What nonsense. What matters isn’t whether we use physical disks or not. And it’s all digital anyway, you don’t get many games on vinyl these days. The real issue is whether you own the games you buy. As GOG is proving, game ownership is something that publishers can easily offer, regardless of the delivery mechanism. If Sony would step up and do the same, killing physical discs wouldn’t be a problem. It’s a trust issue.
GOG doesn’t give you ownership of the game the way physical media does though. Unless they’ve added a feature to sell your used games?
Sony has released very few single player games this generation on purpose. Single player games are perfect for physical media.
Sony wants everyone to play live service games to sell the game, the updates and the online subscription. It is part of the plan.
So some people bought digital and therefore that is justification to get rid of physical?
Most people.
No, I made the choice for physical. I don’t own a single digital game on a Sony console. Don’t put this on me. I want to buy physical. I never wanted digital for myself. I always wanted choice.
Its just that I don’t matter. I’m a minority and Sony don’t give a fuck about me. It’s not my fault Sony is stopping physical production. Its still profitable, so Sony could keep on doing it. But they don’t because they want to fuck me over.
Damned be the man who blames the consumer and he can shove his worked at Valve credentials up his ass.
He’s right though. The consumer has chosen sure a small minority might buy physical but the majority don’t.
It was shown that for PS5 exclusives the split was in favour of physical though. And that doesn’t even count the people that buy second hand
the “choice” was shoved down your throats
I had a PS4, witch was sold and didn’t have coonsole for years. Then I got a PS5 and my account was deleted with all my purchases.
That didn’t happen to my steam games.
The problem is the legislation around digital consumers rights.
Agree with your point, but why did you own a witch, and why did you sell her?
/s
Because of the coonsole. (that’s necromancer slang for raccoon soul)
j/w - aren’t most PC stores digital only anyway?
It isn’t about digital vs physical it’s about ownership. On PC stores you’re still downloading a computer file. That you keep.
PlayStation digital isn’t like PC digital, it isn’t a file that you store on a hard drive it’s an entry in a database to say that you “own” that game. An entry that can be easily deleted whenever Sony feel like it. Think of it like the difference between Netflix and Jellyfin hosting.
Just like Netflix Sony can take away content whenever they want. At least with Netflix they don’t try and claim that I own anything though.
ahhhh makes sense now
Yes, but the part everyone is leaving out is that was greatly helped along when stores like GameStop stopped carrying PC games other than WoW and CoD circa 2010.
Companies offer games as a digital download or physical disc.
Consumers buy physical disc out of a desire to preserve media.
Game is unplayable off the disc without a 98GB download that installs a digital copy of the game onto the hardware. Disc is essentially a physical license to play the game and is useless otherwise.
“You chose this”
Fuck right off. At this point, if a game isn’t either available on GoG or as a FitGirl RePack, it does not register as an option for me anymore. That is my choice.
and seems like ppl don’t realize the disc being the license means when the dig store removes the dig licenses it’ll also remove the versions that apply to that 98gb update for a disc license.
He isn’t wrong how many people here buy from steam - it’s rare if ever you get a physical release of a game on steam.
Now physical rights vs digital are the issue;
Buying a physical item means you own it and can use it whenever you want.
Buying a digital item means you buy the license to use that item. That’s a concept that’s been around for software purchasing for a very long time.
People want to own the digital item the same as the physical and not have the license pulled when a publisher decides to. Sony just doesn’t have the trust of the gaming community for this.
Sorry your wrong physical media has always still been a license to use it.
Yeah, even physical pc games often just have a download key inside and no disk, and computers haven’t had disk drives for a while.
(I know you can get external ones, but even cases nowadays don’t account for the ability to have them as an internal component)
I did manage to snag a copy of House Flipper 2 (it just had a Steam key, no disk) for 6€ a few months ago when the lowest historical price at the time (according to IsThereAnyDeal) was in the 20s or 30s, so I’m very much in the camp of physical releases in any platform. There is much more choice for consumers, game preservation arguments notwithstanding.
Also a ton of games have day 1 patches that you’d need to download anyway from their servers. I don’t recall seeing standalone installers for patches like we used to have. So buying a physical copy just makes you feel good rather than actually avoiding the problem with digital copies.
Two years ago when I built my new computer, there were something like two cases that actually had a slot for a disk drive. I did end up getting one for my older games and it is nice
I’d argue the right fight here is to reliably obtain “permanent ownership” for either kind of purchase. Anyone who bought their games digitally for the past generation and doesn’t follow gaming news (basically a silent majority of gamers) probably doesn’t even care about this ongoing disc backlash/boycott.
But highlighting things like the sudden pull of people’s owned movies, that may matter to them when applied to games.
I see no reason not to pirate a game I bought digitally if it is then removed as a playable game.
Same for movies, if you bought it, then it should be yours.
I think they should only let you rent movies online to avoid this issue totally.
Okay. You’ll basically not be a demographic they serve anymore.
Put it this way. This year had some great singleplayer games. Some of those were funded by terrible publishers. If, in a later year, that publisher sees “Huh, 95% of people pirate this game, only 5% buy it”, then they’ll just cancel all upcoming singleplayer games, and greenlight 20 more live service or gacha games, because that’s where the MONEY is.
