Unlike Steam keys, there are no ways to distribute Playstation keys outside of Playstation platform. By removing retailers and second hand markets, what exactly would make Sony or any other publishers to continue offering any deep discounts on their products on a closed platform, especially when their biggest competitor Xbox has dropped the ball heavily.

I constantly rotate physical games for my PS5.

I'm in the UK, and CeX is a great shop to trade in a game for store credit once I'm finished with it, then pickup whatever I want to play next. Most of the time I can completely cover the cost of the next game with the credit received from the trade, or use some store credit leftover from a previous visit!

When a Sony studio Insomniac Games were hacked and a lot of internal documents were leaked, there were statistics for Sony's first party titles and their sales stats and what the split was between physical and digital sales[0] and for some of the titles, they sold mostly physical compared to digital. Apologies for poor quality, couldn't find a better image

[0] - https://imgur.com/lDhRmUh

My thought as well. "Great" timing.

Because if they don't offer a used virtual marketplace, everyone has to buy new games directly from them.

A used game market provides downwards pressure on new games.

There are almost no new physical releases on PC, sadly. I’ve been collecting older games on CD and DVD.

Ironic that you mention MS because also ironically, around the PS4 launch there was a lot of brouhaha about MS not allowing transfering games, while for the PS4 launch video they showed how easy it is to transfer games (just hand over a disk).

I hate it. I hate digital only games. I get that the numbers and reality are against my wishes but that doesn't make it any better. I want to unpack my console from storage in 20 years and play the games I bought for it even if the company or servers no longer exist.

When buying a gaming console, I imagine folks think more about the upfront cost ($600 for PS5 vs $1,050 for steam machine) as opposed to the total cost of ownership.

The steam machine may be cheaper in the long run once you consider:

* Playing PlayStation games online costs $11/month.

* PlayStation games tend to be more expensive than steam games.

> That will put them in direct competition with Steam, though. Suddenly their cheaper console will result in way higher cost for the lifetime of the console.

...funny that so many people were complaining about the recent Steam Machine not being worth it compared to just getting a PS5; maybe now it's not that bad of a deal after all, huh?

Due to the steam sales and deep discounting its easy to buy games on steam for much cheaper then the consoles. For console where a game may be £60 for several years, buying physical means you can resell. For anyone with a budget, it makes a huge difference on how many games you can play.

They won't be releasing new Blu Rays for decades. Outside of collectors, why would they? Unless there is a hidden market for the discs elsewhere it's not worth it

Why would anyone “buy” movies from PlayStation. That’s not their business, I would never have expected them to be in it for the long haul, just like MS did a rug pull on this a few years ago didn’t they?

steam games don't have discs either

the real problem here isn't lack of plastic circles

To solve what exactly? Sure you will punish Sony but that won't bring optical media back. We need to accept and move on with the times.

Sony won a whole console generation on not being knobheads (as much as MS).

Steam normalized the loss of resale rights on PC long before the consoles caught up. Younger people don't even realize it's a right that prior generations gave up.

Why would someone ever buy new, if that was the case?

If the console is diskless, it will be the last console I ever buy from that company. Sucks to say that about Sony but this is an incredibly out of touch move, that will always linger in the back of gamers minds that it could be tried again in the future if rolled back.

Disc consoles are superior in nearly every way:

- Disc consoles also have a hard drive, best of both worlds.

- You own the physical game. You don't own the digital version, just a license to it, which can be revoked, and deleted.

- You can trade games in 2 seconds.

- People can collect and play hundreds of games over the years on an moments notice, not waiting to download something. Games do try to compete to have the most of the players time, but it's not how all gamers play.

- Patches are normal for all games, and patches are usually smaller sizes than the entire game.

- Vintage is kind of popular now. None of those vintage systems, the original PS1/2/3/4 or Nintendos would be able to be experienced easily or at all if the physical media still didn't exist and survive. Digital platforms disappear when the system is EOL. Emulators can help, but it's a specialty and niche crowd. Handing a Nintendo to kids is something else.

For me: resale value and being able to buy used games for cheap.

One reason is control. You control the physical media. You can sell it, you can buy used games, let people borrow them, etc.

This affects less people, but there are also many who like collecting them. Physical objects are nice, especially if you've been keeping all your old games for old consoles.

Which also ties into control of course: you can still play your games, even if the companies that made them and the console no longer exist, buy old games from retro shops, buy new games for old consoles from new indie devs, etc.

Because Sony and all digital publishers with the exception of GOG are lying thieves. This is just another step in getting rid of ownership, and we are too naive and passive to stand up against it. Physical copies are a must to retain any sense of ownership over purchased games. If this is done, it must be forbidden to show "Purchase" on playstation store as that implies ownership,which it will never be. Also just look at the parallel issue that happened exactly these days with Sony deleting purchased movies from libraries. The same will happen with games. This is legalized theft.

> middle finger to second hand and physical stores

They've seen the writing on the wall for at least a decade; that's why GameStop has more shelf space for Funko Pops than for games.

Counter-argument: I have a Steam account associated with a day 1 purchase of Half Life 2 (so, 25 years or so). Every game I've ever purchased is still available for me to download, while I lost probably 50% or more of my physical games collection.

If I'm renting those games, it sure seems like a good deal.

I do appreciate that console online market places have not historically been as well managed as Steam.

But also, GoG exists: you can buy a PC game and get a DRM-free download that you can play offline and store forever.

GOG will let you download the offline installer for every game they sell, IIRC.

Yeah, and Sony agrees it is stupid... they don't want a used games market.

Yes stupid for shareholders and until the EU comes in and saves the day again this will continue.

There's something to be said for creating a near monopoly and also having the ability to digitally revoke someones right to use something they purchased legally, which we'll see more of.

Regulations are needed to protect us.

This is what happens when you have a market controlled heavily by one player - they use that to their own advantage.

Just these big titles. The indie scene is thriving really well. I'd say let AAA die, we don't really need massively expensive cultural production to enable us to tell stories to each other.

Just these big titles. The indie scene is thriving really well. I'd say let AAA die, we don't really need massively expensive cultural production to enable us to tell stories to each other

Absolute shame, but to be fair the games that ship on disc without any patches are often in no shape to actually be played, so without the corresponding digital patch infrastructure it's already kinda problematic.

Obviously, preservation is in no way in the interest of the companies, they just want to keep selling you the same game over and over as remakes and remasters ad infinitum

Shit, they tried a while ago with a lot of pushback. I hope they don't. I love my vita, and while realistically anybody playing one nowadays has it hacked and can get games from wherever they please, it sucks that the only official way is going the way of the dodo

Rockstar has already announced there's no disk for GTA 6, if you buy a physical copy it's just a download code.

I'm guessing you know this already, but I thought it's worth saying - some Switch 2 carts only contain a game key and not the actual game.

https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/...

What about PC gaming? There are stores that sell you the game and it's yours to keep

You've illustrated exactly why Sony is getting rid of physical media.

Money.

I own a Nintendo Switch, and I've noticed that in the Nintendo store, old games regularly go on sale for in the ballpark of 80% off. Does that happen in the PS store?

You don't even need to go used. Discs constantly drop in price even new.

It's sadly not stupid from their perspective

> To illustrate why this is stupid, I will furnish two links to purchase Dark Souls 3 (PS4, 2016)

> Ebay, to buy: $11 + shipping[0]

> PS Store, to rent: $60[1]

Yeah, Sony is stupid to be leaving money on the table like that. Lucky for us, we live in a market system that we can trust to optimize for maximum consumer benefit (like Sony is doing here). It's our revealed choice that we want to pay more for old games.

For now, it's still possible to crack consoles and extract the games from disk. However, we are probably approaching an era where encryption / trusted computing is so good that future systems will never be cracked.

