You can be a PC couch gamer! Apollo/Moonlight or Steam Link work pretty damn well. If I can play cyberpunk two rooms away from my PC…

it isn’t without its issues, and my ISP’s router keeps messing with things, but hey, my wife went from “watch him play over his shoulder on a 24” screen" to “play in the living room on a couch and controller with him”

you can still play chrono trigger

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Well done. I finished my degree once I quit drinking

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.

No, the games are also worse.

Nintendo also still sells physical games for now.

I did that when the Oblivion horse armor dropped and I felt strength and community in my little rural highschool of like-minded gamers that aligned on the “world we want to see”.

fast forward 20 years. our sacrifice doesn’t matter, companies run like big ocean trawlers and some retards will swim into the net and make it worth their while 😞

I see your point but it’s pointless when most people are sheeple. The 1% of power users never make a difference in the world of today.

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 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?

“Designated free speech zone”

Was curious about how corporate compromised Reddit has become.

TBF almost all the games worth playing before 2016 probably run fine on at least one of: your phone or your linux PC.

I mean, those games from the time you decided not to play games are extremely easy to access these days, with the exception of dead multiplayer titles. There is something to be said about being young and having much more of an ability to experience wonder and enjoyment than later though.

People buy this shit on installments. Consumer culture has turned the average person into a product chugging zombie.

2026: Sony erases digital content from libraries; we’re reminded we don’t own what we buy

2024: PS5 owners lose access to hundreds of games as digital purchases wiped from their accounts

2023: PlayStation Is Deleting Purchased Shows From User Libraries, And People Are Furious

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.

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.

People just want physical discs so they can own what they buy.

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.

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.

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.

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 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

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.

Part of the reason Valve gets away with it is that PC is an open platform. If you don’t want to buy from Valve you don’t have to buy directly from Valve. If you find a better deal elsewhere you can buy the game elsewhere. That’s not true for consoles. When it comes to digital only on Playstation you pay the price Sony tells you to pay because nobody except Sony is allowed to sell on Playstation. If Sony decides to jack up the price you just have to deal with it. If Sony refuses to put their games on sale you just have to deal with it.

The argument about removing your library is true for Valve (less so for GOG because you can just download all your installers and store them locally) but I think that’s a problem of the law. I think the law should catch up to digital media and give it the same rights as physical media. I hope SKG movements makes enough headway to lay the groundwork for someone else to come along and establish actual ownership of digital media.

Valve seems significantly closer to a reasonable compromise between our ideology and the opposing ideology, especially compared to Sony and Microsoft.

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

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.