a visually unique setting with so much fan passion and they somehow made it feel like everything else and not special at all.

To be fair I don't think it's 100% their fault. Everything withers on the vine eventually, people look for new things or get mad at the old things for being too different or disappointing. Even if the new Star Wars movies and show were amazing I doubt I'd be anywhere near as excited for them as I would have been 20 years ago. I think the current Trek show, Strange New Worlds, is really, really good but I still just am not as excited for it as I would have been when Enterprise ended. It is what it is.