re: Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation

I’m just attempting to be cordial.

We need to win normies to our cause, Ultimate as a poster here isn’t a normie ofc none of us would be on this niche board I just think the carrot will work better than the stick.

People need to understand even if they don’t give a frick about physical media going away (I self admit but like 90% digital already) it will still impact you in ways.

This is going to be an incredibly powerful butterfly effect

If you buy their stupid license on the store and they take it away from you if you have pc as an option you can always just pirate it and emulate it since it’s not illegal to emulate a product you already bought

I would argue skip the purchase and just steal all of it. I’ll be pirating a LOT more when this comes to pass giving my money to people and companies I respect

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I think a lot of angry people are making assumptions about the future of gaming, when in reality no one really knows how it'll play out.

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There’s truth in this.

I just can’t see how this can mean anything good for us moving into the next few years of gaming, we need a champion to rise to actually give Sony legit competition.

Xbox could possibly do it Asha has been doing quite well imo.

Sega has actually discussed getting back into console making

I personally don’t care about the line where it becomes legal tbh

I pirate games from companies I think treat their customers like shite, typically put out unoptimized trash, etc

Then if it turns out to be actually worth the money I go buy an actual copy.

Capcom, SQE for certain franchises, CDPR, and games I have high confidence in I just always buy and skip the test it out phase

Steam out here proving why it will be the go to choice for gamers if console companies go fully digital:

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Also very very key in this entire conversation

People TRUST steam. They have spent years and years investing in earning that trust very correctly identifying that it is a resource to be managed like any other.

You can pull from that trust some but it needs to be reinvested if you do.

Steam very rarely even spends their massive amount of accrued trust. Most of the rest of AAA has been overdrawn since like 2015

I think there is over reaction but I also think there are concerns I and many others have that are completely and totally legitimate, and imo would be foolish to simply just hand wave them as nonsense.

I would like to reiterate something; I would have so much less of a problem and many concerns about this if two things were in place.

1. Actual laws fit for purpose in a digital age about ownership and how people buy and sell things

2. If Sony even had the infrastructure to do what they ultimately aim to do. PSN is known almost memetically for being insecure and constantly going down. If they intend to use some fricked up DRM that needs to however often ping PSN to let you play they should at least invest in a functioning online platform

To follow up on your last point, physical media is also good because it protects against censorship and temporal licensing deals.

My copy of Ocarina of Time was a day 1 purchase, it has the Fire Temple chanting in it. The chanting is absolutely incredible for the atmosphere and you can totally see why it's in the game. Well, Nintendo, being a bunch of Japanese people, just found some random creepy chanting and put it in the game, little did they know it was taken from people chanting verses of the Quran. Needless to say, they quickly removed it from the game. Only the original batch of physical OOT printing has this chanting in it.

Another Nintendo example, Mike Tyson's Punchout, one of the most famous NES games, well, it hasn't technically been Mike Tyson's Punchout for over 30 years. The deal to use Mike Tyson's likeness was like a 4 year agreement or something, so after that license expired future versions of the game, the ones you can officially play today, are just "Punchout!" and they skin swapped Mike Tyson with a new character dubbed Mr. Dream.

So if you actually want to legally play Mike Tyson, you have to own the original NES cart.

Games with songs or brand/IP tie ins almost always devolve into a sort of licensing hell. Re-releases can strip music that no longer has license. Some games simply can't be sold anymore.

There was a version of Mortal Kombat awhile ago that had Freddy Krueger included in the roster. That game is not available for sale any where anymore. Removed from all store fronts because of licensing. It's a 15 year old game, nobody is going to take the time and effort to patch him out, so instead the game just gets deleted from existence. Only people who have the disc version can play it.

Even just last year, Wuchang had a controversial censorship and nerf patch, I actually wanted to play the game unnerfed for my NG+ playthrough so I just ran the 1.0 version from disc. PlayStation doesn't' support picking your version. You either run what you have offline or update to the latest version, no way to do anything else.

So yeah, we're belaboring many of the same points. Having video games be a completely ethereal, mutable, non-tangible entity has a gazillion downsides most people don't really even consider. This isn't unique to video games either, applies to everything being digitized nowadays.