However, the flip side is that so many games are built using common game engines, and receive multi-platform releases. So there's a broader surface area for potential preservation. Maybe the PS6 version is permanently dead, but the PC version lives on.

Yes, those things cost money, but the money that we want to make, we want to make it today. And this is how we make it. What economic incentive is there for preservation?

(/takes off devil's advocate hat and puts on flame suit)

Closing the online store for older systems simultaneously with announcing the dropping of physical media leaves an interesting question for the future. Even if you’ve never bought an online PS3 or Vita game, you’ll still be able to use the systems for physical games. Presumably once the PS6 store is gone, any console is just an ornament if you don’t have access to an account with games already purchased (and how long will the download servers stay up anyway? What is the foreseeable future?).

Game companies should have to submit full copies of everything to run the game , servers and clients to the Library of Congress or Smithsonian for preservation

This is why I will not be buying a PlayStation 6. I've had my Steam account for 20 years (21 come October) and I can still download every single thing I've ever bought there. Why should I invest in buying PS6 games when they're gonna be made obsolete by Sony?

Why would physical copies matter for this? All physical games have to be signed by Sony anyways so it's not like a third-party can produce them.

In Brazil we have some websites that do this with old console games. Like this one: https://oldgame.com.br/

Microsoft just tried a generation too early. They could have gotten away with it this gen, and assuming 2028 will be start of next gen it looks like next gen it will go over without a fight.

> can i buy a game on steam

No you can't. When you pay for a Steam game, you rent not buy it.

It still costs double a PlayStation, but yeah, I just bought one. I have kids and a big Steam library, so I am actually saving money with that over a console

Red Dead Redemption 2 is €59.99 on Steam and if you wait for a sale €14.99

For PS4 you can buy the disc version for €19.99 regular price and €17.99 on sale. Used discs start from €9.

If you don’t mind waiting for a sale then Steam is great. Otherwise PlayStation is a better deal.

It was their business, because they sold them....

Maybe introduce virtual scratches? Or like maybe blur the textures a bit every time it's played?

It is still possible to actually buy PC games, not rent them.

I'm sure they can think of some things to make new copies a differentiator such as DLC's and perks in game.

Also, 'new games' eventually get discounted as the title gets old. It's one way of keeping money in the game store ecosystem constantly changing hands.

> steam games don't have discs either

Disc > Steam > Digital console

Steam games exist on physical media that players have some control over: I can copy my Steam data directory across PCs/Steam Deck, I would not be able to do that on a PlayStation.

Sure, I can't resell my Steam games, but the openness of the PC platform has advantages over closed consoles. Valve can't brick old games the way Sony can - a new computer in 2046 will be able to play single-player games backed-up from Steam, not so much for consoles.

I wonder if MS could eat their lunch in the same way, or if the market has changed enough that it won't matter.

Yeah, but games get bigger and more frequent discounts on pc, besides the base game price for a lot of games sometimes decreased after some years.

I have a PC and PS5, and bought game for PS5 just because they were on disk, despite that they would've ran and look much better on my pc.

Sony is releasing like 2 single-player games a year, I might get a PS6, but I'll be in not rush with so little offering, anything else I'll get on PC.

Steam has existed for an eternity compared to any console specific game store. It's not great that you can't resell what you have on Steam, but at least you get to 'keep' it.

Can’t I back them to physical media?

> One reason is control. You control the physical media. You can sell it, you can buy used games, etc.

Unless that game ties to your account and disc becomes useless, or you game need a day 1 patch or day 412 patch or game is online or disc actually just a dummy that lets you download the game. Yes, the (in)convince of physical media totally worth it just so can sell what I got for $40/60/70 for $4 store credit at gamestop. All to have less control than I have from digital download from steam or GOG on PC.

Unfortunately some switch 2 games are only available as digital download codes (e.g. Split Fiction) even though Xbox and PS5 physical versions are real discs. For now.

Even that Nintendo Switch 2 Game-Key Card implementation still works better for parent’s game reselling use case (for a limited time) than outright removing the physical media option as Sony is doing.

From the link you posted:

“Game-key cards are different from regular game cards, because they don’t contain the full game data. Instead, the game-key card is your "key" to downloading the full game to your system via the internet.

After it’s downloaded, you can play the game by inserting the game-key card into your system and starting it up like a standard physical game card. An internet connection is only required when you launch the game for the first time. After this, the game can be started even without an internet connection. However, like regular physical software, the game-key card must be inserted into the system in order to play the game. A Nintendo Account is not required to download the game data.”

So lending and reselling game-key cards is still possible in the same way as physical media… at least until Nintendo’s servers stop serving the game, heh.

Yeah I've seen those, and I deliberately haven't bought any games only available in that format.

They're theoretically a tiny bit better than download codes, but the same applies. If this is the format going forward, I'm out.

Like GOG? Yeah, I'm a bit more accepting of those, since they're DRM free. Being able to just copy and paste from one computer to another or what not is how I feel digital games should work, and how I know they don't work on console.

Steam isn't the Steam machine. If somebody's on a budget a PC you could get for a couple hundred is way more than enough to run nearly all games on Steam; $600 could get you a beast of a machine. I don't really know who the market for the Steam Machine is, because that price is kind of insane. I suppose we'll see how things look in a year or two there.

Why not? Maybe people already have an account there with payment set up, the console hooked up to the TV and soundbar and don't want do sign up somewhere else?

Furthermore, Sony Pictures is huge, so selling movies is absolutely part of Sony's business as a whole.

Libraries :(

Convenience? Maybe a belief the media would be accessible for a long time, versus the ever-changing catalog available from streaming services?

Consumers are lured into walled-gardens all the time - consoles, app stores, hardware. Where would you suggest someone purchase a digital license for a movie?

and yet, Steam is seen as the superior service that deserves to keep their monopoly.

On PC you can fight this by buying from GOG DRM-free digital storefront or the second more sinister option

Genuine question but is this why Gamestop was thinking about buying E-bay which ironically had some of the most greatest meme about "half cash, half stock" if someone remembers that in terms of the immense stupidity displayed in botching up the deal or the finances of it.

but what is the plan for shops like GameStop then if nobody buys or sells games anymore via offline shops. as you mentioned with Funko pops (and I had to search up with that), but they could perhaps transition to merchandise focused goods but I think that even within that online could have a valid competition?

Valve have shown themselves to be reasonably trustworthy unlike say, Sony and Microsoft. If there are no disks then there is no point in consoles in my view, they're just worse computers.

Exactly this. Today I can get a physical copy at release date for ~10 EUR cheaper than on the Playstation Store, then resell it for 3/4 of the price, or lend it to a friend easily.

Everything about digital-only is anti-consumer. Games will be more expensive with fewer and less important discount, the second-hand market will be dead, and so will be sharing games to friends so they can experience it for free.

Nintendo has implemented lending a digital game, but with arbitrary limits (you HAVE to be in physical proximity for the lending process, it lasts a maximum of two weeks, and you can lend 3 / borrow 1 game at a time). Sony and Microsoft don't let you do that.

I saw a photo of Destiny 2 for same at Walmart. First, game is Free-to-Play for years now, second version of a game that is on that disc cannot be played.

Tell me how does physical disc protect ownership? Then compare it to my digital downloads in steam where I can just copy game files between computers (if it's DRM-free)

> Also just look at the parallel issue that happened exactly these days with Sony deleting purchased movies from libraries. The same will happen with games.

I don't think Sony is much to blame here. They lost rights to distribute that content, so they can't distribute it. Blame copyright laws, not Sony.

> You own the physical game.

