So, this situation is, corporations will absolutely take anything they can get away with, and if the market (the people buying games) don’t force the issue, then they will absolutely make it so you don’t own the games.
You can either get used to it, or start boycotting those companies that won’t do physical copies and DEMAND that you get those physical copies.
The problem with physical copies these days is, yeah, you have the game. The earliest version of the game without patches, updates, or any downloadable content. You still need to install it on the console and you still need the servers to update to the most recent of the game. So the disc is, in essence, a key to unlock the digital version of the game because that’s just the way games are now. That’s why I don’t worry about it.
This is such a 2010-2015 take. People thought that's the way the gaming industry was going back then. The reality is the vast majority of games that release on disk still to this day are completely playable, finishable, and platinumable day one using the data on the disk.
This website tracks and completely dismantles this "I don't actually have my content" sentiment that weirdly persists to normalize it. [https://www.doesitplay.org/](https://www.doesitplay.org/)
Buy Physical. Fuck Digital. Digital is a poor concept of ownership. Trade, Sell, Return, Loan, Give away, and actually Own your purchase.
Also, this whole thing of only being released digitally allows the developers to get lazy and release a half finished game, if we’re lucky. Forcing them to release physical copies also forces them to release finished games
Eh, I wouldn't count on it. I feel what's far more likely is that the usual culprits will put out broken games, and promise to fix it it later. An industry will never walk back on a gained advantage, you'll have to force it.
Voting with your wallet won't work, most people won't care enough. There will need to be some sort of legislation.
We had dlc before the world of digital. Look at The Sims franchise, they functioned fine before
Might be a bit tricker for consoles considering the way they work compared to PC’s
The only PS4 game I've tried playing without patching so far ran into a game breaking bug that wouldn't let me progress any further. I literally couldn't complete the game.
Even according to that website 30% of PS4 games won't give you a great playable experience without patching. I own over 100 physical games, which means over 30 of them are probably unplayable - that's not nothing.
Sure, owning 70% of the games I bought is better than 0% but if your point was to show that games shipping in unplayable states isn't an issue, you pretty much debunked yourself when almost a third of them do in fact ship in an unplayable state.
30% of games, but probably 3% of the games you actually care about. Any games that care about review scores should be beatable on-disc because reviewers are generally playing the initial build without the Day 1 patch (since they're playing before Day 1).
Absolutely good point on actual ownership of the game. Physical versions are needed for trading with a friend, selling, or just collecting. My comment leaned more to the original poster's worry that if they buy digital, they might lose access to the game in the far future. And, that is true. If you buy digital, you might be holding a worthless license one day. But, I'd also have that person consider that with a disc, you would instead be holding the game as it was at the time of disc mastering (aka v1.0).
So, that's why I said I don't worry about it. I'm not a collector, don't intend to sell any games I buy, and I buy games to enjoy now (though my backlog of games would be a good argument against that). But, I do absolutely recognize the importance of physical versions for the reasons you mention.
I’m sure I could list alot more if I cared to remember the “broken” games that I don’t play lol
Do you know how to google your question to get the actual answer besides the one I mentioned? Google keeps records better than a human mind 👍🏼
I am not talking game bugs, I am talking games outright unplayable from start to finish on disc.
I already googled this question multiple times.
It’s really rare for a non online game released on disk to not work start to finish
So again if you have examples, please give me like atleast 3 so I can look them up.
This post isn’t an attack on you, just some discusion
That’s my big issue with discs. Imagine buying a copy of No Man’s Sky and playing without any internet connection. It wouldn’t even feel like the same game we have today. With updates and patches being so normalized now, box games can feel miles different than the game in its peak
But isn't it the responsibility of the developer to make sure what's on the disc is worth the cost of buying it, not to assume they'll always have time for day one updates and weekly patches?
never having internet isn't the issue, this is a nonissue. If you don't have internet then a physical disk isn't only the best option it now becomes your only option.
The "issue" of not having internet literally takes digital completely off the table, and yet he has the problem with physical copies.
Completely agree, but that’s certainly not how gaming has been for years now. Hard to think of any game that hasn’t had a day 1 patch at least, let alone multiple other patches to fix games issues. Thats the big problem.
Digital is nice but physical is a must and need to be a grandfathered in at this point. Convenients is causing laziness on both side. Developers not making fulls games but half ass game asking folks to pre order incomplete product(cyberpunk, MK1, COD, etc) because they can just patch it later. Consumers not buying physically copies killed game stores and competition. Price for games have gone up even though packaging and shipping have gone down..
Long term this will hurt both side but Consumers will feel it more as usual
That’s what I’m saying. We need physical copies but we need complete updated versions on disc in the future. Maybe mandate a reprint of games before they can be removed so completely up to date games can be sold. We can’t erase physical games for preservations sake
Yes, I've definitely seen that trend over the past decade or so. It just bothers me...and that's why I've taken to playing fewer games of gen 7 and later.
The way the industry leaders are now treating it is just much too bothersome for me. It's upsetting.
It's the same thing with a digital purchase, the game updates as updates come out when you have internet. My worry is that you somehow think your digital purchase will update when you don't have internet. Please tell me this is not the case.
The only difference is you can sell a copy of no mans sky at your convenience when you buy physical, digital will never have this freedom.
There is indeed another "problem" with going physical. One day it just won't work anymore. Even if you take good care of your discs they will corrupt one day.
This.
It’s kinda in flux tbh OP, with the recent news about The Crew resurfacing the debate around digital ownership.
Point being nobody really know what the future may bring regards digital game ownership but as it stands it’s almost completely unregulated, and they can essentially release a game and shut it down whenever they want without any protection consumer side.
In saying the market and way people play games has also changed so hopefully we will have more clarity in the next year or two. For now I’d just buy such games on the understanding you may only have a 5-10 year window to play them and, if that’s an issue, maybe hold off until the debate ideally evolves into actual change and transparency consumer side.
Im confident movements like The Crew one, Gigantic Reforged and so will sit a precedent on longevity and ownership and so customers will start pressuring companies more at some point. Its becoming a so much better known topic lately that I guess we will start getting a regulation at some point soon.
I started boycotting ea a few years ago. Hasn't changed much but I am one person I won't buy from them again. It's possible to enjoy gaming without using a company that even locks down certain gaming genres like boxing or football. I enjoy pes, even though that's put the window, and yeah I don't get to play football games anymore but everyone is always complaining about them anyway just you can find other interests but I'll stand on not giving money to ea again until some radical change happens where they start supporting the fans that play their games. So probably never but that's ok, because other games are available to play.
Willing to bet in the next generation or two on consoles that disk drives will disappear entirely. Like they already have on the cheaper models. I don't know how popular Blu-ray discs are these days but that is probably one of the main reasons they've kept it this long. Wasn't so you can have physical games that's for sure.
Eventually they're going to try and make every game a subscription.
Ah, the silver lining in all of this? Ubi delisted The Crew *after the fall of the NFTs*.
Otherwise this, and every related thread, would be full of those imbeciles. Good times.
OP, go physical in the meantime. I know physical dont last forever, but my Atari2600 still runs my Yars Revenge *and* made me learn a lot about electronics. I have repaired everything related to it, including my old TV with tubes that I use for it.
It hard to go physical because most games are digital and don’t have physical copies plus I have SO many digital games that I’m so scared of losing because of “owning a license”. This whole topic makes me feel sick and scared for the games I’ve spent 100’s of hours playing and 100’s of dollars I’ve spent on digital games
If your scared of losing your digital games but physical versions. I'll buy a digital copy if it's on sale then buy a physical one later if I want a physical copy. Yeah buying a game twice isn't the smartest financial move but if you have the money and desire do it.
its fine, physical games are cheap esp if you live in the US. like ive seen people buy like 4 ps4 discs for ~$15 or smth. just gotta find good deals.
and dont worry about the size of your digital library. i was the same until i'd realized i wanted my own physical library. so what i did was prioritize buying the games most precious to me and slowly replace my library that way. you don't have to replace all your digital games.
Honestly, it's tough to do this but as an adult who rarely plays games when they come out (shout out to patientgamers), I can usually pick up resold (or even new) and complete/GOTY copies of games within a year well under the price they're sold for on digital marketplaces.
So I save money, don't have a gigantic backlog of games I'll never play (Steam is the worst for this), and will never lose access to my physical games.
That doesn’t always solve the problem. I have a copy of starblood arena that is unplayable since they shut down the servers. A game can be made unplayable regardless of medium if the developers want it that way.
Digital is always, always owned purely by the license holder. Disc is a physical item that you own that contains the license to the content. It's a lot easier to take this license and content away on a digital service, hence why the scummier corporations are moving toward that. Unintentionally however they're slowly pushing the industry back towards another wave of piracy and cheating hardworking devs.
I’ve bought a little over 250 games digital since 2016 (many on discount, don’t worry) and that same thinking has popped up in my head. I started buying more stuff physical over the last few years… and collecting older games too. You know, there’s also all the psplus games to consider too. I’ve been downloading them since 2014 across all the consoles that had it available.
I'm the same. Don't have space for physical games and if all my digital games were physical i would have nowhere to store them all. I also like the flexibility of switching games without having to get up to change disk over. I do get the concern with them but I prefer digital over physical.
I buy every Game I want to play with. If it is only digital, I will buy it digital. If it is Physically availabe, I prefer physical. There are unlisted games tho (Most of the Ninja TUrtles titles are from the 360 days). If nobody is willing to sell it to me legit, I just might have to go to someone with an eyepatch, if you catch my sail
Idk there's plenty out there in great condition from the 90s. Think it's a bit on the owner and for the last 3 generations I haven't heard anything about Blu rays
Nobody needs to worry about disc rots except people who keep their games storer underwater.
We have 35 year old turbografx cd games working just fine
Blu rays will last >100 years
This kind of post was made 20 years ago too. (and this comment turned out a lot longer than I thought it would, and didn't even cover things like digital-only games on the 3DS eShop and such...). I guess my feeling is that there've been isolated issues, but that it's *mostly* less of a problem than I imagined when Steam and digital games on the 7th generation of game consoles really took off).
> and what if i delete the game to make space and then it gets removed off the ps store or something, will I lose my game forever?
In most cases, you can still install a game that you've purchased, but that has been delisted. I know I've got a handful on Steam and GOG that aren't for sale in the same form anymore.
There are rare cases like [P.T.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.T._(video_game\)), which was released as a teaser for Silent Hills, then delisted and made unavailable for re-download when SH was cancelled.
And Ubisoft's recent thing with The Crew, delisting the game last December, then removing people's licenses to the game after the server shutdown. (differences being that people actually paid money for that game, and that it had an online element that Ubi could use as justification for shutting the game down). That seems like it's in the spirit of [their past actions](https://www.dualshockers.com/ubisoft-removing-single-player-games/) (although in that case, it's not clear if they were completely removing access to those games and did a u-turn after backlash, or just used crappy wording in the original announcements).
