GameStop Boss Says Disc Drives Should Be Required On Game Consoles
stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to 
gamespot.com
"It would be great if people had to buy more of the thing," says guy who makes money selling the thing.
stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to
I mean, maybe disk drives are outdated, but being unable to buy used games or give your old game to a friend is garbage (but great for profits of the console manufacturers and game studios). Not to mention that as long as it's a digital download, you don't own the game - you lease it at a flat rate.
Limiting the options and ownership rights of the consumer for profit is bad.
It's only outdated to the rich families who can afford brand new games for their kids. Excluding discs is a great way to force many out of the market.
I wouldn't say this is always true. Numerous times I've bought digital games from the PS store that were heavily discounted while places like Gamestop were still asking MSRP ($69.99) for new or $10 off for used on a game that came out years prior. I still prefer to own a disc but sometimes digital is cheaper and more convenient.
That's why stuff like Gamepass are picking up. Poorer families may not be able to afford a £70 game each month, but £15 a month for a huge library is more achiveable.
With how games work these days, having just the disk is pretty much useless if the publisher decides to delist or discontinue the game from platform, because:
patches and updates don't come with disk form anymore.
many games that requires online authentication to play won't be available to keep playing if their account service is down.
games go on sale with steady rate most of the time(except nintendo), for bargain bin deals you would probably find the game on humble bundle or gog.
you often have the good games that release "better" remake version over and over anyway. Note, I know people sometimes prefer the original version, but not everyone is on the same page and it hugely depending on the dev/publisher for the newer version.
Now let's describe the cons:
in many countries, breaking DRM is illegal. So even if all you want to do archive, you can't make a decrypted copy. That's why homebrew etc provides the key/dumper for you to do such at your own risk. IMO, it's safer(INAL) to download pirated iso/rom compare to doing your own dump. And, archiver actually tried to keep a post patch version before store is closed down(see wiiu store close example), the disk version is not a viable option anymore for archiver.
storage up keep, physical things require storage space. I still have like 3 large shipping box for my older gen(ps3/GC/Wii/X360 games) I will probably donate them to library or something and keep the only ones I wanted to keep.
console part cost, the BD drives are often first point of failure, then HDMI connectors. Cause well, moving parts are easier to break and harder to QA. PS5's 2 versions gives a good example how the disk affects the look, weight, etc. Not to mention, they are a lot slower then SSD and you are required to install all that anyway.
developer/publisher/platform see nothing for used game sales. It sounds like huge shill talk but let's be honest, they want to make a living, if you are not supporting your favorite developer they will have to offset the cost by doing shit you all won't like. ie, mtx, subscription service, selling analytic data, selling the studio to shit publisher that push worth practice, platform raise price to meet target projection. Buy/sell used game only helps that service owner(gamestop/ebgame/bestbuy, not the community.)
did I mention switching disc just to play game is a PITA, and if your case is the modern garbage version, remember those plastic break down more easily and you would have to buy new case to hold your disc.
environment waste for all the manufacturing, packaging and shipping. It's honestly not worth that in modern era if you give a fuck about how future generation will live.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. They want to sell you digital version specifically because you can't resell them. It could easily be solved by creating a digital marketplace, and even turn a profit for the publishers by taking a cut of resales.
This sounds like a console user problem. PCs haven't had disc drives for years and the games are far cheaper. Yes, there's no second-hand market, but with steam sales, humble bundles, and all the freebies I post in !freegames@feddit.uk it's not really become the corpo hellscape we feared.
Also technically you don't own games on disc either, it's just much harder for the publisher to come round your house and snap your copy!
not true all the time. Plenty of games once you have the files are easily able to run. KSP is one such example. I can just copy the KSP folder to any computer and play the game.
Its the devs choice to require things like Steam to validate the game etc.
This article is about consoles, not PCs. Good luck copying your console game to another folder on the HD.
Even disk-based games on newer consoles often don't include the full game; in many cases they're just an installer, really, which then requires downloading the bulk of the files from the net.
I have backups of my games on a PS4, which is air gapped (because the USB interface took a shot of lighning and no longer works).
I have been able to restore them and play games/saves on this console.
Here: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/support/hardware/ps4-back-up-and-restore-with-external-storage/
FTA:
I tried copying game data when we were replacing our PS4 hard drive, but it just caused a lot of problems (with games having to "verify" the installation when launched, which was a very lengthy process, probably longer than just re-downloading it would have been; I don't know what it was actually doing). We were able to preserve save data, though.