When it comes to consoles - you do not.

third parties do. Good luck buying a nintendo game for less than it was at launch

The PC burners/readers are disappearing. We had like ASUS, LG and Pioneer manufacturing. Pioneer had thrown in the towel last year (they were heads above the best in quality). I think ASUS might be gone as well. LG's drives are super hit or miss and I wouldn't be surprised if they give it up eventually.

This is probably due to the fact that they relied on Intel SGX security which has been busted wide open and itself been discontinued by Intel so instead of redesigning the security model, just depreciate the entire format on PC.

I don't think there is that much of a market left for set top players either.

Of all the companies you'd think are committed to the format, it would be Sony right?

Well they currently list one model of set top player on their website and it is the same design since at least the pandemic(when I bought my player). The SKu has changed since then but after looking at the differences, the only design update they have done in those ~6 years is upgraded menu software and removing built-in smart or networking features.

8K hasn't taken off as far as I know but eventually it might and right now there is no transition path to that for physical media.

> The side-effect most people didn't consider is that you never really own a digital copy.

This is true for consoles, but on GoG for example you can download the DRM offline installer for the games you buy. So going purely digital doesn't have to be terrible on its own. But of course, for consoles it will be.

Actually, thinking about this now, I tried to play PS1 games on my PSP about two years ago, but couldn't because they needed to be (re-)authenticated.

Sadly, there's NO way to authenticate PS1/PSP games on PSP anymore. Even connecting it to the PS3 via USB and trying to authenticate it didn't work.

(At least PS1 games still work on PS3 for now, though.)

Collecting is going strong, though. My husband collects physical media, and media books, including a booklet and a nice cover, sell very well. As are special editions of more mainstream movies. Give people something extra and they will gladly buy it. I'd have expected them to go down that path, sell nice steelbooks, media books with an included art book and so on. Add a blu ray with interviews about the development process and so on. I'd pay good money for that and others would as well. Even if they sell the console only with an external disk drive.

Though you have a physical copy of the game, I don't discount a future where a console refuses to load a physical copy of the game because DRM impedes it. Much like when short-lived TLS certificates expire on their own, even by being offline.

Physical copies of games have in their EULA that the game is licensed to you, so theoretically they could still disable it.

Precedent? BlackBerry phones refused to connect to WiFi if you didn't pay for your mobile data plan. It became a 2G brick.

The PS5 is great. We have a PS5 and PS5 Pro, both with disk drives (internal or external). But I really hate this policy. My brother comes over regularly to watch my pets, and he can simply bring a couple of his PS5 games over and play them rather than rebuying them and digitally downloading them. This breaks the in-person social aspect of gaming and game sharing that we've become accustomed to for decades.

I don't think this is really comparable at all. Sony is trying to kill off the used game market in hope of being able to coerce people into paying more. Steam is basically one giant used game market in that you get stuff constantly for 50-90% off.

And pirating stuff off Steam is generally extremely trivial, so it's a largely coercion-free business-customer relationship, and I think that's a large part of why they're doing so well. People like to support businesses that treat them well. And for those that don't? Well I think there's a reason that video game piracy is plummeting, while film/media/streaming piracy is surging.

It's a weird trajectory to see because with the music industry people have started catching on and either support sites that offer more durable forms of ownership or have straight up reverted to physical ownership.

We will own the games we purchase digitally if we change the laws to say that we own them. We've reached the point where politicians are talking about this issue, and I suppose support for copyright reform will only continue to grow.

Sony wouldn’t see any benefit from switching to game key discs. Nintendo introduced them to save on manufacturing costs, but game key discs wouldn’t give Sony any additional market or reduce costs any; they’d only shrink the physical market further.

TBH, 100% offline gaming has been problematic since day-one patches became the norm in the PS3 era. Sure, you might be play version 1.0 of the game from the disc, but often the experience was pretty compromised without the patch, often very buggy, or sometimes even features missing.

And the PS5 is meant to be able to play digitally downloaded while disconnected (at least the ones you own, not the PS+ games). It's just the implementation is little buggy, it sometimes breaks for some people and you get a bunch of vocal people complaining about how it doesn't work.

So IMO, you aren't losing much there. The digital-only experience isn't that different from needing to have internet to download a day-one patch.

It's the used game sales that are the biggest loss from this move.

"The side-effect most people didn't consider is that you never really own a digital copy."

I understand that this is the reality we live in, but I don't know how we have accepted it.

>We won't own games anymore

Some of us do because we only buy from non-DRM encumbered platforms like GoG.

Don't buy games on steam, windows store, apple store, etc.

Stop giving companies money for something you don't own.

> I'm curious whether Nintendo will be following the same path.

Probably, they're already heavily invested in digital-only games, e.g. virtual console, or selling game boxes with just a download code.

But this goes back years already, physical copies of their games have remained expensive for ages. Relatively modern and/or very common "everyone has these" games like various pokemon games going for full price to 2-3x that.

> They want this even more than they want $100 games

Killing the secondary market for games hasten how soon they can sell $100 games.

At least they clearly label them and make them easy to avoid!

> Yeah, Sony is stupid to be leaving money on the table like that

Are they though? Console sales have been dropping. It's only money left on the table if people are also purchasing consoles & games in the same quantities. How many people are just not buying these games because they are digital only?

TBH though, I think the ship has sailed a long time ago. Many games with physical media aren't really playable without downloadable updates anyway. Another reason the modern gaming experience has gotten worse.

>However, we are probably approaching an era where encryption / trusted computing is so good that future systems will never be cracked.

If AI lives up to its promise then in 5-10 years it should be possible (and affordable) to just point an AI at the screen and let it clone all the graphics, then have it implement the engine.

What economic incentive is there for art museums? Maybe society shouldn't be designed primarily around economic incentives.

Especially when you have a passionate community willing to work for free to preserve things, am I right?

They should do legal deposit in the country the game is developed. Some places they have to. The Hitman series is in the collection of national library of Denmark.

As much as I like Steam and dislike Sony (quite a bit in both cases), I will point out that while you can still download every single thing you've bought on Steam, there's no guarantee that it will run on a modern PC. A handful of my past Steam purchases don't. Consoles still hold the advantage of being a tightly defined target platform and a game written targeting a console is compatible with it indefinitely.

You can still download games for PS3 and Vita after they stop selling them. It’s no different from how Steam no longer sells some titles it used to.

If I am being a bit pedantic. Yes you can still download your old games, but they will likely be different from the original release. Grand Theft Auto games are known for dropping songs from the soundtrack due to licensing.

If you have Vice City on DVD and install it you can still enjoy Michael Jackson. Not with the Steam version.

This is really nice, some even come with a manual that looks like the original.

That doesn’t matter. It’s about the end-users perspective in that case. You can sell physical copies in physical stores or online on competitive pricing. The main point is that the customer has a choice. As soon as the physical discs vanish, they won’t. And that’s where gatekeeping starts.

Ok great don't buy them in digital form so Sony learns a lesson?

I personally see no reason to buy anything more than a PS4. I have a PS3 and it plays all the same kinds of games I'd want to play on a 4 or 5, with similar graphical fidelity. I have a 4, but only really have used it to play a remake of a game I can already play on the 3. I also have a vita which is used for indie games since that thing has nearly every indie game you'd ever want to play available (either officially or via homebrew)

I saw my first Dolby Vision Blu-ray and immediately started a Blu-Ray collection. The Blu-ray player on the PS5 is fine, but a nice dedicated player from Sony blows it away.

I would pay for my favorite albums on Blu-ray too. I wish more artists released their entire discography on a really well produced Blu-ray. NIN would be perfect for this. So many Halos, so many videos, all in release order. A real release of Purest Feeling?

> With this news, I have to wonder how much longer bluray will live.

I hope that physical media sticks around. DVDs and Blu-rays often include something that digital releases don't: director's commentaries, "making of" featurettes, and other extras.

For me, it adds a whole new layer of fun to movies I already like.

