“It would be great if people had to buy more of the thing,” says guy who makes money selling the thing.
He is obviously biased by his business interests, but frankly he is ultimately correct. Once consoles are digital only, console players will lose the last form of control they have over anything they own.
You don’t need CDs for that, and CDs don’t prevent that.
As the other user pointed out, most CDs don’t even have a playable form of the game on them anymore. You usually need additional updates to actually play the game (or in the case of those steam installs, the CD doesn’t even have a bare minimum on it)
Technically you can own a game as a digital install too, just they won’t deliver it that way.
Most? That’s definitely not right. Every single game I bought up to the PS4 could be played without any downloads.
I think they mean most recent or most new games, the PS4 came out nearly a decade ago.
Every single game I bought up to the PS4 could be played without any downloads.
But they still couldn’t be played directly from the disk, which is part of the point of the comment you replied to. Every single game I have for PS3 requires it to be installed onto the console in order to play it.
This is why I edited my last comment to say explicitly “played without any download” rather than “run from the disk”, the comment I replied to was missing my point. I couldn’t care less if the disk goes spinny or not, this is not about storage technology, it’s about control over the games you buy. The point is owning games without being bound to online services, which a disk that can be installed directly does perfectly fine.
Unless it needs a day one patch, then you’re SHIT OUTTA LUCK
I watched a YouTube video where the guy played Cyberpunk on a PS4 from disc with no patches installed. It was as bad as you think.
Cyberpunk on PS4 was an unparalleled shitshow
They’re all digital only now. There’s no reason, at all, to have optical drives in consoles. With the advent of direct nvme to video memory you have to load content to the nvme anyway because spinning g plastic sucks soooo much. Today SD is actually cheaper per gb than Blu-ray.
Want to purchase a physical copy? Buy it on a SD card and get a $10 usb SD card reader, which will be compatible with every console anyway.
My prediction will be that the next gen (PS6) will go 100% download only, get shat on then start up a service with gamestop or someone to distro encrypted game installs onto WHATEVER usb media you bring in.
Today SD is actually cheaper per gb than Blu-ray.
Just checked Amazon prizes for the first best SD card and Bluray disc. This is a lie. Discs are still less than half the prize.
And you didn’t take into consideration that it’s much cheaper and faster to press the data onto the disc than writing on an SD card when you do that in great numbers.
30 second search at 100gb (modern AAA games and the biggest Bluray)
Bluray is $10 a disc, microsd is $8 and you get 128gb and can get bigger media, which doesn’t exist for Bluray.
That doesn’t account for mass production, fewer people care about physical media with every passing year.
Physical media will still exist, but it won’t be optical. Opticals advantages over cart just don’t exist anymore. You don’t include a $80+ part on the bom when less than 5% of your users want it and that 5% can get a bog standard usb device that can be had for $10
MicroSD is not comparable to the flash memory on NVME SSDs.
Bluray is $10 a disc
Bluray hasn’t been $10 a disc since maybe 2003. Bluray discs are literally pennies to a manufacturer like Sony.
Nobody said it was. It’s a medium to get games from a brick and mortar store to install onto the nvme on the console you can’t play modern games directly from Bluray either.
Its incredibly niave to think it costs Sony, co-developer of blu-ray, $10 to press a game onto a blu-ray disc. Its probably costs a dollar or less to manufacturer a disc by bow. They can sell blurray movies for $9.99 and still profit.
It will definitely be cheaper for Sony to stick with optical discs next gen if they don’t drop the drive entirely.
It’s also dumb to expect they’ll be paying retail for microsd or whatever usb flash sticks they decive to use.
You should check prices on the 2GB SD cards not the high end ones because the disks usually contain that much or less. Most AAA games only have the game INSTALLER on the disk, and still require you to download the game in order to play it.
You are mixing having your own physical copy with needing to run games straight from the disk. Nevermind that there’s no reason that games couldn’t be sold on faster cartridges, you can still have a physical media that can install a game into the console. Offline, without relying on an online service that will inevitably close eventually.
As it is, with disks and cartridges, they can’t make it so absolutely every game must check with their online services. They have to make sure grandma in the boonies can make little Timmy’s game work right out of the box. Without them, there’s nothing stopping them. They could even straight up say that “no game could be expected to last more than 10 years”, and I see enough people that already seem ready to fall for that. Nevermind that to this day there’s people playing the nearly 40 year old Super Mario Bros.
They have to make sure grandma in the boonies can make little Timmy’s game work right out of the box.
…and yet, most AAA games cannot do this, and require you to go online and download the game assets after you put the disk in the console.
I literally just replied to you about this and I don’t know where you are getting it from. Games may ask for updates but games that are unplayable without downloads are very much the exception.
Not if modern proof of ownership technologies are implemented, such as NFT smart contracts.
Nah, dumping your own copy, or at least DRM-free digital, is a much more reliable way to maintain your ownership than any blockchain-based system.
