Time to bring back physical media on PC?

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨SolarPunker@slrpnk.net⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

People want retail games and if the big 3 can’t cover that market a new and more sustainable subject will fill that space. Maybe it’s time to bring back physical media to PC, a more open system where publishers could make profit selling their retail games similarly to vinyls for music.

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Agent_Karyo@piefed.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
No, physical media is not useful for PC games, you want a DRM free installer (preferably with all relevant patches applied, both game patches and compatibility DLL/mods for older games), not the physical media (which may or may not have DRM).

This ship has sailed a long time ago on PC (~15 years ago).

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- SolarPunker@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I think drm-free indie oriented publishers like Annapurna could make a lot of money with physical copies.
  
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  - Agent_Karyo@piefed.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    That may be true, I just don’t see the point of storing the DRM free installer on a disc, something like an SD card which can be easily updated seems like a much better fit.
    
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  - tburkhol@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    As someone with a collection of a couple hundred CDs and another hundred or so DVDs filling my closet, I’m not really sure everyone appreciates the logistics of holding physical media for a couple-hundred-game library.
    
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  - IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I doubt it. At least for all but the most viral of indie games. Manufacturing physical copies is expensive and would involve minimum order quantity from suppliers.
    
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  - kahjtheundedicated@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I could see physical releases, at least as special editions, being a thing people would like. Though I think today SD cards would make more sense, at least if flash memory prices ever come back down.
    
    But a SD card with a custom label in box with proper box art and a little art book inside would be cool for fans and collectors.
    
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  - terabyterex@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    it costs a lot of money. digital is what help indies flourish. you no longer need a publisher.
    
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- Strider@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Physical media has long sailed but not drm free software.
  
  (I’m not sure which of those you’re referring to, just clearly stating)
  
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  - Agent_Karyo@piefed.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I was talking about data storage on optical discs, not DRM free installers. :)
    
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Fermion@feddit.nl ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It’s not the disc itself that people care about, it’s having a transferrable license. People want the option to rent games, or give them away/resell after playing. Physical media provides some legal protections for that because you are buying a license attached to the thing storing the software.

Digital distribution is a perfectly fine way to get a game, if it weren’t synonymous with big companies taking away your ownership of the right to use software you purchased. You can’t share a game you enjoyed with friends. If you lose access to your account you’re SOL. If the host server shutsdown, you better have had a stable copy installed/backed up.

People don’t hate digital downloads, they hate the consumer abuse they have enabled. Stop the consumer abuse, and only collectors will care about physical media.

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- qwerty@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That’s one of the use cases NFTs were meant for, noncustodial transferable digital property. Sadly, they got ruined by the ape jpeg grifters who didn’t even bother to upload the actual image to the blockchain. The entirety of Steam, Spotify, and Netflix could fit on a specialized blockchain like Arweave, but none of the publishers or big media corporations have any interest in doing that when they can “sell” them to you every 5 years or, better yet, let you rent them one month at a time. Maybe if one day people stop “buying” them, they’ll be forced to do that, but I won’t hold my breath.
  
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  - Flatfire@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Imo they weren’t ruined by grifters. NFTs are built on a flawed system that caters to exactly the kind of libertarian, free enterprise assholes who ate it up. If they weren’t running the grift, they were getting scammed themselves. Crypto is a mirage of wealth, and everything built on top of it is either only a vehicle for legitimate currency or laundering ill gotten gains. It’s just an unregulated stock.
    
    Signed chains of custody already exist, they could be inplemented and nothing is stopping any of these marketplaces from doing so. They don’t need NFTs, which have a needlessly complex set of requirements, to validate a game’s license. Any service could leverage their pre-existing DRM scheme to let you sell your copy to someone else, but that doesn’t give them the same benefits as someone buying a new copy.
    
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  - NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    That’s one of the use cases NFTs were meant for, noncustodial transferable digital property.
    
    How would you: make the key transferable and secret, while still notifying the original vender it happened, and collect payment, and keep me from selling and turning off the key?
    
    And once the vendor went away, no new keys would be issued. So why make a public crypto ledger, when their ledger suffices?
    
    Just like an NFT. Useless in this case too.
    
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  - FartMaster69@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I mean, there’s no reason NFTs are needed for that, a normal database would also work.
    
