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closetfurry ,

Not often I get to say this, but I completely agree. I HATE the walled garden that is the PS store. 90 usd for FIFA? 130 usd for some random GOLD edition of a ubisoft game? No way. Let me pick those up dirt cheap two months later at a retailer who is having a sale, or from someone who has played it and is ready to sell it onwards.

Sina ,

In the current climate where it takes 30 patches and a year for a new release to become playable, discs are not very useful…

Jabbawacky ,

??

Of course they are. Because - you can buy the fucking things second hand or lend them to people!

Sina ,

Sure, but it’s really weird that we are relying and want to rely on disks to be the license basically, because the data storage part is quite useless, at least when your connection is faster than your blue-ray drive. (plus you can directly download the patched game)

XTornado ,

I hope I am wrong but I see the next generation as completely discless specially if this current generation discless versions sold good enough. The only exception could be Nintendo.

Of course they might require some deals with stores or just sell themselves the consoles online… Because the stores want to sell games, they might still sell peripherals and redeemable cards for money or maybe CD keys… No idea tough, but if the benefits fall they might say “Nah I am not selling your console if games aren’t sold here”.

ObiGynKenobi ,

What needs to happen is regulation. Pro-consumer governing bodies (which don’t exist in the US, but the EU has been on a roll) mandating the right to transfer a digital license.

As for the stores, Xbox offers GameStop a small percentage of the revenue from every digital game purchased on a console sold by GameStop. That feels like a healthy compromise for an all-digital business model.

Sina ,

mandating the right to transfer a digital license.

Even for the EU that is not an easy thing to deal with in practice. First they would need to outright ban practices where you rent your license for an unspecified time instead of owning it. (this is how it is with everything in mobile app stores, Steam, Epic etc…) And transfer of digital licenses in general is a very hard nut to crack. How do you simply prove who the license owner is? What about accounts being tied to licenses? (Imagine the EU asking software companies that all products above the value of €25 must be sold with a hardware key to run them & if the key is damaged they are mandated to replace it at the manufacturing cost of said hardware key, or use a central EU ran entity to handle these keys that the companies would need to buy from them. Pretty far fetched, isn’t it?)

Decades of lenient legislation made all this night impossible untangle…

Buttons ,
@Buttons@programming.dev avatar

First they would need to outright ban practices where you rent your license for an unspecified time instead of owning it.

Why?

People were able to rent games in the past. What happened then that was so bad?

Sina ,

i’m not sure if you understood my comment. The issue is that they sell you software for the full price, but there is a fine print on there somewhere that clearly states that they can remove your access at any time due to a variety of reasons. For example I have lost games due to Apple policies forced the dev to remove them from the app store and then I could not reinstall them anymore.

upstream ,

I mean - if the button says “buy” or “purchase” it’s not renting a license, no matter what the fine print in the terms say.

That’s at least how it should be.

Buttons ,
@Buttons@programming.dev avatar

Somehow the law ignores the giant flashing “Buy!” button but is super concerned about the fine print in 6pt font nobody reads.

clutchmattic ,

And transfer of digital licenses in general is a very hard nut to crack. How do you simply prove who the license owner is? What about accounts being tied to licenses?

Another big problem is that the digital license must be transferrable even if the original digital store is deactivated.

The above seems to be the only legitimate use case of Blockchain to me, but the chain must be operated by the state to ensure digital licenses continue to be transferrable

qyron ,

At some point, someone will have to wonder if they have/own anything.

This isn’t The Ascetic Virtues. We develop raport with physical, tangible, things.

LetMeEatCake ,

As I understand it, most disc copies of games today aren’t viable in the first place. Either all of the game data is not on the disc and some needs to be downloaded anyway, or the game copy on the disc is in such a shit state that you wouldn’t want to play that specific copy.

Discs don’t really protect us in the sense of ownership. It’s still reliant on the same backend to enable it in most practical senses.

