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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
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
It's not the disc itself that people care about, it's having a transferrable license. People want the option to rent games, or give them away/resell after playing. Physical media provides some legal protections for that because you are buying a license attached to the thing storing the software.
Digital distribution is a perfectly fine way to get a game, if it weren't synonymous with big companies taking away your ownership of the right to use software you purchased. You can't share a game you enjoyed with friends. If you lose access to your account you're SOL. If the host server shutsdown, you better have had a stable copy installed/backed up.
People don't hate digital downloads, they hate the consumer abuse they have enabled. Stop the consumer abuse, and only collectors will care about physical media.
That's one of the use cases NFTs were meant for, noncustodial transferable digital property. Sadly, they got ruined by the ape jpeg grifters who didn't even bother to upload the actual image to the blockchain. The entirety of Steam, Spotify, and Netflix could fit on a specialized blockchain like Arweave, but none of the publishers or big media corporations have any interest in doing that when they can "sell" them to you every 5 years or, better yet, let you rent them one month at a time. Maybe if one day people stop "buying" them, they'll be forced to do that, but I won't hold my breath.
I mean, there’s no reason NFTs are needed for that, a normal database would also work.
Sure but when a company shuts down or decides to shut down the database all the media goes with it. That's what sony just did, all the stuff you "bought" went poof. Not having the ability to transfer the license is only half of the issue.
Imo they weren't ruined by grifters. NFTs are built on a flawed system that caters to exactly the kind of libertarian, free enterprise assholes who ate it up. If they weren't running the grift, they were getting scammed themselves. Crypto is a mirage of wealth, and everything built on top of it is either only a vehicle for legitimate currency or laundering ill gotten gains. It's just an unregulated stock.
Signed chains of custody already exist, they could be inplemented and nothing is stopping any of these marketplaces from doing so. They don't need NFTs, which have a needlessly complex set of requirements, to validate a game's license. Any service could leverage their pre-existing DRM scheme to let you sell your copy to someone else, but that doesn't give them the same benefits as someone buying a new copy.
NFTs are built on a flawed system
What do you mean by that? What is the flaw of the system?
everything built on top of [crypto] is either only a vehicle for legitimate currency
What do you mean by "legitimate currency"? If I can buy and sell things for it, how is it illegitimate? There are plenty of non-strictly monetary blockchain and crypto applications, like arweave, for example, which is a decentralized, permissionless blockchain based data storage protocol where you can store and share encrypted private data like on google drive or publicly host files and static websites, or DAOs, which enable decentralized control and decision making through provably fair voting. Financial applications of crypto are also great. You can buy and sell things privately over the internet without a need for a middleman who will take a cut and can cut you off if the government makes them or they don't like what you're selling, like what happened with wikileaks, pornhub or more recently with steam. Platforms like hyperliquid and tokenized real world assets give people across the world, also from sanctioned and disenfranchised regions, access to global financial markets where they can privately and permissionlessly trade stocks, commodities, etc. without the need for a broker who can block buying and selling, like robinhood did during the GME short squeeze, front run them, and take a cut of their trades. People from countries with high inflation like Venezuela or Turkiye can use crypto to easily and safely store their wealth in a less inflationary asset like ₿, $ with stablecoins, or tokenized gold.
or laundering ill gotten gains.
How do you launder money with crypto? I thought that starting a fake business in the service sector like a beauty parlor or a restaurant was the gold standard for money laundering, tax man don't care as long as he gets his cut.
Signed chains of custody already exist, they could be inplemented and nothing is stopping any of these marketplaces from doing so.
True, but that's still dependent on the marketplace continuing to exist, if it ever disappears, so does your media. I suppose that's also true for a blockchain, but it would be a lot less likely for the digital media blockchain to go down than some marketplace, and since it's decentralized, the community would have a vested interest in running nodes to help keep it alive.
They don't need NFTs, which have a needlessly complex set of requirements, to validate a game's license.
What complex set of requirements do NFTs have? You can deploy them pretty easily these days. You can send them automatically upon payment, and you wouldn't even need a server for that or validation of licenses, as it could all be done in the EVM with a smart contract.
Any service could leverage their pre-existing DRM scheme to let you sell your copy to someone else
This doesn't address the accessibility issue. If the service goes down, you lose the media you "bought", and doesn't work for services without DRM.
