Cowardly little shits.
Something something sense of accomplishment…
24+ hours? Wow.
That should be more than long enough to get past the attention span of sony customers
Shows how much they care lol
They are afraid haha. And they should be. Dammit.
they gotta come back sometime
Task failed successfully?
In a just world they’d never go back.
Now that Xbox is dead they can do whatever the fuck they want
Wait what? I thought there was a new one in the works? I could have swore I saw a post about it this week.
Yeah, but unless Helix suddenly fixes everything Xbox has been doing wrong since they debuted the XB1 in 2013, the brand is probably dead shortly after it launches.
Xbox has had what? One half-decent console?
The first one was great imho, I think the brand wouldn’t have taken off at all without a decent first machine
The 360 was even better perhaps, thanks to plenty of good games I’d say. Not sure what happened after that, I was off the wagon
The xbone was a hard pivot into the Xbox being a “media center” rather than just a gaming machine. In 2013 we all realized that yes, a console could be used to watch movies or even stream Netflix… But it’s primary purpose was as a gaming console and people were put off by the marketing.
They also had some game sharing controversies of their own. MS and Sony have been trying to kill physical games on their platforms for well over a decade now so we’ll see where it goes.
The xbone pitch was amazing for gamers who watched tv, it just never worked well out of the box. To actually watch live tv, you had to buy an additional dongle and an antenna, and then after spending all that on setting up your media center, you had to buy the remote separately.
And then the whole experience wasn’t as smooth as it should have been, and cable integration was very buggy in my experience.
360 was fine on paper, but the RRoD plagued it.
I would have understood them making this call for PS6 onwards - digital edition only. But while they’re still selling disc PS5s at eye-watering prices? What the fuck are they thinking? Way to burn good will with your ever-shrinking fanbase.
Their competition (Nintendo and Steam) already don’t have physical media. Nintendo is moving towards 100% Game Key cards, and Steam is all downloads. Playstation could have used physical media as a competitive advantage, but decided against it for cost reasons. So now this is the end of gaming physical media. The game sizes are just way too large.
Dual layer Blu-Ray is 100GB, old PS1 games used to ship on many disks (looking at you FF7 and FF8).
And CoD is 250GB or something.
Holy crap really? That’s freakin comically huge
Single layer 25GB, Dual 50GB, Tri 100GB, Quad 128GB.
How much would 2-3 dual-later BDs cost?
The issue isn’t the technical possibility, but whether people are willing to pay the premium for installation media.
Of course I would pay an extra few dollars tohave media and guarantee a game will install and run even if the internet goes away.
This isn’t about convienence for the users, its about killing the secondary market
To the manufacturer? Pennies. It’s made of the same stuff DVDs are. They’re only expensive to the consumer because the entire industry hates the idea of them.
Sorta annoyed Nintendo didn’t receive as much flak as this with hoards of people trying to justify game cards by pointing at Microsoft and Sony.
Nintendo is beyond the event horizon at this point.
And that’s alright. Like, if you can afford a Switch and you get it so your family can play Pokopia and Animal Crossing, all their nonsense doesn’t really matter to your lifestyle.
…But if it does matter, “Nintendo Fans” are in waaay too deep to plausibly defend them anyway.
I had no idea “game key cards” were a thing until this comment sent me down a rabbit hole. What a total scam! Clearly deceptive and anti-consumer. I’m surprised there hasn’t been a class action lawsuit yet. Maybe most are ignorant like myself.
How is it a scam? It is exactlly what is printed on the box. Not everything you dislike is a scam.
The box and packaging makes it look like you are buying a physical game that will play for years after Nintendo turns off their servers. If someone wanted to buy a download key, they could buy the little cardboard scratch off things. Packaging it as if you were actually buying physical media is intentionally misleading.
There is a huge banner at the bottom of the cover art that clearly states that a download is required. It’s only misleading if you can’t read.
How am I as a regular consumer supposed to know what a game key card is? And yes, the non-standardized one off example of a company using a non-plain language description completely destroys the argument that this is anti-consumer and intentionally deceptive. Clearly everyone wants a game keycard inserted in order to play a digital game that if they had bought with an explicit code or completely online wouldn’t be required. It’s also great that completely digital download that takes many gigabytes of storage on my device becomes unplayable the moment I lose the game key. That way, I get the worst of both worlds! I have to be responsible with keeping track with physical media, and I have a massive drain on my devices storage space.
Just look at this Game Key Pass game sold through target. Note how the description says that it is a physical copy, and the specification notes that it is a physical copy. The only reason you may even suspect that this is game-key card that requires a download is if you happen to look at one of the cover art screenshots without alternative text. The fast food industry has been getting wrecked by that sort of oversight for a couple of years now.(Links available on request, but currently on mobile, so lazy)
How is it deceptive? It’s clearly stated on the box in unambiguous terms. In fact, the warning banner for key cards is bigger than the banner for codes in a box. Nintendo isn’t responsible for your inability to read.
You know. Store agnostic game key cards would be so cool.
I’m fine with archiving downloads I’d want + keeping keycards.
