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I mean, maybe disk drives are outdated, but being unable to buy used games or give your old game to a friend is garbage (but great for profits of the console manufacturers and game studios). Not to mention that as long as it's a digital download, you don't own the game - you lease it at a flat rate.
Limiting the options and ownership rights of the consumer for profit is bad.
It's only outdated to the rich families who can afford brand new games for their kids. Excluding discs is a great way to force many out of the market.
I wouldn't say this is always true. Numerous times I've bought digital games from the PS store that were heavily discounted while places like Gamestop were still asking MSRP ($69.99) for new or $10 off for used on a game that came out years prior. I still prefer to own a disc but sometimes digital is cheaper and more convenient.
With how games work these days, having just the disk is pretty much useless if the publisher decides to delist or discontinue the game from platform, because:
Now let's describe the cons:
That's not a bug, it's a feature. They want to sell you digital version specifically because you can't resell them. It could easily be solved by creating a digital marketplace, and even turn a profit for the publishers by taking a cut of resales.
This sounds like a console user problem. PCs haven't had disc drives for years and the games are far cheaper. Yes, there's no second-hand market, but with steam sales, humble bundles, and all the freebies I post in !freegames@feddit.uk it's not really become the corpo hellscape we feared.
Also technically you don't own games on disc either, it's just much harder for the publisher to come round your house and snap your copy!
Not to mention that as long as it’s a digital download, you don’t own the game - you lease it at a flat rate.
not true all the time. Plenty of games once you have the files are easily able to run. KSP is one such example. I can just copy the KSP folder to any computer and play the game.
Its the devs choice to require things like Steam to validate the game etc.
This article is about consoles, not PCs. Good luck copying your console game to another folder on the HD.
Even disk-based games on newer consoles often don't include the full game; in many cases they're just an installer, really, which then requires downloading the bulk of the files from the net.
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.
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.
It is nice to be able to give a game to someone else when you're done playing it.
That's exactly why they don't want it!
I would have played so many less games in my youth if I weren't able to trade discs with friends. I would have missed Vice City, Morrowind and Final Fantasy VII to name a few memorable ones.
I mean.. he has a vested interest. But he's right we need media that isn't dependent on official servers
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.
In the days of zero days patches and DRM requiring a check to the servers, a disc doesn't guarantee that at all.
If anything, disc just became dongles to prove ownership and download the full game.
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?
You all hate discs until you have a library that you can rent games for free close to you.
It’s actually illegal where I live to rent out games. Thanks, Nintendo! (/^^)/⌒●~*
Damn, lot of hate for physical media in this thread.
Xbox One announcement (E3 2013): "YOU CAN TAKE MY DISKS FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS!
Current Year (2023): "Disks are outdated and dead, who needs em anyway?"
Y'all forget way too easily and they are starting to prey upon it.
Yes it is weird. I get people preferring digital copies but I dont get having hostility toward physical media.
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.
"We miss selling you a scratched up disc for $49 with no box, that we paid some poor kid $2 for"
I remember after I got a 3DS I went to GameStop to trade in my DSi and they offered me $5 or a gift card.
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.
Discs don't have the capacity to store modern games anyways. I mean, how many disc would it take to store Starfield? Its's not going to work.
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.
I hope I am wrong but I see the next generation as completely discless specially if this current generation discless versions sold good enough. The only exception could be Nintendo.
Of course they might require some deals with stores or just sell themselves the consoles online.... Because the stores want to sell games, they might still sell peripherals and redeemable cards for money or maybe CD keys... No idea tough, but if the benefits fall they might say "Nah I am not selling your console if games aren't sold here".
What needs to happen is regulation. Pro-consumer governing bodies (which don't exist in the US, but the EU has been on a roll) mandating the right to transfer a digital license.
As for the stores, Xbox offers GameStop a small percentage of the revenue from every digital game purchased on a console sold by GameStop. That feels like a healthy compromise for an all-digital business model.
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.
Not often I get to say this, but I completely agree. I HATE the walled garden that is the PS store. 90 usd for FIFA? 130 usd for some random GOLD edition of a ubisoft game? No way. Let me pick those up dirt cheap two months later at a retailer who is having a sale, or from someone who has played it and is ready to sell it onwards.
I wonder why they would want that
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.
In the current climate where it takes 30 patches and a year for a new release to become playable, discs are not very useful..
Discs suck, other than for used game sales and collecting.
But used games sales is a huge plus. But realistically I think we'll see maybe one more console generation with physical media.
Wait... Based GameStop? I'm confused.
It's obviously in GameStop's interest.
GameStop is terrible for the industry. GameStop is chock full of terrible business practices. Fuck GameStop.
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.