Literally every day Falcom switching to a new engine that can run on anything and doesn't behold itself to engine licensing fees was the smartest thing they've ever done. It feels like Falcom just barely managed to secure their ticket to surviving the crash.

I think an underrated subplot for the Switch 1 was Sakamoto just getting to live his best life after spending most of a decade as "the Other M guy"

My child loves going to the library and checking out a new video game every week. Going digital only eliminates libraries as a way people can access games.

The biggest loss is the Library A lot of Library branches now offer game rentals. When a game isn't physical, that's potentially tens of thousands of people that won't play a game, especially as the hobby gets more expensive and people make less money.

Play games long enough and it really does feel like Nintendo + PC is an inevitability like carcinisation

if you have your own physical media collection, you can do your own version of the Criterion Closet where you stand in your basement by yourself and saying "oh wow, In the Mood for Love, what a film" to absolutely no one

the game industry sucks so bad because I feel bad for the people losing their jobs but this shit is happening completely divorced from material reality. Nothing that got us here was necessary and the fallout isn't either. Can't affect anything because the people responsible are literally irrational

I really can't let this go. All that shit was completely useless if pricing continues to go the way it's going

there was 10 years of discourse about accessibility and diversity initiatives in games only for all the companies to get together and decide the primary audience for games was upper middle class white dudes afterall

Lots of "now that they're digital only, they have to improve the experience, right?" takes floating around, so it must mean we're already at the bargaining stage

>Make country almost entirely dependent on automobiles >disincentivize public transit and trains as too expensive >Associate Biking and walking with being poor >Force people to be poor anyway. Masterful Gambit, sir.

weird how much of today's news we could've maybe avoided if only hiroishi yamauchi got on his knees and apologized to norio ohga for being such a ruthless dick 35 years ago

video game company sony has announced they are discontinuing their popular product, the video game

If you can't preserve games, and games can go away overnight, then your games are disposable. If entire studios can be wiped out overnight, your workers and their work are disposable. The crunch and the health injuries never mattered. Something's gotta change, man.

it also implies that the problem isn't in the industry and in capitalism, but in the art that is produced under it. Like, the fact that a game is new and has to be engaged with through worse means doesn't somehow mean that it's worse than older games that were made under the same economy

if your response to this is “just play retro games instead!” then congrats, you have proven that stale bread and archival footage of circuses is enough to placate you.

I dunno why people are immediately just throwing in the towel with this news You've all fought back on so much other stuff in this industry and beyond it, you can absolutely push back on this too. At least try before you start making so many doom posts Don't make it easy for them

"It was inevitable" "Been saying this for years" "I'm all digital anyway" Please leave. This will mean fewer options for consumers, more control for publishers, and a huge part of gaming culture vanishing just like that You can still buy physical movies. You will not be able to buy physical games

retro agenda fuckers are basically of the mentality that progressive change doesn't need to happen, all you need to do is just indulge in some slightly older bread and circus

no bro listen there are sooooooooo many retro games available that you can use as sand to stick your head in, just disengage, there's no need for class consciousness or any progressive action, just make your retroachievements account bro

people not even gonna yell directly at sony they just went right to retro agandaposting okay

I never want anybody to tell me these companies do things in response to 'the market' ever again. Digital storage is ballooning in price exponentially and Sony went 'what if we made you need more'

the PS6 will cost 1400 dollars and only be available through online order because retailers kicked them out and Sony will wonder why it has 15% the sales of the PS5

Remember when Sony did that DRM check shit a few months ago? With the death oh physical games that means that truly offline console gaming will be gone forever. They will always have to do a “check” to verify your “ownership”

I'm a very, very, casual gamer. This largely ends console gaming for me in terms of new properties. I can still pull out my PS2, which I own, and play what, 100% of my games anytime I want.

digital games have already standardized the idea of never going down in price, only having discounts, so removing the physical element means now they can also start standardizing having even more control over the price of their games (ie make them never "lose value")

Another thought on this - storage space (ie - SSDs) have increased so sharply in price that storing digital games is becoming increasingly difficult and expensive. Discs are DIRT CHEAP to produce - so even if you have to install them, you have a physical, cheap solution right there.

Of all available JP games only 83.88% of them are dumped. DLC wise it's way worse though…

Hell, they proved they can't be trusted with digital distribution in the previous seven *minutes*...

I barely accept Steam as a necessary evil and Steam does everything possible to make digital distribution work. I am definitely not taking digital only from a company that has in the past seven days proven again that they cannot be trusted with such a system.

"At least it's cheaper" I will say as the game recognizes my controller as a banana

Microsoft this week: We're laying off half the industry. Sony: We're ending physical games. Nintendo: have u seen this splatoon weapon we call it the bloblobber

This has such a huge impact on people in rural areas who have to deal with ISP monopolies with unusable speeds. The industry wants to act like the infrastructure is there for this to be the way forward, but big tech is just trying to leave poor people behind.

31 jörmungandr fire emblem heroes

I didn’t even consider how many retailers this will probably fuck over, the concept of “used games” is pretty much gonna be gone for people.

Used market will be destroyed Game ownership too RIP store shelves This is devastating

bro the whole point of consoles was the physical media, a cheaper entry point because publishers sell them at a loss, and the convenience of knowing "shit just works" now all three of those fucking things don't apply to sony meanwhile fucking pcs cost a second mortgage now

I’m still gonna blame Limited Run Games for this even slightly Taking deals from Xbox for physical and its whole brand making it feel like physical is a niche novelty. Fuck that man

LRG is definitely a contributing factor here because tonnes of major publishers turned to them to make physical games despite the fact that LRG can't actually like, make a product with any degree of competence so it just became a bad call to buy a lot of those editions

To this point, I will also reiterate that PS3 and PS Vita digital download preservation remains incomplete, particularly for Japanese games and DLC, where I imagine the bulk of that work has taken place abroad. This essentially gives a one-year deadline to plug some sizeable, yet quite tricky holes.

The Vita in particular has a lot of obscure DLC and even playable titles in Japan that were only offered as purchase bonuses and AFAIK, much of that remains unavailable "elsewhere." PSP content is also at risk. I myself just had to pay for some Japanese DLC because it'd only been dumped in English.

OH MY GOD THIS MEANS THAT THE PS6 ISNT BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE WITH DISCS LMAOOOO

Retail still matters quite a bit in Japan in terms of advertising and exposure. Go into any electronics dept store and Sony and Nintendo will invariably have branded spaces. But if I'm Yodobashi Camera, am I gonna want to offer such support to the PS6? Or just resign it to its own corner like Xbox?

Anyway, IMO, this also speaks volumes about how serious they really are about reclaiming market share in Japan from Nintendo, which is to say: not very. Not necessarily just from the used games perspective (it matters, but digital is growing here), but also their relationships with retailers.

These pieces of news back-to-back is like a sick joke ngl

-Sony decides the prices, possibly dynamic pricing -You can't buy codes from third-party vendors anymore -They're killing their old digital stores so you can't buy older, cheaper versions -They just removed like 500-ish movies from people accounts based on licensing

Something no one is mentioning about this is that with games now becoming digital only, this is 100% signaling to companies to go all in on nickle-and-diming live-service slop. Absolutely cursed timeline.

Good Evening, “video games” was a 45 year sociological study conducted by hardware development industries. We are now complete with our study. Thank you for your time.

yeah i've been a die hard console gamer for over 20 years but i don't see myself continuing if they get rid of physical media. what is even the point