Do you ever think about the rise of digital distribution and the receding physical space of games...

I don't necessarily mean value in an exclusive monetary sense, but also in the sake of convenience, sharing, re-selling, trading, and the novelty value of a collection. Show me a book shelf of games, I'll be impressed. Show me your steam library and I'll click the drop down menu and filter to installed.

What a darn shame

That's where people start sharing copies without losing their own- in other words, torrents, DDLs, etc. Since you can't transfer title to your license, you give someone a perfect copy instead. That's on the companies' heads for denying something as obvious as sharing.

I like physical games, but will use digital distribution if it's more convenient.
When I buy a game digitally I pirate it, and put all my pirated versions in my backup. The publisher gets paid, and I get a copy of the game that I actually own. I could burn them to discs and make a physical collection if I wanted, but I'm lazy.

What really annoys me is that companies insist on making fuckhuge games even though we download them all digitally. I have a 64GB USB stick for free vidya that I share with friends, and I thought that was overkill. That's barely enough for one AAA game nowadays.

*20 dollars

there's a lot more unfortunate grey area with file sharing which also kind of ties into the point of EULAs. It's not a controversial thing here, but for more general audiences - a co-worker would be able to borrow my copy of gal gun, it's just me giving him the case. If I wanted to share it digitally, I'd need to crack the game, upload it, send him the link, and it'll be a much more tedious task more regular consumers wouldn't be as happy with.

I don't like digital libraries. It's handy and convenient and everything else, but leaves you at the mercy of whoever actually owns the library. Fuck that.

Download and keep an archive of cracked games. If you're feeling crafty, you could burn them to discs and make custom cases and covers, maybe even booklets. Steam can just turn off the valve whenever they want and there ain't shit you can do about it.

Consoles are getting the worst of both worlds when it comes to digital copies. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of casual gamers aren't embracing digital because they can't sell it back to Gamestop after they beat it. Unfortunately there's no answer to this because none of the console companies are interested in changing the current system.

yeah, I think digital is pretty bad on pretty much every service, it's why I bought the "journey collection" so I could have a physical copy, instead of buying the game digitally. Digital could have been like $10, but I got a $20 physical copy I will have forever.

The physical market isn't really dying on consoles, it's definitely shrunk a bit, but it still exists.

Digital is great as long as you pirate it

Not unless the rotational velocodensity or electronic interfettence gets to it first.

I'm very intersted in what happens during the collapse of such a system.
Be it steam/origin/uplay/etc. What happens ? Will people go batshit ?

aren't estimates for optical media pressings 75-150 years? Depending on if its CD-R, DVD, BD, etc. I imagine my copy will outlast me.

Digital Distribution is in many was superior but I just like owning a physical product.

Why would game prices go down when everything else like music and films have gone up with inflation and jew taxes, in my country game prices have stayed the same while in the same timeframe film prices have gone up 3x what they used to be. The only exceptions are Bethesda and Call of Duty who charge a jew tax and games get as high as $140 in my country, but I paid $100 for Donkey Kong Country 3 in 1996 and the RRP for Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze was $100 in 2014, I imported it from bongistan for like $60.

They will go cry on reddit and then subscribe to the competitor

I never much liked physical disks for pc since I often lost something that had the registration code on it, and the install discs would get lost or damaged by the time I needed them after the first install, digital fixes that problem for me.
Fuck digital distribution for consoles though, it was probably the reason the one major advantage of consoles vanished.

pretty much all physical copies of games will outlast you. Burned discs have a short life time, especially cheap ones, but a proper, pressed optical media or solid state cartridge will be around longer than you are. Cartridges can also be "re-burned" fairly easily.

*$10

Yeah, but you'll lose it during the next 10 years anyway.

I still have my baby pictures, I think I'll be good.

Why? Do you think corporations and companies like having LESS money? What benefit is there to companies to sell their games for less? Especially when they know so many will buy the games at increased prices anyway? Look at how they've been cutting apart parts of the base game and selling it as on disc dlc. Digital distribution just helps to increase companies profit margins at the cost of quality and service to you.