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  - smeg@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I think “Robot Cache” was a company that claimed to do this sort of thing. The only reason I had even heard of them is because they gave away a game for free, and ironically now they’ve gone out of business and I can’t even access the game anymore!
    
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turbowafflz@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’m like the only one I know with an optical drive in my computer and its not even a bluray drive. Maybe if they distributed on like USB drives? but that seems expensive

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- adarza@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  i’ve never had a hddvd or bd drive. there was one in a laptop we took in for recycling once. didn’t even bother pulling it.
  
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mlg@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
The whole point of PC is digital data though.

The original DOOM was shareware, you were allowed to copy and share it with your friends or online however you wanted because it promoted and popularized the game.

CDs on PC were always just a retail medium. Unlike classic consoles, there are very few PC games that run right off the disk. It was usually an installer.

I know people complain about Steam all the time with “you don’t actually own your games” but you do own your PC and the filesystem which means you can copy that data and do whatever you want with it. No EULA on earth is going to stop you.

Of course if it ships with DRM or relies on steam to launch, then yeah that’s lock in, but that’s where GOG and pirate repacks fill the space.

It was inevitable for consoles to go full digital because 90% of sales are digital and it gets the inherent convenience of digital media, but consoles don’t let you access the filesystem and do whatever you want. It’s a locked down system with a metric ton of security to prevent you from ever copying the game data.

Retail will also always reduce profit, especially for smaller developers who need to rely on a publisher to sell on their behalf.

Steam and GOG take a 30% cut, so it’s probably better to promote itch.io or some other platform if that’s a concern.

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arcine@jlai.lu ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I would honestly be more interested in a hard push for GOG, itch, and other similar DRM-free marketplaces.

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- orochi02@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Itch is just a marketplace tho so while most dont have drm i can Imagine games with drm can be added
  
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Auster@thebrainbin.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Personally, so long as it's DRM-free, physical, installers or zipped files sound like a good idea.

And like with vinyl, if it comes back, it's to be expected that it isn't as big as it once was. But being there, it's another option for the preservation and ownership folks.

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Mereo@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
No, it’s not beneficial. The difference between consoles and PCs is that PCs have an open infrastructure, which lets you back up your data to any medium or service you want.

For example, if Steam goes out of business and doesn’t release the DRMs, they will easily be cracked. You cannot say the same for consoles.

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- BladeFederation@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  There are also multiple places to buy from. Steam is pretty dominant, but only because they’re the best option. You can buy from Sony on PlayStation, that’s it.
  
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  - brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    That’s not really true. Most recent games I’ve bought, I tried to buy off Steam. But they weren’t available anywhere else.
    
    It also hardly even matters as no one on Steam is allowed to price below Steam. So they effectively control pricing power, like Sony; the screws just aren’t so tight yet.
    
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- adarza@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  if a popular console platform became a ‘free for all’, i don’t think its ‘protections’ would last very long under what would become a globally crowdsourced endeavour.
  
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  - doublah@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    You can’t crack a required server-side download
    
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mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
What I’d like to see is good selling indie games doing a “limited edition” or “supporter edition” 6 months to a year after they launch. Have it be a physical box, with an SD card or Blu-Ray with custom art, plus various bits of merchandise.

Essentially, get them to make pre-order or limited editions after the game already launched and garnered goodwill instead of trying to front load all the greed.

I’d definitely buy copies if games like “Sea of Stars” or “Ori and the Blind Forest” did this

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- VerdantTome@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I don’t know that it’s usually naked greed for indies, as much as it’s an effort to boost initial sales and get word-of-mouth going by preying on FOMO.
  
  But yes, I’d be behind delayed special editions. More than once I’ve found out that some indie game had limited extra content for early buyers, and when people asked later if that content would ever be more widely available, the developers gave a slightly smug “Nope! I guess you should’ve backed it / bought it at launch, huh?”-style response.
  
  I know that your life has probably been revolving around this game for months or years, but I only heard about it for the first time yesterday, and your backer campaign / launch sale ended 8 months ago. All you’re doing with that attitude is souring potential customers.
  
  I think it’s better to offer the extras again at a later time, as part of a special edition and/or a separate bundle. Plenty of games do this, too.
  
