People want retail games and if the big 3 can’t cover that market a new and more sustainable subject will fill that space. Maybe it’s time to bring back physical media to PC, a more open system where publishers could make profit selling their retail games similarly to vinyls for music.
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What I’d like to see is good selling indie games doing a “limited edition” or “supporter edition” 6 months to a year after they launch. Have it be a physical box, with an SD card or Blu-Ray with custom art, plus various bits of merchandise.
Essentially, get them to make pre-order or limited editions after the game already launched and garnered goodwill instead of trying to front load all the greed.
I’d definitely buy copies if games like “Sea of Stars” or “Ori and the Blind Forest” did this
I don’t know that it’s usually naked greed for indies, as much as it’s an effort to boost initial sales and get word-of-mouth going by preying on FOMO.
But yes, I’d be behind delayed special editions. More than once I’ve found out that some indie game had limited extra content for early buyers, and when people asked later if that content would ever be more widely available, the developers gave a slightly smug “Nope! I guess you should’ve backed it / bought it at launch, huh?”-style response.
I know that your life has probably been revolving around this game for months or years, but I only heard about it for the first time yesterday, and your backer campaign / launch sale ended 8 months ago. All you’re doing with that attitude is souring potential customers.
I think it’s better to offer the extras again at a later time, as part of a special edition and/or a separate bundle. Plenty of games do this, too.
No, it’s not beneficial. The difference between consoles and PCs is that PCs have an open infrastructure, which lets you back up your data to any medium or service you want.
For example, if Steam goes out of business and doesn’t release the DRMs, they will easily be cracked. You cannot say the same for consoles.
There are also multiple places to buy from. Steam is pretty dominant, but only because they’re the best option. You can buy from Sony on PlayStation, that’s it.
That’s not really true. Most recent games I’ve bought, I tried to buy off Steam. But they weren’t available anywhere else.
It also hardly even matters as no one on Steam is allowed to price below Steam. So they effectively control pricing power, like Sony; the screws just aren’t so tight yet.
I find it pretty hard to believe that you couldn’t find a major new game on Epic or the Microsoft store. An indie title? Sure, a lot of those are limited to Steam, because the devs prefer it. Older games are even more likely to be on GOG than Steam.
No idea what you’re on about with not being able to price below Steam. That is not a thing.
no one on Steam is allowed to price below Steam.
That’s not true at all.
if a popular console platform became a ‘free for all’, i don’t think its ‘protections’ would last very long under what would become a globally crowdsourced endeavour.
While this would be great, we’d have to stockpile on said media which is less convenient. Discs were great but they’d always get lost somewhere and/or used a lot of space when stacked.
I’d personally prefer to download the files on a hard drive which could hold thousands of games while saving space. Only problem being that these games would need to be transferred to an SSD for better read/writing speeds. On the other hand discs would only need to be plugged into a disc slot which may or may not seem very convenient considering how most laptops/PCs don’t have those, meaning we’d need to buy these extra.
Either way having pretty discs with collectibles like in the good old days seems like a good idea if you’re into that sort of things.
Yes I think we can exclude the old-days mass distribution but I think a more niche physical pc market could potentially be profitable in the future
No, physical media is not useful for PC games, you want a DRM free installer (preferably with all relevant patches applied, both game patches and compatibility DLL/mods for older games), not the physical media (which may or may not have DRM).
This ship has sailed a long time ago on PC (~15 years ago).
I think drm-free indie oriented publishers like Annapurna could make a lot of money with physical copies.
I doubt it. At least for all but the most viral of indie games. Manufacturing physical copies is expensive and would involve minimum order quantity from suppliers.
Tbh, popular indie games could probably use crowdfunding platforms post launch to do it
it costs a lot of money. digital is what help indies flourish. you no longer need a publisher.
As someone with a collection of a couple hundred CDs and another hundred or so DVDs filling my closet, I’m not really sure everyone appreciates the logistics of holding physical media for a couple-hundred-game library.
That may be true, I just don’t see the point of storing the DRM free installer on an optical disc, something like an SD card which can be easily updated seems like a much better fit.
Most computer don’t have optical disc drives (I do have one, but I am exception and I don’t use it for data).