Even on PC, you don't actually own anything in your digital library, you're just borrowing it indefinitely, basically.

Yep. The same idea applies to physical copies, you are purchasing a "license" but to my knowledge there has been 0 examples of a company visiting registered customers to collect discs with expired licenses.

There have been recent examples of digital distributors cancelling licenses.

The price of running online distribution becomes cheaper and more reliable every year relative to the user base, and Gabe's net worth has gone from 1 billion during to 4 billion in 2016. On top of all this Steam as a service really ropes users in with account size helping maintain user loyalty. Society collapsing is what will cause these services to die.

I wasn't sure how long they would actually last for, but I suspected that discs would actually outlast an individual, I know cart batteries on N64 games are all dead at this point but these can be replaced, and of course someone could reprint carts themselves, especially with the Roms being so widely available, but that costs money.

They can also edit content you already own if you own it digitally, I think was it Michael Jackson songs were removed from Vice City due to the licence expiring, not on hard copy though.

It always annoys me how people don't look after their shit, my uncles were the worst for it where you could never find the discs for certain games because they always swapped the cases or never bothered putting them back in a case when they finished.

Well there is also the option of a company going under. Which seems more likely with EA or Ubishit.
But it's still possible even for steam.

With me, it's a case of putting the discs somewhere, letting that place be, then coming back years later, and finding out that half the discs mysteriously vanished

optical media varies, burning is the least permanent method of data printing. The way games are mass produced is they use a pressing machine which copies the layout of the master disc and these last a very, very long time. I think by the time we're in our 80s, 90s, etc our Saturn and playstation discs will start losing their held data.

yep, this brings up another point. If you lose it, it's YOU who lost it. Not a company that said "yeah you can't have this any more." It's your own fault, 100% your responsibility.

Vice City and San Andreas I believe. You can mod them back in, but this is yet another hassle.

It's possible for Steam but it's severely unlikely, it's the defacto standard and there aren't many ways they could fuck this up, for most other services that disappeared Users didn't have thousands of dollars of value tied up in them.

As unlikely as it is, that's no excuse for having paid hundreds of dollars to "buy" things that can be taken away from you at any time for any reason. That's not okay and nobody should think it's okay because it's normal these days.

You gotta take into consideration that there are many other factors besides material cost being operated here.

For starters, digital distribution started when physical distribution was still the norm.
If you had a steam-like site and you wanted to sell a game going for 20$ on Gamestop, why would you put it any lower than 20$? You can just drop a single dollar and it's already a better deal than the competition, no need to go even lower.

So yes, the difference you don't see in price is basically mark up they make off everyone buying their games. But this doesn't mean it's all profit, they are now free to spend it in marketing and PR and community moderators and other non-sense, meaning in the end they don't get much more than they used to get but the price is still the same. There's just a few more cats eating from the same bowl, that's all?

And lastly, this ain't no communist utopia. Value doesn't come from how hard it was to create it or even the materials spent in making it.
Value comes strictly from just how much cash people are willing to pay for it.
You see the games being sold for PS4 at 70$ and you wonder to yourself "Why are these games so expensive? How can they be worth so much?"
Well, they might be worth even 10$ to you, but several people still think the full price is what it's worth because they buy it at that price.

The only time the price of things goes down is when they don't sell. Then the seller considers lowering the price and meet the customer on a lower step until both agree in what it's worth. Case in point: Steam's many sales where a lot of people buy lots of games when they are dirt cheap because that's how much they are worth for them.
Not exactly a good example, there's more details about those sales, but it still works as an example

Funny thing with Okami HD's asia/pacific print is that it still requires an install that takes up around 9 GB of space. Also still no "Reset" credits theme if you play it in English, just like the Wii version before it. Otherwise, it's a pretty damn nice HD version. Shame Capcom gave no fucks about doing a native physical release here in the west, like it wasn't popular on the PS2 or Wii before.

