well, music and movies do not weight several hundred GB of data… but that’s also modern games problem.
As a person working in gamdev - they ABSOLUTELY can optimise - people just doesn’t care nowaday.
Yes there is a very simple reason which is massively anti-consumer. Every product competes with it’s own predecessor. Physical products will sooner or later break, movies will sooner or later get boring, same goes for music. But video games are different. People are still playing Tetris and Super Mario 64. You release one good game and the next one has to be better otherwise people will just continue to play the previous one instead of buying the new one. Publishers try to control this aspect. They dont want you to own games only have a license to play. It’s not even a question of “if” they going to take away your older games, but “when”. They want to restrict access to the previous product so you will have to buy the new one. They want full control. Look at Call of Duty. All but, the newest titles are barely playable, and that is done by design.
They should have moved to USB keys a long time ago. Make them big and call them cartridges if you want, but optical discs are far too slow.
And loud. And fragile.
Thumbdrives have a firmware, you could easily make them read-only. And also add your inconvenient DRM snake oil, if you will.
But no, cloud promises more $$$ through lock-in.
Can you imagine if video game prices were affected by the memory shortages?
But is this not how switch1 games were, just read only sdcards with the game on them.
The fundamental difference is that when you buy those formats, you are getting a final product. Nobody is stopping your disc in the middle, to ask if you want to download the special remix of this song, or a deleted scene.
Video games are now constantly upselling, and they can’t do that if the consumer is isolated on their PC.
There’s aso no reason the physical copy can’t demand to get a validation token from Corporate Server every time it’s played
Yep, DRM is the problem, not the distribution format.
Devils advocate here.
I/O and storage in those media formats are kinda limited for video games.
Blue-Ray prob has enough storage (at most we could go for multiple disk releases) capacity but still you would have to copy the games to disk.
I think GOG is on right track on this DRM free keep on disk as long as you want no need to check with external servers to play them.
^
I see a whole lot of theoretical “what if platforms did this or that,” when GoG is already doing it right. That’s the way.
Shitty copy pasta with AI-generated picture that forgets that software is patched all the time compared to movies and music.
I hate streaming more than anyone, but that sloppy comparison sucks.
It’s not an AI-generared picture.
I already have more games than I could ever finish in a lifetime — in 10 lifetimes — and they’re all digital, in big folders full of files. If I had those thousands of games in physical form I’d need a library in my house full of shelves to store them all, yet digitally I can carry them all around in my pocket!
Exactly. I absolutely agree with OP that robbing people of the choice to own physical media sucks…
But when not paired with shitty-ass DRM, digital format media can be an absolute boon for games preservation. Easy to backup, takes up barely any physical space, and doesn’t require physical hardware to play it that will become increasingly sparce and expensive over time.
If the industry doesn’t want to provide legal pathways towards games preservation, then it looks like the pirates are going to start wearing archavist hats too.
The pirates have been wearing archivist hats for a good while now, I think. At least in the movie space.
– Frost
This is the correct take. The option should be there for everyone. Lots of folks here are with you, where the practicality of DRM-free digital format media is more important. To people like me, collecting physical media is a hobby itself. I probably spend more time shopping for records and equipment than listening to them, for example, though of course I do listen to them as well. I used to be the same with games, which is why I have a ton of OG Xbox and 360 discs, and for movies I have a bunch of blu-rays and DVDs. Yeah, it’s hard to find space for it all but that challenge is part of the fun, at least for me. Plus it can work as interior decor too. And I know I’m not alone, CD sales are the highest they’ve been in over 20 years, and I’m sure other formats are similar. But again, having the choice for DRM-free digital is also important. Taking away our choice is bad for us all.
ootl?
Sony recently announced they’ll stop making discs for Playstations in 2028.
ahhh thats som bs! cant have anythin nice in this world 😒
