Price Has No Limits™
PayStation ∆◯╳☐
Unfortunately, physical media for gaming died when always-online DRM was normalized. It doesn’t matter if you have a game on a disc when you have to phone home every time to use it. The corporation may still block your access.
One more step in ensuring no one owns anything. Lease or rent are your options.
That’s fine, I’ll just get better at sailing.
I think the steam deck is genuinely the only console worth buying these days.
I REALLY want Sony to release a handheld that can run PS1, PS2 and PS3 games 🥺
Vita can Run 99% of PS1 games “natively” and has a bunch of PS2 ports (some through PSP). Not PS3 though.
So…steamdeck lol
It’s too expensive. $500 is already too much for these things.
But capitalism’s gotta capitalism.
$700 is actually probably a fair price for a PS5. You can’t really build an equivalent PC for less than that. $900 to $1,200 would probably be close to how much manufacturing the PS5 Pro costs.
But PSN subsidizes these costs, which is why these systems can be this “affordable”.
I doubt it costs that much. You’re looking at it from buying PC components perspective. But they are mass producing identical boards with components that are 4+ years old by now, except the GPU. The cost of production is probably around the same as it was for non-Pro when it was released.
the fuck you are smoking? my first desktop kost that much and it ran crysis really fucking good
Better than a PS5 Pro? Bruh 😂
Adjusted to inflation and time, hell yes
All good points in the comments, but something I haven’t seen a anyone talk about yet:
WHY is a DISK DRIVE $80??? All it does is read a disk. Any encryption on the disk would be decrypted on the console. External disk drives are like $20. If you specially brand them maybe you could go up to $40.
But $80? That’s like a Gameboy Advance. That’s a miyoo mini plus. That’s an entire console in itself.
That’s actually below market value for an external 4K UHD drive.
Like it or not the majority of game purchases are digital these days. It’s a sad development for sure. I buy all my console games as physical discs myself.
I think Sony never wanted a physical media PS5 console. The design made it seem like an after thought. Like a growth on the side of sleek lines.
they weren’t completely wrong now. on thier own financials, its mentioned that only 30% of game sales are physical. physical buyers are now the minority.
I still jerk off manually.
Reminder that you can put in whatever you want in a PC. And that you can get a decent gaming machine for 1k (700+PS plus).
CD Drive? No problem. DVD? Of course. Another SSD? Get some random 50$ thing and throw it in there. Floppy? Harvest some old PC and voila.They make pull out cup holders to put in the CD rom rive slot. There are so many goofy fun things a computer can have in it.
Having a pull out cup holder seems insane to me, my personal rule is no drinks near my pc at all.
That said, I have a drawer in place of my cd drive that holds all my small peripherals (thumb drives, usb to sd card adapter, stuff like that) and it’s great.
I was just trying to say something absurd that I’ve seen being sold for PCs lol
I work in IT, the rule for me, closed lid drinks around PCs, no food or drinks in the server room. Unless you are me…the system/network engineer
In what universe do you live? Ps plus is $80, not $300
So you use your PC or console for only a year?
I can use it as long as I like. Ps plus just gives you 3 “free” games a month and let’s you play online with games that require ps plus. Imo the three games a month for six bucks and change is already worth it. And you keep those games for as long as you have your account, even if you don’t renew your subscription. You can also just get games that don’t require an online component, though those are becoming harder to find.
Eh, on PC you can keep your games forever as long as you don’t lose the drive they’re stored on. And you don’t need to pay extra to access online features.
And you can play any generation of games going back to pong.
If we’re talking raw capabilities… Piracy is subscriptionless and grants you access to virtually 99% of all games from all time and across all consoles. I’m going to say that PC is the clear winner here…
I’m not justifying console vs PC. I’m just pointing out that the $300 on the original comment I replied to for ps plus is insane. $80 a year for a positively moderated, optimized gaming experience the vast majority of the time is worth the money imo.
The only problem with optical drives for PC is that most modern case no longer support them.
A surprising amount of Fractal Design’s cases do.
I’ve checked it, and yes. Also some of the lower-end of Be Quiet!.
The real point is that you can upgrade it incrementally, you don’t have to throw it away, and upgrading will allow you to play all your old games from generation to generation without having to rebuy them for the latest Gen.
Within limits though. E.g. If your mainboard only supports old CPUs that is a huge limiting factor and we saw MS messing with older CPUs just not being supported at all by Win 11.
Now i made the switch to Linux myself too and i am very happy, but for people who want to start somewhere, maybe starting with their own linux gaming PC is a bit much for the start.
I think that’s overkill, but a Steam Deck is on par with a PS5, but portable, and for a cheap dock and a ps5 controller you can play it like a console.
Linux has made such leaps though, have a container with lutris and vulkan and it can handle most basic gaming that doesn’t deal with modern AAA titles.
