PlayStation Network outage leaves players dreading all-digital future | Hacker News Reader

PlayStation Network outage leaves players dreading all-digital future

polygon.com

14 pointsspeckx7 comments

As someone who hasn’t purchased physical media in over a decade I find the current tempest in a teapot rather comical. My home is cozy, not large. I don’t want physical media taking up any space. I don’t sell. I have great internet. It’s convenient.

When PSN is down I do something else. Just like when any other service is down. If this makes the PS6 cheaper then great.

To call this a tempest in a teapot is entirely missing the forest for the trees. This is effectively the end result of "you will own nothing and like it".

"Then they came for me and there was no one left."

That’s really the core issue entirely. It’s not an outage here and there. The problem is Sony simply wipes out content you paid for, typically at the same price as physical media but you were really only renting that content and that can be taken away from you at any point.

They already have Slim versions of the PS5 without the optical reader by default. The PS5 Pro also lacks one.

This is all data-driven. There's a reason GameStop has more space devoted to Funko Pops and shirts than games, and why Walmart has a half aisle of them: people predominantly buy the games online for that exact reason. Why waste space? So you have to get up to change games, and save downloading half of it? (PSN sales often beat retail pricing as well.)

We're at the point where a lot of games are larger than a triple layer BluRay, and typical home connections are faster than the reader can move data. Baldur's Gate 3 didn't ship on a disc at all, for that reason. It's 122GB, and Gran Turismo is in a similar range.

You don't care about game ownership, collecting physical media or being able to sell or let someone borrow your games, nor that a big company controls when you can play your games. Ok.

Do you not understand that other people do care about those things? The main reason people are mad is exactly the word you use to describe what you seem to be happy with: games are becoming "a service". Games did not use to be "a service" that someone other than you, the game owner, controlled. That is what companies like Sony are destroying; this is what people are upset about.

Sony has the numbers. If most people weren’t already digital only then they wouldn’t have pulled the trigger. This is a vocal minority fighting an already lost fight.

> If this makes the PS6 cheaper then great.

Yes, I'm sure that was top of mind for Playstation executives when making this decision. /s

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