3. Sell it as Used to recoupe some of their gamer cash, and spend it elsewhere
3.1 Other user buy a discounted game. << HERE the CD KEY CODE will already have been consumed by the original purchaser.
NOTE: This game is $100.00 for the full version, and $80.00 for the "not all gameplay" version.
NOTE 2: For Disabled Folks amongst us, who game, the Digital Only system is a bit of a kick in the teeth. It's extra difficult to evaluate whether a game is playable for a given person's individual different-ability, and this evaluation/trying-hard-to-work-with-the-game time-period may easily elapse the retailer's (Sony, et al) Digital Refund timer.
Gamers are notoriously bad at doing something like this. If next 6090 card comes with a shovel of shit you have to eat to get the card - most will do it, in addition to paying $5000
Indeed, the whole "you're not buying a game, you are buying a license to the game" is a bad argument that is used to justify not allowing resale.
The only party it benefits are the companies, not the people.
It also kills the joy of discovering old games in the attic when you're moving and sitting down and playing a bit, or passing on games to your kids.
I have 9000+ games on Steam and many others on EA, Ubisoft etc. Value is zero.
I recently catalogued and valued my physical game collection across multiple consoles. Value is over £10,000 and that value will only go up as time passes.
digital goods should have a place, but the issue here is that there's no equivalent physical goods replacements. And i dont think you can regulate this away.
The only force is consumer action (in aggregate). And it seems that companies have managed to train consumers not to take any action against the interests of these publishing companies.
If you dislike this policy you can opt out. Step 1: don’t buy the game in this format.
It’s a shame it doesn’t send a stronger signal, but you’ll still be joining many others.
Eventually, there’ll be enough conscientious objectors that things change. It’s probably some small percentage, so you sitting out will do more than you think!
but as you acknowledge in your choice of words, that's not how it's gonna work. Thus ends capitalism. The fungibility of a dollar is how capitalism washes all evil. If I made a dollar by being evil, but I turn around and give those dollars to an orphanage, those dollars are accepted, the same as if those dollars were from an honest days work. The concept of blood money is one we don't embrace too hard. We wash the sins away with another transaction. There is more to life to money, but it's a poor life without it.
- Externalizes the costs of distribution to consumers. DVDs and Blu Rays cost a pittance compared to the $100 MSRP that GTA 6 is rumoured to retail under. GTA 6 will likely break records for the highest single day gross of a media release of all time. They can't allocate some of that top line to providing a physical token that gamers can collect?
- Sets a bad precedent for future AAA releases in terms of acceptable size. Forces gamers to have to buy more storage at a time when storage costs are astronomical. At 200GB I don't know how anybody can justify valuable space in their SSD for a single game.
- Genuinely leads to worse quality product. Without physical media there's no deadline and effectively no incentive to provide a polished product on release day. Have fun playing a broken game for the next 3 to 5 years.
"At 200GB I don't know how anybody can justify valuable space in their SSD for a single game."
What game plays off the disc itself? Most games copy to the ssd and then just download a new full copy of the game from the cloud the second the copy from the disc is done.
Yeah it was the Ps4/Xbox 1 generation where it became mandatory. That said some games would allow you to boot the game half way through the install and use both the HDD data and Blu Ray data at the same time, this was generally pretty slow as it was still trying to install at the same time.
That is if there isn't a patch, otherwise it will just download most of it again like you said.
It's mandatory for literally all (native) PS5/XSX games; because that means the games can rely on SSD speeds and not worry about supporting fetching data from the spinning disks.
There's a lot of AAA games I havent tried, but why are the launch day patches Ive experienced so gigantic?
Why do games need to download textures, sounds, videos over again? I just can't understand why a 100GB game has a 60GB patch etc, other than purposeful obfuscation or complete disregard for care.
AIUI the process of building asset packs and compressing them can mean that modifying a single texture can mean complete reshuffling of the resulting file; and that means redownloading the whole compiled "pack".
