Bad take. They’ll give you an install disc and then make you enter an account locked code to access it anyway.
Demand digital rights instead, before a big player goes bust. Because at some point that will happen, and you’ll lose more than a handful of discs.
Legislation should force all digital marketplaces to allow selling and gifting purchased media without a middleman taking a cut.
DRM is the issue not physical. No drm means I can just keep replicating my product when physical fails
Yeah that’s my problem with it as well. People keep going “but steam does the same thing” but with steam I actually have the install on my computer, a computer which valve does not control and they cannot take things off me after the fact.
Yesnt. Steam can absolutely remote remove your library.
They never did and probably won’t do it. But they could
How can they do that? I’m curious
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Damn dude, thanks for the insight
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They can take a game off sale but they can’t take something from me that I’ve already downloaded.
In most European countries yes. They can’t legally. But they can technically.
They cannot if you back it up to a folder outside of the steam directory. Provided of course the game doesn’t use Steam’s DRM.
Fun fact! PlayStation Plus, Xbox Live, and Nintendo Online subscriptions go directly to them and none of that supports the server costs game developers have to pay to host online games. This is why most online games are forced into the games-as-a-service model, which makes zero sense to me as a game developer. It’s also why most indie games do not bother to add online multiplayer support as it’s far to expensive to pay for server hosting, let alone the cost of development.
As long as you still have tens of millions of people pre-ordering GTA6, nothing is going to change. People bitch and whine but they keep eating the slop.
I’m fine with digital for convenience. I just don’t want physical to disappear. Having both options is better for everyone.
I would be fine with digital only, but only if there was no DRM.
And alternative stores with alternative servers so I don’t have to buy a subscription for online capabilities and the ability to install whatever software I want… I guess a PC will do just fine.
IDK, second market games are cool.
The whole point of a console is ease, I pop in the disk, I play. If you take away that ease, it becomes just a locked down PC… why would you want that when you could just have a full PC?
I don’t want to make digital seem better, but for this argument it is… you don’t even need the disc, you just turn on the console and select the game. All from the comfort of your sofa. Hell, you don’t even need to go to a store or wait for a delivery in the first place, all those bytes just come to you.
I think something to realize here is that A.) The above is why the majority of people just use digital at this point, and B.) Inserting a brand new game disc into your console still requires downloads, installing and often being online to do so anyway. Modern games rarely even fit on one disc, so the disc is less useful that it was in the XBox OG and PS1 days. It’s more like what Nintendo is doing with the Game Key Carts.
THIS 100%
Modern game discs are literally just Mountain Dew Verification Cans™
You are correct. Which is why at this point you might as well go PC. Console games used to be playable without internet, just pop in and enjoy. I am not referencing the terrible experience it has become today (guess I am old). Nostalgia I suppose for an era that did already die.
Sorry, no. My video drivers fucked up while installing somehow and I had to blow them out with DDU and reinstall everything to get normal functioning back on my PC. I’ve had countless random errors, performance hangs, and more due to just random stupid Windows 11 shit that had to be identified and solved by repeated web searches and in a few cases obtaining and running specialized tools to cleanse my system of the filth W11 is full of.
NONE of this is part of the usual console experience. Exceptions exist, yes. And technical support when they occur is dramatically simpler because they’re all the same.
I think you’re forgetting just how fucking stupid the average person is, and how lazy they are. We’re in the era of cognitive surrender to chatGPT. You think these drooling morons want to web search how to fix a driver installation somehow getting corrupted?
You’re conflating the PC experience with the Windows experience.
You think Linux is going to be a better experience? What do you think someone will think the user will think when they encounter a program or game that simply refuses to run on Linux?
You’re too deep in the sauce, man. I have to reiterate that the average gamer is both horribly stupid and extremely lazy. You gotta keep that in mind. People smart enough and dedicated enough to go through the hurdles associated with gaming on a PC are likely already using one as their primary or sole platform.
I’ve never experienced any problems with gaming in Steam on Bazzite. Never a game that fails to run.
Pretty much all of the big live service games demand kernel access for their anticheat, which typically isn’t allowed on Linux, so those games simply won’t work.
Why is it ok for PC to be all digital? I don’t remember the last time I’ve even seen a physical version of a PC game. Everything is through steam, While console it’s not ok? I can’t remember the last time I purchased a disc version for xbox.
Like I used to have the physical versions of Deadpool and both marvel ultimate alliances but I lost the discs in a move I wish I could purchase them digitally again but that’s about the only downside I’ve encountered with digital only is some license rights gets a revoked
Cannot wait until Sony comes out with a study that shows 100% of gamers ( a small handful of people guaranteed not to care about pjydical media ) don’t want it so they can gaslight tge general public into thinking nobody wants it.
