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.
Maybe at some point. More practically from their perspective they will try to make hosting one’s own data increasingly inaccessible and unaffordable. The Internet is the landlord’s final frontier as there is no more physical space left to enclose on Earth.