“Fiduciary responsibility”
Thanks Milton Friedman!
Well this will be my last PlayStation. I only buy discs so I can trade them with my friends.
I’ve been years buying digital for PC but never did once on PS4, PS3 or XBOX 360, I mean what the point? The only reason to have a console was so that you can sell your discs once played or lending to friends.
We used to be able to do that with PC games, too. But then Valve and Apple killed physical PC games.
Apple killed physical PC games
Valve, sure. But this is a leap of such inscrutable logic that I have to hear more about it.
How did apple do it?
Besides steam offers a digital storefront, and I have seen their own games on physical. Its dofferemt when it is an open competitive market.
only responds to their investors…
Did you know this is legally enforceable? The shareholders can sue a publicly company if it doesn’t prioritize ‘shareholder value’. For example a company that cut profit instead of doing layoffs.
It’s not spoiled leadership, but a rotten ecosystem that breeds amphibian avarice as the dominant culture.
No, a company cannot be sued for failing to maximize shareholder value. The business judgment rule protects any company that wants to raise wages, refrain from layoffs, donate to charity, offer sick leave, etc. What they can’t do is not pursue profit at all. Now, will shareholders vote them out if they do those things? Maybe, but that’s a totally different mechanism than a lawsuit.
As I understand business judgement rule makes the assumption that the company did its decisions in good faith. It doesn’t mean a shareholder derivative lawsuit can’t happen. The shareholders can still sue, and there have been instances where it has been done, but in addition to suing the shareholders would then have to prove loss of profits alongside negligence or bad faith or whatever led to the loss of profits.
Realistically this shouldn’t happen as it probably costs more to prove the company didn’t make every penny of profit it could, but we live in weird times where things that shouldn’t happen do happen so let’s not count out the improbable.
Digital isnt the worst thing, but how “ownership” is controlled can be. I wouldn’t blame Sony for the move but their method is garbage, and their past practices with digital ownership is too.
GoG on the other hand knows how it should be done. I have tons of games from them on a thumb drive. I’ve never actually needed to use it, but its nice to know I can. Major kudos to them.
That said, most of my games are owned on steam, which still has DRM, but at least I can play those games on a 20 year old PC, a modern one, a box in my living room, or on a multitude of hand helds. With Sony you are tied to a specific console and thats that. Good fucking luck when they stop selling that console.
DRM on Steam is up to the publisher.
No. It’s impossible to sell a game DRM-free on Steam. They always require a connection to Valve’s servers to install, regardless of what the publisher wants. GOG lets you download the installer as a file that you can use wherever or whenever you want.
We really need a c/confidentlyincorrect comm for people like you
Ehh, pretty sure they know what they’re talking about, they just have what I consider a really bad take about it, and present it as absolute fact. Because yes, you need a connection to steam to “install” a game from steam, whereas you can predownload a GOG game and then not need a connection to install. Which doesn’t really matter to most people, since they don’t care about having the game use an official installer, as opposed to either an unofficial one or just archived game files, but it is a difference.
Then they’re being deliberately obtuse to make a point. Valve treats downloading and installing as the same thing so needing a connection to “install” a steam game is functionally no different than needing a connection to “download” the installer from GOG and then installing the game. Once Steam has installed the game and it has no actual DRM you can just copy it wherever you like. GOG gives a much better package for storing your games but that doesn’t mean what Steam does is DRM.
I mean yes… kind of. You can go to your library in gog and download (slowly speed-limited and broken into 4 gb chunks for some damn reason) which means no client needed.
But steam does have games that are DRM free after that first install. Ones that you can copy directly out of the folder and put them anywhere and run. Steam no longer needed.
There is a list here https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam although it suggests its about 600 games more that arent on the list yet.
What would really grind Sony’s gears is if everyone stops updating their system and waits for the PS5 Linux hacks to catch up to their firmware version. Then, they install Linux and get Steam working and only buy digital games from Steam and GOG, or emulate older games, on their Linux hacked PS5.
Likely won’t happen. Consoles these days are getting almost impossible to jailbreak.
Even cracking it to play ps5 titles would be amazing. Otherwise, idk what I’m doing with it.
Nintendo churns out the same slop franchises year after year and aggressively sues anyone for anything.
Sony (somehow) believes that investors are what give their company value, not customers, and certainly not employees. They’re abandoning physical media and not backing down on their anti-consumer practices that only continue to get worse.
Microsoft has become the new EA, aggressively buying up every single schmedium-sized gaming studio they can get their hands on, mismanageing them all into the ground, then selling them off for parts to save their own asses while leaving talented studios to die on the vine. They’re basically buying the right to scrap their competition and they’ll get away with it because they have enterprise IT subscriptions to absorb the losses.
AAA gaming is dead. And greed killed it. I’ll be playing indie PC games and emulators for the foreseeable future.
they are lucky pokemon is sustaining nintendo directly and indirectly, even its mostly slop games. even the physical card game became kinda like slop.
luckily they wernt succesful against Palword, which is producing a better game than the consoles.