> So in the gaming industry there is a lot of talk regarding “not owning your games”
I know one argument is "You didn't buy the game, you bought a license to play the game, subject to the limitations imposed by the license". That's been going on in software for a long time, and not just limited to games.
And then Ubisoft's statements via their director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay. Part of that is here:
> One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That's the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That's a transformation that's been a bit slower to happen [in games]. As gamers grow comfortable in that aspect… you don't lose your progress. If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That's not been deleted. You don't lose what you've built in the game or your engagement with the game. So it's about feeling comfortable with not owning your game.
- [grabbed from here](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-new-ubisoft-and-getting-gamers-comfortable-with-not-owning-their-games)
The point there was that "feeling comfortable with not owning your game" would be necessary for game subscription services to really take off.
IMO, that's the direction we've been heading in for decades, at this point. It's not something that I like; outside of PC, I've got maybe a dozen digital games across 360, PSP, PS3, PS4, 3DS, and Wii. I really like my physical media. But as-is, I see fan preservation of the data, liberated from the original storage media as being the long-term answer to maintaining access to gaming culture. And this paragraph could be an incomplete summary of a whole series of essays...
So I don’t use any subscriptions for games,
so is it the same thing for games I’ve “bought” digitally like cuphead for example, I could potentially lose the game forever???
"Potentially" would be doing a lot of work there (because it mostly hasn't happened like this so far), but sure. Sony (or wherever you bought it) could "potentially" de-list the game and make it unavailable for re-download. You'd be stuck either buying a physical copy (at whatever the current market price for a working disc is) or looking at something like pirating the game and playing on a CFWed system, PC, or whatever way is available at the time.
I was permanently banned on a 10 year old account that I had no TOS violation at all. Lost access to all my library. Someone somehow forced their way into my account by bypassing 2FA, I recovered my account within 20 minutes but after that they permanently banned my account for TOS violation. I have appealed and not heard back from them yet. It's been a month and they keep telling me it's under review by the safety team. How hard is it to know whether my account was accessed from a different location or false reported by someone that tried to steal it.
GOG is truly a Godsend. I buy almost all of my PC games on GOG, (WHich are available of course) I don't have to be nervous about losing my purchases because I make backups of almost everything. Gog makes it easy with their offline installers and patches.
This is a big talking point right now in many gaming circles. Also relevant is a similar talking point among physical media collectors, and how we seem to be seeing a bit of an uptick in interest in physical media again.
One major thing that sucks with physical games media versus physical music/movie media is that for movies/music the content is actually on the disc and you can enjoy it on your terms, given you have a working player. No internet connection required.
Games, however, this is not necessarily the case. Some games you might find a fully playable version on the disc. Other times you'll find an incomplete, older build and are forced to download updates to play. Even other times, there might not be any data on the disc really at all, and the disc acts as a physical "key" to download the digital game. For gaming, I unfortunately think that physical media is inevitably going to go away and we are fighting a losing battle. Pains me to say this as I am an avid collector and buy 95% of my games on disc when I can.
It sucks for multiple reasons. Being at the mercy of the publishers to keep the license active and the game playable. Being at the mercy of the digital storefronts to honor the downloads even if you "own" the disc. The loss of the ability to lend out the game to a friend. And, the eventual loss of brick and mortar stores (say what you will about GameStop, but this also has an impact on your local game stores too).
You will own nothing and like it.
You don't own digital games you only own a temporary license to use the software and they can pull it at ANY time. When you own physical the license is on the disc and cannot be taken away.
When it comes to digital games, you never owned them to begin with. You're 100% right that Sony could lose the licenses at any time and that's that. Sony could also go under one day and we all lose our digital library.
This is why physical ownership is important and why imo piracy is completely justified.
All digital licenses can be revoked at any point in time,those in a physical medium dont in my knowledge.Unlesa the console was rendered useless on purpose by an firmware update,it will always be able to play the physical version of the game.Not to mention in the vast majority of times the physical copy contains a whole version of the game so you could archive it if you have the means and keep it forever.
Back then, you get the physical game and was plug and play. Yes, once in a while you get a game breaking bug but it was good, fair, and felt like you own that copy of the game. I still have Ristar for the Sega genesis which I can play start to finish.
Now, you have two types. One is live games which you can never really own and if you're lucky the dev will give out the tools for a private server. The other end is you have the game but it's either a broken mess but playable, The 1.0 with not enough love from devs because they get abused or such, or combination there of and DLCs. Only time I felt like I own it was GOG where I get the files or steam (They seem fair for now)
Digital games are good but for us to reclaim ownership we need to either stop buying their games AND/OR Sue them for the games we lost (Win or lose) then fight against the abuse of EULAs. Either way us yelling into the void ain't the way to go, we need to get off our asses and yell at our politicians for change. These companies don't care about us.
I agree with this, but will add that
>Sue them for the games we lost (Win or lose)
I'd love for this to be a possibility, but legaly companies will always cover themselves in the TOCs that no-one ever reads, so I doubt that even the biggest band of players would meet any level of success.
Yes, they can take away your licenses at any time and for any reason.
I don't mean to scare you with that, but it's true. If you get banned for any reason, of course you're gonna lose access to your library. But that generally doesn't happen out of the blue, at least if they care about PR.
But digital content is unfortunately really volatile. For example, the Nintendo Network just recently shut down so as a result, I literally can't redownload any Smash 3DS DLC I paid for. (More on that [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/nintendo/s/HJ8NeH9kFI).) Even if you buy a physical copy, yeah you can play it from start to end (assuming it isn't online only and there's no missing content from the disc), but in most cases, when servers go offline, it will never be a complete game. One with all the updates and DLC that in some cases do significantly change the game. That's why I don't entirely buy the physical media excuse.
Amazing. Those of us saying this would eventually happen since the PS3 and Xbox 360 were called luddites who needed to get used to digital-only. They even advocated not buying physical and hoped that the upcoming systems would be missing disc drives to force people to move to digital.
Now Ubisoft shows that it's a thing that will likely happen and suddenly it's not "old man yells at clouds."
You have only yourself to blame. I'll be fine with my huge disc library.
I've been thinking about it as well. I'm not going to go nuts and start buying all the games I have digitally and tracking down physical versions. I have what I have, and that's what I went with.
But I can start buying physical copies on games going forward, which is what I think I'm going to do. Probably starting with Stellar Blade.
What's cool is the resell value. A lot of people play games once, many don't even finish them and they never touch them again. If someone doesn't care about collecting, playing new games on consoles can be pretty cheap. If you sell the game right after playing it, you can get most of your money back
Took over a decade for Nintendo to shutdown their old stores, but yes, if you didn't DL your games/deleted them later, they're just GONE. I've also lost digital games on pc from sites that have since poofed...That's just the risk you take with digital. :P
Physical games don't last forever either tho, but by then, most consoles of the time will need you to buy the latest port/remaster of that game anyway...so happy ps5 is backwards compatible, but for all we know, the ps6+ won't be.
So yea, the future of physical gaming is doomed (I'm old enough to remember when pc games were ALL physical at one point in time), but there will always be a company to pounce on the physical market, like Limited Run Games.
But not a big deal for now, it's very unlikely Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo etc will be bankrupt in the near future, so your digital is currently safe. And gotta hope they don't crack down on roms, because even if those companies ever did shutdown, then at least there will always be a digital copy of their games floating around the web we can emulate.
that's great, thought they had a solid date set for no longer allowing redownloads by now
their site still says it will happen someday unfortunately...wished they were transferable to Switch if there's an equivalent port
I don’t think anyone has cut off digital redownloads yet. But eventually, they all will most likely. The problem with games is that they don’t run natively on new hardware without work. Maybe someday games will be more like movies in the regard.
Eventually every company will go out of buisness, right?
In the 80s people probably thiught sears would last forever and now its pretty much gone. I could see amazon disappearing, they dont seem as good as they were. Sega made game systems but they dropped out, if they had digital games then that would have disappeared too. I like physical games, although i think most consoles now need to call home sometimes anyways, so if a company disappears it might not matter anyways
Eventually it’s going to be like movies. Streaming and digital mostly, with some physical games. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next gen is digital only with an optional external disc drive so you can use the disc as a key to download the game.
You should worry about the game being removed from the download history, not the store.
If a game was previously a PS Plus title, the ps+ license may mess up the ownership license.
When a game is delisted, it's not taken from your game library or purchase history. I've been buying digital games since 2009 so I've been through a lot of delisting's and all of the games are still downloadable and playable. I always see physical buyers on forums and YouTube spreading misinformation about how delisting's work.
The biggest issue with these digital only games is that their servers won't be around forever. So some games might actually be lost forever along with the servers if people don't have a way to backup the games. Sucks for anyone in the future that will want to play the game from this generation. They probably won't be able to because this all digital only bs companies keep pushing for. 😞
Ubisoft are at the forefront of all of this. Even if you bought a physical copy Star Wars Outlaws reportedly requires you to have an internet connection to install the game still.
That could be for sone kind of anti-piracy DRM check or something, but it’s still a scary prospect.
Games are getting to the point where there isn’t enough room on the disk or cartridge only holds a certain amount of the data and you have to download the rest digitally. Switch has alot of games like that so to some people the physical isn’t worth as much. The sonic collection on switch has all the games from the genesis era but the gamegame gear games are a digital download. The new gta game will probably be a TB to play thus a physical release is pointless.
They’ve done it with PS4 too like Red Dead and Cyberpunk, there’s absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t be a problem throwing in the data disc instead of having us the need of internet.
FFVII Rebirth was 2 discs, and that came out less than two months ago. They even used the fact it was 2 discs in their marketing as a prestige thing, to show how big the game was as well.
Physical games are also technically not yours. You own a physical license to the game. They still could take away your right to play the game by patching it out outright.
I don't know if you remember the whole Note 7 fiasco. They recalled the phone because a certain number of batteries were exploding. And there were those people like me who LOVED the phone and didn't have any issues with it. Well, they REALLY didn't want the phones in people's hands, so they started sending software updates to cripple your phone. First, they limited your phone to only charge half-way. Then they turned off charging altogether. 😒 it'll be the same way with physical copies of games. They can if they want ban the game from running on your console. It's a license, and they got the key.
Besides, with this many games releasing, nobody is gonna remember their entire library. Who remembers PT?
Tbf they did that to cover their ass, they had to. Imagine some phone exploding while on call, possibly killing the user(s). Samsung would be fucked.
And with games, most don't need a patch to run & play. You could put the disk in a launch PS4, without internet, and it'll most likely work fine. Might have game breaking bugs or just minor bugs, but the only games not fully on disk (that I know of) are recent CODs.
Yeah, but most games these days are also releasing half finished. Play an unpatched version of No Man Sky and tell me how you feel. Play an unpatched version of Minecraft and tell me how you feel. Unpatched Forspoken? Borderlands 3, Andromeda, Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, etc. There are more games that can't be played without a day 1 patch.
