Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
blog.playstation.com
blog.playstation.com
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/sony-erases-digital-...
https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/an-update-on-playsta...
This is a weird marketing strategy. They must feel free to do as they please since they know consumers are trapped.
Gaming is a luxury good. We can all just walk away.
I wish NFTs had taken off as a system for managing decentralized transferrable digital purchases instead of being another investment scam.
My entire Steam library is backed up to LTO tapes. I can get most everything running without needing Steam.
I will continue to support this business model, because I retain the power to own the system and the data.
I thought most Steam games relied on remote activation/verification? Can you install and run them on a non-networked machine? If not, your LTO tapes are close to worthless because Valve (or its buyer) can still pull the same trick that Sony did here, with the same effect.
If you have invested into Sony platforms and games, you're stuck. You either write it off and move now, buying hardware during a component crisis, or you keep investing moving forward. On a PC, I might lose access to games on Steam but my hardware will allow me to buy new games on a different storefront.
If you want to guarantee that you can backup your PC games and run them without a client, then there is always https://www.gog.com/
People have been talking about "walking away" for at least that long.
The soles of those walking shoes are as thick and un-worn as they've ever been.
Like all things, this too shall pass.
Unlike Valve who has never taken away what people have bought without a refund (to my knowledge), Sony doesn’t deserve that benefit of the doubt:
https://www.techradar.com/streaming/entertainment/this-shoul...
Monopolies, anti-competitive behavior, and anti-consumer behavior in general are all bad bad bad. You have to be a very interesting individual to disagree with that.
8 years is roughly the lifespan for a games console though.
And I say this as someone who hates Sony perhaps more than most, having lived through their the CD rootkit and PS3 OtherOS debacles. And been burned by their substandard yet overpriced audio equipment.
They are tools, toys, they are devices. I can still play my PS1 as before, I just need to pop in a CD and I'm good to go.
I’m a retro gamer. I have around 20 systems all hooked up and ready to play from the Atari 2600 through to modern systems like the PS4. In fact I bet I have systems you hadn’t even heard of, and machines that are older than you are.
So I know better than most that consoles can live for decades. But that’s not what people mean when they talk about a consoles life.
What that term means is the period of time that a console is the current generation (and yes, “generation” is the technical term here and not something I made up).
Also decay isn’t a phenomenon exclusive to biology. Plenty of things which aren’t organic can have a life and decay, even though we know they’re not technically a life form. For example stars. But even technology can decay. Capacitors and batteries are the biggest two killers of old technology, and common problems I’ve had to repair in my old hardware. The laser in your PS1 is also a consumable. I’ve had to replace the laser in my PS1 for that very reason. Solder can crack. Any moving parts like motors, fans, and CD/DVD trays can seize up over time too. There’s also sun-bleaching that happens to white and grey casing too, which is thankfully a very easy fix.
You can be a tiny company and still be a monopoly. If you're the only grocery store in a (walkable) town where many elderly people don't own a car, you're a monopoly. If you're the only company allowed to sell beer at a football game (that doesn't allow fans to bring liquids into the stadium), you're a monopoly. If you're a school cantine, and school rules forbid students from walking out during the school day, you're also a monopoly.
Both iOS and Android both generate more in gaming revenue than Sony. The PC gaming market is only slightly smaller than the entirety of the console market. It's going to be very difficult to make an argument that customers don't have reasonable choice, and the recent case against Apple set precedent that owning the single channel of distribution to a product and platform you own isn't monopolistic unless you do shady things like Google did.
Sony's exclusive rights to distributing games on its owned platform and console will not give it pricing power (won't pass SNNIP) or exclude competition.
Sony can be called a dick for what they're doing without it also having to be monopolistic. People are right to be angry and calling them a monopoly over it is being cathartic.
'1: exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action specifically : exclusive control of a particular market that is marked by the power to control prices and exclude competition.'
That definition doesn't define any boundaries on to what market a company has control over. A hardware platform like Playstation only has one store, run by the company who sells the platform; explicit control of the particular market, that market being Playstation games. By going digital only, they now have total command of supply. They also explicitly deny competition from participating. They even have a hand in pricing the games sold on the platforms, an ability they're able to leverage because they hold a vertical monopoly.
The issue isn't me or anyone else defining the word "monopoly" too broadly, it's that the frog has so thoroughly been boiled on what we once considered monopolies that we can no longer see a monopoly for what it is even when it's self-evidently obvious. I agree that anti-trust enforcement has become lax, I'm not arguing that it hasn't... but it shouldn't have. It's been about 30 years of letting big tech and media conglomerates do whatever they want and it is time for that to stop, and not just for video games.
They've always had control by licensing who can publish games on their platform. Now that contract with publishers has changed who can distribute. Publishers are still free to distribute on other platforms in whatever formats those platforms allow.
> that market being Playstation games
This is arbitrarily narrowing the definition of market as far as possible while ignoring reasonable (legal) thresholds. Case in point how Apple's App Store was not ruled a monopoly while Google's Play Store was - there are reasonable tests to pass, and Sony's case will land closer to Apple than Google. And a monopoly is not the only form of anti-competitive abuse.
Might as well claim Domino's has a monopoly on Domino's pizza.
No it isn't, it's literally a market.
Dominos pizzas aren't created and sold by third parties. If you're going to make a comparison, try something doesn't so obviously miss the point (though if you want to talk about commercial food supply chains and how that's become almost entirely monopolized in the United States...).
The rest of your argument is basically "the law says so". Not an argument I'm interested in discussing since I don't care. I explicitly want legislative changes.
> our argument is basically "the law says so".
That's the only argument that matters, because monopoly is a legal matter.
Yeah, you can walk away, but let’s not pretend it’s the same thing as buying orange juice at a new grocer because your regular one only sells it with pulp now. People aren’t being irrational in being annoyed by this.
It's not a luxury to walk away from a sunk-cost, no matter what % of your past expendable income it represents (I think that was kind of what you were hinting at). Anyone can do it.
And most people probably don't replay most games after beating them once, for the handful you do want to replay, you just bust out that console occasionally, or you grab them again in a steam sale to play them on PC instead or something.
The fact that the PS store has still been supported on the console for this long is kind of incredible.
I've been on PlayStation family since PS2, and used to think I was married to it, with my game library and my player character stuff/gear/creations in various games.
But the platform no longer lets me play many of those games, anyway, whether due to console gen or server shutdowns. And nobody cares about my PlayStation gamer score or trophies. So there's little tying me to the platform for the next game I buy.
Sony, please don't make me move to "Linux" gaming, via Valve/GOG/Epic (since I don't want to endorse Microsoft hegemony over the low-level gaming "standard"). PlayStation should be a beloved brand and platform that can be trusted to keep games working -- not one that throws away history, nostalgia, and community. You already impose rules on publishers, so this is within your power.
Related: Project Aces, I was fairly highly ranked in a couple of the Ace Combat installments, but when you shut down the servers, you took away what I'd invested in. I reluctantly bought AC7, but found I didn't have the heart to invest in it, just to have it taken away again, and I won't be buying AC8 nor anything else in the franchise.
There used to be a time when PC games allowed you to connect to random servers. These days Minecraft is the only one that still allows it. And even there, Microsoft go hard on the upselling of their Realms.
Some studios kill their servers after just a couple of years. Even for games that are online first.
Contractually require (and technologically support) that the servers are kept running for n years after the last sale, for example?
Microsoft themselves support self-hosting Minecraft servers. As evidenced by the fact that the server software itself is provided as a free download from an official Minecraft (and thus Microsoft branded) site.
I picked up some ACER handheld at Best Buy and it was a complete joke, the first thing I saw looked like a Windows PC with comically small fonts. My Steam Deck looks more like a Switch or PS Vita.
I hope it's enough.
My take is somewhat difference: Sony is offloading the cost of their prior decisions onto consumers.
For things like movies, they should have negotiated a contract where sold copies are sold copies and cannot be revoked (even if their right to sell/rent copies lapse). For things like the PS3 store, it cannot be run indefinitely. That said, from my understanding, the authorization keys expire if the clock battery on the PS3 dies. That should not be permitted.
I don't think that this is a "do as they please" situation. I think it is a case of bad decisions being made in the past. For some, like the movies, there isn't much they can do to fix the problem after the fact. There is absolutely no incentive for the rights holders to let consumers continue to access previously purchased content (especially with Sony taking all of the blame). Even something like offering refunds to people who purchased the movies is problematic. In all probability, all of their contracts have similar terms. They would have to refund everyone for every purchase in the long run.
Other stuff, like access to PS3 purchases, are likely fixable. The question is: where is the incentive? They could create a patch for old consoles, but it would only affect a small number of customers who still have those consoles. (Worse yet, it wouldn't do anything for those who stored their consoles in the closet -- only to pull it out later to discover the authorization keys are invalid.) The math probably doesn't work out for them so they aren't going to do it.
That is the minimum they should do. At best they should offer the movie collections for free through competitors.
I am saying that as a reflection of reality, not to absolve Sony. Someone at Sony must have understood that their licensing agreements were incompatible with the definition of sale. Someone else likely stuck some clauses into the EULA to reflect that, fully realizing that no-one reads those things (also realizing that it is not reasonable to expect consumers to read an EULA for every transaction in their life). The someone who is now responsible for executing the outcome would also understand that there is the potential for legal action on such a matter, but they also understand that there are legal machinations that will, at worse, limit the damages to a sum that is lower than the cost of refunding the full value of each and every purchase made through their service.
This is how movies work on GOG.
In what might not be a coincidence, they haven't released any movies for many years, and the product category isn't even visible if you don't already own a movie through them.
It's difficult to see how this could ever be possible without significant legislation changes. Nobody (but nobody) offers this, and in the vast majority of the world you literally can't buy out music rights in this way for any licensed music in the titles. That's why literally no online store offers this.
Neither Sony nor Microsoft had a consumer orientation and they will likely loose against the competition.
Physical media was a method to have a "plug & play" game, although that changed in recent times. With that I don't think classic consoles can compete, especially with their new price points.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWSIFh8ICaA
Now at a time when memory and storage prices are at an all time high - they pull a move that directly hurts the customer.
I'd say screwing up ownership is a much bigger issue.
this is how you don't share games on playstation :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Sony should not be let off the hook for its offensive (essentially criminal) behavior.
I won't even review Sony's decades-long efforts to undermine industry standards...
There doesn't seem to be a lot of clarity though around reselling digital downloads the way there is with physical media (first sale doctrine, etc.)
A less scammy terminology must be setup then.