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carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
we need offline, drm-free installers and games that are not tied to the storefront you bought them in

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- VitoRobles@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  You just described GoG which I don’t even want to recommend after they sent a bunch of Nazi emails and then went “Oopsie doopsie poopsie sowwie”.
  
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  - carotte@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    yea gog can fuck off but the way they do games distribution is how it should be for everyone imo
    
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hoohoohoot@fedinsfw.app ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I like this, sure

Maybe something like CD/DVDs that Verbatim has, the ones made our of stone so they can last +100 years and are I think 50GB in space?

I miss being able to easily share fully functioning games…

Its easy to pirate and even legal in some places…

But I might buy physical discs with games if they are featured in some physical store!

Again as someone said I dont know about how DRM works on discs but we cant have that

A perfect standard has to be developed first. Go.

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breakfastmtn@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I’m all for people having discs if they want them but, man, I do not want that shit cluttering up my life.

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freeman@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
We have physical media on PCs, we even still have full control of them and can copy and modify anything we want.

Now you mean we should be buying some kind of disk which will actually offer us no more control and in fact was historically used for DRM.

Adding physical distribution overhead will definitely not help publishers (especially small ones or indie Devs) turn a profit.

Vinyl is horrible for consumers. CD was a format we eventually could use ourselves to copy and mix music to our preference.

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brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Also, I have a pet peeve:

I see a lot of people claim to want discs, but they haven’t actually used them given the choice.

Or buy DRM free. And they don’t.

For what it’s worth, I try to buy games from GoG first, first party storefront second, but that hardly even works anymore. It’s almost always only available on Steam. Maybe rarely on EGS, but then it’s not clear if the download is even DRM free, and it literally cannot be cheaper if it’s listed on Steam too, so that’s not really an option.

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NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
similarly to vinyls for music.

This one sucks so much. Vinyl coming back is awful.

It is heavy, it costs a lot and takes a lot of energy to transport

it is made of plasticizers, usually phthalates with lead as a stabilizer

it degrades from every use

the waste chemicals are often dumped into rivers and streams in poor populations

a lot of energy is used in the steaming and pressing

the sound quality is not as good as people think it is (inner distortion anyone?) and the “warm” and “feel good” sound are easily replicated in other ways. I don’t want to dwell on this one. Lets just say mastering and your equipment have a lot to do with this.
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- ms_lane@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Too bad they’re still the best.
  
  Loudness war is STILL killing CDs and digital.
  
  Vinyl is still unable to deal with stupid brickwalled tracks without making a 12" 2-3 tracks, so until the loudness war ends, Vinyl is still going to be the best format.
  
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  - NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    They really aren’t the best, for a lot of reasons, but I should not have brought that up. If anything you are saying the mixes and mastering for vinyl are best.
    
    Anyways my point still stands. These are incredibly environmentally nasty. The music industry loves them because they can sell the same music to you yet again.
    
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tal@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Most laptops don’t have an optical drive any more. I haven’t looked at desktops.

You can obviously buy an external USB one, or sell things on USB thumb drives, but…

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- Zephorah@discuss.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The internal optical drives for PC used to cost under $30, and then you just need the right case.
  
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  - tal@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I mean, you can definitely get drives. I bought a LibreDrive-flashed USB 4k/UHD Blu-Ray last month, because I wanted to (legally) play UHD Blu-Ray movies on Linux — I don’t know how much longer they’ll be around, and the quality is generally higher than streamed video. But just saying…the infrastructure to use the optical media directly is not generally there any more, I think, on most out-of-box PCs. That’s an additional barrier if you want to sell the stuff in that media format.
    
    goes to skim Dell desktops
    
    Yeah, it doesn’t look like they have optical drives these days.
    
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- SolarPunker@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  People still by cds and vinyls, I don’t think is fair to compare today with the apex of physical media, an adjustment in numbers is inevitable.
  
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  - ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I built a desktop five years ago, and when I asked the Micro Center employee where the Blu Ray drives were, he looked at me like I had two heads, then pointed me to a sad little bin with loose drives with no boxes. People haven’t had disc drives for a long time.
    
