I don’t understand. So he had a team of over 100 people who worked on a Sony deal for like 3 years before it was shut down. Now he’s got a new studio and a new Sony deal? Has no one learned their lessons here?
I think the author missed the mark here by talking about game preservation, as many are already pointing out in these comments.
The real benefit of buying a physical disc/cartridge copy of a game nowadays is the ability to resell it when you’re done playing. That’s actually a huge boon if you buy a lot of newly released games at full price, and play on consoles where sales are less common than PC. Reselling games can save you a LOT of money over time.
Nope. When was your last time bought physical game disk for your PC? In fact, do your PC still have an ODD? Physical disk mush not be the reason why PC gaming is growing and consoles are strinking. That’s a wrong attribution.
I do have an optical drive in my PC, for Blu Rays and music CDs. The thing I was calling out was, “they want to have you buy it over and over again until the end of time,” which isn’t really a thing on PC. Sure, there are remasters and such, but the copy you bought 20 years ago largely still works on your new PC.
Great to hear you still have an ODD installed, but that game disc you bought 20 years ago won’t contribute to today’s growing PC market. Even then, I don’t think the “it” in the line refers to remasters but “new” or “first party” in the eyes of the publishers.
I would understand that original as, “But the publishers don’t want you to resell games. They want to have you buy games from their first party sales channel over and over again until the end of time.”
I’m struggling with your English a bit, but basically yes.
“But the publishers don’t want you to resell games. They want to have you buy games from their first party sales channel over and over again until the end of time.”
This is a problem that doesn’t really exist on PC due to forward compatibility and competing marketplaces. That forward compatibility has now been easily observed for decades by people who’ve been slowly losing the advantages that consoles used to offer.
I disagree. DRM breaks “forward compatibility” especially with online auth, and Steam dominates PC game sales. Not to mention some publishers avoid releasing on Steam but on their own platforms. PC gamers lost the ability to resell games long before the console gamers did. Still, I digress.
None of your poins help nor prove PC gaming market grows and cause console’s to shrink.
Steam isn’t always DRM, and even with its DRM, the vast majority of those games have continued to work without repurchasing them for over 20 years now. The premise at the top was basically that people are willing to give up the ability to resell their games when competition on PC has led to deep sale discounts, and I’d agree with that as well. On consoles now, you’re rapidly headed toward a future where you can’t resell your games and there’s no competition to drive prices down.
While it’s (probably) not the case for Valve, I think it’s pretty clear that Microsoft’s end goal is endless subscription fees and you owning nothing. And there’s a good chance of them succeeding at that as long as the primary OS for PC gaming is Windows.
Game Pass is already plateauing in subscriptions. I’m sure that while it’s far fewer subscribers than they thought they’d have, they’ll be happy to keep making money this way for some time, but it’s not going to turn in to the primary way people play games.
Yup. Waiting on those Skywind and Skyblivion mods to finish up, then I’m gonna put them into the base game and sell you a Tamriel Through the Ages bundle of joy.
Physical media has been dying for years. If you look at the sales statistics between physical and digital, it makes for grim reading if you care about physical media.
75% of game sales in Europe in 2024 were digital. In 2022, 90% of game sales in the UK were digital. It’s a similar story pretty much everywhere. And whilst there’s a lot of noise on the internet about how bad a digital-only future would be, the average consumer doesn’t care.
I realized a while ago that it’s not actually the physical media I care about; it’s the unfettered access. Physical media is just the easiest way to achieve that. I still buy from steam and pay for streaming, but I recognize that those could be taken away at any time. I want to feel like I actually own something. I buy digital music because I get a DRM-free file. I buy from GOG because I get an installer that I can store locally for as long as I want to.
When it comes to movies? I have to buy the disc because (almost?) no one offers a DRM-free video file that I can store locally and play whenever or however I want.
Game preservationists have long argued that a move to a digital-only future will cause games to be lost forever if proper preservation measures aren’t put in place.
There are already scores of online-only titles that can no longer be played either due to their delisting or servers being shut down. In some cases, game discs serve only as physical entitlement keys to be able to play the digital version of the game, meaning if the digital store itself shuts down in the future the disc will become useless.
Once again, the key to preservation is DRM-free, not physical media. We were already headed toward a future with no physical media for games, and these tariffs will only accelerate that. They may be a similar accelerant in the death of consoles.
“Game preservationists have long argued that a move to a digital-only future will cause games to be lost forever if proper preservation measures aren’t put in place.”
Unfortunately, even physical game discs so often don’t contain the full game files and requires access to servers in order to download and access the game. No longer is buying physical the answer to the game preservation problem.
I try to stay a patient gamer. If you do you’re usually rewarded with a discounted, patched up game with content it probably should have launched with. The exception I’ve been using for myself recently for AAA games is, is a the game a single player experience with no micro-transactions? If yes, I’ll buy it day one or close to it. I do want to show them that I’m willing to pay full price for these games if they aren’t predatory pieces of shit.
@sculd@theangriestbird I'm super happy that I started to play mostly indie or niche games, it's super rare I buy a AAA title. Mostly because the game play does feel identical to previous titles or close to other games of that genre without adding any own ideas.
The indie sector is so much more creative and often there are really deep game mechanics. I really do enjoy exploring those, big thank you to all indie developers for being creative and working hard.
@sculd@theangriestbird I do know that developers creating AAA titles do work hard as well to deliver a well polished game trying to fulfill the demand of the community and that it's hard to be as creative as a indie studio if you need to keep a really high graphic and performance standard. Thank you for making those games as well.
But I like to dive deep into mechanics of games and don't care that much about graphics.
Same. I find myself increasingly alienated by so called AAA games and turned to more indie games. I don’t need high graphics nor 60fps, just give me good game play.
Vampire Survivor and Balatro are only two of the more successful examples. I bought dozens of other indie titles that have little to no media coverage.
I do play one GaaS (from Mihoyo) casually though and it sort of fill my need when I want something to chase.
The world has gone too long without game developers returning criticism to fans. Some game devs don’t serve their fans well and deserve a blasting, but that’s generally a minority. Most of the time, gamers in online spaces are the same sort of Karen at the register saying “The customer is always right” every single day, and they‘ve needed to take a step back for a long time.
Corollary: I play an online game that’s full of glitches. I’m upset at the dev about it, but also patient because I know programming is hard, and I’m sure they get frustrated at those bugs too.
your method of expressing your opinion and the content of your argument are entirely unconstructive, utterly pointless, and, above all, disrespectful
That could be applied to so many random Twitter complaints. Just generally whiny, and completely lacking in any kind of understanding of how the process, in this case game development, works. Nevertheless they are confident in announcing their opinion to the universe. As if anyone cared
videogameschronicle.com
Gorące