Funny. The consumer didn’t make physical media worse for the last 15 years.
Manual or at least something besides the disk: Gone Price: Same as digital despite they getting more profit from digital. Disc: half the game, other half downloads. (Not always, mind you) Game: Half baked without at least two patches.
They’ve been giving less and less with physical editions to push the more profitable digital store, and then they act shocked when no one buys physical.
Shockingly, if the only difference between physical and digital is that you need to go out of your way to pick the physical, most people will just get the digital.
Still I got my Switch games in physical so I can trade with friends.
Ah yes the intelligent consumer who always has a choice and is never beholden to the whims of a completely dominant supply side economy.
Can we stop spreading the propaganda for them? Sony lied about digital sales by including digital-only games in their figures.
Every game with a physical release, according to their developers, makes most of their sales on disc. It’s literally always a 70/30 split every single time (give or take 10%). I cannot find any evidence of a game that sold more in its digital form than physical
Where can I learn more about this. Frankly, I will not just take your word for it on such a bold claim.
That’s fair, but it’s ubiquitous. Search Twitter and Bluesky for official game studio and personal developer accounts. They almost always post about their sales soon after a launch. I don’t have any on hand, sorry. I do remember suckerpunch and insomniac doing so all the time.
My claim would be very easily disproven if it wasn’t true
Data from Insomniac Games, leaked last year
The article you linked makes me think it isn’t quite that easy to find proof.
The guy who’s saying this is a controversian, he’s trying to get clicks to his TikTok. He was also opposing stop killing games. He’s not even working in valve more than a decade. So he’s irrelevant but he does make sure to say ex-valve before his title.
I do not even have a tiktok. Who are you talking about?
I’m talking about the guy who’s saying those stuff, chet Faliszek. not you lol.
Ok, I didn’t think you were. I was saying you don’t need to be influenced by some guy to come to the conclusion that if all publishers, studios, their devs, (and their leakers, apparently), all agree on something, it’s most likely true
deleted by creator
- releases digital-only game
- “hmm, 0 physical copies sold… looks like people prefer digital”
I believe you, and im sure it’s because I’ve lost passion for just about everything at this point, but if the disk doesnt hold the game what really is the point anymore. If we bought the entire game on hard drive and the console had a hot swappable port so we used them like cartridges that would be great. I shouldn’t need internet access to play a game by myself. But with the current fuckery, the disc just holds part of the game right, and you have to download the rest of the game when you put it in the console.
You can also use that license thatvomes on that disc and transfer it and sell it or trade it to someone else if you choose.
That choice is being taken away.
Ah that makes sense. I wonder if there are people who create accounts for each game they digitally purchase. Then sell the sign in creds when they are done playing. Talk about a giant pain in the ass that would be
Sony and Microsoft’s Xbox will ban you immediately for this but because Steam is a lot more consumer friendly people do sell whole accounts with a game or two tied to them. There’s a site (that’s kind of shady ish so look out for that) that I have used called G2A that you can buy whole steam accounts with games on.
I think that some of those codes are stolen though or something of that nature but steam doesn’t do anything about it but that is 100% speculation on my part. I thought I heard a dev of a game say something like that one time though that they’d rather you pirate it than buy it off G2A.
Edit: thinking about it more I don’t think its stolen its just the simple fact that you can “trade” or “sell” the entire game that way by selling the whole account tied to it and the game developers don’t like that.
Reasons game developers don’t like steam keys from sites like G2A are:
- Exploiting regional price differences.
- Splitting keys out of bundles.
- Scamming game developers for free keys (claiming they want to promote the game with a giveaway).
- Keys bought with stolen cards (that get chargebacked causing direct loss).
The last reason could apply to reselling steam accounts as well.
Thank you for this I was wondering what the deal was with that. So some of them are stolen.
That really sucks. I’ll probably avoid them going forward
So consumers were given the choice between physical media that you made artificially expensive and overly inconvenient or digital media that you made practically free and ultra convenient. That’s called the illusion of choice. But now you can blame your victims when you abuse them because they brought this on themselves.