Steam on pc shows that gamers can be okay with not having physical media - as long as they trust the vendor that the thing they pay for actually means a persistent access to the game.
Unfortunately this move also gives much more power to the vendor. Once he decides to withdraw access to the player, the ownership of the paid-for thing becomes useless (until a lawsuit were to be filed and won).
Physical media without mandatory internet servers (like in pre-internet consoles) means true ownership - after buying a game, the vendor has no longer any control.
The key point to me is not directly the difference between physical disk or cloud download, but between truly offline versus online-required games (or goods in general).
PC gaming all digital is ok because it’s not a closed ecosystem. I can install whatever platform I want, and buy games. And there are huge sales.
Also there are drm free shops like gog, a huge community with emulators, mods, and in the need pirated copies of the games I bought.
Trust is one thing, but monopolized market is another.
edit: today I found the List of DRM-free games that has many games that DRM free from many PC platforms (1867 games in Steam and 604 in Epic). Meaning that you can launch an installed game directly from the .exe and even make a zip the installed game as backup.
PC gamers accepted the inability to sell and loan games and to have extensive DRM on a large number of games. The console players are the last holds against this anti consumer practice. Just because PCs has multiple stores it doesn’t change the fact Steam is a near monopoly and while its relatively consumer friendly we still don’t own games on it, they can not be passed to others in any way legally. People have a weird love for Steam but the basic facts are the same, it uses DRM, you can’t sell or loan games and you have a licence and don’t own them, you can’t pass them to someone else in a will. Steam is pretty anti consumer on the big items here compared to disks on the consoles.
Steam voluntarily let you have family sharing, without a monthly fee, so that removed the biggest problem without having actual lending.
Will they boycott?
I already did. If i cant find it on PC at a reasonable price the high seas will provide.
“Gamers push back.” Just like they pushed back against $70 and $80 games by lining up around the block to buy a Switch 2 so they could buy $70 and $80 games to play on it. Like Rockstar will make a mint selling $100 copies of GTA6.
Nah, not all of us. When switch 2 came out (and because I wanted a hand held) I looked at it, poked at in the shop and decided to buy a DS instead. $80 vs $650. If I’d been feeling more generous, I would have gotten a Retroid pocket 5 or something. I didn’t need it.
The switch 2 is shiny, but it didn’t fill any niche for me that one of my other rigs couldn’t do (Wii, Wii u, $100 emulation box I built).
“Bigger, better, faster” is a mug’s game. It cannot be won and it’s the lynchpin of capitalism. The way to win is to not play.
Gaming is a luxury good. If the big players are going to go full retard, let them. Let it all burn while you find greener pastures.
This goes for all tech (and luxury goods), IMHO. Do more with less.
Reject the status ladder → identify the actual function → satisfy it with the smallest tool that works = you win.
Then enjoy the absurdity of $650 Switch 2 (and marvel at the cost of Switch 1 increasing in price. Lol no).
I suppose if any game is worth $100 it’ll probably be a game from Rockstar. Personally I’m waiting for reviews since there’s literally no point pre-ordering.
Thank you for providing us an object example lol
People voting with their wallet will decide how this ends.
They will like PC gamers swallow all the DRM and digital downloads as we see everytime there is complaints about Denovo or the latest game has been withdrawn on Steam gamers keep going back and buying more. It will end the same way on Playstation.
I’m not aware of Steam ever having removed a purchased game from a library.
If you have a reliable source that says otherwise please link it.Technically they could do that of course.
But it would be bad for their business and have people do more business with gog.com.
Steam gets chosen over gog.com for convenience.
If purchased games disappear that will be even more inconvenient.edit: I mean “Steam ever having removed a purchased game from a library” in the sense of for no good reason.
Following legal requirements or being dependent on external resources (e.g. game servers) outside the responsibility of Steam are different things and I wouldn’t blame Steam for it.
There’s a reason for the trust people have in Steam.
And there are plenty of reasons for not having trust in Sony.
If I was a console gamer I would have already stocked on all older consoles with all the disks, hacked a secondary console just because and move to PC for main online gaming. Let them suffer. Let them loose money.
But that would never happen. People will not stop buying. Sadly.
They knew before they started, either people took it lying down (unlikely) or there was backlash and reversal… Followed by announcement that disc version of next console is now $500 more expensive than digital, and physical discs will be produced, just at 1/10th the volume and doubled the cost of current.
Yup. It’s always by design. Corporate bullshit has been playing the long game.
