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You know Gabe's famous quote, "The most effective tool against piracy is to offer a more convenient service than piracy"? Digital services almost supplanted physical media due to its convenience, and now in a stunning move, physical media in some cases is more conveneient than digital. It may not be too far off that piracy becomes more convenient than both again.
This is really true. If a game is an online only service model, but the official server goes down, if their is a fan-server workaround it is usually easier to just use a pirated cracked version for that sort of thing. Also physical games go out of print, can become expensive, rare, etc.
Digital is too convenient that the people who produce and distribute such content restrict it to such a degree that it can be taken in a moments notice if not backed up or preserved in some way. And even then, they might take you to court for daring to make your own legal copy as they try to limit your rights by saying it's a "license" and not true individual ownership in the direct consumer sense.
i dont get what ur tryna say. i barely pirate games anymore, i js downlaod my games from steam and boom i can play them instantly with our current internet speeds. my savegame, achievemts everything gets sync between devices... idk man i dont get how piracy is more convienent
convenience, but also price. 12 years ago netflix had basically everything provided it was a few years old already. yeah you didn't own anything but at 8 usd a month it was pure consumer bliss. Now you pay more for less, with other networks pulling their shows off to resell back to you and netflix not really giving a shit about supporting the few original shows people actually like. What broke me was the 4k plans where they're more than happy to take your money, but you have to play by *their* rules if you actually want to access the resolution and bitrate you paid for. At that point my money's better spent getting a vpn, compatible blu ray player and legally torrenting linux iso's that also coincidentally come with a free movie.
Exactly, piracy is a service problem. I’d rather pay for one streaming service than pay for multiple. However I do like that there is competition, as that ensures quality since people could just switch. However the prices and exclusivity I do not like. Plus it doesn’t really apply to streaming services with exclusivity, aka all of them. Therefore they all of monopolies over their own content and can make their services as terrible as they want because you will need to soy for them to access them. Since it’s harder to sail the seas on mobile.
Buying physical media is still super popular in Japan, where Sony and Nintendo are from, so i think they will support physical media for the next few decades, at least until the culture changes
Physical media is still popular in Japan for really only one reason: Internet costs. Japanese home internet services still have data caps, so for a majority of Japanese, physical media is more cost effective since it eliminates stacking data costs on top of monetary costs.
I mean, Sony shipped out their gaming business to America now, and they're planning on discontinuing the Blu-Ray format soon, so I think OPTICAL media is dying at least. The future will likely be digital-only or cartridges, since NAND is becoming cheaper every day.
I mean, they’re making you pay extra for the disc drives and are taking actions against former decisions, like sony saying you can just share games with friends, which you can no longer do, i am scared we have 15 years at most
May not? If you're going to pay for media you certainly never should buy digital, the DRM, the license clauses allowing them to revoke or degrade the quality of your product. Robot Unicorn Attack is a perfect example, I BOUGHT the game for my android phone, a few years later a "update" took away the music from the game, you know 50% of the game's entire experience, it's a super simple game after all. They said it was due to licensing limitations, funny thing is I didn't get $0.49 back.
@@GeorgeWashingtonLaserMusket lol I bought an app that was used my hobby and was very expensive ($40 ish). Unfortunately it was developed in Russia and when Putin invaded it fell under the sanctions and the app ceased to exist. Still waiting for my money back. Guess I’m ‘doing my part’ 🫠
I collect movies too, how the fuck am I going to watch them without a disc drive? The fuck do I do when my internet is out, stare at the walls? I hate this shit, it all hinges on internet access. We don't live in a fucking utopia with free internet everywhere all the time. When my internet is out, and it will because it always does, I want to put in my bluray copy of Excalibur and fucking watch it on my console. I will get fucking radicalized if they take that from me.
Ever since I was a teen in the 00s I've had a mantra for physical media that I think will always apply: If you can try it without buying it, do so. Stream, download, rent, whatever. It can save you money and shelf space if you don't like it as much. But if you like it enough and can buy it, do so. No one can take it away from you, and if you take care of the item it will last you decades.
That’s pretty much how I do it. I’ll buy games I don’t care much about digitally, like online games that don’t leave much of an impression beyond the fun times I had on them with friends. But for games that I’m actually excited to play, I always buy the physical copy
Buying older media is only getting scarier for me though. I've went out of my way to buy games like Forza Horizon on disc, and for some to just degrade to a point on unplayability.
as it should be. - You buy stuff you love/care about keep and play it forever. - You DONT buy trash/scams/incomplete stuff (which is modern gaming 2012 - Now) - You DONT "buy subscriptions or pay licenses" to "unlock soft-locked features" for physical stuff you already BOUGHT PHYSICALLY UPFRONT AT THE STORE SHELVES!!!!!! A subscription like paying xboxlive makes sense since you cant pratically buy "the server running xboxlive".....so instead ur rented access to microsoft's online gaming network. Paying for licences/Subscriptions for hardware you bought up to "unlock features" (thats already built in) is a freaking SCAM!! and i hate it to the gut. Cisco is known good for this scam. F the subsciption with no end model. its the most anti customer/consumer thing ever
Another factor for physical media: Christmas and birthdays. Parents buying games for kids prefer something to physically wrap. Probably why consoles with younger users (nintendo) have the most physical sales.
Bro CDs are the best stuff ever dude you can get em for wicked cheap at any goodwill and sometimes it’s like something crazy good you’ve never heard of before
@@bt3743 You don’t get it!!! You’re being spoon-fed popular propaganda!!! Go to goodwill and find amazing stuff! The CDs usually come with little booklets that have cool reading inside!!! Just the other day I found this album “Dolphin Smiles” by Steve Kindler, and just based off the album art I thought it’d be fun, and lo and behold it’s fantastic, lighthearted, jazzy instrumental study music. And Steve kindler I later found out was the violinist in mahavishnu orchestra! Or there was this other one called like Celtic Solstice, which was like Irish folk spa music with really beautiful uillian pipes and organ and everything… like dude you can actually discover stuff. Plus CDs sound so pristine. And I like the inconvenience of having to mess with the disc and use a piece of technology that isn’t my phone or computer. It makes me connect with the music more.
I have collected 500 or so CDs from thrift stores, mostly for a buck or two each. A lot of the fun of collecting secondhand CDs is browsing through shelves of them in stores. It's like a treasure hunt. There could be a deadmau5 CD hiding somewhere (of which I have found two so far), some other interesting stuff, or just more classical, gospel or another copy of Anastacia's Freak of Nature.
The concept of Gamestop (and stores like that) are a good reason why physical media is t completely going away. A lot of people like to buy physical games because they can save money by trading in old ones.
Sadly there are hardly any Gamestop stores left here in Europe. So we have to trade in games in second-hand stores like CeX or privately owned shops. Days of gaming is getting worse, as getting new titles now need us to go into other kinds of stores like an electronic store or a toy store to buy them and unfortunately the titles are very limited. Any niche titles are no longer visible.
Except, online stores have replaced the best way to get discounted games. You were never going to find a copy of a AAA game discounted at 30+% only a month or two after release at a Gamestop. You are not going to find any indies at the store. But on Steam during the right week you could buy over 10 overwhelmingly positive rated games for $15. I have spent so much less money per game since I swapped to digital only. Yet I am playing so many more games that I love.
Yeah, a lot of people like to rag on Gamestop, but it's still one of the best places, besides mom & pop shops/thrift stores, to get physical games. And it's the only place you can actually trade in an opened game. Best Buy, Target, Walmart(?) don't do that. if you open the seal, you're stuck with it.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 This is true but I still miss haveing the pysical thing. I do like when the physical game is like a bonus thing you can pay a bit more for but its limited.
@ I already do but if you take good care of your discs, they last well over 40 years. Some people still have working Laserdisc and early DVDs to this day.
@cringeonpurpose yes if you keep them in special humidity and temperature controlled environments they can last, but most physical media isn't being stored in those conditions and even then it's luck of the draw. Then you have things like VHS tapes which are actually a consumable. Yes the tape does physically wear out after enough plays.
@@antikommunistischaktion Disc rot is a myth. They might "rot" if you keep them in a 95% storage unit or warehouse, but if they stay room temp. you're fine. I have all my CD's, DVD's and game disc's from the early 90s and they all work fine. I've even pulled out some old VHS that sat in my garage for decades and they still worked.
@@carson21211 lol ok just make sure you have backups of any media you care about. "Disc rot is a myth" until something you care about no longer will play.
Just a PSA, go and check back on those statistics about digital sales. Look at the small print, they are counting EVERYTHING as a digital sale, no matter if it's a $60 game or a $0.05 skin. Both count the same as a single sale.
Whether that's true or not, it still means digital is severely outselling physical media. Even stores are proving that by significant decreasing the shelf space for video games and DVDs.
@@DragonMasonHealerthat’s the issue, DLC is download exclusive or is a code. As a matter of fact, some are literally physical exclusive updates. You can’t sell skins on Fortnite without doing it digitally or losing money.
@DanialDEcool And like I stated before, that doesn't change the fact that physical media is still selling poorly. There's a reason stores are decreasing their shelf space for physical media. It's not because digital media is selling a lot. It's because physical media is selling far less than ever before. Whether or not the digital sales are accurate is meaningless because either way, physical sales still aren't good.
I'm one of the physical game holdouts. There's probably more than most people think. Remedy just released Alan Wake 2 physically even after saying they wouldn't because there's a market for it.
Same here I wanted to play Alan wake 2 so bad but I just could not make myself pay 60$ for something I can’t physically hold on my hands fast forward a year and we get Alan wake 2 on physical with all the dlc and oh yeah toss in Alan wake 1 as an extra, I love that I held out
In the case of Alan Wake 2, the game wasn't profitable when it was digital only, so I guess the physical media release was an attempt to sell it to physical only buyers (like myself). I hope the game becomes profitable eventually.
Some are incapable of going digital to to location and region, or poverty. Some are grounded in principle as they understand the implications of an all digital only media world. Some are starting to see the light after the death of The Crew 😂
I didn't want to buy Alan wake 2 because it was digital only. As soon as they said there was a physical version, I pre-ordered it and went on and bought the physical edition of the first one.
Nintendo Switch physical has one benefit: you don't copy the stupid games over. At worst for first-party games, you need a small day-one patch, but that's it.
@@dammyoyesanya4656 Yes, but you still have to copy the game from the disc for PlayStation and Xbox games (like what you mentioned). Switch games require no installs (unless if they have a mandatory Day 1 Update), so you can save on file space on your Switch that way. Some Switch games have updates that are as big as the original game (like Dead Cells), so it's not guaranteed to be better, however.
I used to work at a restaurant, the owner was a great dude and would always get people in the back of the house with "Hey, you're always messing with the radio/speaker back here, Do you ever just enjoy tapes and CD's?" Yeah but I-- "Oh you do? GREAT! So you'll love when I tape my D to your forehead so you can CD's nuts!!! Frickin weirdo!! HAHAHAHahaha...(while walking to the front of hosue) hey!! Barkeep!! Guess what cook in the back just said he loves...." Great times. One of the only places in working food service for too many years that I actually look back at fondly...
that is dumb. the purpose of the gift is so that the person receives it actually likes and appreciate the item in question. does the gift had to be physical? does a ticket to a concert as a gift loses its value, if its presented as physical or a screenshot?
@@komocakeps527 Yes, it is so dumb because interacting regularly with your friends and family so you can know what they like and would want as a gift is totally not an option, right? My bad, bro.
@@komocakeps527 Not the same thing. I remember getting gifted games, I remember who gave them, how I reacted to it, playing them for the first time. Now a gift card is kinda lazy, it's like giving money to someone, it's unoriginal. I value the present because the person spent their time chosing what they thought I would like, even if I don't. A gift card doesn't have this kind of care
@@MikeVideos327most games shouldn't have any issues on modern Windows or even a compatibility layer like wine or proton... if you're having trouble with a specific game PCGW is your friend
There is truth to this. It's similar to MP3s vs streaming. The MP3 is not on physical media, but it is a detached file and more permanent than physical media.
"My DRM-free game files are getting passed down as heirlooms" Legally, you can't do that, they are still licenses for only personal use.(Thou it's very unlikely that a company would notice or care about it)
I remember the day i pretty much gave up on physical media being viable for me. I have slow internet in my area and my kid wanted mine craft dungeon for his birthday. I didn't want to deal with a 12-18 hour download so I went to game stop an hour away, bought a copy of minecraft dungeon, drove an hour home, opened up the box and inside was a credit card shaped game code for me to download it with... ugh..., we were both so disappointed. Anyways, my kid got to play it the next day as i left my ps4 on all night to download it for him. I saw the writing on the wall and after resisting for years I finally gave in and just paid for expensive internet. Everytime I had a game night with friends I'd pray no patch dropped that day as it would be a 2-8 hour update and I'd just have to reschedule and tell them next time. Hate it so much.
Slow internet is the bane of my existence. These corpo demons want to force digital only they need to put the infrastructure in so we can have cheap internet everywhere or they can go to hell.
Don't you mean give up on digital media? That wasn't a physical game. I wouldn't be surprised if you imported that Minecraft game from Asia that you'd find an actual physical copy instead of a code in a box. At least, for a Nintendo Switch, that is. The unfortunate reality is that the majority of Western gamers preorder digital deluxe editions of games months before launch so developers saw that and thought "Why release a physical copy? People will pay premium for unfinished rental codes". I've always hated digital gaming and streaming, too because I also have slow internet
Stop buying ps4 or 5, Sony is trying to get you to go digital. The Switch still has plenty of physical games and has clear lables on the boxes of games that are just codes.