It s more nuanced. 80% of buy are digital. Some industries it s worse. Like music and movie. But thoses industry value their “hardcore” consumer and will never shelve their physical release, who also append to be better quality than digital release. Contrary to video game where its litteraly the same product. Nobody has an issue with valve being fully digital cause they can’t lock down other store. What sont does is unprecdent and I pray for their downfall.
Physical media is no more expensive or inconvenient than it ever was. It’s just that you’re now comparing it to downloads, which bear no manufacturing cost and don’t require you to physically go to a store or have the media shipped to you. These are exactly the reasons that consumers prefer downloads.
Up until the Wii era you could just insert the disc in the console and start playing immediately, it was much more convenient than waiting an hour for a game to download and install. You didn’t need to manage disk space as well. Or login before playing. The industry destroyed the convenience. Now only Switch has an option to start playing from cartridge.
As far as I know, no one has produced technology to make disc streaming faster. You can blame console design for this, but even if an indie dev simulated this situation with a 50GB game containing compressed textures placed on a Blu-ray, he’d have the same design problem - loading things off that disc takes a long time, and installation is a far better user experience.
The Wii gets away with it because texture sizes back then were much smaller. If you can point to technical demonstrations of how the same process could’ve been achieved on modern games with much larger textures, I’d be interested to hear it.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think we ever got to see a dual disk drive console, at least not in production (exempting gaming PCs). Perhaps in a parallel universe on board storage became cost prohibitive and games came on two simultaneously inserted optical disks, one with the game code and the other with texture packs and art. Nothing that interesting could exist in today’s climate.
Cartridges, same as Switch 2. And high res textures and audio as separate download if needed. Flash memory was getting cheap until AI, 64GB usb 3 drive is still around 10 bucks at retail, so probably 3 bulk, and even cheaper for Sony.
Spinning media will never be as fast, of course, unless every drive comes with a 50GB cache to just load everything once and never seek randomly.
Doesn’t most of the physical media still require downloads to actually play anyway? I don’t own a console but it seems like every time I’m at one of my friends who do and they’re putting a new game in they have to wait on it to install/update or whatever. Maybe it’s just the big AAA ones.
Only if you have an internet connection active. Otherwise, I believe it’s just insert disc and play, IIRC.
When all options are rigged, it’s pretty rude to blame “the consumer”
Of course the “former Valve writer” is Chet Faliszek. The dude never shuts up.
What we want is DRM-free games, not your bullshit
Fucking morons
I feel like everyone in this thread is ignoring the literal headline.
The point being made is that the consumer chose these rights-infringing, privacy-corrupting, ownership-destroying choices.
Then OF COURSE companies weaponised it.
The issue is that your average Joe doesn’t think for a damn second in his life, and picks up whatever is put down.
Yeah, arguments that blank percent of people are morally good are insane since… Most people dont really think about long term morals of their decisions day to day if ever. Most people just live and do by convenience without asking if it is morally good but simply believing the self to be.
It needs to be convenient to do good things for people to do them and the convenient option for a long time has been giving up ownership rights.
Yeah … Morality is subjective… If the majority of a given population does a thing, that thing is moral within that population.
Ironically enough the topic of whether or not morality is ‘subjective’ is also inherently up for interpretation. There’s literally a whole philosophical field of study for this.
That being said, I’ll counter this sentiment by saying that the things we find to be ‘moral’ as a species are more often than not the things that help our species prosper (i.e. taboos for murder, theft, bullying, sexual violence, etc.). Sure, there may be a certain degree of variation within the moral frameworks of a culture, but you’ll be hard pressed to find one that doesn’t have that baseline of enforcing against most forms of explicit harm which can come about against members of that society. If that weren’t the case then we would have gone extinct a long time ago.
You’re confusing biological utility with objective truth.
Sure, human societies share baselines against murder and theft because societies without them collapse. But that’s just evolutionary pragmatism. A behavior that keeps a species alive isn’t a cosmic moral law; it’s just a survival mechanism. If a beehive kills off its drones to survive the winter, it’s not being “moral”, it’s just trying not to die.
