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I hate digital stores. Can we go back to PC games on discs?
- Thread starter tekomandor
- Start date
Hell no. I just found and shoved my ancient CD binder of old discs in a crate over the past weekend and that is not a level of inconvenience to which I would ever want to return.
Digital stores are a straight upgrade from physical discs, no matter you download speed. Run it over night, run it while you're at work, but keep those outdated things away from me.
I didn't even put a disc drive in my new PC.
Digital stores are a straight upgrade from physical discs, no matter you download speed. Run it over night, run it while you're at work, but keep those outdated things away from me.
I didn't even put a disc drive in my new PC.
I got a 64Gb one for my camera barely few weeks ago and I paid it something north of 20 €.
Still, even 15 for the empty support is a pretty fucking price spike to add to a game, and those are ALREADY prices you got from the fact that companies "sell them in bulks", by the way. SD cards aren't exactly niche products, but everyday consumer objects.
I don't think I'd go quite that far, but if I did, I'd have more than enough physical console and PC games in the backlog to keep me playing for the rest of my life. PC gaming is all about having options, so it's weird to think that some people would be in favor of taking any away. Yet, here we are.
It's much more convenient to buy games now, and we have many different key sites to buy keys from so you don't need to even buy from a specific store unlike consoles.
The biggest issue we have now is that all our games are getting split across tons of launchers and there's no good way to organize everything. The launchers also heavily vary in feature set and how they work. Most launchers work well, the most notable exceptions are Bethesda.net which is buggy and Microsoft Store (Game Pass) which does not install games the normal way, but as "Windows Apps" instead which acts as a separate walled garden inside Windows 10 and makes game modding difficult.
I'd never go back to discs. My internet connection is faster than installing from a disc.
The biggest issue we have now is that all our games are getting split across tons of launchers and there's no good way to organize everything. The launchers also heavily vary in feature set and how they work. Most launchers work well, the most notable exceptions are Bethesda.net which is buggy and Microsoft Store (Game Pass) which does not install games the normal way, but as "Windows Apps" instead which acts as a separate walled garden inside Windows 10 and makes game modding difficult.
I'd never go back to discs. My internet connection is faster than installing from a disc.
Huh was it a high-class one? I looked on Amazon and the 128gb ones were by SanDisk for 15€ so it wasn't some no-name brand. But point taken on SD-cards already being produced and bought in bulk, that's true. As I said in my very first post in this thread, I personally atleast, easily would be willing to spend north of 60€ for a PC game if it came with a "SD-cartridge" a box and a full-fledged manual.
We're fighting climate change. We really could do without discs being pressed, wrapped in plastic and shipped all over the world.
This doesn't hold true entirely anymore sadly. Console games on disks are often incomplete nowadays and physical goodies like manuals and all are also all but gone.
AH!
I would.
Barely. And for a minority of titles, anyway.
Clearly we went the wrong direction. Instead of getting rid of optical drives we should have been inventing increasingly extravagant disc storage and automated switching devices to go in your PC case.
Okay, let's not get too silly now.
One of the reasons digital took off so quickly on PC is because physical distribution was an aboslute nighmtare on the platform:
-super strict DRM schemes tied to the disk. At times even with install limits.
- Every copy had a key you needed to redeem, making trading and loaning games impossible.
-because of corporate fuckery, blue ray drives never took off on PC, meaning increasingly large games are distributed on DVD's. Bleh.
-no central infrastructure for patches an updates. You think having 5 launchers to deal with is a lot? Try every publisher or even every dev in case of self-publishing. Also since small companies tend to go bust prepare for having lots of old games with abandoned infrastructure and having to use 3rd party sites for patching old games.
etc.
With how modern publishers operate, physical doesn't make sense on the platform imo.
-super strict DRM schemes tied to the disk. At times even with install limits.
- Every copy had a key you needed to redeem, making trading and loaning games impossible.
-because of corporate fuckery, blue ray drives never took off on PC, meaning increasingly large games are distributed on DVD's. Bleh.
-no central infrastructure for patches an updates. You think having 5 launchers to deal with is a lot? Try every publisher or even every dev in case of self-publishing. Also since small companies tend to go bust prepare for having lots of old games with abandoned infrastructure and having to use 3rd party sites for patching old games.
etc.
With how modern publishers operate, physical doesn't make sense on the platform imo.
So basically, publishers nearly killed the market with their bullshit and that's why we don't own games anymore.
All according to plan.
Jep. Valve came along with their own twist on the DRM formula and since that was (eventually) the least annoying of them all and easy for other devs to implement that's what became standart.
you dont really own a game per se. Digital or physical you own a license to play the game.