For me, this was because the PS4 uses USB 2.0 that caps out at 480 Mbps. It was basically doing checksums of the backup files vs the restored and it just took time, even when the backups I had it running on were a sata SSD.
Funny enough that was already possible on the PS3, so it's a matter of control rather than technological limitation. They use the excuse of "technological progress" to close the walled garden even more.
That's pretty rare despite being constantly mentioned in this thread. I can think of a few that are strictly multiplayer games or the Master Chief Collection which is just a huge net installer disc.
Otherwise games still become gold and are playable start to finish off disc. Switch games on the other hand have quite a few that require a download.
That's fair. It often is the case though, and I think many people don't consider that as being a problem because it just doesn't occur to them.
I think Valve is an example of a company that does it well, since you can download the game if Steam were ever to go under, etc. and you can add non-steam games to steam. It's almost unavoidable that they do it well, though, since steam is running on PCs (mostly).
But Nintendo does it badly. If Nintendo decides to stop supporting Switch downloads, my digital content will vanish (unless I root my switch, etc. but then I may as well just pirate everything). But, at least nintendo has a card reader for their games - if they got rid of it, I'd never truly own any Switch game and would also be forced to pay massively inflated priced for re-released old games, crappy switch ports, or Nintendo titles which almost never decrease in price or go on sale.
Would agree. Especially re:Nintendo.
One of my biggest annoyance is when you have multiple switches on a family account. If you use cartridges local co-op (or whatever it is called) requires two copies of the game (a cartridge in each). If you have the downloaded versions/digital download, then any device on the Nintendo account (ie: 2 switches for kids on a family account) can play against each other locally.
I don’t think you can cache/save a cartridge to a device to be able to do their local play feature (ie via ad-hoc connections in a car)
Other games i know that do this are factorio (you are able to download the game as a zip, and it doesnt stop you from making as many copies as you desire)
That's why NFT's were created, but now that people link NFT's to dumb ass pictures, I wonder how if ever it'll make it as proof of ownership.
He is obviously biased by his business interests, but frankly he is ultimately correct. Once consoles are digital only, console players will lose the last form of control they have over anything they own.
You don't need CDs for that, and CDs don't prevent that.
As the other user pointed out, most CDs don't even have a playable form of the game on them anymore. You usually need additional updates to actually play the game (or in the case of those steam installs, the CD doesn't even have a bare minimum on it)
Technically you can own a game as a digital install too, just they won't deliver it that way.
Most? That's definitely not right. Every single game I bought up to the PS4 could be played without any downloads.
I think they mean most recent or most new games, the PS4 came out nearly a decade ago.
But they still couldn't be played directly from the disk, which is part of the point of the comment you replied to. Every single game I have for PS3 requires it to be installed onto the console in order to play it.
This is why I edited my last comment to say explicitly "played without any download" rather than "run from the disk", the comment I replied to was missing my point. I couldn't care less if the disk goes spinny or not, this is not about storage technology, it's about control over the games you buy. The point is owning games without being bound to online services, which a disk that can be installed directly does perfectly fine.
Unless it needs a day one patch, then you're SHIT OUTTA LUCK
I watched a YouTube video where the guy played Cyberpunk on a PS4 from disc with no patches installed. It was as bad as you think.
Cyberpunk on PS4 was an unparalleled shitshow
They're all digital only now. There's no reason, at all, to have optical drives in consoles. With the advent of direct nvme to video memory you have to load content to the nvme anyway because spinning g plastic sucks soooo much. Today SD is actually cheaper per gb than Blu-ray.
Want to purchase a physical copy? Buy it on a SD card and get a $10 usb SD card reader, which will be compatible with every console anyway.
My prediction will be that the next gen (PS6) will go 100% download only, get shat on then start up a service with gamestop or someone to distro encrypted game installs onto WHATEVER usb media you bring in.
Just checked Amazon prizes for the first best SD card and Bluray disc. This is a lie. Discs are still less than half the prize.
And you didn't take into consideration that it's much cheaper and faster to press the data onto the disc than writing on an SD card when you do that in great numbers.
You should check prices on the 2GB SD cards not the high end ones because the disks usually contain that much or less. Most AAA games only have the game INSTALLER on the disk, and still require you to download the game in order to play it.
30 second search at 100gb (modern AAA games and the biggest Bluray)
Bluray is $10 a disc, microsd is $8 and you get 128gb and can get bigger media, which doesn't exist for Bluray.
That doesn't account for mass production, fewer people care about physical media with every passing year.