Even your premise that the prosperity of our species is inherently “good”, relies on our own subjective bias that we prefer being alive. The universe itself doesn’t care.
But let’s apply your own standard back to the actual topic: video games.
If your baseline for objective morality is “things that help our species prosper,” then a corporation shifting to digital-only game licenses has absolutely zero impact on human survival. By your own logic, it’s completely amoral.
If you still want to argue that going digital-only is “immoral,” you have to abandon your evolutionary argument and admit you’re just projecting a subjective cultural preference onto a consumer inconvenience.
You’re confusing biological utility with objective truth.
Confusing them? No. We simply have different standards for what qualifies as objective truth. For me, if your truth gets you harmed or worse, it’s wrong. Simple as that. I am acutely aware that there isn’t any universal moral standard when it comes to existence at large, but for my own and humanity’s purposes, those which help us get by better than others are the “truer” ones.
Even your premise that the prosperity of our species is inherently “good”, relies on our own subjective bias that we prefer being alive. The universe itself doesn’t care.
As with what I just stated, it doesn’t matter whether the universe itself cares or not. The universe can frankly do whatever the hell it wants (as it certainly does); reality to me and many others is that which I can sense and experience in my lifetime, and that’s all it ever will be. For any reasonable person’s purposes, the universe’s (as a personification) stake in their lives shouldn’t hold any stake in what they do or do not do. And that especially goes for their morality. Nihilism is equivalent to just being mindless and inert matter on a biological level, and that’s honestly just sad given what humanity and its qualifiers have been able to achieve.
If your baseline for objective morality is “things that help our species prosper,” then a corporation shifting to digital-only game licenses has absolutely zero impact on human survival. By your own logic, it’s completely amoral.
Wrong. As with any complex systems we’ve been able to create in our societies, this will certainly be up for debate, but you’ll have to concede that not being able to own the things you purchase (as humans have done and have been able to do for the majority, if not the entirety of our existence) sets a frankly awful precedent for what these corporations and governments will feel they are entitled to do. To pretend it has always been like this is or it’s inevitable is fatalism, which like nihilism, is sad, and frankly pathetic. I pity that mentality.
If you still want to argue that going digital-only is “immoral,” you have to abandon your evolutionary argument and admit you’re just projecting a subjective cultural preference onto a consumer inconvenience.
And what are these “consumer inconveniences”? Because by your logic, the universe shouldn’t care about that either, considering that it’s a human construct and therefore abstracted from the “objective features” of reality. This is the main problem with your mentality. If morality doesn’t matter, then nothing does. And if nothing matters, then this topic is redundant. It’s nothing more than a spending of entropy.
Think what you want to think, believe what you want to believe. But if you’re seriously following the route of nihilism as if it will lead to some sort of peace of mind, I’ve got some bad news for you: it’s just going to make you feel worse. And with that, I’ve got a funny, albeit facetious image relevant to this conversation that I’ve been looking for an excuse to use somewhere. So here it is. Don’t take it too seriously. (Or do, I’m not your dad.)
A free market requires a perfectly informed consumer. That’s impossible before you begin to consider how marketing is dishonest
I actually agree that physical media is better for consumers. If I buy a game, I think I should own it. I should be able to sell it, lend it to a friend, or keep playing it decades from now without worrying about a company flipping a switch. Physical media is objectively more consumer-friendly in that regard.
What I don’t agree with is the narrative that corporations had to force everyone into digital by sabotaging physical releases. That’s not how I remember it.
Steam became wildly popular because consumers embraced it almost immediately. Instant downloads, automatic updates, cloud saves, massive sales, and never having to swap discs were conveniences people overwhelmingly wanted. Publishers certainly recognized the benefits for themselves, more control, no used game market, lower distribution costs, but they didn’t invent the demand. They took advantage of a demand that consumers had already created.
