Former Valve writer says PlayStation killing physical discs is no conspiracy: "You, the consumer, have made your choice, and the choice is for digital"
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/former-valve-writer-says-playstation-killing-physical-discs-is-no-conspiracy-you-the-consumer-have-made-your-choice-and-the-choice-is-for-digital/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
501 replies
Funny. The consumer didn't make physical media worse for the last 15 years.
Manual or at least something besides the disk: Gone Price: Same as digital despite they getting more profit from digital. Disc: half the game, other half downloads. (Not always, mind you) Game: Half baked without at least two patches.
They've been giving less and less with physical editions to push the more profitable digital store, and then they act shocked when no one buys physical.
Shockingly, if the only difference between physical and digital is that you need to go out of your way to pick the physical, most people will just get the digital.
Still I got my Switch games in physical so I can trade with friends.
I just wanna say this is my opinion.
98% of the shit we deal with. Not just game shit, but everything....all boils down to these folks with power being utter rotten puss filled cunts.
Like honestly. Fuck disc. I hate em. I love digital. But fuck me. Let it be mine. Let me mod it (without cheating in it) let me play it on any console I want. Let it be my $80 of the game to do with as I want.
Like stop being such assholes. Why do these folks gotta turn into hateful cunts cause they got money or they made a game or media or whatever the fuck.
Consumers wouldn't be as pissed if they weren't being fisted constantly.
Baby, you keep giving them the money they use to fist you.
True, but ain't that a bit unfair for you to say? Do you not play games? Or watch stuff?
Isn't this a "you complain yet you live in a society." Or whatever.
I also grew up playing games. I won't stop. And yes, while getting fisted, I'll complain. You wouldn't tell someone not to scream when getting attacked.
My solution is to not have/buy a console (and the DS screen starts to be too small) and I'm on Linux.
Which means I don't buy 80€ games.
That's people's problem, they must consume this new branded thing, again and again. Think about it, you have a million people buying whatever shit you make just because of brand/publicity, it will become more important to have the brand going, making the right publicity, than making an extraordinary game.
That said, I'd kill for a sweet semi turnbased "nineties" rpg. I do not play many games, they are rare on linux 😔.
the things they were complaining about in the top comment go beyond consoles, they are a problem with PC games too. even on steam and linux. you’d have to buy exclusively from DRM free platforms like GOG.
also games are not that rare in linux, most work well via steam.
Or just pirate them, ezpz, especially if you already don't morally agree with the publisher.
In a bubble, I'd agree with you on Steam vs. Sony vs. GOG.
But you can't just analyze purely based on principles and logic, there are real life precedents for Sony removing content people purchased with no refund nor any form of customer outreach.
This has never happened on Steam, so in my view you can't equate Sony and Steam. I would say GOG is better than Steam if GOG didn't send nazi shit to people.
Expedition 33 might scratch your itch.
Thanks, but is sure looks way too 3D run around for my taste (it's not turnbased, right?) I just checked the trailer.
It looks like a modern arpg but plays more like paper Mario. It's turn based combat but there's a rhythm block/parry system that's pretty important to not dying. I think it has an auto parry mode for easy difficulty, but it's very much a 2000s era jrpg under a fancy French coat of modern paint. There's areas and dungeons very similar to how final fantasy or Chrono Trigger are structured. Great story.
@Valmond @edible_funk I always thought Expediton 33 was turn-based? Been avoiding coverage because of possible spoilers
I don't AAA game, but haven't run into a single issue with a game running on Linux...
I tried to run Desperados, no go. Red alert/C&C too.
I'm no guru when it comes to all this luti/vm(the graphics never works well or fast)/bottle/ other stuff.
Steam is good though.
Well said
No it's not unfair. What I said was factual. People aren't willing to give up their comforts in order to make real, meaningful change. It's one of those truths that gets argued against anytime it's said with people unwilling to admit it to themselves.
I mean i quit playing games in 2020ish because im sick of getting ripped the fuck off. I don’t watch tv or movies, either, anymore because it’s all sequels and garbage.
Join me and let these industries suffer.
Good for you. And I mean that.
I don't buy enough games to really be impacted. Bf6 and Helldivers have been the most recent. I also use bf6 and HD to play with my best friend who is 4 states away.
But like I said...I literally was playing bf1 and titanfall all the way to bf6 with no other games bought. I don't got a lot of time. I play 1 or 2 games a year and be content with that.
But really good for you. More power to you. I'll try to fight it in another way.
Isn't this literally victim-shaming? It's not just game companies doing it, after all. What's the alternative, to go live alone in the wilderness and not participate in society at all??
You can have change or your can have comfort.
That's why I love gog, and it's the only store that gets my gaming money. The games are mine, as long as I keep a backup of the installer. I can do with them what I want.
I see why the newest AAA games are a must have for younger gamers, but as an older one I now have the patience to simply wait until it releases on gog if I actually have the urge to play it.
Digital is fantastic, I miss the boxes and handbooks and feelies, but I don't miss the discs.
Other stores have DRM free games too. For example Cyberpunk 2077 is DRM free on Steam. DRM, for the most part, is forced by publishers rather than stores.
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
You can do that with Steam games too. The ones without DRM.
And it's the developer that chooses if they want DRM.
Well can you see beforehand which game uses Steam DRM? And I still need the client installed to download anything, and even then I only archive the actual game, not any dependency.
The steam store itself doesn't show if a game uses Steam-DRM (which is a buncha bullshit if you ask me) but the PCGamingWiki usually has that information.
You are sufficiently old. Good job.
I always wanted Wishbringer SO BAD because it came with that damn rock.
Hell yeah. Love GOG.
But for me, while I love old games, I need my new shit lol.
Like bf6 has been a gem for me. Some bugs and bullshit, but I do like it. Which, call me stupid for this but bf6 and modern battle/war games are a bit of therapy for me. I joined the Marines, got to last week of basic training, came back from team(?) Week and was told to get my shit on the front deck or whatever. Ended up I had hep c. Paperwork fell through and it wasn't caught till I was almost done
And grant you, I wanted to "fight for America and the people in it" since I was like 7. I was 20 just outta h.s. It tore my world apart. Had to do meds and all that. Pills and injection.
Anyways. Games like battlefield or even the more serious ones like Insurgency helped me use some of the stuff I learned on my own over the years and stuff in basic to not feel like it was all a huge waste of my life.
Tl"dr I enjoy modern fps games because they help me deal with my trauma in life.
99% of games will never release on GoG no matter how old they get though, because once they’re on GoG they’re essentially free.
GoG is great, but GoG is fundamentally never going to be a competitive storefront. It will always be niche and missing most games people want to buy.
Also people don’t seem to realize but you can “back up” digital Xbox and (I believe) PS5 games too. Download them, transfer them to an external HDD or 10 if you want, and then at any stage you can plug them back in to your console, transfer them over to the internal drive, and they work. Even without internet. It just has to be on your console that is marked as “home console”.
Unlike all the ones on Steam that never get pirated? Steam DRM is so easy to bypass it may as well not exist. Also, unlike GoG, you can add your pirated game to Steam and play multiplayer.
There's no way Steam don't know this is happening which means there's no way it's not intended (especially given Gaben's stance on piracy).
There’s a huge difference between no drm and “easily” bypassed drm.
That might work for some games, but there's an increasing number of games requiring you to establish some sort of connection to the internet even for single player or mostly single player games (Lego Horizon for instance).
Try to transfer one of those and load it up on a new console without an internet connection.
Sure, your "home console" might work for some games for now. But in 10-15 years when Sony is trying to sell you the PS8, they're going to be cutting off service to the PS5. What happens when you have to take that device in for maintenance and they need to do a factory reset? You need to log in again to activate it, except now it's a brick that might only be able to play a few games on physical media. Anything downloaded/backed up would likely require that specific account.
By that time I’d be more worried about finding a working PS5 than their auth servers being taken down. That’s also assuming that they have completely removed backwards compatibility, which in an x86 world is highly unlikely.
The fact is that to preserve games forever, digital distribution is actually much better. These consoles will be emulated at some stage, and they won’t be playing physical games.
More games release on GOG when customers show there's money to be made there. If you make it important to you that your games are DRM-free and spend more money on GOG than Steam, you help tip those scales. It's not fundamental. If DRM is poison for making money, then fewer games will employ it.
But the games people want to buy on steam aren’t on GoG, and there’s no Steam vs GoG sales charts for people to point publishers to and say “look! Look how much money we will spend if you go drm free on GoG!”.
Also there’s just no denying it, and even trying is disingenuous - a game like GTA 6 releasing on GoG without DRM would sell significantly less than it would on a platform with DRM. It’s just the truth. It would be on torrents and every download site the minute it’s released, and millions and millions and millions of people who were going to buy it would get it for free instead.
In the terrible state that the video game industry is in for developers, releasing a big AAA game DRM-free would be the last game they ever release.
Last I looked into it video game piracy actually had a net benefit on sales. Any advantage DRM has from a sales point of view is null after about 3 months post launch anyway. It can and does kill small indie devs but any big boy in the industry, piracy usually benefits sales.
Piracy never has a benefit on sales. Where are you getting that from?
