I’ve been thinking about how Sony, and others, are no longer planning to sell physical games, but fuck! What’s next? Next thing you know, they’ll be charging a subscription fee for using the software. I hope they don’t hear me say that, lest I give them the idea. https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/physical-disc-production-ending-in-january-2028-for-new-games-releasing-on-playstation-consoles/
#gamedev #gameaudio #news #opinion
The future is likely to be streaming-only for big titles.
Gamers dont want physical media so I think it makes sense to stop making it. Its unfortunate that consoles are so locked down and this will lead to abuse of console players but thats the environment they built. I will keep trying to keep PC free because I’d hate to end up like PlayStation or Nintendo yikes.
People often answer “it’s enshittification”. It isn’t wrong but it’s shallow.
Capitalism assumes expansion; stable revenue is seen as failure, not as success. And there are only so many potential customers, before you need to drop the price of the goods so low that your margin of profit lowers. So businesses reach a point where they need to expand, but can’t just “add customers”. They need to extract more money per customer.
But selling goods imposes a limit on that because, just like lowering prices brings more customers, raising prices shuns them away. You need to somehow disguise the additional cost, by fragmenting it into multiple small costs; because often, a customer who’d refuse to pay 50€ for the goods would pay 12 times 5€ just fine, for a total of 60€.
But why stop there? You need to expand further. 12 times, 24 times, let’s charge the customer infinite times. And if the customer feels like they paid enough, they don’t get the goods, even if they already paid their fair price many times over. That leads to the subscription model.
Problem of the subscription model is that customers are dumb, but not that dumb. At a certain point they’ll do the maths and say “hey, I’d pay less for this if I simply bought the goods, instead of the subscription”. So you need to make sure they’re unable to buy the goods, and the only way out is subscription.
But if you tell them so they’ll outrage. Rightfully so. So instead you disguise it as “trust me = be gullible, I’m doing this for your best interests. Noooo, it isn’t because I can milk more from each of you things this way, it’s just for you.” Or they put the blame on something they can’t control, such as “marketing tendencies” or “the industry”. The later is exactly what Playstation is doing.
“You will own nothing and you will be happy”. No inequality if everyone’s equally miserable, and helps push the acceptable amount of control. Something not just these companies do, and that I have the impression that isn’t even originally their agenda.
not everyone is equally miserable when the “you will own nothing” part doesn’t apply to the billionaires who are making it so no one else can own anything.
When black ops 2 was ported to ps5, it became top 1 most played game on that platform and Sony used it as an evidence that digital is better than physical disc.
Next thing you know, they’ll be charging a subscription fee for using the software.
It’s called PS+, and they’re already charging for it /hj
But seriously. The last playstation I owned was PS4, I had so many annoyances with it, half of which were caused by sony not supporting my country properly. When I got a PC I didn’t even intend to use it for gaming much (other than some indies I couldn’t get for console) but I found the experience that wildly better I’d never booted up the playstation again, nor would I buy any further consoles
Them heading down this route is definitely not gonna encourage me to give them any of my money lol
Yeah, PS4 ended up being my last Sony console because of PS+ which I refused to pay for. Only bought physical single player exclusives for it and jailbroke it when it became an option. But, I didn’t use it much because of my PC compared to how much I used my PS3. So that led to me skip the PS5.
I had a somewhat similar experience. Except because sony wouldn’t even let me make an account in my country I couldn’t add a payment card, so if I wanted PS+ I would’ve had to buy a gift card for it for the country my account was set to lol. Similarly I couldn’t buy digital games or DLC without going through that bullshit either, so I just bought physical disks.
I was a teen then so not having a job also meant the PS+ thing was a bit of a cycle - I wouldn’t buy PS+ cause I had no games that needed it, and I wouldn’t buy games that needed PS+ cause I didn’t have it, as I only had a limited amount a month to actually spend on games :p
Anywho yeah, with not having to pay for online, having mods, not being so loud I’d often miss plot critical details, way better options for control configurations for controller, and actually being able to buy games without having to go through loopholes… well I just found PC gaming better in just about every way once I got a computer, so I really had to interest in the PS5, especially at the price range it launched at
I don’t. If they do something stupid I don’t buy it.
