This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
They're just trying to ride out the backlash until we all get distracted enough by other news to forget about it.
I agree. No point in documenting the backlash with social media posts when they aren't going to change their decision.
On a side note, are physical copies of games anything more than install disks anymore?
Not really, but they're install disks you can trade in or lend to a friend.
Yeh they’re expecting the upcoming Microsoft/xbox layoff-ocalypse to dominate the news and make their news yesterday’s story. I’d bet they were expecting the layoffs to be announced yesterday on the Friday.
Also there’s nothing they can say that hasn’t been said already that will make people who are angry change their minds, so there’s literally no point. It’s a vocal minority and the best thing for them to do is ignore it.
it’s a vocal minority and the best thing for them to do is ignore it.
lol no the best thing for sony to do is not be shit.
Sony have been shit for 10+ years, and PlayStation is literally in the best financial position they have ever been. They’re printing money for Sony.
Like I said, it’s a vocal minority complaining, and the best thing for Sony is to ignore them. It’s not the best for the people complaining, in fact it’s the absolute worst because they’re complaining because they want Sony to acknowledge them and reverse course, but Sony are not going to do that so saying nothing is in their best interests.
Cowardly little shits.
I am imagining the marketers leaving the office with life jackets riding small boats. 🛟🚣
Shows how much they care lol
They are afraid haha. And they should be. Dammit.
It's interesting because Japan has traditionally been very big on physical media. I guess Sony PlayStation has had some foreign CEOs recently that may be a factor??
Sony is a weird shitshow of a company. Too big and too many departments and branches, with no one knowing what the other is doing. Back in the day, as Sony Electronics was developing their first physical MP3 player, Sony Music was lobbying to make MP3s illegal. Department heads shift to a different branch and shutdown anything their predecessor was working on.
What you describe isn't weird for a large corporation. When a corporation is large enough, they're all like that.
Sony still seems especially bad about this. They fought for decades to have the dominant physical media format, from Betamax, to Minidiscs, to Memory sticks. They would eventually win with Blurays by selling the PS3 at a huge loss and now they want to abandon physical media?
The PS3 was released nearly 20 years ago and no media standard lasts forever. I think if you told them back then that the PS3 strategy would result in their media format being dominant for two decades, they wouldn't have said "ah well forget it, it's not worth it."
Bluray is starting to show it's age. The decision is really between creating a new physical media format or just going 100% digital. From a purely technological perspective digital makes a lot more sense.
The real problem is about trust and licenses. We don't trust a company when they announce plans to go 100% digital on the same week the break access to people's movies in their digital library. And they could set up a digital system that would allow you to sell your license to someone else, so you could give or sell your copy of the game to someone else. But we know that while that's technologically possible, they aren't going to do that.
So it's not a problem from a technology perspective, but it sucks for the consumer because of how they will implement the technology.
I don’t want games that aren’t going to end up in my attic within the decade, so that I can rediscover them in another half decade, and spend several hours trying to boot the legacy hardware to play them.
That whole experience of actually owning your stuff is gone, if you go digital. It’s not just the theoretical risk that they turn the server off. It’s the constant dependency on Sony servers, licenses, accounts, and digital catalog. Those dependancies precede even being able to look at what titles you own.
Do you remember finding your old WII as a kid? Jailbreaking it years after it became irrelevant, and showing your dad that you loaded all his favorite childhood games onto it for him? Contra, Russian Attack, … my son will never have that experience.
they saw the $$$ in perpetual subscriptions.
Could this be a signal that CDs DVD and Bluray Discs production maybe coming to an end soon? The companies that make them are very likely reporting low sales and a lot of stock on hand.
I would have understood them making this call for PS6 onwards - digital edition only. But while they're still selling disc PS5s at eye-watering prices? What the fuck are they thinking? Way to burn good will with your ever-shrinking fanbase.
Their competition (Nintendo and Steam) already don't have physical media. Nintendo is moving towards 100% Game Key cards, and Steam is all downloads. Playstation could have used physical media as a competitive advantage, but decided against it for cost reasons. So now this is the end of gaming physical media. The game sizes are just way too large.
Just to be fair, the Nintendo Switch 2 does support "Game Key Card" games. Such that you still must download the game and use the card to authenticate your game.
However there are zero first party* Nintendo games that are "Game Key Card" games. If you buy Mario or Zelda you do get the game on the card.
I do expect that will change in the future and follow the trend Sony is taking to be 100% digital. So you're right to be concerned that they are heading in the same direction.in fact with Sony already heading that direction it's even more certain.
*(Pokemon, which feels like a first party and Nintendo owns a large portion of, is technically third party.)
Dual layer Blu-Ray is 100GB, old PS1 games used to ship on many disks (looking at you FF7 and FF8).
Sorta annoyed Nintendo didn't receive as much flak as this with hoards of people trying to justify game cards by pointing at Microsoft and Sony.
Nintendo is beyond the event horizon at this point.
And that’s alright. Like, if you can afford a Switch and you get it so your family can play Pokopia and Animal Crossing, all their nonsense doesn’t really matter to your lifestyle.
…But if it does matter, “Nintendo Fans” are in waaay too deep to plausibly defend them anyway.
Sony being an absolute dick, like they have been for the past 4 decades
This is not a new thing
SONY has always been a ~~little~~ enormous shit.
I see someone remembers the 2005 rootkit debacle. Such assholes.
...and killing the dual boot feature of the PS3, and attacking Geohot for rooting the PS3 (so people could resume dual booting)...
Actually they used to be pretty good back in the 80s and early 90s when they were a hardware maker and the company was always headed by somebody from the Engineering division - they made high quality consumer electronics at reasonable prices.
This is how they built quite the brand name.
Then in the late 90s (if I remember it correctly) they bought a major movie studio in the US and after a few years the top job went to somebody from the Media division.
After that all their electronics (such as Bluray and the MiniDisk) was locked down by design, quality fell a lot, they started lobbying heavily for things that would make Intellectual Property more valuable such as extending the duration of Copyrights, the DMCA and Anti-Circumvention legislation, and became so anti-consumer that they even put out music CDs with rootkits for people who listened to it on a PC.
But yeah, for over 2 decades Sony has been pretty much Evil.
they gotta come back sometime
24+ hours? Wow.
That should be more than long enough to get past the attention span of sony customers
Something something sense of accomplishment...
Task failed successfully?
In a just world they’d never go back.