Even if Sony keeps a token factory or two open to produce blu-rays, I'd imagine we'll see fewer and fewer new releases. Maybe we'll only see them as part of collector's sets that have enough margin to afford a cut of the more limited supply.

This feels like the beginning of the death spiral for blu-ray. Sales aren't going to go up enough for it to be worth it keep factories going, much less spin up new ones.

I can't imagine content owners wanting the physical media to continue any longer than they can get away with. The control they have from digital only must make them feel so powerful. At least as long as everyone continues to buy into their DRM systems.

I've recently looked into purchasing a dedicated 4K Blu-ray player to start building a disc collection again. I'm assuming there's some pretty decent deals in the used bins now. One by one, I keep canceling my streaming subscriptions. At some point, that physical media will be the only thing left. Makes me feel like a prepper of a different sort

they weren't happy about people reselling their games for 5 dollars each, when they could charge 75 dollars to each of those people instead

Can't end soon enough. I hate the CD/DVD format. Very prone to damage. One scratch and the entire disk can be unreadable.

I stopped buying them about 20 years ago when this became apparent to me. Never bought a Blueray player or disk, that was a scam from day one: buy all your content again.

Paying every month for streaming is a nuisance, but not as much as sitting down to watch a movie and the disk won't play. Then trying to clean it, praying it was just a fingerprint.

I hardly ever watch a movie more than once anyway. Once I've seen it, I've seen it. I come out way ahead at $5 for a streaming view than buying for $30+ (or whatever they cost today, I don't even know).

I honestly doubt they'll stop. Sony is a Japanese company, and they seem to still enjoy buying blurays

I think blu-ray will live for quite a while, but will be a bit like vinyl; there will be a consistent, niche market.

> There will always be modding and ways to play game dumps

There won't because advances in defensive cybersecurity have made it so that software exploits are extremely rare (if they exist at all), and modern chips contain hardware defenses against electrical attacks like voltage glitching.

I remember joke “you will own nothing and will be happy”, it is less of a joke now.

And also quality.

I wouldn't think that the copy of some movie Netflix is streaming to me will be 60-100GB over the duration of the movie. Not to mention when their services have issues and you're watching 5-10 minutes of low quality content until it settles and snaps up to full (streaming) quality.

> And the most relevant part is that you cannot transfer/sell a digital copy.

EU or any other gov can pass a law to allow that and we'll have the option.

I’m not sure if Sony has been pushing their video disc formats with PlayStations for a while. PS4 Pro was the “4K” upgrade over PS4, but didn’t support UHD Blu-Ray. And there’s been a disc drive-less PS5 since launch.

Stuff like Blu-Ray seems to be becoming a Laserdisc like enthusiasts niche system, I don’t think it’s been a big thing for Sony for a while.

PS4 is a great system, but I feel it may be my last Sony console. Steam Deck/Steam Machine will probably become the king of the household, as I don't see video games ever really leaving my life.

I wonder if that's because there's a downward price pressure on physical inventory because it needs to get liquidated to free up physical space for new inventory.

At this point it’s a pretty small portion.

Last quarter 85% of all game sales were digital.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/sony-just-reported-a-new-r...

Also, remember the marketing idea of the "Disney Vault"? In the 90s, Disney would take all their movies in and out of print basically, only selling tapes some of the time, and they'd charge top dollar for them, because you couldn't just walk into Walmart and grab a copy of "Cinderella" anytime. They created scarcity easily this way, since before ebay, finding specific things like a certain videotape at a thrift store or something was a lot more work. So they would charge like $25 for a decades-old movie and say "Get it now, before it goes back in the vault!"

I can see this happening with games more after the death of physical media. Create artificial scarcity with limited time windows and charge top dollar for old games because there will be literally no way to get them besides on their digital store terms.

in europe it's often cheaper to buy a game new in box from the retailer than from the PS Store. Not for long maybe. I will mourn the loss of physical games as they are such a big part of console experience

Except it really is. I don't see how businesses don't understand how this sort of anti-customer predatory behavior, MBA stuff, is directly driving reduced sales. The PS5, for instance, has only managed 96 million sales. For contrast the PS2 managed 160 million sales to a smaller market with much fiercer competition.

And I'm one of those tens of millions opting out. The PS2 felt like a great consumer-focused value. Modern consoles feel like opting in to get kicked in the balls and squeezed for every single penny they can get out of you.

The reason modern consoles aren't selling 300million+ units is because of myopia. And the worst part is that it's a vicious cycle. They see their sales shrinking so the penny pinchers and MBAs get even nastier squeezing the ever-shrinking userbase even more resulting in less sales meaning they need to squeeze those that remain even harder and so on.

At seemingly no point is anybody asking 'Hey why do our sales keep falling even though the potential market's way larger and the competition is pretty meh?' I guess that doesn't look as good on a powerpoint slide as trying to kill the used game market and pretending it will have no knock-on effects.

Although it's just anecdata, after spending $600 on the console, I certainly was dismayed to find 10-year old games only being sold at their original prices. Surely they should at least track inflation?

Perhaps Sony could add an optional tipping screen before digital checkout for the good customers.

Nintendo has shown the way, for better or worse.

Tightly managed first party IP with a lot of retro throwback games/compilations/crossovers/virtual console and an overly aggressive copyright approach to managing what people do with their IP (even if fair use).

Nintendo plays the long game. They do not compete directly with Sony, Microsoft and the like.

Sony in particular is doubling down on platform exclusives again. I was waiting for Ghost of Yōtei to come out on PC, but Sony cancelled the port. We're well and truly fucked without physical media for exclusives like this.

The economic incentives will only come when enough people stop buying these kinds of games. Whether or not that will ever happen remains to be seen.

The assumption is that it'll be jailbroken well before they shut down the store.

I was having this discussion with my 9 year old yesterday. He mentioned that a friend had Rocket League on their Switch 2 and "it didn't even need a game card". I told him that anything without a physical card can be taken away, the company that made it can decide to take it back or to stop letting it work. Compared that to my old DS which he found along with game cards for Lego Star Wars and Scribblenauts that still work ~20 years later.

I think he "got" it. He was certainly annoyed at the idea that something purchased could just be taken back. Maybe it'll stick and he'll be better able to understand why I'll push back on a new PlayStation or any digital only games.

Why?

Is there a lower form of “art” than always online AAA garbage?

Im not going to lose any sleep over _COD 75: More of the Same Bullshit_ becoming lost media

They'll be forced to embed alternative stores in the PlayStation.

I won't wait for it though. After 28 years of always having a Sony at home, it ends here for me at the age of 35.

> $600 could get you a beast of a machine

Where can you get a new gaming "beast of a machine" for $600? In the past you could build a reasonable gaming machine for $600 but parts are drastically more expensive today.

If you go to microcenter and look for gaming PCs, their cheapest option is $800 [1]. PC Part Picker's entry level build is $780 [2].

The only option I found with these constraints is this computer from Walmart with a GPU released in 2017 and a CPU released in 2013 [3] (This is not a recommendation for this listing. Please don't buy it).

[1] https://www.microcenter.com/product/705867/powerspec-g530-ga...

[2] https://pcpartpicker.com/guide/fQscCJ/entry-level-amd-gaming...

[3] https://www.walmart.com/ip/STGAubron-Gaming-PC-Computer-Desk...

Apple has been selling movies for far longer haven’t they? Amazon is clearly invested in the space. Even Google.

From a video game store is the part I find odd. I get walled gardens. Not this one for this purpose.

Sony Pictures. A different division of a huge conglomerate. And Sony already has other movie selling divisions/streaming services.

It’s not all one Sony. Just like Samsung or MS divisions fight and get into spats.

Yes, and it's a tragedy that people have given up so much for the shallow convenience of having a shiny launcher and not having to figure out clicking on setup.exe.

