This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Do games even fully come on disc anymore?
Not tryna be a dick but like, haven't touched a modern console in a bit cuz PC.
Don't all new games need like a giant day 1 patch to work anyways now?
Yeah pretty much. I was gifted a collectors edition copy of starfield for xbox when it released, and the media was a metal credit token replica with a download code printed on the side, rather than a disc.
The smart watch it came with was pretty shit too fyi, but that's probably no surprise lol.
Okay, let's get down to brass tacks here...
Unless you're paying for some kind of "streaming" video game service, the game lives on your solid state drive/hard drive... which is physical media.
The license is what allows you to re-download and re-install it over and over.
This isn't a death of physical media, because even the streaming video game services are storing the copies of video games they stream to you on hard drives and solid state drives. The physical media doesn't disappear, but rather corporations are using technology to force you to use it how the company wants you to use it, and the bonus to those companies of the increased price of gaming hardware. Now we will have a difficult time owning our own physical media because it has become so costly.
Just because you don't have enough physical media space to install every game you've ever bought doesn't mean they aren't all living on a hard drive or old cd/dvd-rom SOMEWHERE. The "cloud" isn't actually ephemeral. Surprise, it's just a bunch of other people's computers.
Which is what these corporations want, they want to be in full control of who gets access and when, because you're on their property on their hard drives. There is no profit for the game companies in people like us having enough physical media space to keep data forever.
It’s not like they can remove At from your library at a future date. You can lose your login. You might wanna sell it and switch to a different platform. The disc is your key to that.
The issue is that someone else holds the key to your license. They can revoke it at any time, with 0 meaningful consequences.
We must now provide our own physical media to store the game...which in principle is fine and makes more sense than a game disk. However, the reliance on corporations to not fuck you over is the issue.
Archiving all your games is easier than said done too. To properly "keep" every game, you'll need a lot of high-capacity storage devices. Going by common file backup strategy, we need to store at least 3 copies, ideally 1 off site somehow. That's going to add up quick.
And hopefully your game is DRM free and doesn't try to phone home looking for a valid license on a deprecated server.
They’re delaying the physical release for the same reason they’re delaying the PC release. To keep interest high over time and fleece collectors and double dippers. Is it not obvious?
It also has the added benefit of completely avoiding the largest early-leak vector
They don’t know that yet, it’s like 4 months away from release
I never played on of the GTA series. But I'm done I can't buy a game w/o a DVD/CD so I can play when I'm on generator.
Also why I have over a 1k dvd movies.
A large number of games on Steam don't have always-online DRM. And Steam has an offline mode too. And, of course, there's GOG and other non-DRM platforms.
GOG is my goto, but I like to play the classics like Star Flight, King Quest, etc
With a username like that I'm surprised you didn't mention X-Wing vs TIE Fighter lol
I have the originals still.
