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I'm pretty happy to have so much physical media these days.
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Apr 20, 2020 16:37
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I always want a game to be on disk in a box because it feels more like a real collection. When I moved a while back, I had gathered up all my retro games for storage and it really hit me how proud I was to still have many of the games my parents bought for me. It's something I think a newer generation of gamers will grow up to regret not having for themselves.
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Apr 21, 2020 01:13
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Freakazoid_ posted:I always want a game to be on disk in a box because it feels more like a real collection. They really won't because they grew up never having that attachment.
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Apr 21, 2020 02:11
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I love digital games because I don't trust my 7 year old to change out Switch games on his own.
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Apr 21, 2020 14:23
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Dameius posted:They really won't because they grew up never having that attachment. Maybe this is all my fault and I'm just a slob, but all I have to do to play Deus Ex again is clickity click in my Steam library. Owlofcreamcheese posted:There is like zero chance the console launch doesn't get pushed. Like even if the hardware is physically done every game is going to miss it's launch, even work from home it's not like a bunch of developers are going to be using devkits in their bedroom to make a next gen game. Like just not launching this year would be infinitely better than launching and saying "we have one game out, it's broken and unfinished, no other games are coming for 6 months" and even if everything opens tomorrow everything will still be behind. Lord_Hambrose posted:with special editions being all that remains as far as physical products. Horseshoe theory posted:Aren't all of the big console and game companies basically trying to cut out GameStop as being the middleman? The bigger factor is just the rising tide of digital distribution becoming more convenient as Internet infrastructure improves. Also, the increasing emphasis on post-launch development has shrunk the benefits of physical media. Ever install a game that's been out for a year and have to immediately download updates that are twice the size of the initial install? OneEightHundred fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Apr 21, 2020 |
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Apr 21, 2020 20:38
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Digital vs physical games comes up a lot in this thread. While digital is getting bigger, physical is still here to stay. Last month in particular was big for physical. Final Fantasy 7 Remake is sold out everywhere. Definitely due to a combination of shipping chains being hosed and everyone being quarantined. Physical media is more important now than ever, given that ISPs and digital storefronts throttling their servers due to all the stresses. Game publishers are trying to make physical media obsolete, but they've been doing it through consumer unfriendly tactics. Many AAA game publishers have been trying to phase out single player games in favor of live services that they can rush out the door in a bare bones state and sell microtransactions perpetually to. Luckily, there are smaller developers who have been doing really well making indie titles that are usually completed when released, or give free dlc expansions (in the classic actual content sense.) later down the road. And often times they'll wait until the game is totally complete to release the physical edition. There are also smaller, boutique labels that have been flourishing. Companies like Limited Run Games, Fangamer, and others have been specializing in make beautiful, complete physical editions of formerly digital only games. (How exploitative they are about limiting their numbers and variants is a different can of worms  , a different conversation altogether.) And this isn't limited to video games. There's tons of boutique labels for movies and music. Vinyl has been steadily rising for a decade now. Cassettes are coming back. You'll even see demand for minidiscs depending on what music scene you're into.
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Apr 21, 2020 21:42
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Detective No. 27 posted:
How many indie games even have physical release? Undertale and shovel knight getting collectors editions and that’s about it. I would beat most people that buy physical special editions of games already played the “real” versions and never even turn on the special collection version.
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Apr 21, 2020 21:54
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Pretty much every major indie game you can think of has been getting or got a physical release. Especially on Switch. I can't speak for all, but I'm certain many indie developers dream about seeing physical editions of their games. Just today, Hotline Miami got a Switch physical release across two different labels today and it sold out within the hour. They've also been working with bigger than indie but not quite large studios to release new physical editions of remasters of old games. LRG has been working to release many of the Star Wars remasters that came out or are coming out. As of this writing they're still taking preorders for the upcoming Streets of Rage 4 and the newly digitally released Panzer Dragoon Remake. They're even releasing a special edition of loving Chex Quest.
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Apr 21, 2020 22:05
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Detective No. 27 posted:
Yeah, like, special edition numbered copies. To hang on your wall. Like it's a 60 dollar disk release on a 10 dollar game. Physical releases of indie games are cool but I'm sure they make up like .1% of the actual first time player base. Almost no one who hasn't already played and loved hotline miami would buy a disk that costs 6 times the price of the game. Like I own a physical copy of cave story wii, because I loved cave story and buying a physical copy was awesome at the time, but I'll never actually play it that way. Nor will 90% of everyone that buys stuff like that.
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Apr 21, 2020 22:14
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Detective No. 27 posted:Pretty much every major indie game you can think of has been getting or got a physical release. Most of the indie physical releases have been from developers that already had a highly successful previous digital-only game, a physical release of a game that was already successful on digital, or an exclusive deal cut with the first-party (which typically only happens if it's being developed by a team of already-proven developers).