Ebay, to buy: $11 + shipping[0]
PS Store, to rent: $60[1]
And I'm one of those tens of millions opting out. The PS2 felt like a great consumer-focused value. Modern consoles feel like opting in to get kicked in the balls and squeezed for every single penny they can get out of you.
The reason modern consoles aren't selling 300million+ units is because of myopia. And the worst part is that it's a vicious cycle. They see their sales shrinking so the penny pinchers and MBAs get even nastier squeezing the ever-shrinking userbase even more resulting in less sales meaning they need to squeeze those that remain even harder and so on.
At seemingly no point is anybody asking 'Hey why do our sales keep falling even though the potential market's way larger and the competition is pretty meh?' I guess that doesn't look as good on a powerpoint slide as trying to kill the used game market and pretending it will have no knock-on effects.
DRM, online checks, DLC that should have been part of the base game, digital-only games, etc have ruined all that, and if that's going to be the trend everywhere I'll just stick to a PC and Steam where I have a library of games built up over the decades.
I have a Switch and feel that Nintendo provided a decent experience on their recent systems, but with the advent of "game keys" or whatever they call it on the Switch 2, they've flipped to being even worse than the digital-only systems. At least Sony isn't (yet?) trying to sell you a license on a disc to try to fool you into thinking you own a physical copy.
People are convinced that game key cards will stop working at some point, when it's the reverse that will happen; your card will be fine, but won't work on a Switch 2, only a future console.
Nintendo will close access to their stores to old consoles way before they break access with their cards.
I guess this statement is correct, but my point is that the most important thing to me is that I have the game on the cartridge.
Sure, unless the game is no longer available for download, in which case the key card is a worthless piece of plastic to anyone who hasn’t downloaded it previously. And you still have to contend with all the other downsides of downloadable games including managing the free space on your device.
At this point I don’t trust any console manufacturer to pinky promise that downloads will always be available, so I will not buy anything but a proper physical copy.
If gamers want to stop this, they need to stop rewarding these companies with their money.
99% of gamers who are mad about physical disk distribution going away will still buy the digitally distributed games.
Nope, no sources. That was like… 2 lifetimes ago.
Beyond that, I think the real question is would they be earning more by selling 300million+ units to a growing userbase with a positive relationship than they are selling 100 million units to a shrinking userbase who they have an increasingly adversarial relationship with? And I think it's hard to see the answer to that question being no. But that again requires taking a step back to see the forest through all those trees.
Like here, ending physical disc production is obviously going to give them a short-term boon in profit as they kill off the used game market. But longer term? It's certainly going to further erode their playerbase. The short-term profit boost will be measurable next quarter, whereas the longer-term consequences will appear in the order of years. So you get a short-term boost and then longer term are left wondering where all your players went to. Then they invariably concoct nonsensical explanations that always look for any reason outside of their own actions to explain the decline. Like at one time the fable is that people were giving up consoles for mobile.
Maybe they need to look at releasing a cheaper console and making more quality games instead of constantly pushing so hard on graphics. Graphics help sales to an extent, but it's clearly not the whole story, given the popularity of the Wii or Switch. I think the people in charge no longer understand gaming, and are really struggling to produce games that will draw in large crowds again.
> So I think their strategy is to abandon the mass market and sell to price unconscious consumers who will also pay more for games.
Kinda seems like it. I'm curious to see what happens with that, because even people who so far have been willing to pay more will stop being customers if they can't produce an experience that's worth paying for. Maybe I'm in the minority, but the first-party PlayStation games all feel very samey to me.
But I'm also not sure they can sell a cheaper console. PS5 prices just rose and they'll rise again next year - so that level is already going to cost 800 dollars to consumers. You can't really sell hardware to anyone until ram prices come down it seems.
They could release a ps4 level console but I'm not sure it would be that cheap to source parts for... There are rumors of a handheld so that might be cheaper.
Basically console gaming is about to get impractical and they'll try and find a path to stay alive. That's my read.
> For the ps6, they were already done with design and they'd need to let that go to waste to not put it out.
I guess nobody can predict the future, but this sounds like the sunk cost fallacy. E.g., if it's not going to sell well enough to recoup manufacturing costs, then producing the console will be more costly than just wasting the design effort anyway.
Maybe they don't need mass market sales to at least break even?
The unfortunate truth is that physical sales have been ever declining so the writing was on the wall
Edit: And you can't really compare the PS2 and PS5 in terms of competition. PS5 isn't just competing against other consoles, it's also competing against netflix, youtube, tiktok, any endless scrolling platform. There were much fewer options for entertainment in 2001 than there are now
- The published profit margins from Sony are misleading. They take maximal advantage of inflation, currency shifts, and generational overlap to create a picture of profitability that is well above whatever the 'real' figure might be.
- You're comparing the present to the past, instead of an alternative present. Given the very large increases in market size and reduction in competition I think there's little doubt a consumer friendly Sony could have easily doubled their sales, if not substantially more.
- The downward slope of anti-consumerism is not sustainable. You end up in a situation where you have to keep charging more and more for a product where demand keeps going lower and lower. Especially as we reach an era of declining fertility, there's only so many fools.
- Why would you even want to do this? Even if, and I think that's a huge if, Sony ended up more profitable than good behavior would have yielded, it's going to be by the thinnest of margins. And they've put themselves in a situation where they're now in an increasingly adversarial relationship with their own users. See companies like EA or Activision on the software side doing the same thing. I think there's some je ne sais pas to be had for leaders of a beloved companies, as opposed to leaders of yet another corporate bottom feeder.
Money.
I can see this happening with games more after the death of physical media. Create artificial scarcity with limited time windows and charge top dollar for old games because there will be literally no way to get them besides on their digital store terms.
Either that or eventually we'll have to get some antitrust stuff happening to open these things up, though Epic's App Store lawsuit does not give me much hope in that direction.
This is already under threat due to the Star Wars AI videos being released on Youtube, seemingly without constraint as of yet.
The videos are not Hollywood quality [0], however they circumvent rules Disney can't easily break like using the likeness of any actor at any age in any circumstance.
These fan made videos get lots of views. Even if they were all removed from YouTube, this will be a difficult thing to stop.
I believe a generally accepted "good" or even "great" unofficial, Star Wars film built without sets or actors using AI is inevitable. And that this will be true for any popular franchise.
The natural corollary to this arc is into games, where using AI to code most or all of a AAA-competitive title would be considered inevitable.
I suspect Disney and Sony have at least someone pointing at this outcome.
[0] I suppose idealized Hollywood quality. They are better than some films.
> [0] I suppose idealized Hollywood quality. They are better than some films.
Not only that, but Disney has diluted the the average quality of Star Wars by a huge amount over the past decade. It used to be a big deal culturally every time something official came out in theaters or on TV. Nowadays, there has been enough stuff that even the hardcore fans don't enjoy (even if not everyone agrees on exactly which ones are the worst, overall very few people like everything).
It's a lot easier to make something set in the Star Wars universe that's a realistic level of quality (and potentially competitive with whatever happens to the current iteration of shows/movies) when the bar has also been lowered towards what the current level of AI tooling can produce.
Obviously it's gotten harder over the years, but PS4 and PS5 jailbreaks do exist so that means there's a vector for dumping games that were only ever distributed digitally (at least ones released up to the point where the jailbreaks got patched, as the stores will refused to serve new content until you update your system).
All that said, I think my main argument with respect to emulation and root access was less about individuals having that access, and more that so long as someone gains that access even through extraordinary measures, the games can be dumped and distributed, at which point true ownership becomes possible (even if it takes a while for them to become playable on emulation or hacked hardware).
There is diminishing importance of ownership as time passes though because there is less and less desire to own such assets as they get older and newer titles come out.
There are exceptions to the rule, but I'd imagine less than 1% of the population cares about owning/emulating PS3 or even PS4 games at this point.
So yes, there is an eventual vector for "ownership" (though illicit, at least in this hypothetical) but I doubt that moves the needle much if at all.
On the other hand, the fact that people have spent enough time to write down which entries have this bug and which don't (and potentially even which stadiums have it and don't in the entries that do have the bug, since it's apparently not consistent across them) does lead credence to the idea that the library is pretty widely distributed.
I saw a screenshot of something like this recently with the pre-orders of GTA VI.
They apparently "ran out of digital copies..." of something that doesn't exist yet.
But yeah, it's a trend that will sadly probably happen.
Our collective desire to play GTA 6 will outweigh our desire to "stick it to the man".
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/606/
And yes, I probably played Portal 1 a few years after Portal 2 was out.
There's something to be said for creating a near monopoly and also having the ability to digitally revoke someones right to use something they purchased legally, which we'll see more of.
Regulations are needed to protect us.
> Ebay, to buy: $11 + shipping[0]
> PS Store, to rent: $60[1]
Yeah, Sony is stupid to be leaving money on the table like that. Lucky for us, we live in a market system that we can trust to optimize for maximum consumer benefit (like Sony is doing here). It's our revealed choice that we want to pay more for old games.
Perhaps Sony could add an optional tipping screen before digital checkout for the good customers.
Honestly, Sony should just retroactively bill consumers for inflation. Since $60 in 2016 is worth almost $89 today, they should charge all the people who bought the game back then a $29 price adjustment. It's the the only fair thing to do for.
If consumers don't like that option, an alternative can be a perpetual $5/year subscription that additional provides in-game stickers.
Another alternative is to just buy the used games and play them on the old consoles.
Are they though? Console sales have been dropping. It's only money left on the table if people are also purchasing consoles & games in the same quantities. How many people are just not buying these games because they are digital only?
TBH though, I think the ship has sailed a long time ago. Many games with physical media aren't really playable without downloadable updates anyway. Another reason the modern gaming experience has gotten worse.
A funny quirk of that is that the Mario and Rabbids games are always 90% off because they are not published by Nintendo.
I’m considering trying one of the mail order rental companies again.
We simply have no way to preserve games.
However, the flip side is that so many games are built using common game engines, and receive multi-platform releases. So there's a broader surface area for potential preservation. Maybe the PS6 version is permanently dead, but the PC version lives on.
Byepervisor did crack the hypervisor, but it requires an old version of the firmware and the console has to be kept offline to avoid being upgraded. There's no mechanism to downgrade the firmware like there was with the PS4, which limits the blast radius of potential jailbreaks.
Of course, even offline consoles can be updated, since games can ship with firmware updates required need to play the game.
Also, there are unreleased kernel exploits (i.e. jailbreaks) even for the most recent firmware versions, which will inevitably come out in the future.
The scene is not as mature as PS4, but a lot of progress was made this year.
That’s the crux, safe software is like an unbreakable lock. It can keep safe what you value or it can lock you in|out.
And the rest of my statement isn’t about AI but about secure software.
