It's the ultimate push to turn everything into the perfect Capitalist (not market-oriented) business solution: Getting paid for nothing
If your goal is to accumulate capital, and there are not outside forces regulating your worst impulses, you ultimately will create a class of legal-protected thieves, since the absolutely best and most risk free way to accumulate capital is to be given it in exchange for quite literally nothing.
Gambling is about as close to the platonic ideal as you can, but conquest by military force of political capture is also a very, viable route. Use the law to force people to buy your nothing and be protected for it, rather than being lynched when you steal someone's products.
Mandated insurance that isn't a crown corporation beholden to ratepayers is a perfect example. If you have mandated insurance for something, and that private insurance has a shareholder requirement to see growth every quarter, and the same amount of things are being insured, only one thing can happen:
Rates go up with denials
Payouts go down
Eventually you're paying for insurance you know is worthless but it's mandated by law.
I agree with you, but then isn't it strange that AI does a whole lot of something instead of nothing? Like, the high amount of effort they put into making AI a big thing runs counter to the laziness of getting paid to do nothing.
Though I guess they ARE getting paid doing nothing, with how many data centers are getting cancelled.
Not when you realize that the "something" they're charging you for is:
a) bastardized cargo culted knockoff of "something" so insubstantial that it's very nearly "something-shaped nothing"
b) the "something" is made of stuff that isn't even theirs.
Not only is it giving you a bamboo and thatch sculpture of an airplane when you ask for an airplane; it's made of STOLEN bamboo and STOLEN thatch.
I hope you don't misunderstand me by my saying "something" to imply it's anything substantial, significant, or even good. I'm very anti-AI in all aspects of our lives, just so you know where I'm coming from.
Yes, the theft of intellectual property and art to train AI models is in keeping with their laziness, and yes, the models don't improve our lives in any way. But they can't exactly steal the electricity needed to power data centers, nor can they steal the silicon required to manufacture all the CPU's, GPU's, SSD's, and RAM they require. All those things are enormous capex and opex, and that's what I mean by "something."
That's a lot of work they're doing to push AI, and the only plan I can think of to recoup those costs is to expect taxpayers to foot the bill: they want municipalities to pay for the increase in electricity costs, cover the pollution and devastation their DC's generate, all without creating jobs and opportunities in the region (because why would they pay labor a fair share, yuck). And the finale, when all those investments fail to generate any profit they want a government bailout to keep from going belly up.
I just don't think any of that is worth the effort you know what I mean?
I did not mean to sound as though I had been disagreeing with you ^.^; my comment was more intended to have a 'yes-and' kind of vibe~
but I really do like all that you had to say here and I still agree!
While they're truly not stealing the electricity, what I would hope to imply is that they are nevertheless acquiring it via nefarious means--in that many of these data centers are building gas combustion generators to supplement their power usage in violation of environmental regulations, workplace safety standards, and generally all the laws that say "you can't do that without proper documentation and licensing" etc.
So yeah--the "stolen thatch and stolen bamboo" isn't literally stolen (like you said!) but rather just ill-gotten.
Also I have indeed noticed the way that there's so much money being thrown around, especially the funds they've gotten from "investors" which are really just debt. They're going into massive debt to pay contractors and vendors... and that cap-ex and op-ex? sometimes I wonder if that's the real motive. Just a big stinkin' money laundering racket to bilk people out of their savings (anyone with a managed retirement investment fund that happens to do business with these jerks) and squirrel it away on "other companies" who are "working for" them.
They AREN'T worth the effort. It's the emperor's new clothes all over again. The only thing they're really actually TRYING to do, I hypothesize, is just keep everyone distracted so they can do exactly what you said they would: make themselves 'too big to fail' and then ride off into the sunset when the shoddy facade they propped up comes crashing down, leaving the public sector to foot the bill...
But it does provide nothing. Whatever AI gives is a hallucination, that’s practically nothing since it’s not information you can rely on and you have to verify it anyway.
Think about it this way, if you get connected to an AI chatbot instead of a real person, does it feel like the company is giving you their time? Or does it feel like they are giving you nothing?
Think about it this way, if you get connected to an AI chatbot instead of a real person, does it feel like the company is giving you their time? Or does it feel like they are giving you nothing?
Compared to insufferable automated phone systems, which have existed for decades and employ exactly no one, they are a vast improvement.
any company born after 1993 can’t make good products… all they know is exploitation, fire their workers, enshittify, be pink capitalist, eat hot cash & lie
(yes i know sony was founded before 1993 thank you)
Ever since fucking Trump came to power, he basically defanged the agencies that were supposed to curb corporate abuses and enforce laws and regulations, and allowed corporations to do a lot more anything they want to make more profit.
Yeah but until their bullshit hits their bottom line they won't change, and most people are on autopilot through life and either don't notice or don't care.
Its like they saw how much Xbox has been sucking and thought "hold on, instead of building on this market lead, I bet we could beat Xbox in enshittifying!"
Ever since the PS3 and Xbox 360, it's like the console wars have just been about them trading whose turn it was for the next PR disaster. Racing to the top was too expensive so they race to the bottom instead.
It helps when you get that their goals and ours are not really the same. They want to earn more money, and don't need to provide a perfect service to achieve that. They just need to be (slightly) less shitty than Xbox.
Don't forget they also paid $3.6 Billion for Bungie just to shut down their most popular game and put all their hope in their new extraction shooter that's been struggling. No new games in dev or even green lit. Also they just laid off a bunch of people.
Imagine if Bungie never "vaulted" (read: deleted) any part of Destiny 2 and we were still able to play the original campaign it shipped with? More people would still be playing Destiny 2 and you'd get plenty more new players without them having to use a guide or YouTube lore videos to get caught up on the story.
Instead of mArathon they'd probably be making a Destiny 3
Oh yeah don't get me started on Bungie. The are a shell of their former selves. When they split from Activison and it all came out that the mircotransactions was all Bungie's idea that was my first WTF moment with these guys. They let us believe it was the Corp overlords ruining our game but they did it themselves. Then they did everything they could do to make themselves look profitable for Sony's acquisition. Just horrible decision after horrible decision.
Yeah Bungie management has been atrocious since at least the first Halo. Possibly from their beginning. It's honestly a miracle they've managed to release so many decently sized hits despite being mismanaged to hell and back for each and every single one.
What really sucks is that Marathon is actually pretty fun.
They just completely fumbled the marketing and launch, the UI needs to be cleaned up, and it doesn't feel worth it at $40. IDC if it's a AAA developer, it's still a pretty small game content wise even if it is fun to play.
I’m a diehard Marathon fan, I dumpster dived for an Apple to play the first two on when I was a kid. I can’t even try the new one because they purposefully broke it on Linux.
Don’t blame Sony for bungies mess. Sony got absolutely scammed by Bungie because they were desperately and panicking after MS accounted they were buying ABK.
Bungie have been a terrible studio for a decade at least. Microsoft turned them down when Bungie attempted to sell themselves back to them for a fraction of what Sony paid them only a few months later.
Destiny got what it deserved. I can't believe it lasted as long as it did. I noped after they started charging $40 for a couple maps and a raid labeled as "expansions". And that was destiny 1. The game was an unbelievable ripoff.
Can't believe people still stuck with it even after they locked down the legacy content. It's crazy how much it takes to get people to stop buying enshittified products.
I agree I don't blame Sony at all. Also I hate myself for it but for me no FPS I've played comes close to the fluid gunplay in Destiny and Destiny 2. That is where Bungie always shined for me above everyone else. The rebooted Doom games are a close 2nd. and there are a few indie titles like Turbo Overkill that get close as well. Everything else just doesn't match up when I get that FPS itch.
Oh I know, the gunplay in destiny really was incredible. And the music and atmosphere was top notch, even though the size of the game and story didn't live up to the prelaunch hype.
It was hard to walk away but I couldn't justify overpaying for dlc that should've been $10, maybe $15 at most.
I can’t speak to market trends, but I can say this 100% makes my PS5 my last Sony console. I’ve bought every one, and the only reason I continue to buy them is so I can collect exclusives on disc for my collection.
A digital only console is just a bad, expensive gaming PC. I already have a good expensive gaming PC, so I’ll just buy games digitally there.
Yep. Same. I've been a PlayStation guy since my teens and could start buying my own stuff. If that's the move they want to go with then I have zero issues in dropping them as a whole.
After the recent Sony is deleting your movies you bought crap, I decided I'm never buying a digital game from them ever again. So sounds like it's my last as well. And I was already 90% digital.
Especially seeing as they tried to do the same thing before and reversed course due to the backlash, but I guess they just don't care anymore.
While I applaud your decision, the market has spoken - 85%+ of all console game sales are digital. The overwhelming majority of people don’t care about physical games, especially in a time when the physical copies don’t even contain the full game due to storage constraints.
I’ve been digital-only since the day they made all games available digitally on the Xbox 360, because I don’t trade or re-sell games, ever, and I much prefer the benefits of digital. Most people are like me these days. It sucks for the people that aren’t, but they’re going to have to just move on or abandon their hobby.
I do buy digital and have for decades, but primarily for PC. I don’t for console because that’s the last thing I wanted a console for. I have no intention of abandoning the hobby, but this is my last reason to buy a PlayStation. They offer nothing that isn’t done better on a gaming PC.
I saw the 85% stat they are pushing. I honestly don’t believe it. I strongly believe they are pumping that number up by counting PlayStation Plus redemptions and smaller games in that total. I would be much more interested to see what the actual Physical vs. Digital sales are for a single new release title on day one. I would guess the split is much closer to 70/30. That might be higher in markets where internet access is less robust. This will also piss off retailers and distributors, which now are expected to sell low-margin consoles without high margin games. They chose such a far off date in purpose, to see the feedback and test the waters. I doubt this will come to fruition. Physical media is seeing a resurgence as trust for these companies to maintain services is at an all time low.
On that note, companies need to be careful taking industry wide trends and extrapolating from them with no nuance. That’s why I worded my first comment carefully. I am not anti-Digital at all, but I buy a console for collecting exclusives. I have hundreds of digital Steam games and some digital PS5 games. You know how many digital PS6 games I’ll have? Zero, because I won’t own one. Like backwards compatibility, the benefit of it can’t be quantified by how much time people use it vs. cost of development. Physical media is a draw, even if it is not always taken advantage of. I’m not boycotting, I’m genuinely no longer interested.
This is the kind of decision that looks great on a balance sheet when you have no competition. But when your hardcore audience stops buying, collectors that buy extra releases and collectors editions stop collecting, retailers stop pushing because they can only sell one low margin box, and your competitors see your weakness and double down on it, it might not turn out so great.
The 85% stat isn’t a lie - it’s in their own financials that they release to shareholders, and they’re actually one of publishers with the least digital uptake. Xbox, Ubisoft, EA, etc all also release these figures and they’re higher. You can go to Sonys investor relations portal and check the figures out for yourself.
Physical media is not making a resurgence. It’s getting lower and lower every single year.
Sony will not abandon this plan because they have no reason to. It won’t affect their sales at all.
Also we don’t know how this will affect retail yet, that all depends on if they allow retailers to sell below the PS Store prices.
I didn’t say it was a lie, I said I think it’s inflated the way I already explained. Also, the fact that they are lower than other publishers indicates they will see a bigger impact from this than others.
Physical media is making a resurgence in other areas. Vinyl, DVD, 4K BluRay. Not a big one, but it’s on a backswing. I’m not doubting video games are lower every year because they are still in their initial era.
We’ll just have to agree to disagree on the impact. I think the knock-on effect will be bigger than they anticipate. Obviously they agree with you that it won’t impact anything. I think it will, for all the reasons I just went over. It’s not a 1:1 relationship between sale and impact. When people don’t have the console because it doesn’t attract them, they can’t make any sales. So they won’t lose one sale from me, they’ll lose the console sale and dozens of physical and digital games.
This is exactly what Microsoft went through with cutting BC, trying to kill physical media, and trying to play their dominant hand and we all know how that worked out. Turns out it’s more than the sum of its parts. Sony might succeed, it’s a different era. But it certainly gives a lot of weak spots for competitors to target.
It’s not inflated. They’re not counting PS Plus downloads or anything else, unless you’re accusing them of lying to shareholders and breaking many laws.
The amount of people leaving physical media is not being outpaced by those picking it up.
When did Microsoft try to cut BC?
As I’ve explained in other comments, Microsoft was actually the most pro-consumer with their “all digital” plans. They were doing “physical as digital”, with the benefits of physical and digital.
They'll probably keep releasing for the PS5 for years into the PS6's lifespan, so as long as that happens I'll get their games if they look good, but once they shift over to PS6 completely, I'm done. I already have the hardware, much cheaper to keep using it than to get something new.
You might be able to jailbreak it! I have a collection of consoles that I got only to tinker with. I keep up to date with the PS5/PS4 through MODDED WARFARE on Youtube. Might give you something to make it useful for you, even if it is just to run Linux on it. :P
I'll be looking into jailbreaking my PS5 once Sony drops support for it. Any hardware you already own, even years old, is much more valuable now than it used to be.
There were several PS4-exclusive games coming out that I was really looking forward to,and I was expecting many more; furthermore, I thought it might be handy to have something with built-in optical media support. Most of those original titles were re-released for PC, my future hopes never really materialized, and I never used the optical drive except to insert a disc for DRM purposes.