Physical media will still exist, but it won't be optical. Opticals advantages over cart just don't exist anymore. You don't include a $80+ part on the bom when less than 5% of your users want it and that 5% can get a bog standard usb device that can be had for $10
MicroSD is not comparable to the flash memory on NVME SSDs.
Bluray hasn't been $10 a disc since maybe 2003. Bluray discs are literally pennies to a manufacturer like Sony.
Nobody said it was. It's a medium to get games from a brick and mortar store to install onto the nvme on the console you can't play modern games directly from Bluray either.
Its incredibly niave to think it costs Sony, co-developer of blu-ray, $10 to press a game onto a blu-ray disc. Its probably costs a dollar or less to manufacturer a disc by bow. They can sell blurray movies for $9.99 and still profit.
It will definitely be cheaper for Sony to stick with optical discs next gen if they don't drop the drive entirely.
It's also dumb to expect they'll be paying retail for microsd or whatever usb flash sticks they decive to use.
You are mixing having your own physical copy with needing to run games straight from the disk. Nevermind that there's no reason that games couldn't be sold on faster cartridges, you can still have a physical media that can install a game into the console. Offline, without relying on an online service that will inevitably close eventually.
As it is, with disks and cartridges, they can't make it so absolutely every game must check with their online services. They have to make sure grandma in the boonies can make little Timmy's game work right out of the box. Without them, there's nothing stopping them. They could even straight up say that "no game could be expected to last more than 10 years", and I see enough people that already seem ready to fall for that. Nevermind that to this day there's people playing the nearly 40 year old Super Mario Bros.
...and yet, most AAA games cannot do this, and require you to go online and download the game assets after you put the disk in the console.
I literally just replied to you about this and I don't know where you are getting it from. Games may ask for updates but games that are unplayable without downloads are very much the exception.
Not if modern proof of ownership technologies are implemented, such as NFT smart contracts.
Nah, dumping your own copy, or at least DRM-free digital, is a much more reliable way to maintain your ownership than any blockchain-based system.
It is nice to be able to give a game to someone else when you're done playing it.
That's exactly why they don't want it!
I would have played so many less games in my youth if I weren't able to trade discs with friends. I would have missed Vice City, Morrowind and Final Fantasy VII to name a few memorable ones.
I mean.. he has a vested interest. But he's right we need media that isn't dependent on official servers
If only that was what he was saying. He doesn't care whether they're dependent on servers. The vast majority of physical games sold today are already nothing more than an entitlement and some of the game files, with the rest being downloaded after you insert the disc. He's only concerned with Gamestop getting their cut, both in new game sales and especially in their bread-and-butter trade-in market.
Of course making money is his motive, but that does that matter?
Digital distribution only means you can't give (or sell) your games to someone else. So with digital only the copyright holders of the video games make more money. Once it's all digital only, next step is to require a connection to a server for them to work, so then they can shut it down to force you to buy a new console and re-buy all the old games you want to play again. What are you going to do if the decide to go that way? It's either stop playing video games altogether, or go along with whatever scheme they feel like coming up with when they enshittify themselves like every other company inevitably does.
A physical copy means more options for the consumer, why should we care how much of the pie this corporation or that corporation makes off of it? In fact corporations in general make even more money from non-transferable digital distribution.
I'm not sure why you're trying to convince me of the merits of physical media? I did not, and do not, disagree. It's a more flexible option, and more options is always better for the consumer. But the reality is that physical media, in its current iteration, doesn't offer all that much protection. The only universal benefit of physical media is the ability to regift or resell. It's a great benefit, but it hardly liberates consumers from dependence on servers.
As for my original point, it simply read to me as if this person was giving the GameStop exec credit for something he did not say. I wanted to make sure his comments were seen in an accurate light.
So we should reject an ally that has a shared goal simply because their motives aren't pure enough?
It's the old Stephen Fry quote "it's more important to be effective than it is to be right." We shouldn't care so much about whether or not someone has the right reason for trying to affect a positive result. Gamestop's motives are irrelevant, the effect of their actions are what matters.
Ok, but "It would be great if people had to buy more of the thing" is not an accurate summary either. Putting a CD drive on a console does not mean you have to buy physical media.
Given that MS have put a lot of work into making your digital 360 titles work on Series s/x and even upgrading some of them, I don't think that's a concern with all publishers.
I never accused him of altruism of any kind, if the games came from his servers specifically..... he'd be tuning a different sing
In the days of zero days patches and DRM requiring a check to the servers, a disc doesn't guarantee that at all.
