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Yeah DRM would definitely get weird.
70% of the point of it would be to bring back actually owning your games, so as long as the DRM travels with the disc and you can resell it and the recipient can use it without being an EEEEVIL PIRATE!!!, it’s good.
Though it would introduce the weird issue of having to swap discs like you do a console.
Shoot, apparently it’s not open source. That’s not confidence-inspiring… but then again PS3 CFWs weren’t either (*sighs*)
Does that apply to PS4s running 11.something? I can’t remember what OS version our PS4 is on, but it’s new enough that a jailbreak only came out pretty recently. Needed a specific game disc to work.
Magnetic strips, technically all cards still have them as a backup, but 99.9% of readers accept all three and NFC tap or chip is usually the go-to!
The train station ticket machines where we reload our transit card only take swipes, though. So it is still a thing in very rare places.
When we first got our “food stamps” card (it apparently used to be physical stamps?? but that was long before our time. now you get basically a debit card that can only be used on food), it was also swipe-only. But then a year or two ago they replaced it with one that has a chip and can even do NFC! Nifty.
Cheques, nah, I think you still CAN get a physical paycheck, maybe?, if for some reason you wanted to?, but basically everyone does direct deposit these days
…at least, people who have bank accounts
that’s one reason to get a check. So yeah, those are still a thing, but not common. There are probably-sketchy “check cashing” places in low-income areas that you can take checks to instead of a bank if you don’t have a bank, I don’t know how that works.
Taxes – YEP. 100% still a thing. Fuck TurboTax & co., they pretty much bribed the government to keep this system because it makes them lots of money (because they can sell you “tax prep software” that does your taxes for you and is absurdly expensive and oh! you gotta buy a new one every year because of minor changes to the tax codes!).
– Frost
Yeah, personally I don’t really like the GPL* (for stuff that isn’t actively of interest to companies), but this kind of stripping the GPL from an existing project is just, gross. Definitely seems like an active attempt to nuke it and take it over.
(*because I like it when other open source people can use a given piece of code e.g. I wrote, and I’m not particularly picky about whether they agree with me on what specific form of open source is best; wanna use my MIT or public domain code in a GPL project? go for it!)
(s/open source/free software/g if you’re one of the “open source isn’t REAL FREE SOFTWARE!!!” people; I use the terms interchangeably, bite me)
(also I get using the GPL for stuff that companies would actively want to take over. Like, apparently, this project.)
– Frost
Honestly, the US (where we live) does this surprisingly well, considering how backwards of a country it is in a lot of other ways.
Credit cards, and even debit cards (like the one from our bank), generally have NFC these days, just like phones do. But you don’t need to faff about with your phone. Just pull out your card, tap it, done.
No app compatibility to deal with, just as easy as phone NFC, I don’t know why that’s not the standard over there. (Plenty of people do use phone payments here too though. I don’t get why.)
– Frost
It’ll definitely be more expensive than a console, since they sell the consoles at a loss expecting to make it back on the games. (But not that much more.)
… Especially in this fucking economy when it seems they’re deliberately trying to destroy the concept of having a functional computer that you own and can run arbitrary stuff on.
Which, is why it’s more important than ever to have a PC.
It, uh, was at least definitely possible to do a <$1000 computer back in 2020-25. Ours is under $1000 (I think we started at $400 for a no-GPU build in 2020ish, then got a used RX 580 ($150) once the GPU craze died down and a slightly better CPU ($100), and have an RX 6600 now). Though now with the exploding RAM prices…
– Frost
Hi, we (personally)'re various types of queer, and plural, and otherwise don’t really have local “”“”““real-life””“”“” community. The internet and such is crucial to our continued existence and we know literally nobody offline.
Don’t throw out computers just because “oh Real Life is More Real”.
(yes, you didn’t technically say “throw out computers in general” but it feels like you’re implying it with the “throw out games in general”.)
Also singleplayer games exist and those are good too.
Games are not purely a means to be social to other people in the same room with you. They’re still good for that! But societally we’ve moved way beyond that being the only reason.
(English could really use an inclusive and exclusive we, heh)
Games are actually among the LEAST enshittified regions of tech these days. And that’s with all the shit Ubisoft and their ilk are pulling. Games are like the one category of proprietary software where you can update relatively safely and expect to not be screwed over. Most of the time.
– Frost
I mean, it’s not. GOG is pretty decent too, at the very least.
– Frost