Realistically we’ve chosen to have pricing tightly controlled and to no longer own anything.

Both these things can be fixed without needing physical copies, but we’ll have to fight for it.

Yeah, I suspect most game developers felt the same way about it.

Most PS3 ports were rubbish compared to the Xbox 360 versions, despite the PS3 theoretically being better hardware.

Only the fancier PS3 exclusives really made the most of it.

Probably because it’s been overtaken by exhausting far right narratives pushed by the companies themselves.

My Facebook page doesn’t even show me stuff from people I actually know any more. One of my cousins had a baby, it didn’t even show me that. Instead what it thinks I want to see are badly written posts about immigrants and “lefties” being to blame for everything, as if the UK government is left wing in any way at all…

It’s a game that costs £2.39.

Valve’s main advantage is they don’t have to make up heinous policies in the quarterly game of “tug off the shareholders”.

It’s all been fucked by AI RAM and SSD (and still GPU) prices. If anyone tries for a next gen £1000 console, they’ll be going the same way as Sega.

It’s going to be a tiny minority of people doing that, but there probably ought to be a basic check to see if you got the achievement for completing the game before letting you refund it. Maybe not for YouTube rageslop like this, but for the smaller “experience” games, like Unpacking or something.

Realistically a lot of people are treating the refund system as a demo. I know on PS+ there’s the option on a lot of games to play it for two hours before having to buy it. I guess the PC is a bit too open to allow for that. Could offer that by playing it in the nebulous “cloud” I suppose.

Aren’t they using low accuracy FP units that aren’t suited for gaming anyway?

It really is just Ali Express with better delivery times these days.

I cancelled Prime and just buy a lot less shit I don’t need.

Bad take. They’ll give you an install disc and then make you enter an account locked code to access it anyway.

Demand digital rights instead, before a big player goes bust. Because at some point that will happen, and you’ll lose more than a handful of discs.

I agree, and buy physical games too, but I don’t think the law can mandate a disc drive.

It could mandate that digital goods remain ours forever, and that companies provide a way to keep them forever.

We’ve been lucky that the main players in this are still going. Valve, Sony, MS and Nintendo have deep pockets. But we’ve seen companies go bust before, and they’ll go again. Sega were the top dog until they weren’t. Before now we’ve always had the physical option. Now we won’t. This is the tipping point and laws must be made to protect us before we lose everything.

But who is left? Nintendo?

And that’s only because Nintendo tend to lag about 5 years behind everyone else. They’re not sticking with physical out of their belief in physical games, that’s for sure. Half their stuff is already a key and a download.

Realistically, it wouldn’t really matter about discs at all if we had real digital rights. The rights to transfer games from one account to another, or even between stores. The rights to copy games to other devices, and copy them back again, or even from an online source if the original disappears for whatever reason.

Physical games could take the form of a keycard with a license on it, similar to a credit card chip. Scan it on my machine to attach to my account. Scan it on another to attach to someone else’s account and remove from mine. Run offline by leaving the card in the machine.

And then it gets wiped out by one of his own satellites smashing through it at 25,000mph.

They’re often cheaper on disc. Random sales here and there nearly always undercut the PSN price.

The real reason I’ve not bought many this gen was PS Plus. There’s a lot of games I’d have been vaguely interested in picking up on a decent sale, only they’ve never been on one, and then went on PS Plus so now aren’t worth buying at all.

Realistically the loss of physical discs means we need far more robust digital rights. The right to trade games to other accounts. The right to continue playing them if the store closes, loading games and licence keys from USB etc. That last one is going to need some thought to prevent abuse, but I think it’s essential if we’re going to live in a digital future. On PC that last one could be done by transferring licenses to another store maybe.

That’s why I subscribe to Jellyfin Plus Pro Premium Ad-Free.

The others had their chance. They chose greed.

A disc? In this economy?

I already am.

I just debugged a report, found the issue almost right away. A missing number in a GROUP BY clause.

Well if you’re measuring what I do through LLM use, the Claude is fixing it instead. Hope that dollar was worth it!

Literally the only reason to get the physical on this is if it’s cheaper. Which is entirely possible in the UK, because retail often goes £5 cheaper.

They could at least put a printed map or poster in the box like in ye olden times.

I feel sorry for them for the team that designed this. They had all this shit ready to go and then the RAM and SSD prices went through the roof, and tbh if you’re speccing a machine for mass production, those seem like the bits that were always gonna be cheaper by the time it comes to actually building it. Why would they ever go up? They never have before.

It was a nice idea, but the timing had completely fucked it. I don’t think it was ever going to compete with the PS5 on price, but right now it’s barely even competing with PC on price…

Even the Steam Deck isn’t competitive any more.

This is what shows in Steam when you search for it.

This is all you can buy.

Mental innit? First gen I’ve ever seen where price of hardware went up…

It’s a brutal time to be releasing hardware like this.

GPU prices, RAM, SSDs, all inflated through the roof.

This should have been the price of a PS5 Pro, with the performance of a PS5 and it’s not even that.

I still want the Frame, but only because my OG Rift died a couple of months back. I really don’t want to have to go crawling back to Meta for a Quest 3 when I see the price of the Frame, but I’m not optimistic. They really need a reduced spec Frame that just does the streaming portion. With RAM and GPU prices as they are, that would at least make some sense.