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79% of PS5/PS4 games sold during Sony latest fiscal quarter were for digital version
- Thread starter ArtHands
- Start date
rofif
Banned
This is so stupid. With physical you get ownership, control and tangible item. With digital you are forced to higher prices often. You can’t get game anywhere else, you can’t backup it, you can’t do anything. Digital is removing choice and ownership!!!
Having option to play cyberpunk fully offline or fully unpatched IS THE WHOLE POINT!! We just need a way to download patches to usb stick.
And about your environment rant:
-running servers is expensive. You need to have servers, ac and tons of electricity.
-these plastic games and boxes do not end up in a landfill. Games always stay in home. Have you ever seen a game I trash or threw a game away? No. It’s not McDonald packaging.
-it’s just as bad as internal non swappable batteries. It’s more comfortable to use but you know what? With AA batteries I can use rechargeable or battery packs. Xbox was selling these. Internal battery just as badly removes all my choice and the controller will die one day. With removable batteries I can choose to use it just as if there was internal battery inside.
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rofif
Banned
You will just buy back your games. For 3$ on Amazon.
It’s my choice what to do. Servers will go down for sure. It’s a matter of time.
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Ghost of Caelid
Banned
I wish they had an XSX without a disc drive...im paying for a feature im never going to use. i bought the ps5 digital and have 0 regrets. An XSY or whatever without a disc drive but still xsx power is needed.
Icymanipulator
Member
Also, no waiting in lines, or walking into some shitty store and being asked if you want “insurance” for a disc.
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MidGenRefresh
*Refreshes biennially
Since this thread was derailed and we're talking about personal preferences now:
Consoles → physical for new releases, digital for older, cheaper games
PC → digital
I also tend to throw away plastic boxes and just keep the disc in CD holder thing. I keep boxes only for games that I really like.
I'm not worried about "servers going down". If they take away the game I paid for I will have no remorse to obtain it in "other ways".
Consoles → physical for new releases, digital for older, cheaper games
PC → digital
I also tend to throw away plastic boxes and just keep the disc in CD holder thing. I keep boxes only for games that I really like.
I'm not worried about "servers going down". If they take away the game I paid for I will have no remorse to obtain it in "other ways".
Kamina
Golden Boy
“But I don’t have to go up to change discs going all digital“Digital games are always more expensive + you cant sell them.
So..
lh032
I cry about Xbox and hate PlayStation.
Steam, Origin, Epic Store, and others are now blocked by Indonesian gov due to compliance Entertainment
Zhuge warned this a few days ago, but these sites have finally been blocked since earlier this morning. https://mobile.twitter.com/ZhugeEX/status/1553112395169529856?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://nikopartners.com/indonesia-requires-formal-registration-of-tech-and-game-companies/ Lots of us are...
www.resetera.com
Digital is the futurebaby!!!
All pro-digital owners lets celebrate!!!
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Rhazer Fusion
Member
This is not a good sign. Gamers who are happily embracing and anticipating an all digital future have no idea what they are truly in store for. Being at the mercy of waiting for sales on PSN and XBOX Store with no legitimate competition. Games being removed from the digital store forever. Lack of ownership. Games will be full price for years and years. No trade in, selling or borrowing. No refunds if you don’t like a garbage, broken or boring game. Hey, but you got convenience, right???
If PS6 and the next XBOX are all digital, I’m not getting them. I think physical and digital can coexist and I like the options of having both. I typically buy physical when I can, but I’ll buy digital as well if the price is fair or the game is digital only normally. Wanting to be locked to digital only makes no sense to me though. I don’t understand the plethora of gamers who WANT physical media to die out.
If PS6 and the next XBOX are all digital, I’m not getting them. I think physical and digital can coexist and I like the options of having both. I typically buy physical when I can, but I’ll buy digital as well if the price is fair or the game is digital only normally. Wanting to be locked to digital only makes no sense to me though. I don’t understand the plethora of gamers who WANT physical media to die out.
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It's not great but you can buy digital codes for the MS/Xbox store from other retailers.