You can legally resell if it is on disk.
Fair point, with Steam sales, I don’t really feel the need to resell.
I, for one, would be in favor of selling physical PC games on flash drives. Like, flash drives are (were? not sure how bad the chip shortage has hit them) dirt cheap, and even the biggest games today generally don’t go far beyond 128GB (not counting post-launch patches), and I can find 128GB flash drives retailing for $10 right now at Micro Center. I assume a big enough publisher buying in bulk could get them far cheaper and more price optimized for this specific use case, and 256GB drives for even larger games for not much more. It would be more expensive than discs or cards, true, but not every PC has a disk drive or SD card reader; every PC these days has USB ports and most of them have USB 3.0 now. And still being smaller and more durable than a disc the same way cards are, could save on packaging costs if they optimized the packaging for it.
I also feel that people buying physical PC games are usually enthusiasts willing to pay a premium, anyhow, and giving them a reasonably nice flash drive with the game on it would feel more “substantial” than just getting a card or disc in a plastic case.
I could see physical releases, at least as special editions, being a thing people would like. Though I think today SD cards would make more sense, at least if flash memory prices ever come back down.
But a SD card with a custom label in box with proper box art and a little art book inside would be cool for fans and collectors.
But a SD card with a custom label in box with proper box art and a little art book inside would be cool for fans and collectors.
Essentially Switch cartridges, but PC
Exactly
I combine the two.
Burn offline drm free installers onto blank cds.
Well… Dvds, I can fit some older games into cds but they don’t have the same capacity.
Optical media really isn’t your friend. I love it, I have loads of old games on optical discs and I bought a PS5 with its disc drive specifically because that’s how I wanted to buy the media. But I also back up what I can to spinning rust or solid state drives that can sit cold stored until I want them. Optical media will degrade. There are exceptions, like M-Disc, but the medium is slow and space consuming.
If the files are DRM-free as they said, then there’s nothing stopping backups. I don’t get why you’re trying to paint it as an either/or thing
I’m not sure I understand. Whether it’s DRM free or not has no bearing on the reliability of optical media as a backup format. Discs you write to are not generally as reliable as factory pressings, with some archival exceptions, so it’s not the ideal choice. I wasn’t making any argument about whether it works or not.
JFC, how are you this dense?
I’ll spell it out for you then:
Step 1: Buy DRM-free optical media
Step 2: Place DRM-free optical media into an appropriate reader
Step 3: Copy DRM-free files off optical media
Step 4: You now have a digital backup for your cool collector’s item
I think you’re the one who misunderstood. The guy I replied to was talking about backing up digital games to disc. I mentioned optical discs have poor longevity, then you took it personally.
I mean, I have an external hdd I keep a backup of important files on, and an ssd I use to transfer things onto a second computer, and it’s just a full backup of my primary pc.
Fair enough. I didn’t assume you were doing that for data generally. My original comment was unnecessarily condescending in tone, sorry about that.
Physical media has long sailed but not drm free software.
(I’m not sure which of those you’re referring to, just clearly stating)
I was talking about data storage on optical discs, not DRM free installers. :)
Perfect. 👍
I like this, sure
Maybe something like CD/DVDs that Verbatim has, the ones made our of stone so they can last +100 years and are I think 50GB in space?
I miss being able to easily share fully functioning games…
Its easy to pirate and even legal in some places…
But I might buy physical discs with games if they are featured in some physical store!
Again as someone said I dont know about how DRM works on discs but we cant have that
A perfect standard has to be developed first. Go.
Digital games are fine as long as I have to ability to trade and sell. That’s the only thing physical media gave me that I cared about.
Also, I have a pet peeve:
I see a lot of people claim to want discs, but they haven’t actually used them given the choice.
Or buy DRM free. And they don’t.
For what it’s worth, I try to buy games from GoG first, first party storefront second, but that hardly even works anymore. It’s almost always only available on Steam. Maybe rarely on EGS or something, but then it’s not clear if the download is even DRM free, and it literally cannot be cheaper if it’s listed on Steam too, so that’s not really an option.
No. Optical media bad.