Only half of Nintendo games are bought digitally. It shows things are pretty okay, actually. That's mostly held up by Japan really not liking digital as much as the west. That's why so many games are physical exclusive in Japan, but it never happens the other way around. And given they're the only ones based in Japan...
@@firesonic1010 Meme aside, yes. Playstation left Japan at the end of PS4 and never came back. They're based in California now and have been for years. Funny enough, because the Nintendo Switch was beating them in their own country, lol
@@firesonic1010 Yes, actually. It's common knowledge to people who follow gaming that Playstation left Japan in 2016 in favor of opening their headquarters in San Mateo, California, near many of their main development studios. It caused quite the stir at the time.
I’ve just started collecting DVDs recently. What’s criminal is that even though DVDs are almost irrelevent due to streaming, stores selling DVDs of new movies still charge $14-20 per DVD. You almost have to buy DVDs thrifted in order to get a bang for your buck.
For real. They mever really came down in price. Most of my DVDs are secondhand. My parents hooked me early. My first CDs were from The Record Exchange.
Except it IS cheaper. I just bought No Man's Sky for about $20. Game is still $40-50 at GameStop. I also got Ark Survival Evolved digitally for FREE at a giveaway event. Game still costs money for the physical copy. I pay $10 a month to watch a near limitless library of movie and TV Shows. ONE of those TV Shows will cost me $50 to own. Digital is factually cheaper and more convenient than physical media. That's why physical media is losing.
I’ve also seen games much cheaper at GameStop many cod games are still being sold at full price even a decade after it’s been released same with Star Wars battlefront 2 bought it for $5 bucks it really depends on
It is displacing the collections and CRTs as a mass medium, like peasants eating rice. Its lightweight. It is based on actual piracy, since Netflix simply exploited a frontier, but did not own the movies at its Tombstone bar. So it is more an eraser than anything. A dumped series of 12 high end episodes, filmed with modern power babes who are homely and poorly lit and produced, fall on deaf ears and gut the remaining present industry.
By all means though, huge screens and modern graphics are prett great. Limitless shows are great if you like that sort of thing. And corralling physical colllections is absurdly difficult.
The issue with digital games that digital movies don’t have is that digital games are 3-5x the size of digital movies. It’s probably the biggest reason they haven’t taken off entirely. It’s an especially big problem on the Switch, which is semi-portable. -- I am fine with buying DLC and small indies games digital, but not full-sized, AAA games. That probably accounts for the numbers of digital sales being higher, but people still buying physical media.
I was just thinking about this. I hate the idea of streaming and digital distribution taking over everything. You own nothing, and companies can just yank stuff from you whenever they feel like it. I've had way too many shows taken away from me because whatever streaming service they were on just never bothered getting the license back "Blue's Clues & You!", "Infinity Train", the "Rugrats" reboot, _way_ too many episodes of "Sesame Street" to even count. Streaming is getting to the point where it's not convenient or trustworthy anymore, but we're just forced to deal with it because "it's the future, bitch". I for one always stan physical media over streaming because no one can take it from you. It won't just suddenly stop working one day unless you're careless with it.
Too true. I saw this coming a mile away when Blockbuster closed and Netflix rose. Even back then Netflix would constantly remove movies because of licensing.
Heck, even digital purchases you think you’d have are getting screwed up too. Bought Smiling Friends Season 2 on iTunes. Was gonna take it to my friend’s place and watch on his Xbox. So I start downloading the episodes and play in VLC to make sure it works… Well turns out you can’t even play it in QuickTime (never mind another player), you can only play it in iTunes. But also, it has to _connect online to verify_ so you can watch them. That’s right, you think you’re just buying simple video files, but no, they still have full control. And this new measure was apparently introduced like 2 years ago and still hasn’t been cracked. So I had to pirate a show I already paid for just so I could use it like a normal video file. I’m glad I don’t care much about TV/Movies because this is stupid.
@@jase276 the early days of netflix, were golden, because it had every single mayor movie/series whit an accesible price, but then companies saw an oportunity, everyone made their own streaming service, the rest is history, i'll gladly return to the days of blockbuster at this point.
As a 23 year old man, I totally buy discs all the time. Sure, they are generally secondhand, or such, but man, I can get games for far cheaper than on steam or such. Plus, I can own my favorite movies and series, and watch them whenever I want, without a sub fee, without anything like that. It is great.
See man it’s people like you who ruin it for everyone else…continue being a sheep 🐑 because you never know if one of these companies shut down & you’re stuck without your purchased content 🤦🏾♂️
A game being digital-exclusive isn't a bad thing on its own -- being digital-exclusive and relying on DRM is where it gets ugly. If you can get your games DRM-free, digital-only is honestly pretty rad. Far easier to make backup copies and far harder to lose them unless you're buying cheap hard drives and/or are terrible with organizing your files. I only just recently discovered what an NAS is and promptly bought the components to have some decent long-term storage with redundancy for my ripped DVD's and libraries of mostly 7th-gen-and-older games. It's been worth every penny for the peace of mind.
I don’t like paying a monthly subscription, so I buy my games and stay offline. I like the option to physically hold my media as well. I burn my own CD’s still
So would you play a game if the physical "copy" literally had no data on it at all and was just a physical license key to download the game? Because, uhhhh, that's already happening.
@@mrconroy4672 Main reason why i'll most likely only have the Switch be my only console next gen. With things like the Steam Deck, there's no reason getting a PS or Xbox anymore when they don't even have physical games anymore. Ironically, I have been picking up PS1 and PS2 minis/slims for retro gaming
I worked with a guy near retirement age who was a completionist of all his console games... didn't have the internet. He 100%ed all the big open world game series like Red Dead and Assassins Creed just for the fun. Because he didn't have the internet, and all of those games ship with a butt ton of bugs, he would bring his console into work and we would connect it to the internet to update and get DLC. This would often break his save games and he'd have to do everything all over again.
As someone who collects physical music media (and some movies and video games), I love the idea of sifting through my records and tapes to find something to listen to as opposed to sifting through my Spotify or Apple Music library which is daunting and rather lifeless. Having a tangible item to look at, hold in your hand, feel it etc. brings me comfort! On top of that, it might inspire me to put on something I haven’t played in a while if I see it! And return to an old favorite of mine! I’m not gonna do that with streaming. On top of all this, it’s also just very charming to have your collection out as decor in your living room or bedroom. The amount of times my friends and family visit me and they love the fact I have all of my music out to see and it’s a good conversation starter! It gets people to geek out about music with me which is my bread and butter!
I'm the other way. I was a early adaptor for digital media. Buying games on steam instead of on six, buying games on Xbox 360 store instead of disc's. It felt more conviniemt, the game was yours without the disc, damaged disc's didn't matter anymore. But I've flipped in my later years. I now prefer disc's on my Playstation, I buy 4K Blu-rays. That's mainly because I've come to respect the used market, preservation and with movies the high bitrate
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but 4K Blu-rays are just as bad as digital. They can revoke your copy remotely for whatever reason and I'm pretty sure for some if your internet goes down you may not even be able to use it because it has to connect to servers to authenticate your copy. They're essentially rental keys.
Never got the preservation argument tbh, atleast for PC stuff An offline DRM-free digital installer that you can infinitely copy to other drives & the cloud is much more valuable for preservation than a disc that can rot, accidentally get broken or more easily get lost We should be seeing more and more gamers push for no DRM on their digital games
Personally I'm a best of both worlds guy when it comes to games, but movies and tv shows have to be physical only. Got burned a few times by digital movies having their servers go away or not being compatible with my game system anymore.
@jase276 Sorry, but that sounds bs to me. Do you have any example when that ever happened? I am not talking about online only games. I am talking offline game on disk.
I flipped twice over the years. I first was a fan of physicals, cause it meant I could run over to gamestop to trade em up. Then the Xbox One came out, and buying physical games became pointless (I own TEN games on xbox one physically, and they were bought within a 3-year period). I then recently flipped back to buying physicals, when I started to see people going out of their ways to buy games like HL1 and The Orange Box physically to have on display. Lump that in with mass delisting and what happened with The Crew, and now I am desperate to buy PC games physically! And yes, I do own a physical copy of The Orange Box now, and also L4D2, but I am missing a few other Valve games like HL1 for display. I also got plenty of other old PC games, such as EA's Battlefield 2142. Great game, its more convenient to pirate than to source, then patch the game yourself.
"I had to get up off my couch and find the disc and put it in the console". Not gonna lie, that's less work to play a videogame than I do nowadays as an adult with digital storefronts. If I want to play a game, I have to make sure I've done enough work on my personal projects today that I don't feel lazy, do any other little chores like laundry, make a cup of coffee, have a quick meal, look around to make sure the kids are safely occupied if they're home, and THEN I can justify sitting down, opening Steam and playing something for a couple hours uninterrupted. "Getting up from the couch" is a relatively small hurdle
I am one of those disc buyers, regardless of whether the whole game is on it or not i want something physical for my purchase and prices even brand new are better even on launch day, ownership is important to me when ever it is possible
Physical media will always be superior. You own it, there is no bs. You can trade it. You can resell it. You don't need to worry about stupid ass servers failing. You don't need to worry about them shutting it down. And people that are saying, DVD's die fast, yeah no. If you can't handle it with care like a normal person with a working brain, it's not the DVD's fault. Also, DVD's look, feel and sound infinite times more futuristic than any modern shit. The PSP had the coolest looking disks ever. Sexy console. Sexy 2006. Also, physical media is inconvenient? How fucking lazy has the world become?!?! This is so unbelievably sad...
If you had PC you could get literally any games for free by just embracing emulation. On consoles most of us buy games cause we want to support the devs that made those games otherwise like PC we could just pirate on our consoles too and get any free games we want without issue.
I’ve actually been getting more into physical media over the past couple years. I love collecting my favorite movies, displaying them on the shelf, and playing them whenever i want. I also like having physical games and buying used games if i want to play a game, but i don’t like the developer’s practices.
I've been burned way too many times with Digital Games. Of course mostly by Nintendo. Wii Shop, DSi Shop, Wii U eShop, 3DS eShop, Xbox 360 Marketplace all storefronts that closed, all storefronts that due to their closure have caused me to lose tens of thousands of dollars in games. I can't trust digital storefronts on console.
@ajc2_ For Nintendo consoles they are locked to that specific console you bought them on. So let's say your 3DS dies and you get a 2nd hand one (since you can't get them new anymore) you WON'T be able to download your digital games to it as those games are locked to the now dead 3DS.
I watch most of my movies physically, most of my games are physical, I own CDs in my car/my room, I have a large cassette and VHS collection and refuse to move entirely to digital. I’m only 19, but I refuse to be limited by a corporations greed.. I will always buy physical no matter what.. I hate all streaming services tbh, except for RUclips.
I'm still buying physical new games for my Nintendo switch, when I recently told one of my friends "I bought Dragon Quest III HD-2D and Sea of stars for the switch", He criticized me for not buying them for steam (I have the deck too). It's absurd how the people now are not seeing how we are going in a direction of buying nothing.
A lot of people don't go to stores to buy specific products but to buy the best product available in the category of choice from the store at the time. People don't go to the mobile store and say "Give me Trackmania or I will leave", instead they will just say "Show me what games you have and I will pick what I'm interested in". They will keep stock of items that they think people will be interested in.
I bought star wars battlefront 2 for 5 dollars off of eBay for PS4. it's for like $30 rn on the PSN store. That experience alone was enough for me to get the Disk version of the PS5
A lot of digital-only console users don’t realize that physical media benefits them in that the used game market competes with their console’s digital storefront and helps keep prices lower than retail price. If a game is $60 on PSN but is averaging at $40 on eBay, Sony doesn’t really have a choice but to put it on sale down to $40 digital to stay competitive. This is different for PC because PC players have access to multiple digital storefronts that compete with each other.
It depends. Physical and digital sales don’t tend to line up. You’ll have physical go on sale one month, then digital in another. It also depends on _what_ you’re buying. There’s games that aren’t even that old (2-3 years) that are $30-40, meanwhile they go on sale digitally for $5-10. Games with limited prints or are out of print. My suggestion to anyone is follow twitter accounts with deals, and wishlist games on your preferred digital platforms. There’s also websites that will track individual games’ sales history (at least digital, but sometimes physically too, like DekuDeals). Then you can see if something is a good discount or average, and how often it happens to know if you should jump on it. We’re past the 360 days where companies keep their games at full price on digital and only lower it by 10%. You might see games at “full price” today, but without proper context (sales trackers), they do go on sale. This was Nintendo’s approach but Sony has adopted it too. That said, I’m no advocate for digital. If physical was lost, those deals could become more scarce because companies know customers have no alternative to buy X game on a console, as there’s only one storefront on that console. I still go out of my way to buy physical where possible, but we are getting deals too. It’s just not in the “permanent price drop” sense. More like “rare sales that become monthly sales” (outside 1st party).
Now why are people STILL perpetuating the (mostly) myth of disc rot. Seriously, it happened to ONE line of MUSIC CDs back in the 90"s and literally never happened again. Any movie, game or CD produced then will literally never have this issue. If taken care of your collection can outlast you and several more decades after.
Tell that to my Christopher Reeves Superman movies. I bought them in 2009. I went to watch it the other day and the movie played till Superman shows up in Metropolis and saves Lois from the helicopter and the movie stopped. Superman II won't play at all and neither will the other 2. All my discs worked at one point, and I take care of my discs. Yet they rotted. I just got Expendables last year and the disc already rotted away. There is a whole bunch of discs especially from Warner Bros where they are rotted and don't work. From about 2009 till 2015 there was problems with manufacturing discs. So don't lie saying disc rot does not happen anymore as it certainly DOES.
