usual shortsightedness from bean counters, while studio do lost revenue on second hand trades they gained another player! I can't believe they think that's not a worth while trade. Games are like books, the amount of time people spent on it far outweighs their opportunity cost in earnings, and you only have such a short window to capture that audience so do it however you can, allowing piracy is a legit business strategy, let alone trading second hand games!
It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
271–280 of 549 posts
Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
#272Absolutely this. Fifteen years ago World of Warcraft was at its peak. You had 12 million people paying a monthly fee, plus buying the occasional expansion pack. No other gaming company had seen reoccurring revenue numbers like that before and it changed the industry. One aspect of this was that if you stopped paying you lost access to the game. The industry has been looking for the next way to level up this subscript…
Unfortunately the AI bubble means we are witnessing the death of PC gaming. Watch the GamersNexus video, The Collapse of Personal Computing: https://youtu.be/zyQwAhppWj8 Costs are driving manufacturers out of business. Essential components for PCs are becoming out of reach for the average consumer. You will own nothing and be happy.
GamersNexus is an entertainment channel rather than informative. He likes to talk about conspiracies with no real foundation.
AI demand price hikes are affecting everything including consoles, and the hardware for game streaming. It's an everything price increase rather than just PC. nVidia isn't secretly hoarding GPUs to make you rent them from streaming platforms, they simply make more money selling them to AI companies instead.
Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. Look at the market research. It's growing specifically fast in Asia, but there is also strong growth with North America. Having a PC to check your email, order off amazon, and download recipes is dying. Buying a PC and using it for video games is raising. The PC hardware is getting more expensive, but the upgrade cycles are also extending. If you look at the steam hardware survey most gamers are 1-3 GPU generati…
Hmm I see, that's interesting. Seems like the games industry it self is in a pretty bad state despite that
PC hardware companies are struggling. The ones that sell fans, cases, thermal paste etc because no one is building a new PC right now. But everyone still has the PC they had before the last 2 years and can still play and buy games.
Game developers simply have to stop pushing the minimum specs up for releases over the next few years.
Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just pedantry, and incorrect pedantry at that. BUY does not always mean you gain ownership. You can BUY a license or a haircut and you don't own anything. Are consumers confused in practice by what happens when they click "Buy" on the playstation store? Does anyone really thing Buy here means they will be able to download the game onto their computer and play it there? Fine, pass a regulation that makes onlin…
You can pay for services and you may use the term “buy”, but it is clear you’re receiving a service, and a service in its nature is temporary. Buy a night in a hotel, dinner in a restaurant, haircut, shoe shine. These are all services. Buying of digital services like games, films, and music is an evolution of buying dvds, cds or records. There is an expectation that you now own something. I can dig out my dad’s old r…
Yeah, I can’t actually think of any contracts besides media licenses that are fixed payment for access to a resource for an indeterminate length of time. It doesn’t make a lot of sense when you think about it.
Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
#275I've been running a small game dev studio for ~20 years, and the one change I think must be made, is to ban the usage of "buy" when it comes to games. Games are licensed, not bought, and that should be crystal clear to those who are paying. Most of the games people play runs using proprietary software and/or licenses, and often on very specific hardware, with game features that makes sense for the amount of players t…
You are talking about online games here which are a subset of games. And I agree they exist in the moment since they rely on external servers and other players.
Most games aren't online games though and those would realistically last forever if it wasn't for companies shutting down activation servers or download servers. There's also a problem where old games get delisted. If you want to play an old game today you can just buy the disk of ebay. Now the only way to buy a game is through the digital store which won't be selling the game forever, with no way to officially transfer copies between players.
Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
#276The question I'm left with: in the past, the uproar over these types of changes seemed to make companies change their mind when considering very anti-consumer decisions. Now, they just go ahead anyway. What's different? How do we get back to how it was before? I know the current political climate is one that enables this sort of thing. There are parallels with the current movement also WRT to the employer/employee re…
The uproar was around 2013 when Xbox tried to do this and Playstation made it their marketing to mock this. It's been a decade since and most people have moved digital. Physical games started getting too large to fit on disks, or they shipped with some buggy pre release version that was expected to day one update to a usable release.
