The death of physical media

[eastmen]

It looks like 2023 will be the year physical media drops off a cliff

Notable releases like Alan wake 2 and now Tesco in the UK will stop stocking physical games and Gamestop is leaving ireland

UK supermarket Tesco to stop stocking physical games as GameStop leaves Ireland

The UK games market loses another retailer

www.gamesindustry.biz

Tesco has 2,800 stores in the UK

Game stop ireland closed all 35 of its stores.

The games market across the UK has rapidly accelerated towards digital. Across the four big games of June -- Diablo 4, Final Fantasy 16, Street Fighter 6 and F1 23 -- less than 18% of these games were sold via physical stores.

and

You saw what happened with the pandemic, with digital racing ahead more than anything we had forecasted… Customers rushed to online, and although some came back, it's not been all," said GAME boss Nick Arran. "You can see from market data that online is 75% of the market. Before the pandemic, it was 45%."

here in the states , gamestop is on the verge of collapse

https://www.thegamer.com/gamestop-store-manager-layoffs-stores-empty/

Bestbuy is closing 30 stores this year

Best Buy to close as many as 30 stores this year

The electronics retailer is also remodeling stores to its experiential format and opening 10 outlets.

www.retaildive.com

and other retailers like Target and walmart have drastically reduced it's gaming foot print in stores.

 

[Theeoo]

Unfortunately that is one step closer to not actually owning any digital media you buy.

 

[eastmen]

Unfortunately that is one step closer to not owning any digital media you buy.

Sept will be the 20th year that I have had steam and i still have all the games I have purchased on that platform. Unlike my intelivsion or nes , I don't need to break out ancient hardware to play those games either

 

[Theeoo]

I realise it's the future (or the now) of the medium , but I think it's funny that the idea of actually owning a digital media product will become a quaint anachronism in the future.

 

[Caayn]

Such a shame. The inevitable death of physical games media is slowly eeking closer and closer.

Especially in a household with multiple consoles (Children) will digital licenses quickly become annoying. With a physical copy you just pop-in the disc/cartridge and you're ready to play from a license persective.

After all these years there still isn't a proper solution for sharing digital licenses within your household.

 

[Johnny Awesome]

I'm fine with it. I never really break out old games. There's always something new to play. There's no way I have time for retro.

 

[cheapchips]

I have mixed feelings about digital. It's dreadful from a cultural preservation perspective.

On the other, I rare replay old games, I hate my house filling up with stuff and hate even more the amount of pointless landfill disc cases create.

For today's games, physical media is a rubbish solution to the preservation and ownership issues.

Retro stuff is a little different.

 

[Nesh]

Certainly comes with its benefits and disadvantages. This is a sign of things to come in general in the market.
The big takeaway is that the consumer for convenience will gradually be sacrificing his power over to the content providers.
This isnt going to stop here though. This phenomenon is going to expand beyond gaming. With cloud, everything will eventually be fully controlled by the corporations.
Even features on everyday hardware will be locked to a form of service in a network.

 

[see colon]

I'm fine with it. I never really break out old games. There's always something new to play. There's no way I have time for retro.

I was like this once.

I have mixed feelings about digital. It's dreadful from a cultural preservation perspective.

I think a larger issue is that fact the physical games ship incomplete and broken. If you are collecting physical games from this generation, you are collecting discs full of incomplete assets that need the publishers servers to remain online for you to get a game playable.

The big takeaway is that the consumer for convenience will gradually be sacrificing his power over to the content providers.

Convenience has always been the #1. In music, vinyl offered a level of fidelity that wasn't matched by cassette, nor CD. But the later formats were more convenient. It's the same with the modern crop of lossy compressed digital audio formats. The ones people stream through their phones to cheap bluetooth headphones that crush the sound even more. Because wires are inconvenient.

 

[eastmen]

I was like this once.

I think a larger issue is that fact the physical games ship incomplete and broken. If you are collecting physical games from this generation, you are collecting discs full of incomplete assets that need the publishers servers to remain online for you to get a game playable.