I've been a collector for a while, but my wakeup call was with my PSP. It can't recognize my Wi-Fi anymore, so any digital purchases I "own" are impossible to download unless I use my phone as a Hotspot. It's a huge ballache, and if I didn't figure this out, I would've been boned.
@SuperFranzs not true, actually. This was exposed with that one game where you're a professional unaliver (pretty sure if I say the name of the game the comment will vanish).
it's not Digital vs Physical, it's ownership vs "rental", honestly the shift towards digital media has a lot of benefits, it's more efficient, economical and convenient. The problem is the fact that you have very limited channels from which you can buy games that you will actually own, gog is the only major (and that's debatable) store front that allows you to buy drm free games, as for game preservation I fail to see the difference between having the bluray disc of a video game or a flash/external hard drive of your digital media, what we need is not for physical media to be retained, but for regulations that will allow is to be in actual control of our digital purchases, the ability to do with it as we please, that's the right thing to do.
I disagree. Physical media forces studios and devs to actually learn how to properly optimize a game. Games used to be around 25 GB at THE MOST. Now, games are bloated with sizes of over 70-100 GBs. It's inexcusable. Elden Ring is a current, MASSIVE game that is SEAMLESS most of the time. Guess what size it is on discs? Around 45 GB. On PC, though, it's about 60 GB because why bother optimize when that market/demographic accepts bloat? Still, it's under 70 GB because the game is made by devs that know wtf they're doing and have a standard that their customers/communities holds them to.
@@jase276 That's part of the AAA control. When they make larger games, they lose competition with indies who cannot manage that. They make the game difficult to keep as it's huge thus users are swayed from keeping the game on their systems which means new game releases don't need to compete with old game releases. This is why.
@@jase276 It's a double edged sword. Being less compressed also makes games more easy to mod, so there are some people who actually benefit from the bloat.
Of course it’s not dead ! I’m 26 and I’ve gone back to everything physical. I just got tired of all my favorite shows disappearing from streaming, e-shops closing, etc. Ownership is cool ! And a shelf full of games and DVDs just looks great.
I stopped buying digital on consoles after my Xbox Live account was banned for a BS reason with no option to appeal. Some guy was asking me to do a license transfer so he could get my Halo Reach legendary flames. I told him to buy it on eBay ($20 at the time), or mod it. He kept asking for the license transfer, which I wasn't going to do and risk losing my account, so I told him no. I assume he reported our conversation (Profile, Report, Sent) in a fit of anger and I got banned for profiteering & account phishing.
In Australia, I can usually get new releases $20-$30 cheaper than what they cost digitally. If Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo only want to 'sell' me a rental, then I will only buy them at rental prices, so only buy digital when its dirt cheap (and even then will look at the going rate for a physical version and purchase that if comparable in price before committing to a digital version)
I had a friend (well still have, he didn't die) with whom I would usually make plans on which games to buy. We always bought discs so we could share them between ourselves. He was mostly into online multiplayer stuff and I was into single player stuff, but I would usually borrow his CoD for example to play the campaigns or zombie modes, and he would borrow my RPGs when he wanted "to chill". We did that right up to the end of the PS4 era. When the new gen came out it just didn't feel worth it, so we moved to PC gaming. There it's basically impossible to get physical copies for most games. Worse still Steam is so freaking convenient and the sales actually make big disocounts so it's worth buying digital (never understood why people pay the same for digital on release than physical). Good thing is we can still share our accounts to play each others game if we want, but I miss owning my games 😢 (and if Valve ever cracks down on account sharing we are done)
The only company that I'd even partially trust with digital purchases is Valve, who have not yoinked anyone's games after 2 decades, but even then I'm wary because there's an industry precedent that it's fine to just take people's purchases away on a whim.
The Crew got yoinked. Valve routinely yoinks entire game libraries if a user is caught cheating on one of the games. Cheating sucks, but Valve has no right in being bad and removing all user games like they do. At most, they should remove that one game the user cheated on.
@@bobmcbob4399 They don't do that. There is no global "ban", you just get banned from what you're abusing. If you get caught cheating, it's up to the publisher of that specific game whether to ban you from online play or not. If the game is online-only, then too bad, that's a you problem. You only lose access to all your games if you get banned for something like credit card fraud. You get banned from posting on forums if you're a jackass on forums etc. There are PLENTY of accounts out there with VAC bans, in a lot of cases multiple bans, that still have access to their libraries. In the case of The Crew, it was revoked on Ubisoft's end. Steam still shows you as owning it and lets you download it, it just will never work again because Uplay can't authenticate and the servers are gone anyway. It's situations like this why Valve warn you on the store pages that these games require 3rd party accounts and launchers, if issues like this are important to you, you should avoid any games that do this.
Additionally, even if games are removed from Steam's storefront, they still allow you to download those games at any time, the risk that your games could be taken away by the service is ultimately so unlikely that in my opinion it shouldn't even factor into the debate, it's like deciding whether or not you want to leave your house based on the risk that you'll be crushed by an asteroid as soon as you step outside.
@@bobmcbob4399 I made a long, detailed reply but it seems to have been removed? In short, this is untrue. You only lose access to your games if you're banned for something serious like credit card fraud. If you're inappropriate on the forums, you only get banned from forums. If you cheat in a game, you get banned from online play for that specific game. There are many accounts with multiple game and/or VAC bans that still have full access to their library. With regard to The Crew, that's just Ubisoft's launcher removing it from their account. You can still download the game on Steam if you own it, you just can't play it because the servers are gone and Uplay won't authenticate you.
I have a really old computer (Macbook Pro 2008) as my secondary machine, since I can still use it to a number of things like word processing and image editing, and one of my partitions is to an old version of OSX (like, one of the cat ones old). Steam used to work on it, but they decided to discontinue it, and now it doesn't launch at all. The more up-to-date partition (from I think about ten years ago) has Steam that still boots but is no longer supported at all, which banners across the top of every screen on it warn you when you open it, and it could just be gone the next time I open that computer up. So obviously it's an extreme case because of how old everything involved is, but if my main computer died for any reason I could just lose access to my entire library until I got a replacement, even with a computer that, while very old, still can run a decent portion of Steam's catalogue, because there won't even be a legacy version of the launcher left.
As someone who lives in a non-Western country and not in a big city, it was never an option for me. Online retail allowed you to buy games on physical media, but with a markup.
Watched a dvd recently. I have not used one in years, however the extra effort made it more special, more of an event. Instead of just watching it on my phone on the toilet.
Streaming will always be unreliable and i do not ever want to see bitrate compression artifacts from sudden internet speed fluctations. I want my top BluRay 4K quality all the way through. Also console games i will always buy physical whenever possible so i can borrow the game to my brother when i want to.
I'm one of those weirdos that only buys physical media (34 yrs old), never had cable or streaming, only internet I have is on my phone. Still rockin a free antenna. The day the physical media goes bye bye is the same day i quit buying media.
Thought for a second that the "I don't like criminals" line would follow the inevitable conclusion of "but if these companies take away the games I paid for I'm pirating them all back". Digital piracy onto my own hard drive is the new physical media! And I say this as someone who's sunk thousands of dollars into Steam
I shall start working on vids about that because people keep saying things like "physical doesn't come on the disc" or you need to update in order to play
1:50 I only started buying exclusively digitally when buying the physical disc meant nothing when I needed to connect to a server anyways just to run the disc. OFC things have changed for me recently, where I have been going out of my way to visit antique shops to purchase old PC games for cheap. Last visit, I got my hands on Civ 5, Lego Star Wars, and Bioshock Infinite (this one I did not even know had a physical PC version!)
For games at least, I see a lot of kids buying games physically. I think this is because parents just find it easier to go into a store physically and look through their game section rather than buy through the console.
Really? I've seen the opposite, their parent just give them the gift card for whatever console and they buy games off the respective game digital store.
1:20 the problem isn't going full digital. The problem is control and preservation of your copy of the product you bought. If you had full control over your digital files and had them all backed up so you can pull them for the future without restrictions on it or other ease dropping on what you're doing with them then we'd have no problems but sadly we don't have that hence the problem.
A few things I didn't see mentioned: 1. The Xbox consoles since One have required an internet connection to setup the system for the first time. 2. The detachable PS5 disc drive requires internet to setup the first time. 3. Not all games ship without the full playable game on disc. In fact, if you move away from the big AAA releases, there's tons that ship fully playable.
When the Wii U launch, you could only play the system with its library of games, you can't even play your Wii games unless you had internet access cause the only way to get backwards compatibility on Wii U was through a firmware update download. Something that they could give you but could also take away. When the PS3 launch Sony had a firmware update where gamers could used Linux on their PS3 and then later down the line they released another firmware which took Linux out forcing player to update or else future games will not work on their PS3 if they don't. The reason why Sony taking out Linux was that some gamers found an exploit where they could easily play digital PS3 games without ever buying them at the PS Store.
When I bought my PS5 in 2021 when supply was still limited, I went the GameStop Pro route to secure one. But I didn't pre-order, so me and a bunch of other people were in line on a first-come-first-served basis. When stock at my closest GameStop ran out of the PS5 Disk Version, everyone, and I mean everyone, in line waiting sighed and left thw store empty handed because no one that day wanted the digital only.
I was near the section where they had blurays in Best Buy today. It was replaced with nothing but smart TVs collecting dust. So much so it feels like they might get them sold by the time their last android update comes out, prettymuch making them useless.
I feel like consoles should allow you to buy a blank disc/cartridge and your your own games onto it. They could also remove digital ownership of the game to prevent people from selling infinite copys of the game.
@@qchtohere8636 But you don't own games there. License purchase only. They can revoke a game or your whole library. GoG is best, but they don't make a portable console.
It would unironically be rad if that were a thing. Then I could just pay an inflated amount of money to get Minecraft Console Edition on Switch, rather than not being able to buy it at all.
Memory cards is what you're talking about, any consoles nowadays had that feature. You could literally put all your Switch games onto one 1tb microSD card and take your Switch on the road with you.
Why physical games is dying out, aside from just convenience. 1. more and more games are requiring installs and even updates day one. 2. games are taking up more and more space, and while some compression probably can shrink these games to sizes that can fit on a single disc, multi layer discs are more expensive, and that's assuming they even put the full game on the disc. 3. (feeding off of point 1), optical media is just SLOW. People who rip movies to image copies know this, it can take a couple of hours even for a dual layer blu-ray whose storage caps out at 50 gigabytes. My current internet speed, assuming I can sustain my cap of 600 megabits per second, would allow me to download that volume of data in a little over 11 minutes. And with how much data is being demanded by games these days, optical media just cannot keep up in the same way even a hard drive can. It isn't just consumer habits, but what companies are doing. Heck some games these days are literally just download codes in a case made for a disc. IMO, the only thing I see saving physical media of games is the price of flash memory going into the toilet. I just looked up some 100 GB BD-Rs and they are $5.75 a disc, a bit more than a nickel per gigabyte. a 128 gigabyte NVMe on the other hand, about 20 bucks, though I'm not sure I'd trust them, about 4 times as much.
SSD controllers are expensive, but NAND itself is still falling in price, even though it's slightly more expensive than discs. And with Sony now discontinuing BD-R discs for the consumer market, we might see more cartridges like what Nintendo is doing, as they're faster to load and install into system storage, as well as just acceptable for loading games from.
Flash memory has a rough lifespan of about 5 years. A decent quality optical disc will last 5-10 burned at home or 15-25 years professionally pressed. Flash or SSDs are NOT a comparible replacement to optical discs.
@@suroguner Yeap but not installing also means slower loading times and unstable performance. Hopefully Nintendo's next console embrace ssd cause the internal ram they're using now is just too slow.
5:43 not true. You have to copy data from the disc. At least on playstation. Dunno about xbone. On playstation there is a full 1.0 version of the game on disc. Without internet you cannot update, true. But you can play that 1.0 version from start to finish
@@Binglitpawnyes it is. The only games this won't work for are companies that outright state they require that first-time internet connection, which will be your Ubisoft/Activision/etc. Besides that, yes the data is on the disc. Check it for yourself. Unless you only buy products from those types of companies, but it falls on you as the consumer to do your research ahead of time.
1. Find digital movie 2. Pirate it 3. Put it on a disk 4. Print out cover 5. Put it in a case With the right laser printer and some bulk purchases I make make a movie for about 0.30-0.50 more or less I think Im up to around 2300 out of my 2800 movie collection
I only buy physical games for console, and the day I can't is the day I stop buying games on console. I really wish you could for pc but that died almost 20 years ago. there is no such thing as digital "ownership" and that's why I pay for no subscription services. I buy DVD's or Blu rays for shows or movies I love and pirate everything else, I will never buy a digital product.
Why physical media is still big globally for example I am in Uganda Africa most of these game services like Xbox game pass, Nintendo online or Ps plus doesn't exist in so many parts of the world. That is why many buy discs, cartridges. Also the stores of playstation, xbox and nintendo are geo locked. So many just resort to buying discs and play offline. Yes also internet availability has improved but the speeds vary from region to region and pricing too plus data caps
I buy anything I *genuinely* care about on physical. I spent a lot of money to get shows no longer on print physically, just because I don't want to lose them. When a game has a physical version, I buy it. I bought Baldur's Gate 3 twice because I love it so much. I bought it on PC when it came out, and later bought the physical edition on console because it's entirely playable on disc.
Physical media will never die, what's likely to happen is that if companies refuse to sell them and lock down on taking away ownership of media from ppl piracy will suddenly become bigger than mainstream media since it's easier and cheaper. And there won't be any benefit or convenience for streamibg services.