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Apr 21, 2020 22:19
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This is why I'm saying these things will find new life as boutique products. A lot of these things aren't being bought as someone's first experience with the title. They act as a way to physically preserve the games. On the film side, The Criterion Collection has been working for decades across many different changes in medium. They've been flourishing, despite all their movies also being available in digital form.
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Apr 21, 2020 22:34
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Detective No. 27 posted:A lot of these things aren't being bought as someone's first experience with the title. They act as a way to physically preserve the games. The implications are also different, i.e. yeah boutique releases might be enough to make video game physical releases exist, but is it going to continue being a major release channel for new games, or some low-volume side thing? It feels like talking about Red Box and Netflix 1.0 sustaining video rental when Blockbuster was going out of business, like "video rental" was still a thing, but video rental stores, not so much.
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Apr 21, 2020 23:28
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GoG is cool, but it's gotten far bigger than it's old games roots. Criterion Collection isn't even the only boutique label of physical movies in town. There's Arrow, Olive, Vinegar Syndrome, Shout Factory, and I'm sure some more that I can't think of. They all license from the bigger studios, similarly to Limited Run Games. Arrow has some crazy box sets. Heck, even the bigger studios are now making their own boutique labels for their own films. They're doing well, selling movies, some even older than anyone currently alive right now.
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Apr 21, 2020 23:46
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Doesn't GameStop basically break even or make a thin profit on new game sales and their entire profit model is on the buyback to resale spread for used games?
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Apr 21, 2020 23:56
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Yeah. The real meat of their profit came from pre-owned sales. They got super greedy over the years, offering less and less credit for trade and making the pre-owned games cost more and more to the point where a pre-owned game cost a dollar less than a new copy. They even got rid of their discount card a few months ago.
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Apr 22, 2020 00:08
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Somewhere around here I have a fleather cd case with, among other treasures, my Asheron's Call Beta 0 cd, and a cd of Quake I found sitting on a random shelf in a walmart which fit easily into my pocket.
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Apr 22, 2020 00:13
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I liked physical games but then I kept moving and it became a hassel and I'm looking around for missing games and it's just so much more convenient to have them digitally.... Until my hard drive crashes or my system breaks and stuff will be gone forever
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Apr 22, 2020 00:19
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HootTheOwl posted:I liked physical games but then I kept moving and it became a hassel and I'm looking around for missing games and it's just so much more convenient to have them digitally....  Once I got rid of all my physical games I don't really care about it was so much easier. I have not bought a physical game in years and it is really liberating. I think the last game was Persona 5? Hard drive crashes and house fires can both happen. Don't sweat it.
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Apr 22, 2020 00:23
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I really only want a physical copy of FF7 remake because I have an ancient launch PS4 and the HDD is nearly full. I also like physical copies of switch games. But im in the minority and even I’m buying more and more digital copies. I expect by the time the PS5 comes out ill stop buying physical copies entirely.
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Apr 22, 2020 00:36
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buy physical games so I can keep my job ty
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Apr 22, 2020 00:41
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Physical games are great, because you can sell them after finishing and get a good portion of your money back.
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Apr 22, 2020 00:59
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Gamestop announces executive pay cuts, will reopen some stores I was wondering what steps Gamestop will take to limp to the next-gen console releases. Sucks for them if the console launches get delayed because COVID-19 hits us with a second wave!
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Apr 22, 2020 15:03
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Solaris 2.0 posted:I really only want a physical copy of FF7 remake because I have an ancient launch PS4 and the HDD is nearly full. Physical PS4 games require a full installation of the game to the hard drive to function. The disk is just a license check after that. As someone who has used pandemic time to do a full catalog of their physical game collection, I am totally on board with keeping physical media as an option but the PS4 is pretty much the worst platform for it at the moment.
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Apr 22, 2020 15:14
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You also want to set aside some space for captures, so now's as good a time as any for Spring cleaning the PS4.
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Apr 22, 2020 15:15
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Lambert posted:Physical games are great, because you can sell them after finishing and get a good portion of your money back. When I was big into gaming as a teenager reselling games was a huge help for funding it. When I was finished with a game I was always able to sell it on for anywhere from 20-60% of its value, depending on who I sold it to, how new it was, how much I paid etc. And I could obviously buy second hand games myself too, which helped a lot as well. Is there any way to do that with digital downloads these days? Resell a CDkey equivalent or something? If not, paying full retail price for every game, and never being able to sell them on, must get very expensive.
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Apr 22, 2020 15:39
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That's what Steam sales and playing games five years after they come out are for. I'm playing Witcher 3 for the first time right now and it's great!
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Apr 22, 2020 15:45
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It would be very expensive if you paid full retail price for every game. I don't own any consoles, so I can't remember the last game I bought that didn't have at least a 50% discount.It seems like every Steam or GoG game goes on sale eventually. Origin is more stingy with sales, but the Vault makes up for that.
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Apr 22, 2020 15:46
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Big Mad Drongo posted:That's what Steam sales and playing games five years after they come out are for. QFT! If you're somebody who is OK with waiting 3 or 4 years to play a game you can play all the hits with none of the cost. I just played Wolfenstien The New Order for the first time a couple of weeks ago and it was great!