It is nice to be able to give a game to someone else when you’re done playing it.
That’s exactly why they don’t want it!
I would have played so many less games in my youth if I weren’t able to trade discs with friends. I would have missed Vice City, Morrowind and Final Fantasy VII to name a few memorable ones.
deleted by creator
I mean… he has a vested interest. But he’s right we need media that isn’t dependent on official servers
If only that was what he was saying. He doesn’t care whether they’re dependent on servers. The vast majority of physical games sold today are already nothing more than an entitlement and some of the game files, with the rest being downloaded after you insert the disc. He’s only concerned with Gamestop getting their cut, both in new game sales and especially in their bread-and-butter trade-in market.
Of course making money is his motive, but that does that matter?
Digital distribution only means you can’t give (or sell) your games to someone else. So with digital only the copyright holders of the video games make more money. Once it’s all digital only, next step is to require a connection to a server for them to work, so then they can shut it down to force you to buy a new console and re-buy all the old games you want to play again. What are you going to do if the decide to go that way? It’s either stop playing video games altogether, or go along with whatever scheme they feel like coming up with when they enshittify themselves like every other company inevitably does.
A physical copy means more options for the consumer, why should we care how much of the pie this corporation or that corporation makes off of it? In fact corporations in general make even more money from non-transferable digital distribution.
I’m not sure why you’re trying to convince me of the merits of physical media? I did not, and do not, disagree. It’s a more flexible option, and more options is always better for the consumer. But the reality is that physical media, in its current iteration, doesn’t offer all that much protection. The only universal benefit of physical media is the ability to regift or resell. It’s a great benefit, but it hardly liberates consumers from dependence on servers.
As for my original point, it simply read to me as if this person was giving the GameStop exec credit for something he did not say. I wanted to make sure his comments were seen in an accurate light.
So we should reject an ally that has a shared goal simply because their motives aren’t pure enough?
It’s the old Stephen Fry quote “it’s more important to be effective than it is to be right.” We shouldn’t care so much about whether or not someone has the right reason for trying to affect a positive result. Gamestop’s motives are irrelevant, the effect of their actions are what matters.
Ok, but “It would be great if people had to buy more of the thing” is not an accurate summary either. Putting a CD drive on a console does not mean you have to buy physical media.
Given that MS have put a lot of work into making your digital 360 titles work on Series s/x and even upgrading some of them, I don’t think that’s a concern with all publishers.
I never accused him of altruism of any kind, if the games came from his servers specifically… he’d be tuning a different sing
You all hate discs until you have a library that you can rent games for free close to you. Or you want to sell a game you already played to buy something else. I don’t care of what some boss from GameStop says because at the end of the day, they run a business out of it, but complaining about physical media is something I don’t understand someone would do as a consumer. Did we really learn nothing from companies simply shutting down online stores when they want?
You all hate discs until you have a library that you can rent games for free close to you.
It’s actually illegal where I live to rent out games. Thanks, Nintendo! (/^^)/⌒●~*
This is funny because the games we rented were all from Switch, lol. Where you are from? I’m currently in Canada.
Japan. Nintendo got it passed into law years ago that game’s can’t be rented, because of supposed piracy concerns. But you can go to any video rental place and borrow all the music CDs you could want, because we all know how much more difficult it is to make mp3s from a CD than copy a game.
Yeah, I heard that many things in Japan are extremely protective for companies. Apparently modding is also illegal, right? I was talking with my spouse about console modding and we discovered that
Yes, modding games is illegal there. But it has something to do with the way their copyright works afaik. If a company lets you modify their IP, they effectively give up their ownership rights from what I understood.
I play FFXIV and there it is against TOS too (of course it being a MMO modding can have another context), but for quite a few QoL improvements that came out with more recent patches you can clearly see the inspiration.
It would be interesting to know if modding a game like Skyrim there would be forbidden too.
I have nothing against physical discs, or those who would prefer to own them. I just don’t care about it myself, so I’m not going to fight to keep them.
You should at least want the option because it keeps them honest. If it’s digital only, there’s all kinds of shenanigans they can get up to. “Sorry your console is EOL now so we’re disabling it, but don’t worry, just buy our newest XBone720 and you can re-buy all your favorite classic games and play them on a shitty emulator!”
At least with physical option they know people would go back to buying physical media (which they make less money from) if they tried such a thing.
If they started disabling consoles, people would stop buying them altogether. They’re not going to do that.
Given that MS have the best back cat of all the consoles at the moment, is that really a likely outcome?
Enshittification is inevitable. All it takes is for one dumbass CEO to see a potential increase in revenue and they’ll do it no matter how stupid it is.
until you have a library that you can rent games for free close to you.
It’s called a torrenting client
Damn, lot of hate for physical media in this thread.
Xbox One announcement (E3 2013): "YOU CAN TAKE MY DISKS FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS!