Depends, it's been worth it for me as it's more powerful than my PC and was much cheaper than building a similar power one would have been at the time. But if you already have a powerful PC, yeah, definitely not worth it.
Yeah, I really only got mine for Ragnarok. and as an upgrade to my 4k player. Which I then proceeded to only use detective Pikachu in. So, definitely not my brightest usage of money.
Both because it’s more safe and secure. Plus I have very fond memories of LAN parties and without private servers and local multiplayer kids won’t be able to experience that :(
Don't worry, they'll still be able to drink a bunch of cough syrup and think they're really hanging out chatting with random people on forums and Pink Floyd and Abe Lincoln, and then get genuinely lost in a game for what seems like eternity but can only ever be vaguely recalled later.
That just because it's "dangerous" for children doesn't justify banning it wholesale. Sorry I wasn't more clear.
Yet Microsoft allows people access to host a private server while also putting up scary warnings for kids telling them to stick to the "safe" realms servers or whatever (are they even still called Realms? fuck if I know). On the one hand, it's good they haven't removed it entirely, on the other hand, it seems like that may be their eventual long-term goal with how they treat the private server ecosystem.
I also think Discord and Roblox contributed to people not knowing what the fuck "server" actually means anymore.
definitely end of an era.
I'm not buying a console without physical media.
Sony can kill the second hand market if they want, but that was the last thing that differentiated them from Steam.
Good bye Playstation, i'll remember you fondly.
Hello, Sony's commitment to customer satisfaction is our top priority. The reason for that is that we determined the current product specifications from our analyses of target users and available technologies. For XAVC HS, we envision users enjoying HLG movies by connecting the camera to an HDR (HLG) compatible BRAVIA TV over HDMI, and 60p is what we view as the default setting for playback with it. To record movies in higher quality in 4K/30p, we would recommend selecting XAVC S and XAVC S-I, 10-bit 4:2:2 sampling, either Long GoP and All-I codec. Could you tell us how creators such as yourself want to use HEVC at 30p so we can provide feedback to our design team?
I found that oddly enlightening.
“Well, it’s not optimal for a BRAVIA TV over HDMI, so why would users want this? Why is it worth it for us to waste half a kilobyte for this option in the UI?” Sony cannot fathom anything outside that.
It makes that whole list in OP’s post make total sense. It’s not even cynicism on their part; with that mindset, what would they need a disk player for? What value is Bluepoint is a business review?
They literally cannot understand why PlayStation users would want any of those things. It’s outside the domain.
Could you tell us how creators such as yourself want to use HEVC at 30p so we can provide feedback to our design team?
I just want to fucking choose what I want without having to provide a "user story"!! I HATE uber-market-optimized software and products, give me fucking settings instead of trying to guess for me!
Essentially suits who don't and have never gamed making decisions on gaming. They have no idea what the players want and don't actually care because caring costs money.
Right? I'm still pissed off about the PS3. I owned a PS1 and a PS2. PS3 launched and before I could save up enough money, two awesome features that the PS3 launched with they pulled support for. At launch you could boot to linux and you could play PS2 games. They disabled both before I could buy one. Huge class action lawsuit if I remember correctly. But they keep pulling the same shit.
In fairness, the Linux feature was half baked. I got YellowDog running on it, but because of the goofball CPU, you had to recompile everything to get it to run, which it did poorly.
End of an era for just about everything. Streaming is all enshitified. The job market is shit. Democracy is falling apart. Decades of progress being undone. It's just the way it will be until people get sick of all this shit and start doing things differently and move on. All the great old companies are dead. Either turned to zombie brands or run by zombies. I remember how excited I was to buy my first Sony Trinitron, my first walkman, my Sony component stereo, first PlayStation.
The carts, discs, and hardware will unfortunately eventually stop working, but fortunately most of them can also be emulated on PC really well, sometimes better looking than on original hardware.
Disc systems are mostly built like shit especially from the early 2000s but ROM based cart systems if well taken care of will run for a long long time.
Have my OG N64, Dreamcast and GameGear all run perfectly fine. Well my GG has a dead spider in the screen but it still runs.
PlayStation 1,2, Saturns , the first 2 Xbox’s might be a different issue all together.
But to me this is connected to the growing eshitification of the industry
eventually but that will likely be long after most of us are dead. old consoles and carts are built like a brick house and most of them are repairable even games that have batteries. Just look at the N64 for example. that thing is like the Toyata truck of consoles.
I've found that the real problem is having a television to plug them in to. Still got my old NES and SNES from when I was a kid. But no modern TV has the RF input to connect them to, they're all digital only. Emulation is much easier.
that's what i hate the most about this. "retro gaming and second hand" works now because everything was physical back then, and could be preserved. what will the people of the future have of us? nothing but memories of what will then be a digital graveyard. most of it unpreserved, even through piracy, because consoles are getting harder and harder to hack and emulate and companies are getting more and more litigious.
Eh, everything PS3/360 generation and earlier is basically available at perfect emulation, or definitely will be soon because of the existing emulators and their development.
95% of all games from the PS/Xbox generations since then have been on PC from day 1. Almost all of the Xbox first party games have been on PC since then as well. The switch has been emulated perfectly for ages.
This realistically leaves only a handful of Sony first party PS4 and PS5 games left, and the switch 2 which only just came out.
It warms my heart to see that EVERY comment on Sony's blog post about it is negative. Hope the decision ends up biting Sony in the ass, but even if not, at least people weren't silent about it.
EDIT: and they're being yelled at everywhere else on the internet that people can post as well. Good.
So, this means mandatory proprietary hardware just to play the four or five true permanent exclusives that will be on the PS6 throughout its entire lifetime, given that everything else will eventually come to PC, and you don't actually own any of your digital content, meaning that they can revoke your access to your purchases without notice at any point if they choose to do so.
People will still buy it though, that's the saddest part.
Good thing Sony’s first party output is easy to ignore. Just go watch Wolverine and all the rest of their games on YouTube since they’re basically interactive movies.
Actually, the 2026 strategy and business environment report from Sony simply removed the line "Will continue its efforts to deploy its first-party titles to multiple platforms such as PC" from their priorities list, but did not outright state that they won't port games to PC anymore, as many journalists misinterpreted, the report simply states that it isn't a priority anymore due to mitigated revenue. The main concern within the report seems to be that near simultaneous releases on PC are effectively cannibalizing PS5 hardware sales, so you might still expect PC releases but further down the line compared to the current 1-2 years window, maybe previous generation games released on PC, not current generation.
For now, yes. But these companies change their strategies all the fucking time. As soon as they see their "only on Playstation" strategy is not giving them the expected return, I am sure they're gonna backflip, again.
Microsoft and Sony (and pretty much any other big corporation in the game business) are not reliable in the slightest - the only difference between them right now is the amount of power they have.
I find it both amusing and shocking that we still have 'fanboys' up to this day, when these companies themselves can't even maintain a solid long term strategy. All they care about is making maximum profit at the cost of literally everything else, so their 'promises' hold no weight at all.
Just get a console they said. Console just works they said. Why get a PC when it won't work in a year they said.
This is why I don't buy consoles. I can use a controller on my computer which is upgradable and not subject to one individual company dictating what I can and can't do.
Why get a PC when it won’t work in a year they said.
Interesting because my Steam digital purchases go back to 2007 and I can still play them all.
My first digital purchase was the Orange Box and my second purchase was Psychonauts.
I had purchased Half Life 2 as a physical copy and it still works, too.
Sure they're all just licenses, but a lot of effort has been put into me being able to continue playing them, including on Linux.
Yes, Valve is a different story because they're a private company, but 20 years of license when I could play on any computer I owned at any time I think is showing that digital licensing isn't inherently evil as much as it is widely abused for control.
They're actually not just licenses. When you download a game from steam you get the game data. You can back up this gamedata if you wish. Sure it will have steam DRM but thats something on can get around one way or another.
Real and based. If you get them on GOG, you can download offline installers with no DRM. My GOG collection isn't as big as my Steam, but it's also fairly significant as well. Heroic Launcher on Linux is sweet for GOG games (you just have to plan out wine prefix and directory structure to properly have updates install).
The same is true of Xbox consoles btw. You can back-up your game files from your Xbox to a external hdd and transfer them back to your Xbox in 50 years time and play them even if they’ve been delisted and Xbox no longer exists.
They are still only licenses though, same with steam. Steam still has verification servers. If steam disappeared you are no better off than if xbox did.
If steam disappeared you are no better off than if xbox did.
Steam DRM can be trivially removed. 3rd party DRM is a problem, but thankfully not all games use it and many games have had their DRM removed as well (either by the publisher or through crackers).
I’m not one of those people who pretends they will play a physical disc game for the rest of their life
I do however like physical for two reasons.
Firstly, the price, how tf can you justify charging more when you are cutting out all of the middlemen and listing on your own online store. Secondly, resale. I can buy a game, play it and resell.
If the tradeoff on going digital was that games were 50% cheaper, then I’d be happy. I wouldn’t have to hoard games and I’d have the convenience of digital.
This was me a decade ago when Xbox suggested something like this. Nintendo was shutting down their old eshops and making purchased games unplayable and Playstation was selling shovelware on their online store.
In a dystopia like that...
Suddenly, Steam's digital-only storefront didn't look so bad.
Xbox’s digital future was actually incredibly user friendly - it was all digital, but it allowed people to re-sell and loan their digital games. People were just too dumb to understand what was so good about it.
The alternative is what Sony are now doing - all digital with zero of the perks of physical.
People were just too dumb to understand what was so good about it.
I wouldn't have trusted Microsoft to follow through on this in the long term. I have little doubt they would have removed that concession as soon as they thought they could get away with it.
The entire reason I've ever bought consoles and games was because I could get used games at a bargain and also sell my old consoles and game collections when I'm done with them. I can't imagine that I'm the only person who looked at it this way.
Now console producers pull shit like this when they can't even claim to be more user friendly than PC because SteamOS is a real competitor.
Well I guess it was good while it lasted, at least until the last few years when greed fully took over. Microsoft is already on it's last leg and Sony and Nintendo are going to follow eventually.
Little did the Luddites who applauded this realise that they were signing their own fate.
Xbox One’s digital plans were amazing. Luddites and Sony fanboys just couldn’t understand that an all digital future was inevitable, and actively fought against the only company that was bringing the benefits of physical copies to digital.
Microsoft were doing their “physical as digital” plan which was literally the best digital-only system ever devised, and they were forced to ditch it by people who were too dumb to see the industry trends at the time, and by people who hate Microsoft/xbox.
Now no one gets that amazing “digital only” system.
Microsoft made a plan. Great. Anybody can 'make' a plan and that plan could sound amazing to some people.
You are nostalgizing the ideal parts of their plan without having to see it play out. How would sharing have really worked? Would the disc be tied to your account forever? Would your friend be able to install from it?
And for sake of argument let's say Microsoft executed on this best plan ever. Fast forward 10 years and they are looking for more profits somewhere. What's stopping them from changing the terms of their plan? Pretty sure the TOS you click OK to when installing the game says it lets them alter things as they fit.
They literally outlined all of this. Everything single part. You could choose a friends gamertag to loan your game to. While it was on loan they could download and play it, but you couldn’t since you loaned it out.
As for your second paragraph, no you’re just inventing imaginary what-ifs because you want to be anti-Microsoft - just like I’m sure you did back when they announced these plans.
Thanks to people like you, you’ll now get all the drawbacks of digital and none of the benefits of physical. Congratulations, you played yourself.
Tell me: what is the monthly subscription price of gamepass? What was it a year ago? 2 years ago? How's their game library?
I must've imagined all that fuckery they did to that service. Surely they would never have done anything like that to that digital asset policy you love so much. We can trust them.
Really scary to see where the industry is headed! I've started purchasing games on GOG whenever possible so as to put my money towards an actually good source in the industry but it doesn't feel like enough.
These companies are constantly pushing the boundaries of what they can get away with and it feels like we just gotta take it at this point.
I especially feel bad for the console gamers as they have very little options to get around this and switching to PC is unfortunately more expensive than ever.
Now that PC gaming is at feature parity with console gaming, I think it's particularly important to tell people how available DRM-free gaming is. No, it's not going to be common in the AAA segment of your library, but it's a lot of games. And you'll never have to worry about it being pulled from your library.
The price of hardware is a pain point for sure, but if you're able to see past that, you'll be spending less over a generation on PC than you would on a console between not having to pay for online service, dramatically cheaper gamepad/accessory options, and a massive library of quality games at $30 or less.
I was an XBox guy, and didn't get into Playstation at all. But it was always clear that they were excellent consoles. At a certain income level back in the day, you'd get an XBox or a Playstation, but not both. If you had a smidgen more money to spend, Nintendo had you covered.
I have no emotional fealty to Playstation in any way, but what a shame to see all three formerly awesome systems now competing to see who can enshitify more effectively.
I had a PlayStation and PlayStation 2. Was a huge twisted metal fan. Xbox came out some friends got that. Halo was fun. What made me switch to Xbox was strictly fears of war. The few of my friends that were still PlayStation fans switched to the 360 almost immediately after playing gears.
