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Conina 8 hours ago
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SanAndreasX said:
ConsoleWarVet said:

If physical media disappears, there’s nothing stopping publishers from leasing the license to play a game. Imagine spending $80 dollars a year to keep a game in your library.

It won’t start that bad. At first, the option to lease a game will seem like a good deal. $10-$20 for a new game? Doesn’t seem so bad. You can still choose to buy the full game, after all. But several years later, terms of service changes. Prices go up. Permanent ownership is replaced with a longer lease. Prices go up. The length of the longer lease shortens.

And an AI uses all the metadata that was gathered about purchases and time spent playing to optimize pricing for maximum profit. It will seem normal by this point. Like macrrotransactions (not a typo) and roadmaps.

I see how things are, I know how things were. A disc-free console is just like horse armor DLC, testing the waters to see how much people will tolerate. It won’t stop there. It will just be the beginning.

And that argument was brought up 20 years ago.

It fell on stone-deaf ears, as did the early warnings about what Steam would do to physical media. 

And over 20 years later

  • you don't have to spend a monthly/yearly fee to keep Steam games playable in your library
  • you don't have to spend a monthly/yearly fee to play Steam games online
  • no Steam game licenses were deleted from your account
  • multiplatform games on Steam are cheaper than the console versions in most cases
  • they offer consumer-friendly "bundle completion" prices (if you already have some games of the bundle, the bundle price goes down)
  • you don't have to pay $10 - $20 to unlock "next gen features" (higher resolution / better textures...) if you want to play your old games on newer hardware
  • some upgraded versions are added for free in your Steam library, if you have the old version in your library (f.e. Bioshock 1 + 2 Remastered, Final Fantasy VII, Yakuza Kiwami 1 + 2, Serious Sam 1 + 2, Conan Exiles, Divinity: Original Sins, Little Nightmares, The Sinking City, the Metro games, Skyrim, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games, Doom 1 + 2, Quake 1 + 2, Portal, Half-Life 2, The Witcher 3, Mafia 2 + 3, GTA V, Borderlands...)
  • the digital versions have better compatibility to newer operation systems than the physical versions
  • you can play tens of thousand Steam games on PC handhelds (and laptops without disc drive) due to their digital nature... disc checks of physical games would be problematic on those devices
  • you can play almost any single player game in Steam's offline mode
  • you have a consumer-friendly return policy (physical games normally can't be returned, if they are opened)

Last edited by Conina - 7 hours ago