Submitted 1 week ago by iamthetot@piefed.ca to games@lemmy.world
Well they do talk about video game spending dropping by a whopping 10% compared to last year and hardware spending by an unfathomable 29% compared to the previous year. That‘s unheard of.
So yeah the entire game industry (and probably the entire global economy) is in a deep crisis and corporations are squeezing the last few bucks out of us before things will get very ugly.
The industry isn’t just “collapsing” through a series of failures. It mostly feels like the industry is choosing to repeatedly shoot itself in the face, while refusing to shut off the IV of “painkiller” made of powdered drywall and snake oil.
Well they do talk about video game spending dropping by a whopping 10% compared to last year and hardware spending by an unfathomable 29% compared to the previous year. That‘s unheard of.
I think its more that attention is being eaten by video apps and social media.
As an anecdote, I know a pretty nerdy couple that used to play coop games more regularly, but now just sit down to watch their YouTube feed mostly.
sell fewer physical copies of media
make more media digital-only
surprise, surprise - digital sales rise
brag about how people clearly prefer digital
x.com/charlieINTEL/status/2079561875507826898
Notice that since 2009 the trend of physical media sales. This isn’t a new thing here and was a trend that well before this whole “scandal” of getting rid of physical media from the three console makers.
It was the gamers that moved away from physical media well before the industry made these decisions. It was the gamers that decided convince is more important than having a physical copy of a game. This was something that the gamer market brough largely by themselves and you should focus on making sure we have the same rights over digital goods as we do with physical media, including the ability to sell our keys withing the ecosystem.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m still an advocate for having physical media but I’m not going to be some kind of hypocritical outrage machine when I myself have so much more digital games vs physical games and basically treat physical media as a treat just like vinyl.
I like collecting physical media but its mostly just physical license keys now.
DRM-free digital copies that can run on open-source software like proton or an emulator. With multiple copies on different production batches, manufacturers, and types of media at different sites.
Individual disks rot, data rotated across redundant disks will last forever. That’s how you preserve games for the next generation.
I play most things from a physical copy but I get them from GameFly. I probably only buy one or two games a year but I borrow probably two dozen.
Huh. The AI slop image shown on the post doesn’t appear at the link. Weird. I wanted to see more detail. From here it looks like a giant Wii that takes Laserdisc. The implication is obvious: games are getting too big for optical discs, so let’s use a bigger disc. Only Laserdiscs didn’t hold more than CDs or DVDs despite being the size of vinyl records.
While LaserDisc carried analogue signals (and held around 60 minutes per side — so, naturally, most which had movies were double-sided), the later LV-ROM data format held 3.28GB, way less than the 4.7GB advertised for DVD, which the Wii took (however, the Wii famously could not play DVD movies due to not including the video codec).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc
Of course, the issue is density, not disc size. CD and DVD are the same size, and hold 700MB and 4.7GB, respectively. Blu-ray is also the same size, and holds 25GB per layer, and holds up to 4 layers (however, only one side of a Blu-ray can be used, while DVDs can be flipped and the other side can be used).
So if you took BD-ROM tech and made it on a bigger disc, you’d naturally have more space. But then you run into another issue. With Blu-ray, you’re jumping between layers, and from the inner ring to the outer ring. This makes data retrieval slow. If you make the disc bigger, you’re doubling to tripling the capacity, but load times would go way, way up, as accessing stuff on the bottom layer on the inner ring would be nearly as fast, but accessing stuff on the farthest outer ring would take much longer.
No one’s really proposing LD-sized Blu-rays for gaming. The image is AI slop. AFAIK there weren’t even any vertically loading LaserDisc players.
…getting on topic, I only buy digital when it’s cheap. Usually you can get the physical game for much less secondhand.
The AI slop image
I’m not sure why you jumped to this, but its a stock image from 2025, from GettyImages
themirror.com/…/sony-sparks-global-outrage-surpri…
www.gettyimages.com/detail/…/2186493403?slot=11
A PlayStation employee demonstrates how to put a disk into the PlayStation 5, at the Sony headquarters building in central Tokyo on November 27, 2024. December 3, 2024 will mark the 30th anniversary of the first release of Japan’s Sony PlayStation, transforming the world of video games. (Photo by Richard A. Brooks / AFP) (Photo by RICHARD A. BROOKS/AFP via Getty Images)
Huh. Well, at less than one-inch squared, I was pretty sure that’s what I was seeing. I didn’t think to reverse image search it. I just figured they were being silly.
I’m leaving it. It’s good info.
Are you an AI!? Any human can see the size of that disc and from your link the size of a laserdisc like wtf
It only showed a thumbnail of that image. I saw what the other person linked — I wasn’t ignoring them, I just wasn’t on 11 hours ago when they posted it.
Games are too big to fit onto discs. You buy a physical game and still need to download 80% of the game…
And buying things digitally is just more convenient. You don’t need to leave the house, wait for delivery… digital games don’t scratch, get lost etc.
They get you by giving you an option that is just better 🤷♂️
Problem is you don’t own the digital games. Literally the only problem.
The only problem? What about being able to resell, loan out or borrow games? What about having more than one place where you can buy them?
You can lend out digital games on switch.
Pretty massive downside.
But also, your first two sentences are a huge exaggeration. The vast majority of ps5 physical games ship entirely on disk. You can buy them, insert them into an offline ps5, install, and play. No downloads, no internet required.
Yeah I get why people want physical games, but it just has too many downsides for me.
Please list those pros and cons of digital and physical. I’d like to see the methodology here.
It is a visceral reaction from people who feel like your choices have actively harmed their gaming experience.
Really the gaming industry has been shit as a whole since Xbox tried to pull this crap in 2013. They just kicked the can down the road a decade and we are now feeling it
Yeah it’s a moronic turn of the industry that you can’t actually play the game off the disc and have to manually manage your console’s storage. I have hardly bought any game the last two generations because of it. I’m not going to uninstall a good game for any piece of crap game.
Th3D3k0y@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Almost like they keep not making physical games available.
I bought my copy of Fantasy Life from Japan, because they didn’t make an NA Version physical copy.
The Japanese copy isn’t any different in any way. All translations are present on every version. They just didn’t want to sell a case in English.
HailSeitan@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Exactly. The junk food industry sells snacks made almost exclusively from corn, then IGCorn touts how consumers love corn-based snacks.
charokol@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
It’s more like the vast majority of gamers prefer the convenience of downloading over ownership