Nintendo wasn't always like that. Every Nintendo console before the GameCube was the most powerful console of its generation. The GameCube was second most powerful behind Xbox but ahead of PS2. But like the N64, Nintendo made the GameCube with a fatal flaw that caused a severe limitation that was completely unnecessary: the game storage media.
For the N64, it was the choice to not use disks and thus were limited to only 64MB at most of game filesize, but the GameCube had disks. Except they were those stupid tiny ones that only held like 1.5GB instead of a normal sized disks at the time which held up to 8GB.
Then they made the Wii, which was just the GameCube 1.5, used nearly the same parts except it used normal disks finally and it sold like crazy. Unfortunately, Nintendo learned the wrong lesson and instead of saying "make normal consoles" they now learned to "make weak, cheap consoles." And now we are at where we are.
I'm fine with "weak, cheap consoles" if the games are good, as that's all that really matters. The problem is, Nintendo's game output has been kinda shit lately.
I've been picking up game consoles for my whole life. I decided before the NS2 was announced that I was done picking up game consoles. Now there is absolutely zero chance of me picking up a ps6, it's just not acceptable to do this.
They all want you to go to digital storefronts because they get a bigger cut of the pie and you cannot use anyone else's copy. Soon we'll see them remove activating two consoles on one account entirely and possibly the offline capability as well. They want to make sure you drink your verification cans to keep playing, they just haven't gotten there yet.
The removal of digital media is also out of their hands. They agreed to a distribution contract. The entity that owns that media offered a conditional license in that distribution agreement. Now they are either choosing not to renew or choosing to cancel the agreement and legally Sony don't have a choice except to be sued if they continue to allow people to access that digital content.
I agree it's shitty. I agree that it's a crazy thing to have happen when you're dropping the news about doing away with physical media. But it's still not really in their control.
I guess you could argue that they negotiated a shit contract. They should have had the right to sell a perpetual license to the media. When the contract runs out, they just can't sell it anymore, but they don't have to pull it from those that had purchased it.
In this particular case what they were selling wasn't a licensed copy of a movie or show. They were selling a license to stream. When the contract ran out they had to pull it from the streaming platform.
Sony said that affected customers will lose the ability to stream titles including Outrage: Way of the Yakuza, Paddington, Paddington 2, Pan’s Labyrinth, Rambo 3, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas “due to our content licensing agreements.” As of September, Sony will remove any affected titles that UK users bought from their PlayStation library, per the notice.
The consumers contract for the content is with sony, not with someone else. The underlying structure doesn't interest anyone except lawyers. Sony should be mandated to refund content that they pull from libraries, or they have to ensure that they don't lose access to the content they are "selling". Also, it should be enshrined in law that if you only get a licence that can be pulled anytime that this information is very, very clear when paying for content, and not to hide this information on page 23 or so in their licence agreement, where they redefine the meaning of buy, own, purchase... and so on to something that very much has NOT the meaning of those words.
Ok. So let's say for the sake of argument, you have Netflix. You pay for Netflix specifically for... I dunno, Top Gear. Suddenly without warning Netflix is forced to pull Top Gear from its streaming platform because the license to provide it to stream has lapsed or been otherwise ended. That's basically what happened here except that they allowed you to pay per show or movie.
In this case what these customers paid for is the license to stream these digital items. Which (shitty though I agree it is) they agreed to when they made their purchases. But the fact is, Sony didn't reach into people's Harddrives and remove anything. What they did was remove these shows and movies from the digital streaming library of people who purchased it and the only reason they did is because otherwise they'd be sued if they didn't.
So while I appreciate your outrage, I think it's pretty important to note that the license holder (the entity that actually owns the ability to sell distribution rights for digital licenses to consumers) is the one who sets the terms, not the platform of distribution, and this happens so often that literally no digital media is safe except when you can download it DRM free (Google play music, band camp, GOG etc).
I don't disagree that Sony is at fault for agreeing to that distribution agreement. That's not anything like what I said. What I said was that they did it because they are required to by law.
I bought every PlayStation ever released. I will not be buying this one. Consoles are supposed to get cheaper over time. The gaming sector is going to go tits up and I hope it does.
Playstation customer since my first job at McDonalds let me buy the original first model PSX, all the way through the PS5 --- fuuuuuuuuck you Sony. I've got a PC and you can eat 10 tons of my shit right now with this and your cancellation of PC support. We'll see who wins.
I don't understand why anyone would choose to buy a console after this. The only draws of consoles was the turnkey hardware, which you can generally get with Proton now, and access to physical games, which won't be a thing soon. Now it's just a locked-down PC with a DRM storefront that makes you pay a subscription to pay online games and which may or may not have backwards compatibility from system to system.
Maybe that's just the PC gamer in me talking. Are there any advantages to console anymore? Like, a single benefit?
Nah. Sony will stick around, Playstation will die, Microsoft kills Xbox and everyone will complain about Steam being a monopoly despite their competition choosing to shoot themselves in the foot and dying all on their own.
PlayStation won’t die lol. The overwhelmingly large majority of PlayStation console owners buy digital games exclusively. They have a massive dedicated fan base who will buy whatever they release and defend it to their last breath too.
This is what happens when their only competitor is a mindless Microslop.
Nintendo carved out their niche and Sony has no chance against them in that market after abandoning AAA and AA single player games in favor of trash service games.
sony probably figures they can get away with pulling all this shit since what else ya gonna do? buy a new gaming pc? at literally double or more what they cost last summer?
Since playing online is free and games can be gotten for free as well, that's exactly what I'll do at a higher upfront cost. Or, if prices remain outrageous forever, I'll stick to old games until the hardware stops working, then stop playing games altogether.
Incorrect, the 3DS eshop is still online. Digital games can still be re-downloaded, you just can't buy new ones. The same is true for Wii, DSi, and Wii U.
They need to up their exclusive game...game. Other than DK Bananza, their output has been disappointing. I only got a Switch 2 now because it's only going to get more expensive and I'm hoping for quality exclusives in the next 6 or so years that they'll be supporting it.
Yes, but the quality of those exclusives is lacking compared to their previous consoles. It's only been a year, so I'm going to be optimistic that their output will improve. Looking forward to Ocarina of Time and Xenoblade Genesis.
Ports of games to Nintendo consoles are always the worst way to play them due to the weaker hardware, so exclusives matter a lot more on them. It's the entire reason I got one. PS5 is good for more than just exclusives (especially since, as you pointed out, it barely has any!)
Microsoft is killing their software while Sony kills the hardware and marketplace. This looks like the end of the console generation with the only device left being a handheld by Nintendo.
Nintendo is also now the only one left I'll consider buying their next console depending on how enshittifed it is. They're the only one left now that isn't just a locked-down PC.
This is Sony though, they care so much about playstation customers they even went to the effort of updating the ps3 firmware in March this year to improve things for their customers.
I mean it would be crazy to suggest they would do that for a console they discontinued a decade ago just to try and fuck with people who have the temerity to run custom firmware on hardware they bought and paid for 20 years ago....
Do they still make money of it or was the security hole easy enough to fix, that they paid a few engineer hours from pocket money, just for the fuck you?
"By updating, you can enjoy additional features, improved usability, and enhanced security.
Please note, to play Blu-ray discs, your PS3 system needs a renewed Blu-ray player encryption key. Please update your PS3 system software to the latest version to renew the Blu-ray player encryption key."
I havent actually tried to watch a bluray on custom firmware since, but I'm a weirdo who uses it for playing games so that doesnt matter to me.
Not really end of an era, you're just witnessing a monopoly forming since Xbox is pretty much dead in the water. I guess it's technically a duopoly since Nintendo is fine, but Nintendo kinda does its own thing without regard to what others do. Basically, with Xbox out of the picture, Sony is free to do whatever it wants.
It was always going to be digital only on account of 85%+ of all game sales being digital.
The digital only PS5 wasn’t a market test though, it was purely a marketing tactic - they barely made 5% of PS5 production digital only ones, but it allowed them to market the PS5 as “from $399”, when in reality it was $499.
Its 78% actually, up from 76% last year, but that is sales and not users. I would hardly believe that are users that bought all of their games digitally, even the good collection ones.
My little brother, who started with PS3 as a kid and had/has PS4, PS5 and almost all of his games are in discs, won't be happy about it.
I was only saying the other day, after having all playstations since a PSOne, that I reckon the wind I blowing against the consumer and that the PS5 (disc version) would be my last playstation console.
Unfortunately it turns out I was right, it's a sad day for gamers. 😮💨
They're betting on consumers being too impulsive and stupid to care, and... they're probably right. Nothing's stopped them before, this likely isn't a new line in the sand for them.
Even with the high prices you can still build a decent AM4 based PC and play titles bought on GOG which is DRM free.
If you install Linux you all get one of the best is for free.
If you want to go further you can emulate the heck of old consoles and old PC games and have tons of fun.
You could also sail the high seas for content that has DRM and/or is very expensive.
Don't forget. If you don't own what you buy the piracy is ethical and justified.
After akk, piracy is mostly a service problem and when you enshitify a service you end up FAFO.
They also just announced that the PS3 and Vita Playstation Stores will be shutting down, starting next month in certain regions and everywhere by July 2027. At some point in the future it will be impossible to buy games for your old PS6 because it doesn't support discs and the Playstation Store doesn't support the system.
Honestly, once cheap physical media wasn't able to keep up with game sizes this became inevitable. Blurays can store 100GB, which isn't enough for the bigger games of today, and they will only get bigger. It was still nice to have the disc as a sellable, tradeable license for the game as long as the servers were up, though.
Sony only announced this now because of the upcoming Xbox layoff announcement. Typical “get all of your bad news out in front of the competitors worse news so yours is only in the news cycle for a few days” play.
Xbox’s “physical as digital” plans for the Xbox One were amazing. Bet the people who cried about it are now feeling pretty stupid.
Because stopping disc production has worked so well for Microsoft...
Here's the bit both are forgetting:
The hardware is still sold at retail.
So you go into a store, you see a console for sale but no games. Or, worse, a shelf of old games on the "Discontinued" rack (the Xbox section in most Targets and Walmarts now.) Do you feel inclined to buy that hardware?
Also steam is a storefront, if you want the hardware you go to PC store.
Saying that made me realised that they might actually want to make sure they (the Sony store) are the only one to be able to sell this, no more game store in the future.
They're actually planning for games to be sold at retail as a code in a box, so they still want game displays at retail, but also want to have complete control over the pricing of them. A "have their cake and eat it, too" kind of thing.
The games will still be sold at retailers as a code in a box. I don't see the point, but apparently that's the plan.
Valve can also get away with it because PCs are an open platform and you have options to have control over your digital games, whether legal or not. So the lack of physical media doesn't really matter there.
Minidisc was licensed technology, companies like Sharp, Denon, Pioneer, JVC, Onkyo and Kenwood all made competitive minidisc players. The discs were also sold by many brands.
I don't think Sony's audio division was as restrictive and aggressive as their gaming division.
yeah i still remember when sony lawyered lik-sang.com out of existence for having the temerity to sell sony games outside their intended regional markets.
Consoles were always a walled garden from the very start, very purposefully so, and those things tend to squeeze customers once captured with higher prices and, sooner or later, fully enshittify.
So when consoles originally appeared I just kept gaming on the PC because it was an open platform and the only console I ever had was a WII (the original one) because their controller was at the time innovative, and honestly it wasn't really worth it.
Then, specifically for the PlayStation there's Sony, who have a long track record of anti-consumer actions that started when their leadership stopped coming from the Engineering Division and started coming from their Media Division (after they bought a Movie studio in the US), from their electronics becoming locked down and restrictive for users (they're the ones who came up with Blu-Ray, which was way more locked down to block copying than DVDs were) to the infamous shipping of music CDs with rootkits (the "Sony Rootkit" scandal)
So this increasing enshittification of the PlayStation isn't at all surprising and suspect it will get even worse than this.
Ultimately I think the PlayStation platform will end up dying.
And PC games have been digital for ages it feels. Still a loss, I usually wait half a year to two years before buying new games and can just pick up whatever I want for 20€ on disc without having to wait for the next PS Store sale, often even the version that includes all the DLCs and the remaster of the previous game. PS5 is probably my last console.
Steam kinda killed physical PC games 20 years ago.
And the Steam zealots will come and say, "Yeah, but but you can still buy games on other storefronts! So it's not like this Sony thing at all!" OK, sure.
You need a DRM free installer (preferably with patches built-in) not physical.
Mind you, I am no Valve fan, they lean towards typical American oligarchical behaviour and they made a massive contribution to developing loot boxes. But in comparison to all other large American tech companies, they are not aggressively terrible, still nowhere near "great" though.
Depends on how long Nintendo plans to keep doing game key cards. They suck, but they're better than having no way to transfer a game license at all. I suspect that the "Switch 3" won't have any physical media at all, though.
I'm an Xbox fangirl (a resentingly disappointed one, of course), and the recent industry shenanigans made me get apprehensive about whatever is going to come out next from Microsoft's direction. They could turn the direction around. Not sure if they can.
I liked Nintendo Switch, but Switch 2 was pretty much "yeah, I'll probably get a Steam Deck at some point, sorry".
This PlayStation stuff basically switched my opinion of them from "Nnno" to "Oh hell no".
I will be back to PC gaming! And will be building a new PC once the industry quits being stupid for a moment. Until then, my 2020 laptop will have to do.
