Tangential, irrelevant, "flamebait...generic tangents...internet tropes." "reminder" that the guidelines explicitly say to avoid. Nobody mentioned ownership or licensing or anything tangentially related until you did.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