Just to be fair, the Nintendo Switch 2 does support “Game Key Card” games. Such that you still must download the game and use the card to authenticate your game.
However there are zero first party* Nintendo games that are “Game Key Card” games. If you buy Mario or Zelda you do get the game on the card.
I do expect that will change in the future and follow the trend Sony is taking to be 100% digital. So you’re right to be concerned that they are heading in the same direction.in fact with Sony already heading that direction it’s even more certain.
*(Pokemon, which feels like a first party and Nintendo owns a large portion of, is technically third party.)
the cost to produce and distribute (or rather, the lower profits), was secondary… waaaay tf under the top 5 reasons for dumping physical media: control, control, control. control, and control… control over your “purchases”
I am imagining the marketers leaving the office with life jackets riding small boats. 🛟🚣
It’s interesting because Japan has traditionally been very big on physical media. I guess Sony PlayStation has had some foreign CEOs recently that may be a factor??
Sony is a weird shitshow of a company. Too big and too many departments and branches, with no one knowing what the other is doing. Back in the day, as Sony Electronics was developing their first physical MP3 player, Sony Music was lobbying to make MP3 illegal. Department heads shift to a different branch and shutdown anything their predecessor was working on.
And Sony “solved” the issue by requiring you to use software called Sonicstage to transfer music, and that software re encoded everything as ATRAC with OpenMG DRM.
What you describe isn’t weird for a large corporation. When a corporation is large enough, they’re all like that.
Sony still seems especially bad about this. They fought for decades to have the dominant physical media format, from Betamax, to Minidiscs, to Memory sticks. They would eventually win with Blurays by selling PS3 at a huge loss and now they want to abandon physical media?
The PS3 was released nearly 20 years ago and no media standard lasts forever. I think if you told them back then that the PS3 strategy would result in their media format being dominant for two decades, they wouldn’t have said “ah well forget it, it’s not worth it.”
Bluray is starting to show it’s age. The decision is really between creating a new physical media format or just going 100% digital. From a purely technological perspective digital makes a lot more sense.
The real problem is about trust and licenses. We don’t trust a company when they announce plans to go 100% digital on the same week the break access to people’s movies in their digital library. And they could set up a digital system that would allow you to sell your license to someone else, so you could give or sell your copy of the game to someone else. But we know that while that’s technologically possible, they aren’t going to do that.
So it’s not a problem from a technology perspective, but it sucks for the consumer because of how they will implement the technology.
Bluray is starting to show it’s age
How?
There’s always going to be capacity limitations, they’re bulky compared to an SD card, they can get scratched and who know if some discs will eventually suffer from disc rot as happened with DVDs.
For better or for worse (mostly worse) most games require patches now, so you’ll need an internet connection if you don’t want to be stuck playing the buggy initial release of a game.
games only require patching because developers cut corners thanks to internet connected consoles allowing for updates, before that we had literal decades of stable, playable games.
That has nothing to do with optical media, and everything to do with corporate stupidity and greed.
Bluray has enormous capacity, and compared to SD cards they literally cost pennies to print and manufacture.
the only disc rot I’ve heard about with regards to DVDs is a couple years where Warner Brothers specifically had an issue, which they ended up replacing all the discs for, granted it took them like 10 years to get enough pressure to get off their ass and do it, and it should have done it much sooner, so I’ll concede that WB are cunts… and I wager the reason they had rot is cause they tried to cheap out on the manufacturing and use something substandard.
I don’t want games that aren’t going to end up in my attic within the decade, so that I can rediscover them in another half decade, and spend several hours trying to boot the legacy hardware to play them.
That whole experience of actually owning your stuff is gone, if you go digital. It’s not just the theoretical risk that they turn the server off. It’s the constant dependency on Sony servers, licenses, accounts, and digital catalog. Those dependancies precede even being able to look at what titles you own.
Do you remember finding your old WII as a kid? Jailbreaking it years after it became irrelevant, and showing your dad that you loaded all his favorite childhood games onto it for him? Contra, Russian Attack, … my son will never have that experience.
So it’s mostly sentimentality? That’s just the way it goes with tech, you have to get used to new ways of doing things.
Why I remember as a kid getting pop and chips at the gas station when my parents stopped there to fill up. If I get an EV my children won’t ever have that experience.
I don’t think sentimentality is a valid reason to stick with old technology.
The concerns about Sony supporting the servers long term and the fact that it’s unlikely people will be able to sell or give away their games, those are valid concerns. Sentimentality over technology is silly to me.
It’s not just that experience in and of itself. That is only one experience derived from the lifetime benefit of ownership. You own the things that you enjoy. Hell, I remember playing the Wii… then I remember finding exploits in the Wii, providing replay value… then I remember learning how the Wii works in interesting ways… then I remember hacking the Wii… then I remember discovering a world of community content for hacked wiis… then I remember sharing that with my dad… then I remember regifting that Wii to my mother in law decades later…
Prior generations had the same benefits, be it with cars or whatever. The standards for ownership have been pretty consistent for consumers in the consumer market for centuries if not thousands of years. Suddenly, everything is being locked up and licensed back on fragile infrastructure you don’t own. That’s not tech advancing. That’s you loosing shit.