I'm gonna miss them as they were the only way of playing paid games via Playstation 4 since you couldn't buy digital games via PS Store if you were living in an unavailable country.
They'll do it if they can manage to make it impossible to use any adapter. PSVita used those tiny memory sticks because fuck you for wanting standardized storage solutions
There is no point to consoles anymore. It used to be that consoles were easy to use and cheaper while PCs were more expensive and complex. That is no longer the case. Computers are stupid easy now and consoles have become too expensive. Nintendo excluded they are the only ones doing old console case where it is for children.
No, this is just playstation continuing to hate their customer base.
They've always hated their customers. Between Sony, and Nintendo, I dont know who hates their customers the most... but they both certainly try.
and it doesnt matter, because they both have enough fanboys that strip off their clothes and gleefully dance naked and joyous in the rain of shit both companies sputter out of their assholes and down onto their customers.
The loss of physical media in addition to the rest of their terrible decisions solidified that I'm done with Sony. Still on the PS4, but I see no need to give them any future support.
It really sucks that between this and the death of personal computing at the hands of the AI bubble, my main hobby is becoming unaffordable.
The removal of physical games isn't that big of a deal to me as someone who mostly plays on PC, and the only physical PC games I've bought in the last decade and a half were touhou games I imported off Yahoo auctions.
Honesty I wonder why that actually became so normalized on PC while it didn't on consoles. I'm sure Steam has a big role in it.
Yeah I’m completely done with Sony. They also killed Destiny as a franchise and are already getting ready to launch a PS6 despite them basically producing no games during the pandemic because most people didn’t own a ps5 due to shortages. Feels like we got half a life cycle for this console, then they release the pro for like twice the price, and now they expect you to get ready to upgrade. And of course they are stopping disc production while simultaneously proving they can and will just stop letting you use your digital purchases. I’m sticking to PC and switch 2 for the foreseeable future. I honestly may never buy another console.
Really what needs to happen is a few companies consolidate regional dev talent and become software companies.
If I was sony I'd bet on steamos. Nintendo would be in the best position if their games weren't locked to their systems. Because their wheel house is low spec games that could run on anything.
they make their product and service worse but they're still trying to fight the console wars in 2026 like that japanese soldier who fought ww2 for 30 years after japan surrendered
Amazing to see all four major players in the AAA gaming industry shooting themselves in the feet one way or another:
Xbox trying to spread itself thin between consoles and PC, going into studio purchasing sprees that it was unable to maintain long-term and churning them out as we speak
Steam getting bitten hard by the AI bubble, making their Steam Machine dead on arrival in price, power, and availability of games (although the latter is partly due to a lack of anti-cheat solutions that can be legally deployed on top of an open-source kernel)
And Nintendo pushing for more expensive games than the competition, and deploying Game Cards for physical games as the worst of both worlds
The biggest problem with this isn't really the lack of physical games. (Although this is really disappointing as I used to love having a huge collection of games to look at.) The real problem is where we are being pushed because of this.
Digital games are basically just license keys for us. These companies reserve the right to revoke those license keys from us or just completely remove said game/movie/show from the store and your library whenever they see fit.
Not to mention the end if the used game market but I don't feel like getting into that right now
On PC we have a plethora of options to get our games the way we prefer. GOG is a fantastic company that sells games old and new that are DRM free. Meaning when I buy a game from them I get all of the files for said game and am free to do with it whatever I want, no launcher or internet required.
Not to mention there is always piracy for those that are so inclined.
And those two are just the tip of the iceberg. Console players have to get their games from the console's store and that's it.
That kind of feels like conjecture in my opinion. While yeah piracy is absolutely a problem on PC, that doesn't mean that everyone on the platform is doing it. There's still a ton of money to be made from sales on there.
Well it is, but the writing is also on the wall, computer hardware increases will have more of an impact than consoles which are subsidised
I don’t think it out of the question that to play the newest game on PC your only option will be to stream it from PlayStation or xbox as that will work on cheaper hardware that more people have
At that point the piracy backup goes out the window
I seriously don't understand the "disk" thing. I could see how you want your game to be on a physical media so you don't have to download it when you want to play, but games are so big you couldn't do it for decades already, and having a disk is barely saves you any time anyway. Meanwhile it's a waste of materials, it get scratched all the time, and if you lose it it's gone.
It won't really affect me, but I understand the appeal of a physical artifact servicing as time game's license for those who like to lend, sell, trade, library, etc.
And those same benefits are why the corporations can't wait to do away with it. It's been quite a while since Microsoft tried the same thing and people freaked out enough that they reversed course.
It’s worth pointing out that Microsoft didn’t try the same thing. Microsoft tried to move to “physical as digital”, where they retained the benefits of physical copies such as resale and loaning.
I specifically remember that their plan was essentially CD Keys. You'd buy a physical game and it would have a code inside, or the discs would have unique identifiers that force linked to your account, or whatever.
So yeah, essentially physical media with a digital license. If you were going to be able to resell your game it was going to have to go through microsoft, or maybe you could lend a friend your disc and that lets them buy their own license for a small discount to play it.
It was keys in a box, but they had a framework to allow physical retailers to remove licenses from Xbox accounts and refresh the license key for resale. They also had a system for you to loan your digital games out to your friends via their gamertag. When you digitally loaned it to them, you could not play it and they could. Iirc it would automatically revert after 30 days if you didn’t extend, but you could choose how long to loan it for.
They abandoned it all after the ridiculous crashouts by people who couldn’t see where the future was heading, and now you get digital with no resale and no loaning.
I'll just point out that they/we did not have a system like that, but just promises of it from a tech giant. (except of course for whatever they had designed internally up until that time) So even as somebody who doesn't really sell games, I get why people weren't thrilled with the idea of microsoft being the ever-present broker in the transactions.
It was a new system, one never done before but not outlandish and easy to see how it would work. People just can’t understand and fear new things. Microsoft are, to their own detriment, too forward thinking. The Intended XB1 digital system was as close to a perfect one as you can get. benefits of both physical and digital wrapped in one.
That is only the case because your console is connected to the internet. For example, I can dust off my old PS3 today and play the version 1.0 release of GTA V after installing it from the disc because the console is offline, meaning there won't be any prompt asking me to update the game to the latest version, and it simply works.
You might argue that this is a bad example and that GTA V runs better on modern hardware, so let us consider Bloodborne on the PS4 instead, a title you will not find anywhere else and for which current emulation remains, at best, sketchy. I can insert that disc into my PS4 unplugged from the internet and play it immediately without any mandatory update.
Killing physical support means the end of this possibility for further releases, not that Sony has many exclusives these days, but for the handful of PS6 games that won't make it to PC.
OK, I was looking over Does It Play and a lot do let you play without updates, although the site notes those can have a lot of issues before being patched.
It was more than I would have thought, since everyone I know with a ps5 seems to spend more time getting updates than actually playing, lol.
Or old enough to not care that much. What am I going to do with more plastic?
BUT, I should have been more clear that I was talking only about ps5 and ps5 owners. I would never own one. Their online account is annoying and I have never forgiven them for the rootkit.
I was surprised to find out that there are games that will play without the internet. Although every ps5 MUST be connected to the internet first to link the disc drive to the device.
I used Does It Play to look at the games, and a lot of them will not work without updates. I assumed all at this point, which is why I said what I said.
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It's like corporations don't know how to do anything but enshittify anymore
It's the ultimate push to turn everything into the perfect Capitalist (not market-oriented) business solution: Getting paid for nothing
If your goal is to accumulate capital, and there are not outside forces regulating your worst impulses, you ultimately will create a class of legal-protected thieves, since the absolutely best and most risk free way to accumulate capital is to be given it in exchange for quite literally nothing.
Gambling is about as close to the platonic ideal as you can, but conquest by military force of political capture is also a very, viable route. Use the law to force people to buy your nothing and be protected for it, rather than being lynched when you steal someone's products.
Mandated insurance that isn't a crown corporation beholden to ratepayers is a perfect example. If you have mandated insurance for something, and that private insurance has a shareholder requirement to see growth every quarter, and the same amount of things are being insured, only one thing can happen:
Rates go up with denials
Payouts go down
Eventually you're paying for insurance you know is worthless but it's mandated by law.
Not really, a lot of insurers make the majority of their money from their investing.
United healthcare
I agree with you, but then isn't it strange that AI does a whole lot of something instead of nothing? Like, the high amount of effort they put into making AI a big thing runs counter to the laziness of getting paid to do nothing.
Though I guess they ARE getting paid doing nothing, with how many data centers are getting cancelled.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/economy/nearly-half-of-us-data-centers-planned-for-2026-canceled-or-delayed-and-it-s-expected-to-get-worse/ar-AA20sl2J
Not when you realize that the "something" they're charging you for is:
a) bastardized cargo culted knockoff of "something" so insubstantial that it's very nearly "something-shaped nothing"
b) the "something" is made of stuff that isn't even theirs.
Not only is it giving you a bamboo and thatch sculpture of an airplane when you ask for an airplane; it's made of STOLEN bamboo and STOLEN thatch.
Yep let's take entirety of user submitted content to the internet over 30+ years and repackage it and sell it back to you as if it was our product.
I hope you don't misunderstand me by my saying "something" to imply it's anything substantial, significant, or even good. I'm very anti-AI in all aspects of our lives, just so you know where I'm coming from.
Yes, the theft of intellectual property and art to train AI models is in keeping with their laziness, and yes, the models don't improve our lives in any way. But they can't exactly steal the electricity needed to power data centers, nor can they steal the silicon required to manufacture all the CPU's, GPU's, SSD's, and RAM they require. All those things are enormous capex and opex, and that's what I mean by "something."
That's a lot of work they're doing to push AI, and the only plan I can think of to recoup those costs is to expect taxpayers to foot the bill: they want municipalities to pay for the increase in electricity costs, cover the pollution and devastation their DC's generate, all without creating jobs and opportunities in the region (because why would they pay labor a fair share, yuck). And the finale, when all those investments fail to generate any profit they want a government bailout to keep from going belly up.
I just don't think any of that is worth the effort you know what I mean?
Any proof that that actually happened?
https://cybernews.com/tech/meta-leeched-82-terabytes-of-pirated-books-to-train-its-llama-ai-documents-reveal/
oh, allow me to clarify--!
I did not mean to sound as though I had been disagreeing with you ^.^; my comment was more intended to have a 'yes-and' kind of vibe~
but I really do like all that you had to say here and I still agree!
While they're truly not stealing the electricity, what I would hope to imply is that they are nevertheless acquiring it via nefarious means--in that many of these data centers are building gas combustion generators to supplement their power usage in violation of environmental regulations, workplace safety standards, and generally all the laws that say "you can't do that without proper documentation and licensing" etc.
So yeah--the "stolen thatch and stolen bamboo" isn't literally stolen (like you said!) but rather just ill-gotten.
Also I have indeed noticed the way that there's so much money being thrown around, especially the funds they've gotten from "investors" which are really just debt. They're going into massive debt to pay contractors and vendors... and that cap-ex and op-ex? sometimes I wonder if that's the real motive. Just a big stinkin' money laundering racket to bilk people out of their savings (anyone with a managed retirement investment fund that happens to do business with these jerks) and squirrel it away on "other companies" who are "working for" them.
They AREN'T worth the effort. It's the emperor's new clothes all over again. The only thing they're really actually TRYING to do, I hypothesize, is just keep everyone distracted so they can do exactly what you said they would: make themselves 'too big to fail' and then ride off into the sunset when the shoddy facade they propped up comes crashing down, leaving the public sector to foot the bill...
But it does provide nothing. Whatever AI gives is a hallucination, that’s practically nothing since it’s not information you can rely on and you have to verify it anyway.
Think about it this way, if you get connected to an AI chatbot instead of a real person, does it feel like the company is giving you their time? Or does it feel like they are giving you nothing?
Compared to insufferable automated phone systems, which have existed for decades and employ exactly no one, they are a vast improvement.
any company born after 1993 can’t make good products… all they know is exploitation, fire their workers, enshittify, be pink capitalist, eat hot cash & lie
(yes i know sony was founded before 1993 thank you)
So was Enron? I'm not sure why you chose 1993, companies have been shitty across all of time and space.
reference
Welp, I'm the fucking idiot today lol. Thanks!
"Eat hot chip & lie" was my favorite saying for a long time after that tweet went viral
Ever since fucking Trump came to power, he basically defanged the agencies that were supposed to curb corporate abuses and enforce laws and regulations, and allowed corporations to do a lot more anything they want to make more profit.
Yeah but until their bullshit hits their bottom line they won't change, and most people are on autopilot through life and either don't notice or don't care.
Its like they saw how much Xbox has been sucking and thought "hold on, instead of building on this market lead, I bet we could beat Xbox in enshittifying!"
Ever since the PS3 and Xbox 360, it's like the console wars have just been about them trading whose turn it was for the next PR disaster. Racing to the top was too expensive so they race to the bottom instead.
It helps when you get that their goals and ours are not really the same. They want to earn more money, and don't need to provide a perfect service to achieve that. They just need to be (slightly) less shitty than Xbox.
probably going to complain when steam/valve is the only competitor making bank. MS wasted all thier money on trying to make AI work.
Don't forget they also paid $3.6 Billion for Bungie just to shut down their most popular game and put all their hope in their new extraction shooter that's been struggling. No new games in dev or even green lit. Also they just laid off a bunch of people.