Hilarious thing is when they don't even try to compete with preowned prices, as if the companies are in their own little bubble that people will still drop full price on a game even after the physical copies have gone down to half or less. Admittedly I lucked out a while back and found Tales of Zestiria for a measly $6, but it seems like the average local price is about $25-30. Meanwhile, I was checking something on the PSN the other day, and Namco STILL wants $49.99 for the game in digital format. And then there's cases where a game was given the "digital only in the west" treatment and even years after release still costs full price, barring sales, as there's no physical release to compete against. I suppose maybe those occasional sales that drop them to half or less are supposed to be the saving grace to make up for it, but come on.

I don't think too much of it, I pirate everything blatantly and unashamedly.

You're always at risk of losing content you've paid for but there should be something to defend consumers against digital distribution contracts ending and having their games revoked, I can understand companies removing their games from storefronts but removing it from someones library is absolute bullshit.

The way I see it there are three types of people who pirate:
1. Poorfags
2. People who just think "hey, free shit!"
3. People disillusioned with your shit and vow never to buy your products again
Of those three reasons the last one is the one that would bother me the most as a developer as the first two aren't really lost sales, no matter how much people would claim otherwise.

I'm indifferent about it. It's nice to be able to buy an obscure game and play it right out the bat without dealing with stores or scalpers with shitty shipping. However, the reality is that Valve has the power to pull the plug on their service is worrying thought. At least they can't do it anytime soon without making them into huge targets. I would hope digital media becomes more user-friendly in the future, but I won't hold breath.

Number 3 doesn't even register with me. When a developer has proven itself to me to be completely incompetent I don't play their games. Piracy doesn't factor in at that point. I'm not wasting my time.

Well there's that as well.

There are many ways to be incompetent, some don't necessarily involve ruining their game.
For instance, The Sims games are often quite fun and comfy but the expansion model that has you fork over about 100$ to play the full game is the oposite of that.
So I'm not gonna buy all that shit but I'll still play it, because I like the game, not the business model.

My gripes with Digital Distribution
>even though there's no middleman like the ESRB or retailers and Steam cool with just about anything that gets pumped out of Greenlight, publishers are too afraid to go for the AO rating or they keep censoring themselves because Muh hurt sales

The only advantage to digital distribution I can see is that if you're remote-playing your game system, you have access to your entire game library rather than just what's currently in the disk drive. Even that is a bullshit arbitrary restriction placed on you by decree rather than a technical limitation.

I'm only slightly less concerned about it on the PC side, if only because being an open platform, you're never going to lose your games to a banning or EULA change because if you're dumb enough to tie that shit to your library - then you can always just pirate the games like you should have done in the fucking first place retard. It's not as easy on consoles though, where you have to wait for a jailbreak or CFW, and many games are simply not archived for posterity.

Not to mention that, even with a physical copy, developers can always just patch out "problematic" content - be it bugs, design decisions, or flavor-of-the-month moral panic content via updates - but you can always just delete the local content, unplug the console, and pop disk in to get the original content back. You can't do that with digital since they control the only copies out there and can make whatever changes they want.

Not to mention that with games taking up to 80GB regularly, you'll chew through even multi-terabyte drives in no time. And most consoles only come with 500GB~1TB. If there was a decent internet infrastructure to back it up, it wouldn't be that bad - but having to delete and reinstall games to shuffle space around is horse shit anywhere outside of Japan/Korea. People used to bitch about having to get off of their fat fucking asses and walk six feet across the living room to change disks once ever 20 hours. Now if you want to play a game, you have to click play - then wait anywhere between 10 hours to three fucking days to start playing your game. I almost wonder if this isn't a way for game developers to take advantage of a bad situation in order to gently "encourage" players to only play the "latest and greatest" games - and delete their old stuff to make room, discouraging them from playing their old stuff again because it's such a pain in the ass to have access to your entire library at your fingertips these days.