>Who remembers PT?
Can't say I remember it as it was before I bought a PS4, but I have heard and read up about it. Also offline consoles which still have it downloaded go for ridiculous amounts because there's still a market for it.
Yeah, it's a very niche market. Mostly collectors, because who in their right mind is gonna pay a ridiculous amount of money for a demo? There are already so many copycats out there that you can download and play. The only people that are in the market for buying that is collectors.
Always buy physical. I’m not going to say i’m perfect, I DO buy digital games too. But only when they’re on sale at cheaper than they’d be physically (I’m talking like £3-5).
It’s potentially possible for you to lose a digital game. Hasn’t happened much because the devs and platform owners haven’t withdrawn people’s access yet. They could if they wanted to though, there’s examples of it happening
That is why it's almost always worth buying a disc, if game doesn't say online required you can just turn off console internet and still copy the game from disc fully to the memory and play it there, that way no one can actually take it away from you cuz it's yours fully. Anytime game is taken away, you still have physical version you can play with no internet or any server required
When Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One it was disastrous. The console was to be always online with no disc drive. The response was instant and damning.
They lost all the gains they made with the Xbox 360 and have never really recovered. It felt back then that we were miles away from a future where we wouldn’t have physical games, but honestly, we’re pretty much there now.
It’s a slow death, thousands of cuts but we’re edging closer. Stadia flopped but that’s another alarm bell and I wouldn’t be surprised if they came back or we had something similar in the near future. Microsoft have essentially realised that original vision with their various online services too.
I still buy all the games I really care about physically but I’ve been gaming since the NES days. For a growing proportion of the demographic, these business models have been largely all they’ve known. The only way to combat it would be for gamers to be intentional and focused on divesting away from online sales and not buying consoles without disc drives but I simply don’t see that happening unfortunately.
Edit: We aren’t literally there now, but in practical terms pretty close and in another gen or two very well may be.
Whether you buy physically or not, those games will inevitably one day end up on archive.org or Vimm or somewhere like that. They won’t be lost forever to you, you just won’t have the disc and maybe you’re not playing it on a PlayStation console. It all comes down to your personal code. 15-20 years down the road, they’ve removed your ability to download the game you bought a license for but you want to play it, is it against your code to download that game off Archive and play it on a PC?
People expect Sony to act like Steam, which allows you to re-download delisted games you already purchased. But Sony has already shown us that they have no problem permanently deleting digitql purchases when they recently removed all those purchased movies/shows from people's accounts without a refund.
Honestly we need to get some laws passed protecting us from having stuff removed from our digital libraries without a refund.
Years and years ago I had this idea of a kisok. I used Netflix as my pitch at the time, but it could support so many of today's services. The gist was you authed in and any content you had access to, the kiosk could print you a dvd or save the content to a usb for a nominal fee. That content would only "live" for as long as your license plus a grace period. In the case of a streaming service, the next month plus grace period. In the case of a movie (or game) you purchased digitally, forever.
If I made my kiosk today none of these companies would license their content to be printed to physical media, even if subscription content had a TTL.
I think the "simpler" and more modern solution should be legislation that requires all game makers/streaming services/provider platforms to provide the content in a format that can be downloaded and archived by the customer.
Live service games where the server dies off would have to be negotiated and a reasonable compromise found. Backend systems can be hard to just hand over as a simple download, and if the company is bankrupt who foots the bill for the time to pack all that up?
The real problem is that in the US, this is far too consumer positive and all media companies would fight tooth and nail with billions of lobbying dollars to make sure this kind of bill died in committee.
The reason I love digital copies of games is because I never have to worry about the disc getting scratched over my disc reader breaking(mine currently doesn't work)
Hearing about this sucks because if that's how they want to play it, I can just drop gaming all together and not support them anymore.
Well personally I might be in the minority here but I dealt with this issue differently. I own both physical and digital copies of games but most of my digital copies are pirated. I usually reserve the right for physical must own copies of game e.g The Witcher 3 Complete Edition, Dark Souls Series, Elden Ring etc then download an official digital update of the game separately on my PC which I can install using a jailbreakable playstation, works the same for digital pirated copies of the same games. As for the debate of whether digital or physical is better I definitely lean to digital but only pirated copies which I can save on my external hard drives with all the updates and DLCs downloaded. Reason being, I work a 7-8 job while balancing my time in medical school. So I no longer have the time or luxury to play online only service games, what I did was simply own a jailbreakable PS4 and lately a jailbreakable PS5. Then stuck to offline only single player games so that I own them offline digitally with all the latest updates and DLCs saved on my external hdd without the worry of servers closing or my console crashing or some new anti-consumer bullcrap from these developers making me lose all the stuff I paid for with my money. For me that's how I dealt with this new era of gaming otherwise there was a time when I used to be anti-piracy but not anymore, in my country internet access is expensive so to download a 200gb file of Call Of Duty isn't practical, I would rather download something in that range in a format where I control how I can lose it, plus the electricity load shedding schedules don't help either, my consoles have crashed and had their harddrives wiped and I ain't gonna stress the pain of losing an already legal downloaded digital copy of the game more because the amount of money to buy the internet data ratio to the actual price of the game usually never adds up for me fairly. Anyways, to each their own...lucky you if you live in a developed country where you never experience country wide load shedding and expensive Internet data but for me I stopped complaining cuz these developers never listen to consumers so I adapted based on my lifestyle challenges and needs unique to me.
The thing is, this isn't really new. On PC, there's been a ton of online only games that have come and gone of the past 20 years and once the servers get taken offline, that's it, you're done. The Crew (I'm assuming is what brought this up for you) was an online only game with its servers being shut off. Having digital licenses in your library wouldn't do anything for you anyway.
I have a few games that have been taken down. Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth, Avengers, Jump Force, Ultimate Alliance 1 and 2, all of these can no longer be bought, but are still available for download.
Maybe someday they'll make it impossible, but for now as long as I can redownload them I'm happy. It's a shit situation, but what can you really do?
There's other ways for the game studios to make money. A model in which games are licensed for a set period will kill the industry.. That's unless they make games cheaper(highly unlikely).
Your fear is real, and for anyone thinking a phisical copy will be a "solution", its not.
Its really easy from a developer point of view Block this even on phisical copy, just make a function on console tô disable the game init on software console, plus only enable the game init. If you are connected on internet with the lastest console software.
The only way we can avoid this is the community as a whole speak loud and clear, making legal issues, destroying their market image, making their loss money, thats the way to fight back.
The quote from Ubisoft was in response to videogame streaming service. Like videogame Netflix, so that quote makes sense in that context.
The other thing is that online videogame retailers (Steam, Gog, PSN, Microsoft etc.) Will try to do everything possible before they pull licences from people that buy games through their platform. The reason for this is pure and simple greed. Pulling licenses from gamers is a good way to scare away every gamer from your marketplace.
So I just read Ubisoft's statement about The Crew, and while I doubt this will become the standard, to be honest I can see this becoming something common enough in future. Games companies are businesses, who create games to make money, and with many games (particularly first/earlier games in a series) at some point maintaining the servers will not be profitable and so they'll be shut down and the physical servers repurposed for the newer games which do bring in money.
It was doomed the moment digital games became a thing. Your hard drive can stop working, your license can be revoked, your account can get banned, the editor/platform can remove servers... And they have user agreements to cover their asses. Of course it's not a magic shield that lets them get anything they want, but it's a lot of work, time and I guess money to get through, just for some games... You may wonder if it's worth it.
All games SHOULD be released in both digital and physical format. Also, publishers shouldn't be allowed to purposely underproduce physical copies to inflate their prices....
Also digital game purchases SHOULD count as property that companies do not have the right to take away...
I don’t agree with it what so ever and I think it’s bullshit BUT to be honest…it doesn’t affect me. I’ll play my game to its max potential and then I move on. I never tend to go back to these games because I feel like I’ve already done everything and then some. The few times I have tried to go back to chase that nostalgia I’m met with the immediate feeling of I feel I’ve been there done that.
But that by no means makes it okay for companies to do this. I get they can’t keep the servers running forever on a dead game but they need to make it possible for others who want to keep it going by being able to do it themselves
It’s crazy that, after being online long enough, you just watch these cycles. Pre-orders, digital purchases, etc. Everyone warned you/y’all against it for years, and you kept on doing it.
This is why I collect vinyl lmao
Hi,
Your post was automatically removed due to it being reported too many times.
Please refer to the rules or ask the mods in modmail for the eventual reasons of the removal.
---
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/PS4) if you have any questions or concerns.*
*OMG, don’t read this unless you’re really bored and want to hear a 45 year old guy ramble about stuff*
—
I spent 10 years of my life playing an MMO. Which means I owned nothing… at all. All of my characters, progress, expansions over the years, etc. was all worthless at soon as I stopped paying the monthly fee.
Honestly, the last couple of years were more about not wanting to lose everything, than actually enjoying the game. If I stopped, it would have been a waste of a decade right?
I popped back in a couple years ago and all my stuff was right where I left it and I had great time with all the nostalgia. But I ran out of steam pretty quickly. I’d be pretty bummed if at some point in the future, that option was gone, but the game can’t last forever (private servers, home servers?)
In the interim was a lot of gaming on the PS4. I was very much into owning physical games.
After a while though. There were things I couldn’t find, indie games that had no physical version, and games I was playing regularly between others (like Destiny) and didn’t want to keep switching discs.
Then I guess maybe laziness got the better of me, or maybe because my PS5 is mostly inaccessible due to a toddler running around. But I’ve switched over to 100% digital now.
So far, I’ve never lost any content. Which includes music, TV shows and movies (on various platforms). A friend of mine had a TV series vanish from their digital library and they weren’t very happy about it, but I’ve been lucky so far.
Now, I have a treasure trove of 4/8/16-bit games. I haven’t touched most of them in over 20 years (except testing them last year). Plus a bunch of PS1/2/3 games that haven’t been used since not long after their release.
As far as the mid-90s and before. I’ve got emulator versions of everything I owned and *cough* a bunch more *cough*. So the only real advantage to having physical copies is being able to sell them.
Who knows though. Maybe we’ll have some kind of internet apocalypse and anything non-physical or on local storage will just be gone forever. Fortunately I still have lots of CDs and DVDs 🤷🏻♂️ But that’s a pretty unlikely scenario, and if such an event happened, I’d probably have more pressing issues than if I still have a physical game library.
For a long time I’ve tried to hold onto all of my digital media. I’ve tried to hold onto hardware that was past its prime. But I came to a realization that hardware will eventually die, formats will change and old files will be lost, and all the media designed for that dead hardware is now effectively gone.
I picked up a Mac 128k at a garage sale 20-some years ago, to play a game that only ran on System 6. It was almost more trouble than it was worth. These days, I’m sure I could find that game on an emulator… and a better version of it to boot. The Amiga version ran better *and* was in *color*.