This one is more on the Bungie side of things. Bungie got a few lifelines and STILL fumbled.
Imagine if Bungie never "vaulted" (read: deleted) any part of Destiny 2 and we were still able to play the original campaign it shipped with? More people would still be playing Destiny 2 and you'd get plenty more new players without them having to use a guide or YouTube lore videos to get caught up on the story.
Instead of mArathon they'd probably be making a Destiny 3
Oh yeah don't get me started on Bungie. The are a shell of their former selves. When they split from Activison and it all came out that the mircotransactions was all Bungie's idea that was my first WTF moment with these guys. They let us believe it was the Corp overlords ruining our game but they did it themselves. Then they did everything they could do to make themselves look profitable for Sony's acquisition. Just horrible decision after horrible decision.
Yeah Bungie management has been atrocious since at least the first Halo. Possibly from their beginning. It's honestly a miracle they've managed to release so many decently sized hits despite being mismanaged to hell and back for each and every single one.
What really sucks is that Marathon is actually pretty fun.
They just completely fumbled the marketing and launch, the UI needs to be cleaned up, and it doesn't feel worth it at $40. IDC if it's a AAA developer, it's still a pretty small game content wise even if it is fun to play.
I’m a diehard Marathon fan, I dumpster dived for an Apple to play the first two on when I was a kid. I can’t even try the new one because they purposefully broke it on Linux.
Don’t blame Sony for bungies mess. Sony got absolutely scammed by Bungie because they were desperately and panicking after MS accounted they were buying ABK.
Bungie have been a terrible studio for a decade at least. Microsoft turned them down when Bungie attempted to sell themselves back to them for a fraction of what Sony paid them only a few months later.
Destiny got what it deserved. I can't believe it lasted as long as it did. I noped after they started charging $40 for a couple maps and a raid labeled as "expansions". And that was destiny 1. The game was an unbelievable ripoff.
Can't believe people still stuck with it even after they locked down the legacy content. It's crazy how much it takes to get people to stop buying enshittified products.
I agree I don't blame Sony at all. Also I hate myself for it but for me no FPS I've played comes close to the fluid gunplay in Destiny and Destiny 2. That is where Bungie always shined for me above everyone else. The rebooted Doom games are a close 2nd. and there are a few indie titles like Turbo Overkill that get close as well. Everything else just doesn't match up when I get that FPS itch.
Oh I know, the gunplay in destiny really was incredible. And the music and atmosphere was top notch, even though the size of the game and story didn't live up to the prelaunch hype.
It was hard to walk away but I couldn't justify overpaying for dlc that should've been $10, maybe $15 at most.
I can’t speak to market trends, but I can say this 100% makes my PS5 my last Sony console. I’ve bought every one, and the only reason I continue to buy them is so I can collect exclusives on disc for my collection.
A digital only console is just a bad, expensive gaming PC. I already have a good expensive gaming PC, so I’ll just buy games digitally there.
Yep. Same. I've been a PlayStation guy since my teens and could start buying my own stuff. If that's the move they want to go with then I have zero issues in dropping them as a whole.
After the recent Sony is deleting your movies you bought crap, I decided I'm never buying a digital game from them ever again. So sounds like it's my last as well. And I was already 90% digital.
Especially seeing as they tried to do the same thing before and reversed course due to the backlash, but I guess they just don't care anymore.
While I applaud your decision, the market has spoken - 85%+ of all console game sales are digital. The overwhelming majority of people don’t care about physical games, especially in a time when the physical copies don’t even contain the full game due to storage constraints.
I’ve been digital-only since the day they made all games available digitally on the Xbox 360, because I don’t trade or re-sell games, ever, and I much prefer the benefits of digital. Most people are like me these days. It sucks for the people that aren’t, but they’re going to have to just move on or abandon their hobby.
I do buy digital and have for decades, but primarily for PC. I don’t for console because that’s the last thing I wanted a console for. I have no intention of abandoning the hobby, but this is my last reason to buy a PlayStation. They offer nothing that isn’t done better on a gaming PC.
I saw the 85% stat they are pushing. I honestly don’t believe it. I strongly believe they are pumping that number up by counting PlayStation Plus redemptions and smaller games in that total. I would be much more interested to see what the actual Physical vs. Digital sales are for a single new release title on day one. I would guess the split is much closer to 70/30. That might be higher in markets where internet access is less robust. This will also piss off retailers and distributors, which now are expected to sell low-margin consoles without high margin games. They chose such a far off date in purpose, to see the feedback and test the waters. I doubt this will come to fruition. Physical media is seeing a resurgence as trust for these companies to maintain services is at an all time low.
On that note, companies need to be careful taking industry wide trends and extrapolating from them with no nuance. That’s why I worded my first comment carefully. I am not anti-Digital at all, but I buy a console for collecting exclusives. I have hundreds of digital Steam games and some digital PS5 games. You know how many digital PS6 games I’ll have? Zero, because I won’t own one. Like backwards compatibility, the benefit of it can’t be quantified by how much time people use it vs. cost of development. Physical media is a draw, even if it is not always taken advantage of. I’m not boycotting, I’m genuinely no longer interested.
This is the kind of decision that looks great on a balance sheet when you have no competition. But when your hardcore audience stops buying, collectors that buy extra releases and collectors editions stop collecting, retailers stop pushing because they can only sell one low margin box, and your competitors see your weakness and double down on it, it might not turn out so great.
The 85% stat isn’t a lie - it’s in their own financials that they release to shareholders, and they’re actually one of publishers with the least digital uptake. Xbox, Ubisoft, EA, etc all also release these figures and they’re higher. You can go to Sonys investor relations portal and check the figures out for yourself.
Physical media is not making a resurgence. It’s getting lower and lower every single year.
Sony will not abandon this plan because they have no reason to. It won’t affect their sales at all.
Also we don’t know how this will affect retail yet, that all depends on if they allow retailers to sell below the PS Store prices.
I didn’t say it was a lie, I said I think it’s inflated the way I already explained. Also, the fact that they are lower than other publishers indicates they will see a bigger impact from this than others.
Physical media is making a resurgence in other areas. Vinyl, DVD, 4K BluRay. Not a big one, but it’s on a backswing. I’m not doubting video games are lower every year because they are still in their initial era.
We’ll just have to agree to disagree on the impact. I think the knock-on effect will be bigger than they anticipate. Obviously they agree with you that it won’t impact anything. I think it will, for all the reasons I just went over. It’s not a 1:1 relationship between sale and impact. When people don’t have the console because it doesn’t attract them, they can’t make any sales. So they won’t lose one sale from me, they’ll lose the console sale and dozens of physical and digital games.
This is exactly what Microsoft went through with cutting BC, trying to kill physical media, and trying to play their dominant hand and we all know how that worked out. Turns out it’s more than the sum of its parts. Sony might succeed, it’s a different era. But it certainly gives a lot of weak spots for competitors to target.
It’s not inflated. They’re not counting PS Plus downloads or anything else, unless you’re accusing them of lying to shareholders and breaking many laws.
The amount of people leaving physical media is not being outpaced by those picking it up.
When did Microsoft try to cut BC?
As I’ve explained in other comments, Microsoft was actually the most pro-consumer with their “all digital” plans. They were doing “physical as digital”, with the benefits of physical and digital.
Don't forget that they've halted PC ports for their games, including shitcanning nearly-complete work on Ghost of Yōtei.
They'll probably keep releasing for the PS5 for years into the PS6's lifespan, so as long as that happens I'll get their games if they look good, but once they shift over to PS6 completely, I'm done. I already have the hardware, much cheaper to keep using it than to get something new.
PS4 is my last PlayStation. Can't even recall the last time I powered it up on purpose.
Good call. If you didn't get a PS5 at launch price, it certainly won't ever be worth getting one, or any future PS console.
Honestly, I regret wasting my money on the PS4.
You might be able to jailbreak it! I have a collection of consoles that I got only to tinker with. I keep up to date with the PS5/PS4 through MODDED WARFARE on Youtube. Might give you something to make it useful for you, even if it is just to run Linux on it. :P
Good thinking. I do love making Linux run on things.
I'll be looking into jailbreaking my PS5 once Sony drops support for it. Any hardware you already own, even years old, is much more valuable now than it used to be.
Out of curiosity, why did you get one?
There were several PS4-exclusive games coming out that I was really looking forward to,and I was expecting many more; furthermore, I thought it might be handy to have something with built-in optical media support. Most of those original titles were re-released for PC, my future hopes never really materialized, and I never used the optical drive except to insert a disc for DRM purposes.
Ah, that makes sense. If you were disappointed by how many exclusives the PS4 got, you would have REALLY been disappointed by how many the PS5 got!
Honestly even if you got it launch price, it wasn't worth it. Mine's collected dust since launch
Depends, it's been worth it for me as it's more powerful than my PC and was much cheaper than building a similar power one would have been at the time. But if you already have a powerful PC, yeah, definitely not worth it.
Yeah, I really only got mine for Ragnarok. and as an upgrade to my 4k player. Which I then proceeded to only use detective Pikachu in. So, definitely not my brightest usage of money.
On the bright side, it's worth more now than when you bought it if you want to sell it!
They are also lobbying to make hosting your own videogame server illegal: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/esa-bafflingly-declares-private-minecraft-servers-illegal-in-stop-killing-games-hearing-we-consider-it-piracy-we-have-lawsuits/
Sony is part of ESA.
So is Microsoft who owns Minecraft who definitely presents private servers as dangerous (which for children may very well be true).
Having the possibility to setup a server allowed me to setup one for my sons and I. I’d rather have that then them going online…
You would think that's what every parent would prefer....
Both because it’s more safe and secure. Plus I have very fond memories of LAN parties and without private servers and local multiplayer kids won’t be able to experience that :(
Don't worry, they'll still be able to drink a bunch of cough syrup and think they're really hanging out chatting with random people on forums and Pink Floyd and Abe Lincoln, and then get genuinely lost in a game for what seems like eternity but can only ever be vaguely recalled later.
So are bicycles and kitchen knives. Ffs
That was kind of my point?
That just because it's "dangerous" for children doesn't justify banning it wholesale. Sorry I wasn't more clear.
Yet Microsoft allows people access to host a private server while also putting up scary warnings for kids telling them to stick to the "safe" realms servers or whatever (are they even still called Realms? fuck if I know). On the one hand, it's good they haven't removed it entirely, on the other hand, it seems like that may be their eventual long-term goal with how they treat the private server ecosystem.
I also think Discord and Roblox contributed to people not knowing what the fuck "server" actually means anymore.
definitely end of an era.
I'm not buying a console without physical media.
Sony can kill the second hand market if they want, but that was the last thing that differentiated them from Steam. Good bye Playstation, i'll remember you fondly.
Rest in piss
To reduce costs on printing and to reflect Sony's vision, they are dropping the L from the name of the console.
They're not dropping it, they're hoping you take it.
But leave them with the L.
By not including the extra plastic L on the console, Sony realized it could save 7 cents per console.
You joke but that's why stick drift is an issue now.
lol
A funny anecdote from outside gaming land:
Sony mirrorless cameras, even MEGA expensive ones, have this quirk where they can’t film 30P HEVC video.
The A6700 for instance, can record 24, 30, 60 h.264, but only 24 or 60 h.265. The A7C II is particularly handicapped, with only 24 h.265.
The $7000 A1 flagship is the same. It doesn’t make any sense; all their hardware supports it.
Why?
Well, people kept asking Sony, and someone finally got a response:
https://us.community.sony.com/s/question/0D54O00007B6m2ISAR/why-sony-a7s-iii-doesnt-support-25-or-30-fps-in-h265-codech265-is-available-for-24-50-60-100-120-fps-but-not-the-once-ive-mentioned-aboveplease-sony-update-this-h265-is-going-to-get-more-and-more-popular-with-new-powerful-laptops-coming?language=en_US
I found that oddly enlightening.
“Well, it’s not optimal for a BRAVIA TV over HDMI, so why would users want this? Why is it worth it for us to waste half a kilobyte for this option in the UI?” Sony cannot fathom anything outside that.
It makes that whole list in OP’s post make total sense. It’s not even cynicism on their part; with that mindset, what would they need a disk player for? What value is Bluepoint is a business review?
They literally cannot understand why PlayStation users would want any of those things. It’s outside the domain.
I just want to fucking choose what I want without having to provide a "user story"!! I HATE uber-market-optimized software and products, give me fucking settings instead of trying to guess for me!
I am jacks complete lack of surprise....
This should be expected from the people who brought us memory sticks and betamax
Essentially suits who don't and have never gamed making decisions on gaming. They have no idea what the players want and don't actually care because caring costs money.
Why are people still buying shit from Sony? It would be less work to just flush your cash directly down the shitter.
Right? I'm still pissed off about the PS3. I owned a PS1 and a PS2. PS3 launched and before I could save up enough money, two awesome features that the PS3 launched with they pulled support for. At launch you could boot to linux and you could play PS2 games. They disabled both before I could buy one. Huge class action lawsuit if I remember correctly. But they keep pulling the same shit.
In fairness, the Linux feature was half baked. I got YellowDog running on it, but because of the goofball CPU, you had to recompile everything to get it to run, which it did poorly.
