People want retail games and if the big 3 can’t cover that market a new and more sustainable subject will fill that space. Maybe it’s time to bring back physical media to PC, a more open system where publishers could make profit selling their retail games similarly to vinyls for music.
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I would honestly be more interested in a hard push for GOG, itch, and other similar DRM-free marketplaces.
Itch is just a marketplace tho so while most dont have drm i can Imagine games with drm can be added
We have physical media on PCs, we even still have full control of them and can copy and modify anything we want.
Now you mean we should be buying some kind of disk which will actually offer us no more control and in fact was historically used for DRM.
Adding physical distribution overhead will definitely not help publishers (especially small ones or indie Devs) turn a profit.
Vinyl is horrible for consumers. CD was a format we eventually could use ourselves to copy and mix music to our preference.
Also, I have a pet peeve:
I see a lot of people claim to want discs, but they haven’t actually used them given the choice.
Or buy DRM free. And they don’t.
For what it’s worth, I try to buy games from GoG first, first party storefront second, but that hardly even works anymore. It’s almost always only available on Steam. Maybe rarely on EGS or something, but then it’s not clear if the download is even DRM free, and it literally cannot be cheaper if it’s listed on Steam too, so that’s not really an option.
Nah. The hardware for making discs is aging, and not developed anymore. USB/SD cards are too expensive.
And digital key reselling? That’s a whole can of worms for grifters to squeeze.
Not that it doesn’t suck. I want to (legally) archive and resell my games.
…But I don’t know a good alternative.
The whole point of PC is digital data though.
The original DOOM was shareware, you were allowed to copy and share it with your friends or online however you wanted because it promoted and popularized the game.
CDs on PC were always just a retail medium. Unlike classic consoles, there are very few PC games that run right off the disk. It was usually an installer.
I know people complain about Steam all the time with “you don’t actually own your games” but you do own your PC and the filesystem which means you can copy that data and do whatever you want with it. No EULA on earth is going to stop you.
Of course if it ships with DRM or relies on steam to launch, then yeah that’s lock in, but that’s where GOG and pirate repacks fill the space.
It was inevitable for consoles to go full digital because 90% of sales are digital and it gets the inherent convenience of digital media, but consoles don’t let you access the filesystem and do whatever you want. It’s a locked down system with a metric ton of security to prevent you from ever copying the game data.
Retail will also always reduce profit, especially for smaller developers who need to rely on a publisher to sell on their behalf.
Steam and GOG take a 30% cut, so it’s probably better to promote itch.io or some other platform if that’s a concern.
No, physical media is not useful for PC games, you want a DRM free installer (preferably with all relevant patches applied, both game patches and compatibility DLL/mods for older games), not the physical media (which may or may not have DRM).
This ship has sailed a long time ago on PC (~15 years ago).
I think drm-free indie oriented publishers like Annapurna could make a lot of money with physical copies.
it costs a lot of money. digital is what help indies flourish. you no longer need a publisher.
That may be true, I just don’t see the point of storing the DRM free installerі on an optical disc, something like an SD card which can be easily updated seems like a much better fit.
Most computers don’t have optical disc drives (I do have one, but I am exception and I don’t use it for data).
You can legally resell if it is on disk.
Fair point, with Steam sales, I don’t really feel the need to resell.
I, for one, would be in favor of selling physical PC games on flash drives. Like, flash drives are (were? not sure how bad the chip shortage has hit them, if at all) dirt cheap, and even the biggest games today generally don’t go far beyond 128GB (not counting post-launch patches), and I can find 128GB flash drives retailing for $10 right now at Micro Center. I assume a big enough publisher buying in bulk could get them far cheaper and more price optimized for this specific use case, and 256GB drives for even larger games for not much more. It would be more expensive than discs or cards, true; but not every PC has a disc drive or SD card reader, every PC these days has USB ports and most of them have USB 3.0 now. And still being smaller and more durable than a disc the same way cards are, could save on packaging costs if they optimized the packaging for it.
I also feel that people buying physical PC games are usually enthusiasts willing to pay a premium, anyhow, and giving them a reasonably nice flash drive with the game on it would feel more “substantial” than just getting a card or disc in a plastic case.
As someone with a collection of a couple hundred CDs and another hundred or so DVDs filling my closet, I’m not really sure everyone appreciates the logistics of holding physical media for a couple-hundred-game library.
I doubt it. At least for all but the most viral of indie games. Manufacturing physical copies is expensive and would involve minimum order quantity from suppliers.