Convenience has always been the #1. In music, vinyl offered a level of fidelity that wasn't matched by cassette, nor CD. But the later formats were more convenient. It's the same with the modern crop of lossy compressed digital audio formats. The ones people stream through their phones to cheap bluetooth headphones that crush the sound even more. Because wires are inconvenient.

I disagree with vinyl offering a level of fidelity beyond CD. CD offered better quality while also being more resilient to physical damage and offered quality of life improvements like track skipping that vinyl didn't have. Even cassettes while the audio may not have been as good they were much more durable and were able to work in cars which vinyl couldn't do all while having a form factor many times smaller than vinyl.

I think one major issue with Console media is that there is no reissue of older content. It is impossible to play the bulk of historical console content without the original hardware and while you can find projects out there that allow you to use old carts with expensive adapters on expensive hardware they are very niche.

Looking at Steam all your games largely just work in part due to the windows ecosystem that has a lot of work into backwards compatibility and also dos box. The console world doesn't really have this and it seems like MS is the one leading the charge with the amount of work they put into backwards compatibility on their platform. In some ways I wish they would buy Sega or buy atari/intellivision/what have you so that they can just build an emulator and ship it and those games on thier platforms instead of having them locked away behind ancient hardware and physical media that hasn't been reissued in about as long as I've been alive.

 

[Sonic]

Whike I find it sad for physical media to lessen in sales and wane in significance I also view it aa the practical reality of the present. Itbused to be the future but that's behind us now. A whole generation is growing up without needing to use physical media for their games. The convenience factor is there and there's no going back. The access to games does worry me for a digital only future when it domes to ownership. Also from a preservation standpoint as that is important to many.

Let's be real. The convenience factor is there. I've accepted that I'll the old person telling tales of how old technology worked in the past. Dial up is the best jn that regards. It's like almost impossible to register for some people.

 

[eastmen]

Whike I find it sad for physical media to lessen in sales and wane in significance I also view it aa the practical reality of the present. Itbused to be the future but that's behind us now. A whole generation is growing up without needing to use physical media for their games. The convenience factor is there and there's no going back. The access to games does worry me for a digital only future when it domes to ownership. Also from a preservation standpoint as that is important to many.

Let's be real. The convenience factor is there. I've accepted that I'll the old person telling tales of how old technology worked in the past. Dial up is the best jn that regards. It's like almost impossible to register for some people.

Also the physical media hasn't really changed since the ps3 in 2006. Sure we have ultra blurays but that just took bluray from 25/50 to 33/66/100 It's been really stagnant. Perhaps there will be a renaissance at some point if nand becomes cheap enough. However I think we have all had that debate multiple times in the past

 

[arandomguy]

This tends to get boxed together for obvious reasons but I feel in reality people are actually describing two different issues.

The first issue is the more direct one in that loss of physical media does affect have implications for those that are looking to collect said physical media.

The second issue however isn't really the actual loss of physical media but a DRM and licensing rights issue. Physical media doesn't inherently help preservation nor does digital media inherently preclude preservation, that's just a byproduct of how the console DRM/licensing system and digital distribution system works.

I do feel the distinction is important in that if the latter is the actual concern than the discussion that should be taking place is to directly address that issue as opposed to essentially tackling it from the physical media work around essentially.

 

[cheapchips]

It's funny how the 'this is how you trade PS4 games' was perceived. MS clearly deserved a ribbing for messing up their disk based games with the always online implementation and terrible messaging. Today though, where disks are mostly really rubbish keys, their policies would have resulted in a better level of ownership of digital games. Far from perfect, but better.

Even in 2013, this zinger looked silly in the context of Steam and PC gaming. That moment in time, with both parties being crap about forging a digital future, has meant there's no competition between Xbox and PS for digital ownership. We're left with the inadequate status quo of a decade ago.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Convenience has always been the #1. In music, vinyl offered a level of fidelity that wasn't matched by cassette, nor CD.

Technically. However, for the everyman LPs were all crackle and pop and scratches and hiss. There are even audio filters available for artists to reintroduce these faults to their digital music creations! You need exceptional gear to get the analogue audio fresh at a quality above CDs. As such, the reasons to migrate to CD was all of them - they were better in every single way including what the user heard.