End of an era for just about everything. Streaming is all enshitified. The job market is shit. Democracy is falling apart. Decades of progress being undone. It's just the way it will be until people get sick of all this shit and start doing things differently and move on. All the great old companies are dead. Either turned to zombie brands or run by zombies. I remember how excited I was to buy my first Sony Trinitron, my first walkman, my Sony component stereo, first PlayStation.
Time to double down on retro gaming and buying second hand. Industry wants to burn I say let it.
Plenty of old, cheap games and consoles to pick up second hand. Don't need PlayStation's slop.
The carts, discs, and hardware will unfortunately eventually stop working, but fortunately most of them can also be emulated on PC really well, sometimes better looking than on original hardware.
Disc systems are mostly built like shit especially from the early 2000s but ROM based cart systems if well taken care of will run for a long long time.
Have my OG N64, Dreamcast and GameGear all run perfectly fine. Well my GG has a dead spider in the screen but it still runs.
PlayStation 1,2, Saturns , the first 2 Xbox’s might be a different issue all together.
But to me this is connected to the growing eshitification of the industry
Yeah, it's popular to mod systems like PSX and Saturn with a disc read emulator so you can load ISO files from solid state media like SD cards.
People do this with operating systems as well. Neat stuff
eventually but that will likely be long after most of us are dead. old consoles and carts are built like a brick house and most of them are repairable even games that have batteries. Just look at the N64 for example. that thing is like the Toyata truck of consoles.
Could be. Video game consoles are a young medium, so hard to say if the old consoles will still be going in 30 years or so.
I've found that the real problem is having a television to plug them in to. Still got my old NES and SNES from when I was a kid. But no modern TV has the RF input to connect them to, they're all digital only. Emulation is much easier.
You can get an RF to HDMI converter. But yeah, I'd rather just emulate.
that's what i hate the most about this. "retro gaming and second hand" works now because everything was physical back then, and could be preserved. what will the people of the future have of us? nothing but memories of what will then be a digital graveyard. most of it unpreserved, even through piracy, because consoles are getting harder and harder to hack and emulate and companies are getting more and more litigious.
They'll get to read the plot synopsis on wikipedia
Eh, everything PS3/360 generation and earlier is basically available at perfect emulation, or definitely will be soon because of the existing emulators and their development.
95% of all games from the PS/Xbox generations since then have been on PC from day 1. Almost all of the Xbox first party games have been on PC since then as well. The switch has been emulated perfectly for ages.
This realistically leaves only a handful of Sony first party PS4 and PS5 games left, and the switch 2 which only just came out.
It warms my heart to see that EVERY comment on Sony's blog post about it is negative. Hope the decision ends up biting Sony in the ass, but even if not, at least people weren't silent about it.
EDIT: and they're being yelled at everywhere else on the internet that people can post as well. Good.
So, this means mandatory proprietary hardware just to play the four or five true permanent exclusives that will be on the PS6 throughout its entire lifetime, given that everything else will eventually come to PC, and you don't actually own any of your digital content, meaning that they can revoke your access to your purchases without notice at any point if they choose to do so.
People will still buy it though, that's the saddest part.
Good thing Sony’s first party output is easy to ignore. Just go watch Wolverine and all the rest of their games on YouTube since they’re basically interactive movies.
Right, the only PS5 exclusive I would love to have on PC is Astro Bot.
They've already said they've stopped porting to PC
They have but others have not. GTA will come to PC. GoW Faye likely wont.
I'd rather wait and emulate the next spiderman and Wolverine game tbh.
Actually, the 2026 strategy and business environment report from Sony simply removed the line "Will continue its efforts to deploy its first-party titles to multiple platforms such as PC" from their priorities list, but did not outright state that they won't port games to PC anymore, as many journalists misinterpreted, the report simply states that it isn't a priority anymore due to mitigated revenue. The main concern within the report seems to be that near simultaneous releases on PC are effectively cannibalizing PS5 hardware sales, so you might still expect PC releases but further down the line compared to the current 1-2 years window, maybe previous generation games released on PC, not current generation.
Don't give me hope, I'd already given up on playing Ghost of Yotei
For now, yes. But these companies change their strategies all the fucking time. As soon as they see their "only on Playstation" strategy is not giving them the expected return, I am sure they're gonna backflip, again.
Microsoft and Sony (and pretty much any other big corporation in the game business) are not reliable in the slightest - the only difference between them right now is the amount of power they have.
I find it both amusing and shocking that we still have 'fanboys' up to this day, when these companies themselves can't even maintain a solid long term strategy. All they care about is making maximum profit at the cost of literally everything else, so their 'promises' hold no weight at all.
I don't pay $70 for a game I can't even sell after using it.
Just get a console they said. Console just works they said. Why get a PC when it won't work in a year they said.
This is why I don't buy consoles. I can use a controller on my computer which is upgradable and not subject to one individual company dictating what I can and can't do.
Interesting because my Steam digital purchases go back to 2007 and I can still play them all.
My first digital purchase was the Orange Box and my second purchase was Psychonauts.
I had purchased Half Life 2 as a physical copy and it still works, too.
Sure they're all just licenses, but a lot of effort has been put into me being able to continue playing them, including on Linux.
Yes, Valve is a different story because they're a private company, but 20 years of license when I could play on any computer I owned at any time I think is showing that digital licensing isn't inherently evil as much as it is widely abused for control.
If steam changed ownership and control, there is nothing stopping the new people from doing things similar to other big companies.
Many games are potentially a heart attack away from loss of access
Absolutely, that's my point about them being widely abused.
This is why I keep a good chunk of my steam library downloaded locally and don't buy always-online required games.
They're actually not just licenses. When you download a game from steam you get the game data. You can back up this gamedata if you wish. Sure it will have steam DRM but thats something on can get around one way or another.
This is the power of open platform like PC
Real and based. If you get them on GOG, you can download offline installers with no DRM. My GOG collection isn't as big as my Steam, but it's also fairly significant as well. Heroic Launcher on Linux is sweet for GOG games (you just have to plan out wine prefix and directory structure to properly have updates install).
The same is true of Xbox consoles btw. You can back-up your game files from your Xbox to a external hdd and transfer them back to your Xbox in 50 years time and play them even if they’ve been delisted and Xbox no longer exists.
They are still only licenses though, same with steam. Steam still has verification servers. If steam disappeared you are no better off than if xbox did.
Steam DRM can be trivially removed. 3rd party DRM is a problem, but thankfully not all games use it and many games have had their DRM removed as well (either by the publisher or through crackers).
You still couldn’t redownload games that you bought, that’s the point.
Orange Box was my first digital purchase too!
I’m not one of those people who pretends they will play a physical disc game for the rest of their life
I do however like physical for two reasons. Firstly, the price, how tf can you justify charging more when you are cutting out all of the middlemen and listing on your own online store. Secondly, resale. I can buy a game, play it and resell.
If the tradeoff on going digital was that games were 50% cheaper, then I’d be happy. I wouldn’t have to hoard games and I’d have the convenience of digital.
Just like self checkout. I'm now doing the work of an employee. So I'll ring up everything as an apple now, can't fire me.
Yea the era of giving the "big 3" any of my money
I feel like defending consoles is a lost cause at this point. We can’t trust any of the big 3 anymore.
This was me a decade ago when Xbox suggested something like this. Nintendo was shutting down their old eshops and making purchased games unplayable and Playstation was selling shovelware on their online store.
In a dystopia like that... Suddenly, Steam's digital-only storefront didn't look so bad.
Xbox’s digital future was actually incredibly user friendly - it was all digital, but it allowed people to re-sell and loan their digital games. People were just too dumb to understand what was so good about it.
The alternative is what Sony are now doing - all digital with zero of the perks of physical.
I wouldn't have trusted Microsoft to follow through on this in the long term. I have little doubt they would have removed that concession as soon as they thought they could get away with it.
Found one of the people too dumb to understand it 🤣
Sega, Atari, and
Nintendo of course
Yeah, that’s the end of PlayStation for me. Hopefully someone else will come out with something decent.
The entire reason I've ever bought consoles and games was because I could get used games at a bargain and also sell my old consoles and game collections when I'm done with them. I can't imagine that I'm the only person who looked at it this way.
Now console producers pull shit like this when they can't even claim to be more user friendly than PC because SteamOS is a real competitor.
Well I guess it was good while it lasted, at least until the last few years when greed fully took over. Microsoft is already on it's last leg and Sony and Nintendo are going to follow eventually.
Meh, I’m done with consoles. The exclusives will come to emulators eventually, and there will be plenty of PC games in the meantime.
Ahhh, remember this PS4 promo video (YouTube for sharing physical games vs Xbox)? Pepperidge Farm does.
Shots were fired via that ad.
Little did the Luddites who applauded this realise that they were signing their own fate.
Xbox One’s digital plans were amazing. Luddites and Sony fanboys just couldn’t understand that an all digital future was inevitable, and actively fought against the only company that was bringing the benefits of physical copies to digital.
You are ignoring the fact that these plans were made over a decade ago. You really expect MS to keep their promise when after watching Sony do this?
What exactly is your point?
Microsoft were doing their “physical as digital” plan which was literally the best digital-only system ever devised, and they were forced to ditch it by people who were too dumb to see the industry trends at the time, and by people who hate Microsoft/xbox.
Now no one gets that amazing “digital only” system.
I'll try to make it clearer for you.
Microsoft made a plan. Great. Anybody can 'make' a plan and that plan could sound amazing to some people.
You are nostalgizing the ideal parts of their plan without having to see it play out. How would sharing have really worked? Would the disc be tied to your account forever? Would your friend be able to install from it?
And for sake of argument let's say Microsoft executed on this best plan ever. Fast forward 10 years and they are looking for more profits somewhere. What's stopping them from changing the terms of their plan? Pretty sure the TOS you click OK to when installing the game says it lets them alter things as they fit.
They literally outlined all of this. Everything single part. You could choose a friends gamertag to loan your game to. While it was on loan they could download and play it, but you couldn’t since you loaned it out.
As for your second paragraph, no you’re just inventing imaginary what-ifs because you want to be anti-Microsoft - just like I’m sure you did back when they announced these plans.
Thanks to people like you, you’ll now get all the drawbacks of digital and none of the benefits of physical. Congratulations, you played yourself.
I'm imagining anti Microsoft things?
Tell me: what is the monthly subscription price of gamepass? What was it a year ago? 2 years ago? How's their game library?
I must've imagined all that fuckery they did to that service. Surely they would never have done anything like that to that digital asset policy you love so much. We can trust them.
You’re seriously trying to use price increases as a reason why their “physical as digital” plan wouldn’t work?
The Xbox game library is amazing. They’re consistently the best publisher of the year. The game pass library is incredible.
Really scary to see where the industry is headed! I've started purchasing games on GOG whenever possible so as to put my money towards an actually good source in the industry but it doesn't feel like enough.
These companies are constantly pushing the boundaries of what they can get away with and it feels like we just gotta take it at this point.
I especially feel bad for the console gamers as they have very little options to get around this and switching to PC is unfortunately more expensive than ever.
Either that or become tech-savvy enough for 🏴☠️
Yeah, doable for us on PC but a much higher barrier for entry for those on console
Now that PC gaming is at feature parity with console gaming, I think it's particularly important to tell people how available DRM-free gaming is. No, it's not going to be common in the AAA segment of your library, but it's a lot of games. And you'll never have to worry about it being pulled from your library.
The price of hardware is a pain point for sure, but if you're able to see past that, you'll be spending less over a generation on PC than you would on a console between not having to pay for online service, dramatically cheaper gamepad/accessory options, and a massive library of quality games at $30 or less.
Say it louder for the people in the back!!!
I agree 100% friend 😁
I was an XBox guy, and didn't get into Playstation at all. But it was always clear that they were excellent consoles. At a certain income level back in the day, you'd get an XBox or a Playstation, but not both. If you had a smidgen more money to spend, Nintendo had you covered.
I have no emotional fealty to Playstation in any way, but what a shame to see all three formerly awesome systems now competing to see who can enshitify more effectively.
I had a PlayStation and PlayStation 2. Was a huge twisted metal fan. Xbox came out some friends got that. Halo was fun. What made me switch to Xbox was strictly fears of war. The few of my friends that were still PlayStation fans switched to the 360 almost immediately after playing gears.
I always assumed Nintendo stuff is cheaper since it looks like indie games and not anywhere close to the games you could play on consoles. Huh, TIL.
There is no world where Nintendo had you covered
Their hardware and systems, particularly any online connectivity is 20hrs behind. They’ve also be the shittiest of them all with price hikes
Well, yea. Japan is in a different time zone.
Nintendo wasn't always like that. Every Nintendo console before the GameCube was the most powerful console of its generation. The GameCube was second most powerful behind Xbox but ahead of PS2. But like the N64, Nintendo made the GameCube with a fatal flaw that caused a severe limitation that was completely unnecessary: the game storage media.
For the N64, it was the choice to not use disks and thus were limited to only 64MB at most of game filesize, but the GameCube had disks. Except they were those stupid tiny ones that only held like 1.5GB instead of a normal sized disks at the time which held up to 8GB.
Then they made the Wii, which was just the GameCube 1.5, used nearly the same parts except it used normal disks finally and it sold like crazy. Unfortunately, Nintendo learned the wrong lesson and instead of saying "make normal consoles" they now learned to "make weak, cheap consoles." And now we are at where we are.