Are you a drone controlled by FOMO?
If AI lives up to its promise then in 5-10 years it should be possible (and affordable) to just point an AI at the screen and let it clone all the graphics, then have it implement the engine.
I highly doubt this. The platforms that didn't have any jailbreaking scenes weren't because the devices were so secure; it was because there was not enough demand for it. If given enough time, there will always be hacks and bypasses just like Denuvo or hypervisor bypass like the recent hack.
It's completely possible that future consoles are secure enough that the components fail long before the security does.
And it isn't like any xbox console exclusives come to mind, all their stuff comes out on pc too.
The Xbox One might be single handledly the most complex and secure piece of human hardware. [1] (Highly recommend watching this talk).
(/takes off devil's advocate hat and puts on flame suit)
Conservation is a social interest amd must come from organized initiatives, it will never take shape magically from individual judgement.
Tightly managed first party IP with a lot of retro throwback games/compilations/crossovers/virtual console and an overly aggressive copyright approach to managing what people do with their IP (even if fair use).
Nintendo plays the long game. They do not compete directly with Sony, Microsoft and the like.
But yes I think you're on to something that Nintendo plays the long game the best, they handle their IPs like Disney does: featuring them across multiple verticals that feed into each other. Its surprising to me how long its taken Nintendo to come back to movies and TV.
Actually now that I think about it, Disney's biggest shortcoming is their video game division despite many wonderful retro Disney and Lucasarts games at their disposal.
Is there a lower form of “art” than always online AAA garbage?
Im not going to lose any sleep over _COD 75: More of the Same Bullshit_ becoming lost media
All my own art is derivative schlock, so maybe I’m biased, but I don’t see how the viewer/consumer whoever has any say in the matter. The show is over when it’s over.
Should be compel musicians to record every live performance and make those available to people who couldn’t make it to the show too?
What if someone was in the bathroom during their favorite song, should we compel an encore?
Maybe it’s ok for some things to be ephemeral.
Because they sold them. They put it out in the world. If they just made it and then immediately destroyed it, wonderful! But they didn't.
And, also, their creators are not a monolith. They were worked on by hundreds of hands. The production company shouldn't get to unilaterally make that decision.
> Should be compel musicians to record every live performance and make those available to people who couldn’t make it to the show too?
This is this and that is that.
They sold a pass to play the game while it was open. Just like a swimming pool or a buffet.
Just because we got an executable software instead of a wrist band doesn’t change what it is.
Is the naming convention the sticking point here?
Did we really think it meant “all you can eat until the heat death of the universe”?
> And, also, their creators are not a monolith. They were worked on by hundreds of hands. The production company shouldn't get to unilaterally make that decision.
Why not?
I have never had a say as a developer or designer of other software when the company turned off products, how much we charged customers, what the SLA was etc. etc. etc.
I signed a contract to do a job on a thing. Regardless of how much pride I took in my work I understood the license it would be distributed under and what my role was.
We can form guilds or join coops if we want a say. Labor has pull before and during the work. Get it in writing. After the fact we’re fucked. Welcome to earth. Sucks here but we make do.
> This is this and that is that.
But this is that. They sold us a concert ticket. We checked the checkbox next to the EULA. Nobody made us do it.
I get the ick from this kind of game it so I stopped buying them, except for when I do. Just like I stopped eating Doritos.
I don’t expect something that comes in a colorful crinkly bag at gas station to be healthy and I don’t expect a game sold by some big studio to not be ripping me off.
The idea of interacting with lawyers and politicians to solve the problem of “some of my luxury goods are a bad value” never crossed my mind.
Because the only reason they received copyright protection in the first place (which is a severe limitation of everyone else's free speech) is to encourage them to contribute to our culture by making the games. You don't get to destroy artworks after the fact that were commissioned and fully paid for.
I mean, it's the internet, you can have whatever opinion you want. But imho this is a particularly nasty and unkind opinion.
The music, visual design, dialogue and “world building” of most games (indie and AAA) is trite recycled junk that without the budget would be indistinguishable from the output of a high school drama club (at best).
That’s before we talk about the cynical stuff like the always online, the loot boxes, the decontenting, the Day 1 dlc, the lack of physical disks you can share with friends or sell to GameStop, the bugs, the prices, etc. etc. etc.
I have failed at enough art and software myself to totally appreciate how much effort it takes to ship something even on the level of the crap that most games are. That doesn’t mean I think that makes them precious and people should be compelled to preserve them. Slop is slop regardless of if it was made by a human or a robot.
People put a lot of effort in to a lot of things that yield boring and or unethical results all the time, I don’t know why people treat games as some special case.
Well, clearly.
Obviously, preservation is in no way in the interest of the companies, they just want to keep selling you the same game over and over as remakes and remasters ad infinitum
We have so many problems with the gaming unfortunately, in addition to what you already said, MTX, gambling disguised as loot boxes, console and store exclusives, AAA pricing, lack of creativity in the AAA market etc
You can spend your money on GOG.com.
Will we continue seeing new bluray releases of movies and TV shows for decades, or are their days numbered?
The loss of console gaming presumably removes a guaranteed revenue source that was keeping Bluray pressing plants alive.
Sales of DVDs and Bluray have been declining for years [1] [3]. Some people have been excited pushing the news that UHD bluray sales increased in 2025, [2] but that ignores the fact that the total optical sales still dropped.
[1] https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...
[2] https://www.flatpanelshd.com/news.php?subaction=showfull&id=...
[3] This article has a more complete graph: https://www.statsignificant.com/p/the-rise-fall-and-slight-r...
I've recently looked into purchasing a dedicated 4K Blu-ray player to start building a disc collection again. I'm assuming there's some pretty decent deals in the used bins now. One by one, I keep canceling my streaming subscriptions. At some point, that physical media will be the only thing left. Makes me feel like a prepper of a different sort
The ripping part is a bit annoying and time-consuming though. Ironically, it would probably be easier to buy a disk then download a file rather than ripping.
FYI for UHD disks in particular common ripping software does not include "player" keys (because they are hard to come by and would be blocked by future releases) but only the disc-specific decryption keys. This means that new releases can't be ripped until someone submits a dump of the copy protection data, which can sometimes take a while if you don't do it yourself.
This is basically what mp3.com tried to do: treat the physical (music) disc as a license key that gives you access to a digital copy online. Sadly, the courts did not agree with their interpretation of copyright law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.co....
I hope they continue to feel this way. WEBDL can come faster.
The jump between vinyl and CD was also massive, but vinyl was still good enough. what CDs had though over the massive sound quality improvements was the added convenience of playing specific songs, not needing to turn it over, or play on the move in your car/walkman/etc, and added features such as easy skipping, shuffle, ripping, etc.
I would wager that it were those extra features + added convenience (and the cheaper price) which got people to switch to CDs over the massive improvements of sound quality. Blu-Ray had exactly the same features as DVDs (until publishers artificially decided to skip adding extra content on their DVD releases), were exactly as convenient to playing DVDs, but were more expensive. So I think for most people it simply wasn’t worth their time to upgrade from if all they got was to bump their picture quality from good enough to amazing.
At the end of the VHS era (when DVDs had already been available for years) maybe you had a good enough (picture) quality on the first few plays of the tape (which you still had to rewind etc.), but at the same time you could go to your local video rental get a 5 year old DVD that had been played hundreds of times, had the same (or slightly better) picture quality, much better sound quality, no need to rewind, and tons of extra features.
And DVDs have interlacing too. True, they add the ability to not store the repeated fields from a telecine but that's mostly because the lossy codec would otherwise fuck things up even more. And not all movies even make use of this and even more don't use it for 100% of the frames.
And while DVD's don't have analogue artifacts, they do have a VERY BAD lossy codec with noticeable blocking. Add to that that contemporary encoders didn't even use the limited encoding space of that codec very well.
DVDs winning has nothing to do with quality but was all about convenience. Smaller package size. Don't have to be rewinded. Can be pressed for duplication instead of having to run through a long tape.
Much better than 480p youtube these days.
In the eye of the public the quality of DVDs are obviously good enough, and the jump to Blu-Ray is simply not worth the time and effort to make the switch.
I would pay for my favorite albums on Blu-ray too. I wish more artists released their entire discography on a really well produced Blu-ray. NIN would be perfect for this. So many Halos, so many videos, all in release order. A real release of Purest Feeling?
If I might give you a heads up here, they are not the best. For a reference player look at Magnetar.
My dream setup is a Magnetar UDP 900 MK II and a Leica Cine 1...
Didn't even know there was such a thing... Knowing Leica cameras, I'm afraid to ask about the price. Well, like they say: if you have to ask... :)
It gives me hope the future is not completely lost.
it typically offers better video processing and upscaling, more accurate color reproduction, cleaner gradients, and superior HDR handling (including dynamic tone mapping on some models). Many also support Dolby Vision from UHD Blu rays, which the PS5 does not.
It won't show on a bad screen that much, but a dedicated player will squeeze out more of the disc.
First, the player performs MPEG-4 HEVC decoding, reconstructing full video frames from heavily compressed data.
Once decoded, the signal is still not in a display-ready format.
UHD Blu-rays are almost always encoded in 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, meaning luma (brightness) has full resolution, but chroma (color) is spatially reduced. so one of the first steps in the pipeline is chroma upsampling (chroma reconstruction). After that, the player applies color space conversion and output formatting, usually converting to a HDMI-friendly format like YCbCr 4:2:2 or 4:4:4.
HDR handling is sometimes done on the player. The tv is doing a last stage processing that is fine tuned for it's display like contrast enhancement.
I hope that helps
HOWEVER, there is an exception: Feature support. For example, not all blu-ray players support 4K blu rays. Not all players support Dolby Vision.
If you try to play a 4K blu ray disc in a non-4K blu ray player, it won't function at all (won't read). If you try to play a disc using Dolby Vision in a player that doesn't support it, it will fall back to HDR10.
But assuming 2 players both support the features a disc uses, the end output will be identical.
There's also upscaling, which some players can do differently.
the final output is not guaranteed to be visually identical because parts of the processing pipeline (chroma reconstruction, tone mapping, scaling, and output formatting) are implementation-dependent. There is a spec, but multiple processing stages are not strictly defined to be identical. Higher end players also use a HDR Optimizer and the ps5 does not, which is visually noticeable.
Accordingly, different brands use different video processing hardware and software to rebuild that compressed data. This absolutely results in color accuracy variation, shadow detail, and overall picture differences.
This feels like the beginning of the death spiral for blu-ray. Sales aren't going to go up enough for it to be worth it keep factories going, much less spin up new ones.
