“We’re physically sending you a code to download the game. The servers you’ll download the game from also physically exist.”
At this point we should have had game copies with little read-only USB drives in them.
Read-only to the end user, but companies can update them with their unique keys.
But because of anti-consumer fucking everything all we have is this live service shit.
The only way anyone will be able to play this game in 20 years is through piracy archives.
And that’s how I’ll be playing it this year. I just don’t care to pay $70 for something I can’t own in any way.
I believe my last experience with physical discs was GTA V PC, it had like 6 DVDs and several discs were partially bad. I had to polish them with toothpaste and stuff to get them to work. IIRC it took like 12 hours to install 60GB and then I still had to download a ~20GB patch before it would let me play.
Codes in physical editions are one of the most useless goods in the world, purely offering something in physical stores which does not need to be bought there.
Some years ago (actually probably a decade or so), I fell for a game like that. My internet speed wasn’t great at that time, but the game was pretty large, so I wanted to buy it on disc. However, when I opened the box at home I saw that nothing was included except a code. It wasn’t fraud as it was clearly labeled on the box, but unsuspecting me didn’t even know codes in physical boxes would exist.
We live in a society
I’m just gonna say, I have never in my life been one to buy the “deluxe edition” or “ultimate edition” for games as it always seemed like a cash grab. But as someone who was legitimately considering buying the constellation edition, after YEARS of major fucking hype for this game…this one decision is making me hesitate. Why even sell a physical case then?
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How to kill game reselling 101
This has been an ongoing trend for years now. Microsoft wants everyone to rent GamePass instead of buying a game physically forever.
Remember when this was like a big deal though during the XBone launch?
And then they just…quietly introduced this new way of killing physical copies. And hardly anyone cares.
Physical copies were dead in November of 2013.
People just can’t accept that the moment a game needed a day 1 update of 40+GB that their physical game disk is just a product key you can hold.
You haven’t been getting the full game on disk (and by extension, owning your full game) for literally a decade now. DRM isn’t even a question anymore, hasn’t been for a long time.
I’ve known this for a long time. I just think making a fucking game case and it having a literal code inside is just worse.
What’s the point of buying the physical edition then?
There hasn’t been one for more than ten years now.
Games stopped fitting on disk media during the PS4/XBOne launch, you’ve had to download 90% of the game (it’s almost like the disc is a product key 🤔) ever since then. Had they decided to, you could have been fucked out of your DRM even WITH A GAME IN YOUR HANDS ever since then.
People are really out here a decade after the death of physical copies acting like NOW it’s finally being killed. Shits been dead for years, you just couldn’t see it until the game companies finally stopped giving out discs due to it incurring costs with no real value.
That’s always been a great detriment to preservation but this stops even trading in or borrowing games, akin to the XboxOne idea which was widely panned. They severely damaged the long-term aspects of physical media by shipping incomplete discs but now they’re damaging the short-term benefits too.
I’ve been almost exclusively PC where physical media died long ago, but there will be piracy and much longer time to buy a product legitimately (look at GoG). Console losing physical copies means a near monopoly on the pricing and distribution of games with no means to recoup costs by selling, rent a game (outside of their first party service) or share with friends. It all sucks.
I’ve been buying purely digital since half way in PS3 simply because you can share the games with another account, so if my wife and me want to play something together, we have to buy the game only once. Saves a lot of money but I always missed the feeling of reading the instruction manual and drooling over the artwork.
I remember being a kid and reading the manual of a new game on the way home. Good times.
As someone who literally hated having physical copies. This means nothing to me lol. Sucks for the collectors but as stated. Physical discs were basically obsolete keys for the actual game
