If I were an investor, I’d be worried they aren’t listening to the
wallets with legsconsumers.Most of the ‘‘smart money’’ is just in it for the short term. Get all the value possible out of their position and be the first out. The bagholders will be the same wallets with legs, us, who hold all that shit in our pension funds, IRAs and whatever.
We are very much in a post sustainability mindset when it comes to the investment market. Enshitification is just scrapping the bottom of the barrel to keep the numbers good for another quarter.
I’m shocked
I’m starting to think consoles are cooked. The massive jumps in technology between console generations have turned into small incremental steps. The game quality has dropped (independent games and a few others are exceptions). PC’s used to be slow to boot and load a game vs consoles and also required updates to download, but now PCs are quick and updates are mostly automatic. Consoles used to be nice to just turn on and play without thinking about all that other stuff, yet now they require downloads and updates as well. Loading times aren’t much better either. Consoles used to also be very cheap compared to PCs, but now with the “next gen” being around $1000 the price difference isn’t that huge anymore - especially when you factor in modular updates that can be done to a PC to cheaply extend it’s life. One of the last hold outs for consoles were physical games and now they’re taking that away too.
Not to forget obligatory subscriptions.
While I don’t think that the next console generation will flop entirely, I do strongly suspect that it won’t be as successful as previous ones have been and will lead to a shift where consoles are just cheap streaming boxes that support a subscription to a cloud gaming service, which will eventually be replaced by a single device that can connect to whichever services you want.
PC gaming will be similar for most AAA titles (and in fact will be one of the devices that can support these services), though indie devs will hold out until the requirement of owning a PC leaves only a tiny market.
That’s an interesting take and I can see things moving in that direction. The problem for the console makers is at that point, anyone can make a dumb box to stream with very cheap hardware.
That means the fight will be over exclusives. It’s going to look like streaming services, huh? $15/mo for PS network, $15/mo for Xbox network… Yuck. At that point I’ll stick to indie games locally on PC.
I think you’re underestimating the number of people who just don’t want to take on the secondary hobby of building a PC in the first place.
Cyberpower. iBuyPower. Even Starforge. There’s a bunch of builders out there to remove that “scariness.”
It’s a personal choice, but if they were willing to spend 5-10 minutes to download something like Bazzite and click the 10 total clicks to install it, you’d achieve a console-like experience too.
The information is out there, it’s just not forcefed to you because of a massive marketing budget.
I built my first PC 6 years ago, before PS5 was released.
My PC can still play new release AAA games at high quality graphics and probably will for a number of years still… when it starts to slack a couple hundred $ and it will be good as new.
Was pricey up front but in the end better quality, more choice, and longer lasting.
Me too. AM4 platform. Just upgraded the CPU to a 5800X3D and will get a 5070 TI (maybe super?) soon. This old machine will out perform a PS6 and I can use it as a regular PC as well. The price difference (assuming I would have purchased a PS5/pro and will have purchased a PS6) is minimal especially if you consider (which you have) the higher quality gaming experience.
Well… That goes against the theory of economics, Sony will learn the hard way, like they did with memory stick.
Digital isnt the worst thing, but how “ownership” is controlled can be. I wouldn’t blame Sony for the move but their method is garbage, and their past practices with digital ownership is too.
GoG on the other hand knows how it should be done. I have tons of games from them on a thumb drive. I’ve never actually needed to use it, but its nice to know I can. Major kudos to them.
That said, most of my games are owned on steam, which still has DRM, but at least I can play those games on a 20 year old PC, a modern one, a box in my living room, or on a multitude of hand helds. With Sony you are tied to a specific console and thats that. Good fucking luck when they stop selling that console.
DRM on Steam is up to the publisher.
Steam is DRM
Only if publisher wishes.
You can totally play games downloaded via Steam without launching the shop, if the game is DRM-free.
No. It’s impossible to sell a game DRM-free on Steam. They always require a connection to Valve’s servers to install, regardless of what the publisher wants. GOG lets you download the installer as a file that you can use wherever or whenever you want.
I mean yes… kind of. You can go to your library in gog and download (slowly speed-limited and broken into 4 gb chunks for some damn reason) which means no client needed.
But steam does have games that are DRM free after that first install. Ones that you can copy directly out of the folder and put them anywhere and run. Steam no longer needed.
There is a list here https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam although it suggests its about 600 games more that arent on the list yet.
The 4gb chunks is so you can put them on
Blu-rayDVD discs for storage. Back in the day large games came on multiple discs.Edit: Also it’s probably more what the other guy said about format, fitting on a DVD is just a bonus.
