If cloud gaming is all that’s available, read books, go for walks, hang out with friends instead. Do what we did before the internet. Do not let them win, stop using it.

I said the same for Amazon (personally ordered 1 item from Amazon, received maybe 5 items from Amazon as gifts, I otherwise do not use them but I am 1 insignificant point well outside the graph) and expect the same results

Remember, things got this shitty because most people were fine with Big Tech gradually making things shittier. I look back and realize I’ve been waiting for the One Enormous Dealbreaker for over a decade, but consumers keep moving the red line.

For everyone being all fatalistic and the whole ‘there is nothing you can do’ approach. Vote with your wallet. No money for them means no power for them.

We are the customer, not their bitch. If they don’t provide value, they receive none in return. They go broke and someone else will provide the service we all want.

The only reason you should ever cloud gaming is building your own cloud, e.g., with Moonlight, Steam Link.

My biggest regret is going with 32 of instead of 64GB of DDR5, when I built a new Ryzen 7000 PC in 2022 to replace my aging 4th gen i5.

But what I don’t regret is ignoring everyone telling me not to do all sorts of unspeakable things to snag a $1600 4090 at launch, especially given that it was never sold that cheaply ever again. It’s a beast of a card and I’ll easily get a decade of gaming out of it. Saw 4090s going for over $3K used on eBay lately, so yeah I’m happy with making what was a dumb decision at the time.

Steam is cool and all but I think I’m going to go with GOG a lot more going forward.

And I’ll never stop buying discs for consoles

If there is no ownership then there is no stealing/pirating by sailing the high seas.

IMO the only thing the cloud is useful for in this context is maintaining and syncing saves. Other than that I want my games running locally, thank you.

Meanwhile me playing on linux

I tried cloud gaming briefly and gave up immediately.

Fuck having to wait in a queue to play your games.

I spent more time trying to figure out how to stream from my own gaming PC (to my TV) and it couldn’t do it. How can you make a device that can stream games from a random PC but not one in the same room? Ah purposeful design to prevent that. Fuckers.

RG35xx Pro, Usenet for ROMS

Imagine paying some rando to rent their computer. You can totally trust them, right? They’re not in the Epstein files, right?

Sorry, to busy going to my local game shop and buying Xbox 360 games. So many games to play

Any noticeable latency and I won’t even give something a chance to try it. Needing to send my inputs over the internet, wait for them to get processed, and then have the video output streamed back to my local setup means even a small amount of latency. 40ms (which is what I expect for my connection in online gaming servers) would kill the experience of many games, especially rhythm games or other high-reflex games like the entire fighting game genre. Some stuff like Turn Based RPGs could possibly benefit from cloud gaming for users with underperforming hardware, but that’s it. Strong No Thanks F*** Off from me when it comes to cloud gaming.

Buy your games on GOG and own them forever. You can also buy a cheap, slow as hell external drive and backup your installer files, too. You can still buy games on Steam since most of them don’t have DRM. For now, Steam is also great, but a decade from now they could enshittify.

If you only do console gaming, buy physical cartridges and discs as much as possible. You’ll keep most of the game and can play whenever you want. An example of being able to play “most” of the game applies to games with legacy activation servers, such as Splinter Cell Blacklist and Watch Dogs 1. Most of the game is playable, but anything that requires a connection to that activation servers no longer works.

Finally, scour Craigslist, flea markets, and yard sales to buy old game consoles from before this DRM mess. All those old games still work great. If you buy Wii U, 3DS, and Switch 1, make sure to boot your console and every single game at least once every few years. Yes, every single one of your games. Due to NAND volatility, this will protect your games and console (Wii U) from NAND failure and increase longevity.

Edit: removed Nintendo DS from the list I provided. Nintendo DS does not use NAND; rather, the DS uses mask ROMs which does not have the limitation of NAND volatility.