LogFAQs > #977124796

PraetorXyn posted...

The cost of entry for PC is paid already if you have one, so its just like he said. If I want to play Spider Man 2, I can buy it for $30-40 in 2 or 3 years, or I could get a PS5, get a bigger SSD for it, buy Spider Man 2, then have to buy Spider Man 2 again for $30-40 when it comes to my preferred platform.

Im considering getting a PS5 mainly to replace the PS4 for playing old games that likely wont come to PC, and as a Blu-Ray player so that when I rip them, I can look at the menu to make sure I got all the special features named correctly.

As for ownership, physical discs have been largely pointless since multi gigabyte day 1 patches became nearly ubiquitous. Theyre just glorified install discs in that case, and if the servers are down that let you download the rest of the game, youre going to have a broken mess of a game to play at best. They also force you to swap discs if you want to swap games, and find space for them in your house.

CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Rays still serve a purpose, as the rips you get from them are higher quality than what you can stream and what you can buy on digital storefronts much of the time. For games, digital is exactly the same quality as physical, while being much more convenient. Thats why PC did away with it ages ago.

As for longevity, honestly your house burning down and taking all your physical games with it is a far more probable event than Valve going out of business, which is what it would take for me to lose my Steam library of 1000+ games.

The cost of entry existed whether you got a PC or PS5 though, yeah double dipping can be a factor, but you wouldn't be playing Spiderman 2 for instance unless you bought some sort of hardware. The PC is likely to run you more as well if you want it to last for a long time, the PS5 is guaranteed good enough for the generation or whatever. I'd never suggest buying a console for just one game though, so yeah for timed exclusives just wait till later.

Not all games are like that though. A lot are license checks, but this happens at least one time with steam games or demos as well. You could actually resell the physical media too. The issue with PC gaming is that it started the trend of all media being made digital, paying the same if not more for the product, & not being able to resell anything later on. Or even to give a copy to a friend if they want to play it like that fire Sony meme from years ago.

The convenience of digital has long since been a red herring for consumers to get screwed on markups where games never decrease in price & you end up paying the same even if the overhead was much less since the company didn't have to produce boxes or discs. Alan Wake 2 being exclusive to epic games right now(lmao) & only digital else wise is pretty good reason for me to never play that game now because there's two factors layered on top making it unappealing.

The digital age has just made it easier for as you say, companies to just shit something out then fix it in 20GB day one patches after the fact. That didn't start occuring until that "convenience" for digital games popped off. I bought a game cube or PS2 game, odds are it just fucking worked out the box if it wasn't just shit anyways to play.

Valve has permission to through their ToS to revoke your access to those games at any time whenever they want as is per usual. Valve may be a golden goose in a sort of way but I'd rather roll the dice on my house burning down(I've had a basement flood before & thankfully didn't lose much that time), but being able to carry like 3DS games with you & have permanent access to them so long as your 3DS works will never be a bad thing. Physical media needs to be preserved before we own nothing & like it.