The next two years are probably going to be a mess as collectors snatch everything up annd inventory gets cleared out.
0 - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cherry-bombs-the-under...
I don't think we have ever seen something like it before. A new media format that breaks backwards compatibility, yet uses the exact same physical medium as the previous version. Some people did attempt it with HD movies on DVD, but the attempt failed so badly I don't think it even counts.
Its very existence was a very strong signal Bluray would be the last optical disc format. And the launch of the PS5 without a new optical confirmed it.
I spoke to my local librarian who cited this as the reason they haven't bothered with 4K blueray despite it being 10+ year old technology at this point.
Think of it from the point of view from senior citizens. They likely already have the equipment for DVD and are used to it. That alone is "simpler to operate". Yes Bluray could often have simpler menus but that existing inertia is something that is important as well because I dont think most senior citizens are actively seeking out newer tech if they dont need to.
In case you're asking "why", it's because your "4K" stream is compressed to hell and back. Your home internet connection doesn't even have the bandwidth to stream the quality of a BR.
This has not been true for most people for a while now. Even the high end of 4K blue rays tops out around 100 Mbps, which is achievable on pretty much any broadband connection.
It's only achievable in a real sense if there are video providers out there offering the content at that bitrate. The absolute best you can hope for in optimal conditions is from Apple TV+ at between 30-40 Mbps which is equivalent to what you get with a non-4k blu-ray.
The media includes bonus features that generally aren't available in streaming or torrents.
The media will not suddenly stop existing if some server breaks down, some company goes under or some contract expires.
The movie will not suddenly get "patched" with an AI-upscale or censored scene one day while watching it.
You can lend the media to someone else to watch without having to ask for permission to anyone else.
AVGN complained about it here: https://youtu.be/tetXKdi9U3c?t=400
Is that really a thing?
Blu-Rays also have special features, which most streaming platforms don't offer (I think largely except for iTunes).
I want to support artists who make content I like, but I also want control over my media library. Physical media is the best way to do this.
I hope that physical media sticks around. DVDs and Blu-rays often include something that digital releases don't: director's commentaries, "making of" featurettes, and other extras.
For me, it adds a whole new layer of fun to movies I already like.
I remember back in the heyday of physical media(2010s) directors like Edgar Wright took curation of physical media extremely seriously: Multiple commentaries by not only the director but with the cast, production crew, sound designers etc. Deleted scenes, multiple featurettes and even picture slideshows.
I wonder how much the design of Blueray menus is hampered by the tech choices used in the format. DVDs were video files that repeated with tiny overlays that the player would just draw. Bluray seem to be entire Java applications of which most studios develop one generic version and reuse for every release.
But I never see them anywhere else. Especially streaming. A real loss.
This is probably due to the fact that they relied on Intel SGX security which has been busted wide open and itself been discontinued by Intel so instead of redesigning the security model, just depreciate the entire format on PC.
I don't think there is that much of a market left for set top players either.
Of all the companies you'd think are committed to the format, it would be Sony right?
Well they currently list one model of set top player on their website and it is the same design since at least the pandemic(when I bought my player). The SKu has changed since then but after looking at the differences, the only design update they have done in those ~6 years is upgraded menu software and removing built-in smart or networking features.
8K hasn't taken off as far as I know but eventually it might and right now there is no transition path to that for physical media.
And I don't think 8K will ever take off. 4K is already at the point where much (but not all) of the additional resolution is just noise. Meanwhile 4K pixels are already small enough even for 70"+ TVs at fairly close movie viewing distances so where 8K will provide any advantage at all is exceedingly limited.
And the reasons for that are pretty simple. I like being able to resell games when done with them. I like being able to lend them to friends, or play them on as many consoles as I want. I like the idea of having something that companies (generally) can't remove due to licensing changes or an always online requirement.
This sort of change just feels like yet another step towards constantly renting rather than owning, or streaming games and media without any control over how or when you can use it.
https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...
From the link you posted:
“Game-key cards are different from regular game cards, because they don’t contain the full game data. Instead, the game-key card is your "key" to downloading the full game to your system via the internet.
After it’s downloaded, you can play the game by inserting the game-key card into your system and starting it up like a standard physical game card. An internet connection is only required when you launch the game for the first time. After this, the game can be started even without an internet connection. However, like regular physical software, the game-key card must be inserted into the system in order to play the game. A Nintendo Account is not required to download the game data.”
So lending and reselling game-key cards is still possible in the same way as physical media… at least until Nintendo’s servers stop serving the game, heh.
They're theoretically a tiny bit better than download codes, but the same applies. If this is the format going forward, I'm out.
If I'm renting those games, it sure seems like a good deal.
I do appreciate that console online market places have not historically been as well managed as Steam.
But also, GoG exists: you can buy a PC game and get a DRM-free download that you can play offline and store forever.
In fact, it's thanks to Valve that I no longer need windows to run games and have finally nuked it from my system a bit over a year ago.
So yeah, nothin remains good forever, but credit where it's due, and Valve's DRM is cosmetic at best, and trivial to bypass.
And delisting a game from a store isn't a license pull. Delisting prevents new purchases of the game, but owners of a game prior to delisting can still download and play[2]
For example, even though Sony is closing the PS3 store to new purchases after 20 years, existing owners of digital games can still download their digital copies. So my entire PSN digital library for the past 20 years is still downloadable and playable. Same for Steam.
I love GOG, and prefer a DRM-free digital copy for PC that I can backup redundantly, as it is the most future-proof option, IMO. Physical media can get damaged or lost and digital storefronts won't last forever (even Steam could shut down one day). Even my hard drives can fail and lose data. But even so, when I purchase a digital license for a game, I have good confidence it will be playable for years and years to come.
---
1. Of course, many online multiplayer games have had their servers shut down, after which the game becomes effectively unplayable. But this is a separate problem that isn't solved by choosing physical over digital media.
2. As long as the digital storefront exists and as long the console hardware still works, if I purchased it for a console.
In practice, Steam is likely not going to know or care if the owner of a Steam account has died and someone else is using the account credentials.
* Up to 6 people can share games in a family account
* Each account can join as an adult or a child
* No age verification done, the person who created the account simply marks each invitation as "join as an adult" or "join as a child"
* Adult members have parental controls over child members and can control which games they have access to
* Child members must get purchases approved by an adult member
* No requirement for any particular family structure, like limiting it to two adults. Six roommates sharing a large house can form a Steam family if they want.
The only thing that is even slightly restrictive is the one-year cooldown on joining a new Steam family group if you leave the old one, and even that is pretty reasonable. (Without that, people would abuse the system by saying "Hey, join my family group real quick and I'll share my copy of Portal 2 with you, then leave the group when you're done). Plus, if you're rejoining the family group you just left then there's no cooldown, so "Oops, I clicked the Leave button by mistake" doesn't penalize you.
If you use a VPN then gl
Every game I have purchased on Steam still exists to be played, apart from those where multiplayer servers may have diminished naturally.
If I had these games as physical copies I'd need to have lugged around multiple boxes of games of which I'd probably have lost or damaged the disks.
The ideal solution would be an industry-wide change where games should always be required to be able to play as sold on disc—pipe dream though.
Albums will be replaced with remastered, "deluxe", or anniversary editions with different versions of the same songs.
Movies and TV shows will have different edits which aren't communicated. Songs from the soundtrack get replaced when digital rights expire. Jokes get censored[0].
None of this is communicated by the streaming platforms. You only notice it when you go to listen/watch to that media and realise it's not what you're familiar with. But you've already sold your CDs & DVDs so you have to take what you're given.
I'm sure this will start happening to games soon, if it hasn't already.
There's a reason Game Pass and the Series S exist, they just hadn't had the courage to say the quiet part loud yet.
This is the big point for me. If one buys a digital PlayStation game there's virtually no easy way to transfer it to another owner or sell it like one could do in past console generations. There will always be modding and ways to play game dumps, but it limits that level of "ownership" to those technically inclined to make it work.
Not a fan of this of course, just saying it’s a calculated move they just copied from other industries. People complain and minority ends up following their principles, but similarly as with streaming, nearly everyone just has Spotify and that’s it.
I'm not so sure this is the case. It would massively reduce their market share which is one of the biggest reasons ps5 is relevant imo.
There won't because advances in defensive cybersecurity have made it so that software exploits are extremely rare (if they exist at all), and modern chips contain hardware defenses against electrical attacks like voltage glitching.
Sony recently expunged copies of movies people had bought, so I honestly don't trust them not to do the same with games.
Also, they announced the closure of the PS3 store, so that's even less reason to trust that I won't be able to reobtain the games I've bought digitally in the future...
Physical copies of games have in their EULA that the game is licensed to you, so theoretically they could still disable it.
Precedent? BlackBerry phones refused to connect to WiFi if you didn't pay for your mobile data plan. It became a 2G brick.
Sadly, there's NO way to authenticate PS1/PSP games on PSP anymore. Even connecting it to the PS3 via USB and trying to authenticate it didn't work.
(At least PS1 games still work on PS3 for now, though.)
All of this stuff is just starting to be shut down and deactivated now, the amount of ewaste is going to be massive. I now refuse to buy anything that requires an app or the interenet to use.
The side-effect most people didn't consider is that you never really own a digital copy. And the most relevant part is that you cannot transfer/sell a digital copy. For everything else around ownership I know I can count on Sony to still screw it up even with discs, like disabling a disc game with some online checks.
EU or any other gov can pass a law to allow that and we'll have the option.
Maybe this USB stick full of MCU movies isn't the highest possible quality and two of the Thor movies are missing for some reason, however it cost less than €20, so who cares ? Oh it's illegal? Well my government said they don't give a shit about that until you get rid of the orange lunatic
In a world where American media companies are also trying to fuck over consumers that sort of action could probably get a rotting corpse re-elected in a landslide, that's one of the reasons it's on the backstop threat list - dry policy responses don't connect with voters, but "make as many copies of their stuff as you like" is incredibly popular.
Governments can still force them to sell same as rest of the world or have them pack their bags and leave.
Adobe Creative Cloud became the only option for new Adobe software in 2013, 3 years before that essay. Sure, Adobe is on the forefront of being knobheads, but still.
I wouldn't think that the copy of some movie Netflix is streaming to me will be 60-100GB over the duration of the movie. Not to mention when their services have issues and you're watching 5-10 minutes of low quality content until it settles and snaps up to full (streaming) quality.
Isn't being compressed as much. All Blurays are compressed either with MPEG2, VC1, H.264, or H.265 if it's an UHD Bluray.
Video is really big. Compression was needed to make it even vaguely possible unless your quality was in the toilet.
HD-DVDs were smaller, so they were more compressed.