Digital (dumb name, but what else we gonna call it?!) audio replaced CDs on convenience and robustness, but we start to see people willing to sacrifice quality for that.

Digital games are an inevitability now that they are released broken. You don't get anything owning a physical copy rather than a WIP Beta that's missing features and potentially can't even be completed. At it's most criminal, you just get a downloader on the disc! For me, it doesn't massively impact old games thanks to the joy of emulators. Last night we were playing a PS2 game on PC. I still have the original disc but I never use it and TBH I don't know what to do with it. It's just landfill sitting on a shelf. So long as we can back up content to local storage and don't have to stream it dynamically, we have as much 'ownership' as ever. Digital only becomes an issue when you lose your local copy and it's removed from the service, such as P.T. And this doesn't make economic sense, to remove content, and AFAIK it's only stuff like licensing that screws up back catalogues; that and emulation quality.

Going forwards, games are better suited to digital distribution. We only really need cataloguing of content from PS360 and earlier, grabbing digital copies. Everything since is already digital. Now we can just share the content and have digital backups of massive libraries across a few HDDs, preserved efficiently, ready to be distributed across the world at negligable effort.

 

[see colon]

Technically. However, for the everyman LPs were all crackle and pop and scratches and hiss. There are even audio filters available for artists to reintroduce these faults to their digital music creations! You need exceptional gear to get the analogue audio fresh at a quality above CDs.

It sounds like it was inconvenient to get the best audio quality out of LPs.

 

[dobwal]

This tends to get boxed together for obvious reasons but I feel in reality people are actually describing two different issues.

The first issue is the more direct one in that loss of physical media does affect have implications for those that are looking to collect said physical media.

The second issue however isn't really the actual loss of physical media but a DRM and licensing rights issue. Physical media doesn't inherently help preservation nor does digital media inherently preclude preservation, that's just a byproduct of how the console DRM/licensing system and digital distribution system works.

I do feel the distinction is important in that if the latter is the actual concern than the discussion that should be taking place is to directly address that issue as opposed to essentially tackling it from the physical media work around essentially.

Agree mostly. Even though I still feel the current use of physical vs digital media is appropriate because of the console licensing models of the two are distinctly different and some aspects are inherent to the characteristics of the media on which they reside. Digital could offer a similar model but it would have to exist outside the current model and you would have to choose which during purchase. The likelihood of that happening is probably zero.

 

[Nesh]

Convenience has always been the #1.

And thats exactly the problem once this:

With cloud, everything will eventually be fully controlled by the corporations.
Even features on everyday hardware will be locked to a form of service in a network.

happens

 

[hughJ]

Sept will be the 20th year that I have had steam and i still have all the games I have purchased on that platform. Unlike my intelivsion or nes , I don't need to break out ancient hardware to play those games either

And even before Steam I feel like the PC space was already conditioned to the idea of physical media not being representative of permanent ownership. That sense was pretty fluid given the need for Quake point-releases and Half-Life updates that maintained your ability to keep playing with the bulk of the population. IMO the far greater loss of consumer ownership came with the loss of privately hosted dedicated servers and server binary releases. With or without physical media you'll still be able to play Quake multiplayer decades from now, whereas modern games will only continue to be functional as long as the-powers-that-be allow it. The idea of having to pay for XBox Live always struck me in the same way as having to pay to add a ring tone to my cell phone, or having to use a dedicated app and transcoder to put an mp3 onto my Lyra music player, or having a super restrictive e-book format and e-reader for college textbooks.

 

[see colon]

And thats exactly the problem once this:
"With cloud, everything will eventually be fully controlled by the corporations."
happens

Do corporations not control things now? You aren't buying a product, you are busing the license to a product. I know it feels icky, but it's not only the way it will be, it's the way that it has been for a long time. And just because you could do a thing, like install a software package using one license key on hundreds of pieces of hardware, doesn't mean that was the scope of the license you paid for. It's just more enforceable now than it was 15 or 20 years ago.