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 thought GameStop was going all in on NFTs and bragging about how it was going to revolutionize the gaming space because you could be more “invested” in the things because you really “own” (hahahaha, fucking as if) your own copy.
Oh, wait, *checks notes
They totally are winding that down and going “whoopsie doodles!”
Ryan Cohen making a quick spin because he’s a fucking idiot, and the only thing he has to sell is an “idea” of a company that respects its consumers. GameStop ain’t it Superstonkers. This guy literally went from “You’ll be buying all your games as NFTs at GameStop” to “Errm, yeah, we need physical drives, you know for the gamers, not so we can continue ripping people off with used games.” What a fucking joke. He didn’t care about physical media six months ago because he was all-in on NFTs.
GameStop gonna get Toys ‘R’ Us’d hard. If this is the best Cohen’s got right now, they’ve got nothing.
NFTs and how they only hold enough data to point to a URL aren’t doing the model any favors. NFTs have been a joke since they were initially released. They don’t show ownership of an item, they show a re-direct to a URL where an item you might be able to claim is yours exists.
The people who bought into the idea of “smart contracts” in NFTs got taken for a fucking ride. There’s simply not enough BITS to be able to store such data within an NFT. The best they can do is a URL.
Yeah I dunno man. NFTs at least allow for a softening of the walls in the garden. The potential is there for fun and interesting ideas like interoperability between games and game assets, and 3rd party platforms for buying, selling, and interacting with games and game assets.
At minimum it’s a combined digital proof of purchase and login credentials that you can custody yourself and transfer/sell at will without being forced to do so through the makers’ infrastructure.
People shitting on it seem to default to an oversimplified idea of what they are and can be, and a bad faith superiority on top.
That’s not something I get down with. I like new tech. I like experimentation. And I like seeing where things go rather than assuming I already know.
I can own digital files just fine without needing all that unnecessary bullshit. It’s the copyright cabal that says I don’t “own” them.
Funny, because I have the files stored on a physical drive. If that drive is destroyed, so are the items stored on it. Ergot, data is real and physical. You can already own it physically. NFTs are actually just one more way for wall street to justify the bullshit ways copyright doesn’t work.
Because nothing is stopping digital “ownership” from existing as it currently exists, except people who don’t like the idea that data can be copied infinitely at no cost.
This is why I never took off my pirate hat, because it’s just a bunch of tomfoolery to make you think things don’t already work this way. They do, computing always allowed data to be copied infinitely. It’s jerks who try to code locks to hide them behind who are the problem.
It’s also why I buy games at GOG, because they respect this. They sell games with no DRM and understand that this means piracy will happen, but do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do.
What if that digital file is the title to your car, deed to your home, your college degree, passport, driver’s license, etc?
If you destroy the hard drive they’re stored on, it’s no different than burning a piece of paper they’re written on. Data is always stored in a medium, whether it’s paper or a disk drive. So for digital files like that, you would choose a storage medium that is rated for long-term storage and put it in a fireproof safe. Done.
You’re basically asking “what if you lose the title to your car?” Well, there’s plenty of ways to get a replacement title, even though they’re not easy or free.
The bottom line is data is real and it’s always in a storage medium. The storage medium is what you should be worried about more.
Oh wait, that NFT you “own” is stored on someone else’s server? Oh wait, I guess you don’t own it then, because that data is on a hard drive owned by someone else in the “cloud” and if they destroy that drive, they also destroyed the item you ostensibly “own.”
Oh the server with my Title Deed for my home went down and now I have no proof I own my own home? Probably should have kept a copy of the file locally!
There is nothing interesting about NFTs because they’re a fundamental, nay, purposeful misunderstanding of what data is and how it works.
Sorry my question was poorly formed. You were talking about digital files being stored perfectly fine on a local medium. I was talking about new use cases for unique digital objects, and gave examples of different kinds of existing credentials/titles.
A scan of my Title Deed or my Vehicle Title will already be unique digital files. They can be copied infinitely so I can never lose track of them. I can even take a hash of the original file and always keep that around to make sure I’m always dealing with an original copy.
What does storing it on someone else’s property (server) and just linking to it actually achieve for me, as a person? The NFT does not change the data of the original file in any way, it’s just a hash-check itself in many ways.
Would you be okay with storing your car in someone else’s garage that you couldn’t actually see or access, but were told was secure? That’s what you’re doing with an NFT. You’re putting the actual item you own on someone else’s private property, and then claiming that a piece of paper that shows ownership (NFT) is all you need to get it back. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t.
