Aero Yeah its absolutely insane, games already began costing 80 Euros for Standard Edition like DOOM The Dark Ages and Metal Gear Solid remake, just like Microsoft was testing 70 Euro in 2019 when nobody said a thing about it and then it became the standard in 2020 in the US and worldwide, so if you were not aware of this you don't need to wait for GTA or for the Switch 2 announcement, I can guarantee the 80$ base price was already confirmed for almost a year at this point, GTA might attempt to push that up to a 100$ easily it wouldn't surprise me. For a normie that only plays one or two games at best a year it doesn't matter, same reason they love MTXes.
Kaper Physical games have been dead for like 15 years, I remember how much I hated Steam when I first bought a disc that came with nothing but its installer, I actually thought it was a scam at the time so I used a fake account that I then lost forever. Console gamers need to fight to keep them. At least everything is on PC now and theres wine and GOG.
I wish the gaming industry learned from music, they too fought piracy as hard as possible but they eventually lost hard and just had to get with the times where all music became "free and worthless" and with that they realized they shouldn't fight the people who are willing to give them money in exchange for plastic. I guess thats the problem with gaming that they're not actually losing any money by being anti-consumer quite the opposite infact with all the MTXes. Even worse for movies, at least you can buy FLACs for download and downloaded games are the same as on disc, but for some reason while its normal to download a 100GB game its not even a thing at all to download a 100GB movie officially why? So once they successfully manage to kill Blu-ray all new movies will literally look worse than shit that came out on HD-DVD and D-VHS nearly two decades ago and I think thats just so incredibly backwards. Remember when technology progressed not regressed? Guess it doesn't matter if you're the type to just keep whatever netflix slop playing as background noise on your phone as thats about all their shit is good for now.
Pedestrian I don't quite agree with the modern physical media fanboys that think they have true ownership on a console which is literally a DRM hardware box, but objectively most discs that were ever produced especially while they were relevant very much are superior to any digital copy, digital takes extra effort to maintain to get to where physical is by default. When you buy a disc your content is automatically bundled with read only storage that will last at least 20 years unless you treat it absolutely horribly and that in most cases can not be revoked, you can download an ISO installer for a game right now and reuse a key you find off the picture of the package online as many times as you want, online activation on discs only became a thing with digital distribution to make discs less attractive. Windows XP is probably the oldest thing I can think of that had a "phone home" function to prevent reuse and enabled key revocation. Meanwhile on Steam there are quite a few DRM-free games but you will obviously only be able to play them if you keep them downloaded, which 99% of people don't, for some reason we're still at the point where typical consumer PCs do not have over 1/2TB of storage so its the norm that anything you're done playing you uninstall, same with GOG, its literally pointless if you don't keep your installers backed up, imagine how many more things would be lost today if retail discs could be overwritten and people would've decided they value the extra storage more once they're done with a game. GOG is the best you can do for ownership, you can back up the installers all you want, with a disc you're not legally supposed to do that in some places but at the end of the day most people do not keep their downloadable content backed up so once the providers shut down or ban you its over, meanwhile most people did keep their discs, but I guess this also can be just due to the mindset shift, people used to keep stuff they torrent too out of fear of it being taken down and just to have the peace of mind like with a disc meanwhile now they just use streaming sites and don't care about anything enough when it gets taken down, sure you can technically still save stuff just that nobody cares to do it anymore. Most discs (outside poor pirate copies of their time if they were relevant enough for that to begin with) were dumped online way past their prime, thats only possible because they by default store the content and because people kept them so others could find them years later to save, the same is much harder for digital where most content gets deleted immediately after use and even for the small percent that doesn't HDDs don't last as long, SSD are even worse, and now we actually have a bunch of uncrackable always online DRM on top, everything is locked behind accounts, full disk encryption by default. Before you could be left with your parents usable discs and tapes, now all thats being left behind if they even last that long to begin with is a console or iPhone locked behind 500 accounts and always on DRM and disk encryption with some cached data left on it along the lines of "Cloud subscription expired, some content has been deleted to fit within free storage/account deactivated for inactivity, to reuse this device visit online device management to unbind to reuse on another account".
