grumpy_cat
Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱIt's their walled garden, which they control and were they get to do whatever the fuck they want.
Never, ever jump into a tech stack which is a walled garden, because sooner or later you're almost certainly going to get shafted by those who control it. This applies just as much as a tech consumer as it does as a tech professional.
The amount of companies that I've seen dive face-first into walled gardens because "they wouldn't screw us over, we're paying customers!" is mindblowing.
2 years later, and those same CHUDs have and are yelling at me because prices have gone through the roof, and there's no way to get out of the stack without a complete redesign.
How do the idiots that make these decisions keep failing upwards?
While I agree, the average person doesn't consider things like this (even though they should), and we should avoid getting close to victim blaming.
The first part it is indeed true.
For the second part it really depends: one thing is a technologically naive person who gets themselves into such a situation because of not knowing better, a whole different thing is somebody who should know better but still go in because of convenience and hoping for the best.
In my eyes the former are victims, but not the latter, so I'll definitely blame the latter for jumping in with some awareness of the risks thinking "I will probably be alright" - if you jumped in the pool were you knew there was a shark and got bitten that's on you.
I also definitely blame fanboys, because their actions help pull in more of the first kind - when one is too ignorant about the broader implications of a choice, they shouldn't be actively be trying to get other people to make that choice.
Should they? I mean if they don't consider it, is honestly because they don't care. And if they are happy paying full price on the PSStore let them.
No used market means PIRACY will run free.
The used market is called ‘emulators’ for some odd reason.
I'm sure everyone can afford that with the world collapsing. Joke's om them.
People buy this shit on installments. Consumer culture has turned the average person into a product chugging zombie.
I used to be a playstation, couch gamer. I pretty much quit gaming when the ps4 came out. Things have only gotten worse since. On the bright side, I did manage to get a bachelor degree instead.
I'm a gamer from back in the days when a "games console" was a ZX Spectrum or an Amiga, not an open standard like the PC mainly because back then nothing was standard, but far more open than modern consoles.
Then came the PC and for a time it was the dominant platform for games (basically the good old days of Shareware and a few years after).
Then consoles were reinvented, with the modern console business structure and tech stack which most present day gamers are acquainted with. This time around consoles were a locked down tech and the business was a walled garden model.
At that point I was so used to PCs and to piracy as an alternative to source PC games (or even just a way to unlock purchased games by cracking their DRM), that I never really jumped into modern consoles as it was too locked down. Also by then I was already a Tech professional and aware of the risks of jumping into a tech stack wholly controlled by a 3rd party.
So, yeah, here we are now with the closed down walled garden tech stack were there wasn't even a proper piracy culture to disincentivize abusing locked-in customers having enshittified to extreme levels.
This shit was entirely expectable already back then.
I hope that the whole modern day business model for game consoles dies a horrible death, though people being people I expect that a decade afterwards they will get swindled again en masse by a reinvention of this console model.
I've always had computers to play games on, but consoles have also always been my primary gaming hardware. The additional cost of PC hardware, as well as having to constantly tinker and upgrade parts to be able to run the latest games, was the main reason. But now that consoles are doing away with the used market and also no longer have significantly cheaper hardware, Paying more up front for PC is the only thing that makes sense.
Well, the upside of PCs is that you can keep on upgrading just parts of it, whilst console upgrading is generally just buy a new one, something that has become even more so around the late 00s when the upgrade cycle slowed down quite a lot, even for gaming PCs.
I think (but am not sure) that as long as you didn't aim for top of the range parts and instead used the ones just below (generally much cheaper for only a little bit less performance) all in all it was cheaper to just keep upgrading one's PC than keeping on replacing one's console with a new one as they came out.
Mind you, I've jumped out of the "keep up with the latest titles" threadmill over a decade ago since, with the notable exception of Indie titles, I don't actually find them as entertaining (they're generally very "guided" linear experiences whilst I like lots of freedom and high complexity) plus I discovered that I derive far more enjoyment from great gameplay than I do from great graphics: the latter can indeed be amazing and impressive for the first couple of hours, but it's the former that gets me back to a game again and again and again, even years later.
PCs and Patient Gaming is way cheaper than consoles, though I guess that by now there's also a lot of Patient Gaming in consoles since people keep on using the older one rather than buying the new on.
Further, upgrading one's PC or even just knowing what kind of things are better to upgrade at any one point and how to chose the right parts for upgradeability (such as enthusiast motherboards instead of just cheap ones and the kind of CPU socket that was recent enough that was likely to keep getting new CPUs for a while) requires quite a lot of technical expertise and is beyond most people. even gamers.
