Hi everyone!
For my gaming needs, I have a Steam Deck and a Playstation 5 for now. They’ll probably be joined by a Steam Machine in the next year if the price is under 1000$ with 2 controllers.
For my admin needs, I have a few Linux computers running Fedora.
For my movie needs, I have an HTPC running LibreELEC.
Whenever possible, I’ll get my games on GOG from now on.
A lot of games aren’t on GOG though, so I have to choose between getting physical discs for my PS5 or through Steam.
For now, I can’t get demanding games on Steam since the Deck isn’t powerful enough, but with the arrival of the Machine, I’ll almost have power parity with the PS5.
I don’t plan on selling the PS5 as my son plays some Roblox, the NBA app works better on it than on my TV and I could want some games that Sony won’t release (anymore) on PC.
One day, once my switch to Linux gaming is over I might even give it to my son when hés gonna be old enough to game in his room.
So my question is should I buy physical games on Playstation, with the ability to resell them and get them on GOG one day for cheap, or should I get the games on Steam where they could just be taken away if Steam becomes evil?
Tinfoil hat thoughts: at this point, I wouldn’t trust Sony to honour the ownership of a physical copy forever. There’s nothing stopping them from implementing a system that checks whether your account owns a license for the game that’s on the disk, or prevents the console from launching a delisted game. All it takes is a firmware update.
If preservation is the main concern, I’d check whether the game is available at a 100% peg leg discount (as insurance against corporate-sanctioned theft), then buy it on Steam. Even if Gaben turns to the dark side, PC will always be a more open platform than PS. People love pretending that Sony is still the company that released this epic burn, but that was over a decade ago.
What’s on the disc isn’t even the game you play most of the time. Hell even the day 1 patch that replaces most of the files on the disc isn’t the game you play unless you mainline it in release week.
I don’t think there’s a mechanism for them to tell if you’ve got a license for a disc without putting CD keys in the box. OP only needs them to honor ownership long enough to resell the copy.
It would be trivial to implement on Sony’s centralised infrastructure, without using unique CD keys. All you need is an account identifier, a game identifier, and a record in Sony’s system that indicates whether the specific account is permitted to start the game with that specific identifier. CD keys could still be used for initially associating the game with the account, but after that, Sony could take full control of the account’s access to the game.
This would be how a business commits suicide, not to mention upset their retail partners that sell their hardware.
I’d love to believe that, but I’ve lost count of how many businesses were declared by the internet to have committed suicide, only for people to keep buying their stuff. People at large don’t give a shit, unless a change has immediate negative effects on them, and often, not even then.
The type of change you’re talking about would have immediate negative effects on their customers, and they’d never recover from that. Even with more than half of their game sales coming from digital now, they’d immediately alienate the 20-30% that still buy physical, and they need every customer they can get right now as they bleed market share to PC.