These days my experience has been that even buying a disc does not equate to ownership of the game. If you buy a physical disc copy of a game you still need to work through Steam or Epic etc. Meaning even these games ownership is dependent on the continued existence of that company and platform. Thats why to me whether you buy physical or digital it makes no difference (on pc at least). If a game also requires you to sign in and have a continuous online connection then owning the physical disc does not guarantee ownership for life. Your using and enjoying the game is still dependent on that service provider existing and maintaining the servers and store. The best way to go is to use GOG
Yeah, this is only true for PC. For PC this change happened a lot earlier, it seems impossible to go back to a point where physical media matters on PC again. The PC section in game stores have disappeared almost a decade ago already, or it's a small corner with some codes in a box.
I am a big physical media guy. I still have CDs cassettes. I still use iTunes to load my iPod classic. I can say this. This generation of video gaming has been honestly kind of trash. One of the reasons I love the Nintendo switch is every release is physical and I feel that Nintendo games, particularly on physical media, are a lot more reminiscent of how video games should be. You buy the cartridge you put it in and you are good to go anytime. I've bought physical media since the PS4 era. It is just an absolute pain in the dick
Hey Tyler, physical media glutton here. I think I have some answers (or at least data points) for you to consider. When considering digital sales, remember that the PS+ monthly games are included in that number. I happily claim every game that is offered, and this likely artificially boosts their numbers not unlike Xbox Gamepass. Also the pre-owned market is still quite big, much bigger than you may realize, and these numbers also do not show up. When considering console sales for PS4, remember that most people did not buy PS4 Pro as their first console. There's a high chance that most people who bought a PS4 Pro already bought a PS4 previously, therefore you would see uneven PS+ accounts to console sales ratio. Likely the gap is smaller than at first glance. I am completely expecting PS6 to ditch its disk drive. I'm expecting this because Sony have proven repeatedly to make anti-consumer, seemingly anti-profit decisions if it means they can force players into the ecosystem they desire. With no real competitor left in the console market, Sony will almost certainly give zero fucks about who they upset with their decisions.
Once PS6 happens with no disc drive or other option for physical media with TRANSFERABLE LICENSES, I'm ditching home consoles for PC and whatever Nintendo has cooking up.
This annoys the shit outta me because a 2B hard drive is expensive enough and I also gotta basically download the entire game anyway? Fucking insanity.
If the disc itself has the whole game on it, it still needs to be downloaded first because Bluray disc players have slower read speeds than hard disk drives and ssd. Also consider that storage is cheaper ($/GB) than ever.
You have to install physical games now for mainly two reasons. A: The games are compressed on disc so they can fit. And B: Installing to your hard drive/SSD saves a ton on loading times. For most games it's not that big a deal, just wait a few minutes. Minus updates, they install faster physically.
I think the main reason why physical media is going to still be a thing for a long distance of future is that people still want to feel like they’ve owned something like they can touch something instead of just purchasing something online which yes it may be feel very convenient But with how things are going at the moment with digital media are having questions especially about what happened with the crew when it got shut down and then Ubisoft decided that they could no longer download it because it was part of the policy where you just bought a license so even though that we are in the future right now where everything‘s digital they’re always gonna be that people that you’re just gonna buy a physical game because they feel like they truly owned it even though that it’s typically just a licensed key built in into a blue right disc, but I also do hope for the future that physical media can still happen in the future because it would also be freaking nice to just install the games through the Blu-ray Drive compared to just downloading it through the Internet because there are still a pretty good amount of people around the world who don’t have solid Internet to download the game
Even if Steam does shutdown, there are modders out there who could just create mirror server of the site so gamers could just migrate their library to there and play it there instead. It's the same way they did to Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube, DS, 3DS, PSP, PS Vita, Ouya, Wii, Wii U, and PS3 when those systems are dead, their online stores and server got mirrored so you could still download stuffs for free and even play those older games online through a mirror server.
Discs degrade. Consoles wear out. Servers get shut down. This is why I will forever be in favor of emulation, backups, and piracy as the best option for preserving and playing video games.
@@aaron5364 it reminds of that movie called Metegol, at the end one of the characters says "Stars fade away, Idols fall, Pros get old, managers are forever" lol
This isn't a UK problem I'm afraid. There are more and more physical media shops here! They're so popular they're coming back into our supermarkets. You can even buy vinyl in everyday supermarkets here.
I mainly game on console but occasionally play stuff on PC (built a computer a while back that runs Indy games well). I prefer owning my media, displaying it on shelves, and having a tangible product that I can sell or give away at my leisure. Physical media also has a ton of sales, so if it's the same price or cheaper than digital, then why not buy a thing that you can actually own, display, and potentially sell later or let a friend borrow? I gladly paid an extra $100 for the PS5 with a disk drive for both playing my PS4 and PS5 games. I've been playing PlayStation since the 90s, but if they decide to go all digital in the future, I will probably just completely transition to PC gaming. Most exclusives get released on Steam eventually anyway, and unlike console storefronts, I'm confident I'll be able to continue downloading games I purchased on Steam for decades to come. Plus, I have a long HDMI cable connecting my PC to my TV if I wanted to play a game more comfortably.
Ironically, you can get physical right now on pc, you just have to burn the discs yourself, gog games are drm free, if you want physical you can always take your drm free games and put them on discs for safe keeping.
I think making your own physical discs for PC doesn’t)t make much sense compared to console, because everything you buy on PC works on PC. You just need a bigger SSD/HDD. Whereas with console, my copy of Yoshi’s Wooly World isn’t gonna play on my Switch because 1) it’s a different format, but 2) it isn’t backwards compatible. Sure there’s PC games from early on that may not work as well because it was made for a completely different operating system and whatnot, but I’m pretty sure anything from 2000 on could be played today on your PC just fine (and still more before then). PS5’s don’t even play PS1 discs.
@@mrshmuga9 The entire point of physical media is presurvation for later use, a dvd, or especially a M-disc can last a lifetime, hard drives die, but physical media won't.
@ Fair enough I guess, haven’t heard of M-discs before so I was just thinking of your typical re-writable discs that aren’t any good. But m discs also aren’t the most cost efficient, especially with how big games can get, and they come in small packs. Can range from $1 per disc up to $25 per disc. And the latter was only for a 100GB disc. Granted it depends on the kinds of games you buy, but it doesn’t bode well for the future. Who wants to pay an extra $30 on top of a game? Now you’re waiting for one of them to go on sale, which will take some months or more.
@@mrshmuga9 To be fair i said m-disc due to survivability, they are rated to survive at least a century and theoretically, a millenium if stored properly, you could in theory, put them on anything, which was my point, the only real way to preserve your games permanently.
4:13 Watching this so actually surprises me. I never stopped buying games physically, so I figured most people did and digital games were niche. And then a GameStop clerk told me that they’d sold put of the All-digital PS5. I couldn’t believe it. She said she still bought her games physically too
There's a story that Adam koralik said something along the lines of There are two kids who owned a switch, one bought all the games physically, and one bought them digitally. The parents forced the physical kid to buy physical. The kid was all bummed out because the digital kid was flexing that he didn't have to put the games in etc. the kid who bought physical always bought used so they saved money. One day they both go in together and decide to get another game console. The digital kid brought their switch in and got $200, the physical kid got double, the digital kid was like "but the games are on the console" clerk goes "we can't use those when we sell consoles" Physical games are cheaper in the long run and don't disappear when you get your account banned or whatever.
My main pain with the death of physical media (as much as corporations are pushing for it at least) is that you don't get to own stuff permanently. It's why I switched to GOG from Steam where possible - I want to own it permanently and not have it be revoked at any given time. I have the same beef with physical disks that don't even have the game on them. If I buy it, I should be able to keep it, regardless of whether a given online service shuts down or how much the company wants to take away my access to the thing I bought. Wanting to keep it long term is why I get physical media in the first place - plus I get to lend my copy to friends and family.
It’s good to diversify. Physical media has the risk of getting damaged, destroyed, or stolen. Digital media (through a license) has the risk of being lost or temporarily unavailable due to account hacks, unjust bans, delistings, server outages, or other issues relating to Internet requirements. For preservation/backup purposes, ideally you would want a hard drive with DRM-free game files that you can copy to other hard drives. Unfortunately though, there’s no legal way to do that for many if not most games.
Me too. I have a very small collection of my old games with a couple consoles tucked away. I play everything on my windows laptop or steamdeck. I haven't used my cds since I got a new car this year. My house is too small for a record player and my collection is too tiny to justify a turntable right now.
It’s the same reason people still buy vinyl and cd and cassette for music, like yes it’s not practical or cheap than Spotify or Apple Music but it’s so much cooler to actually have a physical copy of a certain thing, even if it’s been outdated for like 50+ years
I will never and I can't stress this enough never buy a console if it doesn't support physical media but the only exception is PC as GOG has offline installers meaning your license to the game isn't locked behind their server but download to your pc with the game so if they ever shut down or you forget your password but you have you game downloaded to a 1TB flash drive it's fine.
it's the same with films, discs are still being sold in countries that don't have reliable internet for streaming, it's what's actually been keeping the medium alive
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You know Gabe's famous quote, "The most effective tool against piracy is to offer a more convenient service than piracy"? Digital services almost supplanted physical media due to its convenience, and now in a stunning move, physical media in some cases is more conveneient than digital. It may not be too far off that piracy becomes more convenient than both again.
This is really true. If a game is an online only service model, but the official server goes down, if their is a fan-server workaround it is usually easier to just use a pirated cracked version for that sort of thing. Also physical games go out of print, can become expensive, rare, etc.
Digital is too convenient that the people who produce and distribute such content restrict it to such a degree that it can be taken in a moments notice if not backed up or preserved in some way. And even then, they might take you to court for daring to make your own legal copy as they try to limit your rights by saying it's a "license" and not true individual ownership in the direct consumer sense.
i dont get what ur tryna say. i barely pirate games anymore, i js downlaod my games from steam and boom i can play them instantly with our current internet speeds. my savegame, achievemts everything gets sync between devices... idk man i dont get how piracy is more convienent
convenience, but also price. 12 years ago netflix had basically everything provided it was a few years old already. yeah you didn't own anything but at 8 usd a month it was pure consumer bliss. Now you pay more for less, with other networks pulling their shows off to resell back to you and netflix not really giving a shit about supporting the few original shows people actually like. What broke me was the 4k plans where they're more than happy to take your money, but you have to play by *their* rules if you actually want to access the resolution and bitrate you paid for. At that point my money's better spent getting a vpn, compatible blu ray player and legally torrenting linux iso's that also coincidentally come with a free movie.
Exactly, piracy is a service problem.
I’d rather pay for one streaming service than pay for multiple.
However I do like that there is competition, as that ensures quality since people could just switch. However the prices and exclusivity I do not like. Plus it doesn’t really apply to streaming services with exclusivity, aka all of them. Therefore they all of monopolies over their own content and can make their services as terrible as they want because you will need to soy for them to access them.
Since it’s harder to sail the seas on mobile.
Buying physical media is still super popular in Japan, where Sony and Nintendo are from, so i think they will support physical media for the next few decades, at least until the culture changes
Physical media is still popular in Japan for really only one reason: Internet costs. Japanese home internet services still have data caps, so for a majority of Japanese, physical media is more cost effective since it eliminates stacking data costs on top of monetary costs.
@@sandman6088 its never one I think there's more to that
I mean, Sony shipped out their gaming business to America now, and they're planning on discontinuing the Blu-Ray format soon, so I think OPTICAL media is dying at least. The future will likely be digital-only or cartridges, since NAND is becoming cheaper every day.
Even then some games still need to connect to the server every time it opens.
I mean, they’re making you pay extra for the disc drives and are taking actions against former decisions, like sony saying you can just share games with friends, which you can no longer do, i am scared we have 15 years at most
Guy I work with is probably 40, and still buys seasons of shows in DVD. He may not be wrong
May not? If you're going to pay for media you certainly never should buy digital, the DRM, the license clauses allowing them to revoke or degrade the quality of your product.
Robot Unicorn Attack is a perfect example, I BOUGHT the game for my android phone, a few years later a "update" took away the music from the game, you know 50% of the game's entire experience, it's a super simple game after all. They said it was due to licensing limitations, funny thing is I didn't get $0.49 back.
Tbh I think the smartest move right now is to just buy an external SSD and subscribe to a VPN, if you catchy drift... Yo Ho Ho...
@@GeorgeWashingtonLaserMusket lol I bought an app that was used my hobby and was very expensive ($40 ish). Unfortunately it was developed in Russia and when Putin invaded it fell under the sanctions and the app ceased to exist. Still waiting for my money back. Guess I’m ‘doing my part’ 🫠
I'm 43. I don't buy pixels.
I collect movies too, how the fuck am I going to watch them without a disc drive? The fuck do I do when my internet is out, stare at the walls? I hate this shit, it all hinges on internet access. We don't live in a fucking utopia with free internet everywhere all the time.
When my internet is out, and it will because it always does, I want to put in my bluray copy of Excalibur and fucking watch it on my console. I will get fucking radicalized if they take that from me.
Ever since I was a teen in the 00s I've had a mantra for physical media that I think will always apply:
If you can try it without buying it, do so. Stream, download, rent, whatever. It can save you money and shelf space if you don't like it as much.
But if you like it enough and can buy it, do so. No one can take it away from you, and if you take care of the item it will last you decades.
