- cross-posted to:
- gaming@lemmy.ml
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Look around and realize how you got here to Lemmy/kbin/beehaw/etc - you were betrayed by a few VC-captured executives that made profit-blinded, consumer-hostile decisions about an important product you used frequently. They ruined it.
Anyone here defending digital media or saying it’s not that bad or they should have done a digital lending system, you’re not remembering the recent past.
The only acceptable ground to give here is NONE. Physical media needs to start mandatory, or your purchases are never owned and you’re always at risk and at the whims of someone like Spez.
This.
Also, AAA companies shouldn’t be able to ask for pre-orders and them deliver botched games that require terabytes of network traffic just to be playable. Physical media should be playable (decent framerate and seamless-enough gameplay) from the beggining.Alternatively downloadable self-contained installers like what you get from https://www.gog.com/
This may have been an error, either the employee mistook the special edition with the regular, or Microsoft saw how angry people were.
Would be a terrible decision during their Activision legal battle, turning Bethesda into a worse company for the consumer.
Edit: It’s looking more like miscommunication
So, the physical release is just… actual garbage? Like sure, someone may proudly display it in their bookshelf or whatever, but then, it eventually becomes trash, and there’s no reason to keep any of it because there’s no physical copy of the game which can be resold or even borrowed out to friends?
That’s not a “physical release”, that’s a piece of merchandise, as useful as a Funko Pop.
There ought to be a law that a physical release of a game sold in a box has to include some kind of physical media that contains a version of the game. Yes, I get that a multi-gig Day 1 Patch is inevitable, but as someone that had to rely on a craptastic mobile broadband connection for a solid year or two, this is a travesty.
If you wanna just sell a code for a digital version in retail stores, just sell code cards without the plastic disk-like box. It wastes less resources, and makes it more clear what it is.
Boxes should come with branded USB sticks (who even has a disc drive these days?), and if the physical version isn’t a box why even bother. Random swag is the point.
I’ve been saying this for years, blurays have a relatively small (by mobern standards) size cap, USB sticks just keep getting bigger
Well, my previous PC still had disc drives – two in fact, a DVD reader and a CD-RW. Only because I didn’t get a new case and didn’t have any replacement front panels, though, they were never connected because PATA doesn’t work well on a SATA-only board. Also still had a 3.5" floppy drive, also not connected, for the same reason.
Now my case doesn’t even have a bay to put a drive into.
My last desktop (made 3 quarters of a decade ago now) didn’t, but that’s becouse I knew someone with a USB disc reader, the only thing I ever needed it for was installing windows though
Well, the PS5 and XBOX Series X still use disks as their physical media… but yeah, the Series XBOXes in particular could switch over to those storage modules you can slam into the back of the consoles. At least for exclusives - the XBOne has no port for those.
But for PC… I reckon most people buy games on Steam there anyway.
And while I would appreciate swag… I think most developers would only go with cheap non-brandname USB sticks with the logo of the game printed on it, that’s built just good enough to not spontaneously combust if you look at it funny.
No, they would spend way too much money on custom USB drives. There would be 20 different kinds, with the super premium gold edition* only being available as a preorder bonus that costs $20 extra.
*does not contain real gold
Microsoft tried to kill borrowing and lending, and this just seems like ankther attempt. Someone with a real presence on other sites (and is good at social media) should stir up a backlash.
I hate digital-only media. :/
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I love physical media because it’s so easy to get rid of it whenever you want. Are you sick of a game or don’t want to touch it ever again? Resell on the used market for a few bucks or give it to a friend or a young neighbor that might appreciate it. I like to keep a lean collection of games that I actually care about and might replay eventually.
This doesn’t directly affect me, as I’ve exclusively bought digital games only for over a decade, but it still annoys me based on principle. It’s basically a bait and switch - it would be far more honest to just say “it’s digital only” than to sell a useless physical box.
Honestly, one of the reasons to get a physical copy is to save time on the download. Not everyone has blazing fast or reliable internet where they live. Just having to download a patch as opposed to the entire 80+ GB game can be a big deal to some. I know it was like that for me back when the only thing available in a past residence was DSL. No cable or Fiber, just DSL.
Things like this is why I already made the switch to digital games. If the one point of having physical media was to have a backup, and nowadays most games aren’t even fully on the cartridge/disc, whats the point? At that point it’s just another form of DRM.
This isn’t too surprising though, Microsoft has been big into getting rid of physical media.
They’re now saying that this was incorrect: the Xbox release will include a disc.
https://www.gamespot.com/amp-articles/starfield-does-have-a-physical-disc-after-all/1100-6515495/
Why even sell a physical box if it has absolutely no benefit over a digital download? I wonder if it’s at all driven by desire to trick people who want a physical disk copy (ie, a copy that can be resold or traded)?
Given that people generally expect physical copies to have a disk (at least for console games), it feels like false advertising.
Because brick and mortar retail isn’t entirely dead. Impulse buys, Christmas gifts, etc etc etc etc. All the reasons to have a product for sale in a store. The product was never the CD or DVD or floppy disks, and gamers who make a fuss about it are just crotchety for the sake of it. There’s no reason to print physical media. I haven’t even owned an optical drive in my pc for well over a decade. Still bought some “physical copies” of games that were just codes. I’m not upset.
You’re old grandpa, go back inside and stop yelling at The Cloud.
You’re absolutely right. All these people shouting about “back in my day we owned games!” are forgetting that games have to be manufactured. Is all that plastic and pollution worth having a plastic rectangle with a different plastic circle in it? At the end of the day once you’ve played the game that’s it, it’s yours. Your experience is unique and it can’t be taken away, don’t cling to manufactured waste when what you cherish are the memories.
Honestly if you’re making the environmental argument then you also have to factor in all the electricity, rare earth metals, fossil fuels etc. used to serve games over the internet - data centres aren’t exactly eco-friendly places, and running a worldwide network of fibre optic / copper cables takes a fair chunk of resources.
Electricity can be generated sustainably. Rare earth metals can be recycled. We are working on alternatives to fossil fuels. Environmental issues aren’t a zero sum game. You don’t “Lose” just because something else also pollutes. It’s an issue that is worked on systematically. Could it be a lot faster? Yes of course. But we work with what we have.
Data centers are also multi-use. You don’t build a data center just to house your game. You pay for the space in one that already exists. A company can choose to make software available on a platform that is open to a large portion of the world, or it can spend cash and resources shipping boxes of plastic all over the world. The pollution and waste generated by shipping something across an ocean massive. Do you really want to put all that into the air so you can have the plastic circle?
