You’re right! We should stop doing that other stuff too!
–CEOs, probably
They should have moved to USB keys a long time ago. Make them big and call them cartridges if you want, but optical discs are far too slow.
And loud. And fragile.
Thumbdrives have a firmware, you could easily make them read-only. And also add your inconvenient DRM snake oil, if you will.
But no, cloud promises more $$$ through lock-in.
Can you imagine if video game prices were affected by the memory shortages?
But is this not how switch1 games were, just read only sdcards with the game on them.
Nintendo loves a cartridge, and goddamnit sticking with them was right.
There’s aso no reason the physical copy can’t demand to get a validation token from Corporate Server every time it’s played
Yep, DRM is the problem, not the distribution format.
“Please drink verification can”
key codes that get tied to a non-transferable online account have also been a thing for years.
key codes that get tied to a non-transferable online account have also been a thing for
years.decades.
Devils advocate here.
I/O and storage in those media formats are kinda limited for video games.
Blue-Ray prob has enough storage (at most we could go for multiple disk releases) capacity but still you would have to copy the games to disk.
I think GOG is on right track on this DRM free keep on disk as long as you want no need to check with external servers to play them.
^
I see a whole lot of theoretical “what if platforms did this or that,” when GoG is already doing it right. That’s the way.
I see no problem with multiple discs tbh, also, we forget that thumbdrivers, sd cards, SSDs etc etc exist…
Shitty copy pasta with AI-generated picture that forgets that software is patched all the time compared to movies and music.
I hate streaming more than anyone, but that sloppy comparison sucks.
A) If you think this is AI generated and are not just making a rage-baiting pun reference, you’re a silly billy wittle buddy who needs to be given a raspberry.
B) Games used to not need patching. Even games that were patched later had an on-disc version you could always install and play. And games were in fact better for it. A game going gold meant something, now it’s just a release day with a 0 day patch to be even slightly functional.
Remember the console days before the Internet grew up? No downloads. No Patches. The games just worked.
Until you got to the sky canyon in twilight princess and the glitch made you start over because there was no way to patch offline games
Games back then had bugs, too, they just never got fixed and everyone pretended they didn’t exist.
They were also released in a fully playable state. The game worked out of the box, or that would be the end of a game studio, or at least that game.
This has never been true. Daggerfall and Morrowind, for example, were huge successes for Bethesda despite players falling through the floor into an infinite void several times a day. There are countless other examples of horribly buggy games.
Before home internet, PC games magazine cover disks (they did 💾 type for years before CDs) were my main channel of getting very welcome patches.
And if they didn’t just work, they never got fixed.
Therefore people only played and remembered the ones that did. Not much actually changed, we just have more games and more exposure now.
I hate AI and all that shit, but I have heard a lot of horror stories from developers who worked on “retro” gaming systems (from the Megadrive/Genesis to the Jaguar). I admire them for all the work they did because it was hard to code, but there are a fuckton of bugs that were sold during the good old days, and no one noticed what was happening because those bugs were never found.
If you hate using things with massive exploitable bugs while we share a polite fiction that they work as intended, you’re gonna hate civilization.
There were lots of games that had multiple release revisions that fixed bugs. Gran Turismo 2’s original versions couldn’t be completed 100% due to a glitch, a reprint ended up fixing it. If you bought the game on launch, you were stuck with that copy.
This is also why if you go looking for ROMs, you’ll see some games have multiple versions with some differences.
There were also lots of games that were released in buggy, unfinished states. They just don’t get remembered but anyone who grew up gaming in the 90s and early 2000s probably remembers getting some garbage bargain bin games from relatives at Christmas that were complete disasters. The Fifth Element game, for example.
Not only that, but developers back then had to be really deliberate with their decisions due to the tiny size on the media and ram.
Games used to be much more simple too, and easier to test and fix.
