I played a few newly bought used games on my PS3 this weekend and it was really how I could just put in the disc and play the games. There weren’t even updates for the games, the finished game was right on the disc and I could play them instantly.
Imagine a 20s baby experiencing this. They’ll realize what was taken from them , hopefully.
PS5 load times sure are nicer than PS3 load times, though.
Ah, the good old days of PS1 and 2.
On PC, it was insert the disc, install (takes a while), keep disc in, run game, crash, troubleshoot, give up.
Lmao, I got the disk for Portal, and was so excited it had a physical copy. Nope, it was just a link to install steam. wtf.
Also had a disk for bejeweled twist, could never get it to run on my computer.(windows 7/8) A decade and a half later, works flawlessly in wine on Linux.
Don’t forget insert disk 2, flip to backside of disk 1, now disk 3
Patches are not the worst thing in the world. There was a Robocop game, I think for the NES. The developers didn’t have time to complete the 5th level, so they put a time limit on the 4th level that was impossible.
Imagine if Cyberpunk or No mans sky were final at launch.
I realize by your last sentence, you mean 'Imagine if Cyberpunk or No mans sky were left unpatched after release.", but it could also read as “Imagine if Cyberpunk or No mans sky weren’t released incomplete.”, which is way better I think. Just don’t release games that aren’t finished.
I want to agree, but have to acknowledge that, realistically, they won’t even know all the things that need to be addressed before the huge userbase starts poking it.
Back in the day games were limited and the gameplay was generally fairly constrained, making fairly comprehensive QA at least plausible. Now things are so open ended there’s no way a company hits all of that.
Though I’m not sure every game needs to be that open ended…
The thing is, old incomplete games like that usually sold terribly. They are now either forgotten or worse: remembered for being terrible. Stuff like Superman64.
There used to be more pressure on developers to make good games first. Testing and QA departments have shrunk, or st the very least failed to scale with the increased scope of modern games. They instead rely on consumers to report the bugs.
So at the same time they keep raising prices, they are also pushing more of the work onto the consumers.
I think the ET Atari game sold so bad they just sent them the land fill, now I think it’s a collectable
Sure, but it will be used for evil more often than good, so I’d rather not have it at all. Never once did I notice my ps2 game needed any sort of patch or update. And guess what, they all still work perfectly. And if the disc goes bad I can convert to SD or Ethernet .
Imagine if Bethesda couldn’t fix all the bugs in their games.
Oh wait, they don’t anyway, modders do.
Imagine if Bethesda couldn’t fix all the bugs in their games.
Oh wait, they don’t anyway, modders do.
Hey, that’s a lie!
Not even modders can fix ALL of Bethesda’s bugs
That’s seems more an argument to not release the game yet than to release and patch later. Patches should be more for fixing bugs than finishing the game after release.
There were 4 versions of smash melee.
Patches existed before, it’s not an argument one way or the other.
How did those patches make it to users?
New sales in this case, however other cases saw them included in magazines or mailed out without an extra charge.
New sales sound bad. But if they were mailed to the user for free, that sounds great. I’m assuming that was pretty rare though?
I think so, most people didn’t take advantage of it even when it was offered.
I see, thanks
I went to look it up, evidently it was the Commodore 64.
But judging from the context, they wouldn’t have even bothered. They knew and made a change to just force an unsatisfying game over. They had ample opportunity to fix it even after release (logistics easier than NES roms), but didn’t bother.
The logistics would have depended on the medium used. C64 also ran cartridges. Though, even if it was a floppy disk release, distributing updates would have been challenging.
For instance, game magazines would distribute sample games as printed basic code that you had to manually type in and save to a blank floppy to use.
I think game quality started to really tank once online distribution became the norm. The hard cut off of the gold master meant a lot of quality trade offs that are made today would have been shipped forever broken and thus not done. The PMs of today have no such constraint any more and are free to cut corners knowing it can be patched later.
The worst thing is that this goes for EVERYTHING now, not just games. While Tesla got lots of praise for OTA updates, it was one of the worst things that happened to the automotive industry, because manufacturers no longer have to worry about expensive recalls for sometimes serious issues. They will ship things that are known defects, sometimes serious ones, and you can hand wave the consequences away with “Oh, it’ll be OTA’d by delivery.”
That being said, sometimes it’s a benefit, because there might be a major and a minor annoying defect, and we can now better prioritize getting the major one fixed before shipping and the minor one OTA’d, but it has still set a frustrating and dangerous precedent in the industry.