I moved mostly to console years ago, because being able to resell games if they suck / if I completed them was important to me. If you have to login somewhere to play it, you don't really own it. I saw too many places go under over the years to be comfortable with this.
Steam and its authentication for everything is meh to me. But PC was already a mess from securROM and other bullshit remote activation DRM already when Steam showed up. I buy some small amount of discounted things on Steam. Over the years it is a pretty big pile but a lot of that is Humble Bundle.
That all said, I'll buy from GOG any day over physical releases. Best of both worlds.
Steam and its authentication for everything is meh to me. But PC was already a mess from securROM and other bullshit remote activation DRM already when Steam showed up. I buy some small amount of discounted things on Steam. Over the years it is a pretty big pile but a lot of that is Humble Bundle.
That all said, I'll buy from GOG any day over physical releases. Best of both worlds.
Okay sure, but at least I would own the disc that contains a copy of the game to sell/trade/give away freely. I can do whatever I want with it as long as it doesn't violate copyrights.
Yeah, but it should be stressed that those in particular were already largely dead YEARS before the digital market overtook the physical one.
For a long time all we got in our (empty) "physical boxes" were incredibly useful pamphlets with life-saving instructions like "To start a new game, click on NEW GAME".
Physical media will stay there as long as there are enough sales to justify making the investment to make them, but just like it's not feasible for most indie games to release a physical version of their games, over time and as physical sales continue to reduce, you will see the same thing happen with bigger budget games. Everyone should be able to imagine that if physical sales continue to go down on market % every year, there will be a point where console manufacturers will have to ask themselves if it is worth it to include a disc reader on their consoles, when only a 10 or 5 % of the sales are physical. The all digital Xbox One and the rumor of the discless next generation Xbox are only a reflection of this. I wouldn't be surprised if Sony does the same and releases a version of the PS5 without a disc reader. The people that threaten to stop buying or playing new games if digital becomes the only option, seem to care more about the plastic than the game experience itself. If that is the case, so be it. Enjoy the plastic and cut yourself out of the incredible gaming experiences that will continue to come out.
We're never going back to physical discs for PC. Hell, most PCs don't even come with disc drives anymore. You can't find physical games at barely any retail stores either.
Sucks about data caps and that ISPs keep driving that nonsense of not having unlimited broadband, while constantly upping the pricing.
Sorry, but it's a digital-only future for PC.
That genuinely confuses me. How can that bother people that much?
Because I have over 1000 games in my library. Over 170 concurrently installed on my system to pick what I want to play on a whim.
Even assuming a single disc per game, keeping similar habits with physical copies (and still having to install and update them most of the times, anyway) would annoy me to no end.
I guess disc swapping is bearable, if all you play are five exclusives a year and you sell them back as soon as you are finished.
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Yeah no. With how often games get patched nowadays, the data that comes on the disc is outdated anyway.
I also remember having to go to a game's website and download patch EXEs and manually install them back in the day. No fucking thanks.
I also remember having to go to a game's website and download patch EXEs and manually install them back in the day. No fucking thanks.
One big advantage of the PC market shifting digital that's not just convenience/DRM is that the modern day indie landscape would be impossible if disc distribution was necessary.
The lower barrier of entry (and the better margins) made smaller games more viable to do.
The lower barrier of entry (and the better margins) made smaller games more viable to do.
From my brief Google-ing of the issue, are you using an external drive to store any of your games? Because it seems that your issue matches the issue others are having where their drives are going to sleep.
I personally hate clutter and stacks of discs more than I do the slight hassle of reinstalling software.
With how large games are and the fact that PCs nowadays don't even have optical drives, it's never coming back. The best you'll get is a disc with a key to download it and outside of some Kickstarter or limited edition games, it's digital all the way on PC.
There shouldn't be sites required to check the key authenticity or keys required period in the first place.
I agree, but good luck telling that to devs and pubs. Physical DRM was by far worse than anything on digital market, including Denuvo, at least Denuvo won't give you blue screen of death.
Yeah! We should go back to the days where I have to turn to a random page, paragraph, sentence and word in an instruction manual and type it in after swapping 10 floppy disks in order to install the game. Those were the good ol' days!
Most modern PC cases don't even have slots for optical drives in them anymore. That space was replaced by tempered glass and RGB fans. You trying to say we need to give up our RGB, my dude?!
Most modern PC cases don't even have slots for optical drives in them anymore. That space was replaced by tempered glass and RGB fans. You trying to say we need to give up our RGB, my dude?!
That and I miss the days when you were only allowed a limited number on installs before your disc was bricked permanently.