/me patting myself on the back for avoiding subscriptions like the plague since the 90s.
It wasn’t just the price increase, it’s also that my fucking series x wasn’t an upgrade in experience at all, (fuck off loading time bullshit).
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The fact that I need a game pass to play LAN games is what drove me away.
My son disagrees with my decision to leave after that price hike. But, I set aside the annual amount in an “envelope” for him to buy games outright on steam etc vs renting them on Gamepass
YES. This will actually show him the value of saving for owning something vs a subscription that is never guaranteed to not increase in price (in fact its almost guaranteed it will go up in price).
This is a really good move.
Except you’re not really owning anything on Steam. Their policy might change, the CEO might go… Granted it probably won’t happen anytime soon but you’re not really owning anything on Steam too.
There are people who buy hundreds of games on Steam who don’t really play 90+% of their library, and people qho subscribe to Game Pass who “rent” and are able to play the latest games. Neither of them are wrong.
The one upside with steam is that you can access the files. If the company was going down or changing policy you can take the latest installers/game files and back them up.
There are a few games I’ve bought on steam and installed on my retro console because of this setup.
That’s an oversimplification.
For starters it depends on the game and there is zero information in Steam about whether that works or not for a game before you buy, so you can’t make an informed buy there if you care about that.
Further, for many games you have to install something like the Goldberg Emulator which is an implementation of the Steam API DLL that doesn’t in fact talk to Steam.
Without this some games will stop working because the Steam application is not present or the game has been started offline too often.
Even then it’s not guaranteed to work, especially if you have DLCs for that game.
Disconnecting an installed game from Steam or backing up and later using a cached installer is a technically more demanding process and with a higher rate of failure than just downloading and backing up a GOG game’s installer that you later use for installing the game - it’s actually GOG’s Unique Value Proposition that you’re guaranteed to at a later date you’re still able to install a the game in a system compatible with the installer (in my experience only a problem when trying to run an installer over a decade old in a more recent OS, but emphasized because even without phone-home related limitations, there are still possible hurdles due to evolving technology and insufficient backwards compatibility) so it makes sense that their process is seamless and works for all products.