The thing with Steam is that it's more convenient than piratebay, but for the collector in you, piratebay is still there for insurance.

Not to mention whatever's available on GoG where you don't even need a crack to make backups.

With Sony you have no insurance.

> but what is the plan for shops like GameStop then if nobody buys or sells games anymore via offline shops

Bankruptcy.

They've already had to massively cut down after the first round of people switching to digital-only. I doubt they'll survive a digital-only world (maybe a rebrand will work? Or maybe they'll limp along on merch).

As a child trading in games I didn’t play anymore was a great way of getting the latest titles at a discount.

plus, nothings stopping you from distributing a physical PC game. Heck, iirc steam still supports it. Even if it didn't, you could still buy a physical PC anyway since they can just have an exe, flatpak/snap/appimage, or dmg

Not true. The wast majority of games can be backed up locally and reinstalled indefinitely without online access.

Retailer exclusion. Monopoly behavior. Total market control of goods.

> assuming 2028 will be start of next gen

Estimates for next gen used to be 27 or 28. With the RAM shortage, end of 28 is considered the earliest.

Nintendo occasionally does 30% off sales on their published games through the eShop. There are a few active now: https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/sales-and-deals/

A funny quirk of that is that the Mario and Rabbids games are always 90% off because they are not published by Nintendo.

I just pre-ordered the 4K UHD remaster of The Sopranos, and while on the Gruv site I saw another UHD remaster of a movie I enjoy and ordered it. I am excited to experience this (haven't watched physical media in forever), but I was planning on using my PS5. My research also confirms that standalone players are legit, but they are more expnsive than I figured! I guess I'll give one a try and hope this isn't another addiction...

I wish companies would release these for promotional purposes on e.g. youtube or equivalent.

It's from a 2016 essay. I'm not sure it was ever only a joke. I didn't even perceive it as a joke back then (unless you wanted to joke about companies being knobheads). It was already clear by then that that was the direction they wanted to go.

Adobe Creative Cloud became the only option for new Adobe software in 2013, 3 years before that essay. Sure, Adobe is on the forefront of being knobheads, but still.

> The control they have from digital only must make them feel so powerful.

I hope they continue to feel this way. WEBDL can come faster.

I have been collecting many used CDs and DVDs for some ten years - some of them 15+ years old, some of them are covered in scratches and they still work pretty well. Clearly, you are:

a. Spreading lies

b. Exaggerating your experience

Now, Will they last forever? Of course not, but they are mine!

But is there enough of a market for blu-rays of newer western releases in Japan to keep the entire production and distribution chain alive around the rest of the world?

They did

https://curia.europa.eu/site/upload/docs/application/pdf/201...

That's part of what I was thinking. The idea of digital-only must be very attractive for content owners, so I don't think they will put much effort into preventing that outcome.

There is a tradeoff, the Steam Machine is double the price for worse performance and less storage.

That's certainly a factor, especially if demand was less than predicted, stores don't want to hold on to stock that's not selling, distributors and manufacturers don't want it returned. Better for everyone to reduce the price and sell the product.

I wonder how many units the 15% represents, and what the percentage would be compared to number of sales in 2010.

Yeah, the percentage has got smaller, but the industry also got much bigger.

Jokes on them if they think a significant portion of those sales will convert

Videogame preservation is on par with other media conservation, like literature; something that's an overall good for humanity as a whole, but not in the mind of the majority of consumers of such media. And that's perfectly OK. Most people just want to consume and forget.

Conservation is a social interest amd must come from organized initiatives, it will never take shape magically from individual judgement.

The win/win scenario I think is recognizing there is a market for the preserved titles and putting the effort in to capture that market. There's effort involved in emulating old games to work on modern hardware.

But yes I think you're on to something that Nintendo plays the long game the best, they handle their IPs like Disney does: featuring them across multiple verticals that feed into each other. Its surprising to me how long its taken Nintendo to come back to movies and TV.

Actually now that I think about it, Disney's biggest shortcoming is their video game division despite many wonderful retro Disney and Lucasarts games at their disposal.

Gog might consider linux more, which will make me reconsider it. I stopped buying from them because the lack of linux support

My local library never made the jump to Blu-Ray and still only has DVDs. They have physical copies of video games too though.

Steam only exists because Valve forced players to install it, force an online activation, and permanently bind their retail copies of Half-Life 2 to a Steam account. They also forced patching which meant in an era of dialup you couldn't play your single player game for hours, and needed to be connected every 30 days or your game would stop working.

None of the console manufacturers pulled that shit, that Valve gets a pass is wild to me.

Are you saying physical discs can be disabled once the console and disc are in the hands of the owner?

How were they allowed to "sell" those titles in the first place then? Because it was never implied that access might be lost or restricted,it was very much sold to customers,not rented.

As for Destiny not working,this is a related but different problem, stopkillinggames tries to tackle it, but both issues go hand in hand.

1. If we give up physical copies,we lose ownership,as simple as that

2. Server side components must be released by the publisher once they take offline a game, as long as that game was "sold" to the customer

So ownership is a very important component in this, don't make it sound absurd.

Steam isn't a monopoly, it's just a good service. Why would I use a shittier one created by, generally, extremely greedy and woke corporations?

>dedicated player from Sony blows it away

If I might give you a heads up here, they are not the best. For a reference player look at Magnetar.

My dream setup is a Magnetar UDP 900 MK II and a Leica Cine 1...

The heyday of commentary tracks and extras was long ago, over a decade ago. Except for a few boutique labels like Criterion, distributors found that adding such extra features often wasn’t worth their while in the face of declining physical media sales. So, increasingly one just got the film and little else.

Years ago I did a podcast[0] on physical media and hypothesized UHD would be the last physical movie format (and was shocked that it was even a thing).

The next two years are probably going to be a mess as collectors snatch everything up annd inventory gets cleared out.

0 - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cherry-bombs-the-under...

Why not just get everything on the high seas for free, instead of paying for used-bin stuff which is cheap but still costs something? I’m a huge cinephile with a collection on my hard drives of ripped Blu-ray and DVD images, a number running now into the four figures, and I have almost never paid for a physical disc; I own something like 6 that are in a box somewhere.

What's better about the dedicated player out of curiosity?

You can still buy CDs. They don't come with music videos usually but they sound greatr

Or they’ll just stop “selling” copies in those territories and only allow short-term rentals or monthly subscription services.

Hilariously, DVD production could potentially outlive Blu-Ray discs, since DVDs are still popular enough 30 years later, and surpass the sales of Blu-Ray movies.

Why is that? Vinyl has some unique characteristics. But as far as I’m aware, blu-ray is just a storage format for bits, so other than the box art, what is compelling about a blu-ray pressing?

They've also been pushing digital-only PS5s and PS5 Pro so there are fewer reasons to get a disk if you have no disk drive. They have created the problem that they are "solving."

What's kind of an annoying side effect of this is that you have all this fancy new display tech, like quantum dot LED (marketing term, but w/e), or OLED, but it's all pointless because you're just watching it with crappy compression, negating the quality gains.

I do this. I'll buy used disks and rip them to a personal media server. It works great. A friend actually created an eBay bot which monitors listings of disks he wants and will automatically buys them.

The ripping part is a bit annoying and time-consuming though. Ironically, it would probably be easier to buy a disk then download a file rather than ripping.

> I can see this happening with games more after the death of physical media.

I saw a screenshot of something like this recently with the pre-orders of GTA VI.

They apparently "ran out of digital copies..." of something that doesn't exist yet.

There are already more game dumps and mods than anyone can play in single lifetime. There are plenty games without DRM and always-online protections in GOG alone.

