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Don’t forget that they’ve halted PC ports for their games, including shitcanning nearly-complete work on Ghost of Yōtei.
They are also lobbying to make hosting your own videogame server illegal: https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/esa-bafflingly-declares-private-minecraft-servers-illegal-in-stop-killing-games-hearing-we-consider-it-piracy-we-have-lawsuits/
Sony is part of ESA.
Consoles were always a walled garden from the very start, very purposefully so, and those things tend to squeeze customers once captured with higher prices and, sooner or later, fully enshittify.
So when consoles originally appeared I just kept gaming on the PC because it was an open platform and the only console I ever had was a WII (the original one) because their controller was at the time innovative, and honestly it wasn’t really worth it.
Then, specifically for the PlayStation there’s Sony, who have a long track record of anti-consumer actions that started when their leadership stopped coming from the Engineering Division and started coming from their Media Division (after they bought a Movie studio in the US), from their electronics becoming locked down and restrictive for users (they’re the ones who came up with Blu-Ray, which was way more locked down to block copying than DVDs were) to the infamous shipping of music CDs with rootkits (the “Sony Rootkit” scandal)
So this increasing enshittification of the PlayStation isn’t at all surprising and suspect it will get even worse than this.
Ultimately I think the PlayStation platform will end up dying.
I already buy everything digitally so don’t mind that much personally, would be nice if they committed to long term backwards compatibility though
The biggest problem with this isn’t really the lack of physical games. (Although this is really disappointing as I used to love having a huge collection of games to look at.) The real problem is where we are being pushed because of this.
Digital games are basically just license keys for us. These companies reserve the right to revoke those license keys from us or just completely remove said game/movie/show from the store and your library whenever they see fit.
Not to mention the end if the used game market but I don’t feel like getting into that right now
I feel like defending consoles is a lost cause at this point. We can’t trust any of the big 3 anymore.
This was me a decade ago when Xbox suggested something like this. Nintendo was shutting down their old eshops and making purchased games unplayable and Playstation was selling shovelware on their online store.
In a dystopia like that… Suddenly, Steam’s digital-only storefront didn’t look so bad.
Xbox’s digital future was actually incredibly user friendly - it was all digital, but it allowed people to re-sell and loan their digital games. People were just too dumb to understand what was so good about it.
The alternative is what Sony are now doing - all digital with zero of the perks of physical.
People were just too dumb to understand what was so good about it.
I wouldn’t have trusted Microsoft to follow through on this in the long term. I have little doubt they would have removed that concession as soon as they thought they could get away with it.
It’s like corporations don’t know how to do anything but enshittify anymore
any company born after 1993 can’t make good products… all they know is exploitation, fire their workers, enshittify, be pink capitalist, eat hot cash & lie
(yes i know sony was founded before 1993 thank you)
So was Enron? I’m not sure why you chose 1993, companies have been shitty across all of time and space.
Oh no this is gonna drive the uncs wild. We’ll never hear the end of this.
I don’t understand why anyone cares.
I can’t think of a single game that didn’t require an install and then updates before playing anyways.
Games on GOG come with offline installer that can be used to install the most reacent version.
But you’re right, many games do require day 1 patches or even game data to be dowloaded but that makes these worse / lower in quality for many.
That’s gog, not consoles.
I seriously don’t understand the “disk” thing. I could see how you want your game to be on a physical media so you don’t have to download it when you want to play, but games are so big you couldn’t do it for decades already, and having a disk is barely saves you any time anyway. Meanwhile it’s a waste of materials, it get scratched all the time, and if you lose it it’s gone.
