Apparently some lawsuits have started on Sony’s potential price-fixing of all games on their platform since they’re now the only retailer. Before anyone gets excited, these are probably going nowhere, but it’s neat that something is happening. The idea seems similar to the Epic vs Apple/Google lawsuits.
This is a valid observation, but also much more widespread than just Sony.
Xbox, Google Android, Apple, Oculus; there’s probably others. Many electronics companies have made devices that can only interface with their own App Store, in a digital fashion.
And that’s not me excusing it. A perfect world should probably have alternatives - but it does also make one worry that in that future, manufacturers wouldn’t have any incentive to sell their consoles under manufacturing costs.
Something the lawsuit may have to deal with is whether Sony can be aggressively forced into building a disc reader into consoles, in a world where many devices have no such thing.
I foresee a future of jail broken PlayStations and games on flash drives. Raise the sails me mateys!
They’ve longed lobbied for anti-circumvention legislation and the corrupt politicians in the US and the rest of the World (with the EU Comission as a notable mention) have made sure it was implemented everywhere, exactly to avoid such a future.
The entire rotten edifice of Intellectual Property in the present day is literally the product of decades of corrupt politicians stealing more and more from the Public Domain to extend and protect this entirelly artificial kind of “property” for the benefit of the ultra-rich - as Digital became more and more important, laws were made or changed to take more and more rights away from common people in order to make the wealthy wealthier, which is why the richest people in the world right now are mainly in Tech.
I was there in the 90s when this corrupt destruction of the “commons” started limiting what could be done in the Digital domain and saw how we Techies lost that war, which is how we ended up with two decades of every more and ever more enshittified “closed garden” setups for all kinds of digital things.
Without shit like anti-circumvention legislation run of the mill people would have easy access in their friendly corner store to China-made devices doing things like what you describe or, for example, break your iPhone out of Apple’s closed garden.
The shit low-innovation (certainly when compared to the 90s) World we live in right now is the product of decades of this purposeful transforming of the digital and intellectual commons into a Feudal system.
I foresee a future of jail broken PlayStations
To be fair, that future is now. People are already hacking PS5’s to turn them into Linux machines
That only works for launch machines that have never been updated though.
The worse part is that Sony is already using adaptive pricing in their online store. Every user has a profile and the prices are based on previous behavior. Users who spent a lot and impulsively buy games no matter if they’re on sale will pay more.
Greed is a demon.
Sony:
If we can’t choose to buy physical games, we need to have the option of where we can digitally buy them.
Aren’t they going to still sell boxed copies with a digital code inside them? Like what GTA6 is doing.
That gives retailers the ability to have pricing competition, and could result in lower digital prices on PSN too - unless sony prevents them from being sold below their PSN price.
I agree that discs are outdated and can’t hold enough data for the whole game and they should turn to cartridges.
You want $300 games? Cause that’s how you get $300 games lol.
The price of RAM makes cartridges unaffordable.
Oh man full circle back to cartridges would be hilarious.
Observe! The ancient dust blowing technique.
Or you could find another hobby and be done with it all.
Not on a Sony platform.
What if we find a compromise? Instead of getting rid of discs entirely, perhaps Sony could make them smaller. Like some kind of… mini-disc? 😛
We just need to return to these bad boys.
I have some blank floppies I use as coasters. Seriously, though, just changing the physical format the games are distributed on would be a very smart move.
Nintendo not just keeping physical media but going back to cartridges with the Switch and now the Switch 2 has been a fantastic move for them. They increased the price of their console, same as MS and Sony, but it hasn’t gone up nearly as much since the system has barely any storage space in it. And it doesn’t really need the storage because games don’t need to install to compensate for the relatively low optical drive read speeds. Sure, games are the same price or even a bit higher so total cost of ownership after a few years is probably comparable, but the lower buy-in cost has caused them to rapidly gain market share.
I do like physical media, but my gripe about the switch is the damn size of the cartridges.
I got kids and trying to keep track of those itty bitty carts is a constant annoyance. I can’t even get them to keep their fucking shoes in the right spot and those are 100x bigger.
I wish they’d consider that, not because they need to be but just for durability and keeping track of them.
I hope people will just stop playing on PlayStation (or any console for that matter) and go over to PC with Steam (and 🏴☠️).
Consoles, the game prices and the practices of these corporations ain’t worth the money, time and effort.