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  - Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Physical media on PC is as dead as it can get. I haven’t touched an optical medium in the last 15 years, and i don’t have a drive going on 10 years now. I also know of noone around me that is still using CDs/DVDs, the last time i messed with DVDs was when ripping every last one of them, and even my grandma has opted for converting her music to FLAC and freeing up the largish space her music Cds were using, making her collection both save from bitrot and a lot more readily available. I could get behind distribution per USB-Stick, but sticks that are fast enough to handle 100GB+ installations comfortably aren’t cheap in comparison to optical media, and in most cases it would only mean they are used for a single time when copying them to a network storage, in the end just creating tech waste.
    
    DRM-Free installers - that’s where it’s at, and that is what i store; alternatively, for PS1/2 games, compressed CD images are the way to go.
    
    Collectors Editions are the exception, but even here I would prefer the USB stick format if it had redundancy built in - nowadays that is the truly universal storage that any computer can use without needing extra hardware.
    
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LNRDrone@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Physical releases cost a fair bit to make, from just printing the media and designing the package and so on. And then there’s storing and shipping the game around the world so people could actually buy it.

Shipping could be out sourced to the customer easily enough (some kind of direct to customer sales model), but the rest is still a good chunk of extra cost for the publisher. Manufacturing like this also typically has to be paid in advance, so harder for smaller publishers and Indies to get it done in the first place.

I don’t think we will see a comeback of physical releases for PC other than as a collector items, it just doesn’t make sense for normal releases at this point.

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- mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  I don’t think we will see a comeback of physical releases for PC other than as a collector items,
  
  Sure, but you say that like it’s a bad thing
  
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Hxrmit@thelemmy.club ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
While this would be great, we’d have to stockpile on said media which is less convenient. Discs were great but they’d always get lost somewhere and/or used a lot of space when stacked.

I’d personally prefer to download the files on a hard drive which could hold thousands of games while saving space. Only problem being that these games would need to be transferred to an SSD for better read/writing speeds. On the other hand discs would only need to be plugged into a disc slot which may or may not seem very convenient considering how most laptops/PCs don’t have those, meaning we’d need to buy these extra.

Either way having pretty discs with collectibles like in the good old days seems like a good idea if you’re into that sort of things.

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- SolarPunker@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Yes I think we can exclude the old-days mass distribution but I think a more niche physical pc market could potentially be profitable in the future
  
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silver_wings_of_morning@feddit.dk ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I never want to go back to physical media

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brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Nah. The hardware for discs is gone, and rather slow anyway. USB/SD cards are too expensive.

And digital key reselling? That’s a whole can of worms for grifters to squeeze.

Not that it doesn’t suck. I want to (legally) archive and resell my games.

…But I don’t know a good alternative.

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Dookieman12@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
No. Optical media bad.

The issue isn’t the copy being physical. The issue is the included license being too limiting.

Licenses aren’t new or necessarily bad. Even physical retail copies of movies with a license. You know that FBI and InterPol warning at the very beginning? That’s your license. It basically just limits you to personal use. If you charge people money to come to your house and watch it, or if you charge money to rent it, you need to purchase a copy that comes with a license which allows that.

If you were around during the days of movie rental stores, if you ever lost a rental movie and had to replace it, it would often cost $100 or more because you were replacing a copy that came with a rental license.

An ideal purchase would be a digital copy with a license similar to the one included with physical retail copies.

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Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
If they are DRM free so they could be resold or shared/traded then I’m on board. The only two problems I have with digital shit is you cannot share/lend/resell it and, if you’re not in control of storing it, there’s no guarantee it will always be available after purchase.

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billwashere@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Digital games are fine as long as I have to ability to trade and sell. That’s the only thing digital games gave me that I cared about.

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mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Limited time games do this quite often. Its dun to get physical media.

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grinning_serpent@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
No one actually wants physical media other than collectors and preservationists, and the latter can just write digitally obtained files to storage after the fact.

Modern games are very bloated, and even optimized 4K textures still take up a lot of space. We’re past the point where discs are remotely feasible as a way of efficiently storing games.

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Pika@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
As much as I prefer physical release. Optical media is dogshit overall. it’s restrictive on size, subject to bit rot, and prone to being damaged if not kept properly.

I would much prefer the ability to have it software/digital side, but have actual ownership of it.

Hell it could even still have DRM as long as I had the authority to sell it or trade it again when I was done and didn’t involve crashing my performance like denuvo does.

Digital media could 1000% work well its just companies don’t want it to work well as a digital release with the benefits of physical media actively means less sales for them.

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