Anyone else want to make their own physical copies of steam/pirated vidya and put them in pretty cases with custom printed covers on a pretty lightscribed disc? I'd be up for it if I had the funds for the materials needed and the shelf space.

Pic is from cucktaku because thats the only thing on google images that resembled what Im talking about

This has been a growing issue, especially since most casual gamers have 0 patience and mostly go digital out of "convenience". I will have 0 sympathy for these people, when all of the money spent on digital titles goes to waste when their platform of choice pulls some shit. On the bright side, it literally will take only one company (steam, sony, microsoft, nintendo, etc.) to fuck it up first, and then I would hope people will start to wise up and be more concerned with how much money they are throwing away on such an uncertain distribution platform.

While I prefer physical where feasible myself, a lot of games seventh gen and on have installs from the disc itself for whatever reason, be they optional or forced. So even if you do get a physical copy, can play whenever and on whatever system and save memory space, they still force you to eat a chunk of it. I can't even play Tales of Zestiria up there with my friend as of now since his PS3 is a 60 GB one and is almost full, and even with the bluray disc, there's a required 10 GB install to the system.

Wouldn't surprise me if the modern incarnations of some companies despise what they've made/handled in the past. Look at how Square-Enix seemingly goes out of their way to make sure old Enix handled games (Enix having been a bit of a rival of theirs prior to merger) don't see digital rereleases, to the point that ActRaiser seems to be the only old Enix game on the VC or PSN. Even as recently as a PSP, remakes and ports of old Enix published games (Star Ocean: First Departure, Star Ocean: Second Evolution, Valkyrie Profile Lenneth) don't have digital versions, so they can't legitimately be played on the Vita. And then there's the fact that in Japan NIS has put up Soul Nomad on their PSN, but here in the west NISA hasn't given a shit (although there's a valid point to the ">giving NISA money" thing), and it wouldn't shock me if the fact they have that game in their publishing history is now a point of disgust for them and they want people to forget about playing it on more recent systems.

I dusted off my NES two days ago cause I wanted to play some good old fashioned Nintenhard games.

And even after an hour of fiddling with the console and cartridge, I could not get the game to read. It's dead and the games are likely dying as well.

With no new NESes being made, I'll have to play my games on a shitty emulator like a PCfag, and all my old games will just be decorative fossils.

It hurts so bad, Holla Forums, I don't want physical games to die, but there is nothing I can do to stop the entropy from making me inevitably use a fucking keyboard while sitting at a fucking desk looking at a shitty computer monitor for a cartridge game you're supposed to play on the living room TV while stretched out on a comfy ass couch.

It's most likely the NES's cartridge mechanism at fault, not your games. There are replacement mechanisms, and custom ones that don't fuck up, but economics of scale aren't kind to them.
Alternatively get a toploader.

order new NES pins, they are cheap, replace them, disable the lock-out chip, and possibly get a new power supply for the system. Clean your cartridges thoroughly, use brasso if they're particularly dirty or just 91% isopropyl alcohol. The front loader NES is notoriously finicky and has been since they came out. It's a poorly engineered piece of equipment, but after a bit of replacing of parts, cleaning, they usually work just fine.

I guarantee you, your NES and its games are just fine.

Or you could just not be a retard.

You're a colossal faggot, aren't you?

Emulators for older systems can be run on toasters. Possibly actual toasters even. And since laptops are usually crap for vydia unless they cost more than your kidney but they are more than enough for emulators, especially for older systems, you can indeed play it on a laptop.

Now why does this matter? Because most laptops have some HMDI or VGA output and even come with cables for that shit, if you can't find one on your own, that you can plug directly to your TV. This means you can take your shitty laptop that you use for "work" and "research", put it in the living room after connecting a cable, pluggin a wireless controller, configure it on the emulator, have it run and BAM, you get to play the games you like on your big ass screen, sitting on a couch.

