It has to do with ownership and finances. If you buy a game it doesn’t give you rights to it as if you own a physical copy. It can be removed from the store, so you can never download it again. A physical copy is there as long as you can store it properly. In 20 years you can play it with your kids. In addition, selling physical copies is a lively market, which makes sellers recuperate some of their investments and offers it cheaper to new owners. Digitally selling a game doesn’t work, forcing anyone that wants to game… Read more »
What @leduk said.
Suppose you can’t crack the drive in your console, so digital downloads are in danger of being deprecated and lost.
But even though the physical medium is readable and potentially decryptable, it doesn’t contain security fixes and patches, some of them mandatory, it doesn’t contain DLC, it doesn’t contain additional resources you have download.
And if the physical copy needs to connect to a server to even start and the server can’t be faked in any way, the physical copy is hardly more than a paperweight or a doorstop.
This is true to an extent. But Sony can easily brick your physical media too. You might own the disc but there’s still so much back end stuff 100% under Sony’s control that the idea that having physical media somehow insulates you from the “you actually just bought a license” scheme is largely illusory.
But in that case, the license you bought is tied to the physical disc, so you can resell the license, or let a friend borrow the license. its not the ideal, but its better than all-digital for ownership. so there’s that.
The issues with physical media are largely theoretical. Yes, the *could* brick my ability to play my physical copy, but they haven’t so far, and I can currently go and buy second hand games for stuff that’s been released in the last 20-odd years and play it with no problems at all. The problems with digital media are real right now.
I remember when ff7 came in a large blue cardboard foldout with slots. I still have it. I’ve moved with it over a dozen times. It’s a precious piece of an abandoned era of gaming.
Yes, and Ultima III: Exodus’s *three* manuals: The Book of Play, The Ancient Liturgy of Truth (Cleric-type’s “Prayers”), and The Book of Amber Runes (Wizard-type’s “Sorcery”). All three filled with great line art and lore; the two books of magic could have easily been a couple bullet lists over a few pages, but instead each spell gets its own page of an immersive description. I treasured those as a kid. There’s scans of the books at https://c64sets.com/set.html?id=30. And in a broader sense, any of the “feelies” that came in the boxes, like the little glow-in-the-dark plastic “stone” that came with… Read more »
Oh I have a more chaotic one. My grandfather got me into gaming by sending me his Might and Magic collection. The old ones, most recent was Might and Magic VII. He had a self-made strategy guide including printed information for and personal notes. Shit looked like Magellan expedition done via Mapquest and a host of AD&D players all stuffed into a bulging manilla envelope til it was almost 2-inches thick. It established the framework of how I approach games. Every game has personal quicknotes in some form somewhere. Xcom: UFO Defense was even in there.
It should be mentioned that, in the same week that Sony announced this, Sony also “withdrew” 551 movies and TV shows from people who bought (not rented) them to the tune of 7.5 billion that those people had paid for them.
To continue Pyre’s “withdrew” metaphor, it would be like your bank deciding to remove a large portion of every customer’s balance from their accounts and declaring that the removed funds actually belonged to the bank the whole time
I want to play my games of 15 years ago.
Why shouldn’t, just because they stop wanting in me to.
I’m not against for digital copies. I want the disks or a USB or something of the sort.
Note that any company is JUST wanting to lock you into owning every bit of IP ever and even to decide what you can and can’t play.
Black Mammoth
5 days ago
First off, I want to say that I hate the enshitification of everything tech in this day and age. Megacorporations want to take all of our money while giving us nothing at all, and this is another step on the path to renting us consoles, games, and accessories without allowing us to ever own anything ever again. Not only is abandoning physical media really fucking awful for people like me who want to own my things, it’s also extremely stupid from a sales perspective as well. Look at any Target or Walmart; there are large areas for Nintendo games, smaller… Read more »
there are many Nintendo games that do not come with physical media in the cases, just the box with a download code inside. your conclusion is not accurate.
Not if you come in from the rss feed, the comments are already there. Not a problem for me, I know the free comic’s trail behind.