Yup, that’s what I’ve been doing as well. Helps to support the creators and I get a nice physical copy.
but whos gonna take those games away? steam, nintendo, sony or microsoft aint shutting down anytime soon lol
@@Moli05 the xbox 360 online store has been shut down quite a while ago
@@Moli05rrrrrright… can you still buy digital only games for the wii u? No? Those games are unacquirable.
@IsaacMyers1 whos playing on the Wii u tbf 😂
I think buying media you care about physically is fantastic. I've bought CDs, DVDs, and Blu-rays of music and movies I care about.
Remnant, get outta my comment section!
Same here tovarisch
That’s pretty much how I do it. I’ll buy games I don’t care much about digitally, like online games that don’t leave much of an impression beyond the fun times I had on them with friends. But for games that I’m actually excited to play, I always buy the physical copy
Buying older media is only getting scarier for me though. I've went out of my way to buy games like Forza Horizon on disc, and for some to just degrade to a point on unplayability.
as it should be.
- You buy stuff you love/care about keep and play it forever.
- You DONT buy trash/scams/incomplete stuff (which is modern gaming 2012 - Now)
- You DONT "buy subscriptions or pay licenses" to "unlock soft-locked features" for physical stuff you already BOUGHT PHYSICALLY UPFRONT AT THE STORE SHELVES!!!!!!
A subscription like paying xboxlive makes sense since you cant pratically buy "the server running xboxlive".....so instead ur rented access to microsoft's online gaming network.
Paying for licences/Subscriptions for hardware you bought up to "unlock features" (thats already built in) is a freaking SCAM!! and i hate it to the gut. Cisco is known good for this scam. F the subsciption with no end model. its the most anti customer/consumer thing ever
Another factor for physical media: Christmas and birthdays. Parents buying games for kids prefer something to physically wrap. Probably why consoles with younger users (nintendo) have the most physical sales.
i was about to comment this
Works out for me then as a Nintendo game player who prefers to buy physical media, haha
Nintendo also has little to no storage (32gb)
My parents are like this
Bro CDs are the best stuff ever dude you can get em for wicked cheap at any goodwill and sometimes it’s like something crazy good you’ve never heard of before
A spotify subscription costs the same as a single CD every month and you get pretty much every musical recording ever made
AND it's higher quality than spotify as well
Quality is not that good and they scratch very easily
@@bt3743
You don’t get it!!! You’re being spoon-fed popular propaganda!!! Go to goodwill and find amazing stuff! The CDs usually come with little booklets that have cool reading inside!!! Just the other day I found this album “Dolphin Smiles” by Steve Kindler, and just based off the album art I thought it’d be fun, and lo and behold it’s fantastic, lighthearted, jazzy instrumental study music. And Steve kindler I later found out was the violinist in mahavishnu orchestra! Or there was this other one called like Celtic Solstice, which was like Irish folk spa music with really beautiful uillian pipes and organ and everything… like dude you can actually discover stuff. Plus CDs sound so pristine. And I like the inconvenience of having to mess with the disc and use a piece of technology that isn’t my phone or computer. It makes me connect with the music more.
I have collected 500 or so CDs from thrift stores, mostly for a buck or two each. A lot of the fun of collecting secondhand CDs is browsing through shelves of them in stores. It's like a treasure hunt. There could be a deadmau5 CD hiding somewhere (of which I have found two so far), some other interesting stuff, or just more classical, gospel or another copy of Anastacia's Freak of Nature.
The concept of Gamestop (and stores like that) are a good reason why physical media is t completely going away. A lot of people like to buy physical games because they can save money by trading in old ones.
Sadly there are hardly any Gamestop stores left here in Europe. So we have to trade in games in second-hand stores like CeX or privately owned shops. Days of gaming is getting worse, as getting new titles now need us to go into other kinds of stores like an electronic store or a toy store to buy them and unfortunately the titles are very limited. Any niche titles are no longer visible.
Except, online stores have replaced the best way to get discounted games.
You were never going to find a copy of a AAA game discounted at 30+% only a month or two after release at a Gamestop.
You are not going to find any indies at the store. But on Steam during the right week you could buy over 10 overwhelmingly positive rated games for $15.
I have spent so much less money per game since I swapped to digital only. Yet I am playing so many more games that I love.
Yeah, a lot of people like to rag on Gamestop, but it's still one of the best places, besides mom & pop shops/thrift stores, to get physical games. And it's the only place you can actually trade in an opened game. Best Buy, Target, Walmart(?) don't do that. if you open the seal, you're stuck with it.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 This is true but I still miss haveing the pysical thing. I do like when the physical game is like a bonus thing you can pay a bit more for but its limited.
@@haruhirogrimgar6047 facts
I love having hundreds of disc ready to watch whenever I feel like it. Screw streaming.
@@cringeonpurpose yeah you might want to rip those discs and stream. Discrot is real
@ I already do but if you take good care of your discs, they last well over 40 years. Some people still have working Laserdisc and early DVDs to this day.
@cringeonpurpose yes if you keep them in special humidity and temperature controlled environments they can last, but most physical media isn't being stored in those conditions and even then it's luck of the draw.
Then you have things like VHS tapes which are actually a consumable. Yes the tape does physically wear out after enough plays.
@@antikommunistischaktion Disc rot is a myth. They might "rot" if you keep them in a 95% storage unit or warehouse, but if they stay room temp. you're fine. I have all my CD's, DVD's and game disc's from the early 90s and they all work fine. I've even pulled out some old VHS that sat in my garage for decades and they still worked.
@@carson21211 lol ok just make sure you have backups of any media you care about. "Disc rot is a myth" until something you care about no longer will play.
Just a PSA, go and check back on those statistics about digital sales. Look at the small print, they are counting EVERYTHING as a digital sale, no matter if it's a $60 game or a $0.05 skin. Both count the same as a single sale.
Five cent skin? I would complain less about micro transactions if most skins cost 5 cents.
Glad to see you here, and yeah - you're bringing up a good point
Whether that's true or not, it still means digital is severely outselling physical media. Even stores are proving that by significant decreasing the shelf space for video games and DVDs.
@@DragonMasonHealerthat’s the issue, DLC is download exclusive or is a code. As a matter of fact, some are literally physical exclusive updates.
You can’t sell skins on Fortnite without doing it digitally or losing money.
@DanialDEcool And like I stated before, that doesn't change the fact that physical media is still selling poorly. There's a reason stores are decreasing their shelf space for physical media. It's not because digital media is selling a lot. It's because physical media is selling far less than ever before.
Whether or not the digital sales are accurate is meaningless because either way, physical sales still aren't good.
I'm one of the physical game holdouts. There's probably more than most people think. Remedy just released Alan Wake 2 physically even after saying they wouldn't because there's a market for it.
Same here I wanted to play Alan wake 2 so bad but I just could not make myself pay 60$ for something I can’t physically hold on my hands fast forward a year and we get Alan wake 2 on physical with all the dlc and oh yeah toss in Alan wake 1 as an extra, I love that I held out
In the case of Alan Wake 2, the game wasn't profitable when it was digital only, so I guess the physical media release was an attempt to sell it to physical only buyers (like myself). I hope the game becomes profitable eventually.
Some are incapable of going digital to to location and region, or poverty.
Some are grounded in principle as they understand the implications of an all digital only media world.
Some are starting to see the light after the death of The Crew 😂
I didn't want to buy Alan wake 2 because it was digital only. As soon as they said there was a physical version, I pre-ordered it and went on and bought the physical edition of the first one.
Alan Wake 2 on disc still requires the internet. The whole game isn't on there. I know, because I have it.
Nintendo Switch physical has one benefit: you don't copy the stupid games over. At worst for first-party games, you need a small day-one patch, but that's it.
With Sony 1st party games the games are on the disc as well. You don’t need internet to install games. Just copy from disc
@@dammyoyesanya4656 Yes, but you still have to copy the game from the disc for PlayStation and Xbox games (like what you mentioned). Switch games require no installs (unless if they have a mandatory Day 1 Update), so you can save on file space on your Switch that way. Some Switch games have updates that are as big as the original game (like Dead Cells), so it's not guaranteed to be better, however.
squid means not having to copy the games from the cartridge to console ssd to play
Tbf Nintendo switch NEEDS physical games. It only has 32/64gb of storage. The alternative is a microsd card
Most first-party switch games don't even get updates or even a day one patch. There are a ton that are still on version 1.0 to this day
"Back in my day we played games on CDs"
"What are CDs, granddad?"
"CDs nuts lmao gottem"
🤣
I used to work at a restaurant, the owner was a great dude and would always get people in the back of the house with
"Hey, you're always messing with the radio/speaker back here, Do you ever just enjoy tapes and CD's?"
Yeah but I--
"Oh you do? GREAT! So you'll love when I tape my D to your forehead so you can CD's nuts!!! Frickin weirdo!! HAHAHAHahaha...(while walking to the front of hosue) hey!! Barkeep!! Guess what cook in the back just said he loves...."
Great times. One of the only places in working food service for too many years that I actually look back at fondly...
Welp it's a better joke than anything saying "Gyatt"
Do you like Wendy's?.........Do you like Wendy's nuts hit your chin? Best pickup line I've ever used.
@@HaveanOreshnik You've gyatt to be kidding me.
Gifting a person a physical game and not some playstore gift card feels way better honestly.
that is dumb. the purpose of the gift is so that the person receives it actually likes and appreciate the item in question. does the gift had to be physical?
does a ticket to a concert as a gift loses its value, if its presented as physical or a screenshot?
@@komocakeps527 Yes, it is so dumb because interacting regularly with your friends and family so you can know what they like and would want as a gift is totally not an option, right? My bad, bro.
@@radiocuco you have bad friends if you think a ticket screenshot is any less "valuable" than a physical ticket
@@komocakeps527 Not the same thing. I remember getting gifted games, I remember who gave them, how I reacted to it, playing them for the first time. Now a gift card is kinda lazy, it's like giving money to someone, it's unoriginal. I value the present because the person spent their time chosing what they thought I would like, even if I don't. A gift card doesn't have this kind of care
@@komocakeps527 you are very strange, sir
The irony being that true modern games ownership is only truly possible (legally) on PC. My DRM-free game files are getting passed down as heirlooms.
I love DRM-free digital I wish more people knew about it instead of automatically going "digital bad physical good"
Good luck maintaining the software and hardware.
Its hard to run programs from even 10 years ago sometimes.
@@MikeVideos327most games shouldn't have any issues on modern Windows or even a compatibility layer like wine or proton... if you're having trouble with a specific game PCGW is your friend
There is truth to this. It's similar to MP3s vs streaming. The MP3 is not on physical media, but it is a detached file and more permanent than physical media.
"My DRM-free game files are getting passed down as heirlooms"
Legally, you can't do that, they are still licenses for only personal use.(Thou it's very unlikely that a company would notice or care about it)
I remember the day i pretty much gave up on physical media being viable for me. I have slow internet in my area and my kid wanted mine craft dungeon for his birthday. I didn't want to deal with a 12-18 hour download so I went to game stop an hour away, bought a copy of minecraft dungeon, drove an hour home, opened up the box and inside was a credit card shaped game code for me to download it with... ugh..., we were both so disappointed. Anyways, my kid got to play it the next day as i left my ps4 on all night to download it for him. I saw the writing on the wall and after resisting for years I finally gave in and just paid for expensive internet. Everytime I had a game night with friends I'd pray no patch dropped that day as it would be a 2-8 hour update and I'd just have to reschedule and tell them next time. Hate it so much.
Slow internet is the bane of my existence. These corpo demons want to force digital only they need to put the infrastructure in so we can have cheap internet everywhere or they can go to hell.
Don't you mean give up on digital media? That wasn't a physical game. I wouldn't be surprised if you imported that Minecraft game from Asia that you'd find an actual physical copy instead of a code in a box. At least, for a Nintendo Switch, that is. The unfortunate reality is that the majority of Western gamers preorder digital deluxe editions of games months before launch so developers saw that and thought "Why release a physical copy? People will pay premium for unfinished rental codes". I've always hated digital gaming and streaming, too because I also have slow internet
@@jase276sorry worded it weird. I ment that I couldn't rely on physical media
The PS4 version of Minecraft I've bought before was a physical disc. And from what I've seen, the PS5 is on a disc and not a digital code.
Stop buying ps4 or 5, Sony is trying to get you to go digital. The Switch still has plenty of physical games and has clear lables on the boxes of games that are just codes.
Only half of Nintendo games are bought digitally. It shows things are pretty okay, actually.
That's mostly held up by Japan really not liking digital as much as the west. That's why so many games are physical exclusive in Japan, but it never happens the other way around. And given they're the only ones based in Japan...
physical games also have some advantages on switch since they don't take up space on the console and work without an internet connection.
"And given they're the only ones based in Japan..."
Sony: "am I a joke to you?"
That's why I usually exclusively import my Switch games from Asia, I know i'll actually be getting a physical copy instead of a code in a box
@@firesonic1010 Meme aside, yes. Playstation left Japan at the end of PS4 and never came back. They're based in California now and have been for years. Funny enough, because the Nintendo Switch was beating them in their own country, lol
@@firesonic1010 Yes, actually. It's common knowledge to people who follow gaming that Playstation left Japan in 2016 in favor of opening their headquarters in San Mateo, California, near many of their main development studios. It caused quite the stir at the time.
I’ve just started collecting DVDs recently. What’s criminal is that even though DVDs are almost irrelevent due to streaming, stores selling DVDs of new movies still charge $14-20 per DVD. You almost have to buy DVDs thrifted in order to get a bang for your buck.
For real. They mever really came down in price. Most of my DVDs are secondhand. My parents hooked me early. My first CDs were from The Record Exchange.