If you're worried about image quality, many emulators come with graphical options to either enhance the game if you prefer inovation or even ruin your screen to give you that crispy scanbar feel from ye ole times.
The only thing you really have to worry about are those shitty TVs with a delay on their display that's gonna make playing vydia very, very frustrating.

And if this shit sounds like too much effort for you… You never cared about those games to begin with.

stop doing that, that's not nice.

I really enjoy having a shelf full of vidya; there have been a few games I want to play that I just won't buy because I can't put them on my shelf.

For PC games, there is no benefit anymore since almost every disc you buy cannot install the game by itself; it requires some digital service to download as little as an anti-piracy authentication, or as much as the entire game.

Thanks m8, that's so awesome to hear

I have a 360 controller I can use but it just doesn't feel right

When I wanna play Age of Empires or Daggerfall, I'll turn on my computer. But when I wanna play console games I wanna have the console experience. Using an emulator is like pulling out to finish, you don't wanna do that, you wanna nut inside.

I've wanted to that with my pirated music for a long ass time, haven't gotten around to it though. Instead of spending money on LightScribe disks and drives, can't you just glue on a sheet of paper cut out to the dimensions of the disk instead?

You're making me want to blow chunks, that's an unholy abomination, like some sort of eldritch frankengaming.

As an idea, maybe take a few games you can't get working to a local used game store (if you have any) and test them on one of their NESes? Might help narrow down if it's just the system itself having issues or the games as well.

The whingey faggot could just get a PSP, or better yet, a PSTV and install CFW and put his emulators on there. Or get one of those austicPi machines, or a controller cradle for his phone, or any number of other fucking options. Shit, just wait a few years and get a used NES Classic, which has already been cracked to allow roms to run on it.

Or you could just realize that you're getting fucking old and that everything dies, and come to terms with that. You can't go home again.

...

i was more upset when consoles went from carts to optical discs than i was with the move to digital distribution.
having all my games (albeit mostly pirated copies) on backed up hard disks means i'll never spend hours searching for a case only to find it's empty, something else is in there, a scratched disc, or a battery has died and eaten through the cart.
i'm much less enthusiastic about drm that will stop me from installing/running my games from the backup, but i've made an effort in recent years to get cracked copies for the games i had with said drm on them.

It bothers me too, OP.

Mainly because I'm a paranoid piece of shit that appreciates being able to BUY THINGS WITH HARD FUCKING CASH.

Are you retarded? You're not gonna output 240p, you're gonna output whatever renders on your laptop. The emulators deal with the upscaling, what cable you use doesn't even matter.

No, playing with an emulator is like putting a condom before the fucking. It's something you setup up before you start playing but afterwards it's pretty much the same. The "console experience" is massively overrated, I had a PSX, PS2, a Wii and now a PS3 besides my PS, I know what the "console experience" is.

Besides, what actual sounds like more work to you? Setting up your laptop to emulate games and connect it to your living room tv?
Or hunting down for spare parts for an old console and replace them manually on your own?

I don't think you understand 240p.

What's the fucking difference? Even though i only buy physical copies to my consoles, i still have to spend half an hour install the goddam game. It's stupid, consoles were never mean't to be fucking computers, all i want is to play the game, there's storage enough on the disc to play the awful fucking game, so let me just plug it in and play.

Bunch of kikes. Gas them all.

And any moron that continues to feed Steam with money should fucking off themselves. Fucking mongoloids, you're buying products you don't own. Would you go to a supermarket to buy milk and then let them keep it in the store and you could pick up that box of milk and drink out of it anytime the store was open? No, because it's retarded. It's a kikery-way of selling goods without really selling them and you're financing that shit.

Emulators are OK if you just want to play the games. Especially with the NES, where it's accurate enough. You'll probably want to fix your NES anyway, because it's still nice to play on the original hardware.
If you want a modern NES equivalent, there's a company that makes them. They're fucking expensive though: analogue.co/pages/nt-mini
The cart loading mechanism is what fails on a NES first. Some people just replace it with a version without moving parts, like in kickstarter.com/projects/113891498/blinking-light-win-resurrecting-your-nes
Cheapest way to get a NES that won't fuck up is the toploader though.