Nintendo churns out the same slop franchises
looks at most highly rated video games of all time
Look mate, not everything you don’t personally like is “slop”.
Popularity does not imply quality.
I’ve played the recent Zelda games. They’re okay. But also disgustingly overrated.
Slop implies bare bones, generic, repetitive design, and thrown together quick. Say what you want about Zelda, but it has never been any of those.
op probably meant pokemon, which is pretty SLlop since SWSH.
They’re painfully mediocre. The gameplay is straight out of Assassin’s Creed 2 with some Skyrim sprinkles for good measure. Run to the tower, reveal the map, do the quest, check the box, go to the next one, maybe stumble across a cave with some minor loot. Snooze.
That’s funny, because I would describe Breath of the Wild as the antithesis of the open world design, popularized by Ubisoft, that was most ubiquitous when BotW came out. You climb a tower and decide what’s interesting by seeing it from the top of the tower, not because climbing the tower labeled it as a checklist item on your map. In fact, if you do all of the shrines visible from the top of the towers, you’ve only done about half of them, and late in the game, after stumbling across a few shrines by happenstance, you realize from the negative space on the map that anything you couldn’t see from the top of the tower would tend to have a puzzle to solve that would reveal it.
You’re disgustingly overrated. Botw is the greatest game ever. You wouldn’t know good game design if it kicked you in the ass.
And the Switch titles in all of those franchises range from some of, to the flat out worst, in their respective series.
TotK may as well be DLC for BotW, and Windwaker would have been more similar to those titles were it not for the technical limitations of the Gamecube.
They still can’t seem to get Starfox right since 64 and even that was a reboot of the NES title. You’re really gonna look at all those 3DS attempts to reboot the same NES game and tell me that’s not slop?
Pokémon is seeing the worst quality of the whole franchise on Switch and apparently Pokémon Go was just to train military robots or some shit. You’re really gonna look at 3DS models in a Switch game and tell me that’s not slop, my opinion is just wrong?
Smash Ultimate’s online play has 11, ELEVEN frames of input lag under ideal circumstances, the metagame has been busted since Steve, DLC characters are OP, patches were promised, then canceled, and support is over now. You’re really gonna tell me that’s acceptable, totally not slop, my opinion just sucks?
I hope you play Switch games forever, and I hope you love it.
some of, to the flat out worst, in their respective series.
TOTK/BOTW
Look mate, not everything you don’t personally like is “slop”.
And your other cases are pokemon (who’s been accused of sinking since the 3DS days) and Smash’s online. Not even the game, its netcode (which if we’re being real is bad for 99% of Nintendo games). We don’t need to invent reasons to hate Nintendo, okay.
Ive thought slop is ai specific. Looks like the word may be seeing a change in meaning.
Slop has a long history as word used about art. Joeseph Cambell mentions it, people criticsed hollywood of it, publishers complained about it.
I remember those days using the term slop for lazy, uninspired, thowing anything that stuck on the wall, etc. AI is just a logical progression of the same term.
People tend to use it to mean, “thing I don’t like” far too often these days.
This is criticism slop
People just love stating their opinions as facts, and you can’t really give entirely objective opinions about art. When people say this game was amazing/terrible because of some subjective opinion they usually mean I loved/hated this game because that’s what I love/hate.
Greed has been a problem in the AAA game space for a long time. It’s just that before reliable Internet connections, it was harder to exploit people.
Before this, it was lootboxes and gambling mechanics, before that, it was microtransactions, balancing the game to incentivise spending money, and before that it was chopping bits off the game and selling it as DLC.
Prior to that, the worst we got was cheap sequels and shovelware.
It’s all about maximizing shareholder value. Unfortunately, companies have come to the realization that happy customers are no longer the path to success. There is more value in capturing a market and then gutting services to squeeze those pennies out. Long term this can’t be sustainable but here we are.
they will just end up putting mtx into everything.
There’s a whole wide world of AAA video games out there aside from those you mentioned. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II was fantastic just last year; Metaphor: ReFantazio the year before that; Baldur’s Gate 3 the year before that; Elden Ring the year before that. Plenty more still might be significantly smaller, but it would be difficult to count something like The Alters as indie; or Invincible VS or Screamer or Mouse: P.I. for Hire.
Indie doesn’t mean “small and pixel art game”. It means the studio is independent. Kingdom Come and BG3 were made by independent studios with little to no help from pubblishers (if any at all).
The rest you mentioned at max could be considered AA or simply A games IF there was a pubblisher behind them helping with development. What you said was a world of AAA games aside those mentioned is actually a world out there aside AAA games.
And all of those are available on an open platform digitally if not available on physical media.
