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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
gamespot.com
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