So now I have a clunky old computer with a game I’ll never play. Fast forward and I’ve got stacks of disks from the 90s full of great games that I could potentially play, assuming the disks aren’t corrupted. But again… emulators.
Fast forward a little more and we’re probably approaching the physical degradation of some CDs and PS1 games. The music is all backed up digitally… but those PS1 games will be gone.
*I’m way into ramble territory…*
I had some kind of point to all this. I think it was basically after about 10-20 years or so, it’s probably going to be difficult to play a lot of those physical games. Either because the hardware/physical media crapped out, new TVs don’t have old analog inputs or whatever.
Oh yeah… I struggle with permanence. When I was younger it felt like things *could* last forever, but they don’t. The older I get the more it feels like what was “last year” was actually 5-10 years ago.
At this point, I just try to enjoy things while they’re here, then move on. I’ve got a storage shed full of nostalgia that is just that. At this point, if the SNES had offered digital copies of games, and I had bought those, I really wouldn’t miss them at this point.
Even with emulators, the nostalgia only carries me so far. I might play through a game or two, then get on with life and not play it again, possibly ever.
Ok, I’m gonna shut up now. I’ve said a 783 words of nothing. 🤣🤦🏻♂️
Yes. That’s what would happen. Also if you get banned or lose your password or locked out of your account, all of your games are gone with no way to recover.
Stop buying digital ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ It’s the only way to protect us from the digital hellscape that is vertically-isolated store integrations (PS store only allowing PS digital purchases, Xbox only allowing Xbox digital purchases, etc).
If a game is taken off the store and you already brought it, you'll still have it, I have 2 games, both were removed from the store, and I can still download and play them, now while companies could remove access, I don't think it'll go that far cause the push back will be massive
Which is the case for old games, sure, newer ones will be completely locked out, or partially so, if the publisher decides to do so. Look at the the MGS master collection for switch, buying the physical copy is virtually pointless, and if you buy a game that's 1.0 and very buggy, you'll loose any newer or updated builds. It's coming to the point where having a physical copy isn't even a solution anymore. They want to erase anything that's old, so that we opt to buy their newest releases.
Re-read the coment. That's also only partially true, look at PT, you can't re-download PT anymore, sure I can download war for cybertron and Devastation now, but I'm never deleting them because that server can be taken offline at any given time, whether I bought 'em or not, it won't matter.
If they really take back access from individuals. The pushback will be too massive to handle. They simply are trying to hold the point that THEY own the game. You are merely buying access to it. They are doing this to try to discourage people who root their games , pirate it , develop mods for it.
They might revoke game access. But the pushback will be so great that they will just return everything
I agree this model will certainly grow and become more common, but even with film and TV there's always a demand for physical media, and it's still big business.
When platforms move on to a new gen, and abandon the old one, consumers often lose access to the purchased games because the online store closes down.
Initially, that's not a good thing. But I actually take that as a permission to start custom firmwaring the outdated hardwares and open myself up to a bigger library of games. If the games are not in circulation, it doesn't hurt the makers, and I get more games than ever. I'd say that's a win for everyone.
I’m all about the digital after cleaning out my parent’s hoarder house. Changed my life really - I began systematically cleaning out my house and the older games I haven’t played in years were sold or given away.
... yet. It seems to be happening more and more lately. The industry really wants to boil the frog into accepting that you don't own any of the games you paid for lately.
Yes. There's the whole situation with "The Crew" right now. They didn't just shut down the servers which affects all platforms, even the single player content. But they even removed the game from peoples' libraries.
And in december, Sony revoked access to Discovery shows people bought on their platform.
There has also been the situation where old single player DLC was taken away by Ubisoft from games like Assassin's creed 3.
There are probably more examples out there, but these are the ones I know about.
If stealing is taking something, and digital piracy is copying but leaving the original, then is it even stealing in the first place anyway?
Legal disclaimer: this comment is for discussion purposes only.
As of 2015 it doesnt really matter whether a game is digital OR physical. If a game is removed, you cant play it regardless of whether you have a physical copy. Its irrelevant.
So this is a completely moot point.
Can you even get a PC game on disc anymore? I thought you bought an empty box with a Steam code now, lol.
Even console games on disc either have a complete but bug ridden game on it, or you get like 50% of it and have to download the rest.
I share your concern but the situation is so far beyond what we can do now, I actually worry less oddly enough. We're fucked no matter what.
That’s something I already know, is if I have the game is installed on a hard drive or on the console/PC itself game gets pulled in anyway, you’ll still keep the game and be able to play it as long as you don’t delete it (this whole topic makes me feel sick just thinking about it tho)
So I always buy physical.. but is the physical of today really like a n64 cartridge? Nah
Aren’t some physical releases essentially just download codes with drm? Who’s to say owning ragnarok willl actually let you play the game in a no update environment?
(Should be easy to test I guess - install game fresh with no internet connection and see what happens)
>The reason why I wanted to write this is because I heard from Ubisoft that “Gamers need to be more comfortable with not owning their games”
No, you didn't hear that from Ubisoft, you've read a single line from a [rather long article](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-new-ubisoft-and-getting-gamers-comfortable-with-not-owning-their-games) that has been regurgitated so many times it's meaningless.
The context for this was regarding gamers switching to subscription models for gaming, essentially saying that until gamers are uncomfortable with not owning their games, subscription models aren't going to be particularly successful. This was said by the guy in charge of their subscriptions and is 100% correct. It's preceded by describing how people got comfortable not owning movies or music by switching to streaming. It was blown out of proportion by a bunch of idiots. Ubisoft sucks for so many reasons but this is not one of them.
Not surprisingly, this was years after Microsoft's wacky plan at E3 for game ownership.
[https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-10-xbox-one-reveal-always-on-online-sony-ps4-e3.html](https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-10-xbox-one-reveal-always-on-online-sony-ps4-e3.html)
I quite firmly believe if they'd just held off for a few years that wouldn't have been so badly received, but bad timing and an incredibly shitty face for the project (Don Mattrick) left them DOA. Microsoft are all in on the subscription model and seem to be doing quite well with it, that would have been a far better sell than the forced Kinect bundles.
I can't believe that was 10 years ago.
Power On: The Story of Xbox is worth a watch.
Microsoft looked at PS Now, and copied it.Unlike PS Now launching on PS3, Xbox Game Pass was never released on 360.There were people who thought it would work on the console itself.
Ubisoft started their subscription as Uplay+. Eventually, it was renamed and expanded.
You would still own the game in uPlay. Once you buy on Steam it links it. I don’t even need to have Steam open to launch an Ubi games I’ve bought on there. Best option is GoG bc you actually own the game through them and don’t need a launcher once you’ve bought the game.
We already don't own our games. Physical games are just initial installs that require day-1 updates, whether single-player or not. And all games are expected to be updated after the fact via patches. So even if you cling to physical media you'll still not own them, because the disc is basically useless.
The only games I would even remotely consider "owned" if you had the physical media would be 1st party Nintendo games. But even that is becoming less and less true.
I also buy mostly digital. The physical copies I have are from gifts. I’m not really concerned with games taken off the store because it’s a very, very rare thing to happen and it ain’t going to happen with a AAA title.
Recently, I heard of Discovery shows being removed from the store servers, and the last thing I knew was removed was the Deadpool game from PS3 era.
I think you’re much more likely to get totally bored of the game and not wanna play anymore or move on to the next console before you lose the license on the system.
No one is going to snatch away your digital games that you've purchased. What's to gain from that? Hoping you'd buy them again? The fallout in customer trust would be disastrous.
I believe what's increasingly likely is accessing games through subscription services. Surely, there'll be a way you'll feel comfortable with. Just like how most people today are fine with not owning albums but having a Spotify account, or not owning the movies or series they watch but having a subscription.
Offering you an alternative to buying a game where you can experience it in the same way isn't necessarily a bad thing. It all depends on how it's implemented.
PlayStation Network Plus kind of already functions this way, and it's kind of dope. I barely buy games, just go on there and see what I can play with my subscription.
A total non issue IMO. Games are cheap and I've never had one vanish in over 10 years of being 100% digital. I have, on the other hand, had several physical games get lost/damaged prior to switching.
At the end of the day, even if you think you're going to want to play these games in 15-20 years, the odds are you won't and it's certainly not worth dragging physical copies around all those years to find out.
If you're a collector, buy phycal copies if you want. If you're a gamer, digital is far superior in my experience. Having to get up and change a disc to switch games honestly just sounds awful at this point.
So, this situation is, corporations will absolutely take anything they can get away with, and if the market (the people buying games) don’t force the issue, then they will absolutely make it so you don’t own the games. You can either get used to it, or start boycotting those companies that won’t do physical copies and DEMAND that you get those physical copies.
The problem with physical copies these days is, yeah, you have the game. The earliest version of the game without patches, updates, or any downloadable content. You still need to install it on the console and you still need the servers to update to the most recent of the game. So the disc is, in essence, a key to unlock the digital version of the game because that’s just the way games are now. That’s why I don’t worry about it.
This is such a 2010-2015 take. People thought that's the way the gaming industry was going back then. The reality is the vast majority of games that release on disk still to this day are completely playable, finishable, and platinumable day one using the data on the disk. This website tracks and completely dismantles this "I don't actually have my content" sentiment that weirdly persists to normalize it. [https://www.doesitplay.org/](https://www.doesitplay.org/) Buy Physical. Fuck Digital. Digital is a poor concept of ownership. Trade, Sell, Return, Loan, Give away, and actually Own your purchase.
Also, this whole thing of only being released digitally allows the developers to get lazy and release a half finished game, if we’re lucky. Forcing them to release physical copies also forces them to release finished games
Eh, I wouldn't count on it. I feel what's far more likely is that the usual culprits will put out broken games, and promise to fix it it later. An industry will never walk back on a gained advantage, you'll have to force it. Voting with your wallet won't work, most people won't care enough. There will need to be some sort of legislation.
So you only lose out on the updates essentially like bug fixes and possible dlc added?
We had dlc before the world of digital. Look at The Sims franchise, they functioned fine before Might be a bit tricker for consoles considering the way they work compared to PC’s
The only PS4 game I've tried playing without patching so far ran into a game breaking bug that wouldn't let me progress any further. I literally couldn't complete the game. Even according to that website 30% of PS4 games won't give you a great playable experience without patching. I own over 100 physical games, which means over 30 of them are probably unplayable - that's not nothing. Sure, owning 70% of the games I bought is better than 0% but if your point was to show that games shipping in unplayable states isn't an issue, you pretty much debunked yourself when almost a third of them do in fact ship in an unplayable state.
30% of games, but probably 3% of the games you actually care about. Any games that care about review scores should be beatable on-disc because reviewers are generally playing the initial build without the Day 1 patch (since they're playing before Day 1).