I'm still a couch and controller gamer primarily, I just use a PC to do it lol. Honestly, with Steam, it's really easy to just change Steam Big Picture mode as the default shell for Windows, so even if you don't want to install SteamOS, you can still have the console experience of just turning the machine on and booting right into your games menu.
Well done. I finished my degree once I quit drinking
That is fantastic! Congrats on both!
you can still play chrono trigger
You could almost say it's timeless
☜(ﾟヮﾟ☜)
No way, it's FULL of time.
There are a few threads in that sub complaining about the lack of physical discs. There’s even a megathread. My assumption is that this one got removed for posting outside the megathread or something similar considering that other similar threads are still alive and kicking.
“Designated free speech zone”
Was curious about how corporate compromised Reddit has become.
Oh, it's been a shitshow since before the IPO.
No market? Is this communism?
/s
So, it's like Nintendo, but the console is twice as expensive? Yeah, no.
Nintendo also still sells physical games for now.
only some. some or most new switch 2 cartridges are actually keys on the cartridge that just unlock an online download. no game files in sight. you can still resell the cartridge, but for how long is dubious, given that eventually the online store will be shuttered.
No, the games are also worse.
Shocked Pikachu?
It's ok when Valve and CDPR does it.
GOG (not part of CDPR anymore) has no drm and gives you offline installers if you don't use their client. Those games are yours forever.
Steam not so much, but Sony's track record makes Valve look like saints in comparison.
Valve gets away with it because you can get games for dirt cheap there.
I suspect if we were looking at the same image as above except buying Dead Space for $6 like you can on Steam, we'd be seeing a lot less pushback. Part of the excuse they had was physical media having a way bigger distribution cost compared to digital. They're kind of trying to have their cake and eat it too, here.
And yeah, GOG is DRM free so that's a pretty big difference.
Valve makes drm easy but I'm pretty sure the developer can choose to not include it. It'd be on you to back up the files in that case, though.
GOG games you download can be copied and played on any other computer without the need to connect to an external server. You do not even need the GOG Galaxy client to install the games you bought there.
Though Valve is a fair argument
The difference with Valve is that I still can use my PC hardware if Steam should get unavailable. I can't download games from other stores on the Playstation.
Might be time to disable updates on your PS5 (if you can, I dunno, don't console) so you can install Linux and get those other stores (once hacks are available for your BIOS).
That's threading the needle a bit, but alright, as long as they're just anticonsumer enough for you, but no further.
Is it? The sales are often so good, and games I bought 3 or 4 PC builds ago still install and run on my new one.
Also with streak families you can share games.
But I get it, this is more about the used market.
DRM can still ruin the user experience a lot.
For a simple example, I have bought Fallout 3 on Steam, but I cannot run that version on Steam on an old Windows 7 machine by default even though its specs are enough to run it, I need to do some workarounds to launch Steam in the first place, and at that point I'd rather download it from a pirate site.
How would my experience be on the same machine with GOG? I can download it directly from the site, or if I cannot connect to it because of browser incompatibility somehow, I can save a downloaded copy to my flash drive from another computer, then transfer its files and it works.
Some old games might not implement Steam DRM and therefore work with the file transfer, but it doesnt work all the time. On GOG it always works because no DRM.
it tells you when games have drm
don’t buy those
imagine blaming steam for f3 lmao
Valve seems significantly closer to a reasonable compromise between our ideology and the opposing ideology, especially compared to Sony and Microsoft.
Sooo hot take I really don't understand the extent of outrage about physical media. I don't want physical media. It's outdated. It feels like at this point we are just making up reasons to be angry, and millenials entering the "back in my day" age is feeding into this. Don't get me wrong, I'm angry too, but I'm also a contrarian piece of shit and very pedantic about being angry for the right reasons. A used market is important for physical tech and all kinds of things to prevent waste and encourage re-use, but that doesn't make sense for digital goods. I dunno am I way off base here?
My view is that with a physical copy I own it for life and there's no way for Sony to come and take it away after they decide to "end support" or something. I can (and do) still plug in my ps2 and boot up any of my games from back then perfectly fine, and barring age/wear and tear I can continue to do so as long as I want. I'm also able to go buy old ps2 games from anyone who's selling them, I don't have to hope Sony has Mercenaries 2 on sale for $69.99 even though it's older than a decent chunk of PlayStation users.