Sooner or later, people won’t be able to get physical medium at all for the games they enjoy. Favorites will be predestined to be a faded memory, not something you can choose to cherish over time (in a box somewhere, of course). Thats fragile.
What about when life gets busy and you’re suddenly out of touch with modern games? Want to bust out an oldie and kill some time? Tough luck… you never owned those old favorites you’d poured money and time into… That’s where it’s headed. I don’t call that advancement.
they saw the $$$ in perpetual subscriptions.
PlayStation has had foreign leadership for 7 years
How crazy is that for a Japanese company.
Nissan was ran by a Brazilian guy for almost 20 years.
Sure. I just found it humorous a multi-national company like Sony is run by a ‘foreigner’. Foreigner to whom?
Most publicly traded companies are ran by a revolving door of CEOs from around the world. They live a totally different lifestyle from normal people. The majority of wealthy people are not aligned to any country. Only to money.
Most CEO’s have a ‘big item agenda’ which they implement in 5-7 years. After that, it’s time to move on to look for the next challenge. I’m not convinced that’s a bad thing in and of itself as it provides new insights and goals for the company.
Sometimes this works and sometimes the company dies due to the incompetent new CEO or is a CEO hired by a hostile takeover private equity firm to extract as much money from it as possible.
PlayStation, not Sony.
Omg. Do you know the difference between a product and a company?
I wish this would be the anine cabbage of the gaming world.
Wouldn’t that have been the Golden Horse Armor?
It still is in regards to music releases.
Almost every indie creator in the touhou scene releases CDs on booth or somewhere adjacent.Could this be a signal that CDs DVD and Bluray Discs production maybe coming to an end soon? The companies that make them are very likely reporting low sales and a lot of stock on hand.
I mean, I’m all for replacing physical items as it reduces physical plastic waste.
But it does put the onus on consumers to pay for the storage rather than the manufacturer and prices for digital are not any lower than physical so all it does is save the manufacturer money, not the consumer. If it resulted in a 10% decrease in game prices that would help.
The other issue however is that manufacturers do not guarantee a download will be available forever. If that were guaranteed there wouldn’t be an issue, as digital games often need to be re-installed if a bug or error occurs.
Sony being an absolute dick, like they have been for the past 4 decades
This is not a new thing
💯, and despite being one the most anti-consumer companies around, the tens of millions of fanboys will buy their stuff no questions asked, and defend them to the end of the earth on all major gaming forums. Neogaf, Resetera, Reddit, ign, etc are all basically Sony fan sites where basically everyone hopes and prays for a PlayStation monopoly.
Note having said that, this was inevitable as physical game sales are basically dead. It makes sense. It’ll upset a bunch of people, but they’ll still buy every PlayStation console, sub to PS+, and buy all their games on PlayStation.
I read 1 in 7 PS5 games are sold on disk. That’s a minority but it’s certainly not a dead market. That means 14% of the sales potentially lost if they’re unable to convert the customer. Ironically this weekend my internet went out and we spent the whole holiday playing games and movies on disk.
They’re just trying to ride out the backlash until we all get distracted enough by other news to forget about it.
I’m just not buying a PS6, and if my ps5 stops offering physical media. I’ll get rid of it too.
Yeh they’re expecting the upcoming Microsoft/xbox layoff-ocalypse to dominate the news and make their news yesterday’s story. I’d bet they were expecting the layoffs to be announced yesterday on the Friday.
Also there’s nothing they can say that hasn’t been said already that will make people who are angry change their minds, so there’s literally no point. It’s a vocal minority and t bill thing for them to do is ignore it.
it’s a vocal minority and the best thing for them to do is ignore it.
lol no the best thing for sony to do is not be shit.
Sony have been shit for 10+ years, and PlayStation is literally in the best financial position they have ever been. They’re printing money for Sony.
Like I said, it’s a vocal minority complaining, and the best thing for Sony is to ignore them. It’s not the best for the people complaining, in fact it’s the absolute worst because they’re complaining because they want Sony to acknowledge them and reverse course, but Sony are not going to do that so saying nothing is in their best interests.
They’re betting on GTA VI dominating the news as well.
Should’ve waited until September or something before announcing it.
Nah, it’ll have blown over long before then. It’ll be out of the news and people’s minds by August.
I agree. No point in documenting the backlash with social media posts when they aren’t going to change their decision.
On a side note, are physical copies of games anything more than install disks anymore?
Not really, but they’re install disks you can trade in or lend to a friend.
Provided the disc doesn’t require a phoned-in registration key. I think Bioshock started the trend along with limited installations.
Console games aren’t like that, never have been.
Console games also used to be entirely on disk, and didnt require online connections just to play an offline single player game.
Times change.
So you think that they’re going to re-introduce disks and add a “phone home”?
I’m saying, not be cocksure in the ignorance of “That never happened before, surely it’ll never happen in the future”
Because gaming companies have spent the past 15-20 years stripping away our rights and our ownership and our ability to play our games that we’ve paid for.
Deoends on the game. Many games are still playable from disc.