Do you remember when argument for digital sales was it's gonna be cheaper because we don't have to produce physical disc? What a joke
On Sale and with Key Sellers it's cheaper
Except it IS cheaper. I just bought No Man's Sky for about $20. Game is still $40-50 at GameStop. I also got Ark Survival Evolved digitally for FREE at a giveaway event. Game still costs money for the physical copy. I pay $10 a month to watch a near limitless library of movie and TV Shows. ONE of those TV Shows will cost me $50 to own.
Digital is factually cheaper and more convenient than physical media. That's why physical media is losing.
I’ve also seen games much cheaper at GameStop many cod games are still being sold at full price even a decade after it’s been released same with Star Wars battlefront 2 bought it for $5 bucks it really depends on
It is displacing the collections and CRTs as a mass medium, like peasants eating rice.
Its lightweight. It is based on actual piracy, since Netflix simply exploited a frontier, but did not own the movies at its Tombstone bar.
So it is more an eraser than anything. A dumped series of 12 high end episodes, filmed with modern power babes who are homely and poorly lit and produced, fall on deaf ears and gut the remaining present industry.
By all means though, huge screens and modern graphics are prett great.
Limitless shows are great if you like that sort of thing.
And corralling physical colllections is absurdly difficult.
The issue with digital games that digital movies don’t have is that digital games are 3-5x the size of digital movies.
It’s probably the biggest reason they haven’t taken off entirely.
It’s an especially big problem on the Switch, which is semi-portable.
--
I am fine with buying DLC and small indies games digital, but not full-sized, AAA games.
That probably accounts for the numbers of digital sales being higher, but people still buying physical media.
I was just thinking about this.
I hate the idea of streaming and digital distribution taking over everything. You own nothing, and companies can just yank stuff from you whenever they feel like it.
I've had way too many shows taken away from me because whatever streaming service they were on just never bothered getting the license back
"Blue's Clues & You!", "Infinity Train", the "Rugrats" reboot, _way_ too many episodes of "Sesame Street" to even count.
Streaming is getting to the point where it's not convenient or trustworthy anymore, but we're just forced to deal with it because "it's the future, bitch".
I for one always stan physical media over streaming because no one can take it from you. It won't just suddenly stop working one day unless you're careless with it.
Too true. I saw this coming a mile away when Blockbuster closed and Netflix rose. Even back then Netflix would constantly remove movies because of licensing.
Heck, even digital purchases you think you’d have are getting screwed up too. Bought Smiling Friends Season 2 on iTunes. Was gonna take it to my friend’s place and watch on his Xbox. So I start downloading the episodes and play in VLC to make sure it works… Well turns out you can’t even play it in QuickTime (never mind another player), you can only play it in iTunes. But also, it has to _connect online to verify_ so you can watch them. That’s right, you think you’re just buying simple video files, but no, they still have full control. And this new measure was apparently introduced like 2 years ago and still hasn’t been cracked. So I had to pirate a show I already paid for just so I could use it like a normal video file. I’m glad I don’t care much about TV/Movies because this is stupid.
Physical =/= owning and digital =/= accessing. Please look up what DRM is and what downloading a DRM-free game means for you as a customer.
@@jase276 the early days of netflix, were golden, because it had every single mayor movie/series whit an accesible price, but then companies saw an oportunity, everyone made their own streaming service, the rest is history, i'll gladly return to the days of blockbuster at this point.
As a 23 year old man, I totally buy discs all the time. Sure, they are generally secondhand, or such, but man, I can get games for far cheaper than on steam or such. Plus, I can own my favorite movies and series, and watch them whenever I want, without a sub fee, without anything like that. It is great.
See man it’s people like you who ruin it for everyone else…continue being a sheep 🐑 because you never know if one of these companies shut down & you’re stuck without your purchased content 🤦🏾♂️
A game being digital-exclusive isn't a bad thing on its own -- being digital-exclusive and relying on DRM is where it gets ugly. If you can get your games DRM-free, digital-only is honestly pretty rad. Far easier to make backup copies and far harder to lose them unless you're buying cheap hard drives and/or are terrible with organizing your files.
I only just recently discovered what an NAS is and promptly bought the components to have some decent long-term storage with redundancy for my ripped DVD's and libraries of mostly 7th-gen-and-older games. It's been worth every penny for the peace of mind.
I don’t like paying a monthly subscription, so I buy my games and stay offline. I like the option to physically hold my media as well. I burn my own CD’s still
3:44 Finally, someone is speaking up for us rural gamers
I have starlink
Blu-ray and 4K movies on disc are far more important to me than games on disc and the primary reason I still want a drive in my console.
I don't care. If I cannot play the game PHYSICAL, or Pirate it, I just won't play it.
At least Nintendo always willing to do physical games.
So would you play a game if the physical "copy" literally had no data on it at all and was just a physical license key to download the game? Because, uhhhh, that's already happening.
@@antikommunistischaktion Yeah that's a huge problem as well
Does this apply to indie games as well?
@@mrconroy4672 Main reason why i'll most likely only have the Switch be my only console next gen. With things like the Steam Deck, there's no reason getting a PS or Xbox anymore when they don't even have physical games anymore. Ironically, I have been picking up PS1 and PS2 minis/slims for retro gaming
The original title said "Physical media is NOT dead." Now it's "Don't let them take physical media away." Are we already conceding defeat???
charitably, i guess you could interpret it as something like "don't let physical media become dead, because it isn't yet"
I worked with a guy near retirement age who was a completionist of all his console games... didn't have the internet. He 100%ed all the big open world game series like Red Dead and Assassins Creed just for the fun. Because he didn't have the internet, and all of those games ship with a butt ton of bugs, he would bring his console into work and we would connect it to the internet to update and get DLC. This would often break his save games and he'd have to do everything all over again.
I can relate, having played "Mass Effect: Andromeda" for more than 50 hours without any "achievement" noted because it was offline.
As someone who collects physical music media (and some movies and video games), I love the idea of sifting through my records and tapes to find something to listen to as opposed to sifting through my Spotify or Apple Music library which is daunting and rather lifeless. Having a tangible item to look at, hold in your hand, feel it etc. brings me comfort! On top of that, it might inspire me to put on something I haven’t played in a while if I see it! And return to an old favorite of mine! I’m not gonna do that with streaming.
On top of all this, it’s also just very charming to have your collection out as decor in your living room or bedroom. The amount of times my friends and family visit me and they love the fact I have all of my music out to see and it’s a good conversation starter! It gets people to geek out about music with me which is my bread and butter!
I'm the other way. I was a early adaptor for digital media. Buying games on steam instead of on six, buying games on Xbox 360 store instead of disc's. It felt more conviniemt, the game was yours without the disc, damaged disc's didn't matter anymore. But I've flipped in my later years. I now prefer disc's on my Playstation, I buy 4K Blu-rays. That's mainly because I've come to respect the used market, preservation and with movies the high bitrate
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but 4K Blu-rays are just as bad as digital. They can revoke your copy remotely for whatever reason and I'm pretty sure for some if your internet goes down you may not even be able to use it because it has to connect to servers to authenticate your copy. They're essentially rental keys.
Never got the preservation argument tbh, atleast for PC stuff
An offline DRM-free digital installer that you can infinitely copy to other drives & the cloud is much more valuable for preservation than a disc that can rot, accidentally get broken or more easily get lost
We should be seeing more and more gamers push for no DRM on their digital games
Personally I'm a best of both worlds guy when it comes to games, but movies and tv shows have to be physical only. Got burned a few times by digital movies having their servers go away or not being compatible with my game system anymore.
@jase276 Sorry, but that sounds bs to me. Do you have any example when that ever happened? I am not talking about online only games. I am talking offline game on disk.
I flipped twice over the years. I first was a fan of physicals, cause it meant I could run over to gamestop to trade em up. Then the Xbox One came out, and buying physical games became pointless (I own TEN games on xbox one physically, and they were bought within a 3-year period). I then recently flipped back to buying physicals, when I started to see people going out of their ways to buy games like HL1 and The Orange Box physically to have on display. Lump that in with mass delisting and what happened with The Crew, and now I am desperate to buy PC games physically!
And yes, I do own a physical copy of The Orange Box now, and also L4D2, but I am missing a few other Valve games like HL1 for display. I also got plenty of other old PC games, such as EA's Battlefield 2142. Great game, its more convenient to pirate than to source, then patch the game yourself.
"I had to get up off my couch and find the disc and put it in the console".
Not gonna lie, that's less work to play a videogame than I do nowadays as an adult with digital storefronts.
If I want to play a game, I have to make sure I've done enough work on my personal projects today that I don't feel lazy, do any other little chores like laundry, make a cup of coffee, have a quick meal, look around to make sure the kids are safely occupied if they're home, and THEN I can justify sitting down, opening Steam and playing something for a couple hours uninterrupted.
"Getting up from the couch" is a relatively small hurdle
I'm slightly confused...
Would you not still have to do all that if you used CDs?
Its a how can you complain when I have it harder than you bit@ytterbius2900
Yes, he would. He's saying, in the grand scheme of things, having to physically change discs is the least of his worries. Like a drop in the bucket.
@@DanteToska Ah, gotcha. Thanks for clarifying
Exactly my life
I am one of those disc buyers, regardless of whether the whole game is on it or not i want something physical for my purchase and prices even brand new are better even on launch day, ownership is important to me when ever it is possible
Physical media will always be superior. You own it, there is no bs. You can trade it. You can resell it. You don't need to worry about stupid ass servers failing. You don't need to worry about them shutting it down. And people that are saying, DVD's die fast, yeah no. If you can't handle it with care like a normal person with a working brain, it's not the DVD's fault. Also, DVD's look, feel and sound infinite times more futuristic than any modern shit. The PSP had the coolest looking disks ever. Sexy console. Sexy 2006.
Also, physical media is inconvenient? How fucking lazy has the world become?!?! This is so unbelievably sad...
But you do have to worry about physical media devices eventually crapping out.
As a PC guy, yes i love getting free games digitally. Consoles dont give as many free deals. Its not friendly to digital users
If you had PC you could get literally any games for free by just embracing emulation. On consoles most of us buy games cause we want to support the devs that made those games otherwise like PC we could just pirate on our consoles too and get any free games we want without issue.
I’ve actually been getting more into physical media over the past couple years. I love collecting my favorite movies, displaying them on the shelf, and playing them whenever i want. I also like having physical games and buying used games if i want to play a game, but i don’t like the developer’s practices.
I've been burned way too many times with Digital Games. Of course mostly by Nintendo. Wii Shop, DSi Shop, Wii U eShop, 3DS eShop, Xbox 360 Marketplace all storefronts that closed, all storefronts that due to their closure have caused me to lose tens of thousands of dollars in games.
I can't trust digital storefronts on console.
How did you lose literally any money on Nintendo consoles?
If you have the same accounts you can log in and reinstall your games
@ajc2_
For Nintendo consoles they are locked to that specific console you bought them on. So let's say your 3DS dies and you get a 2nd hand one (since you can't get them new anymore) you WON'T be able to download your digital games to it as those games are locked to the now dead 3DS.
But that has nothing to do with the closure of the market places...
I watch most of my movies physically, most of my games are physical, I own CDs in my car/my room, I have a large cassette and VHS collection and refuse to move entirely to digital. I’m only 19, but I refuse to be limited by a corporations greed.. I will always buy physical no matter what.. I hate all streaming services tbh, except for RUclips.
You're smart.
I'm still buying physical new games for my Nintendo switch, when I recently told one of my friends "I bought Dragon Quest III HD-2D and Sea of stars for the switch", He criticized me for not buying them for steam (I have the deck too). It's absurd how the people now are not seeing how we are going in a direction of buying nothing.
A lot of people don't go to stores to buy specific products but to buy the best product available in the category of choice from the store at the time. People don't go to the mobile store and say "Give me Trackmania or I will leave", instead they will just say "Show me what games you have and I will pick what I'm interested in". They will keep stock of items that they think people will be interested in.
I bought star wars battlefront 2 for 5 dollars off of eBay for PS4. it's for like $30 rn on the PSN store. That experience alone was enough for me to get the Disk version of the PS5
A lot of digital-only console users don’t realize that physical media benefits them in that the used game market competes with their console’s digital storefront and helps keep prices lower than retail price. If a game is $60 on PSN but is averaging at $40 on eBay, Sony doesn’t really have a choice but to put it on sale down to $40 digital to stay competitive.
This is different for PC because PC players have access to multiple digital storefronts that compete with each other.
It depends. Physical and digital sales don’t tend to line up. You’ll have physical go on sale one month, then digital in another. It also depends on _what_ you’re buying. There’s games that aren’t even that old (2-3 years) that are $30-40, meanwhile they go on sale digitally for $5-10. Games with limited prints or are out of print. My suggestion to anyone is follow twitter accounts with deals, and wishlist games on your preferred digital platforms. There’s also websites that will track individual games’ sales history (at least digital, but sometimes physically too, like DekuDeals). Then you can see if something is a good discount or average, and how often it happens to know if you should jump on it. We’re past the 360 days where companies keep their games at full price on digital and only lower it by 10%. You might see games at “full price” today, but without proper context (sales trackers), they do go on sale. This was Nintendo’s approach but Sony has adopted it too.
That said, I’m no advocate for digital. If physical was lost, those deals could become more scarce because companies know customers have no alternative to buy X game on a console, as there’s only one storefront on that console. I still go out of my way to buy physical where possible, but we are getting deals too. It’s just not in the “permanent price drop” sense. More like “rare sales that become monthly sales” (outside 1st party).
