Because there’s a lot of misinformation in this thread.
All media is physical media. All data is stored on a medium. Data is real and physical. Some data is stored on paper in ink writing, some data is stored as ones and zeroes on a disc drive, but the type of disc drive may vary. Hard drives, USB thumbsticks, SSDs, and so on, are all physical media.
If I destroy a BluRay, or destroy a hard drive, or burn a piece of paper, does the data still physically exist? No. In all cases, destroying the medium in which the data exists destroys the data. Whether it is paper, a disc you put in a drive, or a hard drive.
When something is stored “in the cloud” it’s still on a hard drive somewhere, just not on your hard drive somewhere. You have essentially chosen to store your property on someone else’s private property. Much like a physical storage unit. If the storage unit burns down, everything in it will cease to exist. If the data center where your cloud data is stored burns down without any backups, same issue, the data ceases to exist.
People in this thread specifically only dislike one type of physical media, and it’s a type that has one of the shorter shelf-lifes for long-term data storage.
Also, with hard drives, its often trivial to recover deleted data, which is why companies that deal with secure data often completely shred old hard drives to prevent data being exfiltrated from them after wiping.
This is needlessly pedantic. When people say “physical copy” they are talking about a physical, individual storage medium with a game on it that you can trade/sell/lend/etc. and give full transfer of the license contained on it. My hard drive is useless to you if all my games are bought via the Microsoft store and you can’t access my account. My halo 3 disc will work on any Xbox 360/Xbone/XSX for anyone every day. Is the distinction clear now?
The problem is it’s kind of murky now since most discs don’t even contain the game anymore. So yeah you can lend/sell them but you’re still dependent on a digital store. It’s just a license for a digital game in physical form. I say this as a physical media proponent.
I am not pro-digital only but if the discs don’t have the game I’m less inclined to pay extra for what is likely to be the first part of my console to fail.
I hope I am wrong but I see the next generation as completely discless specially if this current generation discless versions sold good enough. The only exception could be Nintendo.
Of course they might require some deals with stores or just sell themselves the consoles online… Because the stores want to sell games, they might still sell peripherals and redeemable cards for money or maybe CD keys… No idea tough, but if the benefits fall they might say “Nah I am not selling your console if games aren’t sold here”.
What needs to happen is regulation. Pro-consumer governing bodies (which don’t exist in the US, but the EU has been on a roll) mandating the right to transfer a digital license.
As for the stores, Xbox offers GameStop a small percentage of the revenue from every digital game purchased on a console sold by GameStop. That feels like a healthy compromise for an all-digital business model.
mandating the right to transfer a digital license.
Even for the EU that is not an easy thing to deal with in practice. First they would need to outright ban practices where you rent your license for an unspecified time instead of owning it. (this is how it is with everything in mobile app stores, Steam, Epic etc…)
And transfer of digital licenses in general is a very hard nut to crack. How do you simply prove who the license owner is? What about accounts being tied to licenses? (Imagine the EU asking software companies that all products above the value of €25 must be sold with a hardware key to run them & if the key is damaged they are mandated to replace it at the manufacturing cost of said hardware key, or use a central EU ran entity to handle these keys that the companies would need to buy from them. Pretty far fetched, isn’t it?)
Decades of lenient legislation made all this night impossible untangle…
i’m not sure if you understood my comment. The issue is that they sell you software for the full price, but there is a fine print on there somewhere that clearly states that they can remove your access at any time due to a variety of reasons. For example I have lost games due to Apple policies forced the dev to remove them from the app store and then I could not reinstall them anymore.
And transfer of digital licenses in general is a very hard nut to crack. How do you simply prove who the license owner is? What about accounts being tied to licenses?
Another big problem is that the digital license must be transferrable even if the original digital store is deactivated.
The above seems to be the only legitimate use case of Blockchain to me, but the chain must be operated by the state to ensure digital licenses continue to be transferrable
As I understand it, most disc copies of games today aren’t viable in the first place. Either all of the game data is not on the disc and some needs to be downloaded anyway, or the game copy on the disc is in such a shit state that you wouldn’t want to play that specific copy.
Discs don’t really protect us in the sense of ownership. It’s still reliant on the same backend to enable it in most practical senses.
I mean, maybe disk drives are outdated, but being unable to buy used games or give your old game to a friend is garbage (but great for profits of the console manufacturers and game studios). Not to mention that as long as it’s a digital download, you don’t own the game - you lease it at a flat rate.
Limiting the options and ownership rights of the consumer for profit is bad.
That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. They want to sell you digital version specifically because you can’t resell them. It could easily be solved by creating a digital marketplace, and even turn a profit for the publishers by taking a cut of resales.