SpaceCowboy ,
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca avatar

It is nice to be able to give a game to someone else when you’re done playing it.

Guntrigger ,

That’s exactly why they don’t want it!

I would have played so many less games in my youth if I weren’t able to trade discs with friends. I would have missed Vice City, Morrowind and Final Fantasy VII to name a few memorable ones.

kiranraine ,

I can see them forced to have some form of resellable media Ala switch maybe. But disc’s as others have stated I think are on the way out. Esp bc they’re so easily scratched and everything else…like good for a time but should’ve had something else come in once cartridges caught back up in price. They were always quicker by a long shot…it’s just that memory prices weren’t there in the 90s or until now even really. If I don’t like or don’t want a game I want some way to sell it off and can’t do that digitally bc they won’t equate it to the same thing as selling a used copy XD

isVeryLoud ,

I want a return to cartridges, like the switch.

kiranraine ,

Same tbh…

nodiet ,

I have never ever managed to scratch a disc to the point where it became unusable. Neither have I ever had problems when buying used discs. I agree about the speed though; at this point my internet speed surpasses the speed with which games are installed from a disc

kiranraine ,

I mean I’ve bought plenty that were scratched but still worked. Only one that didn’t really was the twilight princess we found randomly in my church parking lot when I was younger. I just don’t like the speed since no one seems to get nailing down loading times. I’d love something Ala switch games tho…

BigTrout75 ,

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.

gk99 ,

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.

nodiet ,

Looking at RPCS3, it seems like most PS3 games wouldn’t run well on PS5 without dedicated, PS3-like hardware.

BigTrout75 ,

I agree.

Computerchairgeneral ,

Obviously, GameStop has a vested interest in discs sticking around, but it feels like that ship has sailed. Can't remember the last time I bought a physical game and it wouldn't surprise me if the next generation of consoles do away with disc drives altogether. Not really sure how to feel about that. Kind of sad having grown up using discs, but at the same time, it just feels inevitable that consoles are going to move to digital-only distribution.

Ilikepornaddict ,

I bought a discless ps5, because I haven’t put a dosc in my ps4 since 2016. I really have no need or want for one.

belated_frog_pants ,

“We miss selling you a scratched up disc for $49 with no box, that we paid some poor kid $2 for”

bermuda ,

I remember after I got a 3DS I went to GameStop to trade in my DSi and they offered me $5 or a gift card.

AceFuzzLord ,

You could probably steal the Mona Lisa and bring it to GameStop, only to be told they’ll buy it for some crusty, old, pre-chewed gum they found on the sidewalk a year ago. And that’s if you’re lucky.

Pxtl ,
@Pxtl@lemmy.ca avatar

Buggywhip salesman demands accomodation from the horseless carriage industry.

Yes, I’m upset at the licenseification of the gaming industry as much as the next guy but that died long before physical media did. As long as a game can die without its first-party servers, games are leased and not owned.

HawlSera ,

I mean… he has a vested interest. But he’s right we need media that isn’t dependent on official servers

ObiGynKenobi ,

If only that was what he was saying. He doesn’t care whether they’re dependent on servers. The vast majority of physical games sold today are already nothing more than an entitlement and some of the game files, with the rest being downloaded after you insert the disc. He’s only concerned with Gamestop getting their cut, both in new game sales and especially in their bread-and-butter trade-in market.

HawlSera , (edited )

I never accused him of altruism of any kind, if the games came from his servers specifically… he’d be tuning a different sing

SpaceCowboy ,
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca avatar

Of course making money is his motive, but that does that matter?

Digital distribution only means you can’t give (or sell) your games to someone else. So with digital only the copyright holders of the video games make more money. Once it’s all digital only, next step is to require a connection to a server for them to work, so then they can shut it down to force you to buy a new console and re-buy all the old games you want to play again. What are you going to do if the decide to go that way? It’s either stop playing video games altogether, or go along with whatever scheme they feel like coming up with when they enshittify themselves like every other company inevitably does.