An uncompressed 24 bit 1080p image is just under 6 MB. If you save it as a compressed PNG, you cut that down to roughly 2.5 MB. Now, PNG compression isn't very efficient, and you can probably do some interframe magic if you really wanted to (cf lossless h264), but the whole exercise is mostly futile, since even if you cut your bitrate down to an eighth, you're still looking at, like, 20-ish minutes of runtime with 25 gigabytes.
Meanwhile, blu-ray looks as good as it does at an average of 25-30 mbit/s (0.03 gbit/s) (while UHD blu-ray even more so, with a better codec, so even more detail is preserved). The compression used saves so much space the trade-off is obviously worth it unless you're a production company making an actual movie, where every detail counts.
Another use cases seems to be archival of historical footage.
Both should use multipass ahead of time compression with a rate control algorithm, and both should have enough slack streaming bandwidth to handle complex scenes with buffering
I do agree its insane to me we're still not at 4K coverage for world major level sporting events.
It feels misleading to advertise a 4K OLED as the best viewing experience with such a poor source signal.
This actually made me look up some of the specs related to the feeds. Quite an interesting read. They apparently are delivering the main feeds in 2160p.
https://www.iseurope.org/news/fifa-world-cup-2026-broadcast-...
https://www.1001tvs.com/2026-fifa-world-cup-4k-hdr-broadcast...
I understand that this is the reality we live in, but I don't know how we have accepted it.
This is true for consoles, but on GoG for example you can download the DRM offline installer for the games you buy. So going purely digital doesn't have to be terrible on its own. But of course, for consoles it will be.
In the old disc era you’d just pop in the disk and start playing in minutes. You could have as many disks as would fit in your house.
Oh no, you have to stand up and walk 10ft to put it in. What a great inconvenience.
When you die, your digital assets may simply disappear.
There's no inheritance practice, that I know of, of transferring digital assets.
https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/an-update-on-playsta...
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745476
Werent early versions of the Switch 1 jail broken pretty fast and people were dumping switch 1 roms online to play in emulators?
I don’t follow this stuff too closely but I thought that I saw people playing the sequel to Breath of the Wild on PCs to get acceptable frame rates when it came out.
Nah. Switch 1 is already compromised and I'd predict we'll see modchips for the Switch 2 in the next 3 years.
And even if true, there's always emulation (also a pain though).
And dumping games requires a jailbreak.
That's why there's no switch 2 emulation as of now.
I think he "got" it. He was certainly annoyed at the idea that something purchased could just be taken back. Maybe it'll stick and he'll be better able to understand why I'll push back on a new PlayStation or any digital only games.
I see playing a game like Rocket League more in lines of having a membership to club to play a certain game rather than owning a copy of the game to play alone, forever. The club will eventually go away, that's just the nature of such things.
I do agree its a good lesson to teach your kids about the limits and issues of digital "ownership" though.
At least with PC I have the actual files for the game I am playing, and can backup and mod them as I wish.
For now.
If you have Vice City on DVD and install it you can still enjoy Michael Jackson. Not with the Steam version.
Consumers are lured into walled-gardens all the time - consoles, app stores, hardware. Where would you suggest someone purchase a digital license for a movie?
From a video game store is the part I find odd. I get walled gardens. Not this one for this purpose.
Movie playback has been a thing for home consoles for decades. It became kind of a joke that the most played Xbox 360 game was Netflix. As more people have moved to streaming media/digital marketplaces, its only natural for those to grow. I've known lots of people who use their Xbox as their main media center that consume movies on Microsoft's storefront. It makes sense Sony would be in the game as well, as after all they even directly produce a lot of content themselves.
Furthermore, Sony Pictures is huge, so selling movies is absolutely part of Sony's business as a whole.
It’s not all one Sony. Just like Samsung or MS divisions fight and get into spats.
Sony DADC presses every PlayStation games but also has spent decades manufacturing CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, UHD Blu-rays, software, and other optical media for 3rd party customers across the entertainment and computer industry.
If PlayStation discs disappear in 2028, that removes one of the last massive, guaranteed sources of demand for optical disc production inside Sony. Even if the plants continue serving movies, music, and third-party clients for a while, it’s hard not to wonder if this announcement is also the beginning of the end for one of the last major end-to-end optical media manufacturers in the supply chain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Digital_Audio_Disc_Corpor...
I won't wait for it though. After 28 years of always having a Sony at home, it ends here for me at the age of 35.
Steam Summer sales on a PlayStation? I want that today.
If this decision somehow ends up with Steam and Proton for PlayStation, it will be well worth it. Gaben, please get some lawyers to write to the EU posthaste, and start porting Proton to iOS & PlayStation
Part of the appeal for the Switch and Switch 2 is the stability of their resale market. It's easier to pay for a new game when you know you can get 50% of your money back on the used market.
If digital only, then consoles have fewer differentiators to PCs, and PCs let you play online without a subscription.
It's not a given, but it's a plausible future that steam boxes outsell playstations, and that Sony loses its lucrative cut of game sales because people moved to PC since there was no differentiator for consoles other than extra hassle and costs compared to steam.
Nintendo has been the only one really good at that, and even there, they're slipping.
For example, the Switch 2 has been out for a year and has no exclusive Mario or Zelda games yet. They announced another Zelda remake.
I'm not saying they don't have their issues; Pokemon launches since the late 3DS era have been somewhat notorious for performance issues (and of course aren't technically developed first-party, although they're certainly Nintendo exclusive, and I think there's a pretty strong argument that bringing them in house might actually improve the situation), and the Mario Kart entry for the Switch 2 seems to have been considered somewhat lackluster, but I don't think it's totally reasonable to start making long-term predictions yet. In the aftermath of the Wii craze, it would be easy to make similar predictions given the lows of the Wii U era, but they obviously came back pretty strong in the following generation, and there doesn't seem to be much evidence that they've come close to sinking that low again yet.
I think they tend to try to vary the order that they do major releases between generations. The Switch 1 era had Breath of the Wild as a launch title (that also launched on Wii U, which is easy to forget), and Mario Odyssey came up before the end of that year, and they re-released the Wii U version of Mario Kart rather than coming out with an original entry. After the huge cultural zeitgeist around Wii Sports when it was paired alongside a Zelda title for the Wii, they seem to have been trying to repeat that with somewhat quirky minigame compilations alongside major franchises; the Wii U had a weird theme park thing with the new Mario game, and they paired Breath of the Wild with the extremely forgettable 1-2-Switch and a co-op puzzle game that I don't think I ever heard of anyone actually playing.
Last quarter 85% of all game sales were digital.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/sony-just-reported-a-new-r...
https://direct.playstation.com/en-us/buy-accessories/disc-dr...
They actually did a good job giving the consumer choices - it’s just customers didn’t choose physical media.
Yeah, the percentage has got smaller, but the industry also got much bigger.
Taking away physical discs from consoles means the worst of both worlds. You can no longer sell or trade your games, and they are essentially locked to that hardware.
A PS3 is still useable today even with the store gone and will be useable for a very long time. The PS6 might become a brick if its secured enough.
This isn't necessarily true, it really depends on how they go about implementing the sales. The question being, is the sale tied to the hardware or to the account?
I've bought a number of games on the Xbox store over the years. If I were to go buy a new console and log in with my Xbox Live account, I could re-download and play those games. The games aren't permanently associated with any particular piece of hardware, they're associated with the account.
Nintendo's processes have seemed like its tied to the hardware, but since at least the Wii U its technically tied to the account. This may not have been true for the Wii though, but I never really owned the Wii or Wii U. They have sometimes made it difficult to release your account from the old hardware to associate it with new hardware though, sometimes necessitating calling support if you weren't able to disconnect your account from the old hardware.
When transferring accounts to a new Switch 2, my wife's account somehow got locked and it required reaching out to their support for them to unlock it so it could be properly paired to the new hardware. Definitely a frustrating pain on the first day of getting the new console.
The "no longer sell or trade" part is almost always true though. I'm just talking about the game being locked to the hardware.
I think I'm going to stop buying new game consoles and games now and just stick to PC (mostly via Steam) and emulation. Might continue with switch stuff if they keep publishing proper physical media. I find myself revisiting console games that came out 20+ years ago often, and that's a large part of the reason I buy them.
It's still putting my trust in an online store, but I have much more confidence that my Steam games will still be usable a couple of decades from now than the xbox/ps stores. And historically Nintendo has totally axed the online store for each console when the new one comes out, including killing the ability to redownload already purchased games, although they did retain the same store between Switch 1 and 2.
Will be interesting to see whether Steam stays safe when Gabe eventually dies/retires. I think if he passes it on to a trusted successor it might be good for another few decades+, but if the company gets sold or publicly listed I have no hope.
(As a side note, if anyone is a console gamer primarily because of the nice "turn it on, get controller, play with no stuffing around" vibe of it - a pc in a small case with bazzite-deck installed that's just permanently hooked up to your TV is a very seamless experience, it's remotivated me to play a lot of stuff on PC that I would normally default to buying on consoles - JRPGs, racers, platformers etc.)
the real problem here isn't lack of plastic circles
None of the console manufacturers pulled that shit, that Valve gets a pass is wild to me.
You wouldn't complain that Walmart takes a X% cut when you have a healthy competitive market and can chose other store fronts with better prices.
I have a PC and PS5, and bought game for PS5 just because they were on disk, despite that they would've ran and look much better on my pc.
Sony is releasing like 2 single-player games a year, I might get a PS6, but I'll be in not rush with so little offering, anything else I'll get on PC.
Disc > Steam > Digital console
Steam games exist on physical media that players have some control over: I can copy my Steam data directory across PCs/Steam Deck, I would not be able to do that on a PlayStation.
Sure, I can't resell my Steam games, but the openness of the PC platform has advantages over closed consoles. Valve can't brick old games the way Sony can - a new computer in 2046 will be able to play single-player games backed-up from Steam, not so much for consoles.
Not to mention whatever's available on GoG where you don't even need a crack to make backups.
With Sony you have no insurance.
Having gamed for three decades now I'd say the shift has been very real. There's a much larger fraction of games that have representation of women, mental illness, disabilities, races, etc.
Is that progress or destruction? Depends on which side you fall on.
You're saying there are no examples, does that mean you think no shift has happened? That games are still made the same way? If so, are you claiming that games always had this sort of diversity of representation? Or that games nowadays still don't have it?
It's similar to asking was the end of Jim Crow or slavery progress or the destruction of white spaces and to be sensitive to the people who wanted those to continue. I think a lot of the issues we have today are because people in both periods did not ostracize those people like Europe ostracized the Nazis.
