I still jerk off manually.

I’m one of those people. I just can’t be arsed to get up off the couch and put a game in. After work and kids I’m beat and just want to pick something and start playing.

I’m not sure. If that is their strategy they’re dancing on a razor. I mean, the market is pretty slim. Basically, you can get a pretty sweet gaming PC for the price they’re offering. And if you project the amount of games you’ll get and estimate the price differential with prices of the same games on a PC you might be able to uprate the specs a few times. I would say that a PS5 with a reasonable amount of games is probably worth a similar amount to a $1k PC.

unless you only buy no-DRM and your own backups

Going to have to plug GOG here as these are both things they offer. I try to buy games there instead of Steam, purely for this reason.

Maybe but look what happened to Stellar Blade

I’m glad some companies are going full media and the younger Gen is buying physical media. It’s creating a counter culture that smart companies are using to their advantage.

Is it possible for modern games to fit on a disk?

I think it would be an interesting change if brand new games had a hard limit on file size so they can fit on and play from an actual disk.

This in my opinion is one of the valid use cases of a blockchain/NFTs: they provide provable ownership of digital goods. This means that if implemented, in the future we could actually own games music movies ebooks etc. The only remaining step would be a decentralized torrent-like system that allows the users to download the licensed content that they own via their nft.

The difference is the price of buying discs vs. buying from a digital store that has no competitors.

I’ve bought almost exclusively second-hand discs for my PS5, because they’re like half the price for the exact same content.

Sadly it’ll probably be just a matter of time before those will be phased out as well, one way or another.

It does if you rent

I’ve been using gamefly for a while, I can’t rent digital only games

I remember thinking it was bs when half life 2 required a steam account and now everyone loves it.

For $700 they could at least throw in a 4k Blu-ray player.

Then again, I ponied up extra for the disc version of the original ps5 for that exact reason, only to find out the media player software is a giant piece of garbage that was clearly given no effort. So I can’t say I’m too surprised.

Thing is, that’s not how it works on PlayStation. On PS5 you can download and play games without ever connecting to wifi. The whole glorified installer is mostly an Xbox thing ever since the XB1. I’d know since I own both and usually get discs to play my games.

unless you only buy no-DRM and your own backups

or you straight up pirate it.

And now, the physical licence path is even less accessible. The thing with the physical licence key is it’s transferrable even if the actual data is stored elsewhere. It’s a thin veneer, I mean, Sony could gate access to this data to the first account/machine that activated it. So even this advantage is taken away.

Yeah that’s what I meant by sometimes

Its becoming a trend where game companies are now making single player games require a internet connection just to play. I saw some games on Steam where single player games come with anti-cheat, like wtf.

Could you give more details? On which platform did this happen?

If you pirated it you could have played it offline though. Paying customers get a worse experience than pirates

That’s weird, I could.

How do you know that Steam will be around in 20 years?

Use GOG instead, since the DRM-free game installers will outlive Steam :)

How do you know Windows will keep compatibility in 20 years? Valve money partially goes into Proton/WINE development and an evolution of that will absolutely be around in 20 years, just WINE was around 20 years ago already. CD Project doesn’t put any GOG/Cyberpunk money into breaking the Windows monopoly. (Also plenty of titles on Steam come without DRM because DRM is optional.)

How many people actually download and store those installers though? I think GOG is awesome too but practically if you exclusively shop there you have the same problem unless you have a massive NAS on hand

Well for Steam at least the library is independent of the hardware

It comes pretty close to feature parity in terms of ownership. My kids can play my steam library on their own computers, I can play it on any machine I own, I don’t have to pay them any kind of rental fee, and they maintain my software for me.

Only thing I can’t do is what…sell my games to someone else? I don’t do that anyways.

I mean, if you like horrible driver stability; sure. There’s a reason NVidia has like 75% of the market share, and it’s simply because they have a better product. Drivers are more stable, everyone develops for CUDA processing, lots of games only support DLSS for frame-gen, all of the GPU accelerated AI stuff is all NVidia centered, etc.

Sounds like a lot more PC converts in the making.

Well, for now it is. Latency is also a big issue

How are you sure? No one else seems to be…

That’s why your favorite letter is R.

I doubt it costs that much. You’re looking at it from buying PC components perspective. But they are mass producing identical boards with components that are 4+ years old by now, except the GPU. The cost of production is probably around the same as it was for non-Pro when it was released.

900 to 1200’s an insane guess. This many years out R&D’s sure to have chilled out and companies that buy parts by the millions get them at much lower prices than individuals, plus partner companies that kit out their facilities to manufacture those parts recoup their investments in those facilities over time as well. I’m sure Sony’s still taking a few bucks hit on the sale of a console but it’s nowhere near close to double.

the fuck you are smoking? my first desktop kost that much and it ran crysis really fucking good

Vita can Run 99% of PS1 games “natively” and has a bunch of PS2 ports (some through PSP). Not PS3 though.