> At 200GB I don't know how anybody can justify valuable space in their SSD for a single game.
I have 2 classes of SSD in my system. I've got 512gb of extremely fast, high quality NVMe storage. Then I've got 4tb of the cheapest bullshit I could find on Amazon. I put the big games on my crappy ssd. The performance difference is not something I care about anymore.
In my opinion, disc based games have been a ridiculous way to sell modern games because they are physically incapable of storing the amount of game data required for modern AAA games. I understand that they still exist because of the resale value, but solid state storage similar to Nintendo Switch cards makes more sense to me.
On an even more personal note, very few modern games, if any, are worth purchasing for my own enjoyment. The gaming landscape overall has dropped so low that I don't even care anymore.
>very few modern games, if any, are worth purchasing for my own enjoyment
Side question, do you happen to play games that don't have a gun or a ball in it? I always hear people say these things about modern games and it's almost always turns out to be people who play call of duty , sports games and maybe they have played something like assassin's creed or a racing game once in a while, and have never played any indie or non AAA games or anything that isn't made in USA or Japan. I agree there's a lot of dreadful about the gaming industry right now, but there are so many games worth playing that it's just sad to read stuff like this
Again, that was a personal take. I understand millions of people are still able to enjoy modern video games.
I am primarily an FPS gamer. Old school COD was great. I also love older version of Minecraft. Also most Valve games. Portal 2 being my favorite.
If I had to summarize my major problems with modern games/game industry they are this: Unrelatable stories (to me personally), micro transactions, poor optimization, and planned obsolescence (You can never player Overwatch 1 ever again). Then there are other bonus problems like the fortnite-ification of games, E.g., putting every IP know to man into a single game.
Also, loot boxes. Horrible, disgusting business practice. Literally selling gambling to children.
Yeah I agree with micro transaction and obsolescence. It's sad that Valve revived PC gaming while also making it worse (they invented battle passes, lootboxes and DRM), I, nevertheless, still love their games (I keep playing L4D2 to this day with my friends) and TF2 was my favorite multiplayer game
I love TF2 as well! To be a little less negative, I will say that game engines like Godot give me lots of hope for the future. It sets a good foundation for future game devs to make something great. Also, game devs now have access to lots of different platforms to publish their games.
Action: it's triple A but God of War and GoW Ragnarök are pretty good imo. If you don't mind formulaic Horizon zero dawn and forbidden west have a good story and storytelling but gameplay wise it's a bit stale.
Clair Obscure of course.
Weird: graveyard keeper - it has a lot of grinding, it's a hit or miss I guess. It's older but it has pixel graphics so not much of a concern I guess
A PS5 Bluray can hold 100GB of data, sure some AAA titles are in excess of 100GB, although that is still 100GB that the player doesn't have to download, plus they enable re-sell-ability and partially maintain the status quo of "owning" a title.
How much of that 100GB is actually optimized usage? I suspect that a hard cap on the size of the game would lead to a better quality product. The size inflation of games has literally gone insane. I was looking at my Steam library and Tekken 7 was taking up close to 100GB of space which makes absolutely no sense, because it has the same fundamental gameplay as Tekken Tag 1 which was released on a 700MB CD ROM for the PS2's launch.
And with improvements in procedural rendering, textures and environments should become more compact than pre-rendered (and games should load faster as well.)
I was completely unaware that PS5 discs could hold that much data! But that leads me to the next question, what is the read time look like on that? lol. I found this manual on google for the ps5 disc drive, but I don't understand these units.
It's weird to say this, but BD (including 4K UHD BD) is actually really old tech. Sony was talking about quad-layer discs back before they deleted the mandatory disc caddy from the draft BD spec! OK, practically speaking nobody had their hands on a quad-layer disc until BDXL in the mid-2010s, but even then that's still old.