Physical games as they exist today are more just license keys already. It's likely all the console makers wanted to ditch physical a while ago but put it off after the outrage over xbox.
Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm optimistic that the raise in PC gaming will act as a balance for the obvious greed of the consoles. Why? Steam has never done anything to support ownership of games, their policy completely bans transferring licenses or accounts to other people or leaving them to someone when you die. Their next CEO is someone who has only known extreme wealth their whole life and gets the job because daddy started the company,…
This was actually a funny question at work over lunch. A few of us have kids and like most tech guys over 30, our steam accounts have turned into collections. So I asked, who gets your steam account when you kick it. It’s difficult to think about and seems baffling to spend thousands of dollars and hours assembling a collection only for it to poof away into nothing.
Who says anyone needs to inform Valve of your passing? Make sure your children have access to the email backing the account and they're good to go.
Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
When we were in college, one of my friends joked that their stream library was their largest financial asset. When stream trading was more of a thing, and we had a ramen diet, it was probably true
It’s steam, not stream. Normally, I’d assume it’s a simple typo, but I got worried when you wrote it twice. Fool me once, shame on - shame on you. Fool me… you can't get fooled again.
George, is it you?
Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
#279Absolutely this. Fifteen years ago World of Warcraft was at its peak. You had 12 million people paying a monthly fee, plus buying the occasional expansion pack. No other gaming company had seen reoccurring revenue numbers like that before and it changed the industry. One aspect of this was that if you stopped paying you lost access to the game. The industry has been looking for the next way to level up this subscript…
Unfortunately the AI bubble means we are witnessing the death of PC gaming. Watch the GamersNexus video, The Collapse of Personal Computing: https://youtu.be/zyQwAhppWj8 Costs are driving manufacturers out of business. Essential components for PCs are becoming out of reach for the average consumer. You will own nothing and be happy.
I would recommend looking at a wide variety of sources of information. Some YouTube channels, GamersNexus being one, focus heavily on spinning a gloomy narrative. By wide variety of information channels, I don't mean a different YouTube channel.
1. Q1-26 wasn't the worst performing YoY quarter for new PC sales since Covid.
2. The biggest sector hit was the low end computers. That's not usually what we are talking about with pc gaming.
3. Costs go up on PC gaming, but the costs are going up for consoles too.
4. New memory fabs are going to start coming online in 2027 and 2028. This is a short term crunch.
5. The whole interviewing someone in their living room about their bad professional experience and representing it as journalism feels icky to me.
Re: It's not about physical vs. digital games, it's about ownership
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
> being against dumb regulation that only ads unnecessary bureaucracy or stops/limits progress Does such strawman regulation even exist? Some regulation is intentionally designed to limit “progress”, where “progress” happens to have negative externalities. It’s kind of a self-legitimizing opinion. Of course anyone would be against unnecessary regulations. I think the real world is not arguing about whether a regulati…
It takes a minimum of 600 hours of training to get licensed to cut hair in California. Pex plumbing is banned in Chicago as a union protectionist regulation. The "chicken tax" regulation scheme has screwed up the US truck market for decades. Electrical code requirements for the wiring of kitchen islands have changed drastically with very small justification within a short span of time. To this day it is illegal to tr…
I’ll take your word on the other points but this one:
> Many European countries have draconian laws about air conditioning that are killing people this summer.
Needs some debunking. In fact, I think you may have been fed lies because the UK government felt the need to specifically call this out:
https://mhclgmedia.blog.gov.uk/2026/06/25/air-conditioning-r...
In short: AC in the home is legal in the UK subject to following regulations, both national and local. Councils are generally happy to tell you how to comply, in my experience with building control.