An NFT is much more a “certificate of authenticity” than it is a title of ownership.
Look, I love having a blu ray player embedded into my console. But the fact of the matter is, a lot of these consoles have decently high end blu ray players in, and they are expensive. Consider the fact that low end consoles such as Xbox Series S are probably losing money for every sale. Asking them to tack on another feature means they either increase the price of the console or lose even more money on every console sale.
You should have the option to select a digital or a disc version of a console. Maybe even be able to pay extra to upgrade the blu ray player inside your console to a higher quality or more capable one for those who want them.
I agree. If they ban you by mistake (which happens), it can be very hard and even impossible to appeal successfully. There were many stories about that. No one guarantees that your story will gain traction and attention, forcing the company to help you in order to avoid loss of reputation. With physical copies you don’t lose your library at least.
They do. sorta. It’s definitely possible to put something like Starfield on a dual layer BDROM, probably even uncompressed! But then load times would be fucking crazy because BD is an order of magnitude slower than an SSD.
Distributing install files for a day 1 version of a game and using the disc as an auth key, (which is what they did last gen iirc) is still possible.
Transfer the BDROM to my SSD. Literally the same thing as downloading it online. I don’t need it to read off the disc while I play. 360 did this and it worked perfectly fine.
Honestly, I am all good with getting rid of the drives.
I hardly ever touch CDs these days. I keep a spare USB reader, for making a backup copy of a music CD or movie DVD/Blueray, which I use, maybe twice a year.
I have boxes of DVDs and Blu-ray in the garage, and I don’t ever use them. Matter of fact, if I wanted to use them, I’d have to go find a blueray player to actually play them with.
I do all of my gaming on PC, and I don’t think I have physically purchased a game in over a decade. Steam/GoG are both quite nice.
You all hate discs until you have a library that you can rent games for free close to you. Or you want to sell a game you already played to buy something else. I don’t care of what some boss from GameStop says because at the end of the day, they run a business out of it, but complaining about physical media is something I don’t understand someone would do as a consumer. Did we really learn nothing from companies simply shutting down online stores when they want?
Japan. Nintendo got it passed into law years ago that game’s can’t be rented, because of supposed piracy concerns. But you can go to any video rental place and borrow all the music CDs you could want, because we all know how much more difficult it is to make mp3s from a CD than copy a game.
Yeah, I heard that many things in Japan are extremely protective for companies. Apparently modding is also illegal, right? I was talking with my spouse about console modding and we discovered that
Yes, modding games is illegal there. But it has something to do with the way their copyright works afaik. If a company lets you modify their IP, they effectively give up their ownership rights from what I understood.
I play FFXIV and there it is against TOS too (of course it being a MMO modding can have another context), but for quite a few QoL improvements that came out with more recent patches you can clearly see the inspiration.
It would be interesting to know if modding a game like Skyrim there would be forbidden too.
I have nothing against physical discs, or those who would prefer to own them. I just don’t care about it myself, so I’m not going to fight to keep them.
You should at least want the option because it keeps them honest. If it’s digital only, there’s all kinds of shenanigans they can get up to. “Sorry your console is EOL now so we’re disabling it, but don’t worry, just buy our newest XBone720 and you can re-buy all your favorite classic games and play them on a shitty emulator!”
At least with physical option they know people would go back to buying physical media (which they make less money from) if they tried such a thing.
Enshittification is inevitable. All it takes is for one dumbass CEO to see a potential increase in revenue and they’ll do it no matter how stupid it is.
I don’t disagree (or at least there should be a disc drive-included version and the ability to connect any USB Blu-Ray drive,) but obviously GameStop has a motive here.
And I think disc based games should have a legal requirement to have a playable version of the game on disc.
Disc drive consoles are great for people who go months with terrible or no internet. People in the military, or just about anyone who goes out to sea can get a disc mailed to them. It is nice to have physical media to play the games off of.
Why discs instead of cartridges, which are currently the superior physical option? I personally try to buy physical whenever possible, because I don’t trust companies to not ban my account and flush hundreds of dollars of games down the toilet, and it generally feels better to have just that little extra bit more ownership over my own property.
Because cartridges cost more to produce and are limited in storage. Switch carts cap out at 64gb, Blu Rays are up to 100gb at this point and it’s much cheaper to chuck a few of them in a box if the game goes over that. Hence all the switch games with massive downloads required on top of the cart.
gamespot.com
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