As for why nobody's made a higher-capacity disc... well, they did. It was even an industry standard. You just never heard about it because it was exclusively intended to be a replacement for tape libraries. I guess rolling out this tech to consumers was just too impractically expensive?
You can absolutely do resale rights with solid-state media, too. On the other hand, the Switch library is littered with games that require downloading an update in order to play. Switch 2 went further and had games that shipped as a pure license key with no data storage. The underlying economics of game distribution are actually really unfavorable to any amount of overhead. Hell, the reason why physical games even still exist AT ALL is because we can press BDXLs for pennies.
Going back to the stagnation in optical media, the read performance hit a wall a while back, too. You basically can't stream anything off these discs anymore. Hell, some Internet connections might actually be faster than an install from optical media! So that's not really the advantage people think anymore either.
The resale ability is basically the only reason to keep physical media around, though - and I'm surprised we haven't seen a renewed attempt to kill physical. I mean, with movies, most stores have already removed their BD sections; you basically can only buy those online or at some Barnes & Noble stores.
> In my opinion, disc based games have been a ridiculous way to sell modern games because they are physically incapable of storing the amount of game data required for modern AAA games
I’ve worked on a few AAA games with large install sizes, and I personally don’t believe this to be true. Or, I think it’s due to a lack of financial/organizational incentive to skim things down. The cost of storage and distribution is offloaded to the digital marketplace and consumer. Nobody’s KPI is tracked to the download size.
In projects of that size, you’re often trowling through a big proprietary graph of assets. This might be akin to UE’s reference viewer, or maybe less sophisticated. It’s hard to do and very unlikely to be on the roadmap.
Memory for Switch games is more and more expensive, or at least I assume that's why so few physical games have come out for the Switch 2 (plus the whole "key-card" thing with no game date on the carts). With discs you could still use them to install a game, even include multiple discs if you need to. But as another poster noted, for a game that'll sell a ton like GTA6, it's all about just killing the resale market to make just that much more money.
And on a personal note, I feel we are living in a gaming golden age, so many amazing titles, especially indie ones, out there in every conceivable genre. If anything the problem is finding them, since there's so much being released these days. And I say this as someone who still also plays older games (especially 3rd, 4th, and 5th gen).
> but solid state storage similar to Nintendo Switch cards makes more sense to me
These likely degrade in 5-10 years, and have you seen the price of NAND lately? AAA gaming is going to get to be out-of-reach because of storage costs.
I don't know what the degradation for NAND storage is, but another aspect that I didn't mention in my original comment is the fragility of disc based media. In terms of scratches and other damage.
You have to treat a blu ray very badly to get a scratch in it. It might look like a DVD or CD but it's not. It is much more resistant to scratches as it has a protective coating called Durabis from TDK. Sony uses their own proprietary coating.
While this is true, it is a sign of the customer losing control over their purchases. When the servers go dark, the game does too.
Yes there are some practicality issues with physical media but they are kind of trivial to the costs of just handing over all control to the publishers.
same. the last game i purchased that i enjoyed was cyberpunk, although that also got boring because at release it had some issues..
i recently bought battlefield 6 and that has been fun, but even then idk how to describe it. there's just no soul anymore.
i don't think it is because i'm getting older. back in the day there were teamspeak communities that ONLY played battlefield, and that was really fun.
now it is some discord servers, nobody really plays 1 game, but many on rotation. so for me, it feels like every game is just solo with whatever randoms show up.
so i've stopped playing lol. i like to think i got to play some cool games during the golden era, before enshittification, where people formed communities around one game.
> Copies of the game purchased before November 20 will [...] include an additional Vintage Vice City Pack with more cosmetics and cars [...] this is only guaranteed "while supplies last."
As expected, you don't actually own the game at all and it is possible for console makers to ban you from running the game on your machine.
Of course no-one will care (until it happens) but at the same time, it will be available on PS5 and Xbox but not for the PC or the Steam Machine.
