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The $700 PS5 Pro doesn’t come with a disc drive
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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This is yet another nail in the coffin of physical media. Or, in other words games you actually own instead of long term lease.
It's not like physical media makes any difference anyway these days.
Actual disk often gets just a glorified installer, and even if it includes the entire game you're likely to have to activate it online anyway.
The "own your games" ship has sailed long ago, unless you only buy no-DRM and your own backups.
The difference is the price of buying discs vs. buying from a digital store that has no competitors.
I've bought almost exclusively second-hand discs for my PS5, because they're like half the price for the exact same content.
Sadly it'll probably be just a matter of time before those will be phased out as well, one way or another.
Steam keys can be found dramatically cheaper than all of that.
They can, difference is a vast majority of people don't want to buy/build a PC, or deal with a PC setup in general, they just want to press one button to make it work and sit on the couch. So the easy option for them is buying a console, it's plug and play, while a PC requires quite some setup.
So we need Steam Box. Steam Deck just works 99% of the time. I can only complain about the desktop mode being buggy and non-steam games being a pain in the ass to install.
If you wait for a good sale, digital is sometimes cheap or cheaper. I just go with whatever is cheapest at any given moment.
I got the disc version for used games too, but the sad truth is that where I live there isn't really a market for used games.
Or, well, there is, but the prices on used discs are often barely below retail price, if you can even find a copy.
I remember thinking it was bs when half life 2 required a steam account and now everyone loves it.
For better or worse, the landscape has shifted since then. I can't imagine people love Steam for being Steam, but rather for being the most consumer-friendly platform on PC.
Refunds? No questions asked if it's within 2 weeks and 2 hours of playtime.
User reviews and ratings? Yes, and even comments on those reviews.
Community content? Steam discussions, guides, art, etc. Even mods with the workshop.
Bribes development studios for exclusivity deals? Nope! Devs can release games wherever the fuck they want.
Platform support? PC. Not just Windows, but going out of their way to make Linux a first class citizen. They even support Crapple despite its miniscule market share among PC gamers.
You're right. But, all this good stuff is to obfuscate the central fact that you don't own the property you bought. Sure, Valve has claimed that should they go away, as their last act, they'll provide the ability for users to own their purchases, but who actually believes them?
For $700 they could at least throw in a 4k Blu-ray player.
Then again, I ponied up extra for the disc version of the original ps5 for that exact reason, only to find out the media player software is a giant piece of garbage that was clearly given no effort. So I can't say I'm too surprised.
Sony doesn't put much effort into most things.
I'm glad some companies are going full media and the younger Gen is buying physical media. It's creating a counter culture that smart companies are using to their advantage.
This in my opinion is one of the valid use cases of a blockchain/NFTs: they provide provable ownership of digital goods. This means that if implemented, in the future we could actually own games music movies ebooks etc. The only remaining step would be a decentralized torrent-like system that allows the users to download the licensed content that they own via their nft.
How would that support “First Sale Doctrine”?
If you can't modify it, sell it or know what the game software is even doing then calling that "ownership" would be rather lacking. I mean in terms of traditional ownership, not the modern definition: "page 69 of the EULA defines "purchasing" (the software) as a limited, non-transferable lease which can stop working at any time due to dependency on a proprietary server code we will never share I fucked your mom".
You could sell the NFT and lose access to the game just like a disc
You wouldn't be able to modify it as the nft would just allow you to download (edit and run) the game.
Edit: But allowing people to freely resale their digital copies would be a big win for people. No gatekeepers just like with discs
As long as the network exists
If it's a networked game, but there's no reason a offline game shouldn't work other than incompetence.
Also since the NFT is the DRM the game could be available for download outside of the publishers purview, such as a public torrent site.
But if the game has to call home every time it starts and there is no server your game won't work. StarCraft can be played offline, as it was created, but you need to connect to play because Blizzard.
