alt Hacker NewsIt's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
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Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation
Physical media was always one of the selling points for consoles. While PC has essentially been digital-only for a long time (with NONE of the wish list the author here wants, mind you - you can't sell or lend games to random people on Steam, besides a limited "family sharing" feature), consoles were where you go when you want to play a game and then sell it quickly if you don't like it. Physical media accounts for 50% of Switch game sales. I feel that Sony is in panic mode because they released a bunch of stinker first-party games and now they think that removing the disc drive from the PS6 will save them some money. It'll probably lose them a lot of customers.
imo GameStop ruined it for everyone. Nearly all their profits are from reselling games.
There's another story about a game that died and was resurrected, Runescape. It launched with a big fanfare of version 3.0 back in 2008 and was met with total disaster. Fans were quitting, private servers of the pre-EOC update, etc. Jagex heard this and stuck a solo dev onto re-launching an instance of '2007 scape' which was basically an old backup they found and a few server instances. They incorporated features of the platform like voting, where votes require strong consent (75% in some cases) to get new features, and it's a seriously community driven game where both sides have something to gain. Now branded "old school runescape" the game has more players than the "runescape 3" that still exists today as Runescape. A win all around.
This isn't just isn't as clearcut as people make it. A lot of it is based on a historic idea of an SNES cartridge or PS1 disk that contained the complete game, which was played locally and was entirely self-contained. It makes sense that you'd "own" that.
But we don't live in that world anymore. An extreme example is Fortnite. This is free (with paid cosmetics) but imagine if it cost $20. Do you own it? If they shut down the Fortnite servers, the game is pretty much worthless. What do you "own" exactly? Even with games like CoD that have a campaign, the game would degrade by losing online services.
Even for an offline game that's bought online, there will have been patches. If your console dies or you buy a new one, where do you download it from once the service shuts down? Or does it need to be available to download forever? If so, who hosts that?
As another example, I can probably from some old DVDs with games like GTA4 on them if I dig in boxes. I have since bought most on Steam since but ignore that. Years ago I had tried to install GTA4 on a PC and it basically didn't work. It relied on some infrastructure ("Games for Windows"?) that had since been discontinued. I think if I persisted I could've patched it to work but I just gave up. What happens then? What about when it requires an OS that no longer exists? What exactly do you "own"?
For digital TV shows and movies, this is far easier. I've never bought any of these. Years ago, you couldn't even download movies again from iTunes. If you lost it, bad luck. They reversed course on that I believe. But all these cases where the digital store lost the digital icense, which is going to happen, what did you think was going to happen?
What about DRM (for TV shows/movies as well as games)? There are DRM servers. Do these need to be maintained? By whom? You might take the purist approach of "no DRM" but that's really a losing battle.
But games are tougher for the reasons I described.
Here's something else to consider: part of the distribution model for physical media is that the media doesn't last forever (liek a digital copy does). Disks scratch, get broken, get lost, etc. Electronics in cartridges fail. SD cards fail. This degradation is built into the pricing model.
I honestly don't know what the solution is here but this just isn't as clearcut as people are making it out to be.
I question how much of this discussion is really being driven by gamers.
Those who wanted change made it happen. There are indie games and remakes without these restrictions. Most of classic gaming preservation has been successful with its goals apart from some legal gray areas and chasing rarities.
These discussions then fixate on the cutoff year for classic gaming and whether everything beyond that is even worth saving. The conclusion is always the same. Nobody really cares about the slop.
All that remains to discuss is politics. That's always the most vocal part drowning out everyone else. Who keeps banging this drum?
You think you have it tough now, huh? When I was a kid I had to rewind my Apple ][ games on casette tape before returning them to the library, or I'd get a hefty fine, and it was uphill both ways!
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I’ve come to realize there are definitely people out there who have no interest in playing games, they just want to own them.
A child doesn’t think about ownership, he picks up a controller and plays a game. And when the child has grown bored of the game, one day they just never touch it again like a discarded toy, moving on to something else.
It is adults, reminded of their own feeble mortality and impermanence in the world who try to grasp at things like permanent ownership, they long for something that can’t just be torn away from them on a whim. But in life, everything is ultimately torn away from you, there is nothing you can do about it.
Some try to disguise their hoarding as “preservation”. Nobody cares. Even if you had some carefully curated museum, these old games would just be exhibits people look at for a bit with passing curiosity. Nothing more. You didn’t even make these games, why do you care so much?
Focus on enjoying games now, in the time when they are relevant. No matter how hard you try, all those games will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
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Tldr: Walled gardens suck. I can't lend you or sell you my iPhone app either. Physicsl media is cool because it offers both a unit of authenticity and ownership. Second hand games were fine as having the game when it came out was the value, like a movie vs. watching free a year later on TV.
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Does anyone here remember owning games on disk?
It was a royal pain in the ass!
You had to inset the disk every time you wanted to play game. The disks got scratched, destroyed, or rearranged by the wife.
Steam has saved me from all of that. Plus I can share my whole library with my family members.
Sure I might lose access to them all when I die, but 20 years from now who is going to care?
We rent time at a football field. We buy tickets to watch a single match. There are parallels here to not owning video games. I don’t really understand why one is so heinous.
Let’s say there’s a new rule implemented by the NBA that no one likes (similar to a fear of live service games changing). How is that resolved there and why can’t that solution work for video games?
I think a big thing we’re currently missing here is something like a community field or park. Why are there no open-source, community-run Diablo projects for example? If no one cares enough to do that, maybe this isn’t so big of an issue.
And "people" seemingly hated NFT so much, but the basic idea of it, like in this case, would've given sony an opportunity to cash in on every resale of the given physical disc. But, oooh the underlying forces that steer our society towards a dead end didn't like that idea.
Same applies to graphics artists. They sell a painting and if it ever changes hands it would've netted them X percent from the given transactions. But NO, that's not the way this should be handled. The elite doesn't want people to earn easily.
Digital vs physical is the same bs just from a different angle.