yeah cuz there’s no other choice for most games, only 20 percent of all games come out physically! And now therss no choice at all. game collectors like consoles because they can fill their shelves for youtube video backgrounds
there are also people like me who think steam is absolute bullshit because you don’t own anything are forced to use it because that’s where 90 percent of the games are
the bad way of doing things being the most convenient and popular and the way they’ve almost entirely forced on everyone doesn’t make it not bad. also digital isn’t my problem, gog is fine because you get the actual game, not some rental agreement you sign into an app to make use of.
aw hell, someone said it
I get to be the asshole who goes “actually you’re just buying a license when you buy a physical copy too!”
I still understand that these are, in fact, not the same because only owning a physical license still means I have Thing in my hands
yay it’s out of the way
I would buy almost everything on physical if it weren’t harder to do every year. All the retail games stores are closing, and the ones that are still left get like one copy of every big new game, so you have to either pre-order or get super lucky if you want to just walk in and pick it up within the first 3 months of its release. So I don’t think you could even call this a consumer demand issue; consumers are being pushed toward digital sales by companies trying to cut costs.
Standing here ringing the big gong that says “MARKETS ARE UNDEMOCRATIC”
and that’s bullshit too! I barely get games ever anymore cuz I don’t want to rent
Highly shallow consumer take: I just want good reversible sleeve art
Also physical works as a physical reminder to get through the backlog. I forget all the digital shit exists
it is nice to find games in the wild at thrift stores and whatnot. that’s what I’m gonna miss the most. or finding a “gem” somewhere in GameStop somehow.
I can pinpoint the exact timeframe from which I gave up on physical games and it’s when Amazon killed the 20% discount with Prime
fucking Bezos
It is the year 2046. PS6 collectors meet in the night to swap illicit file storage to secure copies of Drakengard 4 and Ratchet and Clank: Triple Detonation
Boutique physical release rip-offery will get even worse. ; )
Edit 1: Although those people will have to move to PC I suppose.
Edit 2: This is fun:
I buy a lot of new games and haven’t bought physical since the PS3 15 years ago so I am theoretically a member of the demographic telling them they can get away with this but imo they obviously, obviously can’t do it, it is going to trigger anticompetitive business practice issues and they’ll have to create alternative app stores and shit in the EU the way that apple had to, just a very silly idea. leaving physical media as a pressure release valve on consoles (even as long as it’s been objectively useless for preservation or really for any purpose other than leaving the secondhand market uncaptured on closed platforms) is basically a market necessity both legally and for the huge numbers of people they’re undercounting who only have access to their ecosystems via like walmart discount bin economics
that said the PS6 is gonna be like $1k without a disc drive at first so I can see them not even needing to serve the secondhand market at first or only doing so via PS4/PS5 back compat (with a $100 optional drive attachment), they are already going to have to confront new hardware being exclusively positioned as high end and that does reinforce all this a bit
I am Ben Stiller from While We’re Young, where I am actively rejecting the physical totems that tie me down without affecting my taste and also Adam Driver is trying to steal my wife
Are you implying that the EU might force Sony to create a system of resellable “digital game unlock keys” like Steam and Xbox have? That would indeed be a pretty big backfire in terms of Sony’s ability to control pricing. But that outcome still would leave them with more control, since keys can only be activated once, whereas physical discs can be played-then-resold an unlimited number of times.
But, do you see any indication Brussels cares enough to take any action here? I realize they have a reputation for regulating every little thing, but still.
it would become pretty turnkey for them if they apply the same model as they have with Apple and it’s one of the only ways they seem able to score political points for regulating this stuff (even if the outcome is unwieldy to the point of uselessness), I would not want to walk straight into it if I were Sony when I could instead be like: the disc drive costs extra, we’re going to manufacture discs in much smaller quantities and maybe physical games cost extra initially at retail too, but knock yourself out, this is not to be perceived as a policy shift
just fully price in that you don’t want to be doing the manufacturing at all without actually capturing the secondhand market. Nintendo’s version of this was smarter, “game key cards” are much more honest about being transferrable licenses and nothing else
The dire production quality of companies making boutique video game collectables has shown that the market does not value actually being able to play media off of the physical object. They value the idea of maybe doing it one day, and of knowing it’s on their shelf.
Only 10% of people beat the games they have, which is why endings need to go. After a certain point if you’re still playing the campaign the world should run out and your character should fall into the void
When I download a zip file from itch I feel like I “own” that. When it’s on steam it’s like “it’s there…I guess…”
I actually fully disagree with this! paying for the convenience of being able to reacquire something from a package manager feels much more like ownership for me than needing to acquire a zip file by any means and get it working on my own; I know very well how to pirate media or software and there’s no doubt in my mind that I could replace any license I’ve purchased with a bit of legwork but that I would have considerably less fun bootstrapping that environment
but this is an argument in favor of leaving the pressure release valve open whether it’s relatively easy PC piracy or console physical media
all products are bad
