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.
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.
Dual layer Blu-Ray is 100GB, old PS1 games used to ship on many disks (looking at you FF7 and FF8).
24+ hours? Wow.
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 MP3s illegal. Department heads shift to a different branch and shutdown anything their predecessor was working on.
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 the 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.
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.
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.
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?
PlayStation, not Sony.
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.
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.
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.
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
360 was fine on paper, but the RRoD plagued it.
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.
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 the best 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.
Depends on the game. Many games are still playable from disc.
SONY has always been a
littleenormous shit.Actually they used to be pretty good back in the 80s and early 90s when they were a hardware maker and the company was always headed by somebody from the Engineering division - they made high quality consumer electronics at reasonable prices.
This is how they built quite the brand name.
Then in the late 90s (if I remember it correctly) they bought a major movie studio in the US and after a few years the top job went to somebody from the Media division.
After that all their electronics (such as Bluray and the MiniDisk) was locked down by design, quality fell a lot, they started lobbying heavily for things that would make Intellectual Property more valuable such as extending the duration of Copyrights, the DMCA and Anti-Circumvention legislation, and became so anti-consumer that they even put out music CDs with rootkits for people who listened to it on a PC.
But yeah, for over 2 decades Sony has been pretty much Evil.
I see someone remembers the 2005 rootkit debacle. Such assholes.
…and killing the dual boot feature of the PS3, and attacking Geohot for rooting the PS3 (so people could resume dual booting)…
Just buy a PC, fuck the consoles. That will teach em!!
Unfortunately even a super low spec pc is still double the price of a PS5.
Also the overwhelming majority of console owners are already 100% digital.
That’s not true at all, but yes consoles will be a bit more expensive than comparable Consoles.
What’s not true? The steam machine and comparable PCs are about USD$1200 when you add in a controller. The base PS5 is USD$650, or $600 for the digital one which is more comparable since the steam machine and PC’s are digital only.
The Steam machine isn’t as powerful as a PS5.
Yeah but you don’t pay monthly for internet access and you have tens of thousands more of pc exclusives
PS Plus is $80 a year for the basic and $160 a year for the ultra premium with like 300+ games. And they give you 3 free games a month even on basic. And if you buy a game, you can share the game with a friend and play online together with the same copy at the same time. With steam sharing one of you has to be offline on that game.
At $600 for the system and $80 a year that’s going to take over 6 and a half years before you hit the $1000 mark.
I have PC and PS5 and am in the middle of making cheaper PCs to get my friends to finally jump ship from PS’s BS and I can tell you absolutely with 100 percent certainty that the guy is right. It is not cheaper. It is way more expensive.
Not sure why he got down voted for that truth.
I’m resorting to making BC 250 builds for my friends (basically will pay a subscription cost through electric now but progress is progress) and it still isn’t cheaper for what you get with PlayStation.
But fuck them though killing off physical and throwing their weight behind ESA to try and make hosting your own game servers illegal and just years of anti consumer bullshit has made me intent on leaving them for good after this year.
From the digital side,you can purchase games from gog, which offers DRM free games. You can download the installers and use them in perpetuity.
Yeah, as long as you don’t want to play anything other than indies. GoG misses out on 99% of AA/AAA games specifically because of the lack of DRM.
Its getting better BG3 and Reanimal and a few other AAA games recently have made their way there.
I think selling it back from CD Projekt to the original creator will slowly see this change to where more and more games are found on there day one.
But yeah if a publisher is a dickhead and not budging on DRM steam or Epic is pretty much your only option. And that does tend to happen. But in that case it isn’t really GOGs fault for what the publisher won’t allow.
That’s the thing - it’s not GoG’s fault, but that doesn’t change the reality of the fact that it is a wasteland if you want recent AA/AAA games
The fact that CDPR sold it says to me that it’s never going to be anything more than it is now in regards to being a real alternative to steam. If CDPR couldn’t do it, with all their financial backing, no way in hell can a single guy.
Unsurprisingly, when a publisher is paying $100mil-$300mil to make a game, they don’t want it ending up on pirate bay and every other download site free of charge for all within an hour of release. They will never release on GoG without DRM.
Right now? Yes.
Before the AI bullshit, no. There was a ton of builds you could do for the cost of the PS5. Not everything needs to be current gen. On top of that most people who build a PC don’t upgrade it for a good 5+ years usually (if not longer), and you’re usually not upgrading everything at once, just the GPU usually. It’s not needed since games literally still run perfectly fine for years and years on older hardware. AM4 systems running ddr4 are now a decade old. I have an AM4 system running a 5800xt (second CPU) and a 6900xt (bought used), and it still handles pretty much everything on high settings @ 1080p, even new stuff that comes out.
That or buy a steam deck for like $300 used lol
Right now, and for the foreseeable future.
No one should be buying a steam deck, even a used one, in 2026 as their main gaming device. That makes the steam machine look like a 5090 powered beast.
People don’t want to buy a PC that already can’t play current gen games.
Yep. The steam deck was basically the equivalent of a budget PC stripped down and shoved into a handheld.
And this was 4 years ago when its new. Which relied heavily on low resolution and resolution scaling to even make due.
Now its even worse, especially with no significant price drop, and double especially with the ridiculous price increase they put on it.
Steam deck is an interesting device, and I’ll give valve credit for it. But its past its time, especially with the lack of price reductions.
Cowardly little shits.
I am imagining the marketers leaving the office with life jackets riding small boats. 🛟🚣
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.
There’s always Microsoft and Nintendo.
Shows how much they care lol
They are afraid haha. And they should be. Dammit.
they gotta come back sometime
Discs were already kinda starting to push their limits as far as their storage capacity on a single disc, it wouldn’t.be profitable with modern AAA games for much longer anyway IMO. 100GB bluray would be like 10-20 bucks on the raw disc alone IIRC
They would sell you a game on 20 discs if you’d buy it that way. The price of discs is negligible. They are trying to kill the availability of used games so they can charge $60 for 10 year-old games because there are no other options.
Blu ray discs cost pennies to manufacture, especially at scale.
Also, Sony owns the blu ray IP.
Also also, if they gave a fuck they could just ship 2 discs in a box. Like they did at the tail end of the xbox 360 days.
They’d just rather not deal with it anymore.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Sony stops producing Blu-ray soon.
We have the technology for the next generation of discs that could support 8k. It just happens to be that no one wants to put money into creating the standard.
Sony may not want to deal with it anymore.
Plus no one buys physical games anyway.