That’s why stuff like Gamepass are picking up. Poorer families may not be able to afford a £70 game each month, but £15 a month for a huge library is more achiveable.
I wouldn’t say this is always true. Numerous times I’ve bought digital games from the PS store that were heavily discounted while places like Gamestop were still asking MSRP ($69.99) for new or $10 off for used on a game that came out years prior. I still prefer to own a disc but sometimes digital is cheaper and more convenient.
This sounds like a console user problem. PCs haven’t had disc drives for years and the games are far cheaper. Yes, there’s no second-hand market, but with steam sales, humble bundles, and all the freebies I post in !freegames@feddit.uk it’s not really become the corpo hellscape we feared.
Also technically you don’t own games on disc either, it’s just much harder for the publisher to come round your house and snap your copy!
With how games work these days, having just the disk is pretty much useless if the publisher decides to delist or discontinue the game from platform, because:
patches and updates don’t come with disk form anymore.
many games that requires online authentication to play won’t be available to keep playing if their account service is down.
games go on sale with steady rate most of the time(except nintendo), for bargain bin deals you would probably find the game on humble bundle or gog.
you often have the good games that release “better” remake version over and over anyway. Note, I know people sometimes prefer the original version, but not everyone is on the same page and it hugely depending on the dev/publisher for the newer version.
Now let’s describe the cons:
in many countries, breaking DRM is illegal. So even if all you want to do archive, you can’t make a decrypted copy. That’s why homebrew etc provides the key/dumper for you to do such at your own risk. IMO, it’s safer(INAL) to download pirated iso/rom compare to doing your own dump. And, archiver actually tried to keep a post patch version before store is closed down(see wiiu store close example), the disk version is not a viable option anymore for archiver.
storage up keep, physical things require storage space. I still have like 3 large shipping box for my older gen(ps3/GC/Wii/X360 games) I will probably donate them to library or something and keep the only ones I wanted to keep.
console part cost, the BD drives are often first point of failure, then HDMI connectors. Cause well, moving parts are easier to break and harder to QA. PS5’s 2 versions gives a good example how the disk affects the look, weight, etc. Not to mention, they are a lot slower then SSD and you are required to install all that anyway.
developer/publisher/platform see nothing for used game sales. It sounds like huge shill talk but let’s be honest, they want to make a living, if you are not supporting your favorite developer they will have to offset the cost by doing shit you all won’t like. ie, mtx, subscription service, selling analytic data, selling the studio to shit publisher that push worth practice, platform raise price to meet target projection. Buy/sell used game only helps that service owner(gamestop/ebgame/bestbuy, not the community.)
did I mention switching disc just to play game is a PITA, and if your case is the modern garbage version, remember those plastic break down more easily and you would have to buy new case to hold your disc.
environment waste for all the manufacturing, packaging and shipping. It’s honestly not worth that in modern era if you give a fuck about how future generation will live.
Not to mention that as long as it’s a digital download, you don’t own the game - you lease it at a flat rate.
not true all the time. Plenty of games once you have the files are easily able to run. KSP is one such example. I can just copy the KSP folder to any computer and play the game.
Its the devs choice to require things like Steam to validate the game etc.
That’s fair. It often is the case though, and I think many people don’t consider that as being a problem because it just doesn’t occur to them.
I think Valve is an example of a company that does it well, since you can download the game if Steam were ever to go under, etc. and you can add non-steam games to steam. It’s almost unavoidable that they do it well, though, since steam is running on PCs (mostly).
But Nintendo does it badly. If Nintendo decides to stop supporting Switch downloads, my digital content will vanish (unless I root my switch, etc. but then I may as well just pirate everything). But, at least nintendo has a card reader for their games - if they got rid of it, I’d never truly own any Switch game and would also be forced to pay massively inflated priced for re-released old games, crappy switch ports, or Nintendo titles which almost never decrease in price or go on sale.
One of my biggest annoyance is when you have multiple switches on a family account. If you use cartridges local co-op (or whatever it is called) requires two copies of the game (a cartridge in each). If you have the downloaded versions/digital download, then any device on the Nintendo account (ie: 2 switches for kids on a family account) can play against each other locally.
I don’t think you can cache/save a cartridge to a device to be able to do their local play feature (ie via ad-hoc connections in a car)
Other games i know that do this are factorio (you are able to download the game as a zip, and it doesnt stop you from making as many copies as you desire)
This article is about consoles, not PCs. Good luck copying your console game to another folder on the HD.
Even disk-based games on newer consoles often don’t include the full game; in many cases they’re just an installer, really, which then requires downloading the bulk of the files from the net.