Tbh, popular indie games could probably use crowdfunding platforms post launch to do it
I could see physical releases, at least as special editions, being a thing people would like. Though I think today SD cards would make more sense, at least if flash memory prices ever come back down.
But a SD card with a custom label in box with proper box art and a little art book inside would be cool for fans and collectors.
But a SD card with a custom label in box with proper box art and a little art book inside would be cool for fans and collectors.
Essentially Switch cartridges, but PC
Exactly
Physical media has long sailed but not drm free software.
(I’m not sure which of those you’re referring to, just clearly stating)
I was talking about data storage on optical discs, not DRM free installers. :)
Perfect. 👍
I combine the two.
Burn offline drm free installers onto blank cds.
Well… Dvds, I can fit some older games into cds but they don’t have the same capacity.
Optical media really isn’t your friend. I love it, I have loads of old games on optical discs and I bought a PS5 with its disc drive specifically because that’s how I wanted to buy the media. But I also back up what I can to spinning rust or solid state drives that can sit cold stored until I want them. Optical media will degrade. There are exceptions, like M-Disc, but the medium is slow and space consuming.
If the files are DRM-free as they said, then there’s nothing stopping backups. I don’t get why you’re trying to paint it as an either/or thing
I’m not sure I understand. Whether it’s DRM free or not has no bearing on the reliability of optical media as a backup format. Discs you write to are not generally as reliable as factory pressings, with some archival exceptions, so it’s not the ideal choice. I wasn’t making any argument about whether it works or not.
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I think you’re the one who misunderstood. The guy I replied to was talking about backing up digital games to disc. I mentioned optical discs have poor longevity, then you took it personally.
I mean, I have an external hdd I keep a backup of important files on, and an ssd I use to transfer things onto a second computer, and it’s just a full backup of my primary pc.
Fair enough. I didn’t assume you were doing that for data generally. My original comment was unnecessarily condescending in tone, sorry about that.
It didn’t seem condescending to me.
Personally I like having my cds put of nostalgia. I don’t spend all that time making multiple cds for large games like horizon zero dawn because I think it’ll stand the test of time lol. Most of the cds I had when they were the standard aren’t functional anymore, but damn if I don’t enjoy it when my little usb disc tray pops out.
It’s generally correct to assume the average pc user doesn’t make backups of anything. I once had a friend call me to their house in a panic because their work laptop ate shit and they had absolutely nothing saved externally. With a recovery company, he managed to scrape about 10% of his client data, and their bank lost a looooooot of reputation over it. Now their laptops do company-wide backups to a single cloud service twice a day. (I asked what they’re gonna do if the cloud service goes down and the answer he gave was “look for a new job” lmao)
I have other backups, I just get nostalgic for the days of Command and Conquer.
I’m all for people having discs if they want them but, man, I do not want that shit cluttering up my life.
It’s not the disc itself that people care about, it’s having a transferrable license. People want the option to rent games, or give them away/resell after playing. Physical media provides some legal protections for that because you are buying a license attached to the thing storing the software.
Digital distribution is a perfectly fine way to get a game, if it weren’t synonymous with big companies taking away your ownership of the right to use software you purchased. You can’t share a game you enjoyed with friends. If you lose access to your account you’re SOL. If the host server shutsdown, you better have had a stable copy installed/backed up.
People don’t hate digital downloads, they hate the consumer abuse they have enabled. Stop the consumer abuse, and only collectors will care about physical media.
That’s one of the use cases NFTs were meant for, noncustodial transferable digital property. Sadly, they got ruined by the ape jpeg grifters who didn’t even bother to upload the actual image to the blockchain. The entirety of Steam, Spotify, and Netflix could fit on a specialized blockchain like Arweave, but none of the publishers or big media corporations have any interest in doing that when they can “sell” them to you every 5 years or, better yet, let you rent them one month at a time. Maybe if one day people stop “buying” them, they’ll be forced to do that, but I won’t hold my breath.
I think “Robot Cache” was a company that claimed to do this sort of thing. The only reason I had even heard of them is because they gave away a game for free, and ironically now they’ve gone out of business and I can’t even access the game anymore!
That’s one of the use cases NFTs were meant for, noncustodial transferable digital property.
How would you: make the key transferable and secret, while still notifying the original vender it happened, and collect payment, and keep me from selling and turning off the key?
And once the vendor went away, no new keys would be issued. So why make a public crypto ledger, when their ledger suffices?
Just like an NFT. Useless in this case too.
