Sony is erasing over 550 movies from PlayStation libraries without offering a single refund. If clicking "Buy" only grants access until a corporate licensing deal expires, the service is fundamentally broken.
I don’t get it. Steam doesn’t sell disks, right? The popular meme is that everyone is shooting themselves in the foot while Valve is doing nothing and winning. But now Sony is just saying they will do what Valve does. Why is everyone so pissed about it? Suddenly everyone loves disks?
People who cared about physical games haven’t been PC gamers for 20 years. You could still care about physical games on consoles until about last week.
Valve is also good to gamers with consumer friendly pricing and their client extends the gaming experience rather than running in the background, mostly useless like the console features and the other store fronts.
I also don’t care for steam but I’m not upset about it because I just stopped playing on PC for years. The games I do play, still came out on disc. I remember that CoD MW2 was the game that broke the camels back, even though you installed it off the disc, it still wouldn’t launch without steam. (Same with HL2 but I knew that going into it and didn’t buy it)
In a sense you’re correct but in reality it’s slightly different because Valve has competition with other digital storefronts as well as the rare physical PC release. Even though Sony are also the ones manufacturing PlayStation discs, they were sold by third parties, and even had the used market for their digital storefront to compete with, keeping prices and sales comparatively in check. If you can only get PlayStation games from a single place, price fixing is going to be easy because customers have nowhere else to go.
I would be curious how that will work with anti-trust legislation. At least currently, there’s an argument that Sony does not prevent people from buying games from other sources, or other publishers from publishing physical games for their consoles.
That’s no longer the case if they switch to a purely digital model, since they become the sole source of all the games on PlayStation, and have unilateral authority over them. The only place you can get a game on a digital model is Sony.
Since the iPhone was released, Apple was the only place you could buy Apps from. The same has been true of a lot of niche appstore-driven devices, like VR headsets. It’ll be hard to argue that a game console, a device to run software, must produce that software on discs, and must sell those discs to other retailers.
In a way, this fight was going on between Epic and Apple over Fortnite back in 2020. Gamers just didn’t care because those devices didn’t have disc drives.
It’s hard to picture how competition could be formalized though. It’s a good thing Valve decided to create their own through the key system, but I can’t picture Sony doing something similar. We might lose discs no matter what happens - I am still trying to think through how we might win back ownership and control regardless. With a lot of goods, you could just claim price competition on things like games, but when so many gamers could barely afford one console to begin with, hardly anyone will afford a second to take advantage of Xbox prices or something.
It’s more than the discs. It’s about the fact that you’re not owning what you purchase and you can spend as much as you like on digital and one day, poof, it’ll be gone and so will your money. Discs aren’t able to be deleted. Even if a format goes obsolete, there’s media players like vlc that will play them.
That’s what it’s about.
Like video games
You can buy all the games you want on steam if goes away after 90 days that’s just how it is but when you buy a game for a system at a what 80$-120$ a game you expect to play it forever be able to play it when the wifi goes out, be able to play with your friends, be able to save your data but all that is online and they’re able to use that against the consumer.
They took split screen, they forced us to use internet, they took memory cards, they dissolved servers. What more can they do oh yeah make it so we don’t actually own the game.
There was a reason people bought consoles. One of those was physical media and the fact you actually owned your copy, could resell it and lend it out. So this has nothing to do with Valve who has almost always been digital. If you want to compare it, you’d need a hypothetical like “Valve always sold digital games but will now switch to disk only games.”
Because they didn’t even wait a week since they showed that they can take away your purchases from you library. At least Valve to my knowledge never pulled a gane from libraries, even if the game was pulled from the store.
I’ve got Unreal Tournament 3 (and all of the UT games) on steam. Those games haven’t been available to purchase on steam for a long time now, not since the Epic games store started up.
I can still download and play those games from steam today. I can still play them with people who bought them on other storefronts.
Steam has been in the news a lot lately for “Anti-consumer” policies, like requiring their storefront games to be the same version as any other store front, forcing developers to sell DLC on Steam if that DLC is available anywhere else, forcing publisher to price their games the same on steam as they are anywhere else… And all those things are pro-consumer, I feel protected from shitty publishers because of the strong requirements Steam has to list items on their storefront.
Now, I will say that Steam, like any other digital storefront, has the opportunity to really fuck us over, and the protections from that was always the existence of physical media. Steam was built from the ground up to compete with owning physical copies of your games. Other digital storefronts have been built with the sole goal of competing with Steam. After physical media is dead, Steam will only have to compete with those other storefronts, and will only need to offer better services than the likes of Sony…who is deleting your purchases and keeping the money.
Besides what others mentioned (Valve being kept in check, barely, and offering more service as a platform), I think Sony can’t afford to do what Valve does, because on equal footing they lose.
Sony saves you a bit of money on the hardware purchase, a small benefit if you buy a lot of games. Maybe some exclusives.
Steam lets you mod the game, play it on whatever device you want (PC now, PC you get in 10 years, Deck, Windows, Linux, likely even some Android devices in the future), and twink the settings to whatever you want, for whatever resolution, quality, or framerate you want. (Edit: also, your device doesn’t become a useless box if Valve becomes evil)
Physicals and exclusives are just about the only thing consoles have going for them, and Sony just lost one.