I don’t recall the last AAA games I paid for I mostly stick to indie games now days.That being said indie devs do make bad decisions too. A recent example is Transport Fever 3 where they partnered with Paradox, that took the game off my wishlist and onto my ignored list. Their post announcing it got zero thumbs up when every other post has over 3K.
I’ve been sticking with indie games for the past few years now. Definitely the better choice, though a handful can get too attached to the games they make.
This past week, one indie dev got super pissed at me when I made a Steam review calling her game bad and going in-depth on why it’s so bad. I’ve reviewed a few hundred games now, and this is the first time an indie dev got that mad over my Steam review.
There’s another dev I support who felt disappointed over a reviewer with a large following bad-mouthing his game. Some fans offered to help defend the dev’s honor by commenting in that Steam review, but the dev talked them down.
Can’t say I blame such devs, though - quality indie games take a long time to make after all. A stranger calling your game bad after all that effort certainly could make an indie dev see red.
I’m with you. I think this whole past year I’ve only played games included in Gamepass, and during that period where they jacked up the price, I was on the cheap tier.
Yes, because still giving them money is what will fix things 🙄
It did. They raised the price and I immediately dropped to a plan that was cheaper than the one I had before. They lost money on me and I assume others, because they dialed back on the price change and brought it back into a reasonable range.
Sure, cancelling completely would have hurt them by an extra $10/mo, but then I’m stuck with a device that I can’t use at all, or I’m spending 50-100 times as much money to buy the same bullshit from someone else.
You’re acting like it’s the only option, but it’s not. You don’t need to lock yourself into a walled garden. You don’t need to buy into a sunk cost fallacy. Even participating a little perpetuates and reinforces the bullshit you’re complaining about, and they’re never gong to suddenly give in to the way things should be. Stop letting these companies hold what you want hostage, dictating how you view your options.
Do you use a smartphone?
You’re never going to change the world alone. There aren’t enough people with your attitude of “cut everything completely” to ever make a change. There has to be compromise somewhere, on both sides.
If someone bought a thing, they are entitled to use that thing. If the maker makes it unusable, then their options for use are limited. 99.9% of people aren’t going to learn how to reverse engineer a game console to figure out how to jailbreak it, and without AI assistance, that usually takes multiple years to figure out, which is usually promptly patched out in an automatic mandatory update. Most people aren’t going to even bother, so they will either pay more to keep the use, or throw it out. And for most people, they aren’t throwing it out.
Right, because the only alternative is reverse engineering professional hardware. /s That’s seriously what you think? No wonder you feel “compromise” is your best option. Good luck with that.
So, what would you propose instead?
I have a Series X that I bought when they first came out, 6 years ago. That’s it. No other consoles, no PC.
What’s your solution to “fight the man” that allows me to game on the weekends?
I’m still salty about Introversion selling Prison Architect to Paradox. It went from a stable, well-designed colony sim with everything included out-of-the-box to a buggy piece of crap with a dozen equally buggy DLC packs, half of which didn’t even fit the game’s theme.
lmao I’m glad people are finally catching on the the trends of the past 20 years
Oh nononono, this is how capitalists, and free enterprise types before them (and let’s be real; a lot of royalty, too), always were. There has always been greedy fucks trying to get as much wealth out of every encounter they could. Though capitalism normalized it for the average Joe.
Just look up “company towns” for one example of how shitty they have already been in the past. They’ve always strived for normal people owning nothing.
The only reason it seems like the past twenty years is because during the previous fifty years, the capitalists were heavily regulated, unions were strong (after fighting and literally dying for much of the nice things we enjoy today like a five day work week), and the ultra-wealthy were taxed to hell and back.
There will always be greedy selfish fucks that must see number go up. The world is slowly re-learning that they are the problem, not the solution.
oh no, I’m not oblivious to that either lol i was just talking about the removal of physical media and addition of software subscriptions specifically.
Capitalism has always been evil as fuck, no argument there.