I feel this in my bones and it's a great way to frame it. My last Playstation console was a PS2 and I've also opted out of recent generations. Historically, for me, one of the benefits of a console was that you could just pop the game in, and it would always work, simply and easily.

DRM, online checks, DLC that should have been part of the base game, digital-only games, etc have ruined all that, and if that's going to be the trend everywhere I'll just stick to a PC and Steam where I have a library of games built up over the decades.

I have a Switch and feel that Nintendo provided a decent experience on their recent systems, but with the advent of "game keys" or whatever they call it on the Switch 2, they've flipped to being even worse than the digital-only systems. At least Sony isn't (yet?) trying to sell you a license on a disc to try to fool you into thinking you own a physical copy.

> Although it's just anecdata, after spending $600 on the console, I certainly was dismayed to find 10-year old games only being sold at their original prices. Surely they should at least track inflation?

Honestly, Sony should just retroactively bill consumers for inflation. Since $60 in 2016 is worth almost $89 today, they should charge all the people who bought the game back then a $29 price adjustment. It's the the only fair thing to do for.

If consumers don't like that option, an alternative can be a perpetual $5/year subscription that additional provides in-game stickers.

What else tracks inflation like that? Do movies?

I am in Europe but I just don't do launch prices on any platform or delivery form so I didn't notice that.

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/606/

Most people really don't care, which is a shame. The sheer quality difference between a 4k digital movie and a 4k bluray is astounding. Hell, oftentimes a standard bluray looks better despite the lower resolution since it isn't being compressed

Except Sony is notoriously bad at actually securing their consoles.

Be aware that many (most) new games with physical disks can also be taken away (see Concord).

Hopefully emulation and piracy will continue to provide a reasonable check valve on this getting too far out of control. I don't personally engage in either at present outside of an old homebrewed Wii U, but I feel like the existence of those is important to remind the digital storefront/platform owners that at the end of the day they aren't actually the only game in town.

Either that or eventually we'll have to get some antitrust stuff happening to open these things up, though Epic's App Store lawsuit does not give me much hope in that direction.

Gamers are notorious for accepting whatever abuse game companies and studios want to inflict, and then keep buying and buying. All the horrible anti-consumer technologies and business practices from DRM to games that are released unfinished, to kernel-level anti-cheats and rootkits, all are routinely done with video games because the industry knows gamers are fanatics and will put up with anything.

If gamers want to stop this, they need to stop rewarding these companies with their money.

99% of gamers who are mad about physical disk distribution going away will still buy the digitally distributed games.

I'm not convinced, jailbreaks are becoming more difficult.

What is frustrating is that even when you buy physical games, often what you get is a buggy beta release of the software that isn't playable without GBs of day-one patches. I have little confidence that 20 years from now I will be able to play console games I bought today, without resorting to "pirating" and console mods or emulators. I'm pretty sure that the Switch will be my last console because of this.

At least with PC I have the actual files for the game I am playing, and can backup and mod them as I wish.

The next console is going to cost at least 1000 dollars, right? There's simply no way to sell hardware at 300 million units now. So I think their strategy is to abandon the mass market and sell to price unconscious consumers who will also pay more for games.

They are the only platform owners championing for an open platform. That should be enough to consider them above all others, no trust required.

Use something like Heroic Launcher which lets you easily download/install GOG games via Proton.

Your point stands, but Rocket League specifically is free (this wasn't always true, but is now...)

I mean Rocket League is game focused on matchmaking through an online platform. Its main game types will stop working when that platform goes away. That's just the kind of game it is, its not like playing Lego Star Wars at all.

I see playing a game like Rocket League more in lines of having a membership to club to play a certain game rather than owning a copy of the game to play alone, forever. The club will eventually go away, that's just the nature of such things.

I do agree its a good lesson to teach your kids about the limits and issues of digital "ownership" though.

Most art is garbage, doesn't mean it's okay to make it inaccessible by fiat.

A lot of lost media used to be considered garbage before it has gotten completely lost. Culture is always worth preserving, at least for historic purposes.

That's just, like, your opinion man.

> They'll be forced to embed alternative stores in the PlayStation.

Steam Summer sales on a PlayStation? I want that today.

If this decision somehow ends up with Steam and Proton for PlayStation, it will be well worth it. Gaben, please get some lawyers to write to the EU posthaste, and start porting Proton to iOS & PlayStation

My main argument is that I have more ownership of games that I have downloaded on PC (be it from steam, gog or that girl who is into fitness) than physical media on consoles.

> How were they allowed to "sell" those titles in the first place then? Because it was never implied that access might be lost or restricted,it was very much sold to customers,not rented.

It was in EULA and ToS.

- some games require online server (See The Crew)

- some games change with updates (try to play destiny 2 red war story line with your physical disc that you can still buy for some reason despite game being free)

- Nintendo can block specific cartridges (only thing that step Xbox and PS from doing that now is that it's not implemented on their end)

- some games have separate online pass and/or DLC codes that can only activated once

- on PC CDs used to come with a cd-key you had to activate (still do?)

- See Xbox One 2013 DRM plan

Only way to "own" a game is to have a pirated version of a game regardless of a platform.

I don’t know the stats but I would guess more people have DVD players then Blu-Ray, so it makes sense for libraries to rather offer DVDs. DVDs is also one of these things that is good enough. The jump in quality between DVD and Blu-Ray is very unnoticeable (when fully immersed) compared to e.g. between VHS and DVD (or even between vinyl and CD).

I cannot explain how offensive this is to work of people who work on these games. Years and years of my life working on some incredible AAA games and you call it garbage because it's always online. Like, you think all the effort, all the actual art, music, writing, lore, world building....all of it garbage, because the game is online only? Do you think WoW is garbage and "art" in quotes?

I mean, it's the internet, you can have whatever opinion you want. But imho this is a particularly nasty and unkind opinion.

I assume they only did it to explain why the DVD cost more than the VHS you might already have. Even with Redbox you probably didn't have the DVD long enough to get a chance to watch the extra content.

Because within my job/industry, getting caught pirating would end my career.

One of the EU's backstop "Fuck Trump" options is to stop enforcing America's IP rights.

Maybe this USB stick full of MCU movies isn't the highest possible quality and two of the Thor movies are missing for some reason, however it cost less than €20, so who cares ? Oh it's illegal? Well my government said they don't give a shit about that until you get rid of the orange lunatic

In a world where American media companies are also trying to fuck over consumers that sort of action could probably get a rotting corpse re-elected in a landslide, that's one of the reasons it's on the backstop threat list - dry policy responses don't connect with voters, but "make as many copies of their stuff as you like" is incredibly popular.

That will last only as long as boomers are still around watching movies.

Many of vinyl's unique characteristics are severe drawbacks compared to digital disks. I see a lot of kids collecting CDs instead—cheaper, lighter, easier to maintain, you can find cars that play them pretty easily, you can rip them losslessly, more hardware to play them, etc. Plus you can a lot of the same benefits of album art, lyrics, etc.

Blu-Rays also have special features, which most streaming platforms don't offer (I think largely except for iTunes).

Having it, physically. It’s harder for companies to play silly games like put the media into a vault, take it off their streaming platforms for tax reasons, etc… I started collected physical blu rays when HBO randomly took a million things off its platform so that it could do accounting tricks.

I want to support artists who make content I like, but I also want control over my media library. Physical media is the best way to do this.

> Ironically, it would probably be easier to buy a disk then download a file rather than ripping.

This is basically what mp3.com tried to do: treat the physical (music) disc as a license key that gives you access to a digital copy online. Sadly, the courts did not agree with their interpretation of copyright law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UMG_Recordings,_Inc._v._MP3.co....

It'd be responsible of them to say that they can only provide 1 million downloads on the first day, or whatever the limits of their contract with the CDN says. Evidence that it's fake!