If anything, disc just became dongles to prove ownership and download the full game.
This is also true. With DRM, I feel like we're missing out on a lot of property rights that should be remediated. I'm not sure what all could be done for zero day patches, though. Maybe we go back to the Windows XP days and distribute update packages via CD as well. TBH, though- if we have the ability to directly access the storage medium of a console and we are able to remove DRM, there's no reason to make a disc drive mandatory
You all hate discs until you have a library that you can rent games for free close to you. Or you want to sell a game you already played to buy something else. I don't care of what some boss from GameStop says because at the end of the day, they run a business out of it, but complaining about physical media is something I don't understand someone would do as a consumer. Did we really learn nothing from companies simply shutting down online stores when they want?
It’s actually illegal where I live to rent out games. Thanks, Nintendo! (/^^)/⌒●~*
This is funny because the games we rented were all from Switch, lol. Where you are from? I'm currently in Canada.
Japan. Nintendo got it passed into law years ago that game’s can’t be rented, because of supposed piracy concerns. But you can go to any video rental place and borrow all the music CDs you could want, because we all know how much more difficult it is to make mp3s from a CD than copy a game.
Yeah, I heard that many things in Japan are extremely protective for companies. Apparently modding is also illegal, right? I was talking with my spouse about console modding and we discovered that
Yes, modding games is illegal there. But it has something to do with the way their copyright works afaik. If a company lets you modify their IP, they effectively give up their ownership rights from what I understood.
I play FFXIV and there it is against TOS too (of course it being a MMO modding can have another context), but for quite a few QoL improvements that came out with more recent patches you can clearly see the inspiration.
It would be interesting to know if modding a game like Skyrim there would be forbidden too.
It's called a torrenting client
Damn, lot of hate for physical media in this thread.
Xbox One announcement (E3 2013): "YOU CAN TAKE MY DISKS FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS!
Current Year (2023): "Disks are outdated and dead, who needs em anyway?"
Y'all forget way too easily and they are starting to prey upon it.
To be fair, most people are thinking of the reasons of ownership, whereas xbox one was about availability.
The problem is it’s kind of murky now since most discs don’t even contain the game anymore. So yeah you can lend/sell them but you’re still dependent on a digital store. It’s just a license for a digital game in physical form. I say this as a physical media proponent.
I am not pro-digital only but if the discs don’t have the game I’m less inclined to pay extra for what is likely to be the first part of my console to fail.
Yes it is weird. I get people preferring digital copies but I dont get having hostility toward physical media.
Because there's a lot of misinformation in this thread.
All media is physical media. All data is stored on a medium. Data is real and physical. Some data is stored on paper in ink writing, some data is stored as ones and zeroes on a disc drive, but the type of disc drive may vary. Hard drives, USB thumbsticks, SSDs, and so on, are all physical media.
If I destroy a BluRay, or destroy a hard drive, or burn a piece of paper, does the data still physically exist? No. In all cases, destroying the medium in which the data exists destroys the data. Whether it is paper, a disc you put in a drive, or a hard drive.
When something is stored "in the cloud" it's still on a hard drive somewhere, just not on your hard drive somewhere. You have essentially chosen to store your property on someone else's private property. Much like a physical storage unit. If the storage unit burns down, everything in it will cease to exist. If the data center where your cloud data is stored burns down without any backups, same issue, the data ceases to exist.
People in this thread specifically only dislike one type of physical media, and it's a type that has one of the shorter shelf-lifes for long-term data storage.
Also, with hard drives, its often trivial to recover deleted data, which is why companies that deal with secure data often completely shred old hard drives to prevent data being exfiltrated from them after wiping.
This is needlessly pedantic. When people say “physical copy” they are talking about a physical, individual storage medium with a game on it that you can trade/sell/lend/etc. and give full transfer of the license contained on it. My hard drive is useless to you if all my games are bought via the Microsoft store and you can’t access my account. My halo 3 disc will work on any Xbox 360/Xbone/XSX for anyone every day. Is the distinction clear now?
I prefer having a physical game collection, but with the way physical games are handled now, with more than half the game needing to be downloaded to the console to cut costs or because they didn't finish the game before release, it doesn't solve the preservation or ownership problems anymore.
That's where piracy comes in, even if it does tend to have negative effects on smaller devs. So long as there is no server or internet connection required to play, piracy will rain supreme in preservation.
Ownership, on the other hand, is a lot trickier. I personally say just having, for PC games, the game download .exe (or equivalent file) is enough to be considered owning it, but that doesn't mean much.
