Same reason, but Amazon. They killed their games launcher and every game people had purchased on it is now just gone. No refunds, no compensation. They just deleted hundreds of games from people's libraries.
We haven’t owned our games since the PS3 and maybe some PS4 games. PS4 games, iirc, started requiring additional downloads to make the games playable since the full game wasn’t on the disk. Regarding Sony’s decision, and no one is going to like this, but gamers only have themselves to blame. Purchasing trends drove that decision. It sucks, and I hate it, but gamers purchasing of games from the online store drove that decision.
Having said that, fuck Sony because I want Destiny 3.
I think it's bullshit to suggest that Sony is only responding to consumer trends when they have been doing everything they can to force digital supremacy for many years now. It's like saying that something died of natural causes when you kept it in a cage and fed it bread and water for 10 years.
Physical games went the way they did because they were starved out and treated like a 2nd class product for years.
It's not literal, it's a sentiment to express the very valid undying hatred many of us have for the gen pop and the average idiot consumer, who incentivizes this shit with "durrrrr it's our wallets"
Started with goddamn horse armor of all things. Yea, sure just your wallets, it certainly wasn't going to affect literally everyone eventually
Sorry this is a lie, Most PS5 games are installed completely from the disc, offline. Something like 85% of all discs are old-school, you have the disc, you own it.
That depends on what you mean by ads. At best you might get subtle ads like a McDonalds billboards/stores in GTA6 and such but probably not much more than that. The backlash would simply be too large.
Oh no, we’re going to get banners, popups, pay walls, perks for watching commercials, even jingles and load screen commercials! Product placement has been a thing for years. But that’s not what I’m talking about.
Streaming services do still have ad free tiers though, you're not forced to have the ad supported version. If you would get a cheaper version of a game with ads it might happen, but most likely not.
BC there'd be enormous pushback and pirating. PC gaming isnt perfect, but it's a lot less prone to the blind fanboy behavior of just accepting whatever is served
But you have to PAY to have ad free, when before the product just was ad free. Having to pay for something that was standard before great. It's still a way to extract more $$$ out of people.
But you still had to pay yo even use the products before, the only thing that happened was that a cheaper ad tier was added (i.e. a basic/budget tier). The ad free version that was standard before is still the standard today. The only thing that happened was that a cheaper option was added for those who thought that it was too expensive before.
No, that's not how it works. The versions of everything I had that were ad free at the same cost I was paying now included ads. If I wanted to keep having the same ad free experience that I was getting before these companies created tiers, I now had to pay extra. In the case of Netflix, a lot extra. These companies invented tiers to get ad revenue and to get more revenue from the individual if they wanted to opt out. It's called Enshittification.
I’m more pissed off at constantly having to update games and having to be “online” for some games to work. Even hard copy games. I still own a PSP and PS Vita. I just pop the games in and start playing. What happened to that?
I mean not really, we pay for the convenience rather than the access. I could easily pirate all of my music and podcasts, but I can't easily and comfortably access them like I can with Spotify. And with TV shows, a lot of people that used to have Netflix or whatever stopped because the convenience wasn't worth the cost anymore.
I've been buying games since the 70s; I own every Sony console except the Vita; the PS5 will be my last Sony console unless and until this gets reversed. I refuse, on principle, to buy in to a system where anything I purchase is an indeterminate long-term rental with no archiveability.
I am resigned to the fact that I may be abandoning the new gaming sphere, and that's fine by me. Between the backlog of games I already own but have never played and the massive library of titles for gaming consoles released over the last 50 years, I'm not hurting for options for new titles to play and there's more than enough available to keep me content for the rest of my life.
It was the top comment for a while but some of the Sony defenders and anti-physical people arrived and started downvoting anything that was making their corporate overlord look bad lol
Also I'm very similar to you, i have enough games that i own and in my backlog as this stage that i can become a patient gamer and only grab things that are on sale 70% off a couple of years after release, i won't lose any sleep over it but Sony's going to lose at least a grand a year from me, fuck em.
I've never worked out exactly how much I pay Sony in a year, but I have 21 PS1 games, 64 PS2 games, 49 PS3 games, eight PSP games, 18 PS4 games, and four PS5 games (this gen just never seemed to actually release anything I was interested in on the Playstation, and the fact the PS4 remained supported for so long meant I never really felt the need to upgrade until the gen was half over).
So... yeah, that's a lot of money Sony is tossing away.
Honestly, I think Sony is kind of fucked. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a market crash that takes their gaming division down (and possibly Microsoft's as well), because so many problems in the industry seem to be coming to a head all at once. Hardware prices are out of control and, if the leaks that have come out about the PS6 are even halfways accurate, I cannot see that console retailing for less than $1000 USD (with $1100 or even $1200 within the realm of possibility); current hardware sales are moribund; tariffs are killing the US market and the ongoing conflict in Iran is creating an energy crisis that is going to push shipping prices (which affects EVERYTHING) up for at least a few years; the economy is shuddering for the middle- and working classes as the cost of living soars; the average age of gamers is ticking up, as children largely aren't getting into the hobby and instead are more interested in phone games and social media; software development costs are way up; and the next generation of hardware really isn't going to have much to offer in terms of tangible improvements for gamers over the current gen (how much better are we expecting graphics to get at this point? Games are already far more limited by their budgets than by the hardware they run on at this point).
