this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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This is yet another nail in the coffin of physical media. Or, in other words games you actually own instead of long term lease.
It's not like physical media makes any difference anyway these days.
Actual disk often gets just a glorified installer, and even if it includes the entire game you're likely to have to activate it online anyway.
The "own your games" ship has sailed long ago, unless you only buy no-DRM and your own backups.
Going to have to plug GOG here as these are both things they offer. I try to buy games there instead of Steam, purely for this reason.
Note that this is a major selling point for GOG and available on most of their library, but unlike their early days, not everything is DRM-free.
Piracy is the only way, clearly capitalism doesn’t give and inch.
Nor a funk
The difference is the price of buying discs vs. buying from a digital store that has no competitors.
I've bought almost exclusively second-hand discs for my PS5, because they're like half the price for the exact same content.
Sadly it'll probably be just a matter of time before those will be phased out as well, one way or another.
Steam keys can be found dramatically cheaper than all of that.
They can, difference is a vast majority of people don't want to buy/build a PC, or deal with a PC setup in general, they just want to press one button to make it work and sit on the couch. So the easy option for them is buying a console, it's plug and play, while a PC requires quite some setup.
So we need Steam Box. Steam Deck just works 99% of the time. I can only complain about the desktop mode being buggy and non-steam games being a pain in the ass to install.
I remember thinking it was bs when half life 2 required a steam account and now everyone loves it.
For better or worse, the landscape has shifted since then. I can't imagine people love Steam for being Steam, but rather for being the most consumer-friendly platform on PC.
Refunds? No questions asked if it's within 2 weeks and 2 hours of playtime.
User reviews and ratings? Yes, and even comments on those reviews.
Community content? Steam discussions, guides, art, etc. Even mods with the workshop.
Bribes development studios for exclusivity deals? Nope! Devs can release games wherever the fuck they want.
Platform support? PC. Not just Windows, but going out of their way to make Linux a first class citizen. They even support Crapple despite its miniscule market share among PC gamers.
You're right. But, all this good stuff is to obfuscate the central fact that you don't own the property you bought. Sure, Valve has claimed that should they go away, as their last act, they'll provide the ability for users to own their purchases, but who actually believes them?
For $700 they could at least throw in a 4k Blu-ray player.
Then again, I ponied up extra for the disc version of the original ps5 for that exact reason, only to find out the media player software is a giant piece of garbage that was clearly given no effort. So I can't say I'm too surprised.
Sony doesn't put much effort into most things.
I'm glad some companies are going full media and the younger Gen is buying physical media. It's creating a counter culture that smart companies are using to their advantage.
It does if you rent
I've been using gamefly for a while, I can't rent digital only games
Thing is, that’s not how it works on PlayStation. On PS5 you can download and play games without ever connecting to wifi. The whole glorified installer is mostly an Xbox thing ever since the XB1. I’d know since I own both and usually get discs to play my games.
Is it possible for modern games to fit on a disk?
I think it would be an interesting change if brand new games had a hard limit on file size so they can fit on and play from an actual disk.
Absolutely. It just depends a lot on the game of course. A blueray disk can contain over 100 GB. But a game could be split over several disks too. It was rather common to do that with CDs on the original PlayStation.
A lot of Xbox 360 games came on multiple discs
The issue isn't the game engine, it's the texture files.
If you don't care what it looks like, you cut 80-90% or more from any modern game subbing low quality textures.
Maybe but look what happened to Stellar Blade
or you straight up pirate it.
There’s not a lot of brave souls doing this as a passionate hobby any longer. Now it’s for the clout, to inject malware, or to receive monetary donations. Or all three!
I hope I am wrong, and we can get back to the passionate hobby, but it’s looking kinda grim from my point of view.
Newer games rarely have the entire game on the disc. Usually there's mandatory patches that must be downloaded to play it. I've seen games where there's only a few hundred MB on the disc while the whole game is maybe 15 or 20 GB.
This means you don't really own the game, since if Sony (or Microsoft or whoever) take down the downloads for the game, you won't actually be able to play it any more.
Essentially your choice is between a physical license key (the disc) plus a download of the game, or a digital license key plus a download of the game.
And now, the physical licence path is even less accessible. The thing with the physical licence key is it's transferrable even if the actual data is stored elsewhere. It's a thin veneer, I mean, Sony could gate access to this data to the first account/machine that activated it. So even this advantage is taken away.
Some enterprise software used to (or maybe still do) use USB dongles for licensing... I'm honestly wondering if games are going to move that way too. Given the fact that practically every game needs a launch day patch, why even have a DVD/Blu-Ray if instead you could just have smaller, more reliable USB dongles? I suspect that in the next generation or two of game consoles, we'll no longer see discs at all.
Death by a thousand cuts
IDK. Between the price tag and lack of the disc drive IDK how many people are gonna buy this thing. It's probably just for people who HAVE to have the highest graphics, to keep them from getting a gaming PC until the PS6 is ready for them.
I'm not sure. If that is their strategy they're dancing on a razor. I mean, the market is pretty slim. Basically, you can get a pretty sweet gaming PC for the price they're offering. And if you project the amount of games you'll get and estimate the price differential with prices of the same games on a PC you might be able to uprate the specs a few times. I would say that a PS5 with a reasonable amount of games is probably worth a similar amount to a $1k PC.
More anti-consumer stuff from corporate bigwigs