Don't be so sure. Apparently they publishers don't make hard numbers publicly available anymore so there's no good data but there was a survey of denuvo games.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/10/the-true-cost-of-game-piracy-20-percent-of-revenue-according-to-a-new-study/
Unfortunately that still doesn't answer the question but until publishers post honest numbers we'll never have the proper metrics to measure the actual impact piracy has. But in the day freeware like Doom basically relied entirely on piracy for sales so it's not an out of pocket take that piracy could benefit sales. It is an old take though. I'm old.
Edit - Also found this which looks at how piracy can help outside of direct sale conversions: https://jier.org/index.php/journal/article/view/3453/2764
Plenty of the games people want to buy are on GOG. Definitely not all of them, but you can find GOTY winners like Clair Obscur and Baldur's Gate 3, games that should have won more awards like Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and The Alters, awesome indie games like Mina the Hollower and Escape from Ever After, plus the old stuff that GOG restores like Dino Crisis and Alpha Protocol that had pent-up demand. There's no chart to compare sales, but developers talk, and they know their own sales data. Firms like Circana buy sales data and then sell the analysis back to help companies figure out what will help them make more money, including where people are buying video games.
That's easy to claim and impossible to prove. Baldur's Gate 3 released day 1 without DRM and still went on to sell over 20M copies; how many people do you think pirated it? Millions and millions? There are some people who are always going to pirate, but I think most prefer the experience of just buying the damn thing and getting better service out of it, not the least of which is quick and easy patching. We also now live in a world where Denuvo is fully broken open. There's no difference in one's ability to pirate once the game has been cracked at all. Piracy is going to happen one way or another, and GTA6 is basically guaranteed to make more money than any other video game that came before it.
This is demonstrably false, given the AAA games that release on GOG all the time.
Why could you only name like 3 then? Which 2026 AAA games have released on GOG?
Which GOG release bankrupted a company by way of piracy?
Never forget, never forgive.
Nintendo 64 games cost like $60-$80 back in the late 90s.
They were also complicated circuit boards with full color manuals and box graphics, none of which is in digital nor the overhead of the creation thereof.
And they could not be patched later, so the testing was absolutely bonkers.
and today they sell like 10x as many copies.
The big blockbusters do. Most games don't make back their development cost.
Yeah fair it is arbitrary, but the line in the sand must be drawn somewhere. So coming from PC platform and 59,99 being the agreed upon number for probably decade or more is a good enough arbitrary point to use as a line in the sand.
There shouldn't be an arbitrary "line in the sand" for games. Just like there shouldn't be for any other product. Because products are not all the same. Some games might take an hour to beat and others have endless replayability and it shouldn't be expected that these all cost the same.
No, there most definitely should, there should be a line or set point for everything. A point from which onward one no longer accepts any further abuse.
Yes sure we can have discussion on where that line stands with gaming, like "no preorders" or "no p2w", but there most definitely should be one or even multiple different ones and that should be upheld or else we do get current climate of AAA games riddled with mtx, psychological manipulation, getting more expensive yearly, no longer any long term guarantees either, while gameplay, story and performance quality dropping as well.
Without a set point or line, corporations wil keep on pushing the boundaries every single year as we keep allowing it.
A higher price does not mean abuse. It very well could just mean its a higher quality game with more content.
How does a low price stop that from happening? If anything it's the opposite.
I wouldn't really use 60$ as a low price, but that's beside the point.
Your missing the trees for the forest. It's not the low price, but setting a line which one does not cross.
Not having that line and constantly accepting every subsequent new mechanic to extract more profit from us has resulted in the current state of AAA gaming industry.
As i said we can discuss where that line runs, 60$ is just my own personal line, but that line, not specifically price, should exist and should not be crossed. Id agree with the "no pre-orders" as well as games should be only bought after independent thrid party reviews have gone out. Just that this line doesn't fit into current context, this one fits better under a post of a releasing of a new highly anticipated game.
Though where would you draw the line?
I’d pay $150 for a great finished game. They don’t make that anymore, and you can’t make anything good and sell it for $60. So I’m not sure what you people want?! You want these companies to spend 3 billion making a game, making it perfect, and charging only $60 for it. Insane. No wonder why gamers get treated like entitled complainers.
Dude, really. Therer are uncountable numbers of good indy games way below 60. So it is possible to produce good games sven below that price point.
What i want is AAA games to stop implementing predatory tactics to squeeze out as much cash from consumers as possible while making games even more expensive. Once they do that we can start discussing price again.
You're aware of the concept of inflation, no?
Are you aware of how much gaming has increased in popularity? Already this should cover the difference inflation makes over the years. When we add in profit form micro transactions and the only reason left to increase prices is greed.
My business has increased in popularity, too. I’m raising prices.
As is you're right, I'm still not going to buy.
Are you saying that gaming increasing in popularity is a reason for companies to decrease the price? I'm not sure you know how this works.
I'm saying that inflammation cant be used as a good justification for increased prices when the profit has increased significantly.
Especially if it's done by the biggest companies who are the main drivers of everything wrong with gaming.
The perceived value back then was not having to pluck down 25c every time you played at the arcade. So even if the price was high it seemed cheap in the long run.
Editt : reading it again I've missed my point by a decade, this applies mostly to the late 80s
Indeed... and I never understood the stand against prices set by publishers, developers, artists, or people... for monetary support calculated for the human time, work, and effort done for a mirracle to share and support in hope...
If the game is honestly updated with effort and hard work I will pay $80.
I clean air bnbs, houses, condos, and all that for a living. I don't do shit for less than $100.
I get folks gotta eat. But if you want my money for your product, it better be that good dick shit. It better be high quality and ducking finished. Not this "oh here's we got updates coming, the game is has a roadmap."
Like motherfucker the game can't drive it doesn't need a road map, it's need to be finished.
Wanna release the unfinished version? $20. But give me user support, working graphics, good multi if it's that game, all the bells and whistles and I'll pay $80 if you show me you goddamn actually care for the thing you are making.
Show me the love for your product/art/work and I will gladly give you money to support you for doing something you care about. And I mean even the ceos. Have some goddamn integrity and humility for fucking once.
Sorry to rant.
No need to apologize for ranting, rant on.
It was $50 before that and as high as $90 before that. $60 is kind of arbitrary, honestly.
Yeah, but it suffices as a line in the sand. We could probably use horse armor as well, but that's even more arbitrary and there are few publisher who have managed to keep mtx based market under control and run a free successful game for years, ex POE.
$60 in 2007 is a bit under $100 now in terms of purchasing power. Games have essentially gone down in price.
Yes, but that's just finding justifications for publisher who use every possible opportunity to screw us over at every opportunity while delivering shittier products every year.
No need to run free PR for them, corpos have whole departments for that. Fuck em, use the same mentality corpos use towards us, show them no mercy or forgiveness. Treat corpos with the contempt they deserve. We are the ones who have to exert the counter force, not just accept whatever they throw at us.
Why would you ever buy anything from a corporation like that?! They aren’t selling you food. This is pathetic. Gamers are pathetic.
We shouldn't, that's the point. Most, probably all AAA companies should crash and burn.
Microsoft is fulfilling that by buying half of them up. They've been incapable of not killing off studios they buy.
Yep, that's absolutely it and it doesn't matter how it's handled the will always be assholes. So we should go back to public measures.
On console, digital only means the only market is them. That's why this is happening, and it's the real issue. The ownership thing is an issue too, but that's been dead for a while, even with physical disks. Very few games worked with only the disk install and no internet, so the disk doesn't let you play without their support anyway.
I've been PC only for a long time now, so I'm fine with digital only. On PC we have some choice of marketplace. Sure, (I'm probably going to get flammed for pointing this out) Valve has used their market dominance to force price parity, but it's still better than consoles. Console players are about to get fucked, and they're probably going to turn around and thank them for it.
There’s nothing wrong with getting fisted.
No, I love fisting. But with consent.
Because people with money have the time and patience to arrange an eloquent argument to legislators.
Easy, and correct, to say “But a lot of those guys are bought and paid for.” They are, but they also need to convince the gullible representatives; the ones that want to think they’re doing the right thing, and will vote yes anytime a bill has “For Children” in the name.
But senators aren’t convinced by “Like stop being such assholes.” They need a mature, well-arranged argument that demonstrates unfairness and harm. SKG showed when it’s well-described, it can have effects.
Ah yes the intelligent consumer who always has a choice and is never beholden to the whims of a completely dominant supply side economy.
The problem isn’t with digital. The problem is with digital licenses and rights.
Exactly. And geo restrictions.
Which stems from licensing and rights
Discs are just as digital as internet data piped through fiber optics. It's a deceitful term which doesn't cover the true change: perpetual license vs time limited license.
I like that discs aren't tied to an online account, so anyone in possession of it can use it to play the game. The company can't take away access like they can banning your online account.
You can resell or trade a disc though. Or at least have been able to up until now I bet they start tying those to specific accounts now while they still make them until 2028.
This intentionally misses the point.
It’s physical and digital distribution.
While that is a shift that happened, it's not the distribution method people actually have problems with, even if they sometimes misattribute it. The problem, which you see mentioned most of the time, is ownership.
Compare how people feel about Sony vs. GOG, which will just let you download DRM-free installer files. Both are distributed via the Internet, but people feel very different about them, right?
Physical discs aren’t DRM free though - the disc is the DRM.
Of course people like DRM free digital games, because it means they can get them for free.
It is however transferable and resellable legally. Digital only versions, even DRM free are not.
