Do you still support physical media? | |||
| Always | 32 | 41.56% | |
| Mostly | 19 | 24.68% | |
| Sometimes | 9 | 11.69% | |
| Rarely | 8 | 10.39% | |
| Never | 5 | 6.49% | |
| Don't care | 3 | 3.90% | |
| Don't have the space | 1 | 1.30% | |
| Total: | 77 | ||
The only time I buy Digital is when there's no other choice. I got Fire Emblem Three Houses and Engage digital because at the time Physical wasn't available and my rewards were going to expire. I got both with DLC content for both for $40 total.
Given the choice and opportunity, I will always choose physical.
| ST.Tachyon said: The thing, this year i stopped buying games. |
Overall I agree, but need to point out that 66% of PS5 discs don't need a day 1 patch to work properly. This is according to doesitplay.org and that number goes a lot higher if you don't care about online multiplayer. Something like 20% of games won't make doesitplay's criteria simply for having a major online multiplayer function. So games like Halo 2 from OG Xbox would sit in the "needs internet" side of doesitplay's methodology. Anyways the takeaway is that 86% of PS5 discs are just fine offline.
Cerebralbore101 said:
You would be surprised how easy it is to restore a disc drive. PS2 drives go out a lot but there's a program you can use to recalibrate them. Gamecube drives have surface-mount capacitors that just need replacing. It's a laser that reads data, with a belt and a small electric motor in it. Lots of modern mods let you download the game to an HDD instead of constantly read from the disc. This saves the drive from running 24/7 and massively extends its life. It's basically what the 360 and PS3 did with game installs off the disk. If you were to store a disc drive for 100 years you would need to replace the belt, caps, gears, and grease. The rest would be fine as long as the caps didn't leak, but changing caps to a non-corrosive substance before storage would fix that. |
All of what you described is a lot more effort and maintenance than just storing duplicate copies on SSDs or HDDs (the latter for long-term storage.)
For collectors, of course, this might be worth the effort. In the same way old record players are maintained a hundred years out by enthusiasts. But it isn't as robust a solution as duplication.
sc94597 said:
All of what you described is a lot more effort and maintenance than just storing duplicate copies on SSDs or HDDs (the latter for long-term storage.) For collectors, of course, this might be worth the effort. In the same way old record players are maintained a hundred years out by enthusiasts. But it isn't as robust a solution as duplication. |
Well of course you would make backups. Just pointing out that original hardware isn't too much work to keep running.
Cerebralbore101 said:
The 85% number is a cherry-picked lie. For all of 2025 the number was 78% digital, not 85% as per Sony's records. And they count $1 indie games the same as a $70 purchase. |
To an extent, yes, but at the same time, numbers don't lie.
The article I quoted mentioned that in the US in 2025 across all platforms, physical game spending was at $1.5 billion TOTAL. Again, that financial figure is across PlayStation, Nintendo, and Xbox combined. That's for the gaming industry's largest market. For reference, physical game spending peaked in 2008 at $11.6 billion.
That's an 87% drop in players buying games physically. And this is at a time when many games now cost $70 for a physical copy, when in 2008, it was mostly $60. That alone paints a bleak picture. And while we don't get exact figures like this in Europe, the article further mentions that the European market is in a similar state.
Ultimately, what I feel Sony should have considered is passing the cost onto consumers. Like what Nintendo is doing with the Switch 2. Often, if you want a physical copy, you're paying $10 more for a Switch 2 physical copy than you would for a PS5 or Switch 1 physical copy. Whether Sony charged an extra $10-$20 for physical copies, the hardcore crowd would've, for the most part, continued buying. Because the option at least remains. $1.5 billion, while nowhere near the figure it used to be, that's still a LOT of money, and shouldn't have been scoffed at.
You called down the thunder, now reap the whirlwind
57,923
Sony is now upset all their YouTube videos are comments spamming about physical. Not to mention downvotes.
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