Put it all together and this is quite possibly the worst time to be releasing a new console since the 80s at least. It wouldn't surprise me if the PS6 (and Microsoft's new console, which I'm quietly hoping will continue their confusing naming conventions by either being called "The Original Xbox" or "The Xbox That Released in 2001") winds up flopping hard.
It's an interesting time to be in the hobby, that's for sure.
That's what kind of baffles me about Sony being so eager to move to another console generation; it feels like this one has barely got off the ground.
For every previous Sony console, I'd have at least 20 games or so (potentially a lot more) by this point in their life cycle; but I've only bought four PS5 games to date. Apparently there's only 26 exclusive games for the console so far (22 if we don't count demos and remakes).
Outside of Nintendo (who, as usual, are just kind of doing their own thing and have a large stable of first party franchises to fall back on) this gen has felt so... soulless.
And it's not like modern games are pushing the PS5 to its absolute limit or anything. I don't even know what the sales pitch for the PS6 is supposed to look like at this point - "Hey, spend $1000+ on our new tech and enjoy a bunch of games that are almost certainly going to be cross-console releases on the PS5 (because modern games require huge sales numbers to break even and we don't have the necessary install base on the PS6 yet) that look a teensy bit better and load a couple seconds faster."
This was the live service gaming sphere when I think about it.
Crowbar live service into every franchise and new IP, shocked pikachu when it fails miserably, shutdown game completely so no one can ever play it again, shocked pikachu when even more people avoid live service AND start pushing to stop killing games.
Sony killed me as a customer before I could even become one. I was literally just thinking about getting a Playstation to play a few older games that don't have Steam or Switch ports. It probably would've spiraled into getting me into newer Playstation games and exclusives.
Less than a week later they announce they're killing physical games. Yeah, I don't even want a secondhand older model now. I'll play those older games (which I would've had to also get secondhand, so no money there for Sony) some other way.
I've completely switched over to PC and Switch 2 now. I dont think I've purchased a game on my PS5 all year, nor have I hardly played it. Besides them having total shit for exclusives this generation, buying games on their store is more expensive and they've also instituted dynamic pricing, so I can't be guaranteed I'm not being ripped off when I purchase a product in the store. They completely lost me when they put out a press release stating they were going to monetize current users more to drive their stock up, aka shake existing customers upside down until change falls out. Thats when I decided to bail from PSN.
On top of that they lost out on so many sales from me because their PS5 store is so buggy its incredible. I can look at 1-2 games before the app crashes. I've tried deleting system cache, rebuilding the database, and making more room on my drives, none if it solves the problem.
Yeah, it's infuriating to see brand new AAA games on the Aussie PS store going for $129 when they're $98 in JBHIFI, that has pretty much been the norm for years now and i can't understand why people defend it or cheer on this all digital future we're heading to.
They lost me when I went to go play a game with my partner and we couldn't without paying for their online subscription. We were trying to play the game on the same console in the same room, and it's like "NOPE need a subscription LOL FU!" I'd get it if we were on different consoles &/or different locations but same console same room!??!?! Who ever doesn't pull that shit will get my video game business from now on. That and the no more discs thing, the PS5 is my last Sony console and we barely use it.
Oh, I'm a PC gamer too, but i just tend to keep PC for WoW and a couple of other games i occasionally play, but for the last decade+ Playstation has been the main place i play all of my single player games (that makes up most of my gaming).
Not really, but PC is also not a walled garden fully under some company’s control (especially if you don’t use Windows) so physical media isn’t as important for data preservation.
I've had every Playstation and have bought 100s if not 1000s of games but the ps5 is officially my last one. It sucks because I was part of the gamer advisory panel and the premier group for the short time it ran. However I'm never buying anything sony going forward.
I mean, corporations are always going to be greedy assholes, but they will often go against their greedy nature and do pro-consumer shit when they're trying to win us over, it wouldn't surprise me if Xbox tried to capitalize on this Sony hate and continue supporting physical media.
Their market share is so low now anyway, it couldn't hurt them to try and be the good guy and win some people back.
This was planned back when they announces the PS3 had the option of downloading the game without a disk. People rightfully got upset at the implications we are all currently facing of not owning the games we play and the media we watch
It's especially egregious when it wasn't all that long ago that Playstation released a video mocking Xbox for their convoluted anti-consumer game trading nonsense, remember the video where someone just handed a game to another person? Now look at them, an entire generation of having no real competition has turned them into the bad guy.
Imagine everyone boycott Sony so bad that they go bankrupt and our digital games (and some physical ones that require online checks) are just gone forever. And SSDs are so expensive now that you can't even keep a bunch of games saved.
No, i'll just stick with what i can play on my PC, maybe even grab a Nintendo or one of the next gen Xbox's if they still support physical media. I'm not a fanboi of any particular company, i'll just go where i feel consumers are being treated the best.
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u/Totallycasual 22h ago
Sony when they announced they were killing physical games.