Having a main character that isn't a straight white male is so minor in comparison. But giving that idea credence is a dangerous path backwards to those arguments of the past
So when people, who don't like this change, point out their dislike of it, the reasonable reaction would be to argue that the change is good. Not that there hasn't been any change.
It's really not that deep.
We won't own games anymore, we won't be able to sell/acquire used games, we won't be able to play disconnected.
I'm curious whether Nintendo will be following the same path.
Probably, they're already heavily invested in digital-only games, e.g. virtual console, or selling game boxes with just a download code.
But this goes back years already, physical copies of their games have remained expensive for ages. Relatively modern and/or very common "everyone has these" games like various pokemon games going for full price to 2-3x that.
And the PS5 is meant to be able to play digitally downloaded while disconnected (at least the ones you own, not the PS+ games). It's just the implementation is little buggy, it sometimes breaks for some people and you get a bunch of vocal people complaining about how it doesn't work.
So IMO, you aren't losing much there. The digital-only experience isn't that different from needing to have internet to download a day-one patch.
It's the used game sales that are the biggest loss from this move.
So I figured that the last console with which I really felt like I had a collection of games that were mine, that I got to keep and could play whenever I wanted, was the PS2.
Some of us do because we only buy from non-DRM encumbered platforms like GoG.
Don't buy games on steam, windows store, apple store, etc.
Stop giving companies money for something you don't own.
At the same time, as @outervale has said: they are shutting down PS3 and PS Vita online stores as well.
AND at the same time as @zache has said & previous discussions about PlayStation Deleting 551 Movies from Customers' Accounts.
WHILE at the same time, Dynamic pricing[0] is occuring where people who buy games are charged more because PS expects them to be able to cough up more money from my understanding
Combining all of this: No physical disc + shutting down online stores + deleting movies from customers accounts + dynamic pricing.
These might basically just be planned obsolence devices while trying to extract as much profits as humanly possible from your wallets.
I remember the dynamic pricing debate and that some people were somewhat tolerable of that, but I think that being tolerable of that is what is causing more and more precedents and an overall situation has occur where things are just increasingly more actively consumer-hostile.
[0]: https://www.ign.com/articles/sony-reportedly-testing-dynamic...
If Sony doesn't offer GTA6 on disc, offline: I'll sell the PS5, too. I just got a 5070Ti, so it's probably back to PC-MasterRace I'll go...
Reasons like this [Sony's 2028 disc-stop] are exactly why I won't be purchasing a PS6. At least (in Sony's defense) they're telling us oldtimers about this now, as opposed to on the day of [stopping disc retail sales].
I was planning to purchase a PS5 for GTA6 after the first trailer but I’m not sure about that now.
----
When GTA5 stopped working (without updating from Win7->10, years ago), I lost a great therapeutic post-work sytem. So I bought a PS4Pro and have never let it get online – FU.sony – never will.
But really hoping the cat-and-mouse game of discless playstations bites Sony in the ass bigtime. I've already got $100 for this future hacker's commissary.
Godspeed, good generatively-transformed futures - may you forever remain pretrained...
But 'physical media' is one of the reasons why a lot o people make a distinction between PC and console games. Removing this will make it easier for consumers to compare a PS5 to a Steam machine, and I don't think that is a good thing for Sony.
It's pretty hard for me to believe that going through the trouble to set up an entirely new Playstation account, buy a game, refund it, and have the dedication to stay offline forever to keep the game could possibly have been a widespread behavior. It will obviously be easy for them to ratchet that into online check required every 30 days once the current thing is out of the news cycle: https://kotaku.com/playstation-drm-ps4-ps5-support-30-days-o...
Google - give us Stadia 2 in 2027, you cowards.
Estimates for next gen used to be 27 or 28. With the RAM shortage, end of 28 is considered the earliest.
That means that when the PS8 rolls around, any games you've bought for the digital-only PS6 will be unplayable, so think about that when you buy digital games when that (and for PS5 now) comes through.
Clearly that’s no longer necessary. Download-only retail boxes or gift cards or whatever are enough.
I know some people really care about physical releases, but I think the writing has been on the wall for years that this was coming.
Killing the used market is a very bad idea. Remember what happened with xbox?
...funny that so many people were complaining about the recent Steam Machine not being worth it compared to just getting a PS5; maybe now it's not that bad of a deal after all, huh?
The steam machine may be cheaper in the long run once you consider:
* Playing PlayStation games online costs $11/month.
* PlayStation games tend to be more expensive than steam games.
Where can you get a new gaming "beast of a machine" for $600? In the past you could build a reasonable gaming machine for $600 but parts are drastically more expensive today.
If you go to microcenter and look for gaming PCs, their cheapest option is $800 [1]. PC Part Picker's entry level build is $780 [2].
The only option I found with these constraints is this computer from Walmart with a GPU released in 2017 and a CPU released in 2013 [3] (This is not a recommendation for this listing. Please don't buy it).
[1] https://www.microcenter.com/product/705867/powerspec-g530-ga...
[2] https://pcpartpicker.com/guide/fQscCJ/entry-level-amd-gaming...
[3] https://www.walmart.com/ip/STGAubron-Gaming-PC-Computer-Desk...
So the most expensive, and important, by far on both accounts part of a decent gaming PC is the video card. A PS5 is around an RX 6700 or a NVidia 2080, and that's being generous. That's a ~$300 card. You then have $300 left for case + mobo + CPU + RAM, which isn't hard. And in reality your CPU doesn't really matter (within reason) because in modern times basically 0 games are CPU limited. It's pretty much always the GPU. Work out the minimum amount you can get the non-GPU parts from, use your remaining budget on the GPU - you'll end up with a great machine for easily under $600.
There's a bunch of subreddits dedicated to this exact topic as well. /buildapcforme could be nice for more specific advice. In general I'd recommend against buying prebuilt systems. The markup they charge is unreasonably high and 'building' a PC in modern times is basically legos for adults, and there's about a million videos on YouTube showing you exactly what to do, step by step.
Again, I think you are missing how much the price of components has increased.
16GB of DDR5 alone costs approximately $200 [1]. I challenge you to find a new case, motherboard, NVMe SSD, and PSU for the remaining $100 in the budget after $200 for ram and after your assumed $300 for a GPU.
[1] https://pcpartpicker.com/products/memory/#b=ddr5&Z=16384001,...
So I don't really understand what's happening. Prices shouldn't be this high. That should be opening the door to huge arbs even for a drop-shipping middle man. Tariffs, shipping, something else?
Maybe if you get in your time machine and go back a few years. Not today though.
<Unplugs PS5>
* Allowing resale of digital games
* Transferring game licences between platforms (so now you have all your Steam games on your Xbox (at least those that run)
* Developing a new disc format (or other physical format) and locking in that for the next gen
* Just buying a blu-ray factory or two to secure supply and locking in and promising physical releases going forward (and then living up to those promises, which isn't going to be easy with bean counters breathing down their neck)
These are massive asks in the current reality, so I can't see MS bothering. Xbox already seems to be living on the edge of relevancy. It seems more likely to me that they just won't bother any more and relegate it to a brand for what remains of the gaming part of Microsoft.
If I remember well PS3 was during the period where blu-ray lasers were production constrained and more expensive with Sony prioritizing their own devices, so the console was price and availability competitive against dedicated disc players by third parties. And the PS3 had pretty long term update/support. I'm fairly sure that had an impact on the financial side as it was in the era when console hardware was subsidized on the expectation they'd get a slice of game sales, except those consoles bought for primarily for movies didn't reimburse them so well.
Stuff like Blu-Ray seems to be becoming a Laserdisc like enthusiasts niche system, I don’t think it’s been a big thing for Sony for a while.
Same reason I prefer GoG over Steam -- at least I can download the installers and store them, and there is no string attached.
Mostly. GoG sells games with DRM now and they don't tell players about it in advance either. Not only are there many multiplayer games with DRM on GoG but there are also single player games. For one example see https://www.gog.com/en/game/cult_of_the_lamb
I have no idea why they allowed that, maybe it happened when they changed owners, but I hope it doesn't keep spreading.
But at the end of the day, part of what makes a console a console to me is the ability to swap games with friends. If I can't do that easily, why wouldn't I just use Steam?
But since customers don't care, who else should care?
I always prefered physical disks. That was my #1 pro-console argument. Without those disks, I simply won't buy anything console related. I vote with my wallet, simple as that.
Of course I know that people will still buy digital disks and then cry when Sony will do something unthinkable like revoking access, but I guess that won't be my problem.
Consumers need to start buying more used media instead of buying new.
They need to use services like GOG.com instead of Steam, even if it's less convenient.
They need to decide that if they can't buy a DRM-free or a physical copy of something then they simply won't buy it, and be confident in that decision instead of caving in to FOMO.
It requires a mindset change which I fear will be too difficult for most -- which is exactly what Sony is banking on.
If the PS6 comes out with no disc player at all, not a chance I buy it.
Also, that's a definite middle finger to second hand and physical stores then ? Hoping MS will make a bet in the opposite direction (but I don't see it) and the players will follow..
I hate it. I hate digital only games. I get that the numbers and reality are against my wishes but that doesn't make it any better. I want to unpack my console from storage in 20 years and play the games I bought for it even if the company or servers no longer exist.
They've seen the writing on the wall for at least a decade; that's why GameStop has more shelf space for Funko Pops than for games.
but what is the plan for shops like GameStop then if nobody buys or sells games anymore via offline shops. as you mentioned with Funko pops (and I had to search up with that), but they could perhaps transition to merchandise focused goods but I think that even within that online could have a valid competition?
Bankruptcy.
They've already had to massively cut down after the first round of people switching to digital-only. I doubt they'll survive a digital-only world (maybe a rebrand will work? Or maybe they'll limp along on merch).
Honestly gamers have been stomaching this for decades with Steam so Sony wants in on some of that sweet sweet action as well.
Killing the secondary market for games hasten how soon they can sell $100 games.
And pirating stuff off Steam is generally extremely trivial, so it's a largely coercion-free business-customer relationship, and I think that's a large part of why they're doing so well. People like to support businesses that treat them well. And for those that don't? Well I think there's a reason that video game piracy is plummeting, while film/media/streaming piracy is surging.
It's not a used game market unless you can transfer it to other people an unlimited number of times without the original company getting a say.
If something costs $10 "normally" and is $1 with a "discount of 90%" you can just as easily say it costs $1 "normally" with the $10 being 10 times "normal". It's purely arbitrary which one you label as the normal price.
I don't think thats comparable at all. You're not buying used games, you're buying discounted games. Sony can discount games too. Steam doesn't have a secondary market either.