Even disk-based games on newer consoles often don’t include the full game
That’s pretty rare despite being constantly mentioned in this thread. I can think of a few that are strictly multiplayer games or the Master Chief Collection which is just a huge net installer disc.
Otherwise games still become gold and are playable start to finish off disc. Switch games on the other hand have quite a few that require a download.
PS4 console data you can back up
Backing up your data regularly is a great way to ensure that important data is saved. You can back up the following types of data saved to a USB drive.
Games and apps
Saved data
Screenshots and video clips
Settings
All user data saved on your PS4 console (excluding trophies) is included in the backup data. When you restore your backup data, your PS4 console is reset, and all data saved on your console is erased.
If you want to return data without restoring your console, use USB extended storage or cloud storage.
I tried copying game data when we were replacing our PS4 hard drive, but it just caused a lot of problems (with games having to “verify” the installation when launched, which was a very lengthy process, probably longer than just re-downloading it would have been; I don’t know what it was actually doing). We were able to preserve save data, though.
For me, this was because the PS4 uses USB 2.0 that caps out at 480 Mbps. It was basically doing checksums of the backup files vs the restored and it just took time, even when the backups I had it running on were a sata SSD.
Funny enough that was already possible on the PS3, so it’s a matter of control rather than technological limitation. They use the excuse of “technological progress” to close the walled garden even more.
He is obviously biased by his business interests, but frankly he is ultimately correct. Once consoles are digital only, console players will lose the last form of control they have over anything they own.
You don’t need CDs for that, and CDs don’t prevent that.
As the other user pointed out, most CDs don’t even have a playable form of the game on them anymore. You usually need additional updates to actually play the game (or in the case of those steam installs, the CD doesn’t even have a bare minimum on it)
Technically you can own a game as a digital install too, just they won’t deliver it that way.
Every single game I bought up to the PS4 could be played without any downloads.
But they still couldn’t be played directly from the disk, which is part of the point of the comment you replied to. Every single game I have for PS3 requires it to be installed onto the console in order to play it.
This is why I edited my last comment to say explicitly “played without any download” rather than “run from the disk”, the comment I replied to was missing my point. I couldn’t care less if the disk goes spinny or not, this is not about storage technology, it’s about control over the games you buy. The point is owning games without being bound to online services, which a disk that can be installed directly does perfectly fine.
They’re all digital only now. There’s no reason, at all, to have optical drives in consoles. With the advent of direct nvme to video memory you have to load content to the nvme anyway because spinning g plastic sucks soooo much. Today SD is actually cheaper per gb than Blu-ray.
Want to purchase a physical copy? Buy it on a SD card and get a $10 usb SD card reader, which will be compatible with every console anyway.
My prediction will be that the next gen (PS6) will go 100% download only, get shat on then start up a service with gamestop or someone to distro encrypted game installs onto WHATEVER usb media you bring in.
Just checked Amazon prizes for the first best SD card and Bluray disc. This is a lie. Discs are still less than half the prize.
And you didn’t take into consideration that it’s much cheaper and faster to press the data onto the disc than writing on an SD card when you do that in great numbers.
30 second search at 100gb (modern AAA games and the biggest Bluray)
Bluray is $10 a disc, microsd is $8 and you get 128gb and can get bigger media, which doesn’t exist for Bluray.
That doesn’t account for mass production, fewer people care about physical media with every passing year.
Physical media will still exist, but it won’t be optical. Opticals advantages over cart just don’t exist anymore. You don’t include a $80+ part on the bom when less than 5% of your users want it and that 5% can get a bog standard usb device that can be had for $10
Its incredibly niave to think it costs Sony, co-developer of blu-ray, $10 to press a game onto a blu-ray disc. Its probably costs a dollar or less to manufacturer a disc by bow. They can sell blurray movies for $9.99 and still profit.
It will definitely be cheaper for Sony to stick with optical discs next gen if they don’t drop the drive entirely.
Nobody said it was. It’s a medium to get games from a brick and mortar store to install onto the nvme on the console you can’t play modern games directly from Bluray either.
You should check prices on the 2GB SD cards not the high end ones because the disks usually contain that much or less. Most AAA games only have the game INSTALLER on the disk, and still require you to download the game in order to play it.
You are mixing having your own physical copy with needing to run games straight from the disk. Nevermind that there’s no reason that games couldn’t be sold on faster cartridges, you can still have a physical media that can install a game into the console. Offline, without relying on an online service that will inevitably close eventually.
As it is, with disks and cartridges, they can’t make it so absolutely every game must check with their online services. They have to make sure grandma in the boonies can make little Timmy’s game work right out of the box. Without them, there’s nothing stopping them. They could even straight up say that “no game could be expected to last more than 10 years”, and I see enough people that already seem ready to fall for that. Nevermind that to this day there’s people playing the nearly 40 year old Super Mario Bros.