Some gamers might be aware of the cons and just might not care, different values etc.
PS I don't want physical to die out because I know my situation is my own and others aren't constrained like me. Saying that as I have three big boxes full of blurays in the living room of my one bed flat.
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Rhazer Fusion
Member
That’s a good point and true. I guess for me nothing beats going online or to different stores shopping for the best prices and even finding rare games they aren’t widely available anymore.
DenchDeckard
Moderated wildly
It's easy to hit 79 percent of digital sales when every console you sell comes with a digital copy of horizon.....
...I kid, its a joke x
...I kid, its a joke x
ZywyPL
Banned
It all depends on the vendor and his execution. People use Steam since forever and no one complaints. GOG is also awesome. If the console companies start to get way too greedy or too shady you can always say "fuck you, I'm going to the competition". Or even just switch to PC entirely. Honestly, those companies will only go as far as people will allow them, Nintendo's games wouldn't be fully priced forever if only people stopped buying them in tens of millions of copies, Sony wouldn't put 70$ on everything from indie to AAA to remaster if only people stopped buying those games at that price, and so on. And who knows, maybe the governments will put its fingers on the digital market and force the platform holders to allow different storefronts, a.k.a. competition.
Maybe then, just maybe, people would stop buying those unfinished, broken games on day-1, or even blindly pre-order them. This one is on all the morons who don't learn.
Hypereides
Member
That is, until "other ways" becomes very easierly ID'ed and attributed down the line.
Before, you say start saying "Pfft, lol, that's never going to happen.", the IETF are actively working towards that kind of shift. We're half-way there. Beyond web 5.0, "other ways" aren't going to look as "tempting" as they are now. Enjoy it while it lasts.
c:/System32/Documents/YouWouldntDownloadACarWouldYou.jpg
There's supposedly talk of trying to funnel all that the under-utilized wasted heat from all these servers farms that are out of the the majority's eye.
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YeulEmeralda
Member
PC has been all digital for 10 years now and it's healthier than ever.
Dont you see going all digital is negative? You cant' swap games with a buddy, they can pull any game you own from the app store at any time, and games will be more expensive. I do not understand why you would cheer or root for digital only?
MasterCornholio
Member
Is there insurance for hacked accounts?
I know renters insurance will cover the physical copies that get destroyed so at least I’ll have the funds to buy them back if it happens. Might be trickier with really old games though.
Belthazar
Member
The thing is... The overall sales skew more towards digital due to the volume of digital only titles and smaller titles with limited runs of physical media, but for bigger AAA titles the divide is much less pronounced, which is why I don't think physical will die anytime soon.
Whenever a new flagship title arrives they'll always want the physical buyers as they're too relevant to ignore for that kind of content
Whenever a new flagship title arrives they'll always want the physical buyers as they're too relevant to ignore for that kind of content
Matt_Fox
Member
I wonder if Gaffers who feel strongly about physical games ownership also feel the same way about music CDs?
I recently burned to digital and moved on all my CDs, and it's great. Apart from freeing up a bookshelf and getting a little bit of money (sadly they aint worth much!), I now have an incredible digital jukebox that can go anywhere with me.
Not physical but it hasn't changed my feeling of ownership / curatorship / passion for the music at all.
I recently burned to digital and moved on all my CDs, and it's great. Apart from freeing up a bookshelf and getting a little bit of money (sadly they aint worth much!), I now have an incredible digital jukebox that can go anywhere with me.
Not physical but it hasn't changed my feeling of ownership / curatorship / passion for the music at all.
Games are fundamentally a different medium than music. Music is eternally backwards compatible, doesn't get patched, is not interactive ... but I do own a few music CDs like some of Koichi Sugiyama's non-Dragon Quest music that will never be available any other way.
MikeM
Member
I hear vinyls are cool again
Topher
Gold Member
Vinyl record sales boom, domestic record pressing plants can't keep up, so artists endure production pressure
Small bands and independent musicians often can't wait the year-long time frame to get a record pressed. They may be pushed out of the biggest and fastest growing physical music medium.
www.tpr.org
I keep saying it. As long as there is demand companies will sell what people want to buy.
