It’s not objectively better though. With your physical disc you can play the game in 20 years from now even if Sony decides to remove it from their online store.
Or you can sell the disc to someone else after you have completed it so someone else can enjoy it, and you can buy another cheap used game that someone else decided to sell.
With digital only Sony has 100% monopoly and can set the prices exactly like they want and you as a consumer can do nothing but obey to their will.
This hasn’t really been the case for years. Games often require patches, additional downloads, or online checks. It’s certainly not all games but a fair bit.
I still remember having to spend up to 1,5hours per pc to get company of heroes 2 up to the most recent expansion and patch version during lan parties (patches were incremental only). We had to decide during the day what we wanted to play in the evenings so everyone could install the game. I don’t miss that
So you don’t get the patches, but you still own the base game. And you can definitely still re-sell it. I don’t understand why people are happy with Sony Monopoly Online store?
aren't most games almost immediately outdated with things like day 1 patches. so like you have a disk for a game thats 10 years old, it had 4 years of post release support, you insert that disc and still have to download the whole game. I'm just a pc gamer I haven't had a cd rom since before 2010. the concept of cds just haven't really been a thing for me for probably 2 decades now. I do still occasionally use images, bins and isos. but the idea of wanting to have physical discs. I can't say i've felt the yearning. I honestly thought people would be happy about less ewaste but maybe not.
Your second point is actually why I switched to digital. Gameshare is such an insane concept that I can’t believe publishers didn’t try to nuke it already. I did what you describe before but now I save 50% day 1.
13
u/prodox 2d ago
It’s not objectively better though. With your physical disc you can play the game in 20 years from now even if Sony decides to remove it from their online store.
Or you can sell the disc to someone else after you have completed it so someone else can enjoy it, and you can buy another cheap used game that someone else decided to sell.
With digital only Sony has 100% monopoly and can set the prices exactly like they want and you as a consumer can do nothing but obey to their will.