this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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Discs have just been a physical license key for a long time now. It's kind of wasteful to even ship discs and the plastic cases anymore, some kind of little card with a chip on would suffice.
What most people get irked about is loss of ownership, which can be a separate topic with careful management. For instance, if you buy an ItchIO game, there’s no DRM and you can copy it anywhere - I imagine many would be fine with digital downloads if everywhere used that system, but on the corporate side they’d likely be grumbling about piracy.
Yea, but I dont think anyone who is buying a console these days cares about ownership like that.
Physical media died a long time ago on PC. The DRM-free options exist as downloads.
That's what they're doing with Switch games now and people are still getting their panties in a twist.
Personally I've long since switched to all digital downloads. Even if it eventually becomes inaccessible, either I don't plan on playing it more, or I'll pirate and emulate it.
Optical discs are extremely cheap, I wouldn't be surprised if it's cheaper than a 128MB chip of storage.
I meant enviromentally. I couldnt care less about the monetary cost to the companies.
maybe, fabricating chips and soldering to boards doesn't come without environmental costs either
obviously the companies won't care about that enough to find out lol
That would be way more reasonable than wasting Blu-ray's for less than a percent of its storage capacity being used by a fricking stub.