They should have moved to USB keys a long time ago. Make them big and call them cartridges if you want, but optical discs are far too slow.
Can you imagine if video game prices were affected by the memory shortages?
But is this not how switch1 games were, just read only sdcards with the game on them.
And loud. And fragile.
Thumbdrives have a firmware, you could easily make them read-only. And also add your inconvenient DRM snake oil, if you will.
But no, cloud promises more $$$ through lock-in.
Devils advocate here.
I/O and storage in those media formats are kinda limited for video games.
Blue-Ray prob has enough storage (at most we could go for multiple disk releases) capacity but still you would have to copy the games to disk.
I think GOG is on right track on this DRM free keep on disk as long as you want no need to check with external servers to play them.
Sony thinking they can just pull a Steam way too late in the game, and with Steam and GOG as competitors 😂
Well, consoles are a pretty closed enviroment. There is no piracy as there is on PC, if still some.
There is a lot of piracy for consoles. It’s just a matter of time.
Aren’t they usually “pirate and you will you lose any right to ask for help with your console, anywhere, ever again”?
You can buy games DRM free on GOG and burn them onto a disk yourself. Or multiple ones, if needed
Control and greed are reasons!
Yes there is a very simple reason which is massively anti-consumer. Every product competes with it’s own predecessor. Physical products will sooner or later break, movies will sooner or later get boring, same goes for music. But video games are different. People are still playing Tetris and Super Mario 64. You release one good game and the next one has to be better otherwise people will just continue to play the previous one instead of buying the new one. Publishers try to control this aspect. They dont want you to own games only have a license to play. It’s not even a question of “if” they going to take away your older games, but “when”. They want to restrict access to the previous product so you will have to buy the new one. They want full control. Look at Call of Duty. All but, the newest titles are barely playable, and that is done by design.
Game companies realized their mistakes in making some fun games in the past, and now are trying to make sure nobody can play them.
I also listen to The Doors and watch the dollar trilogy once in a while - music and movies can be timeless too!
Yeah, good music and movies are evergreen. And every so often, some of the old hits get mega popular among new/younger audiences from being randomly featured in a new show
I don’t disagree with that but I suspect you don’t have 1000s of hours of watching the same movie.
Fair enough, although I don’t have thousands of play time on most games either.
And if you can’t top the old game, remaster/remake it is!
Or digital downloads without the killswitch (DRM)
Sony has always screwed consumers. No idea why anyone buys their products anyway
Remember when Universal Media Discs were not universal and only worked on PSP?
I mean, not always. They mostly did away with bullshit proprietary connectors, did away with their proprietary flash memory cards, and didn’t form a walled garden as putrid as that of Apple.
That being said, nothing is the same anymore. Digital everything will take over, because it’s just cheaper to not burn disks.
They installed those rootkits out of the goodness of their hearts, dammit, they cared about us the whole time and we never showed our appreciation and now look where it got us
Uuuhm, not quite. The Playstation ecosystem absolutely is a walled garden. Their proprietary flash memory cards aren’t a thing anymore because they failed to win against more open standards (SD, microSD) and it would’ve been super expensive to stick with it on their own for no good reason.
There’s aso no reason the physical copy can’t demand to get a validation token from Corporate Server every time it’s played
Yep, DRM is the problem, not the distribution format.
“Please drink verification can”
key codes that get tied to a non-transferable online account have also been a thing for years.
key codes that get tied to a non-transferable online account have also been a thing for
years.decades.
I already have more games than I could ever finish in a lifetime — in 10 lifetimes — and they’re all digital, in big folders full of files. If I had those thousands of games in physical form I’d need a library in my house full of shelves to store them all, yet digitally I can carry them all around in my pocket!
Exactly. I absolutely agree with OP that robbing people of the choice to own physical media sucks…
But when not paired with shitty-ass DRM, digital format media can be an absolute boon for games preservation. Easy to backup, takes up barely any physical space, and doesn’t require physical hardware to play it that will become increasingly sparce and expensive over time.