I'm fine with "weak, cheap consoles" if the games are good, as that's all that really matters. The problem is, Nintendo's game output has been kinda shit lately.
I can't believe Nintendo seems the least shitty of the 3 currently. At least they sell portable licenses via game key cards.
If buying does not equal owning something, piracy can't equal theft. At this rate, what's the point of consoles?
They're also shutting down PS3 and PSVita store access, to add insult to injury.
I've been picking up game consoles for my whole life. I decided before the NS2 was announced that I was done picking up game consoles. Now there is absolutely zero chance of me picking up a ps6, it's just not acceptable to do this.
They all want you to go to digital storefronts because they get a bigger cut of the pie and you cannot use anyone else's copy. Soon we'll see them remove activating two consoles on one account entirely and possibly the offline capability as well. They want to make sure you drink your verification cans to keep playing, they just haven't gotten there yet.
The price increase part is sort of out of their hands. They are a small player in the chip game.
Other parts are all them all shit.
The removal of digital media is also out of their hands. They agreed to a distribution contract. The entity that owns that media offered a conditional license in that distribution agreement. Now they are either choosing not to renew or choosing to cancel the agreement and legally Sony don't have a choice except to be sued if they continue to allow people to access that digital content.
I agree it's shitty. I agree that it's a crazy thing to have happen when you're dropping the news about doing away with physical media. But it's still not really in their control.
I guess you could argue that they negotiated a shit contract. They should have had the right to sell a perpetual license to the media. When the contract runs out, they just can't sell it anymore, but they don't have to pull it from those that had purchased it.
In this particular case what they were selling wasn't a licensed copy of a movie or show. They were selling a license to stream. When the contract ran out they had to pull it from the streaming platform.
The consumers contract for the content is with sony, not with someone else. The underlying structure doesn't interest anyone except lawyers. Sony should be mandated to refund content that they pull from libraries, or they have to ensure that they don't lose access to the content they are "selling". Also, it should be enshrined in law that if you only get a licence that can be pulled anytime that this information is very, very clear when paying for content, and not to hide this information on page 23 or so in their licence agreement, where they redefine the meaning of buy, own, purchase... and so on to something that very much has NOT the meaning of those words.
Ok. So let's say for the sake of argument, you have Netflix. You pay for Netflix specifically for... I dunno, Top Gear. Suddenly without warning Netflix is forced to pull Top Gear from its streaming platform because the license to provide it to stream has lapsed or been otherwise ended. That's basically what happened here except that they allowed you to pay per show or movie.
In this case what these customers paid for is the license to stream these digital items. Which (shitty though I agree it is) they agreed to when they made their purchases. But the fact is, Sony didn't reach into people's Harddrives and remove anything. What they did was remove these shows and movies from the digital streaming library of people who purchased it and the only reason they did is because otherwise they'd be sued if they didn't.
So while I appreciate your outrage, I think it's pretty important to note that the license holder (the entity that actually owns the ability to sell distribution rights for digital licenses to consumers) is the one who sets the terms, not the platform of distribution, and this happens so often that literally no digital media is safe except when you can download it DRM free (Google play music, band camp, GOG etc).
I don't disagree that Sony is at fault for agreeing to that distribution agreement. That's not anything like what I said. What I said was that they did it because they are required to by law.
I bought every PlayStation ever released. I will not be buying this one. Consoles are supposed to get cheaper over time. The gaming sector is going to go tits up and I hope it does.
I guess we're never gonna get to see that super futuristic PS9 that was envisioned back in that old PS2 commercial.
It'll just be a terminal that connects to Sony's servers.
PS9 Commercial
Can anyone come up with a single example of an industry that's not getting simultaneously worse (and/or smaller), and more expensive?
Bet the Sony fanboys wish they didn’t make so much fun of the Xbox one’s digital plans now. Xbox’s digital plan had:
PlayStation buyers will definitely not get the first 2, and Sony will likely prevent the third.
“Arrogant sony” is well and truly back.
Playstation customer since my first job at McDonalds let me buy the original first model PSX, all the way through the PS5 --- fuuuuuuuuck you Sony. I've got a PC and you can eat 10 tons of my shit right now with this and your cancellation of PC support. We'll see who wins.
I don't understand why anyone would choose to buy a console after this. The only draws of consoles was the turnkey hardware, which you can generally get with Proton now, and access to physical games, which won't be a thing soon. Now it's just a locked-down PC with a DRM storefront that makes you pay a subscription to pay online games and which may or may not have backwards compatibility from system to system.
Maybe that's just the PC gamer in me talking. Are there any advantages to console anymore? Like, a single benefit?
2030 declares bankruptcy.
Nah. Sony will stick around, Playstation will die, Microsoft kills Xbox and everyone will complain about Steam being a monopoly despite their competition choosing to shoot themselves in the foot and dying all on their own.
PlayStation won’t die lol. The overwhelmingly large majority of PlayStation console owners buy digital games exclusively. They have a massive dedicated fan base who will buy whatever they release and defend it to their last breath too.
we can only hope
Sony goes bankrupt, so does xbox. Nintendo becomes the megacorporation it always wanted to be.
This is what happens when their only competitor is a mindless Microslop.
Nintendo carved out their niche and Sony has no chance against them in that market after abandoning AAA and AA single player games in favor of trash service games.
sony probably figures they can get away with pulling all this shit since what else ya gonna do? buy a new gaming pc? at literally double or more what they cost last summer?
Since playing online is free and games can be gotten for free as well, that's exactly what I'll do at a higher upfront cost. Or, if prices remain outrageous forever, I'll stick to old games until the hardware stops working, then stop playing games altogether.
it’s like they want us to own …. nothing. hrm.
Bye PlayStation. It’s been a good run, but you’re dead to me now.
Nintendo winning this console generation with the Switch 2 was not on my bingo card.
My MSPaint skills aren't what they used to be, but imagine a console version of this
Nintendo being the best option for a consumer (from a legal perspective) was not on my bingo card
Why bother with consoles anymore? PCs are so much better
Sadly, I can't qualify for the 40 year loan I would need to buy a PC.
Because a rising tide raises all ships, and a vanishing one shipwrecks them.
I don't have a S2, Series, or PS5. I game on PC, that doesn't mean that what's happening in the console space is right.
That being said, I haven't bought a physical PC game in ages, so I'm boned either way
Why not? They kicked everyone’s arse with the Switch 1.
Nintendo shut down the e-shop for the 3DS. All the digital games you owned? Gone.
They're part of the problem.
The 3DS is very easy to jailbreak. Highly recommend it. Just in case anyone needs to hear this.
The digital games you own are still playable.
Incorrect, the 3DS eshop is still online. Digital games can still be re-downloaded, you just can't buy new ones. The same is true for Wii, DSi, and Wii U.
They need to up their exclusive game...game. Other than DK Bananza, their output has been disappointing. I only got a Switch 2 now because it's only going to get more expensive and I'm hoping for quality exclusives in the next 6 or so years that they'll be supporting it.
You do realize the Switch 2 already has more exclusives than the PS5, right?
Edit with sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nintendo_Switch_2-only_games
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:PlayStation_5-only_games
Yes, but the quality of those exclusives is lacking compared to their previous consoles. It's only been a year, so I'm going to be optimistic that their output will improve. Looking forward to Ocarina of Time and Xenoblade Genesis.
Ports of games to Nintendo consoles are always the worst way to play them due to the weaker hardware, so exclusives matter a lot more on them. It's the entire reason I got one. PS5 is good for more than just exclusives (especially since, as you pointed out, it barely has any!)
Microsoft is killing their software while Sony kills the hardware and marketplace. This looks like the end of the console generation with the only device left being a handheld by Nintendo.
Nintendo is also now the only one left I'll consider buying their next console depending on how enshittifed it is. They're the only one left now that isn't just a locked-down PC.
They can do all this because people keep giving them money.
Too many people make it about brand identity than simply playing games.
This is Sony though, they care so much about playstation customers they even went to the effort of updating the ps3 firmware in March this year to improve things for their customers.
I mean it would be crazy to suggest they would do that for a console they discontinued a decade ago just to try and fuck with people who have the temerity to run custom firmware on hardware they bought and paid for 20 years ago....
Sony business logic is fucked.
The updates were for the BluRay licenses they do it on a schedule. You can easily still play online even with pirated games
Do they still make money of it or was the security hole easy enough to fix, that they paid a few engineer hours from pocket money, just for the fuck you?
Don't think that there was ever a security hole. I wouldnt consider installing alt firmware to be a security hole
Per the patch notes: https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/support/hardware/ps3/system-software/
"By updating, you can enjoy additional features, improved usability, and enhanced security.
Please note, to play Blu-ray discs, your PS3 system needs a renewed Blu-ray player encryption key. Please update your PS3 system software to the latest version to renew the Blu-ray player encryption key."
I havent actually tried to watch a bluray on custom firmware since, but I'm a weirdo who uses it for playing games so that doesnt matter to me.
I dont see any money being made on the ps3
Sony doesn't care about what you do on your PS3. You can literally play online and earn trophies with pirated games without getting banned.
Not really end of an era, you're just witnessing a monopoly forming since Xbox is pretty much dead in the water. I guess it's technically a duopoly since Nintendo is fine, but Nintendo kinda does its own thing without regard to what others do. Basically, with Xbox out of the picture, Sony is free to do whatever it wants.
The gonna release PS6 without any physical media option, don't they? Their PS5 digital edition was only a market test.
It was always going to be digital only on account of 85%+ of all game sales being digital.
The digital only PS5 wasn’t a market test though, it was purely a marketing tactic - they barely made 5% of PS5 production digital only ones, but it allowed them to market the PS5 as “from $399”, when in reality it was $499.
Its 78% actually, up from 76% last year, but that is sales and not users. I would hardly believe that are users that bought all of their games digitally, even the good collection ones.
My little brother, who started with PS3 as a kid and had/has PS4, PS5 and almost all of his games are in discs, won't be happy about it.
The large majority of users are digital only. This isn’t even debatable. The sales figures speak for themselves.
I was only saying the other day, after having all playstations since a PSOne, that I reckon the wind I blowing against the consumer and that the PS5 (disc version) would be my last playstation console. Unfortunately it turns out I was right, it's a sad day for gamers. 😮💨
They're betting on consumers being too impulsive and stupid to care, and... they're probably right. Nothing's stopped them before, this likely isn't a new line in the sand for them.
Even with the high prices you can still build a decent AM4 based PC and play titles bought on GOG which is DRM free. If you install Linux you all get one of the best is for free. If you want to go further you can emulate the heck of old consoles and old PC games and have tons of fun. You could also sail the high seas for content that has DRM and/or is very expensive. Don't forget. If you don't own what you buy the piracy is ethical and justified. After akk, piracy is mostly a service problem and when you enshitify a service you end up FAFO.
They also just announced that the PS3 and Vita Playstation Stores will be shutting down, starting next month in certain regions and everywhere by July 2027. At some point in the future it will be impossible to buy games for your old PS6 because it doesn't support discs and the Playstation Store doesn't support the system.
Honestly, once cheap physical media wasn't able to keep up with game sizes this became inevitable. Blurays can store 100GB, which isn't enough for the bigger games of today, and they will only get bigger. It was still nice to have the disc as a sellable, tradeable license for the game as long as the servers were up, though.
2 disks is an option
True.
Personally I bought a PS5 only to collect physical games and be able to play them. I'm not paying premium PS prices for temporary, digital access.
I think it's safe to say this means PS6 will either be digital only, or heavily focused on digital. Which for me is a non-negotiable deal breaker.
PlayStation is pulling off the best marketing campaign Xbox could ever dream of.
PS6 will 100% be digital only. It's likely directly related and will probably release in Nov. 2028.
This isn't gonna help XBOX any, they're even worse and will be doing the same, guaranteed.
Sony only announced this now because of the upcoming Xbox layoff announcement. Typical “get all of your bad news out in front of the competitors worse news so yours is only in the news cycle for a few days” play.
Xbox’s “physical as digital” plans for the Xbox One were amazing. Bet the people who cried about it are now feeling pretty stupid.
Eh. I’m not surprised to see this. But I am happy I built my PC when I did.
Quite frankly I do not feel bad about pirating everything and storing it to my hard drive. If we don’t own it, it’s not stealing.
Just the second great video game crash, not quite a secret landfill of E. T. Games but this is just as bad imo
Because stopping disc production has worked so well for Microsoft...
Here's the bit both are forgetting:
The hardware is still sold at retail.
So you go into a store, you see a console for sale but no games. Or, worse, a shelf of old games on the "Discontinued" rack (the Xbox section in most Targets and Walmarts now.) Do you feel inclined to buy that hardware?
How is that working out for Microsoft?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2026/06/26/xbox-sales-are-its-lowest-ever-this-month-playstation-its-lowest-since-2000/
Valve can get away with it with the Steam products because they are sold in the same online store that sells the games.
Also steam is a storefront, if you want the hardware you go to PC store.
Saying that made me realised that they might actually want to make sure they (the Sony store) are the only one to be able to sell this, no more game store in the future.
They're actually planning for games to be sold at retail as a code in a box, so they still want game displays at retail, but also want to have complete control over the pricing of them. A "have their cake and eat it, too" kind of thing.
