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Comment by altmanaltman | Hacker News Reader

With the planned death of physical media for games, it will soon become impossible to do so. Like, Sony literally plans to stop making discs starting in 2028, and all games you buy will have to be digital only. GTA 6 is just giving a code in a box. It's really the end of times for physical media in a few years, maybe something can change if consumers push back but they likely will not if we are being realistic.

https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/physical-disc-produc...

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Oh no! GTA6, the 2026 simulator, may not be accessible?

If the death of physical media locks me into playing whatver is forcefed to me by AAA studios, I will reject that bargain and engage in the decades of backlogged media I haven't gotten to yet. If every studio stopped making music, movies, and TV today, there is still so much I haven't seen/listened to/played that it won't even move the needle.

Lastly, going against the grain here, but GTA 6 looks about as unappealing as it possibly could. I don't want to play 2026 Simulator, no matter how good it looks. Really it just looks like parody version of current politics and society and that's what games are helping me escape from.

How many games do you need in your life, though? I'd say the top 500 games on the GoG catalog would be more than a lifetime of gaming. That's not even including open source or rom sets.

Factorio. And… yep.

How movies do you need in your life, how many books, how many paintings, how many plays? And yes it might be true for you that you never need to play more than top of 500 gog games but new games sell millions of copies which means millions of people do see the value in new games. You can disagree with that on principle but advocating people should only play top 500 gog because "that's all you need" is not a serious position.

Well if all I had were the best movies before 1998 I would still have a really awesome movie collection. Books fall into a different category in mind. They're leisure but are also deep personal enrichment and education.

all of this is your subjective view though, some people see and enjoy games as art, peesonal enrichment and even education. We cannot assume everyone shares our exact values.

Thank you. I had previously assumed that everyone did share my exact values, and that I could merely introspect and then successfully understand the perspective of any person on earth.

You're welcome but your comment is proof that you did not and the fact that you resort to sarcasm when getting called out shows you do have a fair bit of ego. Hope it works out for you

I'm also not advocating for this. I strongly believe that there's not much we can do about a lot of these things. The world is going to move on an be worse, and most people will boil themselves like frogs. They already own TVs that spy on them and serve them ads. If you try to point out that this is bad they say "but it's inconvenient to buy one that does not!" I guess a lot of people's liberty is worth very little.

If a platform tries to take advantage of you, it's worth trying to change the platform. If you have no chance of changing the platform, you should cut the platform out of your life. I'm not saying "oh, just don't buy new video games" I'm saying "you may be faced with a choice where you either acquiesce to Microsoft's business model, or you do not buy new video games." If you were really faced with that choice, what would you do?

I don't think you're quite getting it. I'm saying, don't get in the box.

"But the bait looks so nice!"

Yes. Yes it does.

Yes, you may have to sacrifice and not get some things you want in the moment. Our capitalistic overlords have demonstrated that they will absolutely abuse you to the maximum extent you permit. If you are willing to give everything to play GTA 6, then they will take it.

The compensation is that there is already more than you could possibly do available in spaces where they are not locking you in a box, or you can break out of the box with minimal moral quandaries and technical difficulties.

This isn't really news. Control your desires or they will control you is not new wisdom. Though the modern ability to exploit other's inability to control their desires certainly does have some new twists on it.

"Each man's master is the person who has the authority over what the man wishes or does not wish, so as to secure it, or take it away. Whoever, therefore, wants to be free, let him neither wish for anything, nor avoid anything, that is under the control of others; or else he is necessarily a slave." - The Encheridion Of Epictetus, second century AD

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3ADiscourses_of_Epictetu...

I generally agree, but I don't think it's wrong to mourn what is lost or to try and advocate politicians regulate and restore what was lost. Especially since the policy of "the customers own nothing" has been extending past video games in ways that are unavoidable. For example, John Deere locking down their tractors. Car manufacturers increasingly trying to turn everything into a subscription.

I agree, the right action as a consumer is boycotting rent seeking products and pestering politicians. But it does feel hopeless as too few of our politicians seem to care about these sorts of seemingly minor grievances.

The right action as a hacker is to liberate your products and open a service where you liberate other people's products.

I don't even own a playstation. And yes, we are all slaves by that definition unless you live in the wilderness and do not rely on anyone or any state but the fact that you use a device and hackernews makes you as much a slave as someone who plays gta 6 by that definition. One should not engage with anything in the modern world lest they be a slave is a naive and impossible standard to hold, morally speaking.

I personally disagree that you must control your desires or get controlled by them. You can wish to change the world instead of being like "NO NOT THE BOX. MAMA DIDNT RAISE NO SLAVE" also.

Then if you really want to do something yourself instead of waiting for leet hackers to do it, buy one, reverse engineer it thoroughly, write a protocol emulator so you can buy the game from the store and download the bits to your PC, and then develop a method to store those bits to as many compatible consoles as you want.

Not the OP, but when the physical media for games dies, I will still be playing games I already own.

That's what collection is for.

Yet, Plaion and SNK are re-releasing the original Neo Geo AES with old big cartridges and they managed to be the best selling console on Amazon for a few weeks. They plan to release new games on 1:1 replica cartridges that will work on a 1991 console. The pre-orders are massive.

Consumers are actually pushing back. Consumers show that even an 35 years old console and 90€ games can sell easily if it comes in a big beautiful box and with the assurance you'll be able to play in 15 years.

The Sony step is also interesting. I have noticed that digital games keep the original price even after a few years while the physical ones, if you search for a bit, you can always find them discounted (the reason may be physical inventory management?). This is excluding memberships. The important point is that prices are probably better behaved if we include stores as a third party sellers, instead of having Sony the only player controlling prices.

Read a book instead. It is not like you have to consume audiovisual media to survive.

No, you go play a video game instead. If we can just tell people what to do and expect them to follow, the world will be a dull place.

Then just stop playing games if that happens. They’re not necessary, it’s not worth getting fucked over by the corpos.

Or make your own games or play ones made by indies that you can actually own.

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