In my opinion, this has been one of the only things about consoles that has been a plus side compared to PC. Now that is gone and I can't imagine why anyone would stay except out of a lack of finances to move to PC.
Also, nope. If people only liked digital DRM free games because you could pirate them GOG wouldn't exist and it would have been out of business years ago. You are believing corporate propaganda with that lie.
I like DRM free because games with DRM usually run like shit or at least noticably worse compared to DRM free.
Also, you ever had a day off work to game during a Steam or PlayStation outage? I was able to play all of my GOG games with zero problem. I don't even know if GOG has ever gone down before, because it doesn't matter to let me play my games. Same thing with SOME physical PlayStation games usually single player. Could play that during outages too.
Technically no, they’re not supposed to be re-sold. Says so on box and disc.
DRM free means there’s no digital rights management, meaning there’s no ownership restrictions essentially.
GoG was also, reading between the lines, recently going to be closed. It was basically given to one of the founders of CDPR. Why would CDPR do that if it was making any sort of profit?
I think the not allowed to be resold and saying so on the box must depend on your country. In mine it is allowed and doesn't say you can't on the box just that you have to abide by Sony terms of service and all that which they've said before doesn't prohibit you reselling the discs.
I know what DRM is but DRM free games are still restricted in that I can't trade or sell it however if gog ever banned me since I already have the offline installers backed up I could still continue to enjoy my games and they can't ever take them away short of suing me or something.
Sony already said before you can sell and trade disc games (which is why they are going after them now)
Also GOG has an annual revenue of around $250 million. I think they (CDPR) just wanted to focus more on being a game publisher instead of running a competing storefront against steam.
It sounds logical. However, by that definition, game boxes with download codes would be physical as well... Yet Sony isn't killing those.
To me it's clear that it's not about the method of distribution or the way data is processed, it's about their business model in general.
The game is still downloaded from a server via codes in a box. The distribution of the game is still digital.
How about we ship a box with both a digital download code and a disc? Would you classify it as digital?
I’d classify the digital copy as digital, and the disc as physical if it has the game on it.
This is pretty straight forward man. Did you download the game from a server? Digital. Did you play it or install it from a physical medium? Physical.
So you agree that it's related to the medium then. Not to the distribution.
As you mention, a distributed box without a disc counts as digital. A distributed box with a disc counts as physical.
So consumers were given the choice between physical media that you made artificially expensive and overly inconvenient or digital media that you made practically free and ultra convenient. That's called the illusion of choice. But now you can blame your victims when you abuse them because they brought this on themselves.
It s more nuanced. 80% of buy are digital. Some industries it s worse. Like music and movie. But thoses industry value their "hardcore" consumer and will never shelve their physical release, who also append to be better quality than digital release. Contrary to video game where its litteraly the same product. Nobody has an issue with valve being fully digital cause they can't lock down other store. What sont does is unprecdent and I pray for their downfall.
Physical media is no more expensive or inconvenient than it ever was. It's just that you're now comparing it to downloads, which bear no manufacturing cost and don't require you to physically go to a store or have the media shipped to you. These are exactly the reasons that consumers prefer downloads.
Up until the Wii era you could just insert the disc in the console and start playing immediately, it was much more convenient than waiting an hour for a game to download and install. You didn’t need to manage disk space as well. Or login before playing. The industry destroyed the convenience. Now only Switch has an option to start playing from cartridge.
As far as I know, no one has produced technology to make disc streaming faster. You can blame console design for this, but even if an indie dev simulated this situation with a 50GB game containing compressed textures placed on a Blu-ray, he'd have the same design problem - loading things off that disc takes a long time, and installation is a far better user experience.
The Wii gets away with it because texture sizes back then were much smaller. If you can point to technical demonstrations of how the same process could've been achieved on modern games with much larger textures, I'd be interested to hear it.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think we ever got to see a dual disk drive console, at least not in production (exempting gaming PCs). Perhaps in a parallel universe on board storage became cost prohibitive and games came on two simultaneously inserted optical disks, one with the game code and the other with texture packs and art. Nothing that interesting could exist in today's climate.
Cartridges, same as Switch 2. And high res textures and audio as separate download if needed. Flash memory was getting cheap until AI, 64GB usb 3 drive is still around 10 bucks at retail, so probably 3 bulk, and even cheaper for Sony.
Spinning media will never be as fast, of course, unless every drive comes with a 50GB cache to just load everything once and never seek randomly.
Doesn't most of the physical media still require downloads to actually play anyway? I don't own a console but it seems like every time I'm at one of my friends who do and they're putting a new game in they have to wait on it to install/update or whatever. Maybe it's just the big AAA ones.
Only if you have an internet connection active. Otherwise, I believe it's just insert disc and play, IIRC.
Can we stop spreading the propaganda for them? Sony lied about digital sales by including digital-only games in their figures.
Every game with a physical release, according to their developers, makes most of their sales on disc. It’s literally always a 70/30 split every single time (give or take 10%). I cannot find any evidence of a game that sold more in its digital form than physical
Where can I learn more about this. Frankly, I will not just take your word for it on such a bold claim.
That’s fair, but it’s ubiquitous. Search Twitter and Bluesky for official game studio and personal developer accounts. They almost always post about their sales soon after a launch. I don’t have any on hand, sorry. I do remember suckerpunch and insomniac doing so all the time.
Edit: https://en.gamegpu.com/news/igry/utechka-insomniac-raskryla-realnoe-sootnoshenie-fizicheskikh-i-tsifrovykh-prodazh-playstation
My claim would be very easily disproven if it wasn’t true
The article you linked makes me think it isn't quite that easy to find proof.
The guy who’s saying this is a controversian, he’s trying to get clicks to his TikTok. He was also opposing stop killing games. He’s not even working in valve more than a decade. So he’s irrelevant but he does make sure to say ex-valve before his title.
I do not even have a tiktok. Who are you talking about?
I’m talking about the guy who’s saying those stuff, chet Faliszek. not you lol.
Ok, I didn’t think you were. I was saying you don’t need to be influenced by some guy to come to the conclusion that if all publishers, studios, their devs, (and their leakers, apparently), all agree on something, it’s most likely true
I believe you, and im sure it's because I've lost passion for just about everything at this point, but if the disk doesnt hold the game what really is the point anymore. If we bought the entire game on hard drive and the console had a hot swappable port so we used them like cartridges that would be great. I shouldn't need internet access to play a game by myself. But with the current fuckery, the disc just holds part of the game right, and you have to download the rest of the game when you put it in the console.
You can also use that license thatvomes on that disc and transfer it and sell it or trade it to someone else if you choose.
That choice is being taken away.
Ah that makes sense. I wonder if there are people who create accounts for each game they digitally purchase. Then sell the sign in creds when they are done playing. Talk about a giant pain in the ass that would be
Sony and Microsoft's Xbox will ban you immediately for this but because Steam is a lot more consumer friendly people do sell whole accounts with a game or two tied to them. There's a site (that's kind of shady ish so look out for that) that I have used called G2A that you can buy whole steam accounts with games on.
I think that some of those codes are stolen though or something of that nature but steam doesn't do anything about it but that is 100% speculation on my part. I thought I heard a dev of a game say something like that one time though that they'd rather you pirate it than buy it off G2A.
Edit: thinking about it more I don't think its stolen its just the simple fact that you can "trade" or "sell" the entire game that way by selling the whole account tied to it and the game developers don't like that.
Reasons game developers don't like steam keys from sites like G2A are:
The last reason could apply to reselling steam accounts as well.
Thank you for this I was wondering what the deal was with that. So some of them are stolen.
That really sucks. I'll probably avoid them going forward
What nonsense. What matters isn't whether we use physical disks or not. And it's all digital anyway, you don't get many games on vinyl these days. The real issue is whether you own the games you buy. As GOG is proving, game ownership is something that publishers can easily offer, regardless of the delivery mechanism. If Sony would step up and do the same, killing physical discs wouldn't be a problem. It's a trust issue.
GOG doesn't give you ownership of the game the way physical media does though. Unless they've added a feature to sell your used games?
Hard drives are physical you can even put it on tape or break out the floppies. No drm is the real winner and true ownership
Wish more people understood this, rather than fetishizing hardware.
Download the offline installer and now you have possession.
Further, because GOG enforces no DRM or mandatory sign-ins, so that means that you also have control over that copy of the game - you can install it and play it however and whenever you see fit.
For GOG games were you downloaded and kept the offline installer, the only way that the rightsholder has of stopping you from installing and playing that game is to sue you, which is:
With other stores they can just force the store to take down the game and now it's up to YOU to sue THEM to get restitution and the "not worth it" is now something that goes against you (unless you have access to a Small Claims Court in the jurisdiction you're in, are you really going to sue them for a 50 bucks game?)
In fact, physical media is worse than digital GOG games, because the former can have phone-home DRM or mandatory sign-ins so you have possession but not control.
PS: However if the point you were making was about resale, then it's a valid point. Mind you, physical media with phone-home DRM or mandatory sign-ins can also be de facto unsellable if that's what the game maker wants.
Good point, I'm guessing it probably falls short of physical media in that way. As I understand it, they let you download an install file for the games you purchase, which you can save and use offline. I doubt that publishers would put effort into enabling a second hand games market
That is true, you can download and keep the install files wherever you wish. You could burn it onto a CD if you want to have it like in the old days.