I always thought it was legacy support for FAT file systems. If one was so inclined, you could break a large file down into chunks yourself using a compression tool.
That reason honestly makes a lot more sense than blu ray compatibility
You probably mean DVDs since they are 4.7gb. Bluray capacity is closer to 50gb per disk I think?
Yep I did, but the other guy is probably closer to the truth of it. Fitting on a DVD is just bonus.
We really need a c/confidentlyincorrect comm for people like you
Ehh, pretty sure they know what they’re talking about, they just have what I consider a really bad take about it, and present it as absolute fact. Because yes, you need a connection to steam to “install” a game from steam, whereas you can predownload a GOG game and then not need a connection to install. Which doesn’t really matter to most people, since they don’t care about having the game use an official installer, as opposed to either an unofficial one or just archived game files, but it is a difference.
Then they’re being deliberately obtuse to make a point. Valve treats downloading and installing as the same thing so needing a connection to “install” a steam game is functionally no different than needing a connection to “download” the installer from GOG and then installing the game. Once Steam has installed the game and it has no actual DRM you can just copy it wherever you like. GOG gives a much better package for storing your games but that doesn’t mean what Steam does is DRM.
I guess it’s the right place to ask even if it’s not really related to Sony and my move away from them.
I download and install my GOG games through Heroic and then move them to a hard drive after I’m finished enjoying them.
If GOG one day disappears, will I still be able to play the games that way or do I really have to separately download the offline installers which are separated in many files?
Realistically, you’ll always be able to download the offline installers from the high seas anyway.
will I still be able to play the games that way
Most of them will probably work, but there’s no real guarantee. Depends on whether the installers dumped critical files into your system / user folders.
I believe Steam games, even in offline mode, can only be run on systems where you have installed Steam and logged into it. If you copy the game files to a disc and give it to a friend, they would not be able to play it.
You’re wrong. It depends on whether drm is enabled. If it is not, then the game files on the disc would work. It is the publisher’s choice whether to enable drm.
As the other comment says, if they can explain how I can install a game from GOG without connecting to their servers, I’m happy to concede the point 😂
im never buying a sony title again.
Last Of Us 3 would be the only digital game I’d still buy for my PS5.
For the rest, no disc, no buy as I’m moving to Steam/Gog anyway.
“Last of us” :/
I’m reluctant to buy any digital games on anything but Steam at this point, and that’s because Valve has begrudingly earned my trust over 20 years of use. I do wonder what plans are in place for the point at which Gabe isn’t around to steer Valve.
I have zero confidence in any other game related corporation to have a long term view in mind, and especially not one in which the platform is designed to be consumer friendly.
I would trust GOG too. At least as long as they let you download offline installers.
Putting your trust on any company is already a mistake. The only correct answer is GoG, or other similar DRM free distributions. You don’t have to trust them, because it doesn’t matter what they might pivot to: you still have your downloaded games, and they still work without any connectivity.
Also, when you end up passing away, guess what happens to your steam library? You cannot pass it on to anyone else.
Idk bought 3 games on Steam just the other day and all three came with pop up when I went to install them to let me know that I was only License to use them.
While I bought 3 games on GOG same day and they only asked if I wanted to donate to their fund to keep games DRM free and letting me know that I own all my games I purchased.
Valve might be going to shit.
Is there anyway to backup our games purchased on Steam?
It’s a license to own a copy of the game because you’re not buying the actual game.
A license is ownership. That’s how all software has always worked, same as music and movies.
What remains to be seen is if courts will enforce the ownership in the light of the anti-consumer practices by publishers and developers removing people’s access to that which they have purchased.
This is a great video explaining everything from the guy who started Stop Killing Games.
I think if the license is revocable, then you never really own even a copy.
I only fully trust licenses that use wording like: "All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met. " (from GPLv3) “Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.” (from ApacheV2)
Is there anyway to backup our games purchased on Steam?
Yes, you can copy the install folders and saves for them. Some can be modified to run without Steam fairly easily, some will need more involved cracks. Generally it’s easier to just redownload the whole game cracked and move your save files over.
Do you or anyone have steps for those cracks. I definitely want to play and keep my games without needing Valve.
You could use something like SteamAutoCracker (SAC) or Goldberg, both are available on Github. A lot of smaller indie games don’t have any DRM, so you can play them without steam or on another computer once you’ve copied the files. For games that have 3rd party DRM like denuvo, you’re better off just downloading a cracked version of a game if it exists, since that DRM is borderline impossible to remove on your own
You can download installers from Fitgirl.