I literally just replied to you about this and I don’t know where you are getting it from. Games may ask for updates but games that are unplayable without downloads are very much the exception.
Six months ago Cohen didn’t give a flying fuck about disc drives because he was selling the idea that you would soon buy all your games from GameStop on an NFT marketplace that they recently had to shut down because the SEC is cracking down on NFTs as Securities.
He gives a fuck now because his golden goose got shot in the head.
I have an XBox One S (and a PC) - really hits home when in Game Stop with my kids and they were looking around (mainly for figures and such), and i’m like “there’s nothing for me here”. Of course I haven’t bought a physical PC title in over 10 years now that I think of it. I feel for the shop owners, they haven nothing for me to buy and I used to like going to shop around. Come to think of it I used to go to book stores quite often too, but not since i got my first kindle.
I did recently re-buy an Xbox 360 and it is kind of nice to browse second hand shops and such and just pickup a game that I can just play without internet etc.
When physical media dies, I no longer have a good reason to buy consoles… that’s literally the whole reason I bother with them - I like browsing through the cases to pick games to play.
I have through ps5, and plan to get a series s or whatever the newest with-optical Xbox is (because I can skip the one, nicely backward compatible), but that’s likely where I end the console journey. As it is now it’s getting harder to find physical copies because so many people only have them digitally. The used game market is already ruined for modern consoles, and I’m not paying full price to rent a game.
I don’t support that user-hostile model. I’ll just pirate all that shit on pc.
I kept hoping that Sony would do a last hurrah with discs and make a console that plays them all. But with discs being pretty much antiquated at this point, I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Sony management didn’t even see a point to backwards compatibility until recently and still can’t be bothered to figure out PS3 emulation. It’s easily the console’s greatest flaw imo.
He’s only saying this about disc drives because six months ago he was saying “You’ll be buying all your games as NFTs from GameStop!” (notice he didn’t give one fuck about physical media six months ago?) and then when that went tits up and they closed their cryptocoin and NFT wallets, they need another way to get people to keep buying stocks. They’ve got those Gamestonk idiots still in a frenzy and they haven’t yet woken up to being taken for a ride since the NFT dream turned bust.
They were selling the idea to Superstonk investment idiots that the “future” of game sales was in NFTs where you would “really own your copy of the game.” Which… to anyone who knows how NFTs really work is such a sick fucking joke as to pawn that idea off on to consumers.
Nvm I misread your initial comment as saying they were shutting down their cryptocoin (as in a coin they launched themselves). Seems they’re shutting down the wallet bc it’s the most vulnerable to violating the vague regulations currently in place. They’ve still got the marketplace and recently announced a project called PlayR that looks to be a game streaming platform.
I can see them forced to have some form of resellable media Ala switch maybe. But disc’s as others have stated I think are on the way out. Esp bc they’re so easily scratched and everything else…like good for a time but should’ve had something else come in once cartridges caught back up in price. They were always quicker by a long shot…it’s just that memory prices weren’t there in the 90s or until now even really. If I don’t like or don’t want a game I want some way to sell it off and can’t do that digitally bc they won’t equate it to the same thing as selling a used copy XD
I have never ever managed to scratch a disc to the point where it became unusable. Neither have I ever had problems when buying used discs. I agree about the speed though; at this point my internet speed surpasses the speed with which games are installed from a disc
I mean I’ve bought plenty that were scratched but still worked. Only one that didn’t really was the twilight princess we found randomly in my church parking lot when I was younger. I just don’t like the speed since no one seems to get nailing down loading times. I’d love something Ala switch games tho…
You could probably steal the Mona Lisa and bring it to GameStop, only to be told they’ll buy it for some crusty, old, pre-chewed gum they found on the sidewalk a year ago. And that’s if you’re lucky.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !gaming@beehaw.org
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it’s gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
They should keep putting whip holders in cars.
Damn, lot of hate for physical media in this thread.
Because there’s a lot of misinformation in this thread.
All media is physical media. All data is stored on a medium. Data is real and physical. Some data is stored on paper in ink writing, some data is stored as ones and zeroes on a disc drive, but the type of disc drive may vary. Hard drives, USB thumbsticks, SSDs, and so on, are all physical media.
If I destroy a BluRay, or destroy a hard drive, or burn a piece of paper, does the data still physically exist? No. In all cases, destroying the medium in which the data exists destroys the data. Whether it is paper, a disc you put in a drive, or a hard drive.
When something is stored “in the cloud” it’s still on a hard drive somewhere, just not on your hard drive somewhere. You have essentially chosen to store your property on someone else’s private property. Much like a physical storage unit. If the storage unit burns down, everything in it will cease to exist. If the data center where your cloud data is stored burns down without any backups, same issue, the data ceases to exist.