That’s the girl from Pragmata isn’t it? Doesn’t scream AI to me
Well, I mean, technically,…
It is! I oddly enough just finished playing thru this scene just a few minutes ago, came in here and was like, huhwhat?!? Diana made a drawing for you and is showing to you for the first time in this scene in the game.
Fun fact: you can just make the games download the patches later on your computer or use a storage device that is RW and write the patched game on the storage the device the game is shipped on
It’s not an AI-generared picture.
You can buy games DRM free on GOG and burn them onto a disk yourself. Or multiple ones, if needed
I already have more games than I could ever finish in a lifetime — in 10 lifetimes — and they’re all digital, in big folders full of files. If I had those thousands of games in physical form I’d need a library in my house full of shelves to store them all, yet digitally I can carry them all around in my pocket!
Exactly. I absolutely agree with OP that robbing people of the choice to own physical media sucks…
But when not paired with shitty-ass DRM, digital format media can be an absolute boon for games preservation. Easy to backup, takes up barely any physical space, and doesn’t require physical hardware to play it that will become increasingly sparce and expensive over time.
If the industry doesn’t want to provide legal pathways towards games preservation, then it looks like the pirates are going to start wearing archavist hats too.
The pirates have been wearing archivist hats for a good while now, I think. At least in the movie space.
– Frost
This is the correct take. The option should be there for everyone. Lots of folks here are with you, where the practicality of DRM-free digital format media is more important. To people like me, collecting physical media is a hobby itself. I probably spend more time shopping for records and equipment than listening to them, for example, though of course I do listen to them as well. I used to be the same with games, which is why I have a ton of OG Xbox and 360 discs, and for movies I have a bunch of blu-rays and DVDs. Yeah, it’s hard to find space for it all but that challenge is part of the fun, at least for me. Plus it can work as interior decor too. And I know I’m not alone, CD sales are the highest they’ve been in over 20 years, and I’m sure other formats are similar. But again, having the choice for DRM-free digital is also important. Taking away our choice is bad for us all.
Also the same reason im never getting pressured into buying a game that’s too expensive or just plain DRM ridden.
Sony has always screwed consumers. No idea why anyone buys their products anyway
Remember when Universal Media Discs were not universal and only worked on PSP?
I remember when I got a PSP in middle school, I thought everything was going to start using UMDs eventually since they were “universal”.
Everything about the PSP looked so high tech because it could display graphics close to PS2 quality, played tiny disks, had a wide screen, and somehow fit 32 whole megabites on a little memory card.
I mean, not always. They mostly did away with bullshit proprietary connectors, did away with their proprietary flash memory cards, and didn’t form a walled garden as putrid as that of Apple.
That being said, nothing is the same anymore. Digital everything will take over, because it’s just cheaper to not burn disks.
Uuuhm, not quite. The Playstation ecosystem absolutely is a walled garden. Their proprietary flash memory cards aren’t a thing anymore because they failed to win against more open standards (SD, microSD) and it would’ve been super expensive to stick with it on their own for no good reason.
They installed those rootkits out of the goodness of their hearts, dammit, they cared about us the whole time and we never showed our appreciation and now look where it got us
Maybe David Manning of the Ridgefield Press can write a story about how unfairly maligned Sony is.
Or digital downloads without the killswitch (DRM)
Check GOG
Exactly
Fuck valve. Oh I forgot they get a pass.
Even when Steam delists games, you still have access to it, even after twenty years.
The content you bought? Sony removed your access after a few years.
Can I sell it?
You can’t do this with electronic DRM free copies either.
Yes they do, because they actually take the care to craft a genuinely awesome user experience. Unlike, I dont know, what seems like literally every other company nowadays
Cope. Can I sell if? Then I don’t own it.
Oh yeah let’s just hate on every store front ever even if they haven’t really done something wrong!
If we’re not going to reward good behaviour, what are we doing here?? Valve might as well go to shit and fuck everyone for a little more profit if everybody’s going to shit on them anyway just for existing.
