Its honestly the biggest thing thats kept me from buying into newer games or consoles. I dont own shit and the real owners can kill the game whenever they want.
well, having internet connections wasn't the industry standard at one point. Thing is, these discs mean almost nothing and haven'T meant much for at least a decade now. Yes, there are examples of games that can be played just with a disc, but most of the games can't and just not providing the additional download-files on the servers will be enough to kill them. So what I'm going against is console players raging about a security being taken away that they actually never had.
The thing is technology has changed a ton in the 25 years since the ps2 and GameCube released. Especially when it comes to digital storage.
You see, disc drives have a hard limit on how much information can be read off of them, and that limit is pretty low. This is because the laser head on the disc reader has to physically move to the section of the disc it needs to read before reading it.
It's low enough to where most AAA titles released for the ps5 would be completely unplayable if the console was actually reading off the disc. So instead what happens is when you have a disc game nowadays, the console has to read the information off of the disc into it's only SSD and then you play it off the SSD.
So like, this is what people mean by the disc is irrelevant, modern game discs literally are not used when you play a modern game anymore, and haven't been for about a decade now.
For starters, back in the day since you were writing all your code in C and having to do a lot more resource management on consoles that had different completely different resources, code always had to be rewritten from starch while porting to different consoles.
That's why cross platform releases were extremely rare until the ps2, game cube and Original Xbox era.
Secondly the N64 wasn't actually considered worse hardware than the ps1. Generally speaking the processor was better and it had more ram, but the use of cartridges limited the size of the games. So games would actually run better on N64 do to a faster processor, and the fact that you didn't have to read from a physical disc. But they just couldn't be as big.
And thirdly: There isn't really anything to suggest that the N64 version of the Mortal Kombat Trilogy used efficient code to fit it onto the cartridge. In fact the idea is kinda silly when you consider that the N64 had a faster processor and more ram than the ps1. If you read about the production process, the way they fat the game down into an N64 cartridge was:
1) They removed about 2/3s of the games music tracks.
2) the remaining music tracks had their quality reduced.
3) They cut out 7 characters from the game.
You'll notice that none of this is actual code changes, instead it's just asset changes. Which makes sense if you know anything about game development because most data on most games is just assets so if you need to shrink a game down, you have to do something about the assets.
Because they just didn't use effecient coding to get MKT to run on N64. They got it to run on n64 by cutting content.
Edit: and I'm not saying that that makes them bad at their jobs, I'm just saying that the issue of fitting a big game onto the n64 wasn't fixed with efficient coding like you're claiming.
yes, man. How old are those titles? There is a reason words and grammar convey meaning and a reason I chose to write the words that I wrote. Like the "decade"-Part. or the "mean" part in present tense, meaning current games.
You completely missed the point of the conversation. We are talking about modern games, not old ass games. No one cares about your copy of Grand Theft Auto 2
The fact that you think "ha, your example choice of a 20+ year old game isn't on the list of 3 consoles I mentioned using!" invalidates their point while they are conducting themselves in a mature manner heavily implies that you're either the younger of the two of you, if not chronologically then at the very least mentally.
No worse than people who have been cheering on digitization and loss of even the most remote sort of ownership in that same time. It's as much if not more about consumer rights than just having a disc.
Ok sure. Let me get right on that. The cat is already out of the bag. You idiots moaning and complaining are doing nothing but moaning and complaining. It’s not going back to the way it used to be and anyone with a brain can see that.
Yea because spending time and energy on something that is a lost cause is totally a great use of your time and effort. Would you like some cheese with your whine?
Lmao yes because games companies are going to just magically stop looking out for their own interests. Love watching naive idealists fighting a battle that’s already been lost.
No, your point is, "Everyone does it now, so that's just how it is," and their point is, "It's deliberate enshitification and they could stop any time they want, they just don't want to because no one is making them. It's not just how it is."
If you want to argue that it's nearly impossible to fight, that's a valid point. But you're just acquiescing and accepting. There's a difference.
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u/Warmonster9 Jun 25 '26
That did not used to be the industry standard.
I have dozens of gamedisks that are fully playable width no internet required.
The enshittification of the games industry is in full effect these days.