Maybe controversial, but I and most of my friends have said fuck GTA6. We’ll wait to see what happens with the PC release.
don’t need these shitty corporations and their walled platforms…
First ive heard of it!
Love this project so much
Sony didn’t really “double down”. The decision to wind down their physical games category was made years ago. Everything after the initial public announcement is to manage public relations.
Not sure many outside Japan realise but Sony are a conglomerate that dip their fingers into unrelated industries. This to them is clearly just a line through a smaller category on the balance sheet.
There’s a discussion to be had about ownership and physical games but i think that market is going to re-emerge in the future in perhaps a more bespoke way, like the resurgence of music vinyls.
To me, Sony seems to be interested in just managing the distribution of IP opposed to “gaming” itself. They’re not true custodians in that space or if they were, then they’re not now.
2 clarifications:
1 - because of Sony’s requirements for printing physical discs, it requires permission and effort from Sony itself. A company cannot simply burn blurays for playstation games, they MUST engage Sony. This isn’t interest in “just managing of the IP,” this is specifically to increase profit by removing physical needs altogether (shipping, manufacturing, distribution, etc) as well as snuffing out the second hand market which, in theory, would drive more profit towards Sony, and finally it provides control. Access can be revoked, products become fluid, and the store can remove your access to older versions if a remake or remaster comes out that you would then have to buy on the new storefront. No new market can spring up with a resurgence in terms of Sony as Sony would have to allow it, being a closed console platform.
2 - they directly respond to shareholder questions around the backlash to the announcement, which they refer to as “various opinions.” They did not retract their statement or change course and choose to push forward. How is that not doubling down?
“There are various reasons we made this decision, the biggest being that the digitalization of content overall has been progressing. That’s the big factor,” he said. "It’s not just for PlayStation, but for all kinds of content; digitalization is progressing. And so, when we think about the future – and we put in a lot of thought and time, and we cautiously considered this – and we came to this conclusion, and we’re going to cautiously move this forward.
Tao added, “And to this decision, we have received various opinions and people have strong views, and we understand that the community has put forth those views to us.”
i was referring to physical games as a whole and not necessarily tied to Playstation games or their discs.
They’ve been transitioning this specific manufacturing division since 2024. It can’t be a “double down” because they’re not going to revert two years of already re-trained staff and re-purposed equipment because of online forum talk.
Messages to shareholders like this is pretty standard. They’re basically saying:
- decision is final
- components manufacturing is more lucrative than disc manufacturing
- we will distribute our IP
So they’re hedging their bets on what their future could be. If they lose out on gaming they’ll make back on microlenses.
Stand-down August 23rd-30th. Want to send a fuck you to Sony? Fuck their profits, then they’ll understand.
Not saying don’t do it, but it’s a blip on the radar. As someone who works in tech, a week blackout looks like a bunch of people going on vacation. Especially during August, which is during many summer vacations.
Never buy a digital title for a console. If you need to buy digital, buy it on the open hardware platform.
If you really want to send a message, deleting your account or cancelling PS plus if you have it does more. That shows a decline in MoM retention.
Timed boycotts are an assimilation to corporate control. If the goal of a boycott is to affect change it must be indefinite as the change it wishes to bring about is required to end it.
Do it this week, next week, the week after…
No tangible amount of people are going to put their money where their mouth is. Gamers have time and time again shown that they can be screwed over. I mean look at the state of the big games now and games as a service taking over, people are happily paying $20+ for a skin in a game, something that used to come included with the game as an unlock.
Not saying you’re wrong but the backlash to this Sony decision seems to have most gamers up in arms. Maybe even waking up a little bit. Maybe I’m too hopeful though.
If your friends agree, just spread the word, there’s no need to spend on those skins when there’s soooo many indie titles out there. Hours and hours of content to keep us busy and direct money away from Sony, Microsoft, etc.
Get some drm free games on GoG.
I’ve already primarily moved to PC over the last year or so but this whole incident has opened my eyes to the jailbreak scene. I have a PS5 for the exclusives but they will no longer get a dime from me and I will not be buying any of their consoles going forward.
🤝
It’s not just gamers. All of these performative bucking of the norm lasts a few days then back to business as usual. People don’t want to give up their comforts for lasting change.
Nobody has explained how simply not using the console you already bought would affect their profits negatively at all. If anything, it will lower their server costs from the reduced bandwidth for a month.
Just stop buying anything from Sony until they get the message. No music, no games, no subscriptions, no movies, no media players or proprietary media (ie BluRay disks regardless of what they are for; even Xbox games), no hardware, etc.
As long as you keep using the console you’re still in the walled garden: you’re giving them data to harvest, being exposed to their ads, padding their MAU numbers… Server costs are negligible - it’s what allows F2P to work as a monetization model.
^ now that’s a boycott
Gave it a go this week. Did some Gardening made a friend :
At least someone likes my cauliflower 👍
Felt pretty okay with it tbh. Will give it another go on the 23rd.