You don't need to, you can play offline. You just need to call home every 30 days to keep the remastered graphics since the base game is free to play now
Every 30 days but you have to call home or have a degraded experience.
Yeah, but at least it's not always online
One big "advantage" (for the companies) of NFTs is that the emitter can take a commission or fee every time the NFT is sold. This can kind of alleviate their fears of people buying from each other instead of buying a new copy. I think that's a fair middle ground for owning a fully digital copy, between physical copy that companies don't want and digital copy that consumers don't want.
How can they force that and not also force a fee to move it to a different wallet you own?
People change wallets all the time and putting a fee on that would be inexcusable
Without knowing why people change their wallets, it's hard to nail down a solution. But, perhaps a smart contract wallet whose access is controlled by an underlying wallet that can be swapped out may help. In any case, all transfers or smart contract execution attracts a fee. Even sending money between wallets.
Well I know all transactions have fees, I meant a fee charged as a commission to transfer it that goes to the developer.
Wallets get compromised, you might upgrade to a multi sig wallet or make a new shamirs secret sharing wallet. You might want to get more privacy after leaking your identity. All sorts of reasons to change it. Having to pay an extra 4% resale fee or whatever it is doing that wouldn't be acceptable.
I mean, I can actually own a bunch of stuff as long as it doesn't have some sort of proprietary DRM bullshit attached to it.
The problem isn't that there's no way to obtain media in a non-bullshit way. The problem is that distributors don't want to provide media in a non-bullshit way.
Sure, you can still own digital media, but you can't sell or trade it like you can with a physical copy.
Meh. If life weren't so focused on material gains and losses, I wouldn't need to.
It would also mean potential losses for the distributors, as people are (supposedly) less likely to buy directly for them.
So, again, the problem isn't the media, it's the distributors.
How would an NFT help in any way? We're not lacking the means to prove you bought the game. We're lacking companies willing to sell you games and laws that prevent companies from saying "buy" when they mean "rent". If we got to a place where torrenting software you've bought in the past is legal, we don't need NFTs to accomplish it...
Thing is, that’s not how it works on PlayStation. On PS5 you can download and play games without ever connecting to wifi. The whole glorified installer is mostly an Xbox thing ever since the XB1. I’d know since I own both and usually get discs to play my games.
It does if you rent
I've been using gamefly for a while, I can't rent digital only games
Sure you can. wink wink 🏴☠️
Is it possible for modern games to fit on a disk?
I think it would be an interesting change if brand new games had a hard limit on file size so they can fit on and play from an actual disk.
Absolutely. It just depends a lot on the game of course. A blueray disk can contain over 100 GB. But a game could be split over several disks too. It was rather common to do that with CDs on the original PlayStation.
A lot of Xbox 360 games came on multiple discs
The issue isn't the game engine, it's the texture files.
If you don't care what it looks like, you cut 80-90% or more from any modern game subbing low quality textures.
They still have to install.
Disks are too slow.
If they use a good, 12X bluray drive, it will be quicker to install from a disk than to download it unless you're lucky enough to have a good fiber internet connection. Even then, the servers you download from will often be overloaded and slow on release day.
That's not my point. Most games do install fine from the disk.
He's talking about playing from the disk, too, and that's a problem.
Maybe someone could do the numbers and see if a memory (USB, SD*, ...) can be cheaper than a BR for this case.
or you straight up pirate it.
There’s not a lot of brave souls doing this as a passionate hobby any longer. Now it’s for the clout, to inject malware, or to receive monetary donations. Or all three!
I hope I am wrong, and we can get back to the passionate hobby, but it’s looking kinda grim from my point of view.
its always been for the clout in the scene. but ive been pirating shit for a couple of decades now, no malware so far.
If you have been doing it for a decade, then surely you’ve noticed the drop in active crackers…?
you can still pirate games without getting malware, even if a little late.
Yeah. Piracy is alive-and-well. You can even acquire and play PS5 games right now if you wanted to.