Imo they weren’t ruined by grifters. NFTs are built on a flawed system that caters to exactly the kind of libertarian, free enterprise assholes who ate it up. If they weren’t running the grift, they were getting scammed themselves. Crypto is a mirage of wealth, and everything built on top of it is either only a vehicle for legitimate currency or laundering ill gotten gains. It’s just an unregulated stock.
Signed chains of custody already exist, they could be inplemented and nothing is stopping any of these marketplaces from doing so. They don’t need NFTs, which have a needlessly complex set of requirements, to validate a game’s license. Any service could leverage their pre-existing DRM scheme to let you sell your copy to someone else, but that doesn’t give them the same benefits as someone buying a new copy.
NFTs are built on a flawed system
What do you mean by that? What is the flaw of the system?
everything built on top of [crypto] is either only a vehicle for legitimate currency
What do you mean by “legitimate currency”? If I can buy and sell things for it, how is it illegitimate? There are plenty of non-strictly monetary blockchain and crypto applications, like arweave, for example, which is a decentralized, permissionless blockchain based data storage protocol where you can store and share encrypted private data like on google drive or publicly host files and static websites, or DAOs, which enable decentralized control and decision making through provably fair voting. Financial applications of crypto are also great. You can buy and sell things privately over the internet without a need for a middleman who will take a cut and can cut you off if the government makes them or they don’t like what you’re selling, like what happened with wikileaks, pornhub or more recently with steam. Platforms like hyperliquid and tokenized real world assets give people across the world, also from sanctioned and disenfranchised regions, access to global financial markets where they can privately and permissionlessly trade stocks, commodities, etc. without the need for a broker who can block buying and selling, like robinhood did during the GME short squeeze, front run them, and take a cut of their trades. People from countries with high inflation like Venezuela or Turkiye can use crypto to easily and safely store their wealth in a less inflationary asset like ₿, $ with stablecoins, or tokenized gold.
or laundering ill gotten gains.
How do you launder money with crypto? I thought that starting a fake business in the service sector like a beauty parlor or a restaurant was the gold standard for money laundering, tax man don’t care as long as he gets his cut.
Signed chains of custody already exist, they could be inplemented and nothing is stopping any of these marketplaces from doing so.
True, but that’s still dependent on the marketplace continuing to exist, if it ever disappears, so does your media. I suppose that’s also true for a blockchain, but it would be a lot less likely for the digital media blockchain to go down than some marketplace, and since it’s decentralized, the community would have a vested interest in running nodes to help keep it alive.
They don’t need NFTs, which have a needlessly complex set of requirements, to validate a game’s license.
What complex set of requirements do NFTs have? You can deploy them pretty easily these days. You can send them automatically upon payment, and you wouldn’t even need a server for that or validation of licenses, as it could all be done in the EVM with a smart contract.
Any service could leverage their pre-existing DRM scheme to let you sell your copy to someone else
This doesn’t address the accessibility issue. If the service goes down, you lose the media you “bought”, and doesn’t work for services without DRM.
The first question is kinda encompassed by the rest of the structure, so I’ll work through the others and come back to it.
Legitimate currency, is admittedly a nebulous term, so I’ll revise this to match something closer to what I meant: minted, regulated currency held to an economic demand. I believe there’s merit to this system, though its benefits have been substantially eroded by modern aristocrats.
By my statement, I meant to say that the most popular use-cases are frequently that of investment, rather than good-faith application of cryptocurrency as currency. I recognize this isn’t true of all currencies, but as long as it remains the case, crypto will continue to be utilized as an investment vehicle for national currencies rather than as something I could go buy my groceries or pay my bills with. One of the biggest fundamental problems that have been a challenge to solve for cryptocurrencies is the overall stability of its value. For some currencies, the idea was that a limited supply would lead to a fixed value, or that proof of work systems would mitigate speculation. This hasn’t proven true. It cannot be tied to someone’s needs, and instead floats based on wants or hype. This is remedied by stable-coins, but at this point you’ve only recreated a national currency with extra hoops to jump through to use it. That said, I do recognize its value as a means to ensure some personal liquidity in nations where the currency at home is more volatile than not, but I think the flaw in this is that no matter what you end up pinning your personal wealth to someone else’s economy.
And believe me, I agree people should be able to spend their money how they please. No few should have complete power of the many, especially not in how the many may accumulate or redistribute their wealth. Robinhood, stock exchanges and their third party brokers should not have power to affect this. In a well-regulated context, they would not.