Which you can explicitly buy a disk drive for, if that’s important to you:

https://direct.playstation.com/en-us/buy-accessories/disc-dr...

They actually did a good job giving the consumer choices - it’s just customers didn’t choose physical media.

I think they mean on console, which has become increasingly difficult, there are a number of PS5s that can do it but that’s only because those were at older firmware versions as far as I know. The majority of the consoles are incapable of that unless other vulnerabilities are found.

You can resell game key cards, at least? They seem better than digital copies to me. And first party games are still on cartridge for the most part.

I've been doing this as well. Occasionally I'll have a disc that fails to rip for some reason (maybe my drive is more sensitive to defects than my player is, or there's some stupid copy protection scheme), and then I'll torrent it. Torrenting is always easier and faster, though it's hard to find special features this way.

> If consumers don't like that option, an alternative can be a perpetual $5/year subscription that additional provides in-game stickers.

Another alternative is to just buy the used games and play them on the old consoles.

Also: <https://www.toonhoundstudios.com/comic/20001202/?sid=372>

Movie tickets are now easily $25 a seat.

Off topic, XKCD should put the original publication date on the page. This one references specific years, and I could tell it's from 2009 after thinking about it, but doesn't hit the same way.

A 4K movie uncompressed would be something like two or three terabytes depending on the format. I think Arri are the only cinema cameras that can even shoot uncompressed or losslessly compressed, the rest shoot lossy compressed video in their native raw formats.

It shouldn't be the case that this is relied upon. There needs to be a cultural shift in the industry back to physical - or at least, preservable - media.

Theres no technical reason one should look better than the other.

Both should use multipass ahead of time compression with a rate control algorithm, and both should have enough slack streaming bandwidth to handle complex scenes with buffering

Even a well-mastered DVD can look better than online streaming.

I would attribute Disney's use of scarcity as a primary means to drive film and TV box office and streaming dollars in the Star Wars franchise.

This is already under threat due to the Star Wars AI videos being released on Youtube, seemingly without constraint as of yet.

The videos are not Hollywood quality [0], however they circumvent rules Disney can't easily break like using the likeness of any actor at any age in any circumstance.

These fan made videos get lots of views. Even if they were all removed from YouTube, this will be a difficult thing to stop.

I believe a generally accepted "good" or even "great" unofficial, Star Wars film built without sets or actors using AI is inevitable. And that this will be true for any popular franchise.

The natural corollary to this arc is into games, where using AI to code most or all of a AAA-competitive title would be considered inevitable.

I suspect Disney and Sony have at least someone pointing at this outcome.

[0] I suppose idealized Hollywood quality. They are better than some films.

We must simply raise kids to understand the pitfalls of live service games and how they should never be trusted or given money.

I've thought it would be cool to have a console where later updates are installed on the game cartridge directly.

> Leica Cine 1

Didn't even know there was such a thing... Knowing Leica cameras, I'm afraid to ask about the price. Well, like they say: if you have to ask... :)

What do you mean woke corporations? How does that affect you?

UHD bluray isn't really a new physical format. It's the exact same physical format as regular bluray. They didn't change a thing except move some previously optional parts of the bluray spec (like three layer discs, and 33GB per layer) to being compulsory.

I don't think we have ever seen something like it before. A new media format that breaks backwards compatibility, yet uses the exact same physical medium as the previous version. Some people did attempt it with HD movies on DVD, but the attempt failed so badly I don't think it even counts.

Its very existence was a very strong signal Bluray would be the last optical disc format. And the launch of the PS5 without a new optical confirmed it.

I am very annoyed by this with the recent surprise smash hit of the movie 'Obsession'. This is a new director made popular by his devoted fan base and they just announced the blueray. One director commentary, a tiny 'featurette' and then just the film.

I remember back in the heyday of physical media(2010s) directors like Edgar Wright took curation of physical media extremely seriously: Multiple commentaries by not only the director but with the cast, production crew, sound designers etc. Deleted scenes, multiple featurettes and even picture slideshows.

I wonder how much the design of Blueray menus is hampered by the tech choices used in the format. DVDs were video files that repeated with tiny overlays that the player would just draw. Bluray seem to be entire Java applications of which most studios develop one generic version and reuse for every release.

(Not op)

it typically offers better video processing and upscaling, more accurate color reproduction, cleaner gradients, and superior HDR handling (including dynamic tone mapping on some models). Many also support Dolby Vision from UHD Blu rays, which the PS5 does not.

It won't show on a bad screen that much, but a dedicated player will squeeze out more of the disc.

There's a bit of misinformation here. At the end of the day, a blu-ray player is reading information from the disc and passing it onto the TV digitally - one player or another are going to do that identically. One can't have 'better color' or anything like that.

HOWEVER, there is an exception: Feature support. For example, not all blu-ray players support 4K blu rays. Not all players support Dolby Vision.

If you try to play a 4K blu ray disc in a non-4K blu ray player, it won't function at all (won't read). If you try to play a disc using Dolby Vision in a player that doesn't support it, it will fall back to HDR10.

But assuming 2 players both support the features a disc uses, the end output will be identical.

There's also upscaling, which some players can do differently.

The movie itself is generally encoded at a higher bitrate than what you can find in streaming or torrents.

The media includes bonus features that generally aren't available in streaming or torrents.

The media will not suddenly stop existing if some server breaks down, some company goes under or some contract expires.

The movie will not suddenly get "patched" with an AI-upscale or censored scene one day while watching it.

You can lend the media to someone else to watch without having to ask for permission to anyone else.

Ever compare a Blu-ray to the same content over streaming? It's not even close. Unlike vinyl records, Blu-ray is vastly superior in quality to alternatives.

In case you're asking "why", it's because your "4K" stream is compressed to hell and back. Your home internet connection doesn't even have the bandwidth to stream the quality of a BR.

Still have my 2014 Corolla which was the last year they included a CD player. My son is begging me to have it instead of trading it in when we get a new car this Fall. He's super into physical media which is crazy to see since he's a zoomer. I'm seeing a lot of kids in the zoomer generation coming back to physical media which is really cool. I play with two guys who are millennials and they're completely hooked on their Sony Minidisc players.

It gives me hope the future is not completely lost.

The football World Cup 2026 is being broadcast in 1080p with washed out colors. Yet every shop was advertising 4K OLED for the best experience of watching the matches.

You saw a faked screenshot, but the meme is definitely referencing the direction that the industry is going and mocking this kind of artificial scarcity.

> since it isn't being compressed

Isn't being compressed as much. All Blurays are compressed either with MPEG2, VC1, H.264, or H.265 if it's an UHD Bluray.

The whole point is that they aren't accepting it. In terms of sales PS2 > PS4 > PS5. That alone is already a big issue but it becomes just comically bad when you consider that the world population is about 33% larger than during the PS2 era, gaming has become completely normalized, and that the competition in modern times is mediocre.

Don't requirements like online server based verification and advancing crypto make it almost impossible to pirate these games?

theoretically, the playstations are the most vulnerable since they run static versions of a FreeBSD derived system. the xbox doesn't really need to be jailbroken and the switch line is nearly impossible

Given enough time, I'm sure it will happen, if only because they're not going to get security updates until the end of time.

And even if true, there's always emulation (also a pain though).

But what's the point of even releasing the next console? The current console generation has barely gotten started, and developers have barely taken advantage of the new hardware.

Maybe they need to look at releasing a cheaper console and making more quality games instead of constantly pushing so hard on graphics. Graphics help sales to an extent, but it's clearly not the whole story, given the popularity of the Wii or Switch. I think the people in charge no longer understand gaming, and are really struggling to produce games that will draw in large crowds again.

> So I think their strategy is to abandon the mass market and sell to price unconscious consumers who will also pay more for games.