Now why are people STILL perpetuating the (mostly) myth of disc rot. Seriously, it happened to ONE line of MUSIC CDs back in the 90"s and literally never happened again. Any movie, game or CD produced then will literally never have this issue. If taken care of your collection can outlast you and several more decades after.
Tell that to my Christopher Reeves Superman movies. I bought them in 2009. I went to watch it the other day and the movie played till Superman shows up in Metropolis and saves Lois from the helicopter and the movie stopped.
Superman II won't play at all and neither will the other 2. All my discs worked at one point, and I take care of my discs. Yet they rotted.
I just got Expendables last year and the disc already rotted away.
There is a whole bunch of discs especially from Warner Bros where they are rotted and don't work.
From about 2009 till 2015 there was problems with manufacturing discs.
So don't lie saying disc rot does not happen anymore as it certainly DOES.
I've been a collector for a while, but my wakeup call was with my PSP. It can't recognize my Wi-Fi anymore, so any digital purchases I "own" are impossible to download unless I use my phone as a Hotspot. It's a huge ballache, and if I didn't figure this out, I would've been boned.
I have received a PSP as a gift ! 🙂
Thank you for the information !
If you are on pc just use GOG or something like that then you own your games
@@Rexithedud Not all gog games are like that.
@@antikommunistischaktion All GOG games are DRM free.
@SuperFranzs
not true, actually. This was exposed with that one game where you're a professional unaliver (pretty sure if I say the name of the game the comment will vanish).
@@antikommunistischaktion Haven't heard about that situation. Do you mean the game had DRM, or that it got taken down and you lost access to it?
@SuperFranzs game had DRM. GoG actually laxed the no-drm policy a year or so ago
Honourable mention for charity shops.
I've got some real bargains on old DVDs, CD, video games etc. etc.
Piracy is the best thing for games preservation
Not for games that rely on a central server.
@A2Adam true but for single player and local multiplayer games that's no prob
it's not Digital vs Physical, it's ownership vs "rental", honestly the shift towards digital media has a lot of benefits, it's more efficient, economical and convenient. The problem is the fact that you have very limited channels from which you can buy games that you will actually own, gog is the only major (and that's debatable) store front that allows you to buy drm free games, as for game preservation I fail to see the difference between having the bluray disc of a video game or a flash/external hard drive of your digital media, what we need is not for physical media to be retained, but for regulations that will allow is to be in actual control of our digital purchases, the ability to do with it as we please, that's the right thing to do.
I disagree. Physical media forces studios and devs to actually learn how to properly optimize a game. Games used to be around 25 GB at THE MOST. Now, games are bloated with sizes of over 70-100 GBs. It's inexcusable. Elden Ring is a current, MASSIVE game that is SEAMLESS most of the time. Guess what size it is on discs? Around 45 GB. On PC, though, it's about 60 GB because why bother optimize when that market/demographic accepts bloat? Still, it's under 70 GB because the game is made by devs that know wtf they're doing and have a standard that their customers/communities holds them to.
@@jase276 That's part of the AAA control. When they make larger games, they lose competition with indies who cannot manage that. They make the game difficult to keep as it's huge thus users are swayed from keeping the game on their systems which means new game releases don't need to compete with old game releases. This is why.
@@jase276 It's a double edged sword. Being less compressed also makes games more easy to mod, so there are some people who actually benefit from the bloat.
Of course it’s not dead ! I’m 26 and I’ve gone back to everything physical. I just got tired of all my favorite shows disappearing from streaming, e-shops closing, etc.
Ownership is cool ! And a shelf full of games and DVDs just looks great.
I stopped buying digital on consoles after my Xbox Live account was banned for a BS reason with no option to appeal.
Some guy was asking me to do a license transfer so he could get my Halo Reach legendary flames. I told him to buy it on eBay ($20 at the time), or mod it. He kept asking for the license transfer, which I wasn't going to do and risk losing my account, so I told him no. I assume he reported our conversation (Profile, Report, Sent) in a fit of anger and I got banned for profiteering & account phishing.
In Australia, I can usually get new releases $20-$30 cheaper than what they cost digitally. If Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo only want to 'sell' me a rental, then I will only buy them at rental prices, so only buy digital when its dirt cheap (and even then will look at the going rate for a physical version and purchase that if comparable in price before committing to a digital version)
I had a friend (well still have, he didn't die) with whom I would usually make plans on which games to buy. We always bought discs so we could share them between ourselves. He was mostly into online multiplayer stuff and I was into single player stuff, but I would usually borrow his CoD for example to play the campaigns or zombie modes, and he would borrow my RPGs when he wanted "to chill".
We did that right up to the end of the PS4 era. When the new gen came out it just didn't feel worth it, so we moved to PC gaming. There it's basically impossible to get physical copies for most games. Worse still Steam is so freaking convenient and the sales actually make big disocounts so it's worth buying digital (never understood why people pay the same for digital on release than physical). Good thing is we can still share our accounts to play each others game if we want, but I miss owning my games 😢 (and if Valve ever cracks down on account sharing we are done)
The only company that I'd even partially trust with digital purchases is Valve, who have not yoinked anyone's games after 2 decades, but even then I'm wary because there's an industry precedent that it's fine to just take people's purchases away on a whim.
The Crew got yoinked. Valve routinely yoinks entire game libraries if a user is caught cheating on one of the games. Cheating sucks, but Valve has no right in being bad and removing all user games like they do. At most, they should remove that one game the user cheated on.
@@bobmcbob4399 They don't do that. There is no global "ban", you just get banned from what you're abusing. If you get caught cheating, it's up to the publisher of that specific game whether to ban you from online play or not. If the game is online-only, then too bad, that's a you problem. You only lose access to all your games if you get banned for something like credit card fraud. You get banned from posting on forums if you're a jackass on forums etc.
There are PLENTY of accounts out there with VAC bans, in a lot of cases multiple bans, that still have access to their libraries.
In the case of The Crew, it was revoked on Ubisoft's end. Steam still shows you as owning it and lets you download it, it just will never work again because Uplay can't authenticate and the servers are gone anyway. It's situations like this why Valve warn you on the store pages that these games require 3rd party accounts and launchers, if issues like this are important to you, you should avoid any games that do this.
Additionally, even if games are removed from Steam's storefront, they still allow you to download those games at any time, the risk that your games could be taken away by the service is ultimately so unlikely that in my opinion it shouldn't even factor into the debate, it's like deciding whether or not you want to leave your house based on the risk that you'll be crushed by an asteroid as soon as you step outside.
@@bobmcbob4399 I made a long, detailed reply but it seems to have been removed? In short, this is untrue. You only lose access to your games if you're banned for something serious like credit card fraud. If you're inappropriate on the forums, you only get banned from forums. If you cheat in a game, you get banned from online play for that specific game. There are many accounts with multiple game and/or VAC bans that still have full access to their library.
With regard to The Crew, that's just Ubisoft's launcher removing it from their account. You can still download the game on Steam if you own it, you just can't play it because the servers are gone and Uplay won't authenticate you.
I have a really old computer (Macbook Pro 2008) as my secondary machine, since I can still use it to a number of things like word processing and image editing, and one of my partitions is to an old version of OSX (like, one of the cat ones old). Steam used to work on it, but they decided to discontinue it, and now it doesn't launch at all.
The more up-to-date partition (from I think about ten years ago) has Steam that still boots but is no longer supported at all, which banners across the top of every screen on it warn you when you open it, and it could just be gone the next time I open that computer up.
So obviously it's an extreme case because of how old everything involved is, but if my main computer died for any reason I could just lose access to my entire library until I got a replacement, even with a computer that, while very old, still can run a decent portion of Steam's catalogue, because there won't even be a legacy version of the launcher left.
As someone who lives in a non-Western country and not in a big city, it was never an option for me. Online retail allowed you to buy games on physical media, but with a markup.
Watched a dvd recently. I have not used one in years, however the extra effort made it more special, more of an event. Instead of just watching it on my phone on the toilet.
Streaming will always be unreliable and i do not ever want to see bitrate compression artifacts from sudden internet speed fluctations. I want my top BluRay 4K quality all the way through.
Also console games i will always buy physical whenever possible so i can borrow the game to my brother when i want to.
I'm one of those weirdos that only buys physical media (34 yrs old), never had cable or streaming, only internet I have is on my phone. Still rockin a free antenna. The day the physical media goes bye bye is the same day i quit buying media.
3:39 I am the one who still buys discs!
Seconded!
I do too but not all the time. But I been playing alot of ps2 lately so overall got lots of disc
98% of my games are on disc. I think i only have like 4 digital games
Thought for a second that the "I don't like criminals" line would follow the inevitable conclusion of "but if these companies take away the games I paid for I'm pirating them all back". Digital piracy onto my own hard drive is the new physical media! And I say this as someone who's sunk thousands of dollars into Steam
You don’t need internet to play most disc based games. No day 1 update needed for the most part
I shall start working on vids about that because people keep saying things like "physical doesn't come on the disc" or you need to update in order to play
@@theelitedragon
Some of the disks are over 100 gig. When you put the disk in the drive it copies to the hard drive.
Yeap the Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection physical copy I got for PS4 and Switch this week had all the games on the physical disc/cartridge.
1:50 I only started buying exclusively digitally when buying the physical disc meant nothing when I needed to connect to a server anyways just to run the disc. OFC things have changed for me recently, where I have been going out of my way to visit antique shops to purchase old PC games for cheap. Last visit, I got my hands on Civ 5, Lego Star Wars, and Bioshock Infinite (this one I did not even know had a physical PC version!)
For games at least, I see a lot of kids buying games physically. I think this is because parents just find it easier to go into a store physically and look through their game section rather than buy through the console.
Really? I've seen the opposite, their parent just give them the gift card for whatever console and they buy games off the respective game digital store.
@@gligarguy4010 At least I see parents buying kids games physically often. Actual stores are just easier to understand compared to digital for some.
1:20 the problem isn't going full digital. The problem is control and preservation of your copy of the product you bought. If you had full control over your digital files and had them all backed up so you can pull them for the future without restrictions on it or other ease dropping on what you're doing with them then we'd have no problems but sadly we don't have that hence the problem.
A few things I didn't see mentioned:
1. The Xbox consoles since One have required an internet connection to setup the system for the first time.
2. The detachable PS5 disc drive requires internet to setup the first time.
3. Not all games ship without the full playable game on disc. In fact, if you move away from the big AAA releases, there's tons that ship fully playable.
When the Wii U launch, you could only play the system with its library of games, you can't even play your Wii games unless you had internet access cause the only way to get backwards compatibility on Wii U was through a firmware update download. Something that they could give you but could also take away. When the PS3 launch Sony had a firmware update where gamers could used Linux on their PS3 and then later down the line they released another firmware which took Linux out forcing player to update or else future games will not work on their PS3 if they don't. The reason why Sony taking out Linux was that some gamers found an exploit where they could easily play digital PS3 games without ever buying them at the PS Store.
When I bought my PS5 in 2021 when supply was still limited, I went the GameStop Pro route to secure one. But I didn't pre-order, so me and a bunch of other people were in line on a first-come-first-served basis. When stock at my closest GameStop ran out of the PS5 Disk Version, everyone, and I mean everyone, in line waiting sighed and left thw store empty handed because no one that day wanted the digital only.
I was near the section where they had blurays in Best Buy today. It was replaced with nothing but smart TVs collecting dust.
So much so it feels like they might get them sold by the time their last android update comes out, prettymuch making them useless.
I feel like consoles should allow you to buy a blank disc/cartridge and your your own games onto it. They could also remove digital ownership of the game to prevent people from selling infinite copys of the game.
The Steam Deck already does this. You just hotswap microSDs if you want.
@qchtohere8636 I didn't know that thanks :)
@@qchtohere8636 But you don't own games there. License purchase only. They can revoke a game or your whole library. GoG is best, but they don't make a portable console.
It would unironically be rad if that were a thing. Then I could just pay an inflated amount of money to get Minecraft Console Edition on Switch, rather than not being able to buy it at all.
Memory cards is what you're talking about, any consoles nowadays had that feature. You could literally put all your Switch games onto one 1tb microSD card and take your Switch on the road with you.
The moment console makers ditch physical media is the same moment when I ditch them.
What's annoying is the digital versions of consoles can only hold like 3 or 4 full triple a games before the storage is full
Why physical games is dying out, aside from just convenience.
1. more and more games are requiring installs and even updates day one.
2. games are taking up more and more space, and while some compression probably can shrink these games to sizes that can fit on a single disc, multi layer discs are more expensive, and that's assuming they even put the full game on the disc.
3. (feeding off of point 1), optical media is just SLOW. People who rip movies to image copies know this, it can take a couple of hours even for a dual layer blu-ray whose storage caps out at 50 gigabytes. My current internet speed, assuming I can sustain my cap of 600 megabits per second, would allow me to download that volume of data in a little over 11 minutes. And with how much data is being demanded by games these days, optical media just cannot keep up in the same way even a hard drive can.
It isn't just consumer habits, but what companies are doing. Heck some games these days are literally just download codes in a case made for a disc.
IMO, the only thing I see saving physical media of games is the price of flash memory going into the toilet. I just looked up some 100 GB BD-Rs and they are $5.75 a disc, a bit more than a nickel per gigabyte. a 128 gigabyte NVMe on the other hand, about 20 bucks, though I'm not sure I'd trust them, about 4 times as much.
And this is for just Play Station and Xbox. Switch games generally don't require installs at all
SSD controllers are expensive, but NAND itself is still falling in price, even though it's slightly more expensive than discs. And with Sony now discontinuing BD-R discs for the consumer market, we might see more cartridges like what Nintendo is doing, as they're faster to load and install into system storage, as well as just acceptable for loading games from.