The way I see it, piracy is fine, but only once the format is dead. I recently hacked both my 3DS and Vita to access the whole libraries since those formats are dead with ones digital store switched off and the other half dead and barely functioning.
But yeah, pay for new releases.
"We miss selling you a scratched up disc for $49 with no box, that we paid some poor kid $2 for"
I remember after I got a 3DS I went to GameStop to trade in my DSi and they offered me $5 or a gift card.
You could probably steal the Mona Lisa and bring it to GameStop, only to be told they'll buy it for some crusty, old, pre-chewed gum they found on the sidewalk a year ago. And that's if you're lucky.
Nobody cares what Gamestop boss says, lol.
"i LiKe ThE sToCk"
It's going to moon any day now, for real this time! /s
Buggywhip salesman demands accomodation from the horseless carriage industry.
Yes, I'm upset at the licenseification of the gaming industry as much as the next guy but that died long before physical media did. As long as a game can die without its first-party servers, games are leased and not owned.
Discs don't have the capacity to store modern games anyways. I mean, how many disc would it take to store Starfield? Its's not going to work.
They do. sorta. It's definitely possible to put something like Starfield on a dual layer BDROM, probably even uncompressed! But then load times would be fucking crazy because BD is an order of magnitude slower than an SSD.
Distributing install files for a day 1 version of a game and using the disc as an auth key, (which is what they did last gen iirc) is still possible.
Transfer the BDROM to my SSD. Literally the same thing as downloading it online. I don’t need it to read off the disc while I play. 360 did this and it worked perfectly fine.
The same thing except you then have to pay for the disk, distribution and worry about stock and so on.
Still possible, but why would that be useful to anyone?
BDXL goes up to 128GB... Conveniently... According to everywhere I look... Starfield is 126.1GB for XBOX...
So yes... Discs do have the capacity and you're wrong.
Further, you can simply use compression, and unpack to the internal SSD. That can probably net you a bunch more space... and then you can move to 2-disc operations if your game is even larger than that.
I guess I haven't been keeping up to date with the latest compact disc technology. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't think many people do so I won't blame you for not knowing. I happen to know because I use something called m-disc for archival purposes. And those are just really fancy blu-rays at this point. The discs I use are 100GB and i knew there were bigger ones.
Cool stuff. I'll probably get into that in the future, only so many external drives one can have lying around.
I hope I am wrong but I see the next generation as completely discless specially if this current generation discless versions sold good enough. The only exception could be Nintendo.
Of course they might require some deals with stores or just sell themselves the consoles online.... Because the stores want to sell games, they might still sell peripherals and redeemable cards for money or maybe CD keys... No idea tough, but if the benefits fall they might say "Nah I am not selling your console if games aren't sold here".
What needs to happen is regulation. Pro-consumer governing bodies (which don't exist in the US, but the EU has been on a roll) mandating the right to transfer a digital license.
As for the stores, Xbox offers GameStop a small percentage of the revenue from every digital game purchased on a console sold by GameStop. That feels like a healthy compromise for an all-digital business model.
Even for the EU that is not an easy thing to deal with in practice. First they would need to outright ban practices where you rent your license for an unspecified time instead of owning it. (this is how it is with everything in mobile app stores, Steam, Epic etc..) And transfer of digital licenses in general is a very hard nut to crack. How do you simply prove who the license owner is? What about accounts being tied to licenses? (Imagine the EU asking software companies that all products above the value of €25 must be sold with a hardware key to run them & if the key is damaged they are mandated to replace it at the manufacturing cost of said hardware key, or use a central EU ran entity to handle these keys that the companies would need to buy from them. Pretty far fetched, isn't it?)
Decades of lenient legislation made all this night impossible untangle..
I mean - if the button says “buy” or “purchase” it’s not renting a license, no matter what the fine print in the terms say.
That’s at least how it should be.
Somehow the law ignores the giant flashing "Buy!" button but is super concerned about the fine print in 6pt font nobody reads.
Why?
People were able to rent games in the past. What happened then that was so bad?
i'm not sure if you understood my comment. The issue is that they sell you software for the full price, but there is a fine print on there somewhere that clearly states that they can remove your access at any time due to a variety of reasons. For example I have lost games due to Apple policies forced the dev to remove them from the app store and then I could not reinstall them anymore.
Another big problem is that the digital license must be transferrable even if the original digital store is deactivated.
The above seems to be the only legitimate use case of Blockchain to me, but the chain must be operated by the state to ensure digital licenses continue to be transferrable
At some point, someone will have to wonder if they have/own anything.
