Submitted 1 week ago by VetOfTheSeas@discuss.online to gaming@beehaw.org
First they make their console come in versions with and without disk drives where the disk version is rarer and more expensive, now suddenly there’s not enough demand for physical games to keep manufacturing them.
“Shifting consumer preference” indeed.
Now watch everyone flee back to Xbox or Nintendo.
It’s truly enshittification at its finest. They think they’ve got all these gamers locked into the ecosystem bc PC building/gaming is pricing people out, Steam box will be over $1000, Xbox is fucking up stuff and cutting back, so it’s a race to fuck stuff up but just slightly less than the competition so they have a “competitive edge”.
I’d be surprised if Microsoft didn’t follow with the exact same policy tbh
I'm mostly just surprised that Microsoft didn't do it before Sony.
Honestly, they can’t afford to. They fucked up in 2012/2013 with the One and have been playing catch up ever since.
You’d ** THINK ** this would be used as an opportunity to leapfrog the competition, but I doubt it.
Unfortunately Nintendo’s been on the trend of basically being digital too with those shitty keycards that will cease to work if you didn’t download the game before they eventually cut their servers (or if you try to play it for the first time in a place without wifi)
Nevermind the whole “We can brick your device whenever we feel like it”. I’m genuinely upset because Nintendo has so many IPs that I love and literally can’t play anywhere else. Especially the fact that they actually made interesting and unique hardware like the DS and Wii, which can be a pain to emulate rather than just having a jailbroken console. Plus there’s way more steps invloved with Switch emulation compared to old consoles.
I’ve got a huge game backlog, but I was really looking forward to this year and the next after that Switch 2 direct :(
The way you worded that makes me think that you think Nintendo’s own games aren’t on the cartridge for Switch 2. They are. All physical Nintendo-published games must by policy be contained on the cartridge, not be a game-key card. The only exception (so far) is Pokemon Pokopia due to Game Freak not being wholly owned by Nintendo and thus not being required to follow the same policy.
Otherwise, 99.9% of third-party games are sadly game-key cards only.
And there we have it, the fabled year of the death of physical game media…
Zedstrian@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
They’ve whittled down game ownership and are now ready to toss it out the window completely to increase their profits.