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 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.
Obviously, GameStop has a vested interest in discs sticking around, but it feels like that ship has sailed. Can't remember the last time I bought a physical game and it wouldn't surprise me if the next generation of consoles do away with disc drives altogether. Not really sure how to feel about that. Kind of sad having grown up using discs, but at the same time, it just feels inevitable that consoles are going to move to digital-only distribution.
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.
Buggywhip salesman demands accomodation from the horseless carriage industry.
Yes, I’m upset at the licenseification of the gaming industry as much as the next guy but that died long before physical media did. As long as a game can die without its first-party servers, games are leased and not owned.
If only that was what he was saying. He doesn’t care whether they’re dependent on servers. The vast majority of physical games sold today are already nothing more than an entitlement and some of the game files, with the rest being downloaded after you insert the disc. He’s only concerned with Gamestop getting their cut, both in new game sales and especially in their bread-and-butter trade-in market.
Of course making money is his motive, but that does that matter?
Digital distribution only means you can’t give (or sell) your games to someone else. So with digital only the copyright holders of the video games make more money. Once it’s all digital only, next step is to require a connection to a server for them to work, so then they can shut it down to force you to buy a new console and re-buy all the old games you want to play again. What are you going to do if the decide to go that way? It’s either stop playing video games altogether, or go along with whatever scheme they feel like coming up with when they enshittify themselves like every other company inevitably does.
A physical copy means more options for the consumer, why should we care how much of the pie this corporation or that corporation makes off of it? In fact corporations in general make even more money from non-transferable digital distribution.
Given that MS have put a lot of work into making your digital 360 titles work on Series s/x and even upgrading some of them, I don’t think that’s a concern with all publishers.
I’m not sure why you’re trying to convince me of the merits of physical media? I did not, and do not, disagree. It’s a more flexible option, and more options is always better for the consumer. But the reality is that physical media, in its current iteration, doesn’t offer all that much protection. The only universal benefit of physical media is the ability to regift or resell. It’s a great benefit, but it hardly liberates consumers from dependence on servers.
As for my original point, it simply read to me as if this person was giving the GameStop exec credit for something he did not say. I wanted to make sure his comments were seen in an accurate light.
So we should reject an ally that has a shared goal simply because their motives aren’t pure enough?
It’s the old Stephen Fry quote “it’s more important to be effective than it is to be right.” We shouldn’t care so much about whether or not someone has the right reason for trying to affect a positive result. Gamestop’s motives are irrelevant, the effect of their actions are what matters.
Ok, but “It would be great if people had to buy more of the thing” is not an accurate summary either. Putting a CD drive on a console does not mean you have to buy physical media.
This is also true. With DRM, I feel like we’re missing out on a lot of property rights that should be remediated. I’m not sure what all could be done for zero day patches, though. Maybe we go back to the Windows XP days and distribute update packages via CD as well. TBH, though- if we have the ability to directly access the storage medium of a console and we are able to remove DRM, there’s no reason to make a disc drive mandatory
I prefer having a physical game collection, but with the way physical games are handled now, with more than half the game needing to be downloaded to the console to cut costs or because they didn’t finish the game before release, it doesn’t solve the preservation or ownership problems anymore.
That’s where piracy comes in, even if it does tend to have negative effects on smaller devs. So long as there is no server or internet connection required to play, piracy will rain supreme in preservation.
Ownership, on the other hand, is a lot trickier. I personally say just having, for PC games, the game download .exe (or equivalent file) is enough to be considered owning it, but that doesn’t mean much.
The way I see it, piracy is fine, but only once the format is dead. I recently hacked both my 3DS and Vita to access the whole libraries since those formats are dead with ones digital store switched off and the other half dead and barely functioning.
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.
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.
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