I do, however, question if comic’s that are handling news topics (like this one), benefit from being released three (or more) months after the event.
I understand a lag is necessary to create an incentive to become a Patreon but maybe these type of comic’s should be given a smaller lag to make the joke land better?
For whatever reason, the site lists the comics by the date that Tim uploaded them, not the date they post for the Patrons or us plebs. When he launched this whole separate release schedule thing, he had dozens of comics that all have the same listed date.
Shecky
5 days ago
Isn’t PC gaming 99% digital too. If Sony is self-destructing then I guess that just leaves Microsoft and Nintendo. The former is probably going to all digital with their next gen. I don’t see Switch 2 abandoning the cartridge this gen, but the successor in 7 years or so may.
And if you have concerns about ‘losing’ your way too many games to get into at the same time, or account for whatever reason – you can still download the master install files and store them offline for when you decide to play/replay them.
I have 2 external drives full of installs ‘I’ll get to eventually’, and several shelves full of the physical masters I bought before they disappeared from the market, so its almost like having the physical master for everything, sometimes several times over.
Like yeah, Steam DOES do “you’re buying a license, not a game, we reserve the right to pull access” like other digital stores, but the big difference is they don’t actually care to enforce it.
Most games you get through Steam continue working offline, or can be run through the .exe with no verification processes. If Steam died tomorrow, I could still play Elden Ring, Stardew Valley, and Half Life Alyx until my hard drive burns out.
Rudfud
5 days ago
Always nice to see Console Wars
Acher4
5 days ago
Hehehe
Very Accurate. 😛
Drakin
5 days ago
Personally I don’t LIKE the idea of turning to all digital, but on some level i understand it. No game these days is released fully completed. There’s day one patches, emergency fixes, and sometimes years worth of tweaking to make a game playable. Look what happened with Cyberpunk 2077. Was that game even tollerable at launch? (I ask because I genuinely don’t know. I waited a couple additional years for as many patches as possible to fix a lot of it and found it very impressive when I finally tried it). And of course there’s DLC. That’s almost never on… Read more »
Cyberpunk 2077 was in very bad shape at launch, and it was still a very good game. It shouldn’t have launched on the ps4, and I think there may have been optimization issues for pc, but my pc had no issues.
Tiger
5 days ago
I’m surprised people make such a fuss over it. I mean, on PC physical has largely been eradicated by the publishers and platforms, it was only a matter of time before consoles would do the same. The current generation of consoles having disc only versions that sold very well, showed it’s not THAT big a deal.
Gamers show publisher what is possible, gamers enable it. I know people like to shit on companies, but it’s us gamers who also are responsible for all of this.
The reason PC has gone essentially full digital is because – as I saw somewhere by someone who made a very good argument about it – the ecosystem is far more generous to it. Specifically, there is competition, good customer support, and more utility for your purchase. Take competition. As others have mentioned, there is more than one storefront that can let you purchase games. GoG is one of them, and their specialization is old games and setting them up to play in modern consoles, but they’re also selling brand-new games (esp. those from their parent company, CD Projekt Red).… Read more »
PC gamers can at least back up and/or burn to disc the installation application if it doesn’t turn around and download more assets live over the net.
Gonfrask
5 days ago
He should have installed a “light carbonated drink” instead.
Don’t really know how this thing will really end. I have talked with very pro-sony persons that say Xbox is the one to go extinct and not them, so ..
Speedy
5 days ago
I do agree that this future is unfortunate, but gamers are being a bit unrealistic about both the consequences of this future and our ability to stop it. While PC still has *some* DRM-free content, lots of games on PC are DRM-only. Lots of the most popular games are live service and will have no practical way to be preserved. And yet somehow, you don’t EVER see people complaining about it. And that’s not even saying anything for always-online mobile games. Everyone knows that 99% of people who advocate for “games preservation” just want piracy and cheap used games (and… Read more »
Phire
5 days ago
I have to admit, one of the drawbacks of the skipped-day release schedule is that current event comics are far less current.