We just seem to trust Valve more to not rugpull our purchases.
Interesting timing to announce this at around the same time as the PS3 digital store is discontinued signaling that digital only doesn't last as long as physical.
My old Nintendo Wii is modified with homebrew software that keeps alive some otherwise inaccessible features since Nintendo shut off their servers. I hope the community can do similar for newer consoles when they reach the end of their life.
I guess this resource is relevant to the topic at hand. It lists games and whether you can play and complete them fully from disc without an internet connection
The lord giveth, and the lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the lord.
i know theres a lot of defeatist talk here about how physical media is dead but almost everyone is taking this as a big deal even if they buy all their games on digital. people want that choice.
the only question is if they care about it enough to get the government involved. im not 100 confident its happening but when you look at stop killing games its proof that players can organize.
Though, I think they will follow what Sony is doing.
At the same time this might bring people closer together (eeerrrm, it won't) by sharing their accounts between each other.
This way you will finally own nothing except for maybe console rent arrears.
Long live independent physical game market. We already see people with 3d printed carts, designing labels and making their own homebrew games for retro consoles. Some people are also producing their own big box PC games for the hell of it.
As I continue to largely ignore AAA & mainstream gaming companies I look forward to how the indie gaming market takes advantage of everyone's growing nostalgia for physical ownership of games.
The physicality is a novelty, much like vinyl records. It’s a market sure, but not a significant one that calls for a paradigm shift.
Happy for them, I'll even buy it if it's DRM-free with off-line installers I can back up.
What percentage of game discs sold today are even playable without first connecting to the internet and downloading additional content? Not in defense of Sony, I just think this battle may have already been lost and not enough people noticed.
- over 1/3 (34%) of PS5 games on disc from their sampled games are either too buggy or missing required/advertised content without downloading something from a server before first play. 13-18% are unplayable without an initial download.
- 40% of games on Xbox One/Series X are too buggy/missing required or advertised content, and 10-11% are unplayable without an initial download.
Some of these games may even have hardcoded download requirements.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/sony-removing-over-50...
Who's to say that the games you buy for the PS6 will be playable in a couple of years?
The moment you need an account or server to play you don't own the game. I think governments should step in here. They must force stores to use words like rent or lease instead of buy. That way it is way more clear where you are going to spend money on.
You would be allowed to keep a backup, play the backup, transfer the backup, etc.
A digital delivery world does not teach the same way as children learning to put a DVD into a player, hitting play, and understanding how things get somewhere.
Physical game disks, were also about community, gathering.
This is surprising because Sony obsessed over the isolation it was creating when it released the walkman.
What did putting a disc in disc reader thought you?
> This is surprising because Sony obsessed over the isolation it was creating when it released the walkman.
And they have the only online storefront on PlayStation, therefore 2nd-hand market is gone. So what is surprising here?
The disc is a step along the way, from record players, to reels, to cassettes, to video tapes, to discs.
Instead of experiencing changes forward, it can be experienced step by step backwards.
Much like Gen Z are rediscovering the 90's, along with single use devices, music players, dedicated cameras, etc, and hopefully remember some people got to experience it as their real present life.
Heck, I have games I bought digitally over 2 decades ago that I can still download and play. There's no way I'd still have kept a box from when I was a teenager.
We all agreed that we’re done with this. Nintendo gets a pass for making physical carts, but we’re done with paying full price to rent content in general. That also means no PS6, no Xbox-Whateverthefuck, and avoiding Game Key Cards where possible on Switch 2 (or buying them used).
If it’s not on GOG or Itch.io free of DRM, or there’s no physical copy available for sale, then we’ll wait for a deep discount on Steam or use our family library instead.
Fuck this noise, we’re out.
Not sure what the sales are like on PS but at least on Steam you can find great deals for the digital copies as well. (You lose the reselling though)
For PS4 you can buy the disc version for €19.99 regular price and €17.99 on sale. Used discs start from €9.
If you don’t mind waiting for a sale then Steam is great. Otherwise PlayStation is a better deal.
Steam is the entire reason I even bought an offline PS4Pro in the first place!. Years ago, they required an update from Win7 to Win10 (in order to keep playing my therapeutic GTA5, which for some reason required an online connection for single player gameplay?!?!). After some rageful months without Trevor'ing, I bought my first-ever gaming console – love it. Stays offline, just in case Sony wants to brick my PS4, too (fucking hypothetical corporate bullies!)...
Imagine a day where Sony drives around with trucks broadcasting WiFi signals instructing rogue, ostensibly-"offline" PS5s to self-destruct, via backdoor GHz...
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Welcome to /hn/ – I've appreciated many of your varied contributions (keep it up!).
I'm in the UK, and CeX is a great shop to trade in a game for store credit once I'm finished with it, then pickup whatever I want to play next. Most of the time I can completely cover the cost of the next game with the credit received from the trade, or use some store credit leftover from a previous visit!
jokes aside, as someone who has never bought physical games, the landscape for physical ownership in this space was already shrinking.
there is a major chunk of playerbase who only plays online multiplayers, which are tied to always-online mode and constant updates. even if you could buy these titles on a disc, practically speaking they carried very little value of physical ownership.
we are just boiling the frog with little more intensity now. if it is possible to repurpose the bluray reader of ps5 to connect to pc, it might be a nice way to invest in one before they stop selling too.
So people should just stop buying games that are not on phyical media. THat will get Sony to change fast.
Now my focus is to be able to publish high quality games that run well on those anbernic/miyoo/ayn-style handheld devices. Those things are actually priced for consumers and the ones that have card slots provide a method for physical media. And of course, using those as a floor, the games could always upscale for more powerful machines.
I'm just so tired of this continual march toward investor appeasement at the expense of the consumers. They're games. They're entertainment. For people to play. Not how I want them to play them; how people want to play them. People shouldn't have to have an account to play them. They shouldn't have to invest a month of rent to play them. They shouldn't have to worry about me revoking their ability to play them. It's just so frustrating to see how far we've gotten from "drop in a quarter and enjoy". The industry is in sad shape and getting sadder by the day.
Also, 'new games' eventually get discounted as the title gets old. It's one way of keeping money in the game store ecosystem constantly changing hands.
A used game market provides downwards pressure on new games.
Will skip PS6 and probably just not bother with gaming.
* 'we' - book, film and gaming industries
The entire console gaming industry has been decimated in the last few weeks.
Of course, it would be interesting to hear the freemarketeering on this site and how people should "vote with their wallet" and sites/movements such as $freeplaystation.whatever sprouting pseudopolemic nonsense.
But the truth is it’s bullshit and this attitude that companies should be able to do whatever they want because it’s a free market is getting so tiresome
Clearly there is agreement that things can be taken too far - as soon as one single consumer protection/anti competitive/monopoly preventing law exists, you’ve admitted those types of laws are needed
So then you’re only arguing about degrees and companies shouldn’t be allowed to do shit that harms consumers this way
On the surface this seems reasonable - it’s inevitable - discs aren’t going to hang around forever
But this goes back to what it means to own something and we’re all being relegated to serfs who don’t own shit
You wanna get rid of discs? Fine, but give me an alternative so that I still own what I buy and can resell it at will
so if you want offline access what happens ? if I wanna trade games what happens. ?
we don't have your game! and what are going to do now?
I know there's a strong desire for physical media, but games are not the same as movies or music and haven't been for a long time.
Xbox hardware sales down 30%, 5% on services and revenue. Sony PlayStation operating revenue is down -41%.
These are not healthy businesses, and the future looks even more bleak.
Years away from new hardware sales, and the franchise front is desperately bad - which means when hardware eventually does land, the drivers to buy them don't look like they are going to be there.
I'd love to bet against you on these businesses dying.
The ps5 sold very well very fast during the pandemic, which could explain why now that the seas are rough the sales slumped.
If PS and Xbox become abandoned and cause game studios start focusing on PCs again I think it would be a good outcome. But that is just me wishing on a star.
They might lose, but it's nothing like PC.
> No physical disc + shutting down online stores + deleting movies from customers accounts + dynamic pricing.
This basically becomes a sunk cost fallacy, both in buying the games or subscription models.
Because there are people who want a game so badly and want to play on release date and that game has partnered up with a console company that they will only release (first) on some consoles with the 4 factors discussed above. It leads to an incredible sunk-cost fallacy which somewhat capitalizes on the fact of the hype of the game and they are looking for any and every ways to capitalize on it for as long as possible.
I imagine some Playstation subscription yearly discount might also happen near the launch of GTA 6 so that they could tie users up to an yearly subscription perhaps.
Get ready for your games to be delisted [1] as you never owned them in the first place (unless you have the disc)
Don’t buy their consoles and games
Is that really enough? AFAIK many PC games with SecuROM won't ever work without crack, as that entire DRM is incompatible with modern OSes.
On PC, discs (when they even exist, which is rare) have basically just been digital keys for a long time.
[0] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/u-s-copyright-office-...
Luckily people have finally started to notice this and I really hope 20 years from now the previously mentioned companies, among others, have strangled themselves to death with their own greed. I just wish more people realized that they are not actually dependent on the services these companies provide and, in fact, it's quite the opposite. More people realizing this and acting accordingly would make the death of those greedy giants happen faster.
But that's an equal love at best. They'll still fork money over hand over fist for games and the associated revenue streams. They're addictive and are literally designed by companies to be that way.
And it goes beyond that these days, really. There's identity and community wrapped up in these online games. Some dude who's been playing WoW since the late part of the Bush administration and who has tattoos and talks daily with his clan or whatever it is literally doesn't have anything else. He's in middle age.
The marketers won.
Ironic to be excluding the same percent of the population as the population he is being inclusive for
I find this comment substantive in that it may spark introspection by the decision makers in his or similar positions
And what’s the point of physical games? So you can play the game in 30 years from now on some retro console you’ve diligently maintained?
Get over it, you’re not going to do any of that. There’s no mythical third act where you go through some library of physical CDs and reminisce about an old ass game. There’s constantly new games coming out all the time, you will just keep buying and buying games, you play them for a bit, and then you move on. It’s not “buy it for life”, it’s buy it for right now have fun and move on. Live in the present, don’t worry about the future.
Even people who have retro consoles and collect physical copies seem to mostly do it for collector purposes. When they die, their kids will send all that to a dump or pawn it off. Pointless.
Maybe things will be like the Nintendo BS-X where people will reverse engineer consoles with games downloaded to extract the game from it.
That being said I do have a physical Atari 2600 with a few games. Astroblast with paddles is still a fun game today, and Video Olympics (the Atari VCS version of Pong) is extremely fun to bring out at parties.