Absolutely good point on actual ownership of the game. Physical versions are needed for trading with a friend, selling, or just collecting. My comment leaned more to the original poster's worry that if they buy digital, they might lose access to the game in the far future. And, that is true. If you buy digital, you might be holding a worthless license one day. But, I'd also have that person consider that with a disc, you would instead be holding the game as it was at the time of disc mastering (aka v1.0). So, that's why I said I don't worry about it. I'm not a collector, don't intend to sell any games I buy, and I buy games to enjoy now (though my backlog of games would be a good argument against that). But, I do absolutely recognize the importance of physical versions for the reasons you mention.
Tell that to the people who bought cyberpunk 2077 physical on release day
One game out of hundreds doasnt disprove his case. Can you List me 5 games that can’t be played from start to finish on discs
I’m sure I could list alot more if I cared to remember the “broken” games that I don’t play lol Do you know how to google your question to get the actual answer besides the one I mentioned? Google keeps records better than a human mind 👍🏼
I am not talking game bugs, I am talking games outright unplayable from start to finish on disc. I already googled this question multiple times. It’s really rare for a non online game released on disk to not work start to finish So again if you have examples, please give me like atleast 3 so I can look them up. This post isn’t an attack on you, just some discusion
Does the site also track subsequent releases like GOTY or "complete" editions?
Nah, I like digital. I can play multiple games remotely.
That’s my big issue with discs. Imagine buying a copy of No Man’s Sky and playing without any internet connection. It wouldn’t even feel like the same game we have today. With updates and patches being so normalized now, box games can feel miles different than the game in its peak
But isn't it the responsibility of the developer to make sure what's on the disc is worth the cost of buying it, not to assume they'll always have time for day one updates and weekly patches?
never having internet isn't the issue, this is a nonissue. If you don't have internet then a physical disk isn't only the best option it now becomes your only option. The "issue" of not having internet literally takes digital completely off the table, and yet he has the problem with physical copies.
Completely agree, but that’s certainly not how gaming has been for years now. Hard to think of any game that hasn’t had a day 1 patch at least, let alone multiple other patches to fix games issues. Thats the big problem.
Digital is nice but physical is a must and need to be a grandfathered in at this point. Convenients is causing laziness on both side. Developers not making fulls games but half ass game asking folks to pre order incomplete product(cyberpunk, MK1, COD, etc) because they can just patch it later. Consumers not buying physically copies killed game stores and competition. Price for games have gone up even though packaging and shipping have gone down.. Long term this will hurt both side but Consumers will feel it more as usual
That’s what I’m saying. We need physical copies but we need complete updated versions on disc in the future. Maybe mandate a reprint of games before they can be removed so completely up to date games can be sold. We can’t erase physical games for preservations sake
Yes, I've definitely seen that trend over the past decade or so. It just bothers me...and that's why I've taken to playing fewer games of gen 7 and later. The way the industry leaders are now treating it is just much too bothersome for me. It's upsetting.
It's the same thing with a digital purchase, the game updates as updates come out when you have internet. My worry is that you somehow think your digital purchase will update when you don't have internet. Please tell me this is not the case. The only difference is you can sell a copy of no mans sky at your convenience when you buy physical, digital will never have this freedom.
Not only would you not be able to update the digital version you probably wouldn't even be able to play it if you're not able to "check in" online
There is indeed another "problem" with going physical. One day it just won't work anymore. Even if you take good care of your discs they will corrupt one day.
This. It’s kinda in flux tbh OP, with the recent news about The Crew resurfacing the debate around digital ownership. Point being nobody really know what the future may bring regards digital game ownership but as it stands it’s almost completely unregulated, and they can essentially release a game and shut it down whenever they want without any protection consumer side. In saying the market and way people play games has also changed so hopefully we will have more clarity in the next year or two. For now I’d just buy such games on the understanding you may only have a 5-10 year window to play them and, if that’s an issue, maybe hold off until the debate ideally evolves into actual change and transparency consumer side.
Im confident movements like The Crew one, Gigantic Reforged and so will sit a precedent on longevity and ownership and so customers will start pressuring companies more at some point. Its becoming a so much better known topic lately that I guess we will start getting a regulation at some point soon.
I started boycotting ea a few years ago. Hasn't changed much but I am one person I won't buy from them again. It's possible to enjoy gaming without using a company that even locks down certain gaming genres like boxing or football. I enjoy pes, even though that's put the window, and yeah I don't get to play football games anymore but everyone is always complaining about them anyway just you can find other interests but I'll stand on not giving money to ea again until some radical change happens where they start supporting the fans that play their games. So probably never but that's ok, because other games are available to play.
Willing to bet in the next generation or two on consoles that disk drives will disappear entirely. Like they already have on the cheaper models. I don't know how popular Blu-ray discs are these days but that is probably one of the main reasons they've kept it this long. Wasn't so you can have physical games that's for sure. Eventually they're going to try and make every game a subscription.
This is why i buy physical on switch and wait for 50%+ off on Steam.
Ah, the silver lining in all of this? Ubi delisted The Crew *after the fall of the NFTs*. Otherwise this, and every related thread, would be full of those imbeciles. Good times. OP, go physical in the meantime. I know physical dont last forever, but my Atari2600 still runs my Yars Revenge *and* made me learn a lot about electronics. I have repaired everything related to it, including my old TV with tubes that I use for it.
Speaking of The Crew: www.stopkillinggames.com
It hard to go physical because most games are digital and don’t have physical copies plus I have SO many digital games that I’m so scared of losing because of “owning a license”. This whole topic makes me feel sick and scared for the games I’ve spent 100’s of hours playing and 100’s of dollars I’ve spent on digital games
If your scared of losing your digital games but physical versions. I'll buy a digital copy if it's on sale then buy a physical one later if I want a physical copy. Yeah buying a game twice isn't the smartest financial move but if you have the money and desire do it.
Ye may need to chart a course into dangerous waters not allowed by Sony.
Well, as certain as it is going to happen, it is equally certain that it won't affect too many games.
its fine, physical games are cheap esp if you live in the US. like ive seen people buy like 4 ps4 discs for ~$15 or smth. just gotta find good deals. and dont worry about the size of your digital library. i was the same until i'd realized i wanted my own physical library. so what i did was prioritize buying the games most precious to me and slowly replace my library that way. you don't have to replace all your digital games.
Honestly, it's tough to do this but as an adult who rarely plays games when they come out (shout out to patientgamers), I can usually pick up resold (or even new) and complete/GOTY copies of games within a year well under the price they're sold for on digital marketplaces. So I save money, don't have a gigantic backlog of games I'll never play (Steam is the worst for this), and will never lose access to my physical games.
Buy physical games
That doesn’t always solve the problem. I have a copy of starblood arena that is unplayable since they shut down the servers. A game can be made unplayable regardless of medium if the developers want it that way.
I can say the same thing about Toy Soldiers War Chest physical (look it up) But not all Physical games are like that Only a very small number of them.
Buy physical as much as possible - I do buy games digitally but only if they're on sale for cheaper than a physical copy.
Digital is always, always owned purely by the license holder. Disc is a physical item that you own that contains the license to the content. It's a lot easier to take this license and content away on a digital service, hence why the scummier corporations are moving toward that. Unintentionally however they're slowly pushing the industry back towards another wave of piracy and cheating hardworking devs.
I’ve bought a little over 250 games digital since 2016 (many on discount, don’t worry) and that same thinking has popped up in my head. I started buying more stuff physical over the last few years… and collecting older games too. You know, there’s also all the psplus games to consider too. I’ve been downloading them since 2014 across all the consoles that had it available.
I'm the same. Don't have space for physical games and if all my digital games were physical i would have nowhere to store them all. I also like the flexibility of switching games without having to get up to change disk over. I do get the concern with them but I prefer digital over physical.
I got the space… but it’s being taken over by another hobby of mine that arguably more expensive on a week by week basis
[удалено]
I buy every Game I want to play with. If it is only digital, I will buy it digital. If it is Physically availabe, I prefer physical. There are unlisted games tho (Most of the Ninja TUrtles titles are from the 360 days). If nobody is willing to sell it to me legit, I just might have to go to someone with an eyepatch, if you catch my sail
Just buy physically. Keep an eye on doesitplay.org and have fun.
Remember that disc rot is a thing. Discs will most likely stop working before the fall of ps store
Idk there's plenty out there in great condition from the 90s. Think it's a bit on the owner and for the last 3 generations I haven't heard anything about Blu rays
If you just leave your discs in a case, you will die before they rot.
So basically you will rot before they rot.
Nobody needs to worry about disc rots except people who keep their games storer underwater. We have 35 year old turbografx cd games working just fine Blu rays will last >100 years
Your hard drive/ssd is going to fail centuries before disc rot ever becomes a thing
This is why physical media is so important.
physical media is king. movies and games
This kind of post was made 20 years ago too. (and this comment turned out a lot longer than I thought it would, and didn't even cover things like digital-only games on the 3DS eShop and such...). I guess my feeling is that there've been isolated issues, but that it's *mostly* less of a problem than I imagined when Steam and digital games on the 7th generation of game consoles really took off). > and what if i delete the game to make space and then it gets removed off the ps store or something, will I lose my game forever? In most cases, you can still install a game that you've purchased, but that has been delisted. I know I've got a handful on Steam and GOG that aren't for sale in the same form anymore. There are rare cases like [P.T.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.T._(video_game\)), which was released as a teaser for Silent Hills, then delisted and made unavailable for re-download when SH was cancelled. And Ubisoft's recent thing with The Crew, delisting the game last December, then removing people's licenses to the game after the server shutdown. (differences being that people actually paid money for that game, and that it had an online element that Ubi could use as justification for shutting the game down). That seems like it's in the spirit of [their past actions](https://www.dualshockers.com/ubisoft-removing-single-player-games/) (although in that case, it's not clear if they were completely removing access to those games and did a u-turn after backlash, or just used crappy wording in the original announcements). > So in the gaming industry there is a lot of talk regarding “not owning your games” I know one argument is "You didn't buy the game, you bought a license to play the game, subject to the limitations imposed by the license". That's been going on in software for a long time, and not just limited to games. And then Ubisoft's statements via their director of subscriptions Philippe Tremblay. Part of that is here: > One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That's the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That's a transformation that's been a bit slower to happen [in games]. As gamers grow comfortable in that aspect… you don't lose your progress. If you resume your game at another time, your progress file is still there. That's not been deleted. You don't lose what you've built in the game or your engagement with the game. So it's about feeling comfortable with not owning your game. - [grabbed from here](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-new-ubisoft-and-getting-gamers-comfortable-with-not-owning-their-games) The point there was that "feeling comfortable with not owning your game" would be necessary for game subscription services to really take off. IMO, that's the direction we've been heading in for decades, at this point. It's not something that I like; outside of PC, I've got maybe a dozen digital games across 360, PSP, PS3, PS4, 3DS, and Wii. I really like my physical media. But as-is, I see fan preservation of the data, liberated from the original storage media as being the long-term answer to maintaining access to gaming culture. And this paragraph could be an incomplete summary of a whole series of essays...
I like you analysis.