Current Year (2023): “Disks are outdated and dead, who needs em anyway?”
Y’all forget way too easily and they are starting to prey upon it.
The problem is it’s kind of murky now since most discs don’t even contain the game anymore. So yeah you can lend/sell them but you’re still dependent on a digital store. It’s just a license for a digital game in physical form. I say this as a physical media proponent.
I am not pro-digital only but if the discs don’t have the game I’m less inclined to pay extra for what is likely to be the first part of my console to fail.
To be fair, most people are thinking of the reasons of ownership, whereas xbox one was about availability.
Yes it is weird. I get people preferring digital copies but I dont get having hostility toward physical media.
I prefer having a physical game collection, but with the way physical games are handled now, with more than half the game needing to be downloaded to the console to cut costs or because they didn’t finish the game before release, it doesn’t solve the preservation or ownership problems anymore.
That’s where piracy comes in, even if it does tend to have negative effects on smaller devs. So long as there is no server or internet connection required to play, piracy will rain supreme in preservation.
Ownership, on the other hand, is a lot trickier. I personally say just having, for PC games, the game download .exe (or equivalent file) is enough to be considered owning it, but that doesn’t mean much.
The way I see it, piracy is fine, but only once the format is dead. I recently hacked both my 3DS and Vita to access the whole libraries since those formats are dead with ones digital store switched off and the other half dead and barely functioning.
But yeah, pay for new releases.
Nobody cares what Gamestop boss says, lol.
deleted by creator
“We miss selling you a scratched up disc for $49 with no box, that we paid some poor kid $2 for”
I remember after I got a 3DS I went to GameStop to trade in my DSi and they offered me $5 or a gift card.
You could probably steal the Mona Lisa and bring it to GameStop, only to be told they’ll buy it for some crusty, old, pre-chewed gum they found on the sidewalk a year ago. And that’s if you’re lucky.
Buggywhip salesman demands accomodation from the horseless carriage industry.
Yes, I’m upset at the licenseification of the gaming industry as much as the next guy but that died long before physical media did. As long as a game can die without its first-party servers, games are leased and not owned.
Discs don’t have the capacity to store modern games anyways. I mean, how many disc would it take to store Starfield? Its’s not going to work.
They do. sorta. It’s definitely possible to put something like Starfield on a dual layer BDROM, probably even uncompressed! But then load times would be fucking crazy because BD is an order of magnitude slower than an SSD.
Distributing install files for a day 1 version of a game and using the disc as an auth key, (which is what they did last gen iirc) is still possible.
Transfer the BDROM to my SSD. Literally the same thing as downloading it online. I don’t need it to read off the disc while I play. 360 did this and it worked perfectly fine.
The same thing except you then have to pay for the disk, distribution and worry about stock and so on.
Still possible, but why would that be useful to anyone?
BDXL goes up to 128GB… Conveniently… According to everywhere I look… Starfield is 126.1GB for XBOX…
So yes… Discs do have the capacity and you’re wrong.
Further, you can simply use compression, and unpack to the internal SSD. That can probably net you a bunch more space… and then you can move to 2-disc operations if your game is even larger than that.
I guess I haven’t been keeping up to date with the latest compact disc technology. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don’t think many people do so I won’t blame you for not knowing. I happen to know because I use something called m-disc for archival purposes. And those are just really fancy blu-rays at this point. The discs I use are 100GB and i knew there were bigger ones.
Cool stuff. I’ll probably get into that in the future, only so many external drives one can have lying around.
Not often I get to say this, but I completely agree. I HATE the walled garden that is the PS store. 90 usd for FIFA? 130 usd for some random GOLD edition of a ubisoft game? No way. Let me pick those up dirt cheap two months later at a retailer who is having a sale, or from someone who has played it and is ready to sell it onwards.
Disc drive consoles are great for people who go months with terrible or no internet. People in the military, or just about anyone who goes out to sea can get a disc mailed to them. It is nice to have physical media to play the games off of.
Why discs instead of cartridges, which are currently the superior physical option? I personally try to buy physical whenever possible, because I don’t trust companies to not ban my account and flush hundreds of dollars of games down the toilet, and it generally feels better to have just that little extra bit more ownership over my own property.
Because cartridges cost more to produce and are limited in storage. Switch carts cap out at 64gb, Blu Rays are up to 100gb at this point and it’s much cheaper to chuck a few of them in a box if the game goes over that. Hence all the switch games with massive downloads required on top of the cart.
That’s basically what the Switch uses. Though they’re more like a memory card, but they kinda look like little tiny cartridges.
In the current climate where it takes 30 patches and a year for a new release to become playable, discs are not very useful…
??
Of course they are. Because - you can buy the fucking things second hand or lend them to people!
Sure, but it’s really weird that we are relying and want to rely on disks to be the license basically, because the data storage part is quite useless, at least when your connection is faster than your blue-ray drive. (plus you can directly download the patched game)