“Vote with your wallet” works in two ways. Pirating mostly shows up as a stay-at-home voter, or a corpse.
If they pull a game after it’s been sold and played then they don’t lose sales from that game.
They lose the fans that bought the original game.
Who is talking about pulling games post-sale? I specifically said “upcoming”. As in, shutting down game studios and future releases.
Your torrent list would get a lot shorter, unless you basically stay retro. Either way, you’d be an irrelevant consumer.
they also mentioned pirating a game they bought. so the pub got the money for it.
well, having a physical disk doesnt guarantee ownership. companies can still leave critical things off the disk and require you to download them when you install, or there can be some verification system. And if corporation servers go down, you still cant use it.
What we need is all the files and data we buy to be fully functional and not behind any encryption or other gate, be it digital or physical. Then make your own physical media of it or back it up whereever you want.
GOG, you buy it and can use it whenever you like and its digital. Best of both.
To be fair, physical media has been dead before the whole sony debacle. What’s the pint of ownjng something like cyberpunk when you own the release version?
I bought physical disks until they were basically phased out. A large chunk of them just registered on Steam and downloaded the latest patch before they would run anyway. I have been against Steam and its DRM for a while, but everyone else chose to have no rights to their games, no ability to sell or loan them or give them to others. You will own nothing and love it.
“You chose digital.”
Chooses DRM-free, piracy otherwise
“Not like that!”
Exactly. DRM is a far bigger problem than physical/digital. Fortunately GOG is a solution to it. Stop buying games with DRM.
That can be another problem: Just like digital, people choose DRM.
There’s only a small crowd that actually makes things like Denuvo single issue; the huge majority of the PC crowd sees they can still play DRM locked games at decent performance, as soon as they buy them, and even play them offline on their Steam Decks. So it’s hard to demonstrate a salient point to them that DRM is bad.
“Means you can play the game anywhere” - They already can, though!
Plenty of people choose GOG too.
Where was the choice?
The problem isn’t with digital. The problem is with digital licenses and rights.
Discs are just as digital as internet data piped through fiber optics. It’s a deceitful term which doesn’t cover the true change: perpetual license vs time limited license.
This intentionally misses the point.
It’s physical and digital distribution.
While that is a shift that happened, it’s not the distribution method people actually have problems with, even if they sometimes misattribute it. The problem, which you see mentioned most of the time, is ownership.
Compare how people feel about Sony vs. GOG, which will just let you download DRM-free installer files. Both are distributed via the Internet, but people feel very different about them, right?
Physical discs aren’t DRM free though - the disc is the DRM.
Of course people like DRM free digital games, because it means they can get them for free.
It sounds logical. However, by that definition, game boxes with download codes would be physical as well… Yet Sony isn’t killing those.
To me it’s clear that it’s not about the method of distribution or the way data is processed, it’s about their business model in general.
The game is still downloaded from a server via codes in a box. The distribution of the game is still digital.
How about we ship a box with both a digital download code and a disc? Would you classify it as digital?
I’d classify the digital copy as digital, and the disc as physical if it has the game on it.
This is pretty straight forward man. Did you download the game from a server? Digital. Did you play it or install it from a physical medium? Physical.
Did you play it or install it from a physical medium? Physical.
So you agree that it’s related to the medium then. Not to the distribution.
As you mention, a distributed box without a disc counts as digital. A distributed box with a disc counts as physical.
Exactly. And geo restrictions.
Which stems from licensing and rights
tada!
you chose this. you chose this by paying for it. you chose this by paying for digital releases.
he’s not wrong.
doesn’t matter. gamers will still pay Sony. they’ll still buy digital releases. the cycle continues.
LOL what? This is some „your carbon footprint“ level horseshit. It‘s like saying you the consumer chose global warming or to lose your job to automation. I mean, did you choose to live near a data center that was build last month? I didn‘t think so either.
We‘re not one tightly organized mass making decisions with far reaching consequences together as consumers. Providers on the other hand practice price-fixing and lobbying in an organized manner. That‘s where I would start pointing my finger at to explain this mess.
I, the consumer are terribly powerless. Only we, the people can change these things for the better by gutting these corporations.
eventually an internal document will leak that details how sony colluded with other corporations and orchestrated the whole thing but it will be like big oil’s climate research where even though they knew first and covered it up, its all our fault and we are responsible for fixing it while they continue to make it worse faster than we could possibly handle
Yet, older generations get blamed for causing the climate crisis.
they voted for and continue to vote for the people that actually cause it
Yeah, it’s always someone elses fault.
If you vote with your wallet, it just means those richer than you have a bigger vote.
Are richer people buying 12 copies of a game?
Kinda; that’s often the reason you see $120 SuperDeluxe editions of games, where the protagonist’s pants have a bit of purple trim. Or $20 “boosts” that skip the first 3 levels (which you’d get by playing two matches)
It’s very much an artifact of wealth consolidation.
Oh yeah, I forgot some games have that kinda shit in them
Sorry, I’m not sure what your comment is supposed to point out exactly. Are you saying boycotting is pointless because there are other people giving them a lot more money than you anyway? I mean it would still cut into their profit
