Ah yes the intelligent consumer who always has a choice and is never beholden to the whims of a completely dominant supply side economy.
Funny. The consumer didn’t make physical media worse for the last 15 years.
Manual or at least something besides the disk: Gone Price: Same as digital despite they getting more profit from digital. Disc: half the game, other half downloads. (Not always, mind you) Game: Half baked without at least two patches.
They’ve been giving less and less with physical editions to push the more profitable digital store, and then they act shocked when no one buys physical.
Shockingly, if the only difference between physical and digital is that you need to go out of your way to pick the physical, most people will just get the digital.
Still I got my Switch games in physical so I can trade with friends.
The problem isn’t with digital. The problem is with digital licenses and rights.
Exactly. And geo restrictions.
Which stems from licensing and rights
Discs are just as digital as internet data piped through fiber optics. It’s a deceitful term which doesn’t cover the true change: perpetual license vs time limited license.
I like that discs aren’t tied to an online account, so anyone in possession of it can use it to play the game. The company can’t take away access like they can banning your online account.
This intentionally misses the point.
It’s physical and digital distribution.
While that is a shift that happened, it’s not the distribution method people actually have problems with, even if they sometimes misattribute it. The problem, which you see mentioned most of the time, is ownership.
Compare how people feel about Sony vs. GOG, which will just let you download DRM-free installer files. Both are distributed via the Internet, but people feel very different about them, right?
Physical discs aren’t DRM free though - the disc is the DRM.
Of course people like DRM free digital games, because it means they can get them for free.
It is however transferable and resellable legally. Digital only versions, even DRM free are not.
In my opinion, this has been one of the only things about consoles that has been a plus side compared to PC. Now that is gone and I can’t imagine why anyone would stay except out of a lack of finances to move to PC.
Also, nope. If people only liked digital DRM free games because you could pirate them GOG wouldn’t exist and it would have been out of business years ago. You are believing corporate propaganda with that lie.
I like DRM free because games with DRM usually run like shit or at least noticably worse compared to DRM free.
Also, you ever had a day off work to game during a Steam or PlayStation outage? I was able to play all of my GOG games with zero problem. I don’t even know if GOG has ever gone down before, because it doesn’t matter to let me play my games. Same thing with SOME physical PlayStation games usually single player. Could play that during outages too.
Technically no, they’re not supposed to be re-sold. Says so on box and disc.
DRM free means there’s no digital rights management, meaning there’s no ownership restrictions essentially.
GoG was also, reading between the lines, recently going to be closed. It was basically given to one of the founders of CDPR. Why would CDPR do that if it was making any sort of profit?
I think the not allowed to be resold and saying so on the box must depend on your country. In mine it is allowed and doesn’t say you can’t on the box just that you have to abide by Sony terms of service and all that which they’ve said before doesn’t prohibit you reselling the discs.
I know what DRM is but DRM free games are still restricted in that I can’t trade or sell it however if gog ever banned me since I already have the offline installers backed up I could still continue to enjoy my games and they can’t ever take them away short of suing me or something.
Sony already said before you can sell and trade disc games (which is why they are going after them now)
Also GOG has an annual revenue of around $250 million. I think they (CDPR) just wanted to focus more on being a game publisher instead of running a competing storefront against steam.
It sounds logical. However, by that definition, game boxes with download codes would be physical as well… Yet Sony isn’t killing those.
To me it’s clear that it’s not about the method of distribution or the way data is processed, it’s about their business model in general.
The game is still downloaded from a server via codes in a box. The distribution of the game is still digital.
How about we ship a box with both a digital download code and a disc? Would you classify it as digital?
I’d classify the digital copy as digital, and the disc as physical if it has the game on it.
This is pretty straight forward man. Did you download the game from a server? Digital. Did you play it or install it from a physical medium? Physical.
Did you play it or install it from a physical medium? Physical.
So you agree that it’s related to the medium then. Not to the distribution.