If the industry doesn’t want to provide legal pathways towards games preservation, then it looks like the pirates are going to start wearing archavist hats too.
This is the correct take. The option should be there for everyone. Lots of folks here are with you, where the practicality of DRM-free digital format media is more important. To people like me, collecting physical media is a hobby itself. I probably spend more time shopping for records and equipment than listening to them, for example, though of course I do listen to them as well. I used to be the same with games, which is why I have a ton of OG Xbox and 360 discs, and for movies I have a bunch of blu-rays and DVDs. Yeah, it’s hard to find space for it all but that challenge is part of the fun, at least for me. Plus it can work as interior decor too. And I know I’m not alone, CD sales are the highest they’ve been in over 20 years, and I’m sure other formats are similar. But again, having the choice for DRM-free digital is also important. Taking away our choice is bad for us all.
it’s about consolidation, control and the ability to control dynamic pricing
Dynamic pricing is basically enshittification of the modern internet age capitalism as a whole.
Time to go back to barter
especially since the relative cost of drives compared to GPU, SSD and RAM is falling fast. It’s probably the cheapest of them already.
Shitty copy pasta with AI-generated picture that forgets that software is patched all the time compared to movies and music.
I hate streaming more than anyone, but that sloppy comparison sucks.
It’s not an AI-generared picture.
A) If you think this is AI generated and are not just making a rage-baiting pun reference, you’re a silly billy wittle buddy who needs to be given a raspberry.
B) Games used to not need patching. Even games that were patched later had an on-disc version you could always install and play. And games were in fact better for it. A game going gold meant something, now it’s just a release day with a 0 day patch to be even slightly functional.
That’s the girl from Pragmata isn’t it? Doesn’t scream AI to me
It is! I oddly enough just finished playing thru this scene just a few minutes ago, came in here and was like, huhwhat?!? Diana made a drawing for you and is showing to you for the first time in this scene in the game.
Well, I mean, technically,…
Remember the console days before the Internet grew up? No downloads. No Patches. The games just worked.
Until you got to the sky canyon in twilight princess and the glitch made you start over because there was no way to patch offline games
And if they didn’t just work, they never got fixed.
Therefore people only played and remembered the ones that did. Not much actually changed, we just have more games and more exposure now.
Games back then had bugs, too, they just never got fixed and everyone pretended they didn’t exist.
They were also released in a fully playable state. The game worked out of the box, or that would be the end of a game studio, or at least that game.
This has never been true. Daggerfall and Morrowind, for example, were huge successes for Bethesda despite players falling through the floor into an infinite void several times a day. There are countless other examples of horribly buggy games.
Before home internet, PC games magazine cover disks (they did 💾 type for years before CDs) were my main channel of getting very welcome patches.
There were lots of games that had multiple release revisions that fixed bugs. Gran Turismo 2’s original versions couldn’t be completed 100% due to a glitch, a reprint ended up fixing it. If you bought the game on launch, you were stuck with that copy.
This is also why if you go looking for ROMs, you’ll see some games have multiple versions with some differences.
There were also lots of games that were released in buggy, unfinished states. They just don’t get remembered but anyone who grew up gaming in the 90s and early 2000s probably remembers getting some garbage bargain bin games from relatives at Christmas that were complete disasters. The Fifth Element game, for example.
I hate AI and all that shit, but I have heard a lot of horror stories from developers who worked on “retro” gaming systems (from the Megadrive/Genesis to the Jaguar). I admire them for all the work they did because it was hard to code, but there are a fuckton of bugs that were sold during the good old days, and no one noticed what was happening because those bugs were never found.
If you hate using things with massive exploitable bugs while we share a polite fiction that they work as intended, you’re gonna hate civilization.
Not only that, but developers back then had to be really deliberate with their decisions due to the tiny size on the media and ram.
ootl?
Sony recently announced they’ll stop making discs for Playstations in 2028.
They often need updates from online sources, so what’s the point