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Apr 22, 2020 17:35
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How are u posted:QFT! If you're somebody who is OK with waiting 3 or 4 years to play a game you can play all the hits with none of the cost. I just played Wolfenstien The New Order for the first time a couple of weeks ago and it was great! I bought Dishonored 2 off of a Steam sale this past Christmas for like $10. It's well worth it to wait months even years for games unless you have the money or just can't wait. Often times, you get the added benefit of a few years worth of patches, improvements, and sometimes free added content thrown in too!
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Apr 22, 2020 19:22
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I have so many games I still want to play but, perversely, a lot less time than when I had no money to buy games. Especially now, getting me to actually buy a new game on release is pretty hard. Why play a worse version of the game for more money? The last physical game I bought was probably Guild Wars 2. Because it was cheaper. Didn't go into a physical store though… Yes, it's me, I'm the one killing game retail!
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Apr 22, 2020 19:43
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for console I always buy physical, its always cheaper, not for pc though there is usually no price difference or any advantage
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Apr 23, 2020 05:59
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I only play games on vinyl 
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Apr 23, 2020 06:40
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raifield posted:It would be very expensive if you paid full retail price for every game. I don't own any consoles, so I can't remember the last game I bought that didn't have at least a 50% discount.It seems like every Steam or GoG game goes on sale eventually. Origin is more stingy with sales, but the Vault makes up for that. Console games do go on sale. PSN has a sale active basically all the time and Microsoft hands out Game Pass passes like candy. The only games that stay full price are Nintendo first party games.
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Apr 23, 2020 07:38
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skooma512 posted:Console games do go on sale. PSN has a sale active basically all the time and Microsoft hands out Game Pass passes like candy. Even then those are actually going on sale on occasion these days. And there's these Nintendo voucher thingies. Animal Crossing New Horizons has apparently broken records for digital game sales.
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Apr 23, 2020 08:32
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taqueso posted:I only play games on vinyl It is frustrating having to change the platter between each sub-level though.
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Apr 23, 2020 18:14
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pseudanonymous posted:It is frustrating having to change the platter between each sub-level though. I had Super Meat Boy on vinyl and it took me almost an hour to realize the disc was skipping.
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Apr 23, 2020 18:18
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Celexi posted:for console I always buy physical, its always cheaper, not for pc though there is usually no price difference or any advantage PC games you can pretty much always get for cheap on sites like CDkeys.com, that negates the advantage of being able to resell console games. taqueso posted:I only play games on vinyl It's true, they just play warmer.
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Apr 23, 2020 18:18
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Thanks to this thread I wondered, "How much data can you hold on a vinyl record?" and I found a bunch of people with absolutely no clue thinking you can directly convert "CD quality" MP3 bit rate to the length of a record. That made my eye twitch pretty badly. I couldn't find any information about a safe baud rate to use with vinyl. There have been vinyl digital encodings before but nobody seems to want to share technical details on them. So I decided that I can make a better half-assed estimate than those people. A good guesstimate for data rate on vinyl is 9600 baud. I wouldn't be shocked if it can be made higher since phone lines weren't exactly clear either, but vinyl is pretty noisy so 9600 feels like a safe estimate. In that case, each side of a record can hold roughly the same amount of data as one 3.5" HD floppy disk. That's not a lot of space, but people have made do with a lot less. What this means is that you can encode Super Mario Bros to vinyl and have plenty of room left over for orchestral tracks to fill in the music as you play. It will only take about four seconds to load the game with this design. Building a NES controlled record player to load the game and then play the appropriate portion of the sound track is left as an exercise to the reader.
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Apr 23, 2020 19:02
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Does it play Doom strikes again
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Apr 23, 2020 20:02
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Random Stranger posted:Thanks to this thread I wondered, "How much data can you hold on a vinyl record?" and I found a bunch of people with absolutely no clue thinking you can directly convert "CD quality" MP3 bit rate to the length of a record. That made my eye twitch pretty badly. You can never really get a clear answer for how much digital storage an analog medium contains. The answer is always "it depends". Like you can always store however much or little data as you want to engineer, however much you can deal with the reasons people don't use analog storage. Like record players that can deal with 5-50hz and ones that can deal with 5-120hz sound both exist as valid record players, and some records do or do not even have pressings fine enough to eve have 120hz change in the grove, but some do, and nothing particular would happen if you wanted to make one with 121hz as the max. And then because it's physical shapes on a physical thing whatever you picked could store different patterns of data more or less well. Like no record needle could read if every point was a totally random height from the previous one, as accurately as if data was encoded to be smoother, but again, how smooth it was forced to be would be totally dependent on the record player you bought, and it'd all just be a mess of tolerances you arbitrarily choose to say how much data a record can contain. Because it could contain more or less data depending what the data was.
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Apr 23, 2020 21:17
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