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MikeM
Member
Whats old is new again. Its why I still buy physical games- it will eventually come back once digital licensing pisses enough people off.
I think there is a similar analogy about streaming services. I think it's fine to have different priorities and attachment to different kind of media.
There probably always be a physical sku for games where it makes sense, whether the price increases who knows. It's possible due to reduced demand and the requirement for larger storage capacities.
Come back? As in increase the percentage of total game sales? If so, what percentage are you thinking?
MikeM
Member
No idea. They just need to take down the wrong game too early and it’ll cause an uproar.
Its why I only buy movies physical. What happened with some of Sony’s recent inability to renew licenses of some movies caused those who bought them legitimately to lose them is a glimpse of what could happen.
TheMan
Member
Their strategy of constant mega sales is paying off. Yeah you lose the ability to sell games but everything goes on sale quickly anyway so you still save money. And with fast internet I can decide on a game, buy it, and DL it in less time than it take to actually get dressed and drive to gamestop
DaGwaphics
Member
Developers have some control of the pricing of their games on these digital storefronts. They reduce prices and participate in sales because that makes them more money at the different stages of a games life. If they set the price and never change it, they aren't making much on it and neither are Sony & MS. The sales and discounts are never going away.
rofif
Banned
You realise there is no comparison?
Pc got many key resellers, stores and you have access to game files.
Digital on console is complete monopoly without a hint of ownership and control.
rofif
Banned
What? As long as I can have my mp3s on my own storage and not in some streaming cloud, that’s the same as owning a cod but better.
Not comparable to our topic here
Rocco Schiavone
Member
Yeah for digital only fanboys like you.
DetectiveBananas
Member
You make good points, unfortunately, GameStop threw away sooo many physical games, cases, and hardware (even if they still worked). So now that’s a lot of tons of waste going into landfills.
dano1
A Sheep
Your talking about online games. It works the same for disc games. I haven’t lost one digital game on my iPhone or PlayStation I paid for.
dano1
A Sheep
Wel
Well my insurance is two step verification. Both on PlayStation and my iPhone. No problems since. All the games I paid for are still available
Unknown?
Member
This isn't correct. Digital games aren't sold, you only buy licenses.
Nearly 80% of All PS5, PS4 Games Are Bought Digitally
Big increase over previous quarterwww.pushsquare.com
79% isn’t high enough.
MasterCornholio
Member
Wel
Well my insurance is two step verification. Both on PlayStation and my iPhone. No problems since. All the games I paid for are still available
I do that as well but I still hear about people getting their accounts hacked. It’s just nice to have a backup plan in case anything does happen.
alabtrosMyster
Banned
I have not bought a disc based game for years.
64bitmodels
Reverse groomer.
Vinyl is really only popular because of nostalgia for the medium
CDs are better in every concievable way, you can rip them to a computer, they have better audio quality than any other form of music thanks to being lossless quality, and they're overall just real convenient
Physical media has actual benefits that not many digital games have found a way to replicate. Being able to hold a video game in your hand, resell it, and not have it be tied to an online server is somthing that's exclusive to physical as of now
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
The fact most gamers have trended to digital (and that even includes many of us spending more money buying external HDD) shows nobody cares about physical.
All the perks gamers brought up in 2013 that digital downloads suck (trading, loaning, reselling, collectors item on a shelf, digital game prices are high etc....) have been tossed in the garbage for a few key reasons:
1. Digital game prices have dropped. Deal prices come fast. When consoles first got full budget games as downloads the deals barely came. It was even worse during the tail end of the 360/PS3 era
2. Anyone doing home sharing with a buddy splitting the costs cuts prices in half also
3. Physical games can be tied to servers anyway. Some games require patches to work and some (I think Crash Bandicoot or Tony Hawk) didnt even have all the content on the disc to begin with. So you cant be an offline gamer
4. Convenience of not needing to get off your ass to swap discs
5. Sony and MS have all digital systems. So the console industry is even promoting them as cheaper options
6. I dont think a lot of gamers care about the possibility of a game maker pulling the plug on a digital game. By that time they already played it enough or it's some 10 year old game they'll never touch again. Most of the time, the things that are pulled first are MP modes when the user base gets low, which affects anyone equally (disc or digital). You never know, out of all the games I have on my external HDD, there might be 20 games which are inaccessible. I'd never know because I havent booted them up in 5 or 10 years.
