For those who don’t know, there has been somewhat of an uproar due to Playstation’s announcement about stopping making disks.
I don’t think it will matter to them if I boycott them. But that won’t stop me of not buying their products.
Same thing with Target - my yearly $200 I spent there before I started my boycott - won’t even ping the radar. But my ‘boycott’ still going strong.PlayStation sold more PS5 without BD reader than the one with. Consumers have already voted
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Sony has rigged the game though, and you’ve bought into it.
Your physical discs are only as good as your ability to download the game files and day-one patches from their servers. For the average user, there really is no benefit to having a disc.
I hate it, but Sony made the choice for us as far back as the PS3.
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“And i own it forever”
We are not talking about the PS2 or even PS3 here though. These new games do not fit on a disk and require constant updates and connection to servers. Any game that requires you to connect to the internet, even if you own the disc, you don’t really own. They can shut that down anytime they feel like it.
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Do you have a source for that? Because I know for a long time the disc version outsold the digital by a pretty wide margin. And the pro doesn’t count because it doesn’t offer a disc option.
I’m pretty sure that was in the media release from Sony but I could be mistaken
Feel free to link this media release
This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs
That’s about games, not consoles.
According to Circana (formerly NPD), as of October of 2024, 82% of PS5s were the disc version.
I bought the one with the disc drive and buy physical games as much as possible. I honestly always felt ripped off paying full price for a console game without getting the physical media. The problem is that nowadays, shipping games before they’re fully cooked and patching later has become the norm. Buying discs of brand-new games doesn’t actually let you keep the full experience anymore. You can resell them though.
Did the same thing
It’s kinda not only customers fault. Sony charges much for the bd version plus 9/10 of the games require huge downloads and installs even if they are physical. Most people just don’t see the point anymore.
If the disk cannot install and play the full game, then it holds little value as physical media for preservation. At that point the only value it has is for collectors.
Or someone who wants to resell it when they’re done playing it. Us old dudes did that often. You could always get a little of the cash back from a game you could use to put toward a new game. With digital it’s full price and no resale.
Or someone who wants to resell it when they’re done playing it
you mean the days when a $80 game could be resold for $5?
Yeah, but every game has an expiration date if you have to rely on a server still being live to download the full game, which is kinda my point.
On top of reselling, you could let friends borrow games that you weren’t using.
To add to what you’ve said, Microsoft has effectively abandoned physical media as well, with Nintendo being the last hold out whom is constantly lambasted for their prices. Computer gaming had completely abandoned physical media for over a decade.
No. And even if PS and their home electronics division died, Sony has their hands in too many pies for it to hurt them longterm as a company; they’re in the cine and ENG industries, they make still cams, they make image sensors for everyone, and last time I thought they also had an industrial imaging division, Sony as a company will be fine even if they lost PS and their home electronics division.
To put it bluntly, Sony is in the position now, that RCA was in when they were in their prime, only Sony has yet to have a CED moment where RCA killed themselves in their stupidity with the CED. And no, Betamax and MD don’t count as neither of those formats killed Sony as a company, the CED killed RCA as a company.
Noup, it’s not going to have any effect. Like the other person said. People hqve already voted with their wallets and will keep voting the same way, because for some reason not buying something is completely unthinkable to way too many people.
Plus like I pointed out, even if PS and their home electronics division died, Sony themselves will still live on because they have their hands in basically everything. They have a pro audio and video division, including ENG. They’re in the still cam business and make image sensors for pretty much everyone else too, and unless that changed, they also have an industrial imaging division as well.
Also, Sony barely makes dedicated disc players anymore, only having one model each of 1080p and 4K BD players in production, and I feel like those won’t be much longer for the world either.
Sony’s future dedicated media player is probably gonna be a glorified Roku-type streaming box; effectively a thin client to stream rented media to.
I’m surprised they even still make traditional AVRs and speakers and didn’t switch exclusively to soundbars or drop out of that market entirely yet, even.
That too, even if through some way gaming market crashes completely. There are multiple other branches that will keep Sony afloat.
As for second-hand physical games, from PS4 onward, there’s the chance that a lot of your discs might not work once support is dropped for those consoles as most of them are glorified license keys.
Nintendo made that concept literal with the Game-Key Cards and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Switch 3 if one actually happens, dropped carts altogether, and the Switch 3 effectively become a glorified tablet that you lost access to your games on after support is discontinued because it’s digital-only.