I mean i am fully in support of PC gaming and in particular Linux gaming. It is just not as easy to keep upgrading PCs component by component. Eventually there is limits, mostly from the mainboards limits.
Meh, gaming pc of theseus, you replace the mobo less often than a console Gen, more if you want.
I was using the same board and CPU I started with back in 2016 up until last year. My bottleneck wasnt even the CPU it was the fucken RAM.
I got a Steam Deck because it’s a little computer. I can put my own OS on it, that’s awesome. The marketing page was talking about DIY repairs and offering spare parts, too.
While this is true, consoles still manage to have a way more convenient experience. Its the only reason why they exist (today)
I think that’s mainly a relic from the past. I didn’t have compability or driver issues for a long time.
Once the PC is set up, it’s as comfortable as a console. Setting the PC up to console standards is reduced to installing steam.
Looks like you never played on a computer on a TV screen. The experience is plaged by pad connection problems (Bluetooth), windows popups, random no full screen issues, sound suddenly on the wrong channel, microphone not working, mouse cursor in the middle of the screen (often reset to the middle after launching the game, even when you are playing with a pad) and so on. You still need a keyboard and a mouse near your couch and there is always something. For sure iam still not paying the markup for a console, but i get why there is a big market.
What are you on about? I use my PC on my TV all the times and I don’t have a single issue you describe. I just have it connected with Hdmi. The TV even turns on and off automatic if function activate.
You’re doing something wrong. I’ve been playing PC games on my couch for a decade and haven’t had any of those issues.
799€ here, 920€ with a disc drive. That is stupidly insane for a console. We’re almost breaking the 1000€ barrier for an “upgrade”, not even the new generation.
I’d bet my money Sony is just testing the grounds to see if they can set PS6 price in a few years over the 1k barrier.
This tbh
There’s little incentive to not go with a gaming PC instead, or to not just wait for the PS6 since I’m sure it will be cheaper
How are you sure? No one else seems to be…
Because Sony knows it won’t sell if it isn’t $600 or less. They’ve learned from experience.
Sony’s problems are twofold:
- They are charging an absurd amount of money for a game console
- They are selling a game console that has practically no first party games for it.
If they had plenty of the latter, they could weather this. But there are still games releasing for the PS4, and they have had 1, maybe 2 PS5 releases that would qualify as first party this year (that don’t bubble down to PC).
Jesus christ, Nintendo is gonna win it all aren’t they?
I see lots of people in this thread saying to go to the PC or the Steam Deck, but are we ignoring that both systems do not have a disc drive too?
I mean, aside from the disgusting price of the PS5 Pro not having a disc drive is the biggest offender (and the reason why I am not even considering buying it, despite being a Sony user since the 1st unit).
I mean, technically you can install a disc drive onto your computer if you want.
TIL you can still buy disc games for PC.
seems like not that long ago i would’ve thought that the idea of a PC without any disc drive was insane. i had to help a neighbor kid the other week when forced bitlocker bricked his gaming PC, sure enough it didn’t have any disc drive!
I was very confused by all this (also I don’t use consoles unless you want to consider the Deck as one) until it dawned on me that what people are apparently now calling “disk drives” are apparently “optical disk drives/readers”.
Aren’t games dematerialised on consoles nowadays? Or is it strictly a PC thing?
I think they’ve lost touch with their user base, but I also think they know that there’s some people that are just going to buy the console because they don’t have a better option available.
Like don’t get me wrong yes it’s now the same price as a low end gaming computer and it doesn’t have upgrade capability, and doesn’t have a physical media drive, but you can put it right where your TV is, so no seperate setup so it takes up less space (PC games on a tv instead of a monitor looks weird and can be a pain to fix). Plus it’s easier to use/more user friendly and everything is in one place.
I personally will not be upgrading past my current, as I find this generation to be super lack luster and not cost effective, but I can see why some might, I disagree with it but I see it.
Nintendo is going to continue to eat everybody’s lunch with decisions like this one
Ahhhh, so my ps5 is the most superior PlayStation still, good to know.
It’s not, but it’s the most reasonable purchase.
This is yet another nail in the coffin of physical media. Or, in other words games you actually own instead of long term lease.
More anti-consumer stuff from corporate bigwigs
It’s not like physical media makes any difference anyway these days.
Actual disk often gets just a glorified installer, and even if it includes the entire game you’re likely to have to activate it online anyway.
The “own your games” ship has sailed long ago, unless you only buy no-DRM and your own backups.
This in my opinion is one of the valid use cases of a blockchain/NFTs: they provide provable ownership of digital goods. This means that if implemented, in the future we could actually own games music movies ebooks etc. The only remaining step would be a decentralized torrent-like system that allows the users to download the licensed content that they own via their nft.
How would that support “First Sale Doctrine”?
If you can’t modify it, sell it or know what the game software is even doing then calling that “ownership” would be rather lacking. I mean in terms of traditional ownership, not the modern definition: “page 69 of the EULA defines “purchasing” (the software) as a limited, non-transferable lease which can stop working at any time due to dependency on a proprietary server code we will never share I fucked your mom”.