A physical copy means more options for the consumer, why should we care how much of the pie this corporation or that corporation makes off of it? In fact corporations in general make even more money from non-transferable digital distribution.

NuPNuA ,

Given that MS have put a lot of work into making your digital 360 titles work on Series s/x and even upgrading some of them, I don’t think that’s a concern with all publishers.

ObiGynKenobi ,

I’m not sure why you’re trying to convince me of the merits of physical media? I did not, and do not, disagree. It’s a more flexible option, and more options is always better for the consumer. But the reality is that physical media, in its current iteration, doesn’t offer all that much protection. The only universal benefit of physical media is the ability to regift or resell. It’s a great benefit, but it hardly liberates consumers from dependence on servers.

As for my original point, it simply read to me as if this person was giving the GameStop exec credit for something he did not say. I wanted to make sure his comments were seen in an accurate light.

SpaceCowboy ,
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca avatar

So we should reject an ally that has a shared goal simply because their motives aren’t pure enough?

It’s the old Stephen Fry quote “it’s more important to be effective than it is to be right.” We shouldn’t care so much about whether or not someone has the right reason for trying to affect a positive result. Gamestop’s motives are irrelevant, the effect of their actions are what matters.

FlowVoid ,

Ok, but “It would be great if people had to buy more of the thing” is not an accurate summary either. Putting a CD drive on a console does not mean you have to buy physical media.

erwan ,

In the days of zero days patches and DRM requiring a check to the servers, a disc doesn’t guarantee that at all.

If anything, disc just became dongles to prove ownership and download the full game.

Syrup ,

This is also true. With DRM, I feel like we’re missing out on a lot of property rights that should be remediated. I’m not sure what all could be done for zero day patches, though. Maybe we go back to the Windows XP days and distribute update packages via CD as well. TBH, though- if we have the ability to directly access the storage medium of a console and we are able to remove DRM, there’s no reason to make a disc drive mandatory

Roundcat ,
@Roundcat@lemmy.ca avatar

I prefer having a physical game collection, but with the way physical games are handled now, with more than half the game needing to be downloaded to the console to cut costs or because they didn’t finish the game before release, it doesn’t solve the preservation or ownership problems anymore.

AceFuzzLord ,

That’s where piracy comes in, even if it does tend to have negative effects on smaller devs. So long as there is no server or internet connection required to play, piracy will rain supreme in preservation.

Ownership, on the other hand, is a lot trickier. I personally say just having, for PC games, the game download .exe (or equivalent file) is enough to be considered owning it, but that doesn’t mean much.

NuPNuA ,

The way I see it, piracy is fine, but only once the format is dead. I recently hacked both my 3DS and Vita to access the whole libraries since those formats are dead with ones digital store switched off and the other half dead and barely functioning.

But yeah, pay for new releases.

csolisr ,

Or at the very least, add a way to sideload DRM-free games. That’s why I love my PS3, WiiU and even my Switch to an extent.

ConsciousCode ,

Why discs instead of cartridges, which are currently the superior physical option? I personally try to buy physical whenever possible, because I don’t trust companies to not ban my account and flush hundreds of dollars of games down the toilet, and it generally feels better to have just that little extra bit more ownership over my own property.

SpaceCowboy ,
@SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca avatar

That’s basically what the Switch uses. Though they’re more like a memory card, but they kinda look like little tiny cartridges.

NuPNuA ,

Because cartridges cost more to produce and are limited in storage. Switch carts cap out at 64gb, Blu Rays are up to 100gb at this point and it’s much cheaper to chuck a few of them in a box if the game goes over that. Hence all the switch games with massive downloads required on top of the cart.

SternburgExport ,

Wait… Based GameStop? I’m confused.

AaronMaria ,

It’s obviously in GameStop’s interest.

ObiGynKenobi ,

A broken clock.

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