Huh? You won't replay every game, sure, but once in a while you'll find a game that you keep coming back to even many years after first playing it. The last time I played Pokémon Red all the way through was only a few years ago. I have permanent Deus Ex, Crysis, FEAR, and Duke Nukem 3D installations on my hard drive, so I can run them for a bit whenever I feel like. Maybe once you put down a game you never pick it again, but don't assume what is true of you is true of everybody.
You enjoy it mostly because you’ve enjoyed it once before.
Regardless, it is not even an argument for physical media, you don’t even have physical copies of these old games, and even if you did, holding the physical copy wouldn’t add anything to your experience besides a bit of novelty.
Physical discs should be obsolete.
What do you mean? I'll try anything if I think it will appeal to me, but I don't know any children to ask what they're into to conduct this experiment.
>or even better try something that people used to like long before you were born, in which case you will very likely see these things as pointless quite quickly.
Like how long? I like classical music. I don't really like theater. I read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and liked it; I read Martín Fierro and hated it. What conclusion do we draw from all this?
>If you observe these things, it is easy to see that nostalgia is enjoyable because it is about associating your youth and naiveté with the object of nostalgia.
No, I don't agree. I don't agree that I derive nostalgic enjoyment from the examples I gave previously. I think that I can enjoy them because they're familiar things that I can engage with as a matter of routine. I can enjoy them for the same reason I biked to work through the same route for over ten years straight without getting bored. Someone completely new cannot derive that same routinary enjoyment. For example, DOOM is basically just as old as Duke Nukem 3D, but I only played it many years later, and so I never finished it (but I also don't think I would have liked it as much back in the day; the gameplay is just not as good. I should try other Build games to see how they compare). As another example, I should definitely feel nostalgia for Saint Seiya, but I tried multiple times just couldn't get through it. It's just for children, an adult can't miss the obvious plot holes. But I saw The Lion King in the theater and then dozens of times on VHS, and then dozens more times off my NAS 20+ years later, and loved it every time -- as an adult I just could better understand why it was so good.
>If you grew up
You're asking to be told off.
>you would see that it is just some distraction that merchants brought to you to profit from your stupidity. If you realize this, you'll enjoy not having to deal with that shit a lot more.
I don't "deal with" the things I like. I like them. Engaging with them is not something I'm forced to do that I have to cope with. Are you an alien? What do you do for fun? Stack rocks on the beach? Or is fun a foreign concept to you?
The idea that no generation can truly enjoy art created by previous generations is, frankly, laughable. And I don't see any reason why that would be different for games.
Sure, I love replaying some of the games I loved when I grew up. But I also love discovering classic games that I had never even heard of before. Likewise, there are many games I enjoyed in my youth that I just can't get into anymore. Sure, nostalgia is a factor, but it's just one amongst many.
Once they used to be even better because they'd come with manuals, posters, and more inside the case, but unfortunately they already took that away from us...
then burning dics isnt stealing
now that avenue is closed. :(
What upsets me more is removing games from the library that people have already bought. Or, not having a unified store strategy where games can still be downloaded if supported on that device. Much like Apple's App Store.
If compared to an iPhone/Apple, Sony takes the cellular carrier approach: tightly integrating the game developers to the platform and the platform can remove that game at any time because the "contract expired".
That is disgusting.
You can still download games onto the latest devices from ages ago on the Apple App Stores, as long as you performed some minor binary updates with a newer Xcode. That's it.
I only purchase physical games (usually used); I don't want a digital library.
Expect XBox to follow suit soon (maybe even Nintendo)
> In response to shifting trends in consumer preference.
I hate this corporate speak. If buying isn't ownership, then pirating isn't stealing.
You're not buying a game, you're buying a license to play the game. If you don't agree with the terms, don't buy that license, but that doesn't mean you're entitled to commit copyright infringement.
If I buy a movie ticket, that means I get to watch the movie once. That's the agreement.
Good thing I don't recognise copyright. Can't infringe on that which does not exist. I'm sick of pretending it does good in the world when I constantly see its consequences are things like this.
> If I buy a movie ticket, that means I get to watch the movie once. That's the agreement.
Given the amount of agreements out there that have unfair terms from the get go, or are otherwise Darth Vadered, why should anyone care what deal the corps give you?
I can ignore that too, you know. Not all laws are reasonable.
> Some people don't recognize speed limits; that doesn't always end well for them.
Breaking the speed limit can be lethal. That's a pretty good reason to follow that rule even if you don't care who made it.
I haven't found good reasons to keep copyright law (on the contrary, I constantly see it hinder progress in society), so I ignore it.
If I get prosecuted for doing copyright infringement, I'll take it with pride.
I can speak from personal experience on this one! Civil disobedience is a wonderful thing.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/sony-just-reported-a-new-r...
On pc there is some competition at least between Steam, epic, gog (the odd one out but I like it) and such. I have no interest in buying a vendor specific computer with only one storefront and no competition.
GoG is an interesting case though, it has loads of games that by and large were available on physical media, but because said physical media is either gone, broken, or in the hands of collectors, getting a physical copy of those games is difficult now. Them being a digital platform re-enables people to play these games.
UT99 can't be bought anymore (though I think Epic now allow people to share it freely), but I can still download it (for now), and access my archived copy.
There are no savings to be had. What you don't pay one way you pay another.
>much more reliable (i never have to mess with drivers, updates just work, etc...)
So do you not own a computer? How do you avoid dealing with those issues, otherwise?
If I want to play a video game, I turn on my PlayStation and it just works and I don't have to think about it or troubleshoot anything. This has not been my experience with PC gaming.
What I didn't expect was how fast the consoles would catch up to PC gaming in terms of hassle, complexity, slowness, unreliability, and potential incompatibilities. PC gaming did make some progress compared to when I was juggling boot disks and editing AUTOEXEC.BAT, but consoles got so much worse so fast. In my opinion, the last time consoles were noticeably simpler than playing on PC was probably about 15 years ago.
Thanks for the fish but enshittification is only getting started.
_Goddamn citation needed!_
isn’t this the same with steam? can i buy a game on steam and copy and use it on another pc i own without downloading it from steam again?
No you can't. When you pay for a Steam game, you rent not buy it.
True.
https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/ "The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services."
> The wast majority of games can be backed up locally and reinstalled indefinitely without online access
That doesn't mean you bought/own them.
Everything about digital-only is anti-consumer. Games will be more expensive with fewer and less important discount, the second-hand market will be dead, and so will be sharing games to friends so they can experience it for free.
Nintendo has implemented lending a digital game, but with arbitrary limits (you HAVE to be in physical proximity for the lending process, it lasts a maximum of two weeks, and you can lend 3 / borrow 1 game at a time). Sony and Microsoft don't let you do that.
This is exactly how I do it - I don't have much time for gaming as much as I would like to so I just buy one game at a time (~90% of the time it's used one), finish it, sell it and possibly look for another one; as the catalogue is so big there is no point of hoarding games
I used to own xbox and had digital collection of games - most of them I never even started (much easier to hoard stuff when it's digital); I don't have that console anymore and I was left with a useless collection of stuff I don't own tied to my online account - never doing that again
Overall I hate this news so much, I probably will give up with 'modern' gaming altogether
Disc consoles are superior in nearly every way:
- Disc consoles also have a hard drive, best of both worlds.
- You own the physical game. You don't own the digital version, just a license to it, which can be revoked, and deleted.
- You can trade games in 2 seconds.
- People can collect and play hundreds of games over the years on an moments notice, not waiting to download something. Games do try to compete to have the most of the players time, but it's not how all gamers play.
- Patches are normal for all games, and patches are usually smaller sizes than the entire game.
- Vintage is kind of popular now. None of those vintage systems, the original PS1/2/3/4 or Nintendos would be able to be experienced easily or at all if the physical media still didn't exist and survive. Digital platforms disappear when the system is EOL. Emulators can help, but it's a specialty and niche crowd. Handing a Nintendo to kids is something else.
When it comes to consoles - you do not.
- some games change with updates (try to play destiny 2 red war story line with your physical disc that you can still buy for some reason despite game being free)
- Nintendo can block specific cartridges (only thing that step Xbox and PS from doing that now is that it's not implemented on their end)
- some games have separate online pass and/or DLC codes that can only activated once
- on PC CDs used to come with a cd-key you had to activate (still do?)
- See Xbox One 2013 DRM plan
Only way to "own" a game is to have a pirated version of a game regardless of a platform.
Tell me how does physical disc protect ownership? Then compare it to my digital downloads in steam where I can just copy game files between computers (if it's DRM-free)
> Also just look at the parallel issue that happened exactly these days with Sony deleting purchased movies from libraries. The same will happen with games.
I don't think Sony is much to blame here. They lost rights to distribute that content, so they can't distribute it. Blame copyright laws, not Sony.
As for Destiny not working,this is a related but different problem, stopkillinggames tries to tackle it, but both issues go hand in hand.
1. If we give up physical copies,we lose ownership,as simple as that
2. Server side components must be released by the publisher once they take offline a game, as long as that game was "sold" to the customer
So ownership is a very important component in this, don't make it sound absurd.
> How were they allowed to "sell" those titles in the first place then? Because it was never implied that access might be lost or restricted,it was very much sold to customers,not rented.
It was in EULA and ToS.
This affects less people, but there are also many who like collecting them. Physical objects are nice, especially if you've been keeping all your old games for old consoles.
Which also ties into control of course: you can still play your games, even if the companies that made them and the console no longer exist, buy old games from retro shops, buy new games for old consoles from new indie devs, etc.
Unless that game ties to your account and disc becomes useless, or you game need a day 1 patch or day 412 patch or game is online or disc actually just a dummy that lets you download the game. Yes, the (in)convince of physical media totally worth it just so can sell what I got for $40/60/70 for $4 store credit at gamestop. All to have less control than I have from digital download from steam or GOG on PC.
But a lot of games are playable just fine without any patches, and there are plenty of physical releases, especially of indie games, which come out after the digital release and include all the patches. And putting aside the nice aspect of owning a physical object (often with cool things like a manual or map in the past and still true with many indie releases now) you still have no control over digital downloads unless it's DRM free, and even then you need to keep back up copies because the service you downloaded it from might disappear.
Indie games rarely come out on physical media. If you want a physical object for the sake of having a physical object - buy/print cases and print covers. Alternatively, get into vinyl, those at least can be presented as wall art.
> you still have no control over digital downloads unless it's DRM free
Again, with consoles you don't have control over physical discs/cartridges either. Nothing stops Sony and MS follow Nintendo. You can only "own" something if it's fully offline and DRM-free (be it officially DRM-free or liberated by nice people)