People in this thread specifically only dislike one type of physical media, and it’s a type that has one of the shorter shelf-lifes for long-term data storage.
Also, with hard drives, its often trivial to recover deleted data, which is why companies that deal with secure data often completely shred old hard drives to prevent data being exfiltrated from them after wiping.
This is needlessly pedantic. When people say “physical copy” they are talking about a physical, individual storage medium with a game on it that you can trade/sell/lend/etc. and give full transfer of the license contained on it. My hard drive is useless to you if all my games are bought via the Microsoft store and you can’t access my account. My halo 3 disc will work on any Xbox 360/Xbone/XSX for anyone every day. Is the distinction clear now?
Yes it is weird. I get people preferring digital copies but I dont get having hostility toward physical media.
Xbox One announcement (E3 2013): "YOU CAN TAKE MY DISKS FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS!
Current Year (2023): “Disks are outdated and dead, who needs em anyway?”
Y’all forget way too easily and they are starting to prey upon it.
To be fair, most people are thinking of the reasons of ownership, whereas xbox one was about availability.
The problem is it’s kind of murky now since most discs don’t even contain the game anymore. So yeah you can lend/sell them but you’re still dependent on a digital store. It’s just a license for a digital game in physical form. I say this as a physical media proponent.
I am not pro-digital only but if the discs don’t have the game I’m less inclined to pay extra for what is likely to be the first part of my console to fail.
I hope I am wrong but I see the next generation as completely discless specially if this current generation discless versions sold good enough. The only exception could be Nintendo.
Of course they might require some deals with stores or just sell themselves the consoles online… Because the stores want to sell games, they might still sell peripherals and redeemable cards for money or maybe CD keys… No idea tough, but if the benefits fall they might say “Nah I am not selling your console if games aren’t sold here”.
What needs to happen is regulation. Pro-consumer governing bodies (which don’t exist in the US, but the EU has been on a roll) mandating the right to transfer a digital license.
As for the stores, Xbox offers GameStop a small percentage of the revenue from every digital game purchased on a console sold by GameStop. That feels like a healthy compromise for an all-digital business model.
Even for the EU that is not an easy thing to deal with in practice. First they would need to outright ban practices where you rent your license for an unspecified time instead of owning it. (this is how it is with everything in mobile app stores, Steam, Epic etc…) And transfer of digital licenses in general is a very hard nut to crack. How do you simply prove who the license owner is? What about accounts being tied to licenses? (Imagine the EU asking software companies that all products above the value of €25 must be sold with a hardware key to run them & if the key is damaged they are mandated to replace it at the manufacturing cost of said hardware key, or use a central EU ran entity to handle these keys that the companies would need to buy from them. Pretty far fetched, isn’t it?)
Decades of lenient legislation made all this night impossible untangle…
Why?
People were able to rent games in the past. What happened then that was so bad?
i’m not sure if you understood my comment. The issue is that they sell you software for the full price, but there is a fine print on there somewhere that clearly states that they can remove your access at any time due to a variety of reasons. For example I have lost games due to Apple policies forced the dev to remove them from the app store and then I could not reinstall them anymore.
I mean - if the button says “buy” or “purchase” it’s not renting a license, no matter what the fine print in the terms say.
That’s at least how it should be.
Somehow the law ignores the giant flashing “Buy!” button but is super concerned about the fine print in 6pt font nobody reads.
Another big problem is that the digital license must be transferrable even if the original digital store is deactivated.
The above seems to be the only legitimate use case of Blockchain to me, but the chain must be operated by the state to ensure digital licenses continue to be transferrable
At some point, someone will have to wonder if they have/own anything.
This isn’t The Ascetic Virtues. We develop raport with physical, tangible, things.
As I understand it, most disc copies of games today aren’t viable in the first place. Either all of the game data is not on the disc and some needs to be downloaded anyway, or the game copy on the disc is in such a shit state that you wouldn’t want to play that specific copy.
Discs don’t really protect us in the sense of ownership. It’s still reliant on the same backend to enable it in most practical senses.
I wonder why they would want that
I mean, maybe disk drives are outdated, but being unable to buy used games or give your old game to a friend is garbage (but great for profits of the console manufacturers and game studios). Not to mention that as long as it’s a digital download, you don’t own the game - you lease it at a flat rate.
Limiting the options and ownership rights of the consumer for profit is bad.
That’s not a bug, it’s a feature. They want to sell you digital version specifically because you can’t resell them. It could easily be solved by creating a digital marketplace, and even turn a profit for the publishers by taking a cut of resales.
