One day digital is also going to die and we will be forced to stream games on a crappy service that costs 50$ a month
I feel sad Radio Shack ran out of business bc now you have to be at least 30 years old to know you can still acquire rippers for $10 to rip/burn dvds, cds, and games. I still use my first Xbox and my latest PS5 as DVD players. The most expensive part is storage atp.
Dont lose hope yet. Im (barely) under 30 and have one of those.
DVDs still exist. DVD players still exist.
so do dvd burners
Physical mediums aren’t gone - they are just all HDD and SSD now.
I switched from CDs to HDDs two decades ago. HDDs are still great as physical long-term storage.
Your digital is just HDDs and SSDs in someone else’s computers.I’ve still got my tapes.
Where’s MiniDisk?
*MiniDisc.
UMD you mean, i don’t think MiniDisk were ever used to distribute games or even general software.
I don’t doubt that digital is more accessible and readily available than other formats. The biggest problem is that few services allow me to download locally what I’ve purchased.
So, for me, you’re not buying anything, you’re just renting for the long term.
Honestly, I’m tired of buying digital only to suddenly find out I can no longer use what I purchased. For these services, I prefer self-hosting or any method that allows me to have a working copy locally. At least I can decide what to do with the digital content.
Just make sure, that you don’t buy anything with unbroken DRM. If you ever lose access, you can just get it back from the pirates.
Then become gog costumer number one, you could say we pay with our wallets and for the change, Gog is right there.
but honestly, I like valve enough, me, personally, not to worry that much.
Steam seems to be one of the very few services (perhaps even the only one I know of) that hasn’t transformed its product by following the trend of enshittification. I have many games on Steam, purchased years and years ago, many of which are no longer available, but I can still download and play, having purchased them back then.
I really appreciate Steam, but from what I read every day, I don’t think “forever” exists, especially online. If we think of it in terms of “everything’s in the cloud,” well, the cloud costs money, so unless they somehow dispose of data, I don’t know if a company can actually keep every single piece of data “forever” while maintaining a good price and not losing out or burdening consumers.
The same goes for physical copies: I could lose them, break them, my house burn down, and I’d lose everything, whereas if they were in the cloud, I wouldn’t have any problems. The point is that consumers should be allowed, where possible, to export what they’ve purchased. Honestly, I think that anyone who bought movies or other content on some platform and then years later discovered that the company had removed them and they could no longer use them (or worse, the same content was on another paid platform) would honestly bother me.
Ohhh, thanks for the new go to site. I buy lots of (digital) music and avoiding amazon has made finding what I want that much harder.
And Qobuz
It does streaming but can you buy and download mp3 or similar?
Yes, you can buy and download CD quality or HD quality (up to 24-bit, 192 kHz) FLAC from their store. From their homepage, there should be a link to the download store in the header bar: https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop
all of those are digital
Cassette.
It’s meant to stand for “digital download”, but that’s what you get from trying to shorten everything to one word or less.
cassete tape, zx spectrum style:
modulated digital by same definition
They’re actually all analog, because they all get processed by your senses, which are analog.
But your senses are electrical impulses, which would be digital.
What exactly do you think analog signals are?
Backups can always use all of these. Doesn’t matter how scrappy it is a couple of hard drives with a parity in running true as/freenas or just Debian with Mergerfs will last you a lot of years.
Cassettes made a bit of a resurgence recently for audio cassettes though I would never want to return to those days for games.
You don’t have to play their game just wait it out Sony and Xbox aren’t doing so hot financially ATM.
Yup, been running my
plexjellyfin server for like 15 years on Ubuntu server off of an 80gb mechanical boot disk.10TB RAID II storage tho
Cartridge is alive and well in the Nintendo ecosystem.
Many are just Game Key Cards.
Which are like Carts, but they need to download digitally. The worst of both worlds :D
Alive, but well?
A lot of Switch cartridges now only have license keys.
Well at least Nintendo themselves still releases full game cartridges and it’s not like you buy a Switch for third party games anyway. Nintendo only introduced the Gamekey card because third party publishers, especially Acti and Ubi, were releasing their own version on Switch 1 and not using consistent packaging labels to tell a gamekey from a full game cartridge apart so probably confused many consumers. Hence why Nintendo created an official version.
Nintendo has its own slew of ethical issues.
I know this might get me a lot of hate on here, but I don’t really care and I don’t understand why people are this upset about it. I can’t remember the last time I bought physical media, nor do I know anyone that has. And most games that are released on physical media are unplayable anyways without the obligatory 40GB day one patch - making the entire concept of physical media pointless.
So yeah, idk if people are actually upset about this or if this is just a big outrage over nothing if I’m honest. But maybe I’m just too PC-pilled in my free and open source ecosystem to realize the struggles of living under the boot of a corporation that removes stuff you paid for at will lmaooo.