As you mention, a distributed box without a disc counts as digital. A distributed box with a disc counts as physical.
You can resell or trade a disc though. Or at least have been able to up until now I bet they start tying those to specific accounts now while they still make them until 2028.
Can we stop spreading the propaganda for them? Sony lied about digital sales by including digital-only games in their figures.
Every game with a physical release, according to their developers, makes most of their sales on disc. It’s literally always a 70/30 split every single time (give or take 10%). I cannot find any evidence of a game that sold more in its digital form than physical
Where can I learn more about this. Frankly, I will not just take your word for it on such a bold claim.
That’s fair, but it’s ubiquitous. Search Twitter and Bluesky for official game studio and personal developer accounts. They almost always post about their sales soon after a launch. I don’t have any on hand, sorry. I do remember suckerpunch and insomniac doing so all the time.
My claim would be very easily disproven if it wasn’t true
Data from Insomniac Games, leaked last year
The article you linked makes me think it isn’t quite that easy to find proof.
The guy who’s saying this is a controversian, he’s trying to get clicks to his TikTok. He was also opposing stop killing games. He’s not even working in valve more than a decade. So he’s irrelevant but he does make sure to say ex-valve before his title.
I do not even have a tiktok. Who are you talking about?
I’m talking about the guy who’s saying those stuff, chet Faliszek. not you lol.
Ok, I didn’t think you were. I was saying you don’t need to be influenced by some guy to come to the conclusion that if all publishers, studios, their devs, (and their leakers, apparently), all agree on something, it’s most likely true
deleted by creator
- releases digital-only game
- “hmm, 0 physical copies sold… looks like people prefer digital”
I believe you, and im sure it’s because I’ve lost passion for just about everything at this point, but if the disk doesnt hold the game what really is the point anymore. If we bought the entire game on hard drive and the console had a hot swappable port so we used them like cartridges that would be great. I shouldn’t need internet access to play a game by myself. But with the current fuckery, the disc just holds part of the game right, and you have to download the rest of the game when you put it in the console.
You can also use that license thatvomes on that disc and transfer it and sell it or trade it to someone else if you choose.
That choice is being taken away.
Ah that makes sense. I wonder if there are people who create accounts for each game they digitally purchase. Then sell the sign in creds when they are done playing. Talk about a giant pain in the ass that would be
Sony and Microsoft’s Xbox will ban you immediately for this but because Steam is a lot more consumer friendly people do sell whole accounts with a game or two tied to them. There’s a site (that’s kind of shady ish so look out for that) that I have used called G2A that you can buy whole steam accounts with games on.
I think that some of those codes are stolen though or something of that nature but steam doesn’t do anything about it but that is 100% speculation on my part. I thought I heard a dev of a game say something like that one time though that they’d rather you pirate it than buy it off G2A.
Edit: thinking about it more I don’t think its stolen its just the simple fact that you can “trade” or “sell” the entire game that way by selling the whole account tied to it and the game developers don’t like that.
Reasons game developers don’t like steam keys from sites like G2A are:
- Exploiting regional price differences.
- Splitting keys out of bundles.
- Scamming game developers for free keys (claiming they want to promote the game with a giveaway).
- Keys bought with stolen cards (that get chargebacked causing direct loss).
The last reason could apply to reselling steam accounts as well.
Thank you for this I was wondering what the deal was with that. So some of them are stolen.
That really sucks. I’ll probably avoid them going forward
So consumers were given the choice between physical media that you made artificially expensive and overly inconvenient or digital media that you made practically free and ultra convenient. That’s called the illusion of choice. But now you can blame your victims when you abuse them because they brought this on themselves.
Physical media is no more expensive or inconvenient than it ever was. It’s just that you’re now comparing it to downloads, which bear no manufacturing cost and don’t require you to physically go to a store or have the media shipped to you. These are exactly the reasons that consumers prefer downloads.