It’s only outdated to the rich families who can afford brand new games for their kids. Excluding discs is a great way to force many out of the market.
That’s why stuff like Gamepass are picking up. Poorer families may not be able to afford a £70 game each month, but £15 a month for a huge library is more achiveable.
I wouldn’t say this is always true. Numerous times I’ve bought digital games from the PS store that were heavily discounted while places like Gamestop were still asking MSRP ($69.99) for new or $10 off for used on a game that came out years prior. I still prefer to own a disc but sometimes digital is cheaper and more convenient.
That’s why NFT’s were created, but now that people link NFT’s to dumb ass pictures, I wonder how if ever it’ll make it as proof of ownership.
This sounds like a console user problem. PCs haven’t had disc drives for years and the games are far cheaper. Yes, there’s no second-hand market, but with steam sales, humble bundles, and all the freebies I post in !freegames@feddit.uk it’s not really become the corpo hellscape we feared.
Also technically you don’t own games on disc either, it’s just much harder for the publisher to come round your house and snap your copy!
With how games work these days, having just the disk is pretty much useless if the publisher decides to delist or discontinue the game from platform, because:
Now let’s describe the cons:
not true all the time. Plenty of games once you have the files are easily able to run. KSP is one such example. I can just copy the KSP folder to any computer and play the game.
Its the devs choice to require things like Steam to validate the game etc.
That’s fair. It often is the case though, and I think many people don’t consider that as being a problem because it just doesn’t occur to them.
I think Valve is an example of a company that does it well, since you can download the game if Steam were ever to go under, etc. and you can add non-steam games to steam. It’s almost unavoidable that they do it well, though, since steam is running on PCs (mostly).
But Nintendo does it badly. If Nintendo decides to stop supporting Switch downloads, my digital content will vanish (unless I root my switch, etc. but then I may as well just pirate everything). But, at least nintendo has a card reader for their games - if they got rid of it, I’d never truly own any Switch game and would also be forced to pay massively inflated priced for re-released old games, crappy switch ports, or Nintendo titles which almost never decrease in price or go on sale.
Would agree. Especially re:Nintendo.
One of my biggest annoyance is when you have multiple switches on a family account. If you use cartridges local co-op (or whatever it is called) requires two copies of the game (a cartridge in each). If you have the downloaded versions/digital download, then any device on the Nintendo account (ie: 2 switches for kids on a family account) can play against each other locally.
I don’t think you can cache/save a cartridge to a device to be able to do their local play feature (ie via ad-hoc connections in a car)
Other games i know that do this are factorio (you are able to download the game as a zip, and it doesnt stop you from making as many copies as you desire)
This article is about consoles, not PCs. Good luck copying your console game to another folder on the HD.
Even disk-based games on newer consoles often don’t include the full game; in many cases they’re just an installer, really, which then requires downloading the bulk of the files from the net.
That’s pretty rare despite being constantly mentioned in this thread. I can think of a few that are strictly multiplayer games or the Master Chief Collection which is just a huge net installer disc.
Otherwise games still become gold and are playable start to finish off disc. Switch games on the other hand have quite a few that require a download.
I have backups of my games on a PS4, which is air gapped (because the USB interface took a shot of lighning and no longer works).
I have been able to restore them and play games/saves on this console.
Here: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/ps4-back-up-and-restore-with-external-storage/
FTA:
I tried copying game data when we were replacing our PS4 hard drive, but it just caused a lot of problems (with games having to “verify” the installation when launched, which was a very lengthy process, probably longer than just re-downloading it would have been; I don’t know what it was actually doing). We were able to preserve save data, though.
For me, this was because the PS4 uses USB 2.0 that caps out at 480 Mbps. It was basically doing checksums of the backup files vs the restored and it just took time, even when the backups I had it running on were a sata SSD.
Funny enough that was already possible on the PS3, so it’s a matter of control rather than technological limitation. They use the excuse of “technological progress” to close the walled garden even more.
deleted by creator
He is obviously biased by his business interests, but frankly he is ultimately correct. Once consoles are digital only, console players will lose the last form of control they have over anything they own.
Not if modern proof of ownership technologies are implemented, such as NFT smart contracts.
Nah, dumping your own copy, or at least DRM-free digital, is a much more reliable way to maintain your ownership than any blockchain-based system.
You don’t need CDs for that, and CDs don’t prevent that.
As the other user pointed out, most CDs don’t even have a playable form of the game on them anymore. You usually need additional updates to actually play the game (or in the case of those steam installs, the CD doesn’t even have a bare minimum on it)
Technically you can own a game as a digital install too, just they won’t deliver it that way.
Most? That’s definitely not right. Every single game I bought up to the PS4 could be played without any downloads.