I'm honestly not real sure why discs and carts even have forced installations, unless some of the game is compressed to make sure it all fits on the disc/cart or something (and thus requiring decompression and installation to use)? I know that sometimes doing an install that option has a noticeable improvement, but so many games have mandatory from-disc/cart-installs that you'd never see a difference since you can't even play them without doing so.

do you know anything about HDD swap?

Some games don't even have the game anymore. See THPS5 and the fact that the only thing on the disc is the tutorial. I wouldn't be surprised if other devs did the same.

That's becoming more and more standard. I see them on game boxes at WalMart all the time, where it says the box only contains an activation code. Bethesda games usually only have about 1/10th of the data you need, and the rest must be downloaded from online. It probably won't be long before console games end up like that too.

Metal gear Solid V only has the launcher on the disk

Yeah, I seem to recall some physical release of one of the Marvel vs. games on the PS3 was just a box for your shelf with a download voucher inside. I suppose in the cases where a game has a required install and also has a digital version you can maybe tell how much is actually on the disc, but I still kind of think those install from disc ordeals are decompressing files rather than a download from online (the way a forced update would be). I could be wrong though.

Actually just checked something for myself. How the fuck does Tales of Zestiria PS3 require 10 GBs of hard drive space for the physical disc version, yet the PSN digital version apparently only has a size of 8.7 GB? Or is this a matter of that being the downloaded size and not the "unzipped and installed" one?

never pay for a video game

It's like the same as how places like Fucking Gamestop try to push the idea that "it's the game itself that matters". Only, instead of trying to fuck you out of a case and manual (implying vidya comes with physical manuals these days), they're trying to say that the digital version has as much value as a physical one, that the data is what's being paid for so "of course this format of the game with no physical production cost is worth the same as a copy that went through an actual print run". It's the devs and/or publisher trying to trim the costs on their end without passing the savings onto the customer. I was actually a bit surprised that Sega wound up charging less than average for Yakuza 5 at its western launch, and even dropping the price lower for early purchases.

And then you have companies that refuse to do retail releases at all, with the only physical print being a limited edition. The digital version winds up cheaper, but still costs the same as a normal retail price and is only cheaper in comparison to a physical version with extra goodies (which understandably costs more).

FUnny I see this topic today of all days. I think digital releases are fine, but I prefer services like GoG where once I download the game there is no DRM attached. I can still lose my library if the company folds or decides to restrict it which sucks, but it's a lot better than Steam for the reason you just mentioned.

But generally I only buy games or content digitally that only exist digitally like the current round of AA or indie games and some types of DLC (like the Muramasa Rebirth DLC). If it exists as a physical disk I will seek it out. It's better for building a library and I trust my ability to maintain my catalogue better than I trust someone not to try and fuck my digital catalogue in the future.

Distribution is the expensive part, you mouth breathing retard. Physical objects tend to pay more taxes too. Companies were also taking away a higher % of the profit from devs/studios.
Physical distribution only kept some ultra shitty games from being as viable to sell and distribute, which is probably the only real good aspect to physical (if you don't take into account the passive consumers not claiming for fuller rights on digital, which is the real issue with digital distribution).
Games are -on average- cheaper now, at least if you consider inflation and other fluctuations to the value of the currencies. You also need to consider that price isn't only related to cost and that the current market is way larger and more eager to pay than ever (with a higher % of adult players with money to waste). And let's not even mention how much money is being wasted on marketing by the companies, that needs to be absorbed by someone and, as long as there are people willing to pay, that someone will be the consumer.

There's a site for CD/DVD covers for steam backups.
steamgamecovers.com/
Is it true that you can only backup steam games once though?

My only beef is I can't find a copy of Cave Story 3D.
Not 3DS, which is just a port of Cave Story DSi

There may be some exceptions, but usually no.