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They are also lobbying to make hosting you own videogame server illegal: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/esa-bafflingly-declares-private-minecraft-servers-illegal-in-stop-killing-games-hearing-we-consider-it-piracy-we-have-lawsuits/
Sony is part of ESA.
So is Microsoft who owns Minecraft who definitely presents private servers as dangerous (which for children may very well be true).
So are bicycles and kitchen knives. Ffs
That was kind of my point?
That just because it’s “dangerous” for children doesn’t justify banning it wholesale. Sorry I wasn’t more clear.
Yet Microsoft allows people access to host a private server while also putting up scary warnings for kids telling them to stick to the “safe” realms servers or whatever (are they even still called Realms? fuck if I know). On the one hand, it’s good they haven’t removed it entirely, on the other hand, it seems like that may be their eventual long-term goal with how they treat the private server ecosystem.
I also think Discord and Roblox contributed to people not knowing what the fuck “server” actually means anymore.
Having the possibility to setup a server allowed me to setup one for my sons and I. I’d rather have that then them going online…
You would think that’s what every parent would prefer…
Both because it’s more safe and secure. Plus I have very fond memories of LAN parties and without private servers and local multiplayer kids won’t be able to experience that :(
Oh no this is gonna drive the uncs wild. We’ll never hear the end of this.
So, nothing to look forward to. This is why you’re so behind in sales.
This only reinforces the reasons why I bought a PC for gaming instead of a console.
Don’t forget they also paid $3.6 Billion for Bungie just to shut down their most popular game and put all their hope in their new extraction shooter that’s been struggling. No new games in dev or even green lit. Also they just laid off a bunch of people.
This one is more on the Bungie side of things. Bungie got a few lifelines and STILL fumbled.
Imagine if Bungie never “vaulted” (read: deleted) any part of Destiny 2 and we were still able to play the original campaign it shipped with? More people would still be playing Destiny 2 and you’d get plenty more new players without them having to use a guide or YouTube lore videos to get caught up on the story.
Instead of mArathon they’d probably be making a Destiny 3
Oh yeah don’t get me started on Bungie. The are a shell of their former selves. When they split from Activison and it all came out that the mircotransactions was all Bungie’s idea that was my first WTF moment with these guys. They let us believe it was the Corp overlords ruining our game but they did it themselves. Then they did everything they could do to make themselves look profitable for Sony’s acquisition. Just horrible decision after horrible decision.
What really sucks is that Marathon is actually pretty fun.
They just completely fumbled the marketing and launch, the UI needs to be cleaned up, and it doesn’t feel worth it at $40. IDC if it’s a AAA developer, it’s still a pretty small game content wise even if it is fun to play.
I’m a diehard Marathon fan, I dumpster dived for an Apple to play the first two on when I was a kid. I can’t even try the new one because they purposefully broke it on Linux.
Don’t blame Sony for bungies mess. Sony got absolutely scammed by Bungie because they were desperately and panicking after MS accounted they were buying ABK.
Bungie have been a terrible studio for a decade at least. Microsoft turned them down when Bungie attempted to sell themselves back to them for a fraction of what Sony paid them only a few months later.
Destiny got what it deserved. I can’t believe it lasted as long as it did. I noped after they started charging $40 for a couple maps and a raid labeled as “expansions”. And that was destiny 1. The game was an unbelievable ripoff.
Can’t believe people still stuck with it even after they locked down the legacy content. It’s crazy how much it takes to get people to stop buying enshittified products.
I agree I don’t blame Sony at all. Also I hate myself for it but for me no FPS I’ve played comes close to the fluid gunplay in Destiny and Destiny 2. That is where Bungie always shined for me above everyone else. The rebooted Doom games are a close 2nd. and there are a few indie titles like Turbo Overkill that get close as well. Everything else just doesn’t match up when I get that FPS itch.
Yea the era of giving the “big 3” any of my money
Console really is hitting checklist of media subscription like apple
End of an era for just about everything. Streaming is all enshitified. The job market is shit. Democracy is falling apart. Decades of progress being undone. It’s just the way it will be until people get sick of all this shit and start doing things differently and move on. All the great old companies are dead. Either turned to zombie brands or run by zombies. I remember how excited I was to buy my first Sony Trinitron, my first walkman, my Sony component stereo, first PlayStation.
At some point Sony bought a Movie Studio in the US and a few years afterwards the company leadership started coming from their Media division instead of their Engineering division.