The games will still be sold at retailers as a code in a box. I don't see the point, but apparently that's the plan.
Valve can also get away with it because PCs are an open platform and you have options to have control over your digital games, whether legal or not. So the lack of physical media doesn't really matter there.
Sony have always been a sh** company though, even as far back as their proprietary mini disc format.
Of course, all corporations are shitty. But there are degrees of shitty.
Minidisc was licensed technology, companies like Sharp, Denon, Pioneer, JVC, Onkyo and Kenwood all made competitive minidisc players. The discs were also sold by many brands.
I don't think Sony's audio division was as restrictive and aggressive as their gaming division.
yeah i still remember when sony lawyered lik-sang.com out of existence for having the temerity to sell sony games outside their intended regional markets.
You're allowed to swear here and MDs weren't proprietary.
UMDs were though.
Console really is hitting checklist of media subscription like apple
This only reinforces the reasons why I bought a PC for gaming instead of a console.
Consoles were always a walled garden from the very start, very purposefully so, and those things tend to squeeze customers once captured with higher prices and, sooner or later, fully enshittify.
So when consoles originally appeared I just kept gaming on the PC because it was an open platform and the only console I ever had was a WII (the original one) because their controller was at the time innovative, and honestly it wasn't really worth it.
Then, specifically for the PlayStation there's Sony, who have a long track record of anti-consumer actions that started when their leadership stopped coming from the Engineering Division and started coming from their Media Division (after they bought a Movie studio in the US), from their electronics becoming locked down and restrictive for users (they're the ones who came up with Blu-Ray, which was way more locked down to block copying than DVDs were) to the infamous shipping of music CDs with rootkits (the "Sony Rootkit" scandal)
So this increasing enshittification of the PlayStation isn't at all surprising and suspect it will get even worse than this.
Ultimately I think the PlayStation platform will end up dying.
Xbox and Nintendo are basically doing the same thing
And PC games have been digital for ages it feels. Still a loss, I usually wait half a year to two years before buying new games and can just pick up whatever I want for 20€ on disc without having to wait for the next PS Store sale, often even the version that includes all the DLCs and the remaster of the previous game. PS5 is probably my last console.
Steam kinda killed physical PC games 20 years ago.
And the Steam zealots will come and say, "Yeah, but but you can still buy games on other storefronts! So it's not like this Sony thing at all!" OK, sure.
But Steam still helped kill physical games on PC.
But since PS is an open platform, you can preserve your digital games for it. Not always legally, but buying isn't owning anyway.
Yeah, no game bought on Steam is owned, just licensed. It sucks. Have to go to other places to actually own it digitally.
Why do you need physical release on PC?
You need a DRM free installer (preferably with patches built-in) not physical.
Mind you, I am no Valve fan, they lean towards typical American oligarchical behaviour and they made a massive contribution to developing loot boxes. But in comparison to all other large American tech companies, they are not aggressively terrible, still nowhere near "great" though.
This
Whilst I don’t agree with it, it’s hardly something new.
Depends on how long Nintendo plans to keep doing game key cards. They suck, but they're better than having no way to transfer a game license at all. I suspect that the "Switch 3" won't have any physical media at all, though.
How are Microsoft doing it?
Not really, as today Microsoft or Nintendo are not forcing anyone to drop disc in physical games, is up to the deloveper to do as they wish.
Closing bluepoint is madness. That studio was really good at remastering games
I'm an Xbox fangirl (a resentingly disappointed one, of course), and the recent industry shenanigans made me get apprehensive about whatever is going to come out next from Microsoft's direction. They could turn the direction around. Not sure if they can.
I liked Nintendo Switch, but Switch 2 was pretty much "yeah, I'll probably get a Steam Deck at some point, sorry".
This PlayStation stuff basically switched my opinion of them from "Nnno" to "Oh hell no".
I will be back to PC gaming! And will be building a new PC once the industry quits being stupid for a moment. Until then, my 2020 laptop will have to do.
I'm gonna miss them as they were the only way of playing paid games via Playstation 4 since you couldn't buy digital games via PS Store if you were living in an unavailable country.
They better be switching to sd cards or something.
They'll do it if they can manage to make it impossible to use any adapter. PSVita used those tiny memory sticks because fuck you for wanting standardized storage solutions
I don’t know if it’s relevant to you but you can buy vita to micro SD adapters now and I did purely out of spite
I imagine they would put TPM chips in them.
There is no point to consoles anymore. It used to be that consoles were easy to use and cheaper while PCs were more expensive and complex. That is no longer the case. Computers are stupid easy now and consoles have become too expensive. Nintendo excluded they are the only ones doing old console case where it is for children.
No, this is just playstation continuing to hate their customer base.
They've always hated their customers. Between Sony, and Nintendo, I dont know who hates their customers the most... but they both certainly try.
and it doesnt matter, because they both have enough fanboys that strip off their clothes and gleefully dance naked and joyous in the rain of shit both companies sputter out of their assholes and down onto their customers.
The loss of physical media in addition to the rest of their terrible decisions solidified that I'm done with Sony. Still on the PS4, but I see no need to give them any future support.
It really sucks that between this and the death of personal computing at the hands of the AI bubble, my main hobby is becoming unaffordable.
So, nothing to look forward to. This is why you’re so behind in sales.
Between this and most of the games coming out these days, apart from indies, being complete crap, I think the PS5 will be my last console.
Bad notice…. I like phisical disc, not is good for ever this system, and one question: you pay the game, but not is you own, not?
People don't care. Most just want to feed on SoMe. A bunch even voted Trump as President - impressed that humas has survived this long
The removal of physical games isn't that big of a deal to me as someone who mostly plays on PC, and the only physical PC games I've bought in the last decade and a half were touhou games I imported off Yahoo auctions.
Honesty I wonder why that actually became so normalized on PC while it didn't on consoles. I'm sure Steam has a big role in it.
The end of that era happened in like 2015...
I'm not really sure what any of these people want us to do?
Go along with the program like sheep. What else can you do, stop playing new games?
Yet another common PlayStation L
Yeah I’m completely done with Sony. They also killed Destiny as a franchise and are already getting ready to launch a PS6 despite them basically producing no games during the pandemic because most people didn’t own a ps5 due to shortages. Feels like we got half a life cycle for this console, then they release the pro for like twice the price, and now they expect you to get ready to upgrade. And of course they are stopping disc production while simultaneously proving they can and will just stop letting you use your digital purchases. I’m sticking to PC and switch 2 for the foreseeable future. I honestly may never buy another console.
Really what needs to happen is a few companies consolidate regional dev talent and become software companies.
If I was sony I'd bet on steamos. Nintendo would be in the best position if their games weren't locked to their systems. Because their wheel house is low spec games that could run on anything.
they make their product and service worse but they're still trying to fight the console wars in 2026 like that japanese soldier who fought ww2 for 30 years after japan surrendered
you gotta really look at these CEOs and ask who hurt them
Amazing to see all four major players in the AAA gaming industry shooting themselves in the feet one way or another:
You guys, they just want to reduce street day leaks
Good thing I skipped a generation of console.
sounds like ai is behind all that
Media rights expiring surely isn't on them.
I don't care to hear about the tribulations of peasants
I already buy everything digitally so don’t mind that much personally, would be nice if they committed to long term backwards compatibility though
The biggest problem with this isn't really the lack of physical games. (Although this is really disappointing as I used to love having a huge collection of games to look at.) The real problem is where we are being pushed because of this.
Digital games are basically just license keys for us. These companies reserve the right to revoke those license keys from us or just completely remove said game/movie/show from the store and your library whenever they see fit.
Not to mention the end if the used game market but I don't feel like getting into that right now
This has all been the case on PC for a long time and there isn’t much complaining over there
On PC we have a plethora of options to get our games the way we prefer. GOG is a fantastic company that sells games old and new that are DRM free. Meaning when I buy a game from them I get all of the files for said game and am free to do with it whatever I want, no launcher or internet required.
Not to mention there is always piracy for those that are so inclined.
And those two are just the tip of the iceberg. Console players have to get their games from the console's store and that's it.
You understand that all this talk of piracy will just ensure that developers only target consoles in the future like they used to right?
It may be relatively strong sales in PC right now but I am sure they will collectively cut that off and you will be left with indie releases on GOG
That kind of feels like conjecture in my opinion. While yeah piracy is absolutely a problem on PC, that doesn't mean that everyone on the platform is doing it. There's still a ton of money to be made from sales on there.
Well it is, but the writing is also on the wall, computer hardware increases will have more of an impact than consoles which are subsidised
I don’t think it out of the question that to play the newest game on PC your only option will be to stream it from PlayStation or xbox as that will work on cheaper hardware that more people have
At that point the piracy backup goes out the window
Maybe for first party games. But I find it hard to believe that companies like Capcom for example would abandon PC.
Realistically though, considering we are clearly in bizarro world anything is possible at this point haha
On PC piracy is a lot easier. If they take my game, I take it back.
Oh no this is gonna drive the uncs wild. We'll never hear the end of this.
I seriously don't understand the "disk" thing. I could see how you want your game to be on a physical media so you don't have to download it when you want to play, but games are so big you couldn't do it for decades already, and having a disk is barely saves you any time anyway. Meanwhile it's a waste of materials, it get scratched all the time, and if you lose it it's gone.
I don't understand why anyone cares.
I can't think of a single game that didn't require an install and then updates before playing anyways.
Games on GOG come with offline installer that can be used to install the most reacent version.
But you're right, many games do require day 1 patches or even game data to be dowloaded but that makes these worse / lower in quality for many.
That’s gog, not consoles.
It won't really affect me, but I understand the appeal of a physical artifact servicing as time game's license for those who like to lend, sell, trade, library, etc.
And those same benefits are why the corporations can't wait to do away with it. It's been quite a while since Microsoft tried the same thing and people freaked out enough that they reversed course.
It’s worth pointing out that Microsoft didn’t try the same thing. Microsoft tried to move to “physical as digital”, where they retained the benefits of physical copies such as resale and loaning.
I specifically remember that their plan was essentially CD Keys. You'd buy a physical game and it would have a code inside, or the discs would have unique identifiers that force linked to your account, or whatever.
So yeah, essentially physical media with a digital license. If you were going to be able to resell your game it was going to have to go through microsoft, or maybe you could lend a friend your disc and that lets them buy their own license for a small discount to play it.
It was keys in a box, but they had a framework to allow physical retailers to remove licenses from Xbox accounts and refresh the license key for resale. They also had a system for you to loan your digital games out to your friends via their gamertag. When you digitally loaned it to them, you could not play it and they could. Iirc it would automatically revert after 30 days if you didn’t extend, but you could choose how long to loan it for.
They abandoned it all after the ridiculous crashouts by people who couldn’t see where the future was heading, and now you get digital with no resale and no loaning.
Useful details, thanks.
I'll just point out that they/we did not have a system like that, but just promises of it from a tech giant. (except of course for whatever they had designed internally up until that time) So even as somebody who doesn't really sell games, I get why people weren't thrilled with the idea of microsoft being the ever-present broker in the transactions.
It was a new system, one never done before but not outlandish and easy to see how it would work. People just can’t understand and fear new things. Microsoft are, to their own detriment, too forward thinking. The Intended XB1 digital system was as close to a perfect one as you can get. benefits of both physical and digital wrapped in one.
It sounds like a lot of good thought and design went into it.
The biggest problem was/is always going to be consumers wary of trusting a tech company not to mess it up because of greed.
That is only the case because your console is connected to the internet. For example, I can dust off my old PS3 today and play the version 1.0 release of GTA V after installing it from the disc because the console is offline, meaning there won't be any prompt asking me to update the game to the latest version, and it simply works.
You might argue that this is a bad example and that GTA V runs better on modern hardware, so let us consider Bloodborne on the PS4 instead, a title you will not find anywhere else and for which current emulation remains, at best, sketchy. I can insert that disc into my PS4 unplugged from the internet and play it immediately without any mandatory update.
Killing physical support means the end of this possibility for further releases, not that Sony has many exclusives these days, but for the handful of PS6 games that won't make it to PC.
Were there any ps5 games that could play from the disc offline anymore?
I guess that was my point: that ps5 players already were used to having to deal with online content.
As I mentioned above, whilst not standard, yes there were titles that could be played without updates.
OK, I was looking over Does It Play and a lot do let you play without updates, although the site notes those can have a lot of issues before being patched.
It was more than I would have thought, since everyone I know with a ps5 seems to spend more time getting updates than actually playing, lol.
that's a them thing, not an us thing. shit takes longer to install on my computer because my internet sucks.
Fair point, I don't own a PS5 so I can't tell.
And there were ps5 discs that did this. I played Astrobot for a month with no downloads or updates.!
I agree it wasn't the norm, but it was possible.
Wow you're young
Or old enough to not care that much. What am I going to do with more plastic?
BUT, I should have been more clear that I was talking only about ps5 and ps5 owners. I would never own one. Their online account is annoying and I have never forgiven them for the rootkit.
I was surprised to find out that there are games that will play without the internet. Although every ps5 MUST be connected to the internet first to link the disc drive to the device.
I used Does It Play to look at the games, and a lot of them will not work without updates. I assumed all at this point, which is why I said what I said.
no worries. i sometimes make erroneous assumptions off incomplete data too