You can't reason with someone who is already biased to one position. They'll never try to see the benefits.
But yeah we can have visa and mastercard approve all of our purchases too
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
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.
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 installerі on an optical disc, something like an SD card which can be easily updated seems like a much better fit.
Most computers don't have optical disc drives (I do have one, but I am exception and I don't use it for data).
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 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.
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.
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 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.
Personally, so long as it's DRM-free, physical, installers or zipped files sound like a good idea.
And like with vinyl, if it comes back, it's to be expected that it isn't as big as it once was. But being there, it's another option for the preservation and ownership folks.
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.
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.
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.
Most laptops don't have an optical drive any more. I haven't looked at desktops.
You can obviously buy an external USB one, or sell things on USB thumb drives, but...
Audio optical media sales peaked a long time back and have massively declined since then.
https://www.statista.com/chart/12950/cd-sales-in-the-us/
Quarter-century back that they peaked.
Successor physical audio formats haven't caught on.
The internal optical drives for PC used to cost under $30, and then you just need the right case.
I mean, you can definitely get drives. I bought a LibreDrive-flashed USB 4k/UHD Blu-Ray drive last month, because I wanted to (legally) play UHD Blu-Ray movies on Linux
I don't know how much longer they'll be around, and the quality is generally higher than streamed video. I don't think that there will be a successor physical video format to UHD Blu-Ray, that this is basically the end of the line. But just saying...the infrastructure to use the optical media directly is not generally there any more, I think, on most out-of-box PCs. That's an additional barrier if you want to sell the stuff in that media format.
goes to skim Dell desktops
Yeah, it doesn't look like they have optical drives these days.
People still by cds and vinyls, I don't think is fair to compare today with the apex of physical media, an adjustment in numbers is inevitable.
There's a difference between "people still buy them" and "people still buy them enough to recoup the investment in producing them."
Music studios have much larger budgets than indie game studios.
...Do they? There are a lot of small indie music labels producing vinyl, and there are indie game studios that can be quite large.
I built a desktop five years ago, and when I asked the Micro Center employee where the Blu Ray drives were, he looked at me like I had two heads, then pointed me to a sad little bin with loose drives with no boxes. People haven't had disc drives for a long time. Games are also getting so big that you'd either need to require UHD discs (even I don't have a drive for that) or multiple discs, and even back in the day, I hated multi disc installs.
Physical media on PC is as dead as it can get. I haven't touched an optical medium in the last 15 years, and i don't have a drive going on 10 years now. I also know of noone around me that is still using CDs/DVDs, the last time i messed with DVDs was when ripping every last one of them, and even my grandma has opted for converting her music to FLAC and freeing up the largish space her music Cds were using, making her collection both save from bitrot and a lot more readily available. I could get behind distribution per USB-Stick, but sticks that are fast enough to handle 100GB+ installations comfortably aren't cheap in comparison to optical media, and in most cases it would only mean they are used for a single time when copying them to a network storage, in the end just creating tech waste.
DRM-Free installers - that's where it's at, and that is what i store; alternatively, for PS1/2 games, compressed CD images are the way to go.
Collectors Editions are the exception, but even here I would prefer the USB stick format if it had redundancy built in - nowadays that is the truly universal storage that any computer can use without needing extra hardware.
ETA: To make the issue clearer: If i had to use physical media to store my game collection alone, i would have to rent a storage room to have enough physical space to store around 45000 titles, and then add even more to have available room for a few thousand music albums. It would making sure all this data is save from the inevitable demise of optical media a fulltime job. This is fine for a museum, it is not fine for a person which has to pay rent per square meter.
Physical releases cost a fair bit to make, from just printing the media and designing the package and so on. And then there's storing and shipping the game around the world so people could actually buy it.
Shipping could be out sourced to the customer easily enough (some kind of direct to customer sales model), but the rest is still a good chunk of extra cost for the publisher. Manufacturing like this also typically has to be paid in advance, so harder for smaller publishers and Indies to get it done in the first place.
I don't think we will see a comeback of physical releases for PC other than as a collector items, it just doesn't make sense for normal releases at this point.
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
Limited time games do this quite often. Its fun to get physical media.