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Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation

blog.playstation.com

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Re: Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation

#381

Post by catapart »

I remember having a goal of eventually publishing on a Nintendo and/or PlayStation console, when I first got in to game dev. Now they've both gotten so far away from gaming as I knew it that I would be embarrassed to publish on either company's consoles.

Now my focus is to be able to publish high quality games that run well on those anbernic/miyoo/ayn-style handheld devices. Those things are actually priced for consumers and the ones that have card slots provide a method for physical media. And of course, using those as a floor, the games could always upscale for more powerful machines.

I'm just so tired of this continual march toward investor appeasement at the expense of the consumers. They're games. They're entertainment. For people to play. Not how I want them to play them; how people want to play them. People shouldn't have to have an account to play them. They shouldn't have to invest a month of rent to play them. They shouldn't have to worry about me revoking their ability to play them. It's just so frustrating to see how far we've gotten from "drop in a quarter and enjoy". The industry is in sad shape and getting sadder by the day.

Re: Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation

#382

Post by wtetzner »

nemomarx wrote: post #347
somenameforme wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it really is. I don't see how businesses don't understand how this sort of anti-customer predatory behavior, MBA stuff, is directly driving reduced sales. The PS5, for instance, has only managed 96 million sales. For contrast the PS2 managed 160 million sales to a smaller market with much fiercer competition. And I'm one of those tens of millions opting out. The PS2 felt like a great consumer-focused value. Mo…

The next console is going to cost at least 1000 dollars, right? There's simply no way to sell hardware at 300 million units now. So I think their strategy is to abandon the mass market and sell to price unconscious consumers who will also pay more for games.

But what's the point of even releasing the next console? The current console generation has barely gotten started, and developers have barely taken advantage of the new hardware.

Maybe they need to look at releasing a cheaper console and making more quality games instead of constantly pushing so hard on graphics. Graphics help sales to an extent, but it's clearly not the whole story, given the popularity of the Wii or Switch. I think the people in charge no longer understand gaming, and are really struggling to produce games that will draw in large crowds again.

> So I think their strategy is to abandon the mass market and sell to price unconscious consumers who will also pay more for games.

Kinda seems like it. I'm curious to see what happens with that, because even people who so far have been willing to pay more will stop being customers if they can't produce an experience that's worth paying for. Maybe I'm in the minority, but the first-party PlayStation games all feel very samey to me.

Re: Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation

#384

Post by kuerbel »

fg137 wrote: post #304
kuerbel wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Not op) it typically offers better video processing and upscaling, more accurate color reproduction, cleaner gradients, and superior HDR handling (including dynamic tone mapping on some models). Many also support Dolby Vision from UHD Blu rays, which the PS5 does not. It won't show on a bad screen that much, but a dedicated player will squeeze out more of the disc.

Knowing nothing about the topic: what kind of processing and upscaling happens when I play a 4k movie on a 4k TV?

No upscaling as it's not necessary. (But better players have better 1080p to 4k upscaling too, as the algorithms are more sophisticated, e.g. edge-adaptive scaling, temporal filtering, etc.)

First, the player performs MPEG-4 HEVC decoding, reconstructing full video frames from heavily compressed data.

Once decoded, the signal is still not in a display-ready format.

UHD Blu-rays are almost always encoded in 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, meaning luma (brightness) has full resolution, but chroma (color) is spatially reduced. so one of the first steps in the pipeline is chroma upsampling (chroma reconstruction). After that, the player applies color space conversion and output formatting, usually converting to a HDMI-friendly format like YCbCr 4:2:2 or 4:4:4.

HDR handling is sometimes done on the player. The tv is doing a last stage processing that is fine tuned for it's display like contrast enhancement.