Up until the Wii era you could just insert the disc in the console and start playing immediately, it was much more convenient than waiting an hour for a game to download and install. You didn’t need to manage disk space as well. Or login before playing. The industry destroyed the convenience. Now only Switch has an option to start playing from cartridge.
As far as I know, no one has produced technology to make disc streaming faster. You can blame console design for this, but even if an indie dev simulated this situation with a 50GB game containing compressed textures placed on a Blu-ray, he’d have the same design problem - loading things off that disc takes a long time, and installation is a far better user experience.
The Wii gets away with it because texture sizes back then were much smaller. If you can point to technical demonstrations of how the same process could’ve been achieved on modern games with much larger textures, I’d be interested to hear it.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think we ever got to see a dual disk drive console, at least not in production (exempting gaming PCs). Perhaps in a parallel universe on board storage became cost prohibitive and games came on two simultaneously inserted optical disks, one with the game code and the other with texture packs and art. Nothing that interesting could exist in today’s climate.
Cartridges, same as Switch 2. And high res textures and audio as separate download if needed. Flash memory was getting cheap until AI, 64GB usb 3 drive is still around 10 bucks at retail, so probably 3 bulk, and even cheaper for Sony.
Spinning media will never be as fast, of course, unless every drive comes with a 50GB cache to just load everything once and never seek randomly.
Doesn’t most of the physical media still require downloads to actually play anyway? I don’t own a console but it seems like every time I’m at one of my friends who do and they’re putting a new game in they have to wait on it to install/update or whatever. Maybe it’s just the big AAA ones.
Only if you have an internet connection active. Otherwise, I believe it’s just insert disc and play, IIRC.
It s more nuanced. 80% of buy are digital. Some industries it s worse. Like music and movie. But thoses industry value their “hardcore” consumer and will never shelve their physical release, who also append to be better quality than digital release. Contrary to video game where its litteraly the same product. Nobody has an issue with valve being fully digital cause they can’t lock down other store. What sont does is unprecdent and I pray for their downfall.
What nonsense. What matters isn’t whether we use physical disks or not. And it’s all digital anyway, you don’t get many games on vinyl these days. The real issue is whether you own the games you buy. As GOG is proving, game ownership is something that publishers can easily offer, regardless of the delivery mechanism. If Sony would step up and do the same, killing physical discs wouldn’t be a problem. It’s a trust issue.
GOG doesn’t give you ownership of the game the way physical media does though. Unless they’ve added a feature to sell your used games?
Hard drives are physical you can even put it on tape or break out the floppies. No drm is the real winner and true ownership
No drm is the real winner and true ownership
Wish more people understood this, rather than fetishizing hardware.
Download the offline installer and now you have possession.
Further, because GOG enforces no DRM or mandatory sign-ins, so that means that you also have control over that copy of the game - you can install it and play it however and whenever you see fit.
For GOG games were you downloaded and kept the offline installer, the only way that the rightsholder has of stopping you from installing and playing that game is to sue you, which is:
- Almost certainly not worth it for then due to the cost of taking somebody to court for it versus what they would gain if they won.
- They actually have to have an actual legal basis for unilateraly changing the licensing agreement with you and hence be allowed to block you from continuing with the activity you have a license for (installing and running that game), which they almost certainly do not have in pretty much the whole World since EULAs aren’t valid there (they’re considered an attempt at, after a sale is completed, forcing unilateral changes to the implicit contract which is the sale, so have no legal validity)
With other stores they can just force the store to take down the game and now it’s up to YOU to sue THEM to get restitution and the “not worth it” is now something that goes against you (unless you have access to a Small Claims Court in the jurisdiction you’re in, are you really going to sue them for a 50 bucks game?)
In fact, physical media is worse than digital GOG games, because the former can have phone-home DRM or mandatory sign-ins so you have possession but not control.