Of course the "former Valve writer" is Chet Faliszek. The dude never shuts up.
When all options are rigged, it's pretty rude to blame "the consumer"
I actually agree that physical media is better for consumers. If I buy a game, I think I should own it. I should be able to sell it, lend it to a friend, or keep playing it decades from now without worrying about a company flipping a switch. Physical media is objectively more consumer-friendly in that regard.
What I don't agree with is the narrative that corporations had to force everyone into digital by sabotaging physical releases. That's not how I remember it.
Steam became wildly popular because consumers embraced it almost immediately. Instant downloads, automatic updates, cloud saves, massive sales, and never having to swap discs were conveniences people overwhelmingly wanted. Publishers certainly recognized the benefits for themselves, more control, no used game market, lower distribution costs, but they didn't invent the demand. They took advantage of a demand that consumers had already created.
In a sense, we shot ourselves in the foot. We collectively chose convenience over ownership because, at the time, it seemed like a worthwhile trade. Now we're living with the consequences of that decision.
It's completely fair to push for stronger ownership rights today. But I think it's a mistake to pretend that consumers were dragged into digital kicking and screaming. For the overwhelming majority of gamers, digital won because they chose it.
I feel like everyone in this thread is ignoring the literal headline.
The point being made is that the consumer chose these rights-infringing, privacy-corrupting, ownership-destroying choices.
Then OF COURSE companies weaponised it.
The issue is that your average Joe doesn't think for a damn second in his life, and picks up whatever is put down.
Yeah, arguments that blank percent of people are morally good are insane since... Most people dont really think about long term morals of their decisions day to day if ever. Most people just live and do by convenience without asking if it is morally good but simply believing the self to be.
It needs to be convenient to do good things for people to do them and the convenient option for a long time has been giving up ownership rights.
Yeah ... Morality is subjective... If the majority of a given population does a thing, that thing is moral within that population.
Ironically enough the topic of whether or not morality is 'subjective' is also inherently up for interpretation. There's literally a whole philosophical field of study for this.
That being said, I'll counter this sentiment by saying that the things we find to be 'moral' as a species are more often than not the things that help our species prosper (i.e. taboos for murder, theft, bullying, sexual violence, etc.). Sure, there may be a certain degree of variation within the moral frameworks of a culture, but you'll be hard pressed to find one that doesn't have that baseline of enforcing against most forms of explicit harm which can come about against members of that society. If that weren't the case then we would have gone extinct a long time ago.
You’re confusing biological utility with objective truth.
Sure, human societies share baselines against murder and theft because societies without them collapse. But that’s just evolutionary pragmatism. A behavior that keeps a species alive isn’t a cosmic moral law; it’s just a survival mechanism. If a beehive kills off its drones to survive the winter, it’s not being "moral", it's just trying not to die.
Even your premise that the prosperity of our species is inherently "good", relies on our own subjective bias that we prefer being alive. The universe itself doesn't care.
But let's apply your own standard back to the actual topic: video games.
If your baseline for objective morality is "things that help our species prosper," then a corporation shifting to digital-only game licenses has absolutely zero impact on human survival. By your own logic, it's completely amoral.
If you still want to argue that going digital-only is "immoral," you have to abandon your evolutionary argument and admit you're just projecting a subjective cultural preference onto a consumer inconvenience.
A free market requires a perfectly informed consumer. That's impossible before you begin to consider how marketing is dishonest
What we want is DRM-free games, not your bullshit
Fucking morons
If GOG just hired one full time intern to go ahead and bake Proton into their platform so they could have Linux support that isn't completely broken, I'd probably start getting more games on their platform again.
Edit: Oh, looks like it's on the way. Maybe I'd better start wishlisting.
If you vote with your wallet, it just means those richer than you have a bigger vote.
Are richer people buying 12 copies of a game?
Kinda; that’s often the reason you see $120 SuperDeluxe editions of games, where the protagonist’s pants have a bit of purple trim. Or $20 “boosts” that skip the first 3 levels (which you’d get by playing two matches)
It’s very much an artifact of wealth consolidation.
Oh yeah, I forgot some games have that kinda shit in them
In some sense yeah, I've heard from some of my more affluent friends buying multiple copies for different platforms. For example, I know someone with at least 4 different copies of GTA-V
Sorry, I’m not sure what your comment is supposed to point out exactly. Are you saying boycotting is pointless because there are other people giving them a lot more money than you anyway? I mean it would still cut into their profit
the "choice" was shoved down your throats
I had a PS4, witch was sold and didn't have coonsole for years. Then I got a PS5 and my account was deleted with all my purchases.
That didn't happen to my steam games.
The problem is the legislation around digital consumers rights.
Agree with your point, but why did you own a witch, and why did you sell her?
/s
Because of the coonsole. (that's necromancer slang for raccoon soul)
"You chose digital."
Chooses DRM-free, piracy otherwise
"Not like that!"
Exactly. DRM is a far bigger problem than physical/digital. Fortunately GOG is a solution to it. Stop buying games with DRM.
That can be another problem: Just like digital, people choose DRM.
There’s only a small crowd that actually makes things like Denuvo single issue; the huge majority of the PC crowd sees they can still play DRM locked games at decent performance, as soon as they buy them, and even play them offline on their Steam Decks. So it’s hard to demonstrate a salient point to them that DRM is bad.
“Means you can play the game anywhere” - They already can, though!
Plenty of people choose GOG too.
He isn't wrong how many people here buy from steam - it's rare if ever you get a physical release of a game on steam.
Now physical rights vs digital are the issue;
Buying a physical item means you own it and can use it whenever you want.
Buying a digital item means you buy the license to use that item. That's a concept that's been around for software purchasing for a very long time.
People want to own the digital item the same as the physical and not have the license pulled when a publisher decides to. Sony just doesn't have the trust of the gaming community for this.
GOG, you buy it and can use it whenever you like and its digital. Best of both.
Yeah, even physical pc games often just have a download key inside and no disk, and computers haven’t had disk drives for a while.
(I know you can get external ones, but even cases nowadays don’t account for the ability to have them as an internal component)
I did manage to snag a copy of House Flipper 2 (it just had a Steam key, no disk) for 6€ a few months ago when the lowest historical price at the time (according to IsThereAnyDeal) was in the 20s or 30s, so I’m very much in the camp of physical releases in any platform. There is much more choice for consumers, game preservation arguments notwithstanding.
Also a ton of games have day 1 patches that you'd need to download anyway from their servers. I don't recall seeing standalone installers for patches like we used to have. So buying a physical copy just makes you feel good rather than actually avoiding the problem with digital copies.
Two years ago when I built my new computer, there were something like two cases that actually had a slot for a disk drive. I did end up getting one for my older games and it is nice
well, having a physical disk doesnt guarantee ownership. companies can still leave critical things off the disk and require you to download them when you install, or there can be some verification system. And if corporation servers go down, you still cant use it.
What we need is all the files and data we buy to be fully functional and not behind any encryption or other gate, be it digital or physical. Then make your own physical media of it or back it up whereever you want.
To be fair, physical media has been dead before the whole sony debacle. What's the pint of ownjng something like cyberpunk when you own the release version?
I’d argue the right fight here is to reliably obtain “permanent ownership” for either kind of purchase. Anyone who bought their games digitally for the past generation and doesn’t follow gaming news (basically a silent majority of gamers) probably doesn’t even care about this ongoing disc backlash/boycott.
But highlighting things like the sudden pull of people’s owned movies, that may matter to them when applied to games.
I see no reason not to pirate a game I bought digitally if it is then removed as a playable game.
Same for movies, if you bought it, then it should be yours.
I think they should only let you rent movies online to avoid this issue totally.
Okay. You’ll basically not be a demographic they serve anymore.
Put it this way. This year had some great singleplayer games. Some of those were funded by terrible publishers. If, in a later year, that publisher sees “Huh, 95% of people pirate this game, only 5% buy it”, then they’ll just cancel all upcoming singleplayer games, and greenlight 20 more live service or gacha games, because that’s where the MONEY is.
“Vote with your wallet” works in two ways. Pirating mostly shows up as a stay-at-home voter, or a corpse.
If they pull a game after it's been sold and played then they don't lose sales from that game.
They lose the fans that bought the original game.
Who is talking about pulling games post-sale? I specifically said “upcoming”. As in, shutting down game studios and future releases.
Your torrent list would get a lot shorter, unless you basically stay retro. Either way, you’d be an irrelevant consumer.
they also mentioned pirating a game they bought. so the pub got the money for it.
I bought physical disks until they were basically phased out. A large chunk of them just registered on Steam and downloaded the latest patch before they would run anyway. I have been against Steam and its DRM for a while, but everyone else chose to have no rights to their games, no ability to sell or loan them or give them to others. You will own nothing and love it.
Sorry your wrong physical media has always still been a license to use it.
A license that can be resold or given away. Not so with digital only licenses.
Companies offer games as a digital download or physical disc.
Consumers buy physical disc out of a desire to preserve media.
Game is unplayable off the disc without a 98GB download that installs a digital copy of the game onto the hardware. Disc is essentially a physical license to play the game and is useless otherwise.
“You chose this”
Fuck right off. At this point, if a game isn’t either available on GoG or as a FitGirl RePack, it does not register as an option for me anymore. That is my choice.
and seems like ppl don’t realize the disc being the license means when the dig store removes the dig licenses it’ll also remove the versions that apply to that 98gb update for a disc license.