Yeah, stick to the companies that really care about the consumer like Intel, Gigabyte, and NVIDIA! 🤡
All resistance is futile, unless (the vast majority of) people will not buy it at all. But they, as usual, will do that anyway, no matter what.
Most people seem to not see the longterm implications of things or just don’t understand or care.
There are an estimated 3,600,000,000 active video game players worldwide…
Why does it never occur to anyone in these threads that YOU might just be an insignificant but vocal minority?
Or they completely understand and are ok with it.
Which surely will be the minority. I don’t care either as I don’t like consoles. But I like customer rights.
Nah most people understand how digital stuff works compared to physical, since every other media format has already gone through this transition. People know that songs and movies get removed from streaming services and digital stores. People know how it works on steam and mobiles, which have been digital only for years.
Obviously. But steam already killed the used game-market many moons ago. And physical games. I boycotted them for years when they launched, knowing how it would end. And here we are. Physical PC games totally eradicated. Gifting away games I’m done with to poorer people who like to game too? Gone. Buying a semi interesting game for half price used? Nope. All gone. And if you buy a physical box, you get a key and a disc with an outdated installer at best.
Remember doom shareware?
But even I caved in and spend 100k on steam games I will never own. At least they offer a great deal of service around it. As long as gaben lives…
Movies and series I exclusively pirate. Music bandcamp, as I can still own the shit I buy.
OK cool, so you see how it’s probably actually the majority that understands the physical/digital trade-off, and they’re ok with it.
The console market has ceded market share to PC over the past few decades specifically because a growing portion of the market sees that it’s cheaper over time. Everyone knows about Steam sales being better than the equivalent on consoles, whether they know it’s because of increased market competition or not. More and more people have shown that they’re doing the math on subscriptions to play online and realizing that it’s not a good deal. When you cut out the physical market and its own methods of keeping purchase prices down, more people still will do the math and decide not to engage.
The actual data does not support your conclusion.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2020/11/gaming-games-consels-xbox-play-station-fun/
Fair points… Guess we will see when the new PS/Xbox hit the market. I hope you’re right…
total price control
Isn’t this the same line they used with Steam?
Can’t you just… buy a different console?
But what if you already bought a console? It shouldn’t be held hostage by Sony selling games at 100$ in the future. A PC without Steam is still a PC.
…Nespresso, SodaStream, Swiffer, HP, Gillette, Glade, Brita, Oral-B, Cricut, GE, Keurig, iRobot, Dyson, Shark, Breville, Weber, Traeger, Pentair, Ring, and Tovala enter the chat…
This is a feature they’re rolling out, specifically with an eye towards the PS6. As far as I’m aware, that console hasn’t even been released yet.
If Sony is retailing games for $100 on their new console, that would strongly dissuade me from buying the console.
A PC without Steam is still a PC.
When the PS2 released, it was a cheaper blueray player than the current iteration of retail blueray players. People would buy the console just to watch movies.
The direction consoles have gone make them more like PCs with a home entertainment configuration than video game machines with some extra bells and whistles.
PS2 was a cheap DVD player, PS3 was a cheap Blu-Ray player, but your point stands.
And the OG Playstation was a cheap CD player. There’s still a cult following for the “audiophile” variant.
By the time the PS1 came out, lots of people already had CD players though. They weren’t cheap, but they weren’t crazy expensive either. DVD and Blu-Ray were in their infancy as the consoles were released, and they were the cheapest options available for playing them.
That’s a pretty big boost for console ownership.
When the PS2 released, it was a cheaper blueray player than the current iteration of retail blueray players. People would buy the console just to watch movies.
Tbh, I think Valve needs to design an addon for the Steam Machine that’s a blu-ray player that hooks onto the side or bottom, and add support for running blu-rays from Game Mode. It wouldn’t require any extra ram or storage, so it wouldn’t fluctuate in price but add value
Even less people care about blu-ray movies than care about physical games.
Except not. There’s currently a resurgence of people buying and using Blu-Ray movies, just like vinyl records
A resurgence that’s still a rounding error in size compared to digital.
So you have nothing to add to the conversation besides negativity and contrarianism? You can be safely ignored then.
Tbh, I think Valve needs to design an addon for the Steam Machine that’s a blu-ray player that hooks onto the side or bottom
Congratulations, you just invented Sega CD.