Given the price of the game and the Steam Machine, I expect the Steam Machine to not sell well at all but GTA 6 to break over $1 billion in sales in a single day.
I'm honestly not sure why this is making headlines. The move to digital-only has been happening for years. I mean, when I got Skyrim's legendary edition, the box only had a code in it, and that was 2013! 13 years ago!
It saves the publisher money and cuts down on reselling, which was cutting into their sales. It simplifies distribution. It gives them far more control, especially if they use their own launcher. Is anyone surprised that they like it when it offers only positives for them?
Also: Many big AAA releases can't even fit on a blu ray anymore. Games are coming up on 200GB+, that will not fit on a disk.
This trend isn't reversing. And the average person buying the game doesn't gaf, so it'll continue.
Of course, there will be some 'protestors' (who will just buy the game anyways) or some """protestors""" (who never intended to buy the game in the first place)
I'll be honest, this discussion is so stale I just don't care at this point. The fight for this ended a decade ago.
And honestly, considering how much more expensive AAA game creation has gotten over the years, and how game price hasn't even close to kept up with inflation, I get it.
There are so many much more egregious behaviors publishers do than this nonsense. Fight them on microtransactions, or making games online-only even for singleplayer content and then shutting down servers. Literally anything than this waste of time.
You can buy games directly on Steam without buying a physical box too; I presumed from context it was clear I was referring to retail, physical editions.
What would be the point? It would need to be six double-side Blurays to fit the actual game on there. You could have one but you're still going to have to download the majority of the game...
Why not include 6 then? I remember when I got the Marathon Trilogy Box Set from the Apple store (before they were called that) in Keene, NH whenever the fuck it was before 2000--maybe 1998? It came with 3+ CDs, a book, a crazy box, and a poster. I will remember to the day I die that beautiful visage of a space marine ripping an alien's skull and spine out of its body with his bare hands. Surely games companies these days can get their act together to put their games on a usb drive or whatever and put it in a box.
This eliminates the resale market.
So, no longer can customers:
1. Buy the game as Physical
2. Play it until done or bored
3. Sell it as Used to recoupe some of their gamer cash, and spend it elsewhere
3.1 Other user buy a discounted game. << HERE the CD KEY CODE will already have been consumed by the original purchaser.
NOTE: This game is $100.00 for the full version, and $80.00 for the "not all gameplay" version.
NOTE 2: For Disabled Folks amongst us, who game, the Digital Only system is a bit of a kick in the teeth. It's extra difficult to evaluate whether a game is playable for a given person's individual different-ability, and this evaluation/trying-hard-to-work-with-the-game time-period may easily elapse the retailer's (Sony, et al) Digital Refund timer.
The "vote with your wallet" mantra holds here. Don't buy it.
Gamers are notoriously bad at doing something like this. If next 6090 card comes with a shovel of shit you have to eat to get the card - most will do it, in addition to paying $5000
and that is why these "AAA" games continues to decline in quality and become more anti-consumer - gamers put up with it.
Spend that $100 bucks on indie games - you'd at least get 5 very good quality ones that aren't anti-consumer.
It's a good first step, but this also seems ripe for regulation. If I buy something – tangible or not – I should be able to sell it on. Period.
(Barring other regulatory burdens. I think it's reasonable that you cannot legally sell on prescription drugs, for example.)
Indeed, the whole "you're not buying a game, you are buying a license to the game" is a bad argument that is used to justify not allowing resale. The only party it benefits are the companies, not the people.
It also kills the joy of discovering old games in the attic when you're moving and sitting down and playing a bit, or passing on games to your kids.
I have 9000+ games on Steam and many others on EA, Ubisoft etc. Value is zero.
I recently catalogued and valued my physical game collection across multiple consoles. Value is over £10,000 and that value will only go up as time passes.
in the attic, you discover your grandpa's steam account scribbled onto a piece of paper with the password.