Now let’s talk about money laundering and fraud. I wasn’t referring to an old mafia outfit. Organized crime has evolved well past that, though I’m sure a shell company with some shady accou ti g is part of the process. Cryptocurrencies are weak for the same reason they are strong. Wallet addresses are at worst, pseudnonymous. It is possible to track them through transactions to exchanges or services with KYC requirements, but not all blockchain services expose transactions transparently. This makes currencies like Monero a popular option for anyone looking to hide the sources and destinations of their payments without needing to worry about how to balance their books for a nail salon. Add in tumbling services for popular cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and stablecoins and now you’ve got yourself a very convenient pipeline for shady dealings.
As a privacy advocate, I believe in the ability to make a cash deal with someone without the scrutiny of the bank, payment processor or other entities, but many of those guiding principles have led to the design of systems that directly facilitate scams, fraud, human trafficking and espionage. The fact that there is no oversight means there are no repercussions until that money re-enters a national currency. It’s an immensely popular way to hide wealth for those who are already rich beyond their means as well. Everything about it requires trusting the individual, and that’s rarely the correct choice.
As for decentralization. I agree here, that’s a better approach. The web should be a collection of nodes, with each reaching to the other to properly describe its namesake. Instead, we have the problem of consolidation among services, where large entities with the means to do so have become immovable conglomerates of critical infrastructure, developing a hub and spoke design instead of the web it was first called. However, blockchains by nature risk the same eventuality. A blockchain relies on redundancy. It needs to be able to point to its own history, and then it needs to have copies of that history redistributed among the entire network of users. The problem is that this requirement becomes exponentially more difficult to fulfill as its use and history extends further. Mining needs to be performed to validate transactions, but mining becomes more time consuming the longer the chain. As a result, the ability to perform these tasks is directly tied to the person able to afford the hardware required. There’s an initial or ongoing investment required no matter what. Not to mention that the validation of these transaction requires energy. It needs to be done computationally, and the cost of that computation also increases as the chain does. The environmental impact may be overshadowed by present AI training datacenters, but it’s still a present and largely unsolved issue.
I hadn’t heard of arweave mind you, but nothing in their documentation about hosting a node or being part of the chain itself leads me to believe they have found a solution to this, which is a must, if you are to rely on it as a stable, distributed storage medium. That said, its permanent storage design is intriguing, since it has the potential to address common problems with the bittorrent protocol.
As for complexity, it’s as described above. The infrastructure is the complexity. You’re right, it’s easy to deploy an NFT, but there is no move to standardize on a platform for them. No self-serving enterprise is going to set themselves up on a chain of custody they do not have control over. I admit this is a political complexity, not a technical one, but I think it’s a truth to contend with for the same reason centralized services exist to begin with.
As for your last point: I don’t believe in NFTs because I fundamentally do not believe in DRM. Smart contracts, NFTs and blockchains on the whole are designed to track, verify, and validate the transfer of ownership in a way that describes and acts as an extension of existing DRM schemes. It goes beyond a certificate of trust, and introduces the limitations of physical property into a digital space. In fact, it doesn’t even solve the resale problem because there would be nothing to prevent a vendor from reintroducing some kind of SecuROM nightmare via a Smart Contract.
I think the base technology is important. At the end of the day blockchains are actually a useful technology, with wide application. But the need to have visibility of the whole transaction is the flaw. You can mitigate it somewhat by chunking the chain and holding data in different places, but the data must remain intact.
You can’t reason with someone who is already biased to one position. They’ll never try to see the benefits.
But yeah we can have visa and mastercard approve all of our purchases too
I am biased, I admit, but that stems from lived experience. I was, for a time, pretty invested in the concept of cryptocurrencies, blockchain cryptography and NFTs. I don’t like traditional payment processors or banks, but I don’t think NFTs themselves are the solution. In general, I think applying physical restrictions to digital content is a bad idea, and ultimately that’s what NFTs and smart contracts aim to do. It sounds nice to be able to validate ownership, but all it does is prop up existing licensing schemes by building a framework to enforce them.
And if you don’t see a problem with that, then we’ve got different perspectives on the world and that’s fine, but don’t assume I’m not willing to listen.
Any service could leverage their pre-existing DRM scheme to let you sell your copy to someone else
But this would not be interoperable with other services, and to make it interoperable would require mutual trust and coordination between them that does not exist. Not to say that NFTs specifically are a solution here (video games are fungible after all, and porting physical ownership properties to digital goods is a problem these companies don’t want to solve to begin with), but there are actual reasons to use credibly neutral infrastructure and standards.
I mean, there’s no reason NFTs are needed for that, a normal database would also work.
Sure but when a company shuts down or decides to shut down the database all the media goes with it. That’s what sony just did, all the stuff you “bought” went poof. Not having the ability to transfer the license is only half of the issue.
