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Soundwave on 12 May 2025
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RolStoppable said:
Soundwave said:

People will pay whatever publishers charge for digitally because they will have no choice otherwise, and that's basically the end of the discussion on that. If it's $70 digital, then it'll be $70 digital unless you can make your own Mario Kart or GTA or whatever. 

Even for home consoles, the disc drive is essentially useless. A Blu-Ray drive is basically like 50MB/sec max at top speed, that's pathetically slow when the SSD in the PS5 is 5500MB/sec. Discs are dead. 

That leaves cartridges, but to get equivalent speed to the UFS 3.1 internal storage the Switch 2 costs more, the same way faster speed SD Cards are more expensive than slower ones. It doesn't come for free. Once the whole "yeah but you can get the physical copy for the same price" thing goes out of the window so does most of the appeal of physical games. 

Sure when you could get it for the exact same cost, that's one thing, but once gamers get a taste of having to pay more, most are going to bail out and switch to digital only. 

But even putting that aside, virtually all 3rd party games will be Key Cards, they already are, it will get worse not better once the PS6/Next XBox show up and don't have any physical media period. 

That's the kind of arrogance that Microsoft displayed with their Xbox One, "You will buy it and you will like it."

It isn't arrogance if virtually every hardware manufacturer is essentially of the same mind. 

That's just market reality. 

You can still buy movies on physical disc for example too ... most consumers don't want to. Same for music. Sure there is a tiny audience of hipsters that think they're cool causing a small surge in vinyl record sales or something but by and large most people have not bought disc based media for movies or music in years if not decades at this point and gaming was never going to be in the long run that different. People got used to it with movies and music, the hold outs will get used to it for games, it's not the end of the world. 

Just because there's a loud minority on message boards that is going to be dragged into a digital age kicking and screaming just is what it is at this point I guess. I don't have a strong opinion one way or another. 

Nintendo will carry the torch of offering their own games on actual carts for this gen, but even that is not very appealing when they are no longer subsidizing the extra cost of the cart + packaging + shipping. It's one thing if you can get either option for the same price, but when you as the consumer have to actually pay the extra cost for the cartridge + packaging + shipping yourself, well then it's not such a great deal anymore.