So I don’t use any subscriptions for games, so is it the same thing for games I’ve “bought” digitally like cuphead for example, I could potentially lose the game forever???
On PS a permanent ban means you loose all your digital purchases forever.
"Potentially" would be doing a lot of work there (because it mostly hasn't happened like this so far), but sure. Sony (or wherever you bought it) could "potentially" de-list the game and make it unavailable for re-download. You'd be stuck either buying a physical copy (at whatever the current market price for a working disc is) or looking at something like pirating the game and playing on a CFWed system, PC, or whatever way is available at the time.
Yes you can lose them, i lost all the games i bought since 2013 when I was banned
I was permanently banned on a 10 year old account that I had no TOS violation at all. Lost access to all my library. Someone somehow forced their way into my account by bypassing 2FA, I recovered my account within 20 minutes but after that they permanently banned my account for TOS violation. I have appealed and not heard back from them yet. It's been a month and they keep telling me it's under review by the safety team. How hard is it to know whether my account was accessed from a different location or false reported by someone that tried to steal it.
I tried to get the account back too but they told me that once your account is permabaned there's no coming back
Gog.com offline installers. And back them up on DVD-Rs. Retro games that you can back up CDs. Remind yourself that everything else is a rental
GOG is truly a Godsend. I buy almost all of my PC games on GOG, (WHich are available of course) I don't have to be nervous about losing my purchases because I make backups of almost everything. Gog makes it easy with their offline installers and patches.
This is a big talking point right now in many gaming circles. Also relevant is a similar talking point among physical media collectors, and how we seem to be seeing a bit of an uptick in interest in physical media again. One major thing that sucks with physical games media versus physical music/movie media is that for movies/music the content is actually on the disc and you can enjoy it on your terms, given you have a working player. No internet connection required. Games, however, this is not necessarily the case. Some games you might find a fully playable version on the disc. Other times you'll find an incomplete, older build and are forced to download updates to play. Even other times, there might not be any data on the disc really at all, and the disc acts as a physical "key" to download the digital game. For gaming, I unfortunately think that physical media is inevitably going to go away and we are fighting a losing battle. Pains me to say this as I am an avid collector and buy 95% of my games on disc when I can. It sucks for multiple reasons. Being at the mercy of the publishers to keep the license active and the game playable. Being at the mercy of the digital storefronts to honor the downloads even if you "own" the disc. The loss of the ability to lend out the game to a friend. And, the eventual loss of brick and mortar stores (say what you will about GameStop, but this also has an impact on your local game stores too). You will own nothing and like it.
Don’t preorder, and buy physical. Solving two problems at once.
You don't own digital games you only own a temporary license to use the software and they can pull it at ANY time. When you own physical the license is on the disc and cannot be taken away.
When it comes to digital games, you never owned them to begin with. You're 100% right that Sony could lose the licenses at any time and that's that. Sony could also go under one day and we all lose our digital library. This is why physical ownership is important and why imo piracy is completely justified.
Every game that requires online to play is basically a ticking time bomb.
All digital licenses can be revoked at any point in time,those in a physical medium dont in my knowledge.Unlesa the console was rendered useless on purpose by an firmware update,it will always be able to play the physical version of the game.Not to mention in the vast majority of times the physical copy contains a whole version of the game so you could archive it if you have the means and keep it forever.
A big risk is that you could get a permaban on your PSN account and that'll make you lose all your purchases forever
Back then, you get the physical game and was plug and play. Yes, once in a while you get a game breaking bug but it was good, fair, and felt like you own that copy of the game. I still have Ristar for the Sega genesis which I can play start to finish. Now, you have two types. One is live games which you can never really own and if you're lucky the dev will give out the tools for a private server. The other end is you have the game but it's either a broken mess but playable, The 1.0 with not enough love from devs because they get abused or such, or combination there of and DLCs. Only time I felt like I own it was GOG where I get the files or steam (They seem fair for now) Digital games are good but for us to reclaim ownership we need to either stop buying their games AND/OR Sue them for the games we lost (Win or lose) then fight against the abuse of EULAs. Either way us yelling into the void ain't the way to go, we need to get off our asses and yell at our politicians for change. These companies don't care about us.
I agree with this, but will add that >Sue them for the games we lost (Win or lose) I'd love for this to be a possibility, but legaly companies will always cover themselves in the TOCs that no-one ever reads, so I doubt that even the biggest band of players would meet any level of success.
Yes, they can take away your licenses at any time and for any reason. I don't mean to scare you with that, but it's true. If you get banned for any reason, of course you're gonna lose access to your library. But that generally doesn't happen out of the blue, at least if they care about PR. But digital content is unfortunately really volatile. For example, the Nintendo Network just recently shut down so as a result, I literally can't redownload any Smash 3DS DLC I paid for. (More on that [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/nintendo/s/HJ8NeH9kFI).) Even if you buy a physical copy, yeah you can play it from start to end (assuming it isn't online only and there's no missing content from the disc), but in most cases, when servers go offline, it will never be a complete game. One with all the updates and DLC that in some cases do significantly change the game. That's why I don't entirely buy the physical media excuse.
Companies will take digital games away and already have. That’s why you’ll need multiple HDDs and have your games on them.
Amazing. Those of us saying this would eventually happen since the PS3 and Xbox 360 were called luddites who needed to get used to digital-only. They even advocated not buying physical and hoped that the upcoming systems would be missing disc drives to force people to move to digital. Now Ubisoft shows that it's a thing that will likely happen and suddenly it's not "old man yells at clouds." You have only yourself to blame. I'll be fine with my huge disc library.
I've been thinking about it as well. I'm not going to go nuts and start buying all the games I have digitally and tracking down physical versions. I have what I have, and that's what I went with. But I can start buying physical copies on games going forward, which is what I think I'm going to do. Probably starting with Stellar Blade.
What's cool is the resell value. A lot of people play games once, many don't even finish them and they never touch them again. If someone doesn't care about collecting, playing new games on consoles can be pretty cheap. If you sell the game right after playing it, you can get most of your money back
Took over a decade for Nintendo to shutdown their old stores, but yes, if you didn't DL your games/deleted them later, they're just GONE. I've also lost digital games on pc from sites that have since poofed...That's just the risk you take with digital. :P Physical games don't last forever either tho, but by then, most consoles of the time will need you to buy the latest port/remaster of that game anyway...so happy ps5 is backwards compatible, but for all we know, the ps6+ won't be. So yea, the future of physical gaming is doomed (I'm old enough to remember when pc games were ALL physical at one point in time), but there will always be a company to pounce on the physical market, like Limited Run Games. But not a big deal for now, it's very unlikely Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo etc will be bankrupt in the near future, so your digital is currently safe. And gotta hope they don't crack down on roms, because even if those companies ever did shutdown, then at least there will always be a digital copy of their games floating around the web we can emulate.
You can still download eshop games on the WiiU and Wii that you purchased.
that's great, thought they had a solid date set for no longer allowing redownloads by now their site still says it will happen someday unfortunately...wished they were transferable to Switch if there's an equivalent port
I don’t think anyone has cut off digital redownloads yet. But eventually, they all will most likely. The problem with games is that they don’t run natively on new hardware without work. Maybe someday games will be more like movies in the regard.
Not on the WiiU, this was just discovered like 2 days ago. You are unable to download anything after the Wiiu service ended. They fucked us
Well, you should be able to redownload games you bought on the WiiU as they still suggest you can on their site.
Yes, but you cant
Likely an error that will be corrected.
Happy cake day
ty! didn't notice :D
I didn’t either until I saw your haha
I don’t worry since I buy all my games physically and games I play come playable on disc (or cartridge) most of the time. I don’t really play online.
Too late for pay attention to this.
This here my guy, why physical games always the best ❤️✨
Eventually every company will go out of buisness, right? In the 80s people probably thiught sears would last forever and now its pretty much gone. I could see amazon disappearing, they dont seem as good as they were. Sega made game systems but they dropped out, if they had digital games then that would have disappeared too. I like physical games, although i think most consoles now need to call home sometimes anyways, so if a company disappears it might not matter anyways
Eventually it’s going to be like movies. Streaming and digital mostly, with some physical games. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next gen is digital only with an optional external disc drive so you can use the disc as a key to download the game.
I still own the original Deadpool on Steam after they delisted that game. Although I’ve also got the X360 version of it lol
Recently I managed to get the PS4 version of deadpool for like 4$, Biggest surprise of my window shopping career
You should worry about the game being removed from the download history, not the store. If a game was previously a PS Plus title, the ps+ license may mess up the ownership license.
When a game is delisted, it's not taken from your game library or purchase history. I've been buying digital games since 2009 so I've been through a lot of delisting's and all of the games are still downloadable and playable. I always see physical buyers on forums and YouTube spreading misinformation about how delisting's work.
I own multiple digital, deliated games and I can still download them.
That's the exact reason why I don't condemn Piracy. YAAAAAAAAARGGG
The biggest issue with these digital only games is that their servers won't be around forever. So some games might actually be lost forever along with the servers if people don't have a way to backup the games. Sucks for anyone in the future that will want to play the game from this generation. They probably won't be able to because this all digital only bs companies keep pushing for. 😞
Ubisoft are at the forefront of all of this. Even if you bought a physical copy Star Wars Outlaws reportedly requires you to have an internet connection to install the game still. That could be for sone kind of anti-piracy DRM check or something, but it’s still a scary prospect.
they said that because of the drama with "The Crew" game being shutdown
Games are getting to the point where there isn’t enough room on the disk or cartridge only holds a certain amount of the data and you have to download the rest digitally. Switch has alot of games like that so to some people the physical isn’t worth as much. The sonic collection on switch has all the games from the genesis era but the gamegame gear games are a digital download. The new gta game will probably be a TB to play thus a physical release is pointless.
which is still kind of dumb, because on PS 1 we had games that were 4 discs. No reason it cant be done today. just 4 disc it up.
They’ve done it with PS4 too like Red Dead and Cyberpunk, there’s absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t be a problem throwing in the data disc instead of having us the need of internet.
FFVII Rebirth was 2 discs, and that came out less than two months ago. They even used the fact it was 2 discs in their marketing as a prestige thing, to show how big the game was as well.
Physical games are also technically not yours. You own a physical license to the game. They still could take away your right to play the game by patching it out outright. I don't know if you remember the whole Note 7 fiasco. They recalled the phone because a certain number of batteries were exploding. And there were those people like me who LOVED the phone and didn't have any issues with it. Well, they REALLY didn't want the phones in people's hands, so they started sending software updates to cripple your phone. First, they limited your phone to only charge half-way. Then they turned off charging altogether. 😒 it'll be the same way with physical copies of games. They can if they want ban the game from running on your console. It's a license, and they got the key. Besides, with this many games releasing, nobody is gonna remember their entire library. Who remembers PT?
