RIP Playstation disc games, 1994-2028.
Also ironic that only 12 years ago they made a huge deal about sharing your real physical games. Microsoft’s catastrophic error was just going in too early.
Sure it may cost a lot sometimes, but what I love about the all-physical machines of our childhoods is that i can usually find a copy of something on eBay if I missed out on it during the 90s or early 2000s. Pretty big bummer that’s going to be impossible to do that for future generations.
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And when things get delisted, they essentially case to be exist for most people and are no longer obtainable.
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Way too early for it but it does suggest PS6 won’t support digital games.
If you look at PS5 discs in the US market, since around 2022 they state “made in Austria” instead of “made in the USA”. The USA plant was still being used for PS1/PS2 game disc manufacturing up until 2020, which speaks for the advantage Sony always had in owning its own manufacturing facilities.
iirc, PS3 game manufacturing ended more recently.
So production moved from the US to Austria where PS game discs have been made for the European market for quite some time.
I guess the writing is now on the wall for the manufacturing facilities in Europe now.
End of an era, for sure, especially in an age where trust in digital ownership has probably hit all time lows regardless of how well console manufacturers have handled things.
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I guess this was inevitable, but I don’t like it. I think the player benefits from choice, and physical are more affordable and liquid in the long term.
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I’m still reeling from the announcement. I think PS6 being digital only was inevitable (as much as I don’t like it), but usually production of physical media winds down long after a platform supports it.
That we’re seeing PS4 and PS5 SKUs not be part of the physical conversation after 2027 is unacceptable, especially as the PS5 still has a good 5 years ahead of it at least. The last PS5 physical release should be printed in 2032 at the earliest, or around 2035 assuming a longer cross-generation transition window.
The last 3DS games were printed in 2022 - eleven years after the console launched and five years after it was replaced by Switch.
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True. Feels like GTA6 pulling off the band-aide recently just gave Sony the courage to pull the trigger on this for all releases. If that were a traditional disc, they may have waited until the end of the generation. But the biggest cat was out of the bag, so I guess they just decided to move forward asap.
Depressing is a strong word, and not considerate of people who battle depression, but it does make me sad. I’ve been a late adopter to consoles on purpose. As I’ve gotten older, and disposable gaming time has eroded, I enjoyed being able to pickup a console and have a huge library of games available. Most being used physical games. That ship is leaving port.
Complaining section, feel free to ignore:
Everything tech is on the fast track to renting licenses to be revoked at corporate will. “You’ll own nothing and like it.” PlayStation is the poster child for this behavior:
PC is mostly not immune either. Steam discloses that you’re buying a license. Who knows what happens when Gabe passes and (insert corporation) offers billions for it. GOG and other DRM free marketplaces are better, but Steam dominates the PC gaming landscape - it’s where I “own” most of my games. At least, for the present, it’s not a walled garden. Who knows what the future of renting your RAM and GPU will be like.
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Cartridges won.
In all seriousness, this is not surprising news. I’m not majorly invested in PlayStation but I will need to keep the PS4 around for a couple of M2 ShotTriggers releases that I have on disc, and the odd Blu-ray. PS5, PS6 etcetera are not on my radar anyway.
I wonder how long Nintendo will manufacture Game Cards? My guess is quite a while, if for no other reason than the Japanese market.
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A landlord for every need. Fun!
outside of Nintendo stuff I think I’m done? I might get a potato laptop to run some fighting games and then maybe dig into finally getting a Mister up and running. I don’t vibe with any of Sony’s output but the one two of eye watering cost of storage and now no discs? I’m out.
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While I wish the Game Key Card on Switch 2 wasn’t a thing, I also think it’s an excellent way to retain physical rights to a digital item, and be able to transfer said rights to someone else.
By removing discs Sony is removing rights from the end user. I also think retailers are going to get to a point where carrying gaming stuff in store becomes more of a burden than an important part of their inventory. A bunch of cardboard doesn’t make for a nice display. As gaming retreats from retail it will become more marginalized as entertainment.
Maybe, maybe not. I think it’s going to change into a service primarily like movies, tv, and music.
Not really appealing to me - I still collect vinyl and CDs for music and would do the same for other mediums if they were important to me (I’m not as big a movie or tv buff).
But I wouldn’t call those things marginalized. Just different in character than what came before. Very.
Gaming was already going through the same changes. This is just another stage.
Nothing will ever be like 90s when nearly every console game got a physical release and teams of 20-30 people can churn out 4-6 games per generation and each can be commercially viable on a retail shelf.
I’m not really one for saying “things were better then” but objectively, the business around gaming was healthier for producing more original concepts with less financial risk.
Even Nintendo appears to playing it safe a bit in recent years.