You try to log in, but turns out you need biometrics to access the library!
digital goods should have a place, but the issue here is that there's no equivalent physical goods replacements. And i dont think you can regulate this away.
The only force is consumer action (in aggregate). And it seems that companies have managed to train consumers not to take any action against the interests of these publishing companies.
Digital wouldn't be so bad if you actually owned it - first sale doctrine, easy resale/transfer, etc.
Though I'm sure game publishers would just switch to token online features to prevent resale.
If you dislike this policy you can opt out. Step 1: don’t buy the game in this format.
It’s a shame it doesn’t send a stronger signal, but you’ll still be joining many others.
Eventually, there’ll be enough conscientious objectors that things change. It’s probably some small percentage, so you sitting out will do more than you think!
How will the seller know you opted out for that particular reason?
in a perfect world, they look at their sales and notice that the games that are only available with no physical media are selling poorly
but as you acknowledge in your choice of words, that's not how it's gonna work. Thus ends capitalism. The fungibility of a dollar is how capitalism washes all evil. If I made a dollar by being evil, but I turn around and give those dollars to an orphanage, those dollars are accepted, the same as if those dollars were from an honest days work. The concept of blood money is one we don't embrace too hard. We wash the sins away with another transaction. There is more to life to money, but it's a poor life without it.
This is bad for many reasons:
- Externalizes the costs of distribution to consumers. DVDs and Blu Rays cost a pittance compared to the $100 MSRP that GTA 6 is rumoured to retail under. GTA 6 will likely break records for the highest single day gross of a media release of all time. They can't allocate some of that top line to providing a physical token that gamers can collect?
- Sets a bad precedent for future AAA releases in terms of acceptable size. Forces gamers to have to buy more storage at a time when storage costs are astronomical. At 200GB I don't know how anybody can justify valuable space in their SSD for a single game.
- Genuinely leads to worse quality product. Without physical media there's no deadline and effectively no incentive to provide a polished product on release day. Have fun playing a broken game for the next 3 to 5 years.
"At 200GB I don't know how anybody can justify valuable space in their SSD for a single game."
What game plays off the disc itself? Most games copy to the ssd and then just download a new full copy of the game from the cloud the second the copy from the disc is done.
Yeah it was the Ps4/Xbox 1 generation where it became mandatory. That said some games would allow you to boot the game half way through the install and use both the HDD data and Blu Ray data at the same time, this was generally pretty slow as it was still trying to install at the same time.
That is if there isn't a patch, otherwise it will just download most of it again like you said.
It's mandatory for literally all (native) PS5/XSX games; because that means the games can rely on SSD speeds and not worry about supporting fetching data from the spinning disks.
I thought as much but wasn't 100% certain.
There's a lot of AAA games I havent tried, but why are the launch day patches Ive experienced so gigantic?
Why do games need to download textures, sounds, videos over again? I just can't understand why a 100GB game has a 60GB patch etc, other than purposeful obfuscation or complete disregard for care.
Ironically, frequently _because of_ compression.
AIUI the process of building asset packs and compressing them can mean that modifying a single texture can mean complete reshuffling of the resulting file; and that means redownloading the whole compiled "pack".
> At 200GB I don't know how anybody can justify valuable space in their SSD for a single game.
I have 2 classes of SSD in my system. I've got 512gb of extremely fast, high quality NVMe storage. Then I've got 4tb of the cheapest bullshit I could find on Amazon. I put the big games on my crappy ssd. The performance difference is not something I care about anymore.
Yeah, guess I will keep buying games years after release when they have been patched and are cheaper.
This likely has little bearing on install size. Maybe you would save some download size but I kind of doubt it.
Day 1 patches have been a thing for years. This honestly is not new.
I'll wait for the Fitgirl digital download special edition.
In my opinion, disc based games have been a ridiculous way to sell modern games because they are physically incapable of storing the amount of game data required for modern AAA games. I understand that they still exist because of the resale value, but solid state storage similar to Nintendo Switch cards makes more sense to me.