This isn't The Ascetic Virtues. We develop raport with physical, tangible, things.
As I understand it, most disc copies of games today aren't viable in the first place. Either all of the game data is not on the disc and some needs to be downloaded anyway, or the game copy on the disc is in such a shit state that you wouldn't want to play that specific copy.
Discs don't really protect us in the sense of ownership. It's still reliant on the same backend to enable it in most practical senses.
Why discs instead of cartridges, which are currently the superior physical option? I personally try to buy physical whenever possible, because I don't trust companies to not ban my account and flush hundreds of dollars of games down the toilet, and it generally feels better to have just that little extra bit more ownership over my own property.
Because cartridges cost more to produce and are limited in storage. Switch carts cap out at 64gb, Blu Rays are up to 100gb at this point and it's much cheaper to chuck a few of them in a box if the game goes over that. Hence all the switch games with massive downloads required on top of the cart.
That's basically what the Switch uses. Though they're more like a memory card, but they kinda look like little tiny cartridges.
Not often I get to say this, but I completely agree. I HATE the walled garden that is the PS store. 90 usd for FIFA? 130 usd for some random GOLD edition of a ubisoft game? No way. Let me pick those up dirt cheap two months later at a retailer who is having a sale, or from someone who has played it and is ready to sell it onwards.
I wonder why they would want that
Disc drive consoles are great for people who go months with terrible or no internet. People in the military, or just about anyone who goes out to sea can get a disc mailed to them. It is nice to have physical media to play the games off of.
Discs suck, other than for used game sales and collecting.
But used games sales is a huge plus. But realistically I think we'll see maybe one more console generation with physical media.
When physical media dies, I no longer have a good reason to buy consoles.. that’s literally the whole reason I bother with them - I like browsing through the cases to pick games to play.
I have through ps5, and plan to get a series s or whatever the newest with-optical Xbox is (because I can skip the one, nicely backward compatible), but that’s likely where I end the console journey. As it is now it’s getting harder to find physical copies because so many people only have them digitally. The used game market is already ruined for modern consoles, and I’m not paying full price to rent a game.
I don’t support that user-hostile model. I’ll just pirate all that shit on pc.
In the current climate where it takes 30 patches and a year for a new release to become playable, discs are not very useful..
??
Of course they are. Because - you can buy the fucking things second hand or lend them to people!
Sure, but it's really weird that we are relying and want to rely on disks to be the license basically, because the data storage part is quite useless, at least when your connection is faster than your blue-ray drive. (plus you can directly download the patched game)
Wait... Based GameStop? I'm confused.
It's obviously in GameStop's interest.
A broken clock.
I can see them forced to have some form of resellable media Ala switch maybe. But disc's as others have stated I think are on the way out. Esp bc they're so easily scratched and everything else....like good for a time but should've had something else come in once cartridges caught back up in price. They were always quicker by a long shot....it's just that memory prices weren't there in the 90s or until now even really. If I don't like or don't want a game I want some way to sell it off and can't do that digitally bc they won't equate it to the same thing as selling a used copy XD
I want a return to cartridges, like the switch.
Same tbh....
I have never ever managed to scratch a disc to the point where it became unusable. Neither have I ever had problems when buying used discs. I agree about the speed though; at this point my internet speed surpasses the speed with which games are installed from a disc
I mean I've bought plenty that were scratched but still worked. Only one that didn't really was the twilight princess we found randomly in my church parking lot when I was younger. I just don't like the speed since no one seems to get nailing down loading times. I'd love something Ala switch games tho....
I don't disagree (or at least there should be a disc drive-included version and the ability to connect any USB Blu-Ray drive,) but obviously GameStop has a motive here.
And I think disc based games should have a legal requirement to have a playable version of the game on disc.
Or at the very least, add a way to sideload DRM-free games. That's why I love my PS3, WiiU and even my Switch to an extent.
GameStop is terrible for the industry. GameStop is chock full of terrible business practices. Fuck GameStop.
He's only saying this about disc drives because six months ago he was saying "You'll be buying all your games as NFTs from GameStop!" (notice he didn't give one fuck about physical media six months ago?) and then when that went tits up and they closed their cryptocoin and NFT wallets, they need another way to get people to keep buying stocks. They've got those Gamestonk idiots still in a frenzy and they haven't yet woken up to being taken for a ride since the NFT dream turned bust.
What cryptocoin?