I choose to crush corporations until they are so small they are easily drowned by pissing on them.
No, I made the choice for physical. I don't own a single digital game on a Sony console. Don't put this on me. I want to buy physical. I never wanted digital for myself. I always wanted choice.
Its just that I don't matter. I'm a minority and Sony don't give a fuck about me. It's not my fault Sony is stopping physical production. Its still profitable, so Sony could keep on doing it. But they don't because they want to fuck me over.
Damned be the man who blames the consumer and he can shove his worked at Valve credentials up his ass.
He's right though. The consumer has chosen sure a small minority might buy physical but the majority don't.
It was shown that for PS5 exclusives the split was in favour of physical though. And that doesn't even count the people that buy second hand
They don’t want you to buy second hand
I know, I'm just saying that their numbers already show that the physical "minority" aren't actually that minor, but that their numbers also don't even show the whole picture.
This person is saying that's untrue https://sh.itjust.works/comment/26484937
People have been buying more and more physical media recently due to the enshittification of streaming. I've been buying blu-rays for movies I really want to 'own'.
It just clearly not up to some people's standards. Imagine how much more $$$ valve would make if they published physical copies for their steam machine.
Have they? More and more, really?
I guess I must have missed the memo, because I no longer have the giant storage cases full of plastic discs or tapes. I'm hard pressed to name anyone else in my social circle who still does.
I just pirate that shit. Why on earth do I want a hard copy of something, plus a device to play it, when a 2-TB hard drive can host more media than I could watch continuously for a month. That's before you get into degraded quality of older discs and machines. Or my increased appetite for foreign media - shit that was never on offer in the states without knowing a boutique distributor or a friend traveling overseas or someone with a subbed copy.
Getting this from Valve is absolutely mind-bending, given how much of their library is exclusively digital.
I have no love for discs. It's a dead technology. We should work on software ownership instead.
I just wanted to add that it's also really stupid to claim that "consumers chose thing" because companies did it since they found it more profitable. Companies do many things people don't actively want (or even dislike) for profit.
An interesting example is brought up by Andreas Malm in his book "Fossil Capital". He explains how consumers didn't chose for the manufacturing of electronics and lots of other things to move to China. Companies moved their manufacturing there because it was cheaper and would increase their profits. Now the choice for many consumers is basically to buy Chinese-made or not buy at all. I know since I actually tried a few years ago!
That is absolutely not true. Companies chose cloud-streamed gaming. But because no one saw it as useful, it didn't catch on and Stadia ended up shuttering their services. Companies chose 3D TVs, but consumers didn't. We are seeing the "choice of AI" in home computing, and it's remarkable how long they have attempted to extend the effort of "forcing consumers to choose it", but to their credit, there are at least some home AI afficionados that somehow love Windows 11 Copilot.
I can assume you were not part of the digital games zeitgeist, but I can assure you, a great many (perhaps non-vocal) gamers were, and were very much for it.
I feel like one shouldn't conflate liking something with choosing something. You definitely have a point that consumers can stop things. If enough consumers dislike something enough, it will likely fail. Like you point out though, it was still companies that made the choice to go for cloud gaming. They were just wrong about it being profitable as far as I can tell.
I was part of it and I love digital games (gimme drm free), still doesn't mean I actually chose things to go this way!
“Former” and “writer”
Sure. So there’s no reason he might not got paid by Sony to say this, right? Or yet alone have any professional knowledge on distribution of games.
Edit: check is wiki. He’s a sorry ass grifter. Putting up valve before his name to make his sorry points more credible. Trying to squeeze out his valve history even though majority of his career was spend on not being able to cope with indie studio workload and then shifting to riot games for monies. Now he’s making TikTok videos talking about valve like it’s his majority of experience. Also he was opposing Stop Killing Games. https://preservetube.com/watch?v=qr6I2BiU238
Friendly reminder that GOG exists and has a backlog of great games that can keep you entertained for ages. If you want to put your money where your mouth us, I suggest putting it there.
Buying the hot new thing no questions asked is how we get more of the Sonys of the world.
I agree physical games are dead, but I'm sure as shit not buying digital from anyone with a history of plucking purchased shit out of people's libraries.
This is what I will do. I’ll play my backlog, buy used games on disc and newer releases on gog.
I hate it as much as the next person here, but it was always inevitable. It was never a question of if, but when.
I know a lot of people look at physical media from a preservation angle, but in an era where games have a long tail of post-release updates and DLC, I'm not so sure they even serve that purpose anymore. If I want to replay my old games in 50 years, in many cases I probably don't just want to play the 1.0 that's on the disc. If I'm still dependent on the availability of a third-party download server to get the remaining data, do discs even still matter all that much?
And don't forget bitrot. The modern bluerays are scarecrow and wind chime material in like 2-3 decades after manufacturing.
I’ve been downvoted en masse for saying that physical media doesn’t last forever, and that many of my PS1/2/3 physical copies no longer work due to labels peeling off and disc rot. It doesn’t happen apparently.
Physical media isn’t what people should want - it’s emulation. Physical media only works as long as there’s original hardware to play it on, and it’s getting harder and harder to get working original hardware.
I don’t care about playing the game on original hardware, I care about being able to play it on readily and easily available hardware.
Also Blu-ray players/drives need regular updates for the encryption keys, it's why the PS3 gets updates every couple years still. Sony will stop updating them some day.
People keep pre-ordering absolutely everthing no matter the price because they need to have it the moment it comes out. THIS means companies can do whatever the fuck they want because people will let them do it.
The solution is so easy stop buying their shit. Yes you won't play on the second it comes out 6 months later its like 50% at least.
Nothing will change because people value convenience over change.
Yes it is a conspiracy. Sony doesn’t want physical games for a whole bunch of reasons not least of which is control and greed. And if you think this is a new thing you would be wrong. They have been pushing this quietly for years. Second hand sales, game rentals, trading… these are all things that cut into Sony’s profits. If you ever want a reason follow the money.
Chet Falisek has been on a crusade to have bad contrarian takes since he left Valve. His stance on Stop Killing Games was downright stupid.
When did he oppose SKG?
On this one I would watch the whole video. He’s trying to be pragmatic about the fight, not mocking anyone upset at disc loss.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6LbwYHZJ1PY
That seems like a massive oversimplification of his stance.
He’s discussing the intricacies of what’s needed to keep games running past end of life, and highlighting what he sees as pain points. I don’t see any flat rejection, mostly he’s pointing out the kinds of legislation that can be harmful to indies and easy for corporations to circumvent.
I can understand not agreeing with everything he says there, but implying he’s an opponent of the movement doesn’t seem practical just off that video.
I don't know why it wouldn't be a practical conclusion to draw, considering that the points made on that video are basically in line with the points brought up by the video game corporations and trade associations, who as you might have guessed are very firm opponents of the movement.
I've brought up some of those same points in discussion, not because I "want to protect my dear precious widdle AAA publishers", but because this is what lawyers do - they practice the most critically focused arguments their opposition will deliver when a confrontation goes to its highest court.
If you say a murderer stabbed someone, and I say "His lawyer's going to ask you to show a murder weapon", that's not me covering for him, just pointing out what's needed to deliver that conclusion.
Similarly, Chet has adequate experience describing what's needed to keep a multiplayer game running, and if a AAA publisher brings their lawyers to court against SKG, they will absolutely deliver those same arguments - which makes the movement's flexibility position on how servers run a critical subject to think about. I don't blame anyone for feeling doubtful about how game makers can share servers, since it's a very tricky subject.
But to lend credit to your stance, if not that specific argument: Someone did share a different preserved YT link that I think portrays him as an opponent of SKG more clearly. I'm a bit disappointed in that stance, and I think he overstated Ross as being totally inflexible. The fact that he deleted it may at least indicate he changed his mind a bit, but it's hard to say for sure.
I agree it is a lot easier to take his latest video more sympathetically if you haven't seen his earlier video.
I think it comes off as oppositional instead of being helpful in the way you describe because SKG is already more flexible than he lets on in this new video. I mean he says in the video a couple of times over that this is how "he would do it", and that "this isn't the only way". But that just means that the difficulties and scenarios he brings up isn't really in the scope of SKG, and that the kind of preservation he wants to see isn't the kind of preservation that SKG is aiming for. But by presenting these scenarios in the general case, he gives off the indirect impression that the preservation itself is more difficult than it needs to be. For SKG, as long as the game is left in a reasonably functional state, it's all good.
Yes, the game corporations are presenting these more restrictive preservation scenarios because they want to paint this problem as being too difficult to solve, while Chet (I imagine, given his background) is presenting these scenarios because he believes it will be of genuine benefit to the consumer, but but ultimately they are both opponents of the more flexible requests laid out in the SKG movement.
Plus, he (like a lot of Valve employees) are pretty gung ho about the free market working itself out, and mentions that legislation are punitive and don't work and that the game publishers should be partners in the effort and not enemies, so I can't imagine he would get along well with the lot of the people in the SKG movement just on an ideological basis.
Digital games are nice. There was a good chunk of time during the ps4/xbone era where I bought a lot of digital games. But in recent years as I have watched how these companies have acted, I have switched back to buying physical as much as possible. I realized I actually prefer having the thing in my hands. Being able to look at it on the shelf with the rest of my collection. Now I only buy digital as a secondary more convenient copy when there is a good sale. Otherwise, I want to own my game and feel it in my hands as I insert a cart or a disk.