Yet I hesitate to subscribe mostly because then if I -ever- am not subscribed in the future, I will have to wait ages for the comic to catch back up.
It’s fine. You pretty much have to swim in console news to get most of them. I don’t get most of them either. This one I understood because It’s somewhat tangential to the “stop killing games” thing.
wakeangel2001
5 days ago
This is kind of a parallel to real life empires and royal dynasties. You have a government that’s in a comfortable situation with no conflict, then a leader comes into power who isn’t competent and fucks everything up. The specifics vary, picking fights with neighbors, bad trade deals, good old fashioned royal incest…
Brownee
5 days ago
Suddenly realise there was no console war set regarding the Nintendos upgrading their equipment.
Mikael84
5 days ago
As much as this sucks, this isn’t really unexpected outcome. It was just matter of time before they start doing that. However the real treat are the Gamer Karens thinking that they can pirate legally. Not only they can cause massive damages to emulator and cracking community. They can also cause massive PR damage when government tries to make customer friendly laws and can cause servers being more restictive too. Sony is pretty good at lobbying these laws and everytime some Gamer Karen openly boast about pirating Sony’s games, Sony just get’s more ammunition there. The real way to boycot… Read more »
CaptTucker
5 days ago
But presumptuous to call ps5 the “winner” of this generation. Especially with a certain console out pacing it’s comparable sales and having amassed more exclusives in a year than the PS5 has managed in 6…
The war is still very very much on
AngryLittleMan
5 days ago
I was wondering when this was going to get mentioned. I’m not disappointed at all.
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I do not see any comments. If I order it on anything but oldest I see my own. No other.
Now it all works again. Quick fix!
Is it a general opinion or a Tim thing?
For my part, I really dislike the physical products.
I am a messy guy and I found that once the blister is out, the CD are NEVER in the right box :'(.
It has to do with ownership and finances. If you buy a game it doesn’t give you rights to it as if you own a physical copy. It can be removed from the store, so you can never download it again. A physical copy is there as long as you can store it properly. In 20 years you can play it with your kids. In addition, selling physical copies is a lively market, which makes sellers recuperate some of their investments and offers it cheaper to new owners. Digitally selling a game doesn’t work, forcing anyone that wants to game… Read more »
It’s not like they cant lock the physical copy to your account anyhow. What we need is the right to resell anything we buy including digital media.
fun fact: if your game needs updates/internet to work, even you have a physical game, you dont really onw it
What @leduk said.
Suppose you can’t crack the drive in your console, so digital downloads are in danger of being deprecated and lost.
But even though the physical medium is readable and potentially decryptable, it doesn’t contain security fixes and patches, some of them mandatory, it doesn’t contain DLC, it doesn’t contain additional resources you have download.
And if the physical copy needs to connect to a server to even start and the server can’t be faked in any way, the physical copy is hardly more than a paperweight or a doorstop.
This is true to an extent. But Sony can easily brick your physical media too. You might own the disc but there’s still so much back end stuff 100% under Sony’s control that the idea that having physical media somehow insulates you from the “you actually just bought a license” scheme is largely illusory.
But that should not be how it ought to be.
But in that case, the license you bought is tied to the physical disc, so you can resell the license, or let a friend borrow the license. its not the ideal, but its better than all-digital for ownership. so there’s that.
The issues with physical media are largely theoretical. Yes, the *could* brick my ability to play my physical copy, but they haven’t so far, and I can currently go and buy second hand games for stuff that’s been released in the last 20-odd years and play it with no problems at all. The problems with digital media are real right now.
This sounds like a “you” problem.
I remember when ff7 came in a large blue cardboard foldout with slots. I still have it. I’ve moved with it over a dozen times. It’s a precious piece of an abandoned era of gaming.
Ultima IV’s cloth map….