Fun fact: the Model 3 was shipped without any low-mu (ice/snow) calibration for its stability control system, and it was later OTA updated. Why was this allowed? They needed to get cars off the line ASAP, and they said “Well, all the initial customers are in California and it’s summer, so they won’t be driving in slick conditions.” Literally delivering to customers with known safety defects, but because it could be updated OTA, they didn’t care.
I know I’ve seen that movie but I cannot remember what it is.
It’s the story of how McDonalds became big. Think it’s called The Founders or something
why does it have the same vibes as the scene from falling down
I wasn’t aware of the origin and I dreamed that it was some sort of twilight zone thing. Like the guy hadn’t ordered his food yet and the weird golden age town’s burger joint just inherently knows what he’s going to order. It plays into the growing sense of unease as the town gets weirder and weirder by being too perfect until the drop and it’s revealed to be some sort of trap.
Sounds like algorithmic surveillance (modern social media) applied to real life, which I think I’ve seen as a movie or black mirror episode
Though you may need to reconfigure your memory managers and manually set up your sound card…
But then you are treated to the ultimate satisfaction of “YOUR SOUND CARD WORKS PERFECTLY”
“ENJOYING YOURSELF?”
Damn, core memory unlocked.
Please, don’t give me hope. This feels like seeing a photo of a loved one you lost. Still hurts that we had this in the past and now no more
Geforce Now replaying this meme as an ad
NO, NOT LIKE THAT
I mostly play retro games these days and on an emulation device. Hundreds of games ready at the push of a button.
Is it even possible this day? Haven’t like game sizes ballooned to like 100s of gbs?
I just want a digital copy of the game that I move between machines like normal mf files
They also launch in an incomplete state with devs expecting to be able to deliver patches over the Internet
Was going to say, what disk holds 50 gb of data
Yeah enjoy your phisical disc of unpatched cyberpunk and no man’s sky. Or really any game
?
They can patch it before releasing it.
They can do a lot of things that they won’t
That patch is supposed to stop bootlegs from getting out as easily, it contains part of the code to run the program.
There was a time that you could download patches for offline PC games. The game developers/distributors put them up on their websites. I like the idea that you could download and archive them alongside the original game files so you can still have the fixed game long after the developers have gone bust and their site has gone.
In a world without patching, they would have finished the games before shipping them.
Except installing from disc is slower than downloading
You didn’t go retro enough.
You don’t install from disk, you run from disk.
To be fair I do remember Spyro taking ages to load each level… N64 didn’t have as many loading issues due to the way the cartridges worked
Ah yes, put the disc in, wait 5 minutes for it to load.
There are simpler ways to say that the PS3 was your first experience with gaming.
LOL, I am this old.
Yeah maybe if u live in Estonia which has excellent Internet services.
But definitely not in germany, where u have to pay a shitton of money and still only get shitty speeds lol
You underestimate how slow blu-ray drives are.
For both xbox and playstation, right now, with discs, unless your internet if faster than 200Mbps, discs are faster. Also, installing from disc has no bandwidth caps, which is common in many places.
And if you say “I have faster internet”, good for you buddy. Your experience isn’t shared by everyone around the world.
Of course interent is faster than 200Mbit, it’s 2026. 1Gbit is standard and if you’re willing to pay a little extra you can get up to 8Gbit up/down.
Also, bandwidth caps? On residential internet? WTF.
1Gbit is standard
Fucking where? The “premium” service my ISP offers only promises 100Mbit, and I’m not exactly in the boonies.
In a lot of places that aren’t America, sadly.
But I really think the person arguing with you about internet speeds is missing the point.
The argument about disks shouldn’t be about what is faster or more convenient.
Disk or digital? Doesn’t matter.
Ownership versus no ownership? That’s what matters.
Just happens that almost all digital is not true ownership. I’d love for every site to be like GOG with true DRM-free downloads.
Ownership versus no ownership? That’s what matters.
All software is licensed, there’s no true ownership regardless of medium.
People who think owning a disk after the ps2 / GameCube / Xbox era means owning a guaranteed means to play the game forever are literal retards.
Probably same people who complain that $70 is too much for games when they were also $70 back in the 80’s 90s, 00’s, 10’s and 20’s
The fuck are you on about?
Having an actual brain.
This is the most unhinged opinion around this topic.
Your first point is pretty fair, but it is drowned out by the rambling below. Game distribution, for example, is much, much cheaper nowadays.
Have you ever heard of inflation? I paid $90 for Majora’s Mask and the required memory expansion back in ‘02. That would be $176 today.
The thing you’re ignoring is back then games would go on sale pretty quickly. Hardly anyone paid more than $20 for any game.
The thing you’re forgetting is that this is a complete fabrication.
Okay kid, whatever you say.