For me, improving digital rights is only a partial compromise, when we should continue to have choices. Losing secondhand copies and hurting that part of the industry is unforgivable to me. My choice is not for digital, and these companies moving away from it is a dealbreaker for me. If this is the route all of them go, I will no longer play modern games. Fuck it's not like most of them are actually worth buying and playing these days when it's all designed to squeeze as much money out of you as possible.
I have hundreds of physical games, and there are so many more I can still collect and play. I feel comfortable enough with my old games that I could never touch a new game again and have plenty to play for the rest of my life. If this is where the companies choose to try to force us to go, then I'm out. I've managed to live my whole life without playing a PS6 or GTA 6. I'm not going to be strongarmed into losing my choice.
"We constantly say voting with your wallet will make it so businesses will only create what you're willing to buy. ... Gaming is in the state it's in currently because the vast majority of gamers are okay with it? Have the wallets already voted?"
In this sense, Chet is right, the 'democracy' of consumers has prevailed, and the people have spoken. They said 'digital.' I myself have been a PC gamer for over a decade now and I can't remember the last time I bought physical media.
But then Chet shows his entire rancid asshole by actively ignoring the power dynamics between corporation and customer. The corporation always has the upper hand because the customer CAN ONLY buy what the corporation is OFFERING to sell. The corporation is always, at all times, presenting the customer with a false choice. A customer who has shitty internet and has to purchase all physical media, they may be in the democratic minority but that doesn't mean we feed them to the wolves. But an ex-Valve writer wouldn't know shit about that, they haven't shipped a physical game since Portal 2. What choice did you give consumers for Counterstrike, 2023? Half Life Alyx, 2020? Dota, 2013?
Suck my dick, clown.
Absolutely not correct, because the opposite is also true. The corporation can only sell what the consumer is offering to buy.
Turns out the consumers will buy literal shit if it’s branded with a rockstar logo.
But there are way more customers than there are corporations. What you're saying it true only if the corporation is selling something no customers wants to buy. The existence of gaming whales more or less proves that is not the case. 90% of the customers can choose not to buy but as long as that last 10% covers the rest of 90% it doesn't matter that the majority of the customers refuse to buy what is being sold.
Consumerism being a democratic process is probably the most effective propaganda capitalists have fabricated.
On the other hand, the corpos don't have the upper hand, they have to make a product we're willing to buy. We always have the right not to buy it and should use it more often. If any brand makes a bad product or sells it with too high price, we should fully use our right not to buy it. Not accept it, begrudgingly, and buy it.
I have done it multiple times over and no corpo hit squad has shown up to force me to buy anything. Even much more easier for digital goods as we can always sail the high seas.
While yeah it hasn't have had any effect on the overall market, at least i have a clear conscious and refuse to become a victim of corporations.
More people should use this right, we are not helpless victims of corporations.
Last time I bought a disc it had just a downloader on it
Bullllllshit. I have bought multiple games in the last decade that didn't include a physical disc but a code for me to go download the digital copy.
And you returned it and demanded a physical copy?
I asked if they had a physical copy to which they said "you have one", to which I showed them the code, and they said "oh they're all like that".
Garbage take.
I don't buy AAA games. Because paying for a code and waiting four hours for the rest of the game to download is bullshit.
My biggest gaming spending spree in the last five years has been on itch, and I can make my own physical copies of those
Honestly, in my lifetime I've bought maybe 7 physical games, and that was the Myst series.
I was too poor when I was a kid so pirated, now I use Steam, and if that goes to shit, I'll be sailing the seas again, just like with streaming.
That's not an argument to take the same choice away from future customers.
We made the choice for mostly digital in a world where physical was still available as a fallback. That's not the same situation as if it wasn't. The existence of physical media and a resale market does prevent some of the worst fuckeries of an otherwise monopoly, regardless if you ever bought or sold used games.
Also Valve is a very different animal to Sony.
Steam has removed (not delisted from the store, removed from the libraries of people that owned the game) less than 40 games since inception. Excluding F2P games, Valve has mostly refunded people where a game is outright removed.
Sony has closed 4 music stores in the same period, with no recourse for purchases. They've removed tens of thousands of movies from PlayStation accounts over the same period, these were 'purchased' and then just removed for licensing reasons.
Valve has a level of trust they earned and why Digital only isn't as much of a problem there, now. It was during the opening years becuase Valve had not earned that trust yet.
Sony has burned people so many times I just consider them not trustworthy in general. any 'purchase' on any Sony service is just a 2-3 year lease imo.
Do you have a credible source for that? A while ago someone commented that Valve had promised not to remove any games, but couldn't support that claim with a source.
The younger generation, the future customers, do not care for physical media. They’re being raised in an increasingly digital only world. The only ones that care about physical media are the people that grew up with it before digital was a thing, and are stuck in their ways.
You did not understand my comment. They may not care about the physical media, but they will care about the fuckeries a Sony with a total monopoly over playstation games will force on people. Dictating higher prices without even the slightest competition will only be the beginning.
But they won’t because they’re already used to that on every digital service that they grew up using.
They’re not getting pricing competition for games on iOS or Android. There’s no subscribing to Netflix or Spotify for cheaper through a different store.
I like Valve but stfu dude.
Physical discs was the only thing that was a plus side of consoles compared to PC gaming (you could trade and resell it).
This is so clearly a company employee portraying a certain sentiment that the company stands to profit from and acting like that is what consumers chose.
Sony, chose this. I didn't chose this. And valve knows that now 30- 40% or better of PlayStation players will be making their way over to them in the next 5 years with this very sentiment of "oh well its what consumers chose"
I know it wasn't the company of valve that said this and just an employee but still fuck this dudes opinion on the topic. Of course he shills for the end of discs that was the only thing that set consoles apart from Steam.
I disagree. The main selling point of a console is not the physical media. There are consoles out there that do not even have that feature. It's the convenience of buying a console once and then knowing everything will run fine. No tinkering, just start it up with your controller and game.
People have fast Internet connections nowadays and can just buy it online and download. You probably have patches to download anyway. It might be even more convenient because you don't have to go to the store or insert the disk to play. I don't think people are sharing games that much anymore.
I think the average guy does not care. There might be some complaints at first like with the iPhone dropping the headphone jack, but then people are just gonna be fine with it. Consoles are not going anywhere. They are the iPhones of gaming, small selection but great optimization for that specific hardware.
Really now the price point is the main thing because any game can be ran very easily with steam forums and reading like two comments for problematic games.
Console is still plug and play sort of when it comes to games just working but any game can be ran PC trivially. Although console is a lot smoother to wake up and just start gaming in seconds PC has to boot and all that unless in sleep mode which isn't always consistent
The quality, tone, and tenor of this entire debate says FAR more about the type of people who want to talk about video games on the internet than it says about the ethics of corporations, creators, or the video game industry...
I was hoping that Lemmy game communities may be better than Reddit, but it seems like the same old circle-jerk...
What does it say?
That people are getting tired of companies bleeding them dry for every single thing in every way that they possibly can?
You expected a website primarily full of people who hate greediness and billionaires in general to not have anything to say about a decision that is anti consumer?
The cool thing about communities is that you can find all kinds of people who agree with your viewpoint. You could make your own with the 5 other people that feel the way you do on this topic and get the conversations you were hoping for.
Some facts:
It is wild how much gaming has grown.
But none of that means you can't still produce disks especially if all that growth equates to more profit overall.
What if you just don't want to? Can you provide any other examples where artists or creators are LEGALLY COMPELLED to produce art on a specific medium or under a specific distribution/licensing scheme? Because that is what is being suggested by many who oppose the move to digital.
Imagine you were a photographer who works exclusively in digital art, and the courts rule that you cannot continue to sell digital art unless you also maintain a physical darkroom and also offer physical prints of your art. Would that seem reasonable?
"I don't agree to the terms of your storefront and I won't sell it there"
Also, many games release on PlayStation and Xbox that are digital only and have no discs. This has existed since PS3.
Do you know how many exclusives are only on Steam?
Same way with gog's DRM free stance which is why people get upset they don't have every single game that comes out, its the publishers choice.
The freedom to make that choice is important.
For what you described to have any merit you would have to force companies to sell their games on all gaming storefronts which will never happen and shouldn't because that is anti consumer and anti business all at the same time.
Same way with Denuvo. If a company wants that shit in their game they can do that and I can choose not to buy it until they remove it. But no one should ever try to force that across the board.
It would be different if PlayStation and Xbox had always been digital but they haven't. They are taking a consumer choice and right (reselling a disc) away by this decision. That's why people are pissed.
The ability to release your game only digitally with no disc has ALWAYS existed.
And no your imagined fantasy scenario of the photographer would not be right.
I am starting to think maybe you are saying PlayStation shouldn't be forced to make discs and the fact is that they ARENT digital only has always existed and they just said they are stopping making discs with no court cases or forcing their hand and it will stay that way they get to do whatever they want.
Thing is, people who have been with them since 1994 have a right to be pissed off about an anti consumer move like this.
If my wife fucks another dude at the bar I'm going to bitch about it very vocally so she knows I'm unhappy and leave her. That's kind of like this. You have a right to do something and people have a right to react the way they want to about it short of violence.
