Surely you are joking? Nintendo and Sony don't owe their exclusives to anyone and are totally justified in making exclusive things in order to sell their hardware.

Besides, not all PC games are available on all platforms either.

Piracy is never justified.

Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire

All this will do is shoot themselves in the foot.

Those who are happy to go digital will see no value in owning a console when you can get the convenience of steam on PC.

Those that like physical media will quit or pirate. For me Switch 2 was going to be the console to remember with all the great games coming to it, but then when 90% are game key cards or code in a box, it become the console I want to forget. I haven't even unpacked mine yet or any games to play. I have lost all interest in gaming on consoles.

Mobile gaming will eventually be king as it's convenient and most those games I can still play since the first smart phone come out.

Retro console will now be the thing to own as it's plug and play, no need to worry if you will loose access to the game.

This is just me venting. The dream of freeing myself from Sony hardware has been crushed; I’ll no longer be able to play the games I love so much on the best platform...

Don't take me too seriously.

Not in principle they aren’t. That’s all DRM. If digital games were inherently associated with accounts, there would be no file-sharing of games.

If anyone wanted to, they could download a DRM-free copy of any game playable on pc, copy it to an SD card, add a custom sticker, box, manual, and sell that as a full game and that game would be fully playable as long as they have a game launcher. That’s literally all a “physical” game is. They just add DRM to prevent that. GoG for example does not with their games. File-sharing sites have those updates too.

I think this is the future model. Either free production or patronage. Current tech allows games at like PS3-4 level with a small team. And AI will make that exponentially better. Yes, state funding as well.

Again, that has nothing to do with physical media. If you want to be untethered to companies, you can just file-share your games or buy games from GoGon PC and use the heroic launcher. This just has nothing to do with digital vs physical. It’s DRM, which means copyright, which means it’s a question of wanting and not wanting to file-share ultimately. The ownership people want already exists on PC. It.s just illegal.

I think copyright is never justified. It lets people manufacture scarecity that doesn’t exist so they can sell an infinite supply at any price they want and make definitionally exponential profits from what is materially worth 0 currency. File-sharing is just people acknowledging this how obvious this reality is and how easy it is to interact with. You can limit infinite supply forever. As soon as it’s copied, legal or not, it’s no longer theirs in anything but name because they are not the sole possessors of it anymore.

All of this is to say that video game ownership is incommensurate with being against file copying and file sharing. Companies do what Sony is doing because it is otherwise trivially easy to simply copy any game infinitely in literally less than a second and subsequently share it infinitely. Its abundance of supply craters demand for their games, because they have to compete in price with $0, something no one can do.

Whenever you “sell a physical game,” you are selling a combination of the physical media it’s on plus the game itself. This is true whether the media is a disk, a cartridge, or a console. The reason this is not illegal is because you’re kind of just selling the physical media. Again, without DRM, it is trivially easy to just copy the file to multiple SD cards and sell each of those. You don’t own the game - you own the physical media the game is on and you’re selling that, because you legally can’t just sell the game. When you sell a used book, you’re not selling the story - you’re selling the paper the story is on. You don’t legally own the story. The copyright holder does, and they have a legal monopoly on distribution.

What they don’t have is a physical monopoly on distribution. I have no sympathy to Sony or Nintendo or Microsoft or Valve or CD Projekt Red, but they do what they do because this business literally cannot survive the physical reality of non-rivalry and $0 marginal cost of reproduction. Sony making their systems digital only makes it exponentially harder to file-share games, meaning they can actually more effectively artificially limit supply within their platform before they are ultimately cracked. CDPR is sheerly operating off of non-existent good will, which is crazy to me.

EDIT: Here is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. I didn’t even know this existed. I just understand hardware and software enough to know that this is possible and that this is how it would work.

Someone made an operating system that allows you to download DRM free games directly onto an SD card and this operating system will automatically boot your DRM free games. The fact is that even if you legally purchase these games, which is the specific intent of this specific software since it’s not meant for file sharing or file copying free games, this is completely illegal in the USA at least unless you download the original file onto the SD card directly from the store you buy it at the moment do you buy it. Technically even moving a file from one folder to another is copying it and copying a copyrighted file is copyright infringement. What I just said literally has legal president. There was a case that makes this true.

So again, this has nothing to do with physical games and everything to do with the legality of file sharing and file copying. In other words, privacy.