But they still couldn’t be played directly from the disk, which is part of the point of the comment you replied to. Every single game I have for PS3 requires it to be installed onto the console in order to play it.
This is why I edited my last comment to say explicitly “played without any download” rather than “run from the disk”, the comment I replied to was missing my point. I couldn’t care less if the disk goes spinny or not, this is not about storage technology, it’s about control over the games you buy. The point is owning games without being bound to online services, which a disk that can be installed directly does perfectly fine.
Unless it needs a day one patch, then you’re SHIT OUTTA LUCK
I watched a YouTube video where the guy played Cyberpunk on a PS4 from disc with no patches installed. It was as bad as you think.
Cyberpunk on PS4 was an unparalleled shitshow
I think they mean most recent or most new games, the PS4 came out nearly a decade ago.
They’re all digital only now. There’s no reason, at all, to have optical drives in consoles. With the advent of direct nvme to video memory you have to load content to the nvme anyway because spinning g plastic sucks soooo much. Today SD is actually cheaper per gb than Blu-ray.
Want to purchase a physical copy? Buy it on a SD card and get a $10 usb SD card reader, which will be compatible with every console anyway.
My prediction will be that the next gen (PS6) will go 100% download only, get shat on then start up a service with gamestop or someone to distro encrypted game installs onto WHATEVER usb media you bring in.
Just checked Amazon prizes for the first best SD card and Bluray disc. This is a lie. Discs are still less than half the prize.
And you didn’t take into consideration that it’s much cheaper and faster to press the data onto the disc than writing on an SD card when you do that in great numbers.
30 second search at 100gb (modern AAA games and the biggest Bluray)
Bluray is $10 a disc, microsd is $8 and you get 128gb and can get bigger media, which doesn’t exist for Bluray.
That doesn’t account for mass production, fewer people care about physical media with every passing year.
Physical media will still exist, but it won’t be optical. Opticals advantages over cart just don’t exist anymore. You don’t include a $80+ part on the bom when less than 5% of your users want it and that 5% can get a bog standard usb device that can be had for $10
Its incredibly niave to think it costs Sony, co-developer of blu-ray, $10 to press a game onto a blu-ray disc. Its probably costs a dollar or less to manufacturer a disc by bow. They can sell blurray movies for $9.99 and still profit.
It will definitely be cheaper for Sony to stick with optical discs next gen if they don’t drop the drive entirely.
It’s also dumb to expect they’ll be paying retail for microsd or whatever usb flash sticks they decive to use.
MicroSD is not comparable to the flash memory on NVME SSDs.
Bluray hasn’t been $10 a disc since maybe 2003. Bluray discs are literally pennies to a manufacturer like Sony.
Nobody said it was. It’s a medium to get games from a brick and mortar store to install onto the nvme on the console you can’t play modern games directly from Bluray either.
You should check prices on the 2GB SD cards not the high end ones because the disks usually contain that much or less. Most AAA games only have the game INSTALLER on the disk, and still require you to download the game in order to play it.
You are mixing having your own physical copy with needing to run games straight from the disk. Nevermind that there’s no reason that games couldn’t be sold on faster cartridges, you can still have a physical media that can install a game into the console. Offline, without relying on an online service that will inevitably close eventually.
As it is, with disks and cartridges, they can’t make it so absolutely every game must check with their online services. They have to make sure grandma in the boonies can make little Timmy’s game work right out of the box. Without them, there’s nothing stopping them. They could even straight up say that “no game could be expected to last more than 10 years”, and I see enough people that already seem ready to fall for that. Nevermind that to this day there’s people playing the nearly 40 year old Super Mario Bros.
…and yet, most AAA games cannot do this, and require you to go online and download the game assets after you put the disk in the console.
I literally just replied to you about this and I don’t know where you are getting it from. Games may ask for updates but games that are unplayable without downloads are very much the exception.
Yeah keep that mindset and follow Blockbuster’s fate.
Six months ago Cohen didn’t give a flying fuck about disc drives because he was selling the idea that you would soon buy all your games from GameStop on an NFT marketplace that they recently had to shut down because the SEC is cracking down on NFTs as Securities.
He gives a fuck now because his golden goose got shot in the head.
Besides Gamestop - I think it could be important. What if the servers shut up in the future? How do you get your purchased games?
You download them and back them up. What happens if the disc is scratched or your buddy drops a blunt on it?
Your buddy buys you a new disk…
If it’s still being published or if a second hand copy doesn’t cost more than your buddy’s annual wage.
What fucking second hand games are you buying? Beloved classics aren’t that expensive.
If they’re purely digital and drmed you can’t back them up.