If Sony was selling a backlog going back to 1980 at deep discount with no monthly fees and DRM-free at the seller’s discretion, they would get less flak.
I just wander what would be like Steam with Valve bandcamp style physical merch selection. haven’t cheched but atleast itch.io wont forbid to put link to their physical merch store?
Lol exactly! “The good billionaire”, hypocrites… I wish people were so determined to protest about healthcare and where their tax money goes… But mess with their pacifying reality escapism media and they’re all pumped… Not a single word about the environment and microplastics… I wish this was a psyop of some kind but I guess people are just really dumb.
Don’t expect G*mers to be consistent in their opinions.
it’s about consolidation, control and the ability to control dynamic pricing
Dynamic pricing is basically enshittification of the modern internet age capitalism as a whole.
Time to go back to barter
well, music and movies do not weight several hundred GB of data… but that’s also modern games problem.
As a person working in gamdev - they ABSOLUTELY can optimise - people just doesn’t care nowaday.
Sony thinking they can just pull a Steam way too late in the game, and with Steam and GOG as competitors 😂
Well, consoles are a pretty closed enviroment. There is no piracy as there is on PC, if still some.
There is a lot of piracy for consoles. It’s just a matter of time.
Piracy for consoles isn’t like it was in the Xbox 360 and earlier days (excluding Nintendo although they seem to have finally gotten their shit together with switch 2 in this regard). Security for consoles was a joke back then and easily defeated with hardware mods, sometime within weeks of release. Now the focus is more on soft modding and even then it can take ages, if ever.
The ps5 is technically jailbreakable but only in an extremely narrow and unlikely set of circumstances (eg did you buy a ps5 several years ago and never connect it to the internet awaiting a hack that may never come?). And even that took years to release. A far cry from the days of 10 different ps2 modchips and softmods for you Xbox, both available relatively quickly with a super active scene supporting them
Aren’t they usually “pirate and you will you lose any right to ask for help with your console, anywhere, ever again”?
You can get banned from connecting your console to their services if you’re caught using pirated games, or you’ve tampered with the system. There’s ways around it though, and some people don’t care if they’re locked out of services as long as the system still plays the pirated software.
That’s a point against Sony, specifically being a closed system. Having to buy games on Sony’s store requires getting a PS5/6 in the first place, but why get one when PCs are open, and usable if Valve goes rogue too?
Honestly, when I wrote it I was thinking “Sony doesn’t have to compete against relatively easy piracy like Steam and GOG do”. I don’t even remember what my actual point was, but I think it was precisely against Sony as in “there is no easy alternative if Sony goes rogue, your PS OS belongs to them, so they have not such incentive to make things good, therefore the risk is higher” or something like that lol.
Fuck optical media.
Why? What storage do you think works better?
They want games on vinyl, or maybe 8-tracks. Maybe metal cylinders. Jk it’s probably cartridges (hopefully).
If only i could play an 8-bit game on vinyl
Solid state cartridges.
Engraved crystal. Slow, but solid af
I wanna have a Minority-Report-style crystal ball feeding system
Excuse me, but still? not 8 mm, VHS, or DVD? People existed before the year 2000.
Fucking millennials
Oh man, I can’t wait to pick up a copy of Project Hail Mary on VHS. I’m sure that will be widely available and easy to purchase
Is a bit wild how they remembered to put down vinyls and even cassettes, but forgot DVDs and VHS tapes which are very arguably bigger household names than Blu-ray.
Also, literally all millenials were born before 2000. And many of them (myself included) grew up with VHS and DVD.
See how they bury me
Blu-Ray is pertinent here because it is a Sony product
But they could have mentioned other formats too - would it have made the argument any better? Absolutely not, but sure, go ahead and yell at clouds
So were CDs and VHS
Jvc made vhs but go off
Sony backed Betamax. They lost that round.
