On an even more personal note, very few modern games, if any, are worth purchasing for my own enjoyment. The gaming landscape overall has dropped so low that I don't even care anymore.
i recently bought battlefield 6 and that has been fun, but even then idk how to describe it. there's just no soul anymore.
i don't think it is because i'm getting older. back in the day there were teamspeak communities that ONLY played battlefield, and that was really fun.
now it is some discord servers, nobody really plays 1 game, but many on rotation. so for me, it feels like every game is just solo with whatever randoms show up.
so i've stopped playing lol. i like to think i got to play some cool games during the golden era, before enshittification, where people formed communities around one game.
Read speed BD-ROM (66 GB/100 GB) ~10×CAV BD-ROM (25 GB/50 GB) ~8×CAV BD-R/RE (25 GB/50 GB) ~8×CAV DVD ~3.2×CLV
As for why nobody's made a higher-capacity disc... well, they did. It was even an industry standard. You just never heard about it because it was exclusively intended to be a replacement for tape libraries. I guess rolling out this tech to consumers was just too impractically expensive?
You can absolutely do resale rights with solid-state media, too. On the other hand, the Switch library is littered with games that require downloading an update in order to play. Switch 2 went further and had games that shipped as a pure license key with no data storage. The underlying economics of game distribution are actually really unfavorable to any amount of overhead. Hell, the reason why physical games even still exist AT ALL is because we can press BDXLs for pennies.
Going back to the stagnation in optical media, the read performance hit a wall a while back, too. You basically can't stream anything off these discs anymore. Hell, some Internet connections might actually be faster than an install from optical media! So that's not really the advantage people think anymore either.
The resale ability is basically the only reason to keep physical media around, though - and I'm surprised we haven't seen a renewed attempt to kill physical. I mean, with movies, most stores have already removed their BD sections; you basically can only buy those online or at some Barnes & Noble stores.
These likely degrade in 5-10 years, and have you seen the price of NAND lately? AAA gaming is going to get to be out-of-reach because of storage costs.
And on a personal note, I feel we are living in a gaming golden age, so many amazing titles, especially indie ones, out there in every conceivable genre. If anything the problem is finding them, since there's so much being released these days. And I say this as someone who still also plays older games (especially 3rd, 4th, and 5th gen).
Side question, do you happen to play games that don't have a gun or a ball in it? I always hear people say these things about modern games and it's almost always turns out to be people who play call of duty , sports games and maybe they have played something like assassin's creed or a racing game once in a while, and have never played any indie or non AAA games or anything that isn't made in USA or Japan. I agree there's a lot of dreadful about the gaming industry right now, but there are so many games worth playing that it's just sad to read stuff like this
Yes there are some practicality issues with physical media but they are kind of trivial to the costs of just handing over all control to the publishers.
I’ve worked on a few AAA games with large install sizes, and I personally don’t believe this to be true. Or, I think it’s due to a lack of financial/organizational incentive to skim things down. The cost of storage and distribution is offloaded to the digital marketplace and consumer. Nobody’s KPI is tracked to the download size.
In projects of that size, you’re often trowling through a big proprietary graph of assets. This might be akin to UE’s reference viewer, or maybe less sophisticated. It’s hard to do and very unlikely to be on the roadmap.
What supplies!? Rockstar is running out of bytes?
So, no longer can customers:
1. Buy the game as Physical
2. Play it until done or bored
3. Sell it as Used to recoupe some of their gamer cash, and spend it elsewhere
3.1 Other user buy a discounted game. << HERE the CD KEY CODE will already have been consumed by the original purchaser.
NOTE: This game is $100.00 for the full version, and $80.00 for the "not all gameplay" version.
NOTE 2: For Disabled Folks amongst us, who game, the Digital Only system is a bit of a kick in the teeth. It's extra difficult to evaluate whether a game is playable for a given person's individual different-ability, and this evaluation/trying-hard-to-work-with-the-game time-period may easily elapse the retailer's (Sony, et al) Digital Refund timer.
(Barring other regulatory burdens. I think it's reasonable that you cannot legally sell on prescription drugs, for example.)
Of course no-one will care (until it happens) but at the same time, it will be available on PS5 and Xbox but not for the PC or the Steam Machine.
Given the price of the game and the Steam Machine, I expect the Steam Machine to not sell well at all but GTA 6 to break over $1 billion in sales in a single day.
- Externalizes the costs of distribution to consumers. DVDs and Blu Rays cost a pittance compared to the $100 MSRP that GTA 6 is rumoured to retail under. GTA 6 will likely break records for the highest single day gross of a media release of all time. They can't allocate some of that top line to providing a physical token that gamers can collect?
- Sets a bad precedent for future AAA releases in terms of acceptable size. Forces gamers to have to buy more storage at a time when storage costs are astronomical. At 200GB I don't know how anybody can justify valuable space in their SSD for a single game.
- Genuinely leads to worse quality product. Without physical media there's no deadline and effectively no incentive to provide a polished product on release day. Have fun playing a broken game for the next 3 to 5 years.
What game plays off the disc itself? Most games copy to the ssd and then just download a new full copy of the game from the cloud the second the copy from the disc is done.
That is if there isn't a patch, otherwise it will just download most of it again like you said.
It saves the publisher money and cuts down on reselling, which was cutting into their sales. It simplifies distribution. It gives them far more control, especially if they use their own launcher. Is anyone surprised that they like it when it offers only positives for them?
Also: Many big AAA releases can't even fit on a blu ray anymore. Games are coming up on 200GB+, that will not fit on a disk.
This trend isn't reversing. And the average person buying the game doesn't gaf, so it'll continue.
Of course, there will be some 'protestors' (who will just buy the game anyways) or some """protestors""" (who never intended to buy the game in the first place)
I'll be honest, this discussion is so stale I just don't care at this point. The fight for this ended a decade ago.
And honestly, considering how much more expensive AAA game creation has gotten over the years, and how game price hasn't even close to kept up with inflation, I get it.
There are so many much more egregious behaviors publishers do than this nonsense. Fight them on microtransactions, or making games online-only even for singleplayer content and then shutting down servers. Literally anything than this waste of time.
Because PC and console games have (had?) different cultures.
This has been normalized for PC games for decades, but it absolutely is not the norm for consoles.
https://www.ign.com/articles/some-retailers-are-refusing-to-...
It’s a shame it doesn’t send a stronger signal, but you’ll still be joining many others.
Eventually, there’ll be enough conscientious objectors that things change. It’s probably some small percentage, so you sitting out will do more than you think!
https://www.techradar.com/televisions/blu-ray/weve-seen-an-i...
Day 1 patches have been a thing for years. This honestly is not new.
jcgrillo•1h ago