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GameStop Boss Says Disc Drives Should Be Required On Game Consoles (www.gamespot.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/gaming@beehaw.org
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"It would be great if people had to buy more of the thing," says guy who makes money selling the thing.

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[–] 58 points 3 years ago (21 children)

He is obviously biased by his business interests, but frankly he is ultimately correct. Once consoles are digital only, console players will lose the last form of control they have over anything they own.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    You don't need CDs for that, and CDs don't prevent that.

    As the other user pointed out, most CDs don't even have a playable form of the game on them anymore. You usually need additional updates to actually play the game (or in the case of those steam installs, the CD doesn't even have a bare minimum on it)

    Technically you can own a game as a digital install too, just they won't deliver it that way.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (6 children)

    Most? That's definitely not right. Every single game I bought up to the PS4 could be played without any downloads.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (4 children)

    Every single game I bought up to the PS4 could be played without any downloads.

    But they still couldn't be played directly from the disk, which is part of the point of the comment you replied to. Every single game I have for PS3 requires it to be installed onto the console in order to play it.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    This is why I edited my last comment to say explicitly "played without any download" rather than "run from the disk", the comment I replied to was missing my point. I couldn't care less if the disk goes spinny or not, this is not about storage technology, it's about control over the games you buy. The point is owning games without being bound to online services, which a disk that can be installed directly does perfectly fine.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Unless it needs a day one patch, then you're SHIT OUTTA LUCK

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago (10 children)

    They're all digital only now. There's no reason, at all, to have optical drives in consoles. With the advent of direct nvme to video memory you have to load content to the nvme anyway because spinning g plastic sucks soooo much. Today SD is actually cheaper per gb than Blu-ray.

    Want to purchase a physical copy? Buy it on a SD card and get a $10 usb SD card reader, which will be compatible with every console anyway.

    My prediction will be that the next gen (PS6) will go 100% download only, get shat on then start up a service with gamestop or someone to distro encrypted game installs onto WHATEVER usb media you bring in.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    Today SD is actually cheaper per gb than Blu-ray.

    Just checked Amazon prizes for the first best SD card and Bluray disc. This is a lie. Discs are still less than half the prize.

    And you didn't take into consideration that it's much cheaper and faster to press the data onto the disc than writing on an SD card when you do that in great numbers.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    You should check prices on the 2GB SD cards not the high end ones because the disks usually contain that much or less. Most AAA games only have the game INSTALLER on the disk, and still require you to download the game in order to play it.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (4 children)

    30 second search at 100gb (modern AAA games and the biggest Bluray)

    Bluray is $10 a disc, microsd is $8 and you get 128gb and can get bigger media, which doesn't exist for Bluray.

    That doesn't account for mass production, fewer people care about physical media with every passing year.

    Physical media will still exist, but it won't be optical. Opticals advantages over cart just don't exist anymore. You don't include a $80+ part on the bom when less than 5% of your users want it and that 5% can get a bog standard usb device that can be had for $10

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    MicroSD is not comparable to the flash memory on NVME SSDs.

    Bluray is $10 a disc

    Bluray hasn't been $10 a disc since maybe 2003. Bluray discs are literally pennies to a manufacturer like Sony.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    Its incredibly niave to think it costs Sony, co-developer of blu-ray, $10 to press a game onto a blu-ray disc. Its probably costs a dollar or less to manufacturer a disc by bow. They can sell blurray movies for $9.99 and still profit.

    It will definitely be cheaper for Sony to stick with optical discs next gen if they don't drop the drive entirely.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (2 children)

    You are mixing having your own physical copy with needing to run games straight from the disk. Nevermind that there's no reason that games couldn't be sold on faster cartridges, you can still have a physical media that can install a game into the console. Offline, without relying on an online service that will inevitably close eventually.

    As it is, with disks and cartridges, they can't make it so absolutely every game must check with their online services. They have to make sure grandma in the boonies can make little Timmy's game work right out of the box. Without them, there's nothing stopping them. They could even straight up say that "no game could be expected to last more than 10 years", and I see enough people that already seem ready to fall for that. Nevermind that to this day there's people playing the nearly 40 year old Super Mario Bros.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    They have to make sure grandma in the boonies can make little Timmy's game work right out of the box.

    ...and yet, most AAA games cannot do this, and require you to go online and download the game assets after you put the disk in the console.

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