The PS5 probably won’t see any noticeable decrease in game sales, because pretty much everyone who wants one already has one, but I’ll be interested to see if gamers call Sony’s bluff for the PS6 or not.
I haven’t bought a physical game in years. But I also haven’t owned a PS since 2 so fuck Playstation.
whoops wong place
Nintendo churns out the same slop franchises year after year and aggressively sues anyone for anything.
Sony (somehow) believes that investors are what give their company value, not customers, and certainly not employees. They’re abandoning physical media and not backing down on their anti-consumer practices that only continue to get worse.
Microsoft has become the new EA, aggressively buying up every single schmedium-sized gaming studio they can get their hands on, mismanageing them all into the ground, then selling them off for parts to save their own asses while leaving talented studios to die on the vine. They’re basically buying the right to scrap their competition and they’ll get away with it because they have enterprise IT subscriptions to absorb the losses.
AAA gaming is dead. And greed killed it. I’ll be playing indie PC games and emulators for the foreseeable future.
Nintendo churns out the same slop franchises
looks at most highly rated video games of all time
Look mate, not everything you don’t personally like is “slop”.
Ive thought slop is ai specific. Looks like the word may be seeing a change in meaning.
Slop has always had the meaning of low effort and non-artistic meant for mass production. It alludes to the vats of gray mush that would get fed to kids for lunch on an industrial scale. Or to the random mix of pig feed.
People tend to use it to mean, “thing I don’t like” far too often these days.
This is criticism slop
People just love stating their opinions as facts, and you can’t really give entirely objective opinions about art. When people say this game was amazing/terrible because of some subjective opinion they usually mean I loved/hated this game because that’s what I love/hate.
I’d argue boiling a thing down to “slop” is a lazy way to avoid saying why they didn’t like it.
Slop has a long history as word used about art. Joeseph Cambell mentions it, people criticsed hollywood of it, publishers complained about it.
I remember those days using the term slop for lazy, uninspired, thowing anything that stuck on the wall, etc. AI is just a logical progression of the same term.
And the Switch titles in all of those franchises range from some of, to the flat out worst, in their respective series.
TotK may as well be DLC for BotW, and Windwaker would have been more similar to those titles were it not for the technical limitations of the Gamecube.
They still can’t seem to get Starfox right since 64 and even that was a reboot of the NES title. You’re really gonna look at all those 3DS attempts to reboot the same NES game and tell me that’s not slop?
Pokémon is seeing the worst quality of the whole franchise on Switch and apparently Pokémon Go was just to train military robots or some shit. You’re really gonna look at 3DS models in a Switch game and tell me that’s not slop, my opinion is just wrong?
Smash Ultimate’s online play has 11, ELEVEN frames of input lag under ideal circumstances, the metagame has been busted since Steve, DLC characters are OP, patches were promised, then canceled, and support is over now. You’re really gonna tell me that’s acceptable, totally not slop, my opinion just sucks?
I hope you play Switch games forever, and I hope you love it.
some of, to the flat out worst, in their respective series.
TOTK/BOTW
Look mate, not everything you don’t personally like is “slop”.
And your other cases are pokemon (who’s been accused of sinking since the 3DS days) and Smash’s online. Not even the game, its netcode (which if we’re being real is bad for 99% of Nintendo games). We don’t need to invent reasons to hate Nintendo, okay.
Popularity does not imply quality.
I’ve played the recent Zelda games. They’re okay. But also disgustingly overrated.
Slop implies bare bones, generic, repetitive design, and thrown together quick. Say what you want about Zelda, but it has never been any of those.
And have you played Splatoon 3/Raiders, Metroid Dread/Prime 4, Kirby Air Riders, Donkey Kong Bananza, Rhythm Heaven Groove, etc?
You’re disgustingly overrated. Botw is the greatest game ever. You wouldn’t know good game design if it kicked you in the ass.
Botw is the greatest game ever.
Statements like these sure as shit ain’t gonna help your case. I’ve seen a few videos of the game and it looks just about the same as every other open world game - with mid graphics. Let me know when the game releases on pc and i can actually try it though.
I played it on PC. Highly recommend.
Yeah i know about emulation, me not playing it is more about them fostering a closed platform.
They’re painfully mediocre. The gameplay is straight out of Assassin’s Creed 2 with some Skyrim sprinkles for good measure. Run to the tower, reveal the map, do the quest, check the box, go to the next one, maybe stumble across a cave with some minor loot. Snooze.