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/08/gamestop-citing-regulatory-uncertainty-winds-down-its-crypto-and-nft-wallet/
They were selling the idea to Superstonk investment idiots that the "future" of game sales was in NFTs where you would "really own your copy of the game." Which... to anyone who knows how NFTs really work is such a sick fucking joke as to pawn that idea off on to consumers.
Nvm I misread your initial comment as saying they were shutting down their cryptocoin (as in a coin they launched themselves). Seems they’re shutting down the wallet bc it’s the most vulnerable to violating the vague regulations currently in place. They’ve still got the marketplace and recently announced a project called PlayR that looks to be a game streaming platform.
Obviously, GameStop has a vested interest in discs sticking around, but it feels like that ship has sailed. Can't remember the last time I bought a physical game and it wouldn't surprise me if the next generation of consoles do away with disc drives altogether. Not really sure how to feel about that. Kind of sad having grown up using discs, but at the same time, it just feels inevitable that consoles are going to move to digital-only distribution.
I thought GameStop was going all in on NFTs and bragging about how it was going to revolutionize the gaming space because you could be more "invested" in the things because you really "own" (hahahaha, fucking as if) your own copy.
Oh, wait, *checks notes
They totally are winding that down and going "whoopsie doodles!"
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/08/gamestop-citing-regulatory-uncertainty-winds-down-its-crypto-and-nft-wallet/
Ryan Cohen making a quick spin because he's a fucking idiot, and the only thing he has to sell is an "idea" of a company that respects its consumers. GameStop ain't it Superstonkers. This guy literally went from "You'll be buying all your games as NFTs at GameStop" to "Errm, yeah, we need physical drives, you know for the gamers, not so we can continue ripping people off with used games." What a fucking joke. He didn't care about physical media six months ago because he was all-in on NFTs.
GameStop gonna get Toys 'R' Us'd hard. If this is the best Cohen's got right now, they've got nothing.
The regulatory environment isnt doing the NFT-based game ownership model any favors.
NFTs and how they only hold enough data to point to a URL aren't doing the model any favors. NFTs have been a joke since they were initially released. They don't show ownership of an item, they show a re-direct to a URL where an item you might be able to claim is yours exists.
The people who bought into the idea of "smart contracts" in NFTs got taken for a fucking ride. There's simply not enough BITS to be able to store such data within an NFT. The best they can do is a URL.
https://www.enchant.com/what-is-nft-ownership
Yeah I dunno man. NFTs at least allow for a softening of the walls in the garden. The potential is there for fun and interesting ideas like interoperability between games and game assets, and 3rd party platforms for buying, selling, and interacting with games and game assets.
At minimum it’s a combined digital proof of purchase and login credentials that you can custody yourself and transfer/sell at will without being forced to do so through the makers’ infrastructure.
People shitting on it seem to default to an oversimplified idea of what they are and can be, and a bad faith superiority on top.
That’s not something I get down with. I like new tech. I like experimentation. And I like seeing where things go rather than assuming I already know.
I can own digital files just fine without needing all that unnecessary bullshit. It's the copyright cabal that says I don't "own" them.
Funny, because I have the files stored on a physical drive. If that drive is destroyed, so are the items stored on it. Ergot, data is real and physical. You can already own it physically. NFTs are actually just one more way for wall street to justify the bullshit ways copyright doesn't work.
Because nothing is stopping digital "ownership" from existing as it currently exists, except people who don't like the idea that data can be copied infinitely at no cost.
This is why I never took off my pirate hat, because it's just a bunch of tomfoolery to make you think things don't already work this way. They do, computing always allowed data to be copied infinitely. It's jerks who try to code locks to hide them behind who are the problem.
It's also why I buy games at GOG, because they respect this. They sell games with no DRM and understand that this means piracy will happen, but do it anyway because it's the right thing to do.
Copy that floppy, motherfucker.
What if that digital file is the title to your car, deed to your home, your college degree, passport, driver’s license, etc?
Living in a digital world there are IMO fascinating use cases for unique (read non-copyable, self-custodied) digital objects.
What I’m not interested in are assumptions of limitations for things we barely understand.
If you destroy the hard drive they're stored on, it's no different than burning a piece of paper they're written on. Data is always stored in a medium, whether it's paper or a disk drive. So for digital files like that, you would choose a storage medium that is rated for long-term storage and put it in a fireproof safe. Done.
You're basically asking "what if you lose the title to your car?" Well, there's plenty of ways to get a replacement title, even though they're not easy or free.
The bottom line is data is real and it's always in a storage medium. The storage medium is what you should be worried about more.