PS: However if the point you were making was about resale, then it’s a valid point. Mind you, physical media with phone-home DRM or mandatory sign-ins can also be de facto unsellable if that’s what the game maker wants.
Good point, I’m guessing it probably falls short of physical media in that way. As I understand it, they let you download an install file for the games you purchase, which you can save and use offline. I doubt that publishers would put effort into enabling a second hand games market
That is true, you can download and keep the install files wherever you wish. You could burn it onto a CD if you want to have it like in the old days.
I feel like everyone in this thread is ignoring the literal headline.
The point being made is that the consumer chose these rights-infringing, privacy-corrupting, ownership-destroying choices.
Then OF COURSE companies weaponised it.
The issue is that your average Joe doesn’t think for a damn second in his life, and picks up whatever is put down.
Yeah, arguments that blank percent of people are morally good are insane since… Most people dont really think about long term morals of their decisions day to day if ever. Most people just live and do by convenience without asking if it is morally good but simply believing the self to be.
It needs to be convenient to do good things for people to do them and the convenient option for a long time has been giving up ownership rights.
Yeah … Morality is subjective… If the majority of a given population does a thing, that thing is moral within that population.
Ironically enough the topic of whether or not morality is ‘subjective’ is also inherently up for interpretation. There’s literally a whole philosophical field of study for this.
That being said, I’ll counter this sentiment by saying that the things we find to be ‘moral’ as a species are more often than not the things that help our species prosper (i.e. taboos for murder, theft, bullying, sexual violence, etc.). Sure, there may be a certain degree of variation within the moral frameworks of a culture, but you’ll be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t have that baseline of enforcing against most forms of explicit harm which can come about against members of that society. If that weren’t the case then we would have gone extinct a long time ago.
You’re confusing biological utility with objective truth.
Sure, human societies share baselines against murder and theft because societies without them collapse. But that’s just evolutionary pragmatism. A behavior that keeps a species alive isn’t a cosmic moral law; it’s just a survival mechanism. If a beehive kills off its drones to survive the winter, it’s not being “moral”, it’s just trying not to die.
Even your premise that the prosperity of our species is inherently “good”, relies on our own subjective bias that we prefer being alive. The universe itself doesn’t care.
But let’s apply your own standard back to the actual topic: video games.
If your baseline for objective morality is “things that help our species prosper,” then a corporation shifting to digital-only game licenses has absolutely zero impact on human survival. By your own logic, it’s completely amoral.
If you still want to argue that going digital-only is “immoral,” you have to abandon your evolutionary argument and admit you’re just projecting a subjective cultural preference onto a consumer inconvenience.
You’re confusing biological utility with objective truth.
Confusing them? No. We simply have different standards for what qualifies as objective truth. For me, if your truth gets you harmed or worse, it’s wrong. Simple as that. I am acutely aware that there isn’t any universal moral standard when it comes to existence at large, but for my own and humanity’s purposes, those which help us get by better than others are the “truer” ones.
Even your premise that the prosperity of our species is inherently “good”, relies on our own subjective bias that we prefer being alive. The universe itself doesn’t care.
As with what I just stated, it doesn’t matter whether the universe itself cares or not. The universe can frankly do whatever the hell it wants (as it certainly does); reality to me and many others is that which I can sense and experience in my lifetime, and that’s all it ever will be. For any reasonable person’s purposes, the universe’s (as a personification) stake in their lives shouldn’t hold any stake in what they do or do not do. And that especially goes for their morality. Nihilism is equivalent to just being mindless and inert matter on a biological level, and that’s honestly just sad given what humanity and its qualifiers have been able to achieve.
If your baseline for objective morality is “things that help our species prosper,” then a corporation shifting to digital-only game licenses has absolutely zero impact on human survival. By your own logic, it’s completely amoral.