When it comes to Playstation, you can either buy from PS Store or buy a disk somewhere else where it can be cheaper. Without physical media you only have one store, a full monopoly. I think that's the main issue.
I like being able to touch the things. The tactile feedback of something in my hands is nice.
Also: Don't have much digital storage.
I do have that childhood nostalgia for cartridges, but that aside the modern joy of physical media is usually something like works offline, works 20 years from now, can't be remotely disabled. But I've found that once you're paying $599 for a brick with a 5 year expiration time bomb built-in, $70 per game, 20GB downloads before you can start playing, the dark patterns don't end there, and the whole ecosystem just isn't worth all the hassle.
Physical goods aren't here for nostalgia, they're here for media that can't be remotely recalled the moment the corpos decide for whatever reason you can't own it anymore.
Its very important in the legal space. On the high seas, a HDD thumb drive or archival mdisc/tape drive are the same.
GOG has managed to put out DRM free games though on a digital distribution platform. I can have my entire library backed up and it isn't possible for them to nuke it in any way, as far as I know. It really isn't a problem inherent to digital downloads, only the way some are trying to do it.
I've bought plenty of games that turned out to be dogshit, and the only solace they've provided is the ability to recoup some of the money by selling or trading the games. The physical games I do own are carefully curated, and I can still play all of them. I don't want to be put in a position where I can't get my money back AND I'm stuck with some shitty Hogwarts game.
You aren't off-base, you just aren't taking Sony's, Nintendo's, Microsoft's tendencies to say "You don't own that game you bought anymore" into account. Games are way too expensive to be able to brush off the full price of a game that you have every reason to be able to go back to after years of not playing them. Don't put your trust in companies, especially after decades of eroding consumer trust.
Steam doesn't do this (anywhere nearly as often). The lesson you should be getting from this new game sales trajectory is that if buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't theft. Don't reward companies for clawing back any benefits you have of buying something. All you're doing is ceding ground that you won't get back.
The issue is removing another option for acquiring a game as well as a lack of ownership.
Physical media allows you to do whatever you want with your copy of the game. It allows the market to determine the price of the game instead of just sitting at whatever price they want on the digital store.
There is also the issue of download speeds. There are still many people in the world who have awful download speeds and/or data caps. Those people will lose the option to have the entire game on the disc.
While there are a lot of reasons why getting rid of physical media is bad (such as physical media getting certain consumer protections that digital currently doesn't) I'm going to try to make an argument I think you'd understand. From the image in the post Dead space digital version costs 69.99 but Dead Space physical version costs 18. Why does it cost 69.99 digitally and 18 physically? Because corporations like money. A physical disk cuts into their profit margin. They could've made 139.98 by selling the game to two people but instead they only made 69.99 (I know the numbers aren't accurate and from physical sales corporations make even less but for the sake of the argument I'll stick to those numbers) because only the first person paid the corporations and when that person was done they sold it to the second person who didn't pay the corporations anything. In a sense physical media cost corporations a sale. But that's one of the benefits of consoles for consumers. You can actually get old physical disks relatively cheap on the second hand market. Now you could argue that physical disk users are a minority and you're probably right, but the fact that a physical market exists keeps corporations in check. If a game is priced too high you can always see if you can find a physical version for cheaper. But if there's no physical version available you pay what they tell you to pay. Digital only on a closed platform is just giving corporations more control over the pricing of games and we know they want to jack up the price.
I'm with you, I prefer digital media over physical. But my digital media is also bought on an open platform so I can choose where I get the best deal when buying digital media. I don't have to pay the price Steam gives me, I can buy the game on GOG or Itch or a plethora of third party sellers. Despite the media being digital I retain (some) control over the pricing. That's not true for consoles so on consoles digital only is a horrible idea.
People just want physical discs so they can own what they buy.
I don't want it either, but look at this and look at gog.
I agree with the theory. the reality is that there is no structure to resell digital goods and doing so isn't in the favour of the corps controlling it.
if there were a third party way to transfer ownership of digital goods? absolutely. but there isn't, you're at the mercy of the corp that wants more money and fuck you give it to them
You're not way off, digital is superior and less wasteful in theory, and in a progressive society we'd have already realised that digital goods should be transferable and should not expire (= should not have DRM), certainly not sooner than physical goods! We do not live in that society atm (:
A practical example from experience: a steam game can only be gifted (aka transferred) to another account if you buy at least a second copy/key. The first copy is therefore less valuable than a game on a physical copy, that I can lend or gift to a friend.
