“It would be great if people had to buy more of the thing,” says guy who makes money selling the thing.
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Current Year (2023): “Disks are outdated and dead, who needs em anyway?”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.
Because there’s a lot of misinformation in this thread.
All media is physical media. All data is stored on a medium. Data is real and physical. Some data is stored on paper in ink writing, some data is stored as ones and zeroes on a disc drive, but the type of disc drive may vary. Hard drives, USB thumbsticks, SSDs, and so on, are all physical media.
If I destroy a BluRay, or destroy a hard drive, or burn a piece of paper, does the data still physically exist? No. In all cases, destroying the medium in which the data exists destroys the data. Whether it is paper, a disc you put in a drive, or a hard drive.
When something is stored “in the cloud” it’s still on a hard drive somewhere, just not on your hard drive somewhere. You have essentially chosen to store your property on someone else’s private property. Much like a physical storage unit. If the storage unit burns down, everything in it will cease to exist. If the data center where your cloud data is stored burns down without any backups, same issue, the data ceases to exist.
People in this thread specifically only dislike one type of physical media, and it’s a type that has one of the shorter shelf-lifes for long-term data storage.
Also, with hard drives, its often trivial to recover deleted data, which is why companies that deal with secure data often completely shred old hard drives to prevent data being exfiltrated from them after wiping.
This is needlessly pedantic. When people say “physical copy” they are talking about a physical, individual storage medium with a game on it that you can trade/sell/lend/etc. and give full transfer of the license contained on it. My hard drive is useless to you if all my games are bought via the Microsoft store and you can’t access my account. My halo 3 disc will work on any Xbox 360/Xbone/XSX for anyone every day. Is the distinction clear now?
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.
Most? That’s definitely not right. Every single game I bought up to the PS4 could be played without any downloads.
I think they mean most recent or most new games, the PS4 came out nearly a decade ago.
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.
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:
- patches and updates don’t come with disk form anymore.
- many games that requires online authentication to play won’t be available to keep playing if their account service is down.
- games go on sale with steady rate most of the time(except nintendo), for bargain bin deals you would probably find the game on humble bundle or gog.
- you often have the good games that release “better” remake version over and over anyway. Note, I know people sometimes prefer the original version, but not everyone is on the same page and it hugely depending on the dev/publisher for the newer version.
Now let’s describe the cons:
- in many countries, breaking DRM is illegal. So even if all you want to do archive, you can’t make a decrypted copy. That’s why homebrew etc provides the key/dumper for you to do such at your own risk. IMO, it’s safer(INAL) to download pirated iso/rom compare to doing your own dump. And, archiver actually tried to keep a post patch version before store is closed down(see wiiu store close example), the disk version is not a viable option anymore for archiver.
- storage up keep, physical things require storage space. I still have like 3 large shipping box for my older gen(ps3/GC/Wii/X360 games) I will probably donate them to library or something and keep the only ones I wanted to keep.
- console part cost, the BD drives are often first point of failure, then HDMI connectors. Cause well, moving parts are easier to break and harder to QA. PS5’s 2 versions gives a good example how the disk affects the look, weight, etc. Not to mention, they are a lot slower then SSD and you are required to install all that anyway.
- developer/publisher/platform see nothing for used game sales. It sounds like huge shill talk but let’s be honest, they want to make a living, if you are not supporting your favorite developer they will have to offset the cost by doing shit you all won’t like. ie, mtx, subscription service, selling analytic data, selling the studio to shit publisher that push worth practice, platform raise price to meet target projection. Buy/sell used game only helps that service owner(gamestop/ebgame/bestbuy, not the community.)
- did I mention switching disc just to play game is a PITA, and if your case is the modern garbage version, remember those plastic break down more easily and you would have to buy new case to hold your disc.
- environment waste for all the manufacturing, packaging and shipping. It’s honestly not worth that in modern era if you give a fuck about how future generation will live.
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In the current climate where it takes 30 patches and a year for a new release to become playable, discs are not very useful…
??
Of course they are. Because - you can buy the fucking things second hand or lend them to people!
I kept hoping that Sony would do a last hurrah with discs and make a console that plays them all. But with discs being pretty much antiquated at this point, I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Sony management didn’t even see a point to backwards compatibility until recently and still can’t be bothered to figure out PS3 emulation. It’s easily the console’s greatest flaw imo.
I agree.