I wouldn’t trust Sony to not fuck that up somehow like everything they do.

That’s the Steam Deck.

So…steamdeck lol

Nah from what I’ve heard is because they perceive as being very complex, more so than it actually is.

Most people that I’ve spoken to don’t mention the price. They usually talk about how they just don’t know how to get games in the first place and start talking about settings and updates that they always hear about. That being said, I still don’t know like I said lol. I’m just curious and want to see how it goes.

That’s not necessarily true. I want my gaming to just work, and that’s not the case in Windows. It’s becoming less the case with console gaming, but I can still be confident that when I buy a game for my PlayStation it’ll actually boot, I won’t need to use third-party software for controller support, and I won’t need to tinker with drivers. That said, I already have a PS5. The TV I game on is still 1080p, so I don’t understand what $700 would get me over my current hardware.

I can say that for myself it’s not really just the price. I don’t have space to put a computer. With a console I can hook it to the TV and tuck it up under it. When I wanna play I can grab just the controller and sit on the couch. I like simplicity. With a pc I need a mouse, keyboard, desk, a chair, speakers, and a monitor. I know it can be hooked up to a tv however the tower still stands as an issue. The smaller compact towers that can be tucked have limited capabilities that rest below consoles.

On top of all that PCs are regularly getting releases years after a games release. PC gaming is only superior if the things going to be entirely utilized by the person and for some reason a lot of PC gamers think the average person will be doing so when that’s simply not the case.

I haven’t built a new computer in awhile, but 4tb ssd would have costed more than the console when it launched would it have not? Unless you are saying they should have shipped with a hybrid SSD/HDD setup. Not sure if read/write speeds would hold up to the frame rates needed for their games now.

I’m not going to defend the Pro exactly, but out of curiosity what is your usecase for needing so much storage on a console? Multiple users? Bad Internet? I feel like I have a max of 1-3 active games at a time, and can just delete and download/install them as needed. Works just fine for me so I feel like something else must be going on.

You’re using the same amount of storage whether you buy games physically or digitally.

The difference being that you can load the content back onto the SSD at will, and regardless of server statuses… A lot of people have bandwidth caps or live in places with shit internet speeds.

Edit: I should clarify that I know some publishers only use the disc as a license of sorts with only a few MB of data… I’m wholly against this concept. Think publishers that don’t ship a working game on the disc should be barred from selling physical copies at all as it’s just landfill.

“If a game needs a server and the official servers shut down, the protocols have to be released to the public”. I think it would be a good starting point.

Imo, the term “buy” for all goods should pass some sort of litmus test. Eg:

does the product being sold have the same properties as a brick?

• can the product be resold privately?
• can the product be lent to another user temporarily?
• would the product still perform its function when the manufacturer stops supporting it?
• would the product still perform its function if the manufacturer ceased to exist.

if the product does not pass all these tests, the customer is not buying. Consider using terms such as ‘rent’ or ‘lease’ or ‘subscription’

What do you mean? If it does not have a drive, you can’t give a disc to anyone.

I realized that that’s terrible when I compared prices of Assassin’s creed games a few years ago.

I got AC Origins and AC Odyssee for 15 dollars (for both) on ebay. In the PS store, it was still 59.99 dollars for one (120 dollars for both). And technically, I can still sell both physical games for 10 dollars…

I forgot abou that

“Significantly” Going by the comparison Sony felt large enough to brag about there’s hardly a noticeable difference

Also explains why they raised the price on the normal PS5 - “Well, the Pro isn’t THAT much more…”

Pro revisions are the time to go crazy with outrageous prices since they’re not needed to be able to play any of the games. But if they try that crap with a base model, it’s PC Master Race time for me.

I do even more appropriate if you count DLSS like the pro is, “play older games” basically what Sony has atm

Or don’t max settings

I think the PS5 doesn’t come with a monitor so, why a laptop?

*1440p upscaled from 720p

A classic Japanese car? Like those nimble little things that drift down crazy steep mountains and stuff?

Haven’t played monster hunter, but the last of us looks great on pc.

Depends how old you get. After 30 years some games just don’t work like they used to!

Thankfully we do have modern solutions for old fashioned problems now.

Even if you give a shit about upgrading, binding yourself to sony or whatever company.

Within limits though. E.g. If your mainboard only supports old CPUs that is a huge limiting factor and we saw MS messing with older CPUs just not being supported at all by Win 11.

Now i made the switch to Linux myself too and i am very happy, but for people who want to start somewhere, maybe starting with their own linux gaming PC is a bit much for the start.

I think that’s mainly a relic from the past. I didn’t have compability or driver issues for a long time.

Once the PC is set up, it’s as comfortable as a console. Setting the PC up to console standards is reduced to installing steam.