Wrong. As with any complex systems we’ve been able to create in our societies, this will certainly be up for debate, but you’ll have to concede that not being able to own the things you purchase (as humans have done and have been able to do for the majority, if not the entirety of our existence) sets a frankly awful precedent for what these corporations and governments will feel they are entitled to do. To pretend it has always been like this is or it’s inevitable is fatalism, which like nihilism, is sad, and frankly pathetic. I pity that mentality.
If you still want to argue that going digital-only is “immoral,” you have to abandon your evolutionary argument and admit you’re just projecting a subjective cultural preference onto a consumer inconvenience.
And what are these “consumer inconveniences”? Because by your logic, the universe shouldn’t care about that either, considering that it’s a human construct and therefore abstracted from the “objective features” of reality. This is the main problem with your mentality. If morality doesn’t matter, then nothing does. And if nothing matters, then this topic is redundant. It’s nothing more than a spending of entropy.
Think what you want to think, believe what you want to believe. But if you’re seriously following the route of nihilism as if it will lead to some sort of peace of mind, I’ve got some bad news for you: it’s just going to make you feel worse. And with that, I’ve got a funny, albeit facetious image relevant to this conversation that I’ve been looking for an excuse to use somewhere. So here it is. Don’t take it too seriously. (Or do, I’m not your dad.)
A free market requires a perfectly informed consumer. That’s impossible before you begin to consider how marketing is dishonest
What we want is DRM-free games, not your bullshit
Fucking morons
When all options are rigged, it’s pretty rude to blame “the consumer”
Of course the “former Valve writer” is Chet Faliszek. The dude never shuts up.
I actually agree that physical media is better for consumers. If I buy a game, I think I should own it. I should be able to sell it, lend it to a friend, or keep playing it decades from now without worrying about a company flipping a switch. Physical media is objectively more consumer-friendly in that regard.
What I don’t agree with is the narrative that corporations had to force everyone into digital by sabotaging physical releases. That’s not how I remember it.
Steam became wildly popular because consumers embraced it almost immediately. Instant downloads, automatic updates, cloud saves, massive sales, and never having to swap discs were conveniences people overwhelmingly wanted. Publishers certainly recognized the benefits for themselves, more control, no used game market, lower distribution costs, but they didn’t invent the demand. They took advantage of a demand that consumers had already created.
In a sense, we shot ourselves in the foot. We collectively chose convenience over ownership because, at the time, it seemed like a worthwhile trade. Now we’re living with the consequences of that decision.
It’s completely fair to push for stronger ownership rights today. But I think it’s a mistake to pretend that consumers were dragged into digital kicking and screaming. For the overwhelming majority of gamers, digital won because they chose it.
If you vote with your wallet, it just means those richer than you have a bigger vote.
Are richer people buying 12 copies of a game?
Kinda; that’s often the reason you see $120 SuperDeluxe editions of games, where the protagonist’s pants have a bit of purple trim. Or $20 “boosts” that skip the first 3 levels (which you’d get by playing two matches)
It’s very much an artifact of wealth consolidation.
Oh yeah, I forgot some games have that kinda shit in them
In some sense yeah, I’ve heard from some of my more affluent friends buying multiple copies for different platforms. For example, I know someone with at least 4 different copies of GTA-V
Sorry, I’m not sure what your comment is supposed to point out exactly. Are you saying boycotting is pointless because there are other people giving them a lot more money than you anyway? I mean it would still cut into their profit
the “choice” was shoved down your throats
If GOG just hired one full time intern to go ahead and bake Proton into their platform so they could have Linux support that isn’t completely broken, I’d probably start getting more games on their platform again.
Edit: Oh, looks like it’s on the way. Maybe I’d better start wishlisting.
I had a PS4, witch was sold and didn’t have coonsole for years. Then I got a PS5 and my account was deleted with all my purchases.
That didn’t happen to my steam games.
The problem is the legislation around digital consumers rights.
Agree with your point, but why did you own a witch, and why did you sell her?
/s
Because of the coonsole. (that’s necromancer slang for raccoon soul)