I mean, I can actually own a bunch of stuff as long as it doesn’t have some sort of proprietary DRM bullshit attached to it.
The problem isn’t that there’s no way to obtain media in a non-bullshit way. The problem is that distributors don’t want to provide media in a non-bullshit way.
Sure, you can still own digital media, but you can’t sell or trade it like you can with a physical copy.
Meh. If life weren’t so focused on material gains and losses, I wouldn’t need to.
It would also mean potential losses for the distributors, as people are (supposedly) less likely to buy directly for them.
So, again, the problem isn’t the media, it’s the distributors.
unless you only buy no-DRM and your own backups
Going to have to plug GOG here as these are both things they offer. I try to buy games there instead of Steam, purely for this reason.
Going to have to plug GOG here as these are both things they offer.
Note that this is a major selling point for GOG and available on most of their library, but unlike their early days, not everything is DRM-free.
Piracy is the only way, clearly capitalism doesn’t give and inch.
Nor a funk
I remember thinking it was bs when half life 2 required a steam account and now everyone loves it.
Is it possible for modern games to fit on a disk?
I think it would be an interesting change if brand new games had a hard limit on file size so they can fit on and play from an actual disk.
Absolutely. It just depends a lot on the game of course. A blueray disk can contain over 100 GB. But a game could be split over several disks too. It was rather common to do that with CDs on the original PlayStation.
They still have to install.
Disks are too slow.
If they use a good, 12X bluray drive, it will be quicker to install from a disk than to download it unless you’re lucky enough to have a good fiber internet connection. Even then, the servers you download from will often be overloaded and slow on release day.
That’s not my point. Most games do install fine from the disk.
He’s talking about playing from the disk, too, and that’s a problem.
The issue isn’t the game engine, it’s the texture files.
If you don’t care what it looks like, you cut 80-90% or more from any modern game subbing low quality textures.
For $700 they could at least throw in a 4k Blu-ray player.
Then again, I ponied up extra for the disc version of the original ps5 for that exact reason, only to find out the media player software is a giant piece of garbage that was clearly given no effort. So I can’t say I’m too surprised.
It does if you rent
I’ve been using gamefly for a while, I can’t rent digital only games
Maybe but look what happened to Stellar Blade
Thing is, that’s not how it works on PlayStation. On PS5 you can download and play games without ever connecting to wifi. The whole glorified installer is mostly an Xbox thing ever since the XB1. I’d know since I own both and usually get discs to play my games.
unless you only buy no-DRM and your own backups
or you straight up pirate it.
There’s not a lot of brave souls doing this as a passionate hobby any longer. Now it’s for the clout, to inject malware, or to receive monetary donations. Or all three!
I hope I am wrong, and we can get back to the passionate hobby, but it’s looking kinda grim from my point of view.
its always been for the clout in the scene. but ive been pirating shit for a couple of decades now, no malware so far.
If you have been doing it for a decade, then surely you’ve noticed the drop in active crackers…?
you can still pirate games without getting malware, even if a little late.
Yeah. Piracy is alive-and-well. You can even acquire and play PS5 games right now if you wanted to.
IDK. Between the price tag and lack of the disc drive IDK how many people are gonna buy this thing. It’s probably just for people who HAVE to have the highest graphics, to keep them from getting a gaming PC until the PS6 is ready for them.
I’m not sure. If that is their strategy they’re dancing on a razor. I mean, the market is pretty slim. Basically, you can get a pretty sweet gaming PC for the price they’re offering. And if you project the amount of games you’ll get and estimate the price differential with prices of the same games on a PC you might be able to uprate the specs a few times. I would say that a PS5 with a reasonable amount of games is probably worth a similar amount to a $1k PC.
Death by a thousand cuts
Or, in other words games you actually own
Newer games rarely have the entire game on the disc. Usually there’s mandatory patches that must be downloaded to play it. I’ve seen games where there’s only a few hundred MB on the disc while the whole game is maybe 15 or 20 GB.
This means you don’t really own the game, since if Sony take down the downloads for the game, you won’t actually be able to play it any more.
Essentially your choice is between a physical license key (the disc) plus a download of the game, or a digital license key plus a download of the game.
And now, the physical licence path is even less accessible. The thing with the physical licence key is it’s transferrable even if the actual data is stored elsewhere. It’s a thin veneer, I mean, Sony could gate access to this data to the first account/machine that activated it. So even this advantage is taken away.
Some enterprise software used to (or maybe still do) use USB dongles for licensing… I’m honestly wondering if games are going to move that way too. Given the fact that practically every game needs a launch day patch, why even have a DVD/Blu-Ray if instead you could just have smaller, more reliable USB dongles? I suspect that in the next generation or two of game consoles, we’ll no longer see disc’s at all.