Kinda seems like it. I'm curious to see what happens with that, because even people who so far have been willing to pay more will stop being customers if they can't produce an experience that's worth paying for. Maybe I'm in the minority, but the first-party PlayStation games all feel very samey to me.

The jump in quality from DVD to Blu-ray is huge, as much as it was from VHS to DVD. Going to 4k from there isn't noticeable, but going to HD in the first place is massive.

Yeah bluray is really only necessary for 4k. And dvd probably beats streaming quality

He thinks AAA games are garbage, not because they are online but because they are AAA. Similar to people's opinions about Marvel films and other high budget productions.

It has Dolby height sound encoded for x.x.4 systems

I think it was around 8500 euro for the 100''. They also have a smaller one for 3500!

By politicizing games, ruining them with their agenda, and in a hundred other ways.

Knowing nothing about the topic: what kind of processing and upscaling happens when I play a 4k movie on a 4k TV?

Technically blueray has a 'update mechanism' that newer films will require players to update to.

AVGN complained about it here: https://youtu.be/tetXKdi9U3c?t=400

Hu?

the final output is not guaranteed to be visually identical because parts of the processing pipeline (chroma reconstruction, tone mapping, scaling, and output formatting) are implementation-dependent. There is a spec, but multiple processing stages are not strictly defined to be identical. Higher end players also use a HDR Optimizer and the ps5 does not, which is visually noticeable.

It looks great on youtube at 4k, at least if you are somewhere where they are transmitting it through youtube.

I'm a zoomer. I use a flip phone and collect physical media. I play ripped CDs on my PS Vita while I'm on the go, though I would love minidisc if it was less expensive

Oh? It was fake? It was very convincing.

But yeah, it's a trend that will sadly probably happen.

> Your home internet connection doesn't even have the bandwidth to stream the quality of a BR.

This has not been true for most people for a while now. Even the high end of 4K blue rays tops out around 100 Mbps, which is achievable on pretty much any broadband connection.

A UHD Bluray tops out at about 150Mbps, most home internet is capable of that. It would just cost too much for the streaming services to support it.

Supposedly the master stream from FIFA is in HDR, so if the colors are washed out its probably a bad conversion with your TV provider or TV.

I do agree its insane to me we're still not at 4K coverage for world major level sporting events.

Have profits gone down?

Emulation requires the ability to dump games.

And dumping games requires a jailbreak.

That's why there's no switch 2 emulation as of now.

Yes, for play-online titles for sure, but I think everything up to Xbox 360 / PS3 era has robust emulation and wide distribution of the whole library.

Obviously it's gotten harder over the years, but PS4 and PS5 jailbreaks do exist so that means there's a vector for dumping games that were only ever distributed digitally (at least ones released up to the point where the jailbreaks got patched, as the stores will refused to serve new content until you update your system).

For the ps6, they were already done with design and they'd need to let that go to waste to not put it out. I doubt it'll have many exclusives though - it's probably a ps5 pro pro thing.

But I'm also not sure they can sell a cheaper console. PS5 prices just rose and they'll rise again next year - so that level is already going to cost 800 dollars to consumers. You can't really sell hardware to anyone until ram prices come down it seems.

They could release a ps4 level console but I'm not sure it would be that cheap to source parts for... There are rumors of a handheld so that might be cheaper.

Basically console gaming is about to get impractical and they'll try and find a path to stay alive. That's my read.

Huh, I always thought they were uncompressed. That's why people preferred it over hd-dvd

> the switch line is nearly impossible

Werent early versions of the Switch 1 jail broken pretty fast and people were dumping switch 1 roms online to play in emulators?

I don’t follow this stuff too closely but I thought that I saw people playing the sequel to Breath of the Wild on PCs to get acceptable frame rates when it came out.

> switch line is nearly impossible

Nah. Switch 1 is already compromised and I'd predict we'll see modchips for the Switch 2 in the next 3 years.

You have to be very dense to think AAA video game devs have some woke agenda and not just knee-jerk reaction to market changes. There are plenty of games for you to goon to.

Which games specifically were ruined? How were they ruined? Can you provide a single example and explain how it is woke and why it ruins the game?

No upscaling as it's not necessary. (But better players have better 1080p to 4k upscaling too, as the algorithms are more sophisticated, e.g. edge-adaptive scaling, temporal filtering, etc.)

First, the player performs MPEG-4 HEVC decoding, reconstructing full video frames from heavily compressed data.

Once decoded, the signal is still not in a display-ready format.

UHD Blu-rays are almost always encoded in 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, meaning luma (brightness) has full resolution, but chroma (color) is spatially reduced. so one of the first steps in the pipeline is chroma upsampling (chroma reconstruction). After that, the player applies color space conversion and output formatting, usually converting to a HDMI-friendly format like YCbCr 4:2:2 or 4:4:4.

HDR handling is sometimes done on the player. The tv is doing a last stage processing that is fine tuned for it's display like contrast enhancement.

I hope that helps

Most blu-rays are 1080p, not 4K. The latter gets marketed as "UHD" and sold in a black case, to contrast the blue case of traditional FHD blu-rays.

Netflix isn't serving 100Mbps though.

The TV channel broadcast was 50Hz, 1080p and used image compression. They did not broadcast the master stream directly. That would have cost too much money.

It feels misleading to advertise a 4K OLED as the best viewing experience with such a poor source signal.

But also the reality is that most people have their devices connected through a shitty wi-fi connection and may be effectively limited to 50 or even less mbps, specially if you consider the unpredictability that comes with it.

Yeah, I should've specified softmods. There was a hardware bug in the launch switches SOC that wasn't patched until a year or so after the consoles launch

Sorry, I should've specified soft mods. iirc there's only been 1 softmod for the switch that was patched out extremely early on before we knew about it

Uncompressed 24-bit 1080p running at 24 FPS requires 1.192 Gbit/s, or 0.149 GByte/s. So a 25 GB (single-layer) blu-ray has enough space for a whopping 167.8 seconds of uncompressed 1080p video running at 24 FPS. You can double that with a dual-layer blu-ray, and there are more corners you can cut, but I don't think you'll fit your movie in there.

Video is really big. Compression was needed to make it even vaguely possible unless your quality was in the toilet.

HD-DVDs were smaller, so they were more compressed.

Are any streaming services actually serving that bitrate?

True. Plus the big streaming services' business model now is low quality content produced in house or with cheap royalties, that people put on in the background. They might have a prestige show or two, but that's just a hook to get you to subscribe, they'd much prefer you watch the cheap stuff.

I don’t think that you guys should be debating compressed vs uncompressed, but lossy compression vs lossless compression. Your math seems to derive from a naive storage format.

Ah, that's what it was. I'm still half asleep, I didn't drink enough caffeine this morning haha

Blu-ray is lossy too. All video codecs of note that aren't for professionals are lossy, so the point mostly still stands. Lossless compression doesn't go very far when it comes to video.

An uncompressed 24 bit 1080p image is just under 6 MB. If you save it as a compressed PNG, you cut that down to roughly 2.5 MB. Now, PNG compression isn't very efficient, and you can probably do some interframe magic if you really wanted to (cf lossless h264), but the whole exercise is mostly futile, since even if you cut your bitrate down to an eighth, you're still looking at, like, 20-ish minutes of runtime with 25 gigabytes.

Meanwhile, blu-ray looks as good as it does at an average of 25-30 mbit/s (0.03 gbit/s) (while UHD blu-ray even more so, with a better codec, so even more detail is preserved). The compression used saves so much space the trade-off is obviously worth it unless you're a production company making an actual movie, where every detail counts.

I just looked up the compression rate of FFV1 because I never thought about this. It’s apparently 4x. More would be possible, but increase computational requirements.

Another use cases seems to be archival of historical footage.