On an even more personal note, very few modern games, if any, are worth purchasing for my own enjoyment. The gaming landscape overall has dropped so low that I don't even care anymore.
>very few modern games, if any, are worth purchasing for my own enjoyment
Side question, do you happen to play games that don't have a gun or a ball in it? I always hear people say these things about modern games and it's almost always turns out to be people who play call of duty , sports games and maybe they have played something like assassin's creed or a racing game once in a while, and have never played any indie or non AAA games or anything that isn't made in USA or Japan. I agree there's a lot of dreadful about the gaming industry right now, but there are so many games worth playing that it's just sad to read stuff like this
Again, that was a personal take. I understand millions of people are still able to enjoy modern video games.
I am primarily an FPS gamer. Old school COD was great. I also love older version of Minecraft. Also most Valve games. Portal 2 being my favorite.
If I had to summarize my major problems with modern games/game industry they are this: Unrelatable stories (to me personally), micro transactions, poor optimization, and planned obsolescence (You can never player Overwatch 1 ever again). Then there are other bonus problems like the fortnite-ification of games, E.g., putting every IP know to man into a single game.
Also, loot boxes. Horrible, disgusting business practice. Literally selling gambling to children.
Yeah I agree with micro transaction and obsolescence. It's sad that Valve revived PC gaming while also making it worse (they invented battle passes, lootboxes and DRM), I, nevertheless, still love their games (I keep playing L4D2 to this day with my friends) and TF2 was my favorite multiplayer game
I love TF2 as well! To be a little less negative, I will say that game engines like Godot give me lots of hope for the future. It sets a good foundation for future game devs to make something great. Also, game devs now have access to lots of different platforms to publish their games.
Do you have any recent games you recommend?
Final Fantasy 7 Remake games (one of the best modern RPGs with amazing combat and extension / sequel of the iconic PS1 RPG)
Balatro (roguelite game with poker cards, very addicting)
SIGNALIS (isometric shooter with puzzles ala Silent Hill)
A Space for the Unbound (beautiful story driven sidescroller set in rural Indonesia, great OST and pixel art)
Dredge (lovecraftian horror fishing game, pleasant gameplay loop and fun mechanics, even my mom who doesn't like video games liked it).
Sword of the Sea (just play this one, same creators as Journey)
Call of the Sea (first person lovecraftian puzzle game)
and some older ones from pre 2020:
Nier: Automata, Death Stranding
I might add:
Cozy: Tiny Bookshop and Stardew Valley
Action: it's triple A but God of War and GoW Ragnarök are pretty good imo. If you don't mind formulaic Horizon zero dawn and forbidden west have a good story and storytelling but gameplay wise it's a bit stale. Clair Obscure of course.
Weird: graveyard keeper - it has a lot of grinding, it's a hit or miss I guess. It's older but it has pixel graphics so not much of a concern I guess
Also weird: Disco Elysium
Also weird: Baby Steps
Rogue: Hades and Hades 2
Climbing: Cairn. It is SO good.
What genre?
A PS5 Bluray can hold 100GB of data, sure some AAA titles are in excess of 100GB, although that is still 100GB that the player doesn't have to download, plus they enable re-sell-ability and partially maintain the status quo of "owning" a title.
How much of that 100GB is actually optimized usage? I suspect that a hard cap on the size of the game would lead to a better quality product. The size inflation of games has literally gone insane. I was looking at my Steam library and Tekken 7 was taking up close to 100GB of space which makes absolutely no sense, because it has the same fundamental gameplay as Tekken Tag 1 which was released on a 700MB CD ROM for the PS2's launch.
Tekken 7 does not need to be 100GB.
And with improvements in procedural rendering, textures and environments should become more compact than pre-rendered (and games should load faster as well.)
