this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
0 points (50.0% liked)
Games
16920 readers
900 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Its a fair issue.
(Not a surprising one, the all digital console does what it says on the tin.)
But it is a fair issue to raise as a defect with the proposal the Pro offers.
It's a valid POV. My take is opposite: All the CDs and DVDs I ever bought will eventually fail to work, the disc drives will fail to work too. My Steam account is 21 years old. I can still play games I bought 21 years ago, even on my Steam Deck and desktop Linux PCs.
Whilst I don't care about game discs, the notion of a high end media device without a UHD drive seems nuts to me.
PC is an open platform though that allows for much better longevity when it comes to games scaling with future hardware without needing the approval of publishers pushing an update.
Console games are at the mercy of whether future consoles will have backwards compatibility and then new settings to meet expectations of future hardware. So physical is something I still prefer for console because I view console games more stuck in time due to so much being dependent on what is allowed. Don't really have a long term view of consoles. More of a nice to have an option to sell.
Largely speaking compatibility is uncertain across any two console generations.
On these platforms physical media represents license transferability.
It's not really new though. They launched with a digital only PS5, too, for the same reason (to create a lower price to entry for the same hardware). If they'd just priced it at $800 with the disk drive included, would people be happier?
The reality is that their margins aren't high. The PS4 Pro might not have had the same premium, but it was using very old tech that they were able to get prices down over time on. Their chip costs haven't gone down this generation because of the world around them. The Pro is still a high end chip on a manufacturing process with lots of demand. It wasn't going to cost less. It couldn't.
The positioning there was a bit different. The "PlayStation 5" was presented first with the primary name while "PlayStation 5 Digital Edition" was presented as a secondary optional variant.
https://youtu.be/RkC0l4iekYo
In comparison for the Pro the digital nature of the console is not mentioned in the announcement video at all.
https://youtu.be/6HaRMiTfvks
Oddly even the blog post of the announcement didn't include it in its main list of compatible hardware:
https://blog.playstation.com/2024/09/10/welcome-playstation-5-pro-the-most-visually-impressive-way-to-play-games-on-playstation/
It does mention it later but the change in focus from disc drive as default in 2020 to digital only as default in 2024 is a new position for the company.
The actual difference is that you can add it after the fact. The original digital edition never promised you'd ever be able to add a drive.
They still listed it as starting at $399
i play most of my games as rentals from the library. until we can do that digitally,