Yes, and Ultima III: Exodus’s *three* manuals: The Book of Play, The Ancient Liturgy of Truth (Cleric-type’s “Prayers”), and The Book of Amber Runes (Wizard-type’s “Sorcery”). All three filled with great line art and lore; the two books of magic could have easily been a couple bullet lists over a few pages, but instead each spell gets its own page of an immersive description. I treasured those as a kid. There’s scans of the books at https://c64sets.com/set.html?id=30. And in a broader sense, any of the “feelies” that came in the boxes, like the little glow-in-the-dark plastic “stone” that came with… Read more »
Oh I have a more chaotic one. My grandfather got me into gaming by sending me his Might and Magic collection. The old ones, most recent was Might and Magic VII. He had a self-made strategy guide including printed information for and personal notes. Shit looked like Magellan expedition done via Mapquest and a host of AD&D players all stuffed into a bulging manilla envelope til it was almost 2-inches thick. It established the framework of how I approach games. Every game has personal quicknotes in some form somewhere. Xcom: UFO Defense was even in there.
It’s a boomer thing. They want to see and touch things they bought. Kinda like physical money and money in a bank you can access using the internet.
No, people want to own the things they buy.
That’s what I said.
It should be mentioned that, in the same week that Sony announced this, Sony also “withdrew” 551 movies and TV shows from people who bought (not rented) them to the tune of 7.5 billion that those people had paid for them.
And, yes, that was perfectly legal.
To continue Pyre’s “withdrew” metaphor, it would be like your bank deciding to remove a large portion of every customer’s balance from their accounts and declaring that the removed funds actually belonged to the bank the whole time
I want to play my games of 15 years ago.
Why shouldn’t, just because they stop wanting in me to.
I’m not against for digital copies. I want the disks or a USB or something of the sort.
Note that any company is JUST wanting to lock you into owning every bit of IP ever and even to decide what you can and can’t play.
First off, I want to say that I hate the enshitification of everything tech in this day and age. Megacorporations want to take all of our money while giving us nothing at all, and this is another step on the path to renting us consoles, games, and accessories without allowing us to ever own anything ever again. Not only is abandoning physical media really fucking awful for people like me who want to own my things, it’s also extremely stupid from a sales perspective as well. Look at any Target or Walmart; there are large areas for Nintendo games, smaller… Read more »
there are many Nintendo games that do not come with physical media in the cases, just the box with a download code inside. your conclusion is not accurate.
Umm….why are we getting a comic from last July?
Patreon supporters will be caught up to what is released. Before you go to the comments, it literally explain this.
Not if you come in from the rss feed, the comments are already there. Not a problem for me, I know the free comic’s trail behind.
I do, however, question if comic’s that are handling news topics (like this one), benefit from being released three (or more) months after the event.
I understand a lag is necessary to create an incentive to become a Patreon but maybe these type of comic’s should be given a smaller lag to make the joke land better?
For whatever reason, the site lists the comics by the date that Tim uploaded them, not the date they post for the Patrons or us plebs. When he launched this whole separate release schedule thing, he had dozens of comics that all have the same listed date.
Isn’t PC gaming 99% digital too. If Sony is self-destructing then I guess that just leaves Microsoft and Nintendo. The former is probably going to all digital with their next gen. I don’t see Switch 2 abandoning the cartridge this gen, but the successor in 7 years or so may.
PC digital isn’t the same as console digital
There are ZERO DRM-free games on console
GoG is mostly DRM-free, Steam has a lot of DRM-free. You can load these games on any drive and play them on any PC, offline.
It’s very easy to preserve PC games for the future. Not so much for console games.
And if you have concerns about ‘losing’ your way too many games to get into at the same time, or account for whatever reason – you can still download the master install files and store them offline for when you decide to play/replay them.
I have 2 external drives full of installs ‘I’ll get to eventually’, and several shelves full of the physical masters I bought before they disappeared from the market, so its almost like having the physical master for everything, sometimes several times over.
Yeah, agreed with the Steam+GoG bit.
Like yeah, Steam DOES do “you’re buying a license, not a game, we reserve the right to pull access” like other digital stores, but the big difference is they don’t actually care to enforce it.
