Here's a little something to energize the day!

RANT TIME

sorry the 90s nerd in me has to come out for a bit

:P ANYWAY

So the whole Sony abandoning physical thing. I get that there's a whole economic reality behind cost-of-production and that there's been a shift towards digital. And one might say gamers are selfish for not buying the discs that they claim to so badly want. One might even be correct in some instances. But there's a reason they're calling out for the discs, and it's not just to have a trinket on their shelf.

That's not even the point - So much of gaming now is not functional without the internet. Even discs and cartridges are sometimes just fancy entitlement keys and you still have to download gigabytes of patches and updates and NEED internet to play on day 1.

Okay, let's think about that. What happens when the company kills the servers behind this? You just lost the game (pun intended for those old enough to get it). Copyright law makes it illegal to host your own servers so there's no way to keep things running without corporate blessing (see how the user-run classic WoW servers were killed) and no company wants to shoulder the burden of keeping them running (see the reason for the stop killing games movement in the EU).

Unlike the 90s and early 2000s when you got discs with more or less complete V1 software, there's no way to even play the V1 of the game offline now in many cases. Once the company moves on, your purchase was just lit on fire.

snort

Well they have an infinite money glitch because they've made it so you don't *own* the game, you merely *license* it. That's another problem that needs fixing, and it's so endemic in society today that lots of software and IT pros, as well as gamers are responding to it negatively.

Basically, all is rent.

Good luck getting a perpetual license for something like Photoshop or Office now. (Office has them, but still gets around it by EOLing support and then making it a pain to keep using it). Everything is pay [forever] to play in an economy where everyone is getting laid off, inflation is skyrocketing, and AI is causing hardware costs to just explode with no slowdown in sight (at least until the circular funding between the big players is brought under control).

Yeah. The real reason gamers are crying is not so much the disc as they want to OWN what they pay for and be able to play it at any time, even if the company behind it's gotten bored with it because they need to move on to the next shiny thing to make line go up again. I think they would be happy if they just had a way to permanently archive the thing offline in a workable state in some fashion and the community be allowed to run their own servers to keep the thing going.

You lot are really showing your age here

Too bad for you Big Money owns the law

Doesn't make it untrue, Swiss Miss

anyway, until these tensions are resolved, gamers and those of us who believe in the right to be able to own and archive our digital purchases will always be irate, and dare I say it, a little self-centered.

I have spoken.

What is 「 Suburban Senshi 」 if not decades late and filled with stale references?