I hope that helps

Re: Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation

#385

Post by vrsgjye »

somenameforme wrote: post #363
ryandrake wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gamers are notorious for accepting whatever abuse game companies and studios want to inflict, and then keep buying and buying. All the horrible anti-consumer technologies and business practices from DRM to games that are released unfinished, to kernel-level anti-cheats and rootkits, all are routinely done with video games because the industry knows gamers are fanatics and will put up with anything. If gamers want to…

The whole point is that they aren't accepting it. In terms of sales PS2 > PS4 > PS5. That alone is already a big issue but it becomes just comically bad when you consider that the world population is about 33% larger than during the PS2 era, gaming has become completely normalized, and that the competition in modern times is mediocre.

[dead]

Re: Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation

#386

Post by Jigsy »

miyoji wrote: post #373
Jigsy wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can see this happening with games more after the death of physical media. I saw a screenshot of something like this recently with the pre-orders of GTA VI. They apparently "ran out of digital copies..." of something that doesn't exist yet.

You saw a faked screenshot, but the meme is definitely referencing the direction that the industry is going and mocking this kind of artificial scarcity.

Oh? It was fake? It was very convincing.

But yeah, it's a trend that will sadly probably happen.

Re: Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation

#387

Post by tokai »

downrightmike wrote: post #378
mrandish wrote: post #298

Between DRM, DLC, mandatory connectivity and the end of physical media, the future will look back on this era as the 'dark age' of digital gaming history. Maintaining activation servers, cloud storage and digital delivery costs money. If it doesn't disappear when the title reaches EOL, it certainly does when the company is gone or shifts business models. And draconian copyright laws create legal jeopardy around orpha…

Game companies should have to submit full copies of everything to run the game , servers and clients to the Library of Congress or Smithsonian for preservation

They should do legal deposit in the country the game is developed. Some places they have to. The Hitman series is in the collection of national library of Denmark.

Re: Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation

#388

Post by canthonytucci »

downrightmike wrote: post #378
mrandish wrote: post #298

Between DRM, DLC, mandatory connectivity and the end of physical media, the future will look back on this era as the 'dark age' of digital gaming history. Maintaining activation servers, cloud storage and digital delivery costs money. If it doesn't disappear when the title reaches EOL, it certainly does when the company is gone or shifts business models. And draconian copyright laws create legal jeopardy around orpha…

Game companies should have to submit full copies of everything to run the game , servers and clients to the Library of Congress or Smithsonian for preservation

Why?

Is there a lower form of “art” than always online AAA garbage?

Im not going to lose any sleep over _COD 75: More of the Same Bullshit_ becoming lost media

Re: Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation

#389

Post by deltoidmaximus »

saturn8601 wrote: post #351
swiftcoder wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your home internet connection doesn't even have the bandwidth to stream the quality of a BR. This has not been true for most people for a while now. Even the high end of 4K blue rays tops out around 100 Mbps, which is achievable on pretty much any broadband connection.

Netflix isn't serving 100Mbps though.

Are any streaming services actually serving that bitrate?

Re: Physical disc production ending in Jan 2028 for new games on PlayStation

#390

Post by wtetzner »

palmotea wrote: post #321
lelandfe wrote: post #38

To illustrate why this is stupid, I will furnish two links to purchase Dark Souls 3 (PS4, 2016) Ebay, to buy: $11 + shipping[0] PS Store, to rent: $60[1] [0] https://www.ebay.com/itm/298370753624 [1] https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/dark-souls-iii/

> To illustrate why this is stupid, I will furnish two links to purchase Dark Souls 3 (PS4, 2016) > Ebay, to buy: $11 + shipping[0] > PS Store, to rent: $60[1] Yeah, Sony is stupid to be leaving money on the table like that. Lucky for us, we live in a market system that we can trust to optimize for maximum consumer benefit (like Sony is doing here). It's our revealed choice that we want to pay more for old games.

> Yeah, Sony is stupid to be leaving money on the table like that

Are they though? Console sales have been dropping. It's only money left on the table if people are also purchasing consoles & games in the same quantities. How many people are just not buying these games because they are digital only?

TBH though, I think the ship has sailed a long time ago. Many games with physical media aren't really playable without downloadable updates anyway. Another reason the modern gaming experience has gotten worse.

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