711–720 of 833 posts
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You can at least make local backups of your Steam games. If a game is removed such that you can't even download it anymore, you can always just install it manually.
Steam has DRM,so no. Easily cracked yes, but then you can just go the full pirate route.
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You can at least make local backups of your Steam games. If a game is removed such that you can't even download it anymore, you can always just install it manually.
Steam has DRM,so no. Easily cracked yes, but then you can just go the full pirate route.
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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.
Have profits gone down?
Beyond that, I think the real question is would they be earning more by selling 300million+ units to a growing userbase with a positive relationship than they are selling 100 million units to a shrinking userbase who they have an increasingly adversarial relationship with? And I think it's hard to see the answer to that question being no. But that again requires taking a step back to see the forest through all those trees.
Like here, ending physical disc production is obviously going to give them a short-term boon in profit as they kill off the used game market. But longer term? It's certainly going to further erode their playerbase. The short-term profit boost will be measurable next quarter, whereas the longer-term consequences will appear in the order of years. So you get a short-term boost and then longer term are left wondering where all your players went to. Then they invariably concoct nonsensical explanations that always look for any reason outside of their own actions to explain the decline. Like at one time the fable is that people were giving up consoles for mobile.
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I saw my first Dolby Vision Blu-ray and immediately started a Blu-Ray collection. The Blu-ray player on the PS5 is fine, but a nice dedicated player from Sony blows it away. I would pay for my favorite albums on Blu-ray too. I wish more artists released their entire discography on a really well produced Blu-ray. NIN would be perfect for this. So many Halos, so many videos, all in release order. A real release of Pure…
>dedicated player from Sony blows it away If I might give you a heads up here, they are not the best. For a reference player look at Magnetar. My dream setup is a Magnetar UDP 900 MK II and a Leica Cine 1...
Great buildup on Sony's side to gain trust in this move in the gaming community ahead of this announcement when just this week they again pulled hundreds of "purchased" movies from customer's libraries without refund, reminding everyone that digital content is rented, not owned. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/sony-erases-digital-...
And don't forget closing the PS3 and Vita Playstation stores, which they announced at the same time: https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/an-update-on-playsta... This is a weird marketing strategy. They must feel free to do as they please since they know consumers are trapped.
Neither Sony nor Microsoft had a consumer orientation and they will likely loose against the competition.
Physical media was a method to have a "plug & play" game, although that changed in recent times. With that I don't think classic consoles can compete, especially with their new price points.
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What's the difference between calling it "woke agenda" or "market changes"? Seems to me you agree with the other poster, that AAA game devs now make games targeted towards different people.
Woke in nearly all contexts in 2026 can be substituted for a racial, xenophobic, and/or homophobic slur and mean exactly the point of the person who used it. The lack of actual examples when called out makes it very obvious.
Having gamed for three decades now I'd say the shift has been very real. There's a much larger fraction of games that have representation of women, mental illness, disabilities, races, etc.
Is that progress or destruction? Depends on which side you fall on.
You're saying there are no examples, does that mean you think no shift has happened? That games are still made the same way? If so, are you claiming that games always had this sort of diversity of representation? Or that games nowadays still don't have it?
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…
I reckon Sony get a few more years of even more profitable rent seeking before the EU regulates them like Apple’s App Store and forces a game purchase to be valid on all platforms it’s playable on.
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Why DVD and not Blu-ray? The reason I said boomers buy DVD is because there are still a lot of senior citizens that are not internet savvy that like to rent out movies from their libraries, the dvds are simpler to operate, are more reliable from deep scratches, and a lot of boomers have simple equipment. Most of them don't care about perceived quality. This market is big enough that ironically DVDs may actually outli…
They're often cheaper and not everything is on Blu-ray. If Blu-ray was going really strong and overtook DVDs, I'd be happy about it. I don't really think DVDs are "simpler to operate" except for the fact that you only need cheaper equipment (though one can imagine someone with ingrained habits believing them to be "complicated").
I never understood why disc versions of current gent console exists at all. Don't @ me about internet speeds: even if game does come on a disc, day 1 patches got out of hand before this generation was launched or in works.
For me: resale value and being able to buy used games for cheap.
This is exactly how I do it - I don't have much time for gaming as much as I would like to so I just buy one game at a time (~90% of the time it's used one), finish it, sell it and possibly look for another one; as the catalogue is so big there is no point of hoarding games
I used to own xbox and had digital collection of games - most of them I never even started (much easier to hoard stuff when it's digital); I don't have that console anymore and I was left with a useless collection of stuff I don't own tied to my online account - never doing that again
Overall I hate this news so much, I probably will give up with 'modern' gaming altogether
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I am in Europe but I just don't do launch prices on any platform or delivery form so I didn't notice that. Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/606/
Off topic, XKCD should put the original publication date on the page. This one references specific years, and I could tell it's from 2009 after thinking about it, but doesn't hit the same way.
And yes, I probably played Portal 1 a few years after Portal 2 was out.