It effects the poorest people most, which should be the reason everyone hates it, no matter your personal choice of media.
Buying used games at the pawn shop, borrowing from your library or friend, etc is right and good.
Publishers doing day 1 patches, etc is not an excuse to justify abolishing access.
In fact, day 1 patches should either not be a thing, or cost as much as a voluntary recall of the first batches of disks did in 2005.
Instead of being happy they don’t need to spend billions to prevent a fiasco, they squirm at the thought of someone not going through their racket to get a loicence.
A legislated digital refresh on the second hand disc market would be nice consumer protection policy. But no, community servers are too much to ask for from these fucks.
The poorest people won’t ever be getting a PS6 so that’s kinda irrelevant. It’s not like the PS2 days where after 3 years the console was 20% of its launch price. Those days are long gone.
Poor people could afford to get a game console back in those days, just a few years behind launch. Now the PS5 is hundreds of dollars more than it was at launch 5 years ago. Early adopters getting the cheapest price for a console was not on my bingo list but that’s where this hobby is at now.
The market conditions are very unique right now since this is caused by all the AI-slop, and consoles going up in price like this has never happened before. If we think long-term though, i think it will still apply like it used to.
Nah, it’s never going back to how it was, even when RAM prices normalise. Why? Node shrinks. They just don’t happen anymore. That was the main reason why price drops could happen previously. As it stands there’s no shrinking left to do, so no massive price drops.
Even if that were true, the prices wouldn’t increase either. I think there’s more factors at play though that make consoles cheaper over time.
The prices increase with inflation and costs. They’re not getting cheaper to make, which means that they have to increase the price to match inflation.
The market conditions are not unique - this is the new normal. Do you really think the Trump admin is going after the RAM cartel? That was the past, open corruption is the new standard
When i said unique i was purely referring to consoles going up in price instead of down. RAM cartel was already a thing long before trump though, as much as i hate the turd.
You know Trump won’t always be in office, right? He isn’t a permanent fixture. Best case scenario, he croaks today, worst case scenario, he’s out in another two and a half years. Granted I’m not exactly expecting miracles of whoever comes next, but they couldn’t be much worse than the overinflated oompah loompah.
I appreciate your optimism.
Gotta keep hope, otherwise what’s the point, right?
They are going to stop making PS5 discs as well.
I think people downvoting you don’t realize you don’t like the current situation. But it’s real. Shit’s real bad right now, Sony wants every dollar they can get a hold of. This hobby is now a luxury the majority of people will not be able to enjoy, and it sucks badly.
I really don’t know of any way this industry can sustain this. How will gamers, Sony and the rest endure this level of enshittification?
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Yeh the downvotes are weird to say the least. So the downvoters think that poor people can afford the PS6 at the >$1000 it’s going to be? Or a PS5 at a price higher than it launched at? Isn’t the PS5 like USD$650 now? What poor person can afford that and $80 games?
Consoles used to be the cheaper option. PS2 at launch in 2000 was $300. A pc in the year 2000 cost about $600 or more if you were putting together a gaming rig.
The PS5 is $650, and that’s still less expensive than a gaming pc. Minimum spend for a gaming rig would be $800 or more.
The reality is that consoles were the most in reach option for poor people, and maybe they still are.
I suspect that people who really really can’t afford the hobby on console will turn to roms on much older PCs.
The resale market is precisely what they want to kill. Can’t sell a game twice if one copy can be played by two people. Can’t profit from nostalgia with a retro re-release (that will inevitably be shittier than the original) if the original retro game can still be played.
At least it’s in the article: in the case of Sony everything is tied to hardware. You can’t control the hardware or use it in novel ways. It’s just a bad choice, disc or no disc.
