Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary Update

And when you buy an album on CD you just license it for personal use, you can't play it on the radio or in a commercial space. "Buying" a copy of some intellectual property always had strings attached even in the age of physical media.

Steam can delete a game from your account, they can't delete a cd that I physically have with me.

Why does this even need to be spelled out...

To add to bdjsiqoocwk pointing out the self-evident, in many jurisdictions you have both the right, and the tools to make backups of media for personal use. What exactly is legally permissible and actually possible with non-physical stuff is much more complicated.

Do they have a record of doing this?

Paranoia here is largely warranted. But people had fewer rights than they realized before. And finding a way to play older media is often a rather expensive endeavor.

Edit to add: I also find picking on Valve awkward here. Microsoft? Sony? I would be far more inline. Even Nintendo. Valve seems to be much more on favor of empowering users, though.

This should be so trivially apparent to anyone on HN using Steam that pointing it out is like noting the sky is blue.

Not contradicting your point, but adding tangential interesting information.

Blu-Ray UHD discs can no longer be played on modern computers as Intel has removed the trusted execution environment needed to decrypt them. Blu-Ray UHD players do a handshake that verifies the use of Intel SGX.

One might have always been skeptical of these discs, especially as AMD had never implemented those TEE instructions.

But I believe the interesting takeaway is that even physical media is becoming something you can’t count on using without the continued permission/assistance of some outside party.

Without regulation I would expect that all new media will eventually require players to be always-online.

> Why does this even need to be spelled out...

Indeed. Why did you bother?

Why hasn’t the requisite software been updated to perform a non-SGX handshake? That seems like a yawning oversight. o_O

The UHD DRM scheme requires some kind of secure enclave for key management, and SGX was the only suitable system for that on PCs. There is no non-SGX system they would certify.

True but a lot of games require an online launcher to even start, even if they are also distributed on physical media

I buy most of my games on GOG for that reason. At least you can download a DRM-free copy that can never be taken away.

Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo all have physical releases for most of their games that they can't take from my cold dead hands. Valve has singlehandedly killed that market for PC games.

Nintendo has some where you can't rent anymore, because the save data is on cartridge. They all have limitations on regions.

Again, Steam /could/ do this. Has it? The others have done the things.

3DS saved to the cart and had region-locking. Neither applies to Switch. You can get a JP copy of Splatoon 3, play it on your NA Switch, swap to the NA version of the game, and not lose anything.

Ah, that is good to hear. May pick up a switch game for the kids while in Japan, then.

That seems less than optimal.