The issue isn’t the copy being physical. The issue is the included license being too limiting.
Licenses aren’t new or necessarily bad. Even physical retail copies of movies with a license. You know that FBI and InterPol warning at the very beginning? That’s your license. It basically just limits you to personal use. If you charge people money to come to your house and watch it, or if you charge money to rent it, you need to purchase a copy that comes with a license which allows that.
If you were around during the days of movie rental stores, if you ever lost a rental movie and had to replace it, it would often cost $100 or more because you were replacing a copy that came with a rental license.
An ideal purchase would be a digital copy with a license similar to the one included with physical retail copies.
I’ve been burning cds with my offline installers on every game I can. Finding blank cds in physical stores is hard, I lucked out finding this stack brand new at a thrift store.
I would very much like to have a desktop with cd racks filling the frame around it again.
I’m all for people having discs if they want them but, man, I do not want that shit cluttering up my life.
similarly to vinyls for music.
This one sucks so much. Vinyl coming back is awful.
- It is heavy, it costs a lot and takes a lot of energy to transport
- it is made of plasticizers, usually phthalates with lead as a stabilizer
- it degrades from every use
- the waste chemicals are often dumped into rivers and streams in poor populations
- a lot of energy is used in the steaming and pressing
- the sound quality is not as good as people think it is (inner distortion anyone?) and the “warm” and “feel good” sound are easily replicated in other ways. I don’t want to dwell on this one. Lets just say mastering and your equipment have a lot to do with this.
Too bad they’re still the best.
Loudness war is STILL killing CDs and digital.
Vinyl is still unable to deal with stupid brickwalled tracks without making a 12" 2-3 tracks, so until the loudness war ends, Vinyl is still going to be the best format.
They really aren’t the best, for a lot of reasons, but I should not have brought that up. If anything you are saying the mixes and mastering for vinyl are best.
Anyways my point still stands. These are incredibly environmentally nasty. The music industry loves them because they can sell the same music to you yet again.
If anything you are saying the mixes and mastering for vinyl are best.
That’s the ticket. It’s really because vinyl is worse that it’s become better, since it can’t do the brickwalling CD is capable of. A well mixed CD will always be better than a well mixed vinyl but well mixed CDs are in short supply.
If they are DRM free so they could be resold or shared/traded then I’m on board. The only two problems I have with digital shit is you cannot share/lend/resell it and, if you’re not in control of storing it, there’s no guarantee it will always be available after purchase.
The whole point of PC is digital data though.
The original DOOM was shareware, you were allowed to copy and share it with your friends or online however you wanted because it promoted and popularized the game.
CDs on PC were always just a retail medium. Unlike classic consoles, there are very few PC games that run right off the disk. It was usually an installer.
I know people complain about Steam all the time with “you don’t actually own your games” but you do own your PC and the filesystem which means you can copy that data and do whatever you want with it. No EULA on earth is going to stop you.
Of course if it ships with DRM or relies on steam to launch, then yeah that’s lock in, but that’s where GOG and pirate repacks fill the space.
It was inevitable for consoles to go full digital because 90% of sales are digital and it gets the inherent convenience of digital media, but consoles don’t let you access the filesystem and do whatever you want. It’s a locked down system with a metric ton of security to prevent you from ever copying the game data.
Retail will also always reduce profit, especially for smaller developers who need to rely on a publisher to sell on their behalf.
Steam and GOG take a 30% cut, so it’s probably better to promote itch.io or some other platform if that’s a concern.
we need offline, drm-free installers and games that are not tied to the storefront you bought them in
physical versions could be offered for those, i think it would be cool! but it’s not necessary imo. as long as it’s preservable and transferable, it’s good.
You just described GoG which I don’t even want to recommend after they sent a bunch of Nazi emails and then went “Oopsie doopsie poopsie sowwie”.
yea gog can fuck off but the way they do games distribution is how it should be for everyone imo
I’m like the only one I know with an optical drive in my computer and its not even a bluray drive. Maybe if they distributed on like USB drives? but that seems expensive
i’ve never had a hddvd or bd drive. there was one in a laptop we took in for recycling once. didn’t even bother pulling it.