I was completely unaware that PS5 discs could hold that much data! But that leads me to the next question, what is the read time look like on that? lol. I found this manual on google for the ps5 disc drive, but I don't understand these units.
Read speed BD-ROM (66 GB/100 GB) ~10×CAV BD-ROM (25 GB/50 GB) ~8×CAV BD-R/RE (25 GB/50 GB) ~8×CAV DVD ~3.2×CLV
Doesn't really matter, PS5 games can't be played from disk anyway; they have to be installed to the SSD first.
It's weird to say this, but BD (including 4K UHD BD) is actually really old tech. Sony was talking about quad-layer discs back before they deleted the mandatory disc caddy from the draft BD spec! OK, practically speaking nobody had their hands on a quad-layer disc until BDXL in the mid-2010s, but even then that's still old.
As for why nobody's made a higher-capacity disc... well, they did. It was even an industry standard. You just never heard about it because it was exclusively intended to be a replacement for tape libraries. I guess rolling out this tech to consumers was just too impractically expensive?
You can absolutely do resale rights with solid-state media, too. On the other hand, the Switch library is littered with games that require downloading an update in order to play. Switch 2 went further and had games that shipped as a pure license key with no data storage. The underlying economics of game distribution are actually really unfavorable to any amount of overhead. Hell, the reason why physical games even still exist AT ALL is because we can press BDXLs for pennies.
Going back to the stagnation in optical media, the read performance hit a wall a while back, too. You basically can't stream anything off these discs anymore. Hell, some Internet connections might actually be faster than an install from optical media! So that's not really the advantage people think anymore either.
The resale ability is basically the only reason to keep physical media around, though - and I'm surprised we haven't seen a renewed attempt to kill physical. I mean, with movies, most stores have already removed their BD sections; you basically can only buy those online or at some Barnes & Noble stores.
I've read just a few days ago that the sale of physical media is going up again. Even just slightly.
https://www.techradar.com/televisions/blu-ray/weve-seen-an-i...
> In my opinion, disc based games have been a ridiculous way to sell modern games because they are physically incapable of storing the amount of game data required for modern AAA games
I’ve worked on a few AAA games with large install sizes, and I personally don’t believe this to be true. Or, I think it’s due to a lack of financial/organizational incentive to skim things down. The cost of storage and distribution is offloaded to the digital marketplace and consumer. Nobody’s KPI is tracked to the download size.
In projects of that size, you’re often trowling through a big proprietary graph of assets. This might be akin to UE’s reference viewer, or maybe less sophisticated. It’s hard to do and very unlikely to be on the roadmap.
Memory for Switch games is more and more expensive, or at least I assume that's why so few physical games have come out for the Switch 2 (plus the whole "key-card" thing with no game date on the carts). With discs you could still use them to install a game, even include multiple discs if you need to. But as another poster noted, for a game that'll sell a ton like GTA6, it's all about just killing the resale market to make just that much more money.
And on a personal note, I feel we are living in a gaming golden age, so many amazing titles, especially indie ones, out there in every conceivable genre. If anything the problem is finding them, since there's so much being released these days. And I say this as someone who still also plays older games (especially 3rd, 4th, and 5th gen).
> but solid state storage similar to Nintendo Switch cards makes more sense to me
These likely degrade in 5-10 years, and have you seen the price of NAND lately? AAA gaming is going to get to be out-of-reach because of storage costs.
I don't know what the degradation for NAND storage is, but another aspect that I didn't mention in my original comment is the fragility of disc based media. In terms of scratches and other damage.
You have to treat a blu ray very badly to get a scratch in it. It might look like a DVD or CD but it's not. It is much more resistant to scratches as it has a protective coating called Durabis from TDK. Sony uses their own proprietary coating.
While this is true, it is a sign of the customer losing control over their purchases. When the servers go dark, the game does too.