Sony has a right not to produce discs but I also have the right to call out that greedy decision for what it is and never buy from them again. No one is forcing publishers to do shit and they never have.
I would not agree with some sort of law that FORCES Sony to keep making discs but I would agree with their customers bitching enough about it that they choose to change course.
If they decide not to I'll just decide not to use them anymore. As someone who owns over 500 games on PlayStation though I absolutely have the right to call them out on their bullshit a spade is a spade and Sony is a greedy anti consumer company at this point. Used to love them.
You NEVER owned the game, only the media. See my other response about the legal EULA that have been included with every game you have ever purchased. Studios and publishers have no moral or legal duty to sell you a piece of plastic.
If you disagree philosophically, don't buy games from studios and publishers who don't distribute physical media...
However unhappy you are about this decision, it does NOT give you the legal or moral authority to DEMAND that an artist create art in the medium of your choice. I suspect the only reason that this vocal minority is kicking up a fuss is because they realize that the industry doesn't care, because they can still thrive without your business.
No one is going to hold the entire industry back because you and a miniscule minority are too cheap, or afraid to move forward.
Hey guess what. Companies retain less popular options all the time because it makes them more attractive as businesses.
LOL what? This is some „your carbon footprint“ level horseshit. It‘s like saying you the consumer chose global warming or to lose your job to automation. I mean, did you choose to live near a data center that was build last month? I didn‘t think so either.
We‘re not one tightly organized mass making decisions with far reaching consequences together as consumers. Providers on the other hand practice price-fixing and lobbying in an organized manner. That‘s where I would start pointing my finger at to explain this mess.
I, the consumer are terribly powerless. Only we, the people can change these things for the better by gutting these corporations.
Inf act some of us chose NOT to live next to the data center and they built the fucker anyway.
Agree with all points.
eventually an internal document will leak that details how sony colluded with other corporations and orchestrated the whole thing but it will be like big oil's climate research where even though they knew first and covered it up, its all our fault and we are responsible for fixing it while they continue to make it worse faster than we could possibly handle
Yet, older generations get blamed for causing the climate crisis.
they voted for and continue to vote for the people that actually cause it
Yeah, it's always someone elses fault.
Try get your games pressed onto disc and boxed. Shit’s difficult as fuck and Sony hasn’t done anything to streamline the process and make it easier and cheaper. Even if you have the money as an indie dev you will basically be forced to go through a publisher and forgo a significant chunk of your margin to get a physical release and the margins are already a quite ways smaller than digital for physical releases. Hence why indie games rarely see a physical release on PlayStation. Sure only a minority of people buy physical but so do a minority of music consumers buy vinyl. Yet vinyl is thriving. Sony is the gatekeeper they hold the keys to turn physical games into a successful niche segment of the market like what vinyl is to music but they purposefully decided not to.
I don't mind digital if i can own it, store it wherever i want and installing it without internet
"We gave you two options previously, making one prohibitively expensive unnecessarily, and you didn't pick that one as we planned. We respect your decision."
tada!
you chose this. you chose this by paying for it. you chose this by paying for digital releases.
he's not wrong.
doesn't matter. gamers will still pay Sony. they'll still buy digital releases. the cycle continues.
Easy for Valve to say; they never deleted anything anyone paid for without refunds. While I still think they would get pushback for it, I don't think it would have been as much had they not deleted over 500 movies from accounts just like a week before.
Not valve, a former valve employee
Valve deleted music tracks from GTA San Andreas with an “update.” No refunds.
Rockstar did that, not Valve. You also didn't pay for the music, anyway. You paid for the game.
Valve was still the middleman pushing consumer hostile update deleting files from MY COMPUTER.
Fuck Valve.
This is also not what people are choosing. This has been chosen for them. These mental gymnastics these capilitistic fucks always use to justify this garbage are just propaganda.
While consumers may value the ease of use of digital platforms this doesn't mean they want to give up their rights of resale or have their game pulled at a later date because of some licensing bullshit. Digital is fine if our rights are still protected, but they aren't.
I play on PC, last console I owned was Sega Saturn. I have a few physical copies but most of my games are on steam and Gog. a friend who plays in console and perceive as normal Sony's practices, asked what's the difference between how he choose to play and me: I shared with him the example, some time ago rockstar delisted the original 3d GTA trilogy. Its not available in any digital platforms as an option to buy, but I still have them and play actually.
Then I shared with him the amazing indie games, he can buy for cheap, and the recurring sales. And let him know that on Sony's ecosystem, they won't have this flexibility, they will set dynamic prices, lock people out without any easy way to appeal.
It dawned on him, finally. Yesterday he shared Dammit Jeff's video advising to turn auto update on ps5 off. Like him, there's a lot of players misinformed of the consequences of consoles tyranny.
There's a reason he's former steam.
I would happily buy steam physical games if they existed
They did. GameStop back in the day tried to stop Steam and the switch to digital codes in cases.
So some people bought digital and therefore that is justification to get rid of physical?
Most people.
No we havn't
I think part of the reason why games have inflated so little, compared to any other goods, is that they slowly but consistently moved from selling physically to selling digitally, thus increasing profit without needing to raise prices. Now they are forcing more to switch to digital AND they are increasing prices. I do think the AAA gaming industry is about to hit a wall quite soon
Playstation was dead to me once they released the PS3 and did the bait and switch linux thing (again).
Why do you care what Sony does, just avoid them all together.
The only hope is governments deciding that you have a right (probably for a limited time, discs dont last forever) for you to have license Key that you can use, trade, barter or sell.
But who will manage a database of keys? I hate that I am going to say this: a blockchain of key/ownership? I cant think of any other decentralized method.
Or a home brew is going to happen that "rips" the hard drive on install and makes a copy on a USB or attached drive or something, but that brings us back to the problem: the hardware itself.
If you don't own the machine, you don't own the data. You DONT own the playstation because it is proprietary and you cant do anything with it.
Blockchain doesn't necessarily need to have "Proof-of-Work" which is what makes Bitcoin and other cryptos so environmentally unfriendly.
It would be a fine method for tracking ownership from a trusted centralized source. And I mean "trusted" in the sense of "they probably won't just make some shit up because they'd get wrecked in court", not in terms of actual trust lol.
But you say "decentralized", for most blockchain projects that's just a buzzword lol, it's very hard to actually pull off. Especially without a financial incentive ie operators taking a cut of every sale made.
Sony has released very few single player games this generation on purpose. Single player games are perfect for physical media.
Sony wants everyone to play live service games to sell the game, the updates and the online subscription. It is part of the plan.
Yeah... for global gaming market disk sales are like under 5% of total sales, even for consoles it's like 10%. It's a nice option for you and me, a collectors item, aftermarket sales, a hedge for digital "ownership" rugpulls? For publishers and devs it's just a cost that doesn't even justify itself, because nobody is buying or putting their money where their mouth is. How low would the marketshare have to go for them to be justifying pulling the plug. Nobody really gave a shit about physical until few days ago.
Plus 90% of the games that come with disk option these days are irredeemable AAA slop anyway. Digital distribution enabled the indie scene where all the innovation is these days. if we had disks we we wouldn't have indie studios. Companies like EA, Sony, and Ubisoft would dominate totally and act as gatekeepers, because only they would have the resources pay for the upfront cost of publishing to make the damn things. Digital won, accept the caveats and be happy about the upsides.
If it was actually the consumers choice then Sony would continue offering the PlayStation with a disc drive and physical media since that is what the vast majority of consumers chose despite it costing more to purchase.
A random bluesky post is not a study
You can't draw any conclusions on console sales alone. I also bought the disc version, despite predomenantly buying digital releases.
It's more expensive but not that much more expensive. The difference was in the ballpark 50 bucks or so. On a 500 to 700 euro or so purchase (by the time you add a controller, charging stand, games etc.) this is peanuts.
I didn't buy the disc version because I needed it for physical games, I bought it to have the option.
For the record I hate that it's going away. But i'd be lying if I said I didn't get it.
I'd argue that that is exactly what you voted for. The option to still have physical media.
You may well have been buying mostly digital games, but you DID buy the console with a disk drive for a reason.
Somebody might buy a mountain bike, doesn't make the company they bought it from responsible for supplying a course to use it on.
Huh? What is this analogy? Doesn't make sense to me. In this case, your mountain bike provider is the sole provider of courses in the world and is now deciding to get rid of all off-road courses. Only asphalt remains.
Right, but why would they keep maintenance on these courses going if nobody uses them and only uses their mountainbike to ride to work, over the asphalt? Why not focus on making them better for that instead?
The community at large stopped buying games on disc. Evidently to the point Sony feels confident enough to axe them entirely without too much noise. So far it seems to me they are right, I don't really see the public outrage you can get with other controversies like the launch state of some games.
And why wouldn't they honestly, this has been pretty much the reality in the PC landscape since the PS3 era and also XBOX is also already pretty much there.
And yeah, technically on the PC there is "comptetition" in terms of other digital storefronts but it's mostly the publisher that decide where you buy their game, not you. So in practice it's highly debateable how much that actually works as proper competition for the consumer. In practice you just have a bunch of extra bloat installed...
You might not have that competion on the Playstation, but Sony is now going to have to keep the Playstation interesting to people without offline disc deals people could score elsewhere, we'll see how they manage...