This as in the early 00s.
That was when Sony started enshittifying, with things like locking down their consumer devices (not just to block copying but also to do things like segment markets via region locking) and at one point they even shipped Music CDs with a PC Rootkit (the infamous “Sony Rootkit” scandal).
IMHO, Sony was maybe one of the first large companies to start enshittifying.
I’ve actually been boycotting Sony since then, so roughly for 2 decades now.
Technofascists running/ruining the world
Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. Enshittification is the inevitable result of shareholders demanding endless growth at all costs.
I could just as well point to dumb people giving them their money as the reason. At the end it is more complicated than such a simplistic reductions.
Victim blaming is never a good take.
Not really, no.
Infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet.
I bought every PlayStation ever released. I will not be buying this one. Consoles are supposed to get cheaper over time. The gaming sector is going to go tits up and I hope it does.
plus people have prioritize money to elsewhere like basic needs, instead of luxury needs.
It’s a historic moment to see an almost 6-year old console appreciate and not depreciate in value over time. Never before seen in the ~40 years of gaming. It’s insane
Value is different than cost. The value continues to plummet, while the cost continues to rise.
Good point. Monetary value then
That’s even scarier, electronics usually devalue way faster than inflation!
Bye PlayStation. It’s been a good run, but you’re dead to me now.
I seriously don’t understand the “disk” thing. I could see how you want your game to be on a physical media so you don’t have to download it when you want to play, but games are so big you couldn’t do it for decades already, and having a disk is barely saves you any time anyway. Meanwhile it’s a waste of materials, it get scratched all the time, and if you lose it it’s gone.
I don’t understand why anyone cares.
I can’t think of a single game that didn’t require an install and then updates before playing anyways.
Games on GOG come with offline installer that can be used to install the most reacent version.
But you’re right, many games do require day 1 patches or even game data to be dowloaded but that makes these worse / lower in quality for many.
That’s gog, not consoles.
It won’t really affect me, but I understand the appeal of a physical artifact servicing as time game’s license for those who like to lend, sell, trade, library, etc.
And those same benefits are why the corporations can’t wait to do away with it. It’s been quite a while since Microsoft tried the same thing and people freaked out enough that they reversed course.
It’s worth pointing out that Microsoft didn’t try the same thing. Microsoft tried to move to “physical as digital”, where they retained the benefits of physical copies such as resale and loaning.
I specifically remember that their plan was essentially CD Keys. You’d buy a physical game and it would have a code inside, or the discs would have unique identifiers that force linked to your account, or whatever.
So yeah, essentially physical media with a digital license. If you were going to be able to resell your game it was going to have to go through microsoft, or maybe you could lend a friend your disc and that lets them buy their own license for a small discount to play it.
It was keys in a box, but they had a framework to allow physical retailers to remove licenses from Xbox accounts and refresh the license key for resale. They also had a system for you to loan your digital games out to your friends via their gamertag. When you digitally loaned it to them, you could not play it and they could. Iirc it would automatically revert after 30 days if you didn’t extend, but you could choose how long to loan it for.
They abandoned it all after the ridiculous crashouts by people who couldn’t see where the future was heading, and now you get digital with no resale and no loaning.
Useful details, thanks.
I’ll just point out that they/we did not have a system like that, but just promises of it from a tech giant. (except of course for whatever they had designed internally up until that time) So even as somebody who doesn’t really sell games, I get why people weren’t thrilled with the idea of microsoft being the ever-present broker in the transactions.
It was a new system, one never done before but not outlandish and easy to see how it would work. People just can’t understand and fear new things. Microsoft are, to their own detriment, too forward thinking. The Intended XB1 digital system was as close to a perfect one as you can get. benefits of both physical and digital wrapped in one.
It sounds like a lot of good thought and design went into it.
The biggest problem was/is always going to be consumers wary of trusting a tech company not to mess it up because of greed.
Wow you’re young
Or old enough to not care that much. What am I going to do with more plastic?
BUT, I should have been more clear that I was talking only about ps5 and ps5 owners. I would never own one. Their online account is annoying and I have never forgiven them for the rootkit.
I was surprised to find out that there are games that will play without the internet. Although every ps5 MUST be connected to the internet first to link the disc drive to the device.