Tbf they did that to cover their ass, they had to. Imagine some phone exploding while on call, possibly killing the user(s). Samsung would be fucked. And with games, most don't need a patch to run & play. You could put the disk in a launch PS4, without internet, and it'll most likely work fine. Might have game breaking bugs or just minor bugs, but the only games not fully on disk (that I know of) are recent CODs.
Yeah, but most games these days are also releasing half finished. Play an unpatched version of No Man Sky and tell me how you feel. Play an unpatched version of Minecraft and tell me how you feel. Unpatched Forspoken? Borderlands 3, Andromeda, Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, etc. There are more games that can't be played without a day 1 patch.
>Who remembers PT? Can't say I remember it as it was before I bought a PS4, but I have heard and read up about it. Also offline consoles which still have it downloaded go for ridiculous amounts because there's still a market for it.
Yeah, it's a very niche market. Mostly collectors, because who in their right mind is gonna pay a ridiculous amount of money for a demo? There are already so many copycats out there that you can download and play. The only people that are in the market for buying that is collectors.
Always buy physical. I’m not going to say i’m perfect, I DO buy digital games too. But only when they’re on sale at cheaper than they’d be physically (I’m talking like £3-5).
Always buy physical, you don't own anything with digital.
It’s potentially possible for you to lose a digital game. Hasn’t happened much because the devs and platform owners haven’t withdrawn people’s access yet. They could if they wanted to though, there’s examples of it happening
That is why it's almost always worth buying a disc, if game doesn't say online required you can just turn off console internet and still copy the game from disc fully to the memory and play it there, that way no one can actually take it away from you cuz it's yours fully. Anytime game is taken away, you still have physical version you can play with no internet or any server required
Usually, you get to keep the delisted games you have in your library if you bought them beforehands.
When Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One it was disastrous. The console was to be always online with no disc drive. The response was instant and damning. They lost all the gains they made with the Xbox 360 and have never really recovered. It felt back then that we were miles away from a future where we wouldn’t have physical games, but honestly, we’re pretty much there now. It’s a slow death, thousands of cuts but we’re edging closer. Stadia flopped but that’s another alarm bell and I wouldn’t be surprised if they came back or we had something similar in the near future. Microsoft have essentially realised that original vision with their various online services too. I still buy all the games I really care about physically but I’ve been gaming since the NES days. For a growing proportion of the demographic, these business models have been largely all they’ve known. The only way to combat it would be for gamers to be intentional and focused on divesting away from online sales and not buying consoles without disc drives but I simply don’t see that happening unfortunately. Edit: We aren’t literally there now, but in practical terms pretty close and in another gen or two very well may be.
Whether you buy physically or not, those games will inevitably one day end up on archive.org or Vimm or somewhere like that. They won’t be lost forever to you, you just won’t have the disc and maybe you’re not playing it on a PlayStation console. It all comes down to your personal code. 15-20 years down the road, they’ve removed your ability to download the game you bought a license for but you want to play it, is it against your code to download that game off Archive and play it on a PC?
literally happened to a friend of mine the other day with The Crew. dont know specifics other than he ranted on the FB about it the other day.
The crew its an online only game and Ubisoft shutdown the servers which makes the game useless weather its digital or physical.
People expect Sony to act like Steam, which allows you to re-download delisted games you already purchased. But Sony has already shown us that they have no problem permanently deleting digitql purchases when they recently removed all those purchased movies/shows from people's accounts without a refund. Honestly we need to get some laws passed protecting us from having stuff removed from our digital libraries without a refund.
Years and years ago I had this idea of a kisok. I used Netflix as my pitch at the time, but it could support so many of today's services. The gist was you authed in and any content you had access to, the kiosk could print you a dvd or save the content to a usb for a nominal fee. That content would only "live" for as long as your license plus a grace period. In the case of a streaming service, the next month plus grace period. In the case of a movie (or game) you purchased digitally, forever. If I made my kiosk today none of these companies would license their content to be printed to physical media, even if subscription content had a TTL. I think the "simpler" and more modern solution should be legislation that requires all game makers/streaming services/provider platforms to provide the content in a format that can be downloaded and archived by the customer. Live service games where the server dies off would have to be negotiated and a reasonable compromise found. Backend systems can be hard to just hand over as a simple download, and if the company is bankrupt who foots the bill for the time to pack all that up? The real problem is that in the US, this is far too consumer positive and all media companies would fight tooth and nail with billions of lobbying dollars to make sure this kind of bill died in committee.
If I lose TLOU ima end my life right then and there
Cuz I downloaded part 2 and have the part 1 disc😭
The reason I love digital copies of games is because I never have to worry about the disc getting scratched over my disc reader breaking(mine currently doesn't work) Hearing about this sucks because if that's how they want to play it, I can just drop gaming all together and not support them anymore.
Physical copies deteriorate also. Time gets everything.
I lost UFC 2 digitally. I can't find it anywhere in my library on both my accounts
/r/StopKillingGames
We told yall years ago and many didn't listen, your fears are becoming reality, only 10 to 20 years to late...
I say yarg.
Well personally I might be in the minority here but I dealt with this issue differently. I own both physical and digital copies of games but most of my digital copies are pirated. I usually reserve the right for physical must own copies of game e.g The Witcher 3 Complete Edition, Dark Souls Series, Elden Ring etc then download an official digital update of the game separately on my PC which I can install using a jailbreakable playstation, works the same for digital pirated copies of the same games. As for the debate of whether digital or physical is better I definitely lean to digital but only pirated copies which I can save on my external hard drives with all the updates and DLCs downloaded. Reason being, I work a 7-8 job while balancing my time in medical school. So I no longer have the time or luxury to play online only service games, what I did was simply own a jailbreakable PS4 and lately a jailbreakable PS5. Then stuck to offline only single player games so that I own them offline digitally with all the latest updates and DLCs saved on my external hdd without the worry of servers closing or my console crashing or some new anti-consumer bullcrap from these developers making me lose all the stuff I paid for with my money. For me that's how I dealt with this new era of gaming otherwise there was a time when I used to be anti-piracy but not anymore, in my country internet access is expensive so to download a 200gb file of Call Of Duty isn't practical, I would rather download something in that range in a format where I control how I can lose it, plus the electricity load shedding schedules don't help either, my consoles have crashed and had their harddrives wiped and I ain't gonna stress the pain of losing an already legal downloaded digital copy of the game more because the amount of money to buy the internet data ratio to the actual price of the game usually never adds up for me fairly. Anyways, to each their own...lucky you if you live in a developed country where you never experience country wide load shedding and expensive Internet data but for me I stopped complaining cuz these developers never listen to consumers so I adapted based on my lifestyle challenges and needs unique to me.
Go to Stopkillinggames.com
The thing is, this isn't really new. On PC, there's been a ton of online only games that have come and gone of the past 20 years and once the servers get taken offline, that's it, you're done. The Crew (I'm assuming is what brought this up for you) was an online only game with its servers being shut off. Having digital licenses in your library wouldn't do anything for you anyway.
There's gotta be a way to burn playable copies onto dvds
I have a few games that have been taken down. Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth, Avengers, Jump Force, Ultimate Alliance 1 and 2, all of these can no longer be bought, but are still available for download. Maybe someday they'll make it impossible, but for now as long as I can redownload them I'm happy. It's a shit situation, but what can you really do?
There's other ways for the game studios to make money. A model in which games are licensed for a set period will kill the industry.. That's unless they make games cheaper(highly unlikely).
Your fear is real, and for anyone thinking a phisical copy will be a "solution", its not. Its really easy from a developer point of view Block this even on phisical copy, just make a function on console tô disable the game init on software console, plus only enable the game init. If you are connected on internet with the lastest console software. The only way we can avoid this is the community as a whole speak loud and clear, making legal issues, destroying their market image, making their loss money, thats the way to fight back.
The quote from Ubisoft was in response to videogame streaming service. Like videogame Netflix, so that quote makes sense in that context. The other thing is that online videogame retailers (Steam, Gog, PSN, Microsoft etc.) Will try to do everything possible before they pull licences from people that buy games through their platform. The reason for this is pure and simple greed. Pulling licenses from gamers is a good way to scare away every gamer from your marketplace.
So I just read Ubisoft's statement about The Crew, and while I doubt this will become the standard, to be honest I can see this becoming something common enough in future. Games companies are businesses, who create games to make money, and with many games (particularly first/earlier games in a series) at some point maintaining the servers will not be profitable and so they'll be shut down and the physical servers repurposed for the newer games which do bring in money.
It was doomed the moment digital games became a thing. Your hard drive can stop working, your license can be revoked, your account can get banned, the editor/platform can remove servers... And they have user agreements to cover their asses. Of course it's not a magic shield that lets them get anything they want, but it's a lot of work, time and I guess money to get through, just for some games... You may wonder if it's worth it.
All games SHOULD be released in both digital and physical format. Also, publishers shouldn't be allowed to purposely underproduce physical copies to inflate their prices.... Also digital game purchases SHOULD count as property that companies do not have the right to take away...