That’s funny, because I would describe Breath of the Wild as the antithesis of the open world design, popularized by Ubisoft, that was most ubiquitous when BotW came out. You climb a tower and decide what’s interesting by seeing it from the top of the tower, not because climbing the tower labeled it as a checklist item on your map. In fact, if you do all of the shrines visible from the top of the towers, you’ve only done about half of them, and late in the game, after stumbling across a few shrines by happenstance, you realize from the negative space on the map that anything you couldn’t see from the top of the tower would tend to have a puzzle to solve that would reveal it.
Greed has been a problem in the AAA game space for a long time. It’s just that before reliable Internet connections, it was harder to exploit people.
Before this, it was lootboxes and gambling mechanics, before that, it was microtransactions, balancing the game to incentivise spending money, and before that it was chopping bits off the game and selling it as DLC.
Prior to that, the worst we got was cheap sequels and shovelware.
It’s all about maximizing shareholder value. Unfortunately, companies have come to the realization that happy customers are no longer the path to success. There is more value in capturing a market and then gutting services to squeeze those pennies out. Long term this can’t be sustainable but here we are.
There’s a whole wide world of AAA video games out there aside from those you mentioned. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II was fantastic just last year; Metaphor: ReFantazio the year before that; Baldur’s Gate 3 the year before that; Elden Ring the year before that. Plenty more still might be significantly smaller, but it would be difficult to count something like The Alters as indie; or Invincible VS or Screamer or Mouse: P.I. for Hire.
The big games you mention here are what most would coin AA titles, AA is absolutely still able to hit homeruns at time.
But the AAA (biggest budget games) plays a bit too safe, I have a feeling GTA VI might be a banger. But that’s an anomaly for a AAA game.
We need more innovative games, triple A’s should be able to invent new things. Studios quite often does so, and then has it gutted by publishers/investors because it carries too high of a risk
I think that’s just the Overton Window shift. If a game’s budget is in 9 figures of USD to make, I don’t see how you couldn’t call it AAA. Even the likes of Elden Ring and Metaphor are similarly big, and they’re probably only short of 9 figures USD by way of being made in Japan for a comparable amount of labor. There’s a wide spread between GTA VI and the next-most-expensive games ever made. The AAA of yesteryear was made by a team the size of The Alters or even far smaller.
Indie doesn’t mean “small and pixel art game”. It means the studio is independent. Kingdom Come and BG3 were made by independent studios with little to no help from pubblishers (if any at all).
The rest you mentioned at max could be considered AA or simply A games IF there was a pubblisher behind them helping with development. What you said was a world of AAA games aside those mentioned is actually a world out there aside AAA games.
Kingdom Come is an Embracer joint; a subsidiary of Plaion. They’re definitely not independent. Baldur’s Gate 3 was self published but with a sizable investment from Tencent to fund its $100M budget. Valve is independent, but I don’t think anyone would say Half-Life 3 is their most anticipated indie game.
And all of those are available on an open platform digitally if not available on physical media.
Maybe controversial, but I and most of my friends have said fuck GTA6. We’ll wait to see what happens with the PC release.
Every company that goes public stock shifts their priorities from customers to investors (extracting money).
Got fed u with the fucking stick drift and Sony’s bullshit. Plugged my Rog ally that was taking dust to the TV, put bazzite on it. Now I can play what I want with a 20$ controller.
Playstation can go to hell.
I’ve been years buying digital for PC but never did once on PS4, PS3 or XBOX 360, I mean what the point? The only reason to have a console was so that you can sell your discs once played or lending to friends.
We used to be able to do that with PC games, too. But then Valve and Apple killed physical PC games.
Apple killed physical PC games
Valve, sure. But this is a leap of such inscrutable logic that I have to hear more about it.
Didn’t they stop manufacturing computers with CD/DVD drives a while ago? Perhaps that’s what they’re referring to.
Yes, Apple were the first to make PCs without floppy drives, and also the first to make them without optical drives. Mac users kept buying Macs; other PC manufacturers saw that people were willing to buy PCs without optical drives, so they copied Apple, and now you can’t buy any PC software (including games) physically. This all happened in parallel with the rise of Steam, as Valve somehow got PC gamers to insist on DRM.
To be clear, there was no collusion or conspiracy going on, just people reading the market and finding ways to consolidate power and income.
as Valve somehow got PC gamers to insist on DRM.
