Why the hell don't games come on physical media anymore?!?

[Victor1234]

I still have some of the boxes. The cover art was too good to throw away and should inspire future generations to attain immortal glory!

 

[Norfleet]

People who think there is some magical difference between the bits on a disk and the bits on your internal storage are very strange, the codex seems to have a lot of them.

There's a natural appeal to physically possessing a thing: An aspect that Steam COMPLETELY LACKS, since your game is a brick the moment Steam decides it is. People tend to mistakenly correlate this with physical ownership of a disk (which, if it is still powered by Steam, is still completely worthless the moment Steam decides it is).

 

[jimster]

With physical you own something you can resell instead of dumping your money into the void.

But yeah the next best thing is DRM-free with a PDF of the manual.

 

[Norfleet]

With physical you own something you can resell instead of dumping your money into the void.

That's where your misunderstanding is. If you own a "physical" disk of a Steam game that requires a Steam account linkage to function and won't function without Steam, you own a worthless piece of plastic that doesn't do anything and has no resale value.

 

[Lucumo]

With physical you own something you can resell instead of dumping your money into the void.

That's where your misunderstanding is. If you own a "physical" disk of a Steam game that requires a Steam account linkage to function and won't function without Steam, you own a worthless piece of plastic that doesn't do anything and has no resale value.

Pretty sure most people understand that it's more of a mockery than anything else. Buying DRM'ed shit like that is nothing short of disgusting. Even the most beautiful box and greatest game manual can't cover that stain.

 

[Dadd]

With physical you own something you can resell instead of dumping your money into the void.

But yeah the next best thing is DRM-free with a PDF of the manual.

Nobody is going to buy your 20-year-old game that only you and 10 other people play. The money is already in the void.

 

[Ezekiel]

PC users never embraced Blu-ray drives. Didn't help that the copy-protection of movies was much more a pain in the balls than DVD. Screw having to install a modern AAA game with nine DVDs.

The fuck? The blu ray era was the golden age. Everyone had a bd writer for dem "legal" backups.

The adoption rate was tiny compared to DVD drives, practically nothing.

Only because they were on the market longer. Every laptop came with a BD-writer built in until like 2014.

For desktops, BD-RW drives were standard, unless you went out of your way to find a "combo drive" that could only read blu ray but write DVDs.

This was the standard until SSDs became popular, making HDD prices crash and allowing everyone to afford hueg multi terabyte hard drives, and online services like Steam showed up.

What? Where? My desktop (2012) didn't come with any BD drive. It came with a DVD writer and a cardreader.

Anyway, regarding physical media, I get my physical PC games from Japan. If Western developers/publishers don't want my money, I'm happy to spend it there instead.

It f it was a pre built system, it was probably one of those combo drives.

If it was a pre-built and Lucomo is a typical example of someone who just bought what was available and could not customize his drive option, then how does that show PC users embraced Blu-ray drives? There are a thousand features in Windows that I don't use, and many that almost no one uses, to use a different example. You put in as many features as possible in order to sell the item to more people. The BD drives were probably cheap.

 

[mindx2]

With physical you own something you can resell instead of dumping your money into the void.

But yeah the next best thing is DRM-free with a PDF of the manual.

Nobody is going to buy your 20-year-old game that only you and 10 other people play. The money is already in the void.

WRONG! Have you seen the insane prices PC boxed games are going for nowadays?! Nostalgia is a powerful aphrodisiac... as well as lucrative.


Oh, and I look at physical boxed games all the time...

 

[Lucumo]

PC users never embraced Blu-ray drives. Didn't help that the copy-protection of movies was much more a pain in the balls than DVD. Screw having to install a modern AAA game with nine DVDs.

The fuck? The blu ray era was the golden age. Everyone had a bd writer for dem "legal" backups.

The adoption rate was tiny compared to DVD drives, practically nothing.

Only because they were on the market longer. Every laptop came with a BD-writer built in until like 2014.

For desktops, BD-RW drives were standard, unless you went out of your way to find a "combo drive" that could only read blu ray but write DVDs.

This was the standard until SSDs became popular, making HDD prices crash and allowing everyone to afford hueg multi terabyte hard drives, and online services like Steam showed up.

What? Where? My desktop (2012) didn't come with any BD drive. It came with a DVD writer and a cardreader.

Anyway, regarding physical media, I get my physical PC games from Japan. If Western developers/publishers don't want my money, I'm happy to spend it there instead.

It f it was a pre built system, it was probably one of those combo drives.

If it was a pre-built and Lucumo is a typical example of someone who just bought what was available and could not customize his drive option, then how does that show PC users embraced Blu-ray drives? There are a thousand features in Windows that I don't use, and many that almost no one uses, to use a different example. You put in as many features as possible in order to sell the item to more people. The BD drives were probably cheap.