I get where you’re coming from, but I disagree both personally and objectively. I said this in another post, but if you zoom out from the specifics here, what’s being eliminated here is choice. Sure, it’s not much of a choice, but as a consumer you could buy physical or digital, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, Valve, etc. By removing the only other choice we have you have to buy the games digitally. At that point it can be altered, up-charged, revoked, or any number of other shitty decisions and we have little recourse - other than to opt out entirely.
Yes, all of this has been a slippery slope: digital downloads, DLC, games ballooning in size/requiring internet connectivity for day 1 patches, removing games from stores due to expired music licenses, etc. But the death of physical games is a big final step forward. I totally understand that this decision doesn’t directly affect you - but it likely will, in one way or another. Killing off DVD/BR because we have streaming now means that streaming services can jack up prices because there’s no alternatives: no competition. They can remove shows that don’t make money and then they’re lost forever (Disney removed the Willow TV show a month after it aired. Beyond piracy, it’s now a lost property). They can remove, edit, or censor TV shows that are now thought of as offensive as taste change. Physical media is the backbone of preservation (which is particularly difficult with games) and it will be made much harder as physical is killed off.
Or maybe these are the desperate dying gasps of the dinosaurs of old media? Console prices are rising (5yrs into the lifecycle), sales are decreasing, game dev cycles take longer and longer, graphics/tech advancements are plateauing, the youths only play Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox, and AI is being shoved into everything. There is a wonderful renaissance of indies and smaller scale games! So maybe Playstation’s downfall and XBOX’s dismemberment will free up capital and interest into the vast variety of games that exist beyond COD & Assassin’s Creed?
I’ll get off my soapbox now, and I’m not trying to beat you up for your opinion. Personally, I am in a similar boat as you where I feel compelled to opt out of big tech, focus on FOSS, play indie games, go touch grass, etc, etc. It’s clear to me that all of these awful threads are connected: we are being forced back into serfdom in ways big and small. Everything is a subscription. No right to repair what you own. Corporations have more ‘free-speech’ than a citizen. It just sucks to see more and more evidence of the boot stepping down on our necks.
Today it’s games and movies. Tomorrow it’s something actually important and they’ll rent us an apology for a terminal illness and nothing else.
Console players kinda deserve this. They put everything into a closed ecosystem and they couldn’t justify thier usecase to the masses.
Guys, y’all did this to yourselves. You didn’t have to use Steam when it launched, but you did because it was convenient.
Physical media started dying the moment people flocked to Steam for PC gaming.
The public wanted this. A niche minority doesn’t. The overwhelming majority of game sales are now digital. Why would companies keep manufacturing discs when almost everyone is downloading their games?
And I know, I know, physical media is better for the consumer. I know about the EULAs, licensing, and the ownership issues. I’m not defending digital media. I’m simply saying: y’all made your bed, now sleep in it.
For the record, my entire game library is digital too, aside from some old Xbox 360 and PS4 games I still have on disc. I’m in the same boat. I’m no better than anyone else.
I just see reality for what it is.
If you want physical media back, stop buying digital games. Stop playing them. Delete your Steam account. Uninstall your games.
What the hell did you think these companies were going to do?
To say that Steam is the one solely responsible for this is misleading. That would mean only gaming is switching to digital only. Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, etc are also responsible for killing physical media outside of gaming
Agreed. Streaming services are a whole different can of worms that contribute to this issue.
Physical media has the inherent benefit of being difficult to remove from the customer. Because of the several thousand years of precedent and “argument” has lead to the current protections many countries have.
Digital distribution of Digital goods has significant benefits to the customer and producer over physical distribution. A lot of physical game media at this point is basically a license key and a mostly working game that needs downloaded patches they were still developing while the discs were being printed. The downsides are the current legal mechanisms and that a lot of people involved in the producing would like to continue to eat and pay rent.
Don’t act like this guy.
Yes, I understand. This is the most common talking point I see when discussing this topic, and it’s completely valid.
Ownership is an important consideration. Unfortunately, the buying public has either decided, through ignorance or because they’ve been convinced, not to care about it.
Digital downloads are, by a massive margin, the preferred way to acquire games. The market has spoken.
Like I said, delete your Steam account. Don’t purchase digital games.
Otherwise, accept the fact that we’ve willfully surrendered our leverage to the corporations.
But when I download a game on steam, I can do whatever I want with the file, and play it whenever I want. I can’t say the same thing when I download a game on my PlayStation
Correct. Sony is pure crap.
After digital: Direct brain implantation. IE all your games are stored in memory. And I don’t mean RAM. It also isn’t YOUR brain.
Definitive way to curb RAM prices, just use people’s brains.
You could also sell part of your brain to openAI to offload part of their models for the cloud.
It’s the matrix book but instead of cpu power is RAM storage.
What like on the brains on Indian children in those Matrix tubes?
Some of them are still around just not as big anymore
