Who Owns the Hardware? (Not the First Time the Question Was Asked)

[dewline]

I've never bought computers for gaming purposes beyond maybe chess. So I guess I have no stake re: Fortnite specifically. But I do agree with this opinion as stated by one Ben Werdmüller:

These are our devices; we bought them. We should be able to run the software we want on them. Anything else is heavily disempowering at best, and a barrier to trade and innovation at worst. And developers like Epic are experiencing firsthand where the chips fall.

Comments

[agoodwinsmith]

Y'know? If I bought me a shovel, and a wizard cursed it so it could only dig clay, I would be hunting down a wizard to see if the curse would prevent me from cracking wizards in the shins.

[dewline]

That's a good metaphor there.

[thewayne]

This is a big problem, especially when it comes to the iPad platform because like it or not, you're locked in. I like it to a degree: you're buying yourself a lot of protection from malware that pops up on a scarily frequent basis on the Android platform.

And then Apple decides to be utter jerks and things like this comes along. And they've been jerks with increasing frequency.

I've owned Android tablets before, albeit briefly. And the briefly point comes in because I really hate all the configuration and the poor searchability and really utter lack of curation of their app store - see my point on malware above. So you end up balancing major restrictions, which may or may not bother you, vs the Wild West.

I have two iPads, a Mini Series 2 with 16 gig that was just eclipsed by iOS and is still receiving updates, and a much older larger one with 32 gig. The Mini is mainly a news reader and for playing Sudoku in bed before I go to sleep, I've had it for about 7 years, I'd guess. The 32 gig is for ebooks, both are used for surfing.

The 32 gig has been so far eclipsed in app updates that I pretty much can't install news apps: I have to use their web sites, and that's okay, though inconvenient. The Mini has the opposite problem: I can get apps, but back when I bought it, I had no idea that 16 gig wasn't remotely enough memory and buying a larger one was a (then) formidable increase in price.

So everything has a price.

In the face of Fortnite, if you have a Windows PC, there's no lockin. Except you have to download it from somewhere, which means someone's app store because no one seems to sell CDs/DVDs anymore for games. If you buy a DVD/Bluray, you're playing on a console game, so now you have platform lock-in. Right back to Apple and iPads.

And let me tell you about Microsoft's App Store for Windows PCs.

Our guest Dave, he loves a game called State of Decay 2. Post-apocalypse zombie killing first-person shooter. Personally, I have no real interest in it, but for some reason he bought me a copy and emailed me the code to download and activate it on the Microsoft Store.

EXCEPT IT DOESN'T EFFING WORK!

The laptop is fully up to date on patches and otherwise works perfectly well, and I do stress it by running up to 10-12 instances of Lord of the Rings Online. I've turned off my firewall. I've rebooted. I've tried launching the Store in Safe mode. I've created a new Store account (code has already been used). I've created a new account on my computer. I've done everything short of reformatting the laptop and reinstalling Windows 10. And Dave has spent a lot of time scouring message boards and chatting with people to try and figure out how to resolve it, to no avail.

So even with a bog-standard Windows 10 PC or laptop, you can get screwed over.