I used Does It Play to look at the games, and a lot of them will not work without updates. I assumed all at this point, which is why I said what I said.
no worries. i sometimes make erroneous assumptions off incomplete data too
That is only the case because your console is connected to the internet. For example, I can dust off my old PS3 today and play the version 1.0 release of GTA V after installing it from the disc because the console is offline, meaning there won’t be any prompt asking me to update the game to the latest version, and it simply works.
You might argue that this is a bad example and that GTA V runs better on modern hardware, so let us consider Bloodborne on the PS4 instead, a title you will not find anywhere else and for which current emulation remains, at best, sketchy. I can insert that disc into my PS4 unplugged from the internet and play it immediately without any mandatory update.
Killing physical support means the end of this possibility for further releases, not that Sony has many exclusives these days, but for the handful of PS6 games that won’t make it to PC.
And there were ps5 discs that did this. I played Astrobot for a month with no downloads or updates.!
I agree it wasn’t the norm, but it was possible.
Were there any ps5 games that could play from the disc offline anymore?
I guess that was my point: that ps5 players already were used to having to deal with online content.
Fair point, I don’t own a PS5 so I can’t tell.
As I mentioned above, whilst not standard, yes there were titles that could be played without updates.
OK, I was looking over Does It Play and a lot do let you play without updates, although the site notes those can have a lot of issues before being patched.
It was more than I would have thought, since everyone I know with a ps5 seems to spend more time getting updates than actually playing, lol.
Consoles were always a walled garden from the very start, very purposefully so, and those things tend to squeeze customers once captured with higher prices and, sooner or later, fully enshittify.
So when consoles originally appeared I just kept gaming on the PC because it was an open platform and the only console I ever had was a WII (the original one) because their controller was at the time innovative, and honestly it wasn’t really worth it.
Then, specifically for the PlayStation there’s Sony, who have a long track record of anti-consumer actions that started when their leadership stopped coming from the Engineering Division and started coming from their Media Division (after they bought a Movie studio in the US), from their electronics becoming locked down and restrictive for users (they’re the ones who came up with Blu-Ray, which was way more locked down to block copying than DVDs were) to the infamous shipping of music CDs with rootkits (the “Sony Rootkit” scandal)
So this increasing enshittification of the PlayStation isn’t at all surprising and suspect it will get even worse than this.
Ultimately I think the PlayStation platform will end up dying.
Just get a console they said. Console just works they said. Why get a PC when it won’t work in a year they said.
This is why I don’t buy consoles. I can use a controller on my computer which is upgradable and not subject to one individual company dictating what I can and can’t do.
Why get a PC when it won’t work in a year they said.
Interesting because my Steam digital purchases go back to 2007 and I can still play them all.
My first digital purchase was the Orange Box and my second purchase was Psychonauts.
I had purchased Half Life 2 as a physical copy and it still works, too.
Sure they’re all just licenses, but a lot of effort has been put into me being able to continue playing them, including on Linux.
Yes, Valve is a different story because they’re a private company, but 20 years of license when I could play on any computer I owned at any time I think is showing that digital licensing isn’t inherently evil as much as it is widely abused for control.
Orange Box was my first digital purchase too!
If steam changed ownership and control, there is nothing stopping the new people from doing things similar to other big companies.
Many games are potentially a heart attack away from loss of access
Absolutely, that’s my point about them being widely abused.
This is why I keep a good chunk of my steam library downloaded locally and don’t buy always-online required games.
They’re actually not just licenses. When you download a game from steam you get the game data. You can back up this gamedata if you wish. Sure it will have steam DRM but thats something on can get around one way or another.
This is the power of open platform like PC
Real and based. If you get them on GOG, you can download offline installers with no DRM. My GOG collection isn’t as big as my Steam, but it’s also fairly significant as well. Heroic Launcher on Linux is sweet for GOG games (you just have to plan out wine prefix and directory structure to properly have updates install).
The same is true of Xbox consoles btw. You can back-up your game files from your Xbox to a external hdd and transfer them back to your Xbox in 50 years time and play them even if they’ve been delisted and Xbox no longer exists.
They are still only licenses though, same with steam. Steam still has verification servers. If steam disappeared you are no better off than if xbox did.
If steam disappeared you are no better off than if xbox did.
Steam DRM can be trivially removed. 3rd party DRM is a problem, but thankfully not all games use it and many games have had their DRM removed as well (either by the publisher or through crackers).
Just the second great video game crash, not quite a secret landfill of E. T. Games but this is just as bad imo