Reading this and your other comment, this bit seems a bit disingenuous to me. Nobody is insisting on Steam in order to have DRM. Valve found a way to make Steam’s DRM palatable to gamers, and from there even managed to make people have a preference for it as a distribution channel. You pointed out yourself, gamers were not happy about this with the initial roll out with Half-Life 2. Whether it was their own games, helping jumpstart the age of indie devs, or the other parts of Steam like the communities and chat, they did actually add stuff to the program that gamers found value in. Nobody should operate under the illusions that a corporation is their friend and will actually look out for their interests, but it doesn’t help anyone to exaggerate making claims like “PC Gamers insist on DRM.” Heck, one of the most common complaints I see about Steam is people complaining about it having DRM like Denuvo in some games, or requiring you to launch some publisher’s launcher and sign in to one of their accounts to play a game when you’re already signed in to the account in Steam you bought the game with.
How did apple do it?
Besides steam offers a digital storefront, and I have seen their own games on physical. Its dofferemt when it is an open competitive market.
Yeah, I have a copy of Half-Life: Blue Shift on CD somewhere, from before Steam was a thing.
Two things happened in parallel. This wasn’t a conspiracy and there was no collusion, it was just businessmen making canny decisions which worked out. Fair warning, this post is longer than I expected.
In 1998, Apple released the iMac, the first PC without a floppy drive. In 2008, they released the MacBook Air, the first PC without an optical disc drive, for the sake of making it really really thin. A few subsequent Macs did have optical drives, but the last one was the MacBook Pro, released in 2012. On both occasions, people predicted that Apple was DOOMED, because who would want to buy a PC without basic hardware?
But people did. Some people depend on Mac-exclusive software, and come Apple fans are just cultists. In any case, removing components didn’t adversely affect sales, and so other companies concluded they could make cheaper PCs by dropping floppy drives and optical drives, which they did. As such, you can’t get a computer with a floppy drive at all any more; you can get one with an optical drive, but you have to know where to look and specifically ask for one.
Meanwhile, Valve were doing pretty well with Half-Life and its expansions. Releasing updates and patches was very much a fuck at the time, because Windows didn’t have a package manager (and I’m not sure it has one even today). Valve’s programmers started work on Steam initially as a way to distribute updates easily and automatically, but its potential as a DRM system quickly became apparent.
In 2004, Valve released their long-awaited and highly-anticipated new game, Half-Life 2 both physically and digitally… and all versions required Steam. No, you couldn’t just put the DVD you owned into your PC, install the game, and play it. You needed to also install Valve’s own DRM system, which would regularly call home, in order to play a copy of a game you physically own.
(Pedants and lawyers will say you only license, not own, the game on the DVD. This is true. However, you do own the DVD that the game is on. You don’t own the game itself, but you do own that specific copy of it).
People hated this. PC gamers already found it intolerable that they had to have the CD in the drive to play games they owned as if it was a PlayStation, but having to register over the Internet? That was a bridge too far!.. but this was Half-Life 2, and gamers™ will talk a big game about boycotting up until it’s time to actually boycott. Everybody wanted to play Half-Life 2, because it’s the sequel to one of the best, most influential games ever made, and it honestly really did live up to the hype. So they sucked it up, installed Steam, and had a blast with Half-Life 2. Steam also had a storefront grafted on top, allowing people to buy Valve’s back catalogue through it, and would also serve as
The next year, Valve figured that hey, if they can sell their own games, why not those of other devs? So they started selling a selection of smaller games, and this is what really led to indie games becoming viable. Without the expense of packaging and distribution, smaller groups and solo devs were able to release smaller, cheaper, and more niche games and passion projects that didn’t need to sell like gangbusters to make a profit without having to set up and maintain their own online shops. Steam became the standard vector for selling indie games, and over time, bigger and bigger games started being sold on Steam until it morphed from a major shop into infrastructure. It’s no longer just a shop/DRM system, it’s now The Thing That People Use For PC Games.
Just three years after Steam started selling third-party games, Apple started phasing out optical drives. Two years after the MacBook Air, Valve released Steam on Mac. As Steam grew and expanded, PCs with optical drives faded away, leaving PC gamers with no choice but to buy digitally, and that meant using Steam, which [https://www.xda-developers.com/valve-steam-monopoly-real-gamers-chose/](does have a monopoly in the PC gaming space).
And that is how the independent parallel actions of Apple and Valve killed physical PC gaming.
Phasing out the optical drive from laptops was just about inevitable regardless of what Apple did. It saved a lot on battery life, not just form factor. I might see digital distribution of music, not video games, as a bigger driver for removing the disc drive, too.
Of course Apple weren’t thinking about video games. But they still dropped optical drives, which led to everyone else dropping optical drives, hence no more physical PC games.
SD cards could have been a successor but it’s no match for the ease of a good service over broadband internet