Hm, tough to remember since it's been a bit over ten years but I think I was only able to customize the HDD, if at all (might have been a different "product" then). Otherwise, I would have certainly got rid of that card reader. I also just remembered that I got gifted a laptop in early 2013 which did definitely not have a BD-writer but a normal DVD reader/writer, like one would expect. Did PC games ever ship on BDs? I've no clue where Zarniwoop gets the impression from that BD drives were ever standard on a PC (desktop or laptop). They were a choice, sure, but always less popular than DVD drives.

With physical you own something you can resell instead of dumping your money into the void.

But yeah the next best thing is DRM-free with a PDF of the manual.

Nobody is going to buy your 20-year-old game that only you and 10 other people play. The money is already in the void.

WRONG! Have you seen the insane prices PC boxed games are going for nowadays?! Nostalgia is a powerful aphrodisiac... as well as lucrative.


Oh, and I look at physical boxed games all the time...

Yep, bought the Princess Maker Memorial Box (sealed) like two months ago for 42300 Yen (~300€), excluding fees, shipping, taxes etc, which is like three times the original price. But with the major decline and almost everything being digital, there isn't much that is worthwhile to buy and before the money gets moldy in the bank account, might as well just throw it at older and overpriced PC games.

 

[Roguey]

There's a natural appeal to physically possessing a thing: An aspect that Steam COMPLETELY LACKS, since your game is a brick the moment Steam decides it is. People tend to mistakenly correlate this with physical ownership of a disk (which, if it is still powered by Steam, is still completely worthless the moment Steam decides it is).

Games on physical media have a far greater chance of getting bricked (disc fails, drm makes it impossible to install, see securom). Once you own a game, Valve cannot take it away from you (unless you violate their terms of service, pretty easy not to do).

"What if Valve shuts down?" They've been going for nearly 20 years. Any day now?

 

[†††]

All it takes is Gabe dying and Steam nuking your account for saying the N-word in PMs.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

(disc fails, drm makes it impossible to install, see securom).

It's amazing how much people try to forget this. I have games I cannot play because the DRM does not work anymore. So much for physical copy conferring ownership.

 

[AlphaYellow]

Physical media isn't failsafe either, the disc can rot and make it unplayable, so... yeah. I have a habit of backing up my really old CD-ROM games (and I have a lot of them). And new PC games are so expensive ugh.

 

[Lutte]

I threw away all of my physical stuff some years ago. Literally threw away, because I can't be arsed to deal with the time spent dealing with selling stuff online, packaging and mailing crap. You would have to pay me a great deal more than, say, the 40 euros I currently see on ebay for the french copy of PST with the poster to have made this worth wasting time. The sealed copies sell for prices that are attractive enough, but then, who the fuck keeps sealed copies of games in their homes apart from nutty collectors?

What does physical media matter? if you hate DRM then keep a cracked copy somewhere, if a DRM free version doesn't exist.

I did the same with music and books. No more paper books. Much space gained.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

I threw away all of my physical stuff some years ago. Literally threw away, because I can't be arsed to deal with the time spent dealing with selling stuff online, packaging and mailing crap. You would have to pay me a great deal more than, say, the 40 euros I currently see on ebay for the french copy of PST with the poster to have made this worth wasting time. The sealed copies sell for prices that are attractive enough, but then, who the fuck keeps sealed copies of games in their homes apart from nutty collectors?

What does physical media matter? if you hate DRM then keep a cracked copy somewhere, if a DRM free version doesn't exist.

I did the same with music and books. No more paper books. Much space gained.

How about putting up a single ad offering the games? So someone would take care of them. NIGGER.

 

[Infinitron]

A decade or so ago, "Steamfags" vs "boxfags" was still an active argument on the Codex. The boxfags were basically defeated by history, as the old gamer moral panics surrounding digital distribution, DRM, etc gave way to various identity politics culture wars. But I still remember the howling when Paradox Interactive went Steam-exclusive in 2013...

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

I can't believe people go to art galleries when they can look up jpegs on the internet.

 

[Lutte]

How about putting up a single ad offering the games? So someone would take care of them. NIGGER.

I may not care for a little amount of possible gain, but I sure as hell also don't care to let someone else make profits from my stuff. Let's get real, most people who still give a fuck about physical media are just looking to use it as a medium for speculation. I'd sooner bin my shit than give it away to some random son of a bitch.

 

[Gilius Thunderhead]

How about putting up a single ad offering the games? So someone would take care of them. NIGGER.