I have backups of my PS4, with games downloaded from the PS store that say different.
Heck any Playstation disc games tries multiple times to get you to save it to the HDD.
The DRM is the key part of that. So the answer is DRM-free, not physical media. Especially since all games get patched these days.
You can’t buy all games at GOG.
You can’t buy all games on disc either. Also, not every game on Steam has DRM.
In retrospect there were some advantages to Blockbuster compared to streaming services where stuff disappears every day.
I have an XBox One S (and a PC) - really hits home when in Game Stop with my kids and they were looking around (mainly for figures and such), and i’m like “there’s nothing for me here”. Of course I haven’t bought a physical PC title in over 10 years now that I think of it. I feel for the shop owners, they haven nothing for me to buy and I used to like going to shop around. Come to think of it I used to go to book stores quite often too, but not since i got my first kindle.
I did recently re-buy an Xbox 360 and it is kind of nice to browse second hand shops and such and just pickup a game that I can just play without internet etc.
Discs suck, other than for used game sales and collecting.
But used games sales is a huge plus. But realistically I think we’ll see maybe one more console generation with physical media.
When physical media dies, I no longer have a good reason to buy consoles… that’s literally the whole reason I bother with them - I like browsing through the cases to pick games to play.
I have through ps5, and plan to get a series s or whatever the newest with-optical Xbox is (because I can skip the one, nicely backward compatible), but that’s likely where I end the console journey. As it is now it’s getting harder to find physical copies because so many people only have them digitally. The used game market is already ruined for modern consoles, and I’m not paying full price to rent a game.
I don’t support that user-hostile model. I’ll just pirate all that shit on pc.
I kept hoping that Sony would do a last hurrah with discs and make a console that plays them all. But with discs being pretty much antiquated at this point, I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Sony management didn’t even see a point to backwards compatibility until recently and still can’t be bothered to figure out PS3 emulation. It’s easily the console’s greatest flaw imo.
I agree.
Looking at RPCS3, it seems like most PS3 games wouldn’t run well on PS5 without dedicated, PS3-like hardware.
GameStop is terrible for the industry. GameStop is chock full of terrible business practices. Fuck GameStop.
He’s only saying this about disc drives because six months ago he was saying “You’ll be buying all your games as NFTs from GameStop!” (notice he didn’t give one fuck about physical media six months ago?) and then when that went tits up and they closed their cryptocoin and NFT wallets, they need another way to get people to keep buying stocks. They’ve got those Gamestonk idiots still in a frenzy and they haven’t yet woken up to being taken for a ride since the NFT dream turned bust.
deleted by creator
What cryptocoin?
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/08/gamestop-citing-regulatory-uncertainty-winds-down-its-crypto-and-nft-wallet/
They were selling the idea to Superstonk investment idiots that the “future” of game sales was in NFTs where you would “really own your copy of the game.” Which… to anyone who knows how NFTs really work is such a sick fucking joke as to pawn that idea off on to consumers.
Nvm I misread your initial comment as saying they were shutting down their cryptocoin (as in a coin they launched themselves). Seems they’re shutting down the wallet bc it’s the most vulnerable to violating the vague regulations currently in place. They’ve still got the marketplace and recently announced a project called PlayR that looks to be a game streaming platform.
deleted by creator
I can see them forced to have some form of resellable media Ala switch maybe. But disc’s as others have stated I think are on the way out. Esp bc they’re so easily scratched and everything else…like good for a time but should’ve had something else come in once cartridges caught back up in price. They were always quicker by a long shot…it’s just that memory prices weren’t there in the 90s or until now even really. If I don’t like or don’t want a game I want some way to sell it off and can’t do that digitally bc they won’t equate it to the same thing as selling a used copy XD
I have never ever managed to scratch a disc to the point where it became unusable. Neither have I ever had problems when buying used discs. I agree about the speed though; at this point my internet speed surpasses the speed with which games are installed from a disc
I mean I’ve bought plenty that were scratched but still worked. Only one that didn’t really was the twilight princess we found randomly in my church parking lot when I was younger. I just don’t like the speed since no one seems to get nailing down loading times. I’d love something Ala switch games tho…
I want a return to cartridges, like the switch.
Same tbh…
I bought a discless ps5, because I haven’t put a dosc in my ps4 since 2016. I really have no need or want for one.
“We miss selling you a scratched up disc for $49 with no box, that we paid some poor kid $2 for”
I remember after I got a 3DS I went to GameStop to trade in my DSi and they offered me $5 or a gift card.
You could probably steal the Mona Lisa and bring it to GameStop, only to be told they’ll buy it for some crusty, old, pre-chewed gum they found on the sidewalk a year ago. And that’s if you’re lucky.