Having a pull out cup holder seems insane to me, my personal rule is no drinks near my pc at all.

That said, I have a drawer in place of my cd drive that holds all my small peripherals (thumb drives, usb to sd card adapter, stuff like that) and it’s great.

Do you mean IDE? I’m confident your PC has S-ATA.

There’s IDE to SATA cards available for eight bucks.

There’s always some a usb-converter for 10$ around.

A surprising amount of Fractal Design’s cases do.

So you use your PC or console for only a year?

true and if you really want that console experience install smth like bazzite,holoiso,nobara home cinema edition (non immutable),etc and dualboot windows for app compatibility you can use playnite on windows to make it look like a ps5

People who buy consoles do it for the “press a button to game”.
Not necessarily because they don’t understand pc’s, but because they don’t want the faff.

To be fair, you could play free on PS2. Although you had to buy a weird adapter.

Yeah, looking at the prices, it’s about right for what it is.

Suppose the upshot of using a generic component is you could also attach it to a PC.

Looks like the long term goal of them is to stop selling discs altogether. I couldn’t even get BG3 on a disc when it came out, and I think Alan Wake 2 was the same (only physical copy I can see is the deluxe version with both AW1&2 on it).

I see the mythical digital savings never made it to us, to the surprise of absolutely fucking nobody. I wouldn’t mind if they actually put games on a discounted price after a year or so, but you can still see several year old games at the full original retail price.

IIRC the Xbox 360 used to do a thing where you’d put your old OG Xbox disc in, and it would download any extra code it needed to run. Most of these older games would be under a few MB of actual code.

Pretty sure the PS5 is powerful enough to run PS1 and PS2 emulated, and probably have a good crack at running PS3 games as well, although a lot of the good PS3 games got a remaster for the PS4 gen anyway.

I think the only thing stopping really us doing it now is the PS5 drive can’t actually read CDs. Plus I think they want to test each game before release and sell us them on PSPlus tiers.

Personally I think it’s only worth it if you have the standard ps4, if you have a PS4 Pro you’re not really getting all that much from the ps5. Graphics are a slight upgrade, still not actual 4K and the ram is nice but performance wise it’s somewhat similar, usually your biggest reason to jump from one generation to the next is exclusives and game availability, but the PS5 has been absolutely atrocious at trying to obtain games that work only for the Ps5, every big name developer out there is still making releases that work for both consoles due to the fact that there’s still so many people that are running the PS4. This is a very different outcome then when the PS2 and the PS3 was released where yes they still offered it for both consoles but two or three years after launch they had more or less left the console in the dust, and here we are almost 5 years later and they’re still making games for both platforms

You can buy a whole-ass computer for $700 and it won’t charge you a subscription fee just to turn it on.

Oh shit thank you!

*dicless

You’re right! My point no longer stands. Removing the disk drive would then save about $100 from the console, which makes sense to remove if you’re cutting costs and most players play digital anyways.

~also if you’re pushing digital games.

Ah, I should have been more specific. Back in the day I got my GBA new for $75 retail. (With inflation that’s probably a lot more now.)

Used DS lites are great, especially if you can fix the broken hinges and screens.

It’s EA. You’ll be playing it until they randomly decide to turn off the servers.

Hoist the jolly roger!

I love physical media. That way they can’t take it away!

Fuck that noise too.

It’s all good until they pull the content you thought you bought. I also prefer the convenience of downloaded games, but if it’s a game I really like, I buy the physical version.

On steam people know they have an option to sail the high seas. But the same concern is there.

Steam didn’t start with physical hardware and then try to remove it. And stream doesn’t design, own and operate the hardware for the most part.

Valve has the reputation to back it up. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo’s reputations make all digital game libraries a guessing game for when they give up and shut it down.

PS4 is superior in every way but power. Small, cheap and high availability, huge game library. PS4 will stay relevant this entire. gen

Or a PS5. The comparisons between PS5 and PS5 Pro are nearly impossible to notice.

seems like not that long ago i would’ve thought that the idea of a PC without any disc drive was insane. i had to help a neighbor kid the other week when forced bitlocker bricked his gaming PC, sure enough it didn’t have any disc drive!

TIL you can still buy disc games for PC.

I think this piece of hardware is cheaper than a comparable PC, but longer term you’ll pay quite a bit more for games.

I don’t disagree. In fact I agree fully. But when the industry promotes early access games (digital only) and digital day 1 with physical to follow 3 or 6 months later, it is pushing consumers to digital. So its irrelevant if they do or do not have an optical drive on the console.

If I’m not mistaken it’s actually a Blu-ray player not just a dvd player. Mind you this is from memory not necessarily a fact, lol

Oh yeah, no doubt. One of the whole benefits of PC gaming is being able to snag games from other retailers. Honestly disk drive consoles have the advantage of being able to snag games from other users.