Seems like the next logical step. Most big games are always-online Games as a Service where your local storage is useless if the company server doesn’t handshake. A lot of business and productivity software already requires subscriptions and is partially online. Every single fucking company wants to have an app on your phone so they can watch you in the bathroom. And there’s talk that MSFT might start moving Windows off the PC entirely and in to the cloud.
I figure at some point it’s in the shareholder’s best interests to prohibit users from actually storing anything locally. Storage is really just stolen subscription revenue, when you think about it. Every time a user accesses something on a local drive they’re stealing the chance for you to extort them in to paying a subscription fee.
What do think, too distopian? Back when tapes, CDs, MiniDiscs, all the old generations of data storage that you could write to at home were first circulating the media industries tried real, real hard to make them illegal to privately own. We’ve been fighting an escalating battle against digital (and analog I guess) IP regimes ever since then. Streaming has pretty much killed physical media afaik. I have no idea if blu-rays or DVDs are still printed for sale.
Idk, just a thought. Let me know what you think.
Ok, but at this point you’re not arguing they’re wrong. Only that enforcement will be tricky.
Also, I can predict exactly how it’s going to work, because I’ve been seeing the same trend. A new forced Windows update will just make it so that storage no longer connects because it’s “unsafe”.
What about Linux? What about Mac? What if the user is using a “no longer supported” version of windows. Those won’t be getting updates.
This issue is extremely problematic and these are some of the variables that need consideration. Nothing is as simple as flipping a switch.
Most people don’t know that Linux even exists and Mac usage is something like 2%. Those are effectively rounding errors. A lot of people would switch away from Windows, but many might not.
Linux is 2% and mac is higher but I don’t know that figure off the top of my head. The amount of users still on Windows XP is shockingly high overseas. In any case. There is no easy way to implement, enforce or otherwise enable compliance on this. Hard drives are a core functionality of a computer ecosystem and there is no way I can see local storage being disabled so a handful of cloud based software solutions can turn a bigger profit. It just causes way too many issues.