Yes there are some practicality issues with physical media but they are kind of trivial to the costs of just handing over all control to the publishers.
same. the last game i purchased that i enjoyed was cyberpunk, although that also got boring because at release it had some issues..
i recently bought battlefield 6 and that has been fun, but even then idk how to describe it. there's just no soul anymore.
i don't think it is because i'm getting older. back in the day there were teamspeak communities that ONLY played battlefield, and that was really fun.
now it is some discord servers, nobody really plays 1 game, but many on rotation. so for me, it feels like every game is just solo with whatever randoms show up.
so i've stopped playing lol. i like to think i got to play some cool games during the golden era, before enshittification, where people formed communities around one game.
Some Retailers Are Refusing to Sell GTA 6 Due to the Lack of a Disc
https://www.ign.com/articles/some-retailers-are-refusing-to-...
I wish I could be angry about this, but the time has passed.
20+ years ago I refused to buy the Steam version of Civilization 5 and waited for my physical boxed copy.
Turns out it was just a CD with a Steam code and some cached content.
I was so angry. I'm over it now, but I felt the need to share.
> Copies of the game purchased before November 20 will [...] include an additional Vintage Vice City Pack with more cosmetics and cars [...] this is only guaranteed "while supplies last."
What supplies!? Rockstar is running out of bytes?
250GB day one patch incoming.
As expected, you don't actually own the game at all and it is possible for console makers to ban you from running the game on your machine.
Of course no-one will care (until it happens) but at the same time, it will be available on PS5 and Xbox but not for the PC or the Steam Machine.
Given the price of the game and the Steam Machine, I expect the Steam Machine to not sell well at all but GTA 6 to break over $1 billion in sales in a single day.
because physical media cannot hold whole game data? i thought we had already been through muti play disc era.
I'm honestly not sure why this is making headlines. The move to digital-only has been happening for years. I mean, when I got Skyrim's legendary edition, the box only had a code in it, and that was 2013! 13 years ago!
It saves the publisher money and cuts down on reselling, which was cutting into their sales. It simplifies distribution. It gives them far more control, especially if they use their own launcher. Is anyone surprised that they like it when it offers only positives for them?
Also: Many big AAA releases can't even fit on a blu ray anymore. Games are coming up on 200GB+, that will not fit on a disk.
This trend isn't reversing. And the average person buying the game doesn't gaf, so it'll continue.
Of course, there will be some 'protestors' (who will just buy the game anyways) or some """protestors""" (who never intended to buy the game in the first place)
I'll be honest, this discussion is so stale I just don't care at this point. The fight for this ended a decade ago.
And honestly, considering how much more expensive AAA game creation has gotten over the years, and how game price hasn't even close to kept up with inflation, I get it.
There are so many much more egregious behaviors publishers do than this nonsense. Fight them on microtransactions, or making games online-only even for singleplayer content and then shutting down servers. Literally anything than this waste of time.
> I mean, when I got Skyrim's legendary edition, the box only had a code in it, and that was 2013! 13 years ago!
Because PC and console games have (had?) different cultures.
This has been normalized for PC games for decades, but it absolutely is not the norm for consoles.
Playstation and Xbox both have disc drive free SKUs.
You can buy games directly on Steam without buying a physical box too; I presumed from context it was clear I was referring to retail, physical editions.
What would be the point? It would need to be six double-side Blurays to fit the actual game on there. You could have one but you're still going to have to download the majority of the game...
Why not include 6 then? I remember when I got the Marathon Trilogy Box Set from the Apple store (before they were called that) in Keene, NH whenever the fuck it was before 2000--maybe 1998? It came with 3+ CDs, a book, a crazy box, and a poster. I will remember to the day I die that beautiful visage of a space marine ripping an alien's skull and spine out of its body with his bare hands. Surely games companies these days can get their act together to put their games on a usb drive or whatever and put it in a box.
And also do shit like this: https://youtu.be/WlRM9-Rm34Q?si=Trv2-Nivxr5PBC9k
idk anything about games these days, but that mudbogger stang is sick