I may not care for a little amount of possible gain, but I sure as hell also don't care to let someone else make profits from my stuff. Let's get real, most people who still give a fuck about physical media are just looking to use it as a medium for speculation. I'd sooner bin my shit than give it away to some random son of a bitch.

 

[whocares]

I will not eat the bugs. I will not live in a pod. I will not use 2FA.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

People really overstate the fail rate of discs. I can't say I've had that happen ever, even with former rental games or CDs made in the 80s. Besides one disc failing vs a hard drive failing is a very different level of problem.

I do find it amusing and insightful that in the film world you can pick up some forgotten '70s or '80s film in a really nice blu-ray package at a reasonable price, while PC games basically get overpriced boxes of random crap where the actual game is incidental to the whole package.

 

[Lutte]

A decade or so ago, "Steamfags" vs "boxfags" was still an active argument on the Codex. The boxfags were basically defeated by history, as the old gamer moral panics surrounding digital distribution, DRM, etc gave way to various identity politics culture wars. But I still remember the howling when Paradox Interactive went Steam-exclusive in 2013...

It also helped that overall Valve didn't try very hard to lock down games on their platform.

Steam's DRM hasn't really changed since inception, and a single method of cracking works on all games that use this. Combined with a steam emulator for games that require steamworks APIs to execute (like achievements, save system, online bits) you don't actually need to redownload a specific cracked version of your game library for games that use this, should you feel the need for reassurance on whether your library will keep working if valve goes to shit.

Also, DRMs aren't mandatory on steam. If a game has DRM it's because the publisher wants it.

Here's a large, yet far from complete list of DRM-free games on steam :

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam

It took me a long while to accept steam personally, my account dates to 2009, steam came out in 2003. But ultimately it was the lesser evil. Do people here even remember Starforce? physical games in that same era started featuring DRMs that are a lot more obnoxious than Steam ever was, installing kernel drivers that could break your windows installation. Boxed copies were never, at any point in time, "the good guy" in the fight against DRM. You actually can't run some of the Starforce games on modern windows. At all. Keeping the stupid CD and its box does you no good.

Meanwhile companies like Blizzard and Ubisoft had introduced shit like "always on" drm, making valve look even better.

 

[Victor1234]

People really overstate the fail rate of discs. I can't say I've had that happen ever, even with former rental games or CDs made in the 80s. Besides one disc failing vs a hard drive failing is a very different level of problem.

I do find it amusing and insightful that in the film world you can pick up some forgotten '70s or '80s film in a really nice blu-ray package at a reasonable price, while PC games basically get overpriced boxes of random crap where the actual game is incidental to the whole package.

+1, I've even had my basement flood once with boxes of CDs soaked and they still worked after. But I would also never trust just the CDs (or Steam). Multiple backups is the way to go and with storage solutions so cheap these days, no excuse for not having them.

 

[Alex]

I suppose I should just be thankful I did get to live through the time where we got some good physical games. To be quite honest, I've never cared for boxes much, but some of those old manuals were really awesome. In particular I remember X-Com's and Sim City's. Funnily enough, the last time I saw a good manual that I enjoyed reading for itself was with Dominions 2, which is a lot more recent than any of the others I remember.

 

[Ezekiel]

People really overstate the fail rate of discs. I can't say I've had that happen ever, even with former rental games or CDs made in the 80s. Besides one disc failing vs a hard drive failing is a very different level of problem.

I do find it amusing and insightful that in the film world you can pick up some forgotten '70s or '80s film in a really nice blu-ray package at a reasonable price, while PC games basically get overpriced boxes of random crap where the actual game is incidental to the whole package.

+1, I've even had my basement flood once with boxes of CDs soaked and they still worked after. But I would also never trust just the CDs (or Steam). Multiple backups is the way to go and with storage solutions so cheap these days, no excuse for not having them.

Yes, I rip my movies and stuff and then keep the DVD/BDs as backups. But I've never seen disc rot in person.

They do take up more space than they should, though. Really wish CD jewel cases had been the standard across every disc-based medium, video games and movies included. There is no reason at all for the case to take up eight times as much space as the disc. Why so much taller and thicker than what's actually inside? The video game and movie industries must think we all still can afford big houses. It's stupid of them to continue doing that when almost everybody is moving to downloads and streaming, with space in the home often being named as a reason. They should be trying to keep as many as possible, and of the ways to do that would be to reduce the sizes of the cases. None of the CD jewel cases that I still own have cracked. Even if they did crack or the hinges broke, they are pretty cheap to replace, way cheaper than UHD cases. The inserts also don't slide out of the top or bottom like in DVD and BD cases, and there's not that problem of the transparent plastic stretching, becoming looser. The only exception should have been boxsets with many discs, where the weight of it all would have been too much for a CD jewel flipper case.