(Oh, and they lost couch gaming too, because SteamOS is opening up)
I don’t get it. Steam doesn’t sell disks, right? The popular meme is that everyone is shooting themselves in the foot while Valve is doing nothing and winning. But now Sony is just saying they will do what Valve does. Why is everyone so pissed about it? Suddenly everyone loves disks?
People who cared about physical games haven’t been PC gamers for 20 years. You could still care about physical games on consoles until about last week.
Valve is also good to gamers with consumer friendly pricing and their client extends the gaming experience rather than running in the background, mostly useless like the console features and the other store fronts.
I also don’t care for steam but I’m not upset about it because I just stopped playing on PC for years. The games I do play, still came out on disc. I remember that CoD MW2 was the game that broke the camels back, even though you installed it off the disc, it still wouldn’t launch without steam. (Same with HL2 but I knew that going into it and didn’t buy it)
In a sense you’re correct but in reality it’s slightly different because Valve has competition with other digital storefronts as well as the rare physical PC release. Even though Sony are also the ones manufacturing PlayStation discs, they were sold by third parties, and even had the used market for their digital storefront to compete with, keeping prices and sales comparatively in check. If you can only get PlayStation games from a single place, price fixing is going to be easy because customers have nowhere else to go.
Makes sense, thanks.
I would be curious how that will work with anti-trust legislation. At least currently, there’s an argument that Sony does not prevent people from buying games from other sources, or other publishers from publishing physical games for their consoles.
That’s no longer the case if they switch to a purely digital model, since they become the sole source of all the games on PlayStation, and have unilateral authority over them. The only place you can get a game on a digital model is Sony.
Since the iPhone was released, Apple was the only place you could buy Apps from. The same has been true of a lot of niche appstore-driven devices, like VR headsets. It’ll be hard to argue that a game console, a device to run software, must produce that software on discs, and must sell those discs to other retailers.
In a way, this fight was going on between Epic and Apple over Fortnite back in 2020. Gamers just didn’t care because those devices didn’t have disc drives.
It’s hard to picture how competition could be formalized though. It’s a good thing Valve decided to create their own through the key system, but I can’t picture Sony doing something similar. We might lose discs no matter what happens - I am still trying to think through how we might win back ownership and control regardless. With a lot of goods, you could just claim price competition on things like games, but when so many gamers could barely afford one console to begin with, hardly anyone will afford a second to take advantage of Xbox prices or something.
It’s more than the discs. It’s about the fact that you’re not owning what you purchase and you can spend as much as you like on digital and one day, poof, it’ll be gone and so will your money. Discs aren’t able to be deleted. Even if a format goes obsolete, there’s media players like vlc that will play them.
That’s what it’s about.
Like video games
You can buy all the games you want on steam if goes away after 90 days that’s just how it is but when you buy a game for a system at a what 80$-120$ a game you expect to play it forever be able to play it when the wifi goes out, be able to play with your friends, be able to save your data but all that is online and they’re able to use that against the consumer.
They took split screen, they forced us to use internet, they took memory cards, they dissolved servers. What more can they do oh yeah make it so we don’t actually own the game.
There was a reason people bought consoles. One of those was physical media and the fact you actually owned your copy, could resell it and lend it out. So this has nothing to do with Valve who has almost always been digital. If you want to compare it, you’d need a hypothetical like “Valve always sold digital games but will now switch to disk only games.”
It’s why they got rid of memory cards and split screen. More people to buy their own games and systems.
Because they didn’t even wait a week since they showed that they can take away your purchases from you library. At least Valve to my knowledge never pulled a gane from libraries, even if the game was pulled from the store.
I’ve got Unreal Tournament 3 (and all of the UT games) on steam. Those games haven’t been available to purchase on steam for a long time now, not since the Epic games store started up.
I can still download and play those games from steam today. I can still play them with people who bought them on other storefronts.
Steam has been in the news a lot lately for “Anti-consumer” policies, like requiring their storefront games to be the same version as any other store front, forcing developers to sell DLC on Steam if that DLC is available anywhere else, forcing publisher to price their games the same on steam as they are anywhere else… And all those things are pro-consumer, I feel protected from shitty publishers because of the strong requirements Steam has to list items on their storefront.
Now, I will say that Steam, like any other digital storefront, has the opportunity to really fuck us over, and the protections from that was always the existence of physical media. Steam was built from the ground up to compete with owning physical copies of your games. Other digital storefronts have been built with the sole goal of competing with Steam. After physical media is dead, Steam will only have to compete with those other storefronts, and will only need to offer better services than the likes of Sony…who is deleting your purchases and keeping the money.
Ok, so it’s not as much about physical media as about Sony being shitty company. Thanks.
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/0/3421063428074619863/
Yep, they won’t
Besides what others mentioned (Valve being kept in check, barely, and offering more service as a platform), I think Sony can’t afford to do what Valve does, because on equal footing they lose.
Sony saves you a bit of money on the hardware purchase, a small benefit if you buy a lot of games. Maybe some exclusives.
Steam lets you mod the game, play it on whatever device you want (PC now, PC you get in 10 years, Deck, Windows, Linux, likely even some Android devices in the future), and twink the settings to whatever you want, for whatever resolution, quality, or framerate you want. (Edit: also, your device doesn’t become a useless box if Valve becomes evil)
Physicals and exclusives are just about the only thing consoles have going for them, and Sony just lost one. (Oh, and they lost couch gaming too, because SteamOS is opening up)