I suppose we'll see, but if the numbers were real, seems 15% still bought physical. I'm one of those. I pretty much only buy games physically. I wouldn't mind if they kept selling the mountain bike (disc drive) and let others maintain the roads of their own volition. (Super rare games, etc.)
I am sorry, but "former" seems to be the keyword of the nonsense stated...
And have you ever heard of merchandize as CD, tapes, vinyl, mugs, t-shorts, statuettes, etc., and why it exists? Why some would love... to keep it closer to heart in hands...
My choice is for human art, dear "former writer'...
Which is really depressing as the only time I buy digital is when the games are 60% off or more.
I like digital games on PC, not gonna lie.
But the only money I'm spending on the consoles I have is on used games. That's what makes them worthwhile for me. I spent stupid money on the ps5 and psvr2 because my library of games could be built at a discount, and maybe every now and then I'll get a new game that looks interesting because I have the system already. I bought the disc version of the ps5 specifically, not right at launch but close enough to it that I had to look around to find one (and said no thanks to the driveless ones that were available). Can't remember if it was for the ps5 or psvr2 but for one of them I even held my nose and got it from walmart, which I try to avoid when possible.
Though the writing is already on the wall with these things. So many games are already just download codes even if they are on a disc or card, which means they require active support just to install and once that's gone (either by Sony or publisher's choice), then that game is gone. And I know you assholes think that's a good thing because it means someone who would otherwise be playing that game needs to find something else to do and that something else might be buying another new game. So ultimately it doesn't really matter if you (Sony) use discs or not, since removing them entirely is really just slamming that final nail in the coffin, but it's already there just waiting for the hammer. I probably won't get the next PlayStation either way.
I'm 37 years old, I only buy digital when it's cheap and easy.
I will never ever buy a $100 game digitally. Years ago when I bought overlord, overlords DLC and overlord 2 all for $5 and I got 40+ hours out of it.. That was 10 years ago.. If that is taken away from me then I'll be annoyed but I won't want to burn down the entire industry.
Rockstar a few years ago created a terrible remaster of GTA3, GTA VC and GTA SA and they wanted to exterminate the original PS2 versions.
I'm Happy the digital versions but I still have all of the PS2 discs in a box somewhere.
GTA VI is releasing soon with no disc... Enjoy! No disc.. And no Lazlow.. I've got plenty of other games on discs I can play.
Valve, who ushered in the digital only landscape for PC, is like, "We're all trying to find the guy who did this!"
Edit: this is a joke. Please Steam nerds put down your neck beards and chill.
I only care about getting a copy of the game, not a licence.
When was the last time you got a fully up-to-date playable title on physical media?
For me it was Call of Duty Black Ops 7 my friend beat it and gave me the disc for my PS5 since he is someone who plays them for a few months and moves on to another game.
That ability to freely give away or resell a game you bought is magical and has been a part of gaming on consoles since the beginning. Now, that's being taken away and I don't agree with it.
And you booted it up and played it straight away? No installation, no updates?
I'm not arguing against a resale/borrowing market, but that doesn't need to have anything to do with physical media.
I thinj you could the campaign but because Call of Duty games still require insane amounts of updates for multiplayer and that was what I was playing no.
However, I have a lot of games that I can run straight away off the discs those are always single player games though.
Doesn't change that you can't resell or trade digital though even DRM free. Disc was the only way to do that despite updates or whatever else it was transferable and yes that has everything to do with physical media.
On PlayStation's blog post that they since deleted but can be viewed in the archives many people said the same thing "ok then, can we sell or trade our digital games now?" The answer will be no, of course because that's what this is all about conquering.
Thing is, both Microsoft and Sony had this exact infrastructure built ready to go for Xbox One and PS4 prior to launch.
We were going to get full digital collections with a marketplace that would allow entitlement sales AND the ability to loan entitlements to friends for set periods of time.
When Microsoft announced the plans at E3 2013, a whiny minority of "core gamers" kicked up such a fuss that Microsofts stock tanked and they backpedalled... Sony hadn't made any announcements yet and presented the EXACT opposite of Microsoft's plan literally 8 hours later despite the fact that their existing hardware DevKits and system software functioned exactly as Microsoft had described. Sony got to look like the "hero" while both of them then scrambled to completely reengineer their hardware and system software prior to launch...
There is an opportunity to work with these companies toward defining what consumers actually want, but as long as the response they get is this petulant luddite outrage of "physical media or death" what is their motivation?
You can't make yourself unreasonable then expect people to reason with you.
Also, those launch discs might be playable, but you know as well as I do that it's the absolute smallest and worst version of the game. Software IS a service now, and that's fucking great because it means the thing you pay for once gets better better over time. You don't get that with any other consumer product.
I thought this was a scheme where you sell it back to Microsoft and they give you a few cents back on it, NOT where you could trade games between other players and that was why it wasn't received well.
It is not unreasonable to want to own or resell a game I buy I understand that can't be done on digital only PC storefronts but when the only other option is to buy digital on PC or PlayStation of you have both someone would be crazy to buy it on the one where they have to pay an ongoing subscription (that just increased!) To play it online.
Every single single player game I've gotten in the last 5 years have been on discs (for playstation) because I could sell it after I beat it and I was able to do that on Facebook marketplace for no fees and everyone was happy with the price. Now that that is being taken away I will just let my PlayStation collect dust and stop updating it until a jailbreak is available for it so I can copy the game files and actually own them.
I have bought every PlayStation since PS1 and have slowly watched them turn themselves into an anti consumer brand that values the C Suite and shareholders over what players actually want.
They "used metrics Sony Financial Reports
in a misleading way that heavily favors digital dominance. By calculating the digital ratio using total full-game software units—which naturally clumps digital-only indie titles, free-to-play titles, and older games with no active physical printing together with new AAA releases—the resulting percentages look overwhelmingly digital.
That right there, is the opposite of how Sony used to be.
Also no, because the game on disc has the ability to be updated and then it runs just exactly like any other game for the system. This can be a problem when they shut down their servers in 20 years but by that time a jailbreak will be ready to rock and I can update it anyway without their servers just like I do for PS4 and PS3 already.
The entire point, is that you get a game that runs the exact same as a digital download but you can sell it. I've basically gotten every single player game for 20-30% off by selling the one I finished before on Facebook marketplace (or if I feel like being robbed of its fair value I could take it to GameStop) and now that will not exist and since its the choice between a shitty digital store that literally JUST TOOK AWAY PEOPLES LEGAL PURCHASES (stole) vs the one that let's you download games you bought from their servers even after the publishers don't sell them anymore then its a very easy choice to never fuck with PlayStation ever again.
The only way I can see this working is if they let you trade games to other players in a public like marketplace not where they offer to give you $2 back when you revoke the license back to them like Xbox was trying to do.
This absolutely CAN be done, and again, MS and Sony built the infrastructure to support it. Steam could as well.
Again, you NEVER owned the game, period. Every single game you have ever purchased (even cartridge ones) came with an EULA explicitly stating that the game itself was "licensed, not sold", and that the studio/publisher had no legal duty to provide access for any specific period of time. You can go look at the games on your shelf RIGHT NOW and confirm this.
Do you have any source for this claim? Because I worked with the products during this timeframe and this is contrary to my understanding and every piece of NDA'd documentation I read.
Realistically we've chosen to have pricing tightly controlled and to no longer own anything.
Both these things can be fixed without needing physical copies, but we'll have to fight for it.
Nonsensical quote, discs are also digital.
Dragon's Lair on LaserDisc? 🤓
Really? I didn’t have a choice. You can play the games they offer as digital downloads, or you can not play the games. There is no “or you can buy the BluRay.”
So every game you wanted to play on PS5 was digital only?
I don’t have a a PS5.
So you’re not the consumer that the person in the OP is talking about, are you?
Sooo PCs used physical media, too? Or are we just making this a playstation pity party only instead of the loss of physical media for games in general?
Sony are not killing physical discs on PlayStation because people on pc buy all digital - they’re doing it because the overwhelming majority of PlayStation owners buy digital games.
I do prefer digital over all but that's because I play on PC now where those digital purchases will last generations at a time. My console game purchases are nearly always physical because I like to sell them on when I'm finished with them.
Over the last 10 years, I bought 5 digital games and played through dozens of physical. I guess it’s on me.
Goddammit you ruined it for us all
Slop. I don't know anyone who's ever bought digital when physical was available.
j/w - aren’t most PC stores digital only anyway?
It isn't about digital vs physical it's about ownership. On PC stores you're still downloading a computer file. That you keep.
PlayStation digital isn't like PC digital, it isn't a file that you store on a hard drive it's an entry in a database to say that you "own" that game. An entry that can be easily deleted whenever Sony feel like it. Think of it like the difference between Netflix and Jellyfin hosting.
Just like Netflix Sony can take away content whenever they want. At least with Netflix they don't try and claim that I own anything though.
ahhhh makes sense now
Yes, but the part everyone is leaving out is that was greatly helped along when stores like GameStop stopped carrying PC games other than WoW and CoD circa 2010.
Where was the choice?
How exactly did I choose digital? I don't even buy games.
Bean soup?
What the fuck!?! looks inside a blu ray disc.
1s and 0s
IT IS DIGITAL YOU UTTER CUUUUUUU
I own zero physical copies and don’t care too so I don’t see a problem
based