In a sense, we shot ourselves in the foot. We collectively chose convenience over ownership because, at the time, it seemed like a worthwhile trade. Now we’re living with the consequences of that decision.
It’s completely fair to push for stronger ownership rights today. But I think it’s a mistake to pretend that consumers were dragged into digital kicking and screaming. For the overwhelming majority of gamers, digital won because they chose it.
If GOG just hired one full time intern to go ahead and bake Proton into their platform so they could have Linux support that isn’t completely broken, I’d probably start getting more games on their platform again.
Edit: Oh, looks like it’s on the way. Maybe I’d better start wishlisting.
People have been buying more and more physical media recently due to the enshittification of streaming. I’ve been buying blu-rays for movies I really want to ‘own’.
It just clearly not up to some people’s standards. Imagine how much more $$$ valve would make if they published physical copies for their steam machine.
People have been buying more and more physical media recently due to the enshittification of streaming.
Have they? More and more, really?
I guess I must have missed the memo, because I no longer have the giant storage cases full of plastic discs or tapes. I’m hard pressed to name anyone else in my social circle who still does.
I’ve been buying blu-rays for movies I really want to ‘own’.
I just pirate that shit. Why on earth do I want a hard copy of something, plus a device to play it, when a 2-TB hard drive can host more media than I could watch continuously for a month. That’s before you get into degraded quality of older discs and machines. Or my increased appetite for foreign media - shit that was never on offer in the states without knowing a boutique distributor or a friend traveling overseas or someone with a subbed copy.
Imagine how much more $$$ valve would make if they published physical copies for their steam machine.
Getting this from Valve is absolutely mind-bending, given how much of their library is exclusively digital.
I choose to crush corporations until they are so small they are easily drowned by pissing on them.
I just wanted to add that it’s also really stupid to claim that “consumers chose thing” because companies did it since they found it more profitable. Companies do many things people don’t actively want (or even dislike) for profit.
An interesting example is brought up by Andreas Malm in his book “Fossil Capital”. He explains how consumers didn’t chose for the manufacturing of electronics and lots of other things to move to China. Companies moved their manufacturing there because it was cheaper and would increase their profits. Now the choice for many consumers is basically to buy Chinese-made or not buy at all. I know since I actually tried a few years ago!
That is absolutely not true. Companies chose cloud-streamed gaming. But because no one saw it as useful, it didn’t catch on and Stadia ended up shuttering their services. Companies chose 3D TVs, but consumers didn’t. We are seeing the “choice of AI” in home computing, and it’s remarkable how long they have attempted to extend the effort of “forcing consumers to choose it”, but to their credit, there are at least some home AI afficionados that somehow love Windows 11 Copilot.
I can assume you were not part of the digital games zeitgeist, but I can assure you, a great many (perhaps non-vocal) gamers were, and were very much for it.
I feel like one shouldn’t conflate liking something with choosing something. You definitely have a point that consumers can stop things. If enough consumers dislike something enough, it will likely fail. Like you point out though, it was still companies that made the choice to go for cloud gaming. They were just wrong about it being profitable as far as I can tell.
I was part of it and I love digital games (gimme drm free), still doesn’t mean I actually chose things to go this way!
“Former” and “writer”
Sure. So there’s no reason he might not got paid by Sony to say this, right? Or yet alone have any professional knowledge on distribution of games.
Edit: check is wiki. He’s a sorry ass grifter. Putting up valve before his name to make his sorry points more credible. Trying to squeeze out his valve history even though majority of his career was spend on not being able to cope with indie studio workload and then shifting to riot games for monies. Now he’s making TikTok videos talking about valve like it’s his majority of experience. Also he was opposing Stop Killing Games. https://preservetube.com/watch?v=qr6I2BiU238
Yes it is a conspiracy. Sony doesn’t want physical games for a whole bunch of reasons not least of which is control and greed. And if you think this is a new thing you would be wrong. They have been pushing this quietly for years. Second hand sales, game rentals, trading… these are all things that cut into Sony’s profits. If you ever want a reason follow the money.