Most games you get through Steam continue working offline, or can be run through the .exe with no verification processes. If Steam died tomorrow, I could still play Elden Ring, Stardew Valley, and Half Life Alyx until my hard drive burns out.
Always nice to see Console Wars
Hehehe
Very Accurate. 😛
Personally I don’t LIKE the idea of turning to all digital, but on some level i understand it. No game these days is released fully completed. There’s day one patches, emergency fixes, and sometimes years worth of tweaking to make a game playable. Look what happened with Cyberpunk 2077. Was that game even tollerable at launch? (I ask because I genuinely don’t know. I waited a couple additional years for as many patches as possible to fix a lot of it and found it very impressive when I finally tried it). And of course there’s DLC. That’s almost never on… Read more »
Cyberpunk 2077 was in very bad shape at launch, and it was still a very good game. It shouldn’t have launched on the ps4, and I think there may have been optimization issues for pc, but my pc had no issues.
I’m surprised people make such a fuss over it. I mean, on PC physical has largely been eradicated by the publishers and platforms, it was only a matter of time before consoles would do the same. The current generation of consoles having disc only versions that sold very well, showed it’s not THAT big a deal.
Gamers show publisher what is possible, gamers enable it. I know people like to shit on companies, but it’s us gamers who also are responsible for all of this.
The reason PC has gone essentially full digital is because – as I saw somewhere by someone who made a very good argument about it – the ecosystem is far more generous to it. Specifically, there is competition, good customer support, and more utility for your purchase. Take competition. As others have mentioned, there is more than one storefront that can let you purchase games. GoG is one of them, and their specialization is old games and setting them up to play in modern consoles, but they’re also selling brand-new games (esp. those from their parent company, CD Projekt Red).… Read more »
PC gamers can at least back up and/or burn to disc the installation application if it doesn’t turn around and download more assets live over the net.
He should have installed a “light carbonated drink” instead.
Don’t really know how this thing will really end. I have talked with very pro-sony persons that say Xbox is the one to go extinct and not them, so ..
I do agree that this future is unfortunate, but gamers are being a bit unrealistic about both the consequences of this future and our ability to stop it. While PC still has *some* DRM-free content, lots of games on PC are DRM-only. Lots of the most popular games are live service and will have no practical way to be preserved. And yet somehow, you don’t EVER see people complaining about it. And that’s not even saying anything for always-online mobile games. Everyone knows that 99% of people who advocate for “games preservation” just want piracy and cheap used games (and… Read more »
I have to admit, one of the drawbacks of the skipped-day release schedule is that current event comics are far less current.
Yet I hesitate to subscribe mostly because then if I -ever- am not subscribed in the future, I will have to wait ages for the comic to catch back up.
I never understood any of those robots comics
What confuses you? 🙂
Everything really.
It’s fine. You pretty much have to swim in console news to get most of them. I don’t get most of them either. This one I understood because It’s somewhat tangential to the “stop killing games” thing.
This is kind of a parallel to real life empires and royal dynasties. You have a government that’s in a comfortable situation with no conflict, then a leader comes into power who isn’t competent and fucks everything up. The specifics vary, picking fights with neighbors, bad trade deals, good old fashioned royal incest…
Suddenly realise there was no console war set regarding the Nintendos upgrading their equipment.
As much as this sucks, this isn’t really unexpected outcome. It was just matter of time before they start doing that. However the real treat are the Gamer Karens thinking that they can pirate legally. Not only they can cause massive damages to emulator and cracking community. They can also cause massive PR damage when government tries to make customer friendly laws and can cause servers being more restictive too. Sony is pretty good at lobbying these laws and everytime some Gamer Karen openly boast about pirating Sony’s games, Sony just get’s more ammunition there. The real way to boycot… Read more »
But presumptuous to call ps5 the “winner” of this generation. Especially with a certain console out pacing it’s comparable sales and having amassed more exclusives in a year than the PS5 has managed in 6…
The war is still very very much on
I was wondering when this was going to get mentioned. I’m not disappointed at all.
Perfection!
Holup! The PS nation won the war?!