The media goes poof anyway, there’s plenty of NFTs that point to dead links on domains that expired once the grift was no longer worth it.
Personal backups are the only real way to protect media for yourself and those around you.
What I’d like to see is good selling indie games doing a “limited edition” or “supporter edition” 6 months to a year after they launch. Have it be a physical box, with an SD card or Blu-Ray with custom art, plus various bits of merchandise.
Essentially, get them to make pre-order or limited editions after the game already launched and garnered goodwill instead of trying to front load all the greed.
I’d definitely buy copies if games like “Sea of Stars” or “Ori and the Blind Forest” did this
I don’t know that it’s usually naked greed for indies, as much as it’s an effort to boost initial sales and get word-of-mouth going by preying on FOMO.
But yes, I’d be behind delayed special editions. More than once I’ve found out that some indie game had limited extra content for early buyers, and when people asked later if that content would ever be more widely available, the developers gave a slightly smug “Nope! I guess you should’ve backed it / bought it at launch, huh?”-style response.
I know that your life has probably been revolving around this game for months or years, but I only heard about it for the first time yesterday, and your backer campaign / launch sale ended 8 months ago. All you’re doing with that attitude is souring potential customers.
I think it’s better to offer the extras again at a later time, as part of a special edition and/or a separate bundle. Plenty of games do this, too.
we need offline, drm-free installers and games that are not tied to the storefront you bought them in
physical versions could be offered for those, i think it would be cool! but it’s not necessary imo. as long as it’s preservable and transferable, it’s good.
You just described GoG which I don’t even want to recommend after they sent a bunch of Nazi emails and then went “Oopsie doopsie poopsie sowwie”.
yea gog can fuck off but the way they do games distribution is how it should be for everyone imo
If they are DRM free so they could be resold or shared/traded then I’m on board. The only two problems I have with digital shit is you cannot share/lend/resell it and, if you’re not in control of storing it, there’s no guarantee it will always be available after purchase.
I’m like the only one I know with an optical drive in my computer and its not even a bluray drive. Maybe if they distributed on like USB drives? but that seems expensive
i’ve never had a hddvd or bd drive. there was one in a laptop we took in for recycling once. didn’t even bother pulling it.
Personally, so long as it’s DRM-free, physical, installers or zipped files sound like a good idea.
And like with vinyl, if it comes back, it’s to be expected that it isn’t as big as it once was. But being there, it’s another option for the preservation and ownership folks.
No, it’s not beneficial. The difference between consoles and PCs is that PCs have an open infrastructure, which lets you back up your data to any medium or service you want.
For example, if Steam goes out of business and doesn’t release the DRMs, they will easily be cracked. You cannot say the same for consoles.
There are also multiple places to buy from. Steam is pretty dominant, but only because they’re the best option. You can buy from Sony on PlayStation, that’s it.
That’s not really true. Most recent games I’ve bought, I tried to buy off Steam. But they weren’t available anywhere else.
It also hardly even matters as no one on Steam is allowed to price below Steam. So they effectively control pricing power, like Sony; the screws just aren’t so tight yet.
I find it pretty hard to believe that you couldn’t find a major new game on Epic or the Microsoft store. An indie title? Sure, a lot of those are limited to Steam, because the devs prefer it. Older games are even more likely to be on GOG than Steam.
No idea what you’re on about with not being able to price below Steam. That is not a thing.
Yeah, it’s mostly newer indie or “AA” games I’ve been into.
On the pricing: https://blog.subimpact.net/2026/06/valve-allegedly-threatened-to-delist.html?m=1
But in a nutshell, the allegations is that Steam threatens to delist games if they’re priced lower than Steam on other storefronts, similar to what Walmart or Amazon are accused of doing.
no one on Steam is allowed to price below Steam.
That’s not true at all.
if a popular console platform became a ‘free for all’, i don’t think its ‘protections’ would last very long under what would become a globally crowdsourced endeavour.
You can’t crack a required server-side download
No. Optical media bad.
The issue isn’t the copy being physical. The issue is the included license being too limiting.
Licenses aren’t new or necessarily bad. Even physical retail copies of movies with a license. You know that FBI and InterPol warning at the very beginning? That’s your license. It basically just limits you to personal use. If you charge people money to come to your house and watch it, or if you charge money to rent it, you need to purchase a copy that comes with a license which allows that.
If you were around during the days of movie rental stores, if you ever lost a rental movie and had to replace it, it would often cost $100 or more because you were replacing a copy that came with a rental license.
An ideal purchase would be a digital copy with a license similar to the one included with physical retail copies.