Flash memory has a rough lifespan of about 5 years.
A decent quality optical disc will last 5-10 burned at home or 15-25 years professionally pressed.
Flash or SSDs are NOT a comparible replacement to optical discs.
@@suroguner Yeap but not installing also means slower loading times and unstable performance. Hopefully Nintendo's next console embrace ssd cause the internal ram they're using now is just too slow.
@@VOAN unstable performance? Slower loading times? you act like the switch is using CDs instead of carts.
5:43 not true. You have to copy data from the disc. At least on playstation. Dunno about xbone. On playstation there is a full 1.0 version of the game on disc. Without internet you cannot update, true. But you can play that 1.0 version from start to finish
This is not true in all cases even for PlayStation.
@@Binglitpawnyes it is. The only games this won't work for are companies that outright state they require that first-time internet connection, which will be your Ubisoft/Activision/etc. Besides that, yes the data is on the disc. Check it for yourself. Unless you only buy products from those types of companies, but it falls on you as the consumer to do your research ahead of time.
@@xmatoko all I'm saying is not all PlayStation game discs printed have all the data on the game discs.
1. Find digital movie
2. Pirate it
3. Put it on a disk
4. Print out cover
5. Put it in a case
With the right laser printer and some bulk purchases I make make a movie for about 0.30-0.50
more or less
I think Im up to around 2300 out of my 2800 movie collection
Factor in inflation you would be looking at $2.00. but I get what you mean
It's not the same as a pressed disk. The Burned discs won't last as long as the original pressed disks.
That quite literally is the definition of illegal you’re no longer in the gray area your just going to jail
@@gamerkid2329 How much soy do you eat on a daily basis?
Hey, if they don't sell what you want, you're doing them a favor by making it yourself.
I only buy physical games for console, and the day I can't is the day I stop buying games on console. I really wish you could for pc but that died almost 20 years ago. there is no such thing as digital "ownership" and that's why I pay for no subscription services. I buy DVD's or Blu rays for shows or movies I love and pirate everything else, I will never buy a digital product.
Why physical media is still big globally for example I am in Uganda Africa most of these game services like Xbox game pass, Nintendo online or Ps plus doesn't exist in so many parts of the world. That is why many buy discs, cartridges. Also the stores of playstation, xbox and nintendo are geo locked. So many just resort to buying discs and play offline. Yes also internet availability has improved but the speeds vary from region to region and pricing too plus data caps
Whoops! You have to put the CD in your... wait... uh... where are the CD drives? What do you mean there aren't any?
I buy anything I *genuinely* care about on physical. I spent a lot of money to get shows no longer on print physically, just because I don't want to lose them.
When a game has a physical version, I buy it.
I bought Baldur's Gate 3 twice because I love it so much. I bought it on PC when it came out, and later bought the physical edition on console because it's entirely playable on disc.
Physical media will never die, what's likely to happen is that if companies refuse to sell them and lock down on taking away ownership of media from ppl piracy will suddenly become bigger than mainstream media since it's easier and cheaper. And there won't be any benefit or convenience for streamibg services.
These days my experience has been that even buying a disc does not equate to ownership of the game. If you buy a physical disc copy of a game you still need to work through Steam or Epic etc. Meaning even these games ownership is dependent on the continued existence of that company and platform.
Thats why to me whether you buy physical or digital it makes no difference (on pc at least). If a game also requires you to sign in and have a continuous online connection then owning the physical disc does not guarantee ownership for life. Your using and enjoying the game is still dependent on that service provider existing and maintaining the servers and store.
The best way to go is to use GOG
You got it man
Yeah, this is only true for PC. For PC this change happened a lot earlier, it seems impossible to go back to a point where physical media matters on PC again. The PC section in game stores have disappeared almost a decade ago already, or it's a small corner with some codes in a box.
I am a big physical media guy. I still have CDs cassettes. I still use iTunes to load my iPod classic. I can say this. This generation of video gaming has been honestly kind of trash. One of the reasons I love the Nintendo switch is every release is physical and I feel that Nintendo games, particularly on physical media, are a lot more reminiscent of how video games should be. You buy the cartridge you put it in and you are good to go anytime. I've bought physical media since the PS4 era. It is just an absolute pain in the dick
Hey Tyler, physical media glutton here. I think I have some answers (or at least data points) for you to consider.
When considering digital sales, remember that the PS+ monthly games are included in that number. I happily claim every game that is offered, and this likely artificially boosts their numbers not unlike Xbox Gamepass. Also the pre-owned market is still quite big, much bigger than you may realize, and these numbers also do not show up.
When considering console sales for PS4, remember that most people did not buy PS4 Pro as their first console. There's a high chance that most people who bought a PS4 Pro already bought a PS4 previously, therefore you would see uneven PS+ accounts to console sales ratio. Likely the gap is smaller than at first glance.
I am completely expecting PS6 to ditch its disk drive. I'm expecting this because Sony have proven repeatedly to make anti-consumer, seemingly anti-profit decisions if it means they can force players into the ecosystem they desire. With no real competitor left in the console market, Sony will almost certainly give zero fucks about who they upset with their decisions.
Once PS6 happens with no disc drive or other option for physical media with TRANSFERABLE LICENSES, I'm ditching home consoles for PC and whatever Nintendo has cooking up.
@@fujinshu This is da whey
I’ve reached a point where I don’t bother on a console game if it isn’t physical since my backlog is a never-ending pit lmao
One massive thing for me is that each game on console needed to be installed. Why would I buy a disc if I still need to take up space on my device?
This annoys the shit outta me because a 2B hard drive is expensive enough and I also gotta basically download the entire game anyway? Fucking insanity.
Because once you have it they can't do jack to take it from you.
If the disc itself has the whole game on it, it still needs to be downloaded first because Bluray disc players have slower read speeds than hard disk drives and ssd. Also consider that storage is cheaper ($/GB) than ever.
You have to install physical games now for mainly two reasons. A: The games are compressed on disc so they can fit. And B: Installing to your hard drive/SSD saves a ton on loading times. For most games it's not that big a deal, just wait a few minutes. Minus updates, they install faster physically.
@kylewhiteman Yeah but storage bring cheaper just makes discs seem even more inconvenient and ancient.
I think the main reason why physical media is going to still be a thing for a long distance of future is that people still want to feel like they’ve owned something like they can touch something instead of just purchasing something online which yes it may be feel very convenient But with how things are going at the moment with digital media are having questions especially about what happened with the crew when it got shut down and then Ubisoft decided that they could no longer download it because it was part of the policy where you just bought a license so even though that we are in the future right now where everything‘s digital they’re always gonna be that people that you’re just gonna buy a physical game because they feel like they truly owned it even though that it’s typically just a licensed key built in into a blue right disc, but I also do hope for the future that physical media can still happen in the future because it would also be freaking nice to just install the games through the Blu-ray Drive compared to just downloading it through the Internet because there are still a pretty good amount of people around the world who don’t have solid Internet to download the game
I think the main reason that people accept digital on PC is because if Steam shuts down, just crack the DRM and there you go!
isn't denuvo really hard to crack and only one cracker left?
Even if Steam does shutdown, there are modders out there who could just create mirror server of the site so gamers could just migrate their library to there and play it there instead. It's the same way they did to Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube, DS, 3DS, PSP, PS Vita, Ouya, Wii, Wii U, and PS3 when those systems are dead, their online stores and server got mirrored so you could still download stuffs for free and even play those older games online through a mirror server.
In a world without physical media piracy is a moral necessity. At least for preservation purpouses.
Discs degrade. Consoles wear out. Servers get shut down. This is why I will forever be in favor of emulation, backups, and piracy as the best option for preserving and playing video games.
This could be the intro to a psychological thriller set in a dystopian future about media piracy and
preservation.
@grayzelfx I lost it reading this. 😂 You turned my text into a "Comment You Can Hear" instantly
@@aaron5364 it reminds of that movie called Metegol, at the end one of the characters says "Stars fade away, Idols fall, Pros get old, managers are forever" lol
discs don't degrade if you take care of them and don't trap them in a humid enviorment
Servers shutdown, lose of digital ownership/rights to play seem to degrade much faster than physical Discs
This isn't a UK problem I'm afraid. There are more and more physical media shops here! They're so popular they're coming back into our supermarkets. You can even buy vinyl in everyday supermarkets here.
Bro's forgot about jailbreaking console market
I mainly game on console but occasionally play stuff on PC (built a computer a while back that runs Indy games well). I prefer owning my media, displaying it on shelves, and having a tangible product that I can sell or give away at my leisure. Physical media also has a ton of sales, so if it's the same price or cheaper than digital, then why not buy a thing that you can actually own, display, and potentially sell later or let a friend borrow?
I gladly paid an extra $100 for the PS5 with a disk drive for both playing my PS4 and PS5 games. I've been playing PlayStation since the 90s, but if they decide to go all digital in the future, I will probably just completely transition to PC gaming. Most exclusives get released on Steam eventually anyway, and unlike console storefronts, I'm confident I'll be able to continue downloading games I purchased on Steam for decades to come. Plus, I have a long HDMI cable connecting my PC to my TV if I wanted to play a game more comfortably.
Ironically, you can get physical right now on pc, you just have to burn the discs yourself, gog games are drm free, if you want physical you can always take your drm free games and put them on discs for safe keeping.
I think making your own physical discs for PC doesn’t)t make much sense compared to console, because everything you buy on PC works on PC. You just need a bigger SSD/HDD. Whereas with console, my copy of Yoshi’s Wooly World isn’t gonna play on my Switch because 1) it’s a different format, but 2) it isn’t backwards compatible. Sure there’s PC games from early on that may not work as well because it was made for a completely different operating system and whatnot, but I’m pretty sure anything from 2000 on could be played today on your PC just fine (and still more before then). PS5’s don’t even play PS1 discs.
@@mrshmuga9 The entire point of physical media is presurvation for later use, a dvd, or especially a M-disc can last a lifetime, hard drives die, but physical media won't.
@ Fair enough I guess, haven’t heard of M-discs before so I was just thinking of your typical re-writable discs that aren’t any good. But m discs also aren’t the most cost efficient, especially with how big games can get, and they come in small packs. Can range from $1 per disc up to $25 per disc. And the latter was only for a 100GB disc. Granted it depends on the kinds of games you buy, but it doesn’t bode well for the future. Who wants to pay an extra $30 on top of a game? Now you’re waiting for one of them to go on sale, which will take some months or more.
@@mrshmuga9 To be fair i said m-disc due to survivability, they are rated to survive at least a century and theoretically, a millenium if stored properly, you could in theory, put them on anything, which was my point, the only real way to preserve your games permanently.
Fr, a pissnickel can't play my copy of ridge Racer I've had since launch. Wtf.
4:13 Watching this so actually surprises me. I never stopped buying games physically, so I figured most people did and digital games were niche. And then a GameStop clerk told me that they’d sold put of the All-digital PS5. I couldn’t believe it. She said she still bought her games physically too
**me flexing in mirror: “you’re damn right”
What
There's a story that Adam koralik said something along the lines of
There are two kids who owned a switch, one bought all the games physically, and one bought them digitally. The parents forced the physical kid to buy physical. The kid was all bummed out because the digital kid was flexing that he didn't have to put the games in etc. the kid who bought physical always bought used so they saved money. One day they both go in together and decide to get another game console. The digital kid brought their switch in and got $200, the physical kid got double, the digital kid was like "but the games are on the console" clerk goes "we can't use those when we sell consoles"
Physical games are cheaper in the long run and don't disappear when you get your account banned or whatever.
We get all our switch games on cartridges. The kids like it more, and I like how it'll still be available for use ten years from now
They also taste funny.
My main pain with the death of physical media (as much as corporations are pushing for it at least) is that you don't get to own stuff permanently. It's why I switched to GOG from Steam where possible - I want to own it permanently and not have it be revoked at any given time. I have the same beef with physical disks that don't even have the game on them. If I buy it, I should be able to keep it, regardless of whether a given online service shuts down or how much the company wants to take away my access to the thing I bought. Wanting to keep it long term is why I get physical media in the first place - plus I get to lend my copy to friends and family.
I buy both. Digital to play and physical for the collection and backup.
It’s good to diversify. Physical media has the risk of getting damaged, destroyed, or stolen. Digital media (through a license) has the risk of being lost or temporarily unavailable due to account hacks, unjust bans, delistings, server outages, or other issues relating to Internet requirements.
For preservation/backup purposes, ideally you would want a hard drive with DRM-free game files that you can copy to other hard drives. Unfortunately though, there’s no legal way to do that for many if not most games.
Me too. I have a very small collection of my old games with a couple consoles tucked away. I play everything on my windows laptop or steamdeck. I haven't used my cds since I got a new car this year. My house is too small for a record player and my collection is too tiny to justify a turntable right now.
It’s the same reason people still buy vinyl and cd and cassette for music, like yes it’s not practical or cheap than Spotify or Apple Music but it’s so much cooler to actually have a physical copy of a certain thing, even if it’s been outdated for like 50+ years
The Dreamcast outlived you all, like a Zombie from SEGA.
Don‘t Dreamcast it’s over.
It got games way into the 2000s with Last Resort, Rush Rally Racing and Pier Solar.
I will never and I can't stress this enough never buy a console if it doesn't support physical media but the only exception is PC as GOG has offline installers meaning your license to the game isn't locked behind their server but download to your pc with the game so if they ever shut down or you forget your password but you have you game downloaded to a 1TB flash drive it's fine.
it's the same with films, discs are still being sold in countries that don't have reliable internet for streaming, it's what's actually been keeping the medium alive