I want you to consider how you got into music, and then consider what options there are for kids today. It’s a very different environment. Unless you want to buy your child a phone and pay for a subscription service, how would he even begin to listen to anything? And even if you have someone old enough to have that setup, where do you even begin?
The end result is a lot of kids just never get into music now.
I thought about this at length and ended up giving my son a CD player and we bought a couple CDs of pokemon music at Tower Records when we were in Tokyo. He’s free to take any of the CDs I have and has been digging into Dragon Quest music lately. I listen to a lot of Japanese rock music while driving so I’ve encouraged him to try those too, there’s one band he liked and took the greatest hits album for. But how many parents are going to do any of this? Very few.
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Got into pop music with radio and MTV. I bought CDs at chain stores when they were around.
But then got into jazz by hanging with musicians and going to jazz clubs in nyc in my late teens. I started collecting jazz vinyl in my late 20s once I got too busy to go to clubs as often.
I’m not sure how kids today get into music to be honest. I assume it’s all social media algorithms and TikTok these days.
Maybe they are streaming music on apps for free with commercials too?
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In my experience in Australia a lot of kids watch YouTube on smart TV or a family iPad. Hence they like baby shark, wiggles, Danny Go etc.
When they get older they may have their own iPad and yes watch/listen to free tiers of things.
Think about how affordable the hardware to play videogames used to be. It was an easy toy purchase for mom and dad from Pong through PlayStation 2.
With the advent of PS3 and Xbox 360 things really went off the rails price-wise at launch and it took years for those to become truly affordable. Nintendo fortunately gave the average family the Wii at that time to keep gaming affordable.
Now we’re at a point where even Nintendo’s current system is a $500 purchase. Yes, with inflation that doesn’t seem like as much as it sounds like, but for a heck of a lot of people that’s also a heck of a lot of money to move on from Switch, which frankly seems to be doing just fine alongside the Switch 2, and probably because again, it’s affordable.
If the next gen is $1000 machines to run $80 games, I think we probably are looking at a very real problem for videogames as we know and enjoy them continuing to be relevant. The youth will hopefully continue to find Nintendo, but beyond that? I’m not sure there’s a real future… and removing it from retail sales will make it even less visible in our every day lives. If Target/Walmart in the US decide they’re done keeping the floor space for it, gaming will be in very big trouble.
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It’s a good talking point for sure.
Setting aside reduced utility that digital brings like preowned and lending, it does make you wonder which direction Sony will take here.
It’s worth noting Sony only announced that disc manufacturing is being suspended, but new games will continue to be made available at retail. So they are probably investing in a new format by which those games are carried.
If you look at the original Switch, many reprints ended up as codes in box, and while yes, it’s a download code and that still sucks, many of the traditional dynamics with packaged games retail still apply to those code in box releases.
They are almost always sold below RRP, they are heavily discounted, retail loved them because the margins were higher on them, so they had more room to be price competitive.
A friend earlier this year linked me to a listing he found of Capcom Arcade Stadium 1 and 2 - it’s still in stock and the price is still great:
https://www.argos.co.uk/product/8484460
that’s a third of the price it costs to buy both Capcom Arcade Stadiums from the Nintendo eShop, and even cheaper than the lowest sale price seen on the Nintendo eShop to my recollection.
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It’s strange because we had a $149 new 3DS model in mid-2017, the New 2DS XL, but it didn’t seem to do well despite a very competitive price and massive library of 3DS software including very affordable Nintendo Selects re-releases. Which we never saw again.
So I can see why Nintendo has also followed Sony and Microsoft in console pricing. Competition from mobile gaming and Minecraft must have really eaten into that traditionally affordable handhelds market by 2017.
If you look at unit sales, also, Switch Lite was never a significant share of overall Switch sales. But it’s great that Nintendo had an entry level system that can be seen as an affordable purchase for younger players. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a dock-only Switch 2 emerge next year as components costs continue to rise.
Like you point out though, current pricing trends on consoles don’t seem particularly sustainable and while there’s almost certainly a future for gaming it’s may not be a future that includes traditional home consoles and a thriving environment for full-priced games.
Really sad when I think about it, given the tremendous legacy that this corner of gaming has left behind, and how resilient it has been to so-called industry shifts (mobile, free-to-play, cloud gaming, subscription services).
We might really be looking at the end in one or two generations’ time.
The Switch Lite has always cost too much for what it is and this has really limited it IMO.
I have one and like it, much prefer to play handheld on it than a full size switch (I shudder at the thought of using the Switch 2 handheld for long periods). But I got it cheap second hand, the new price is frankly stupid, it should have launched cheaper and should have dropped too.
And on top of that, it’s still too large, really not in the same league as handhelds of old in terms of portability. It’s way larger than a Vita and people complained Vita was too big when it came out.