The only thing that’ll kill Sony as a company is if they have a CED-level screw-up as the CED was such a massive screw-up that it killed RCA as a company, and Sony has yet to screw up that badly. I make the RCA comparison because RCA in their prime, before their stupidity got the best of them, was basically in the position Sony is currently in with having their hands in basically everything. I really feel like Sony and other big companies for that matter, should treat RCA’s demise and the CED debacle that caused it as a cautionary tale, but that’s just my opinion.
Nope. You will own nothing and you will love it.
(Nobody was buying disks – boycott for DRM free offline or something useful)
When was the last time a boycott worked?
On the right, Bud light after the transgender ad. On the left, people have called for boycotts for so many things it gets drowned out as noise.
The BDS movement had a lot of successes.
No it wont.
Since covid, physical media has been declining sales. Since games and other media are only getting larger, it makes sense to have it digitally instead of multiple disks. Consoles and PCs are being made without disk drives.
And even dedicated BD players are seemingly on the way out as most of the major manufacturers either severely pared or discontinued player production outright, assuming they’re even in the home AV business anymore to begin with.
Sony just has one model each for a 1080p and 4K BD player, I don’t know what Panasonic is up to with their players if they even make anymore, and beyond that, boutique videophile brands like Magnetar and Reavon were still making players last time I checked, but they’re ludicrously expensive.
Assuming Sony discontinues their dedicated disc players and moves exclusively to streaming boxes, they’ll be done with physical media forever. And I’m still surprised they even make traditional AVRs and speakers and didn’t kill those in favor of a couple soundbars yet.
Exactly!
It’s just Sony, look at Nintendo. They are trying to transition from cartridge to code for digial downloads. Steam has exploded the last 10 years and everything is digital
It’s not a bad thing, tech is just evolving. People can make the comparison to cartridges when disk based consoles came out.
Its a bad thing for two reasons:
- It destroys any form of ownership people have over digital assets like games, movies, etc.
- No ownership destroys the second hand market. This hurts for a number of reasons:
- Preservation can now only be done illegally
- Access to gaming and other media becomes more expensive
- Large corporations get to decide what you can / cannot play. Removing games from storefronts and consoles is a lot easier than hunting down physical copies.
That being said I have no issue with digital only, we just need legislation that forces some form of “ownership” beyond just a license.
The fifth part has an asterisk: Access can still be denied for physical copies, too. The Crew was proof of this, not to mention all the old G4WL CD titles which are effectively paperweights because their DRM is defunct and there’s no crack yet for a lot if them if there ever will be any, and as for BD movies, in theory the studios could revoke AACS keys for a given group of media and render those media into coasters as well.
Audio CDs are DRM-free at least so they’re pretty much immune to that, but if Sony had their way with their rootkit DRM and didn’t get successfully sued over it, audio CDs would be DRM-encumbered too, thankfully they didn’t get their way and did get successfully sued over it so audio CDs remain DRM-free to this day so you could rip them to FLAC and do as you wish with that copy.
I’ll answer with a question that should well serve as an answer
What boycott?
It’s working for me. I didn’t even know about the boycott and I still don’t have a playstation. It must have succeeded in controlling the narrative.
no
No.
- most people don’t know about it
- many actual children won’t care
- many “gamers” are little better than children
or the main point, modern games can’t really fit on physical media.
Discs is probably not the future but we could go back to cartridges with solid-state storage and get more than enough for a large game. It doesn’t have to be particularly compact so I assume companies could save money on not opting for the most state of the art densest drives
I suppose. But I remember old games came on multiple disks.
I also think that chasing every higher graphics has reached diminishing returns. Style counts for more than fidelity, I think.
Probably not.
If I know gamers, it will be just as effective as the Modern Warfare 2 PC boycott back in the day
The general population doesn’t care about discs or even owning their game. I think one-vendor consoles are on their way out though. There will just be normal computers in fancy boxes and Nintendo left after this next gen runs its course imo. About time tbh.
The lack of affordability in the console space will do more. I’d ballpark 95% of playstation purchasers have no idea about Sony’s announcement. And when it finally happens, they’ll just do whatever they need to do to make the game run. But if they just can’t justify the money it takes to do what they need to do, then sony won’t get the money, and they’ll notice.
But no, playstation won’t notice the blip of people who refuse to purchase for long-term ownership reasons.
