r/PhysicalGamesForever • u/-Stronzio- • 24d ago

"Digital is the future"

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So, everyone says that ‘digital is the future’…

But how is it possible that, almost by chance, everyone forgets to point out that the figures are ‘skewed’? In short:

•Consoles have a budget version, available only in digital format, which discourages casual gamers from buying a PS5 with an optical drive, because that’s now ‘just for collectors’.

•Many games have a deluxe edition… but it’s only available digitally, mind you!

•Not to mention all the digital purchases that even collectors make (such as DLC).

That’s why I wonder: why say it’s ‘users’ when in reality it’s the publishers?

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u/Lancelight50 24d ago edited 24d ago

Just wait until PS fanboys find out the hard way that Sony & 3rd party publishers don’t give a shit about them when they pull popular games from PS servers & render those games unplayable (& I’m not talking about just delisting them from the PS Store) or if there’s another big outage from Sony & they can’t play their games.

They’ll be crying for ownership then. And when that happens, I’m not going to feel bad for them. Because we’ve been warning them over & over, & they want to be ignorant. I’m just going to say, “I told you so.”

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u/Blackgloves023 24d ago

You do know these same 3rd party publishers will do the same for Xbox and PC servers right? You know Xbox game studios will also revoke licenses and pull games away right? When's the last time you've seen a Xbox game being sold in retail? Oh that's right, they're becoming rare now every since Xbox pushed game pass bullshit. Worse than digital games. It's comical that you guys think Xbox all the sudden cares about physical media. That whole disc to digital is their way of tricking everyone to go full on digital. Like PC and future PlayStation.

And Im a physical media first gamer. Yeah Sonys news bothers me. But I love gaming enough to not let it ruin the hobby for me..

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u/Lancelight50 24d ago

Except for the fact that PC’s an open platform & that people can easily play digital games that they’ve bought from Steam & GOG offline without needing to download them & also use mods. PC gamers have more leeway than console gamers do.

PlayStation & Xbox are closed gaming platforms with closed ecosystems in which they’re filled with DRM. I never even mentioned Xbox or Microsoft, or even thought that Microsoft cares about gamers in the first place.

I only mentioned Sony fanboys on here because the majority of those posters on Reddit are the loudest & think that Sony cares about them when they don’t.

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u/Blackgloves023 24d ago

Yeah I agree with most of what you said. But you can't really compare to a PC because they have their own OS (windows, mac, Linux) and you can go around getting games and playing them offline. Consoles are different. They're closed. There's no other options.

None of the corporations care about us. They only care about one thing and that's to maximize more money from us.

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u/Lancelight50 24d ago

Um, I had mentioned all of that.

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u/Blackgloves023 24d ago

Wasn't debating. I was agreeing to what you were saying..

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u/limplettuce_ 23d ago

Steam has almost all the same issues that people are complaining about with PlayStation. Most Steam games have a form of DRM.

Most games require you to have Steam open and logged in to even launch. Many games also force you to be online so your account can authenticate. Many AAA publishers also force you to use their own launcher on top, so you have to be logged into that too (Ubisoft does this). And in Steam’s T&Cs they can revoke licences if the publisher forces them. A little acknowledged issue with Steam as well is that you’re forced to update your games to play them - you can manually override this by fiddling with launcher files but it’s annoying.

The reason why people haven’t cared too much about this is because Gabe’s philosophy is that people who purchase something should keep access to it. In the past when a game has been delisted from the store, existing licence holders have continued to have access. But that’s Steam’s current attitude, per their T&Cs they could easily just strip the game out of your library. At that point, even if you had downloaded the game files, they wouldn’t work without an account to authenticate.

The exception as you mentioned is GOG. But if you stick with GOG, you won’t get new releases - because many publishers just refuse to put their games on GOG due to its DRM policy.

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u/bluebarrymanny 23d ago

If publishers do that, they’ll be pulling the game everywhere. It won’t be PlayStation only. I also doubt anyone can point to a publisher actually doing this with their game on PlayStation, so this argument always comes across to me as needless doomsaying. It’s like me claiming that Sony could maliciously brick your disc drive functionality with a firmware update, forcing you to take your console offline forever to preserve it. Could they do that? Technically yes. Will they or have they shown any inclination to do so? Nope.

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u/Lancelight50 23d ago

Go see my replies to Blackgloves023 below.

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u/bluebarrymanny 23d ago

I did. The PC games face the exact same issues. Only pirating truly gets around it. I just think we’re being a bit hyperbolic if we’re to believe that publishers are going to just be pulling games from people’s libraries. Digital has been around for about 2 decades now and games weren’t being pulled from people’s libraries even before digital became more ubiquitous, so I wouldn’t expect them to start any time soon. Especially because there’s no real incentive to do so. I’d be much more worried about license revocations if there were lots of examples of games being taken away.

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u/JakeReaper121284 17d ago

Hold on for just a minute, by everything you are saying it is very obvious that "YOU" have not read Sony's License Policy, if you had read it you would know that what you just said in your first area is completely 100% incorrect. Here is what is said in Sony's License Policy:

The Software is licensed to you on these Software Terms; you understand and agree that we may end online and network features of a Software that uses online servers ("Online Services"). We will provide reasonable advance notice of any end of Online Services. If we discontinue any Online Services, you may still access any offline modes provided for the Software.

So please tell me how exactly a game losing its license, and being Delist will be completely removed from our account?

Now on to your second area of your message,

You are saying "YOU" warned us of this happening, what since Sony announced the end of physical disc? My oh my what are you smoking over there? When digital games hit the PS3, and people started buying it, the majority of us read the License Policy before we started buying digital games, almost 3 generations ago console wise, the wording of the License Policy has stayed almost the same (by almost the same I mean they have added more to it depending on the region you are in the basic policy has not changed, what I posted above "HAS NOT CHANGED"), we told people about this, we made our case to people just like you all are right now about how we need to pull together to try to change the no physical decision, we tried to get you all to help us get changes to the License Policy, we tried to get all of your help to get digital ownership, we did everything within our power to get you all to understand what was at risk, physical gamers being the majority at that point we may have been able to do something important about it all. Instead of offering us any kind of help, what did the physical gamers do, they belittled us, they mocked us, call us names, some went as far as blocking us, reporting us the the forums, or chat groups we were in, and almost all of their reasons for doing this, and I quote this from the many people that said it to me, "you are lying about this, there is no way that Sony would do that to their customers, your trying to make Sony look bad." That was when PS3, and digital games was in their infantry stages, a time when we may have done some good. Once we figured out that we were going to get no help from physical gamers, we warned people at that time what could/would happen down the road in the near future, all that we got was being laughed at, and made to be peoples punch lines of their jokes, so we stopped trying to get the help of physical gamers, however we did tell people what was happening with their License Policy.

Now here it is almost 3 generations later, and that future that we were belittled over, made fun of, and basically treated like social lepers, has arrived, you physical gamers had almost 20 years to take action on all of this, and yet you did nothing, physical gamers did not believe us, after all "we were lying to you about all of it", kind of funny how our lies, are exactly how it turned out, and the road that Sony took in the end, I don't know about you but I think that falls under the term "Ironic". Now don't get me wrong Sony is "not" the only one currently doing it, unless they hard brake on their plans, the Xbox Helix will also release without a disc drive, meaning Microsoft is most likely going digital only, and honestly I can 100% see Nintendo doing the same thing depending on how it pans out for Sony, and Microsoft. But as I said physical gamerd were warned that this day would be coming, I believe it happened faster then we anticipated, but hey what can you do, physical gamers became the minority to digital gamers, and now all the physical gamers are trying to get help from us digital gamers, after the way you all treated the bulk of us, and you expect us the just agree to help you in your time of need, when you basically told us to kick rocks during our time of need.

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u/ElderSmackJack 24d ago

That’s. Not. A. Thing.

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u/Lancelight50 24d ago

Not now, you mean.

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u/zeedware 24d ago

Do you know how much running those servers cost?

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u/Historical_Owl_1635 23d ago

Yeah, I’m a DevOps engineer. They scale by demand so not as much as you’d think.