Oh wait, that NFT you "own" is stored on someone else's server? Oh wait, I guess you don't own it then, because that data is on a hard drive owned by someone else in the "cloud" and if they destroy that drive, they also destroyed the item you ostensibly "own."
Oh the server with my Title Deed for my home went down and now I have no proof I own my own home? Probably should have kept a copy of the file locally!
There is nothing interesting about NFTs because they're a fundamental, nay, purposeful misunderstanding of what data is and how it works.
Sorry my question was poorly formed. You were talking about digital files being stored perfectly fine on a local medium. I was talking about new use cases for unique digital objects, and gave examples of different kinds of existing credentials/titles.
A scan of my Title Deed or my Vehicle Title will already be unique digital files. They can be copied infinitely so I can never lose track of them. I can even take a hash of the original file and always keep that around to make sure I'm always dealing with an original copy.
What does storing it on someone else's property (server) and just linking to it actually achieve for me, as a person? The NFT does not change the data of the original file in any way, it's just a hash-check itself in many ways.
Would you be okay with storing your car in someone else's garage that you couldn't actually see or access, but were told was secure? That's what you're doing with an NFT. You're putting the actual item you own on someone else's private property, and then claiming that a piece of paper that shows ownership (NFT) is all you need to get it back. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.
An NFT is much more a "certificate of authenticity" than it is a title of ownership.
¯\(ツ)/¯
Yeah keep that mindset and follow Blockbuster's fate.
Besides Gamestop - I think it could be important. What if the servers shut up in the future? How do you get your purchased games?
You download them and back them up. What happens if the disc is scratched or your buddy drops a blunt on it?
If they're purely digital and drmed you can't back them up.
The DRM is the key part of that. So the answer is DRM-free, not physical media. Especially since all games get patched these days.
You can't buy all games at GOG.
You can't buy all games on disc either. Also, not every game on Steam has DRM.
I have backups of my PS4, with games downloaded from the PS store that say different.
Heck any Playstation disc games tries multiple times to get you to save it to the HDD.
Your buddy buys you a new disk....
If it's still being published or if a second hand copy doesn't cost more than your buddy's annual wage.
What fucking second hand games are you buying? Beloved classics aren't that expensive.
In retrospect there were some advantages to Blockbuster compared to streaming services where stuff disappears every day.
Six months ago Cohen didn't give a flying fuck about disc drives because he was selling the idea that you would soon buy all your games from GameStop on an NFT marketplace that they recently had to shut down because the SEC is cracking down on NFTs as Securities.
He gives a fuck now because his golden goose got shot in the head.
I have an XBox One S (and a PC) - really hits home when in Game Stop with my kids and they were looking around (mainly for figures and such), and i'm like "there's nothing for me here". Of course I haven't bought a physical PC title in over 10 years now that I think of it. I feel for the shop owners, they haven nothing for me to buy and I used to like going to shop around. Come to think of it I used to go to book stores quite often too, but not since i got my first kindle.
I did recently re-buy an Xbox 360 and it is kind of nice to browse second hand shops and such and just pickup a game that I can just play without internet etc.
They should keep putting whip holders in cars.
Honestly, I am all good with getting rid of the drives.
I hardly ever touch CDs these days. I keep a spare USB reader, for making a backup copy of a music CD or movie DVD/Blueray, which I use, maybe twice a year.
I have boxes of DVDs and Blu-ray in the garage, and I don't ever use them. Matter of fact, if I wanted to use them, I'd have to go find a blueray player to actually play them with.
I do all of my gaming on PC, and I don't think I have physically purchased a game in over a decade. Steam/GoG are both quite nice.
I kept hoping that Sony would do a last hurrah with discs and make a console that plays them all. But with discs being pretty much antiquated at this point, I don't think it's going to happen.
Sony management didn't even see a point to backwards compatibility until recently and still can't be bothered to figure out PS3 emulation. It's easily the console's greatest flaw imo.
Looking at RPCS3, it seems like most PS3 games wouldn't run well on PS5 without dedicated, PS3-like hardware.
I agree.
Look, I love having a blu ray player embedded into my console. But the fact of the matter is, a lot of these consoles have decently high end blu ray players in, and they are expensive. Consider the fact that low end consoles such as Xbox Series S are probably losing money for every sale. Asking them to tack on another feature means they either increase the price of the console or lose even more money on every console sale.
You should have the option to select a digital or a disc version of a console. Maybe even be able to pay extra to upgrade the blu ray player inside your console to a higher quality or more capable one for those who want them.