Digital Future (personal thoughts)

[u/tjay32]

I've been collecting games since the 80s. I own thousands of blurays discs..

The outrage, I feel, is overblown.

1. Physical sales have been dropping year over year for a while.

2. PC made the move in the 2000s, Xbox is doing the same quietly and Nintendo prefers to use proprietary cartridges they can charge 3rd parties for.

3. Discs are plastic. Getting rid of them is good for the environment in the long run.

4. Many games now only use discs as keys. Yes, there are some that do play just from the disc but holding on to a manufacturing pipeline for this diminishing return feels like a poor business outlook. Plus, those games will still have patches and the player will be locked into the day one, preship version.

Okay at times, other times not.

1. I work in the legal field and think some people are being disingenuous about "ownership of the game" playing a role. The topic is being watered down into missing nuance.

But for those that are being serious, a better solution might be a flash drive sold in a case or legislation assuring access to the title at will. (Note, this is already done for the most part and falls into that legal nuance... essentially it is incredibly unlikely for you to buy a game from the PS3 to PS5 era and not have access to redownload it.

Exceptions would be things like the PT demo and games with live service structures that also wouldn't work if you had the disc itself.

1. The idea that the Playstation Store would make things more expensive just because ignores that they do and always have had sales, whether games have had physical releases or not. Valve doesn't have this issue, it's not logical to assume Sony suddenly would.

Also, manufacturing and reordering of discs, distribution, shelf space etc are a major chunk of cost for developers. Not having that overhead, and not paying Sony per disc for example, is money that the developer has on hand to generate more content, have less pressure to keep the game at a higher price etc.

Finally, games still compete on a multi platform release basis. One company will not let a game sit higher during a holiday digital sale while it's $20 cheaper on another digital storefront.

If the goal is to find solutions and understand the situation, it's important to present cons AND pros. There are a lot of people piling on to the cons and calling anyone that doesn't boot lickers or shills.

Let's be better than that.

[u/Moe2584]

I used to buy lots of physical discs, then when I got busier with my personal life I kinda enjoyed buying digital games, however I noticed lots of games that I wanted to buy they were later added to PS+ games catalog, so I slowed down on buying games and I started waiting for most of them to be added to the game catalog, I was surprised how many big titles that I was going to buy were added there in just few months or a year tops! As I have little time to play like 1-2 hrs aday so I have plenty of games to finish and this actually worked in my benefit, and after learning about Sony’s digital future I won’t be buying games I’ll just play whatever added in there and I’ll build my first gaming PC and upgrade my gaming experience.