Somehow, I find it amusing how people have reacted to Sony’s recent announcement that they will be dumping physical discs from the pipeline. Mostly, because it’s long overdue on both sides. People should be outraged, but it’s also not what makes Sony money.
On one hand, I do kind of feel like, “Welcome to PC gaming,” since digital has been the norm for a long time. If you’re into PC games, you’ve probably been predominantly digital for a long, long time whether or not Steam is your personal state capital. Done well, it’s actually a pretty great experience–but it’s always predicated on access. That is to say, we should get on our knees and thank Gabe and company for not being an evil monopoly rather than a mostly benevolent one.
On the other hand, I think we do lose a bit of something. The secondary market matters to some people, but is overrated IMHO. Those who suffer most will be those who need to trade in old games in order to afford new games, those who make their living selling and trading games. But we’ve known GameStop is probably a future Best Buy or Tower Records. It’s not a question of if, but when. I actually don’t mind physical games: I mind updating physical games. As I get older, one of the things that irks me is the broken release state.
See, when I was a kid, games came on a cartridge, and if you had a broken launch, you were probably going to go out of business sitting on 50,000 useless ROMs or hoping those chips were electrically erasable only to learn what mask ROM actually meant on the invoice sheet 😂. By contrast, today, folks like CD Projekt Red I think deserve great props because while they had an absolute shit-show launch, unlike many they have actually stuck around and maintained their games. Games come out all the time riddled with deal breaking problems, and if we’re lucky, the major ones get fixed or well known enough to avoid.
Something that always sucked about PC gaming was patch maintenance. You have the disc, you put it in the closet, but ahh crap where did you put the CD-R with the patch and map files to play online or fix random crashes, or other stuff? Those issues only became more critical over time as games become increasingly less “complete” at launch.
One of the reasons I never took strongly to modern consoles and physical media is the installation model. Back when games ran off the disc, I think it was a fair trade. You avoid the storage cost and slow-ass downloads of the era in favor of shuffling and storing media. Not a terrible deal, whether you prefer it or loath it, it’s a mostly fair trade. Then we reached the era where BD-ROMs at best included installation files to go on the console’s HDD just like the age of Windows 9x/XP gaming. More typically however, discs that were useless without downloading just as much data in updates or served as little more than a licensing token.
That’s why for example, most of my Xbox One games were purely digital. There was really no “real” point from the actual gameplay experience for the majority of games I played, the only real impact was having to have the disc in the drive for what was going to be a download anyway.
Nintendo’s Switch I think is a somewhat interesting middle ground, but one that will probably fade into obsolesce soon enough. Game cards of Nintendo’s own games largely run off card with updates stored locally, and most other vendors simple don’t give a fuck. If it costs $15 to produce a game card when you were already losing money off producing a $2 disc, folks don’t have to think hard about releasing digitally or code-in-a-box. I personally hate the concept of code-in-a-box, but understand the reasoning behind it.
The sad thing IMHO, is that we don’t take things to a logical next level. The problem with the Game Card model is that it doesn’t reflect how games are made anymore, just like the optical disc model–it doesn’t store updates. The only way to solve that is to make it field programmable, which like the issue of enough bandwidth to feed modern high end graphics, is best done with solid state memory. But we kinda miss the twisty point: the storage.
If we’re unwilling to pay for the storage capacity, the media is too expensive, and if we have to install locally, that storage capacity is just a net waste–a license key on a disc or card doesn’t solve real problems, not ones that can’t be solved digitally. You can create decent systems to move license keys between accounts, but it’s not in corporate interests. Being able to run a 200 GB video game off physical media small enough to worry about your three year old swallowing it, and not having to install all that crap to the console, now that is a harder problem to solve.
But I kind of wish we would solve that problem, or at least try to solve it. I would much rather swap a handful of memory cards or slot-able solid state drives than manage “Well, how much shit fits, and how much shit can I just redownload later.” That’s a problem we can sort of solve in modern environments, but isn’t being solved by physical media itself.