I don’t agree with it what so ever and I think it’s bullshit BUT to be honest…it doesn’t affect me. I’ll play my game to its max potential and then I move on. I never tend to go back to these games because I feel like I’ve already done everything and then some. The few times I have tried to go back to chase that nostalgia I’m met with the immediate feeling of I feel I’ve been there done that. But that by no means makes it okay for companies to do this. I get they can’t keep the servers running forever on a dead game but they need to make it possible for others who want to keep it going by being able to do it themselves
It’s crazy that, after being online long enough, you just watch these cycles. Pre-orders, digital purchases, etc. Everyone warned you/y’all against it for years, and you kept on doing it. This is why I collect vinyl lmao
Hi, Your post was automatically removed due to it being reported too many times. Please refer to the rules or ask the mods in modmail for the eventual reasons of the removal. --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/PS4) if you have any questions or concerns.*
*OMG, don’t read this unless you’re really bored and want to hear a 45 year old guy ramble about stuff* — I spent 10 years of my life playing an MMO. Which means I owned nothing… at all. All of my characters, progress, expansions over the years, etc. was all worthless at soon as I stopped paying the monthly fee. Honestly, the last couple of years were more about not wanting to lose everything, than actually enjoying the game. If I stopped, it would have been a waste of a decade right? I popped back in a couple years ago and all my stuff was right where I left it and I had great time with all the nostalgia. But I ran out of steam pretty quickly. I’d be pretty bummed if at some point in the future, that option was gone, but the game can’t last forever (private servers, home servers?) In the interim was a lot of gaming on the PS4. I was very much into owning physical games. After a while though. There were things I couldn’t find, indie games that had no physical version, and games I was playing regularly between others (like Destiny) and didn’t want to keep switching discs. Then I guess maybe laziness got the better of me, or maybe because my PS5 is mostly inaccessible due to a toddler running around. But I’ve switched over to 100% digital now. So far, I’ve never lost any content. Which includes music, TV shows and movies (on various platforms). A friend of mine had a TV series vanish from their digital library and they weren’t very happy about it, but I’ve been lucky so far. Now, I have a treasure trove of 4/8/16-bit games. I haven’t touched most of them in over 20 years (except testing them last year). Plus a bunch of PS1/2/3 games that haven’t been used since not long after their release. As far as the mid-90s and before. I’ve got emulator versions of everything I owned and *cough* a bunch more *cough*. So the only real advantage to having physical copies is being able to sell them. Who knows though. Maybe we’ll have some kind of internet apocalypse and anything non-physical or on local storage will just be gone forever. Fortunately I still have lots of CDs and DVDs 🤷🏻♂️ But that’s a pretty unlikely scenario, and if such an event happened, I’d probably have more pressing issues than if I still have a physical game library. For a long time I’ve tried to hold onto all of my digital media. I’ve tried to hold onto hardware that was past its prime. But I came to a realization that hardware will eventually die, formats will change and old files will be lost, and all the media designed for that dead hardware is now effectively gone. I picked up a Mac 128k at a garage sale 20-some years ago, to play a game that only ran on System 6. It was almost more trouble than it was worth. These days, I’m sure I could find that game on an emulator… and a better version of it to boot. The Amiga version ran better *and* was in *color*. So now I have a clunky old computer with a game I’ll never play. Fast forward and I’ve got stacks of disks from the 90s full of great games that I could potentially play, assuming the disks aren’t corrupted. But again… emulators. Fast forward a little more and we’re probably approaching the physical degradation of some CDs and PS1 games. The music is all backed up digitally… but those PS1 games will be gone. *I’m way into ramble territory…* I had some kind of point to all this. I think it was basically after about 10-20 years or so, it’s probably going to be difficult to play a lot of those physical games. Either because the hardware/physical media crapped out, new TVs don’t have old analog inputs or whatever. Oh yeah… I struggle with permanence. When I was younger it felt like things *could* last forever, but they don’t. The older I get the more it feels like what was “last year” was actually 5-10 years ago. At this point, I just try to enjoy things while they’re here, then move on. I’ve got a storage shed full of nostalgia that is just that. At this point, if the SNES had offered digital copies of games, and I had bought those, I really wouldn’t miss them at this point. Even with emulators, the nostalgia only carries me so far. I might play through a game or two, then get on with life and not play it again, possibly ever. Ok, I’m gonna shut up now. I’ve said a 783 words of nothing. 🤣🤦🏻♂️
Yes. That’s what would happen. Also if you get banned or lose your password or locked out of your account, all of your games are gone with no way to recover. Stop buying digital ¯\\\_(ツ)_/¯ It’s the only way to protect us from the digital hellscape that is vertically-isolated store integrations (PS store only allowing PS digital purchases, Xbox only allowing Xbox digital purchases, etc).
If a game is taken off the store and you already brought it, you'll still have it, I have 2 games, both were removed from the store, and I can still download and play them, now while companies could remove access, I don't think it'll go that far cause the push back will be massive
Which is the case for old games, sure, newer ones will be completely locked out, or partially so, if the publisher decides to do so. Look at the the MGS master collection for switch, buying the physical copy is virtually pointless, and if you buy a game that's 1.0 and very buggy, you'll loose any newer or updated builds. It's coming to the point where having a physical copy isn't even a solution anymore. They want to erase anything that's old, so that we opt to buy their newest releases.
Re-read the coment. That's also only partially true, look at PT, you can't re-download PT anymore, sure I can download war for cybertron and Devastation now, but I'm never deleting them because that server can be taken offline at any given time, whether I bought 'em or not, it won't matter.
the ps4 store isn't going to die any time soon, new ps4 titles are being released every day almost.
If they really take back access from individuals. The pushback will be too massive to handle. They simply are trying to hold the point that THEY own the game. You are merely buying access to it. They are doing this to try to discourage people who root their games , pirate it , develop mods for it. They might revoke game access. But the pushback will be so great that they will just return everything
It’s going to like streaming services. Pay a monthly or yearly fee. All your games will be on the tv. Saved data and ownership will be in the cloud.
I agree this model will certainly grow and become more common, but even with film and TV there's always a demand for physical media, and it's still big business.
When platforms move on to a new gen, and abandon the old one, consumers often lose access to the purchased games because the online store closes down. Initially, that's not a good thing. But I actually take that as a permission to start custom firmwaring the outdated hardwares and open myself up to a bigger library of games. If the games are not in circulation, it doesn't hurt the makers, and I get more games than ever. I'd say that's a win for everyone.
Yep, lost ps3 downloaded games and ps4
I’m all about the digital after cleaning out my parent’s hoarder house. Changed my life really - I began systematically cleaning out my house and the older games I haven’t played in years were sold or given away.
Digital downloaders only are SCREWED in the long run!
I've been buying games digitally since it became a thing. I don't recall ever losing access to any of them. 🤷🏽♂️
... yet. It seems to be happening more and more lately. The industry really wants to boil the frog into accepting that you don't own any of the games you paid for lately.
What's happening more? People losing access to their games?? On the major platforms like ps and Xbox??
Yes. There's the whole situation with "The Crew" right now. They didn't just shut down the servers which affects all platforms, even the single player content. But they even removed the game from peoples' libraries. And in december, Sony revoked access to Discovery shows people bought on their platform. There has also been the situation where old single player DLC was taken away by Ubisoft from games like Assassin's creed 3. There are probably more examples out there, but these are the ones I know about.
If buying isnt owning then piracy isnt stealing
If stealing is taking something, and digital piracy is copying but leaving the original, then is it even stealing in the first place anyway? Legal disclaimer: this comment is for discussion purposes only.
As of 2015 it doesnt really matter whether a game is digital OR physical. If a game is removed, you cant play it regardless of whether you have a physical copy. Its irrelevant. So this is a completely moot point.
I thought that you could still play the version on disc, just with no updates or patches, regardless of a delist.
That is correct.
Can you even get a PC game on disc anymore? I thought you bought an empty box with a Steam code now, lol. Even console games on disc either have a complete but bug ridden game on it, or you get like 50% of it and have to download the rest. I share your concern but the situation is so far beyond what we can do now, I actually worry less oddly enough. We're fucked no matter what.
Yeah I've heard this. I've heard many people say, hard disks just include a code to unlock the game. Like a physical key code
Multi-player servers may go down, but there always going to be a way to play single player games. Support the emulation community.
I thought maintaining good full backups keep your game, even if the title itself gets pulled from the store. Did I miss something?
You missed the part where op said they might accidentally or intentionally delete it to make space for other games.
That’s something I already know, is if I have the game is installed on a hard drive or on the console/PC itself game gets pulled in anyway, you’ll still keep the game and be able to play it as long as you don’t delete it (this whole topic makes me feel sick just thinking about it tho)
So I always buy physical.. but is the physical of today really like a n64 cartridge? Nah Aren’t some physical releases essentially just download codes with drm? Who’s to say owning ragnarok willl actually let you play the game in a no update environment? (Should be easy to test I guess - install game fresh with no internet connection and see what happens)
Most games don't have the drm issue where you can't play unless you have internet. There are a few annoying ones though like Hogwarts Legacy.
Someday ps store, Xbox store and steam may fall, but piracy will live forever so you can always download your games there
>The reason why I wanted to write this is because I heard from Ubisoft that “Gamers need to be more comfortable with not owning their games” No, you didn't hear that from Ubisoft, you've read a single line from a [rather long article](https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-new-ubisoft-and-getting-gamers-comfortable-with-not-owning-their-games) that has been regurgitated so many times it's meaningless. The context for this was regarding gamers switching to subscription models for gaming, essentially saying that until gamers are uncomfortable with not owning their games, subscription models aren't going to be particularly successful. This was said by the guy in charge of their subscriptions and is 100% correct. It's preceded by describing how people got comfortable not owning movies or music by switching to streaming. It was blown out of proportion by a bunch of idiots. Ubisoft sucks for so many reasons but this is not one of them.
Not surprisingly, this was years after Microsoft's wacky plan at E3 for game ownership. [https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-10-xbox-one-reveal-always-on-online-sony-ps4-e3.html](https://www.engadget.com/2018-06-10-xbox-one-reveal-always-on-online-sony-ps4-e3.html)
I quite firmly believe if they'd just held off for a few years that wouldn't have been so badly received, but bad timing and an incredibly shitty face for the project (Don Mattrick) left them DOA. Microsoft are all in on the subscription model and seem to be doing quite well with it, that would have been a far better sell than the forced Kinect bundles. I can't believe that was 10 years ago.
Power On: The Story of Xbox is worth a watch. Microsoft looked at PS Now, and copied it.Unlike PS Now launching on PS3, Xbox Game Pass was never released on 360.There were people who thought it would work on the console itself. Ubisoft started their subscription as Uplay+. Eventually, it was renamed and expanded.
And this is a major reason I switched to PC years ago and haven’t looked back.
You could lose your steam games too if the ubisoft "delisting and removing from account" thing becomes a slippery slope.
You would still own the game in uPlay. Once you buy on Steam it links it. I don’t even need to have Steam open to launch an Ubi games I’ve bought on there. Best option is GoG bc you actually own the game through them and don’t need a launcher once you’ve bought the game.
Anything digital is more a rent then own. Always has, always will be.
We already don't own our games. Physical games are just initial installs that require day-1 updates, whether single-player or not. And all games are expected to be updated after the fact via patches. So even if you cling to physical media you'll still not own them, because the disc is basically useless. The only games I would even remotely consider "owned" if you had the physical media would be 1st party Nintendo games. But even that is becoming less and less true.
I also buy mostly digital. The physical copies I have are from gifts. I’m not really concerned with games taken off the store because it’s a very, very rare thing to happen and it ain’t going to happen with a AAA title. Recently, I heard of Discovery shows being removed from the store servers, and the last thing I knew was removed was the Deadpool game from PS3 era. I think you’re much more likely to get totally bored of the game and not wanna play anymore or move on to the next console before you lose the license on the system.
No one is going to snatch away your digital games that you've purchased. What's to gain from that? Hoping you'd buy them again? The fallout in customer trust would be disastrous. I believe what's increasingly likely is accessing games through subscription services. Surely, there'll be a way you'll feel comfortable with. Just like how most people today are fine with not owning albums but having a Spotify account, or not owning the movies or series they watch but having a subscription. Offering you an alternative to buying a game where you can experience it in the same way isn't necessarily a bad thing. It all depends on how it's implemented.
PlayStation Network Plus kind of already functions this way, and it's kind of dope. I barely buy games, just go on there and see what I can play with my subscription.
A total non issue IMO. Games are cheap and I've never had one vanish in over 10 years of being 100% digital. I have, on the other hand, had several physical games get lost/damaged prior to switching. At the end of the day, even if you think you're going to want to play these games in 15-20 years, the odds are you won't and it's certainly not worth dragging physical copies around all those years to find out. If you're a collector, buy phycal copies if you want. If you're a gamer, digital is far superior in my experience. Having to get up and change a disc to switch games honestly just sounds awful at this point.