Piracy is the most consistent and solid form of preservation, definitely. Well technically piracy is a subset of “