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64bitmodels
Reverse groomer.
most of the time the fanbase finds ways to get that game back up and running soon enough. See titanfall, Doom 1993, Quake, etc
but yeah, while i do care about preservation it's for the sake of future generations, because most of the people on GAF probably don't care enough about most modern games to want to replay them 10 years from now, (and if you're the type of person who DOES care, like me, there are most certainly ways to get those games running on modern hardware easily)
I think we should be more concerned about cloud gaming. Acessing core files on a computer and OS you own is easy, doing that on an OS that's essentially streamed to your PC is something different entirely because you don't even own your fucking files at that point.
also, an all digital future wouldn't be a bad thing if digital gaming were handled more like GOG. Giving away the game files with no DRM attached pretty much removes all of the issues with digital
StreetsofBeige
Gold Member
I think end of the day, gamers just got to accept the game business is no different than other industries.
Whether it's going digital to cut out disc sales middlemen like Amazon or EB, or shutting down access/purchase of old games so they can funnel gamers to their new games at higher prices, that's the way it goes. And many games are licensed based, so at some point EA has to shut down old EA Sports games.
I'm not a core PC gamer, but I've bought my share of $2-5 GOG games for my shitty laptop. It's a bad laptop but I can run a bit better games on it if I wanted to. But instead I bought up 1990s oldies for dirt cheap. Thankfully, GOG's business model supports that. Steam doesnt even carry most of these games as they trend to the newer games in the 2000s.
I'm sure Steam can figure out a way to carry more GOG games for $3, but they'd rather sell me $10 games. To Steam, I'm not worth the hassle that low. They'd rather get me buying $5-10 cheapies which I have done.
Every once in a while people talk about if Activision will do a MW2 MP remaster like they did for COD4. Well, they got halfway there with a SP remaster. Where's the MP?
They probably realized too many gamers would play that classic game with zero MTX. So dont do it and hope they play the latest games with lootcrate mania.
alabtrosMyster
Banned
Imagine if there was a way to take into account the games that are used on a service like PSNow (whatever its name is at the moment).
This is not 1-1, but there has to be a ratio where you can say, this person would have bought x amount of games but they played only on the rental service instead (I know, if you have an xbox this is apparently not the case, but for normal people it probably is).
This is not 1-1, but there has to be a ratio where you can say, this person would have bought x amount of games but they played only on the rental service instead (I know, if you have an xbox this is apparently not the case, but for normal people it probably is).
DragoonKain
Neighbours from Hell
As a collector, will always support physical.
ChuckeRearmed
Member
Makes sense.
PC is 100%, Xbox is at 90%, Sony is at 80%. It will reach 100% just like with PC eventually, because digital is much more convenient. How many people borrow disks from their friends these days anyway?
PC is 100%, Xbox is at 90%, Sony is at 80%. It will reach 100% just like with PC eventually, because digital is much more convenient. How many people borrow disks from their friends these days anyway?
Rhazer Fusion
Member
True. There will always be sales and discounts on the digital front especially to help companies make more money, but the companies generally dictate when these discounts or sales happen. Physical games are almost always significantly cheaper and are even permanently reduced normally. I just prefer having more control over what I pay for games and with digital you have to generally wait for your favorite games to get discounted.
Developers have some control of the pricing of their games on these digital storefronts. They reduce prices and participate in sales because that makes them more money at the different stages of a games life. If they set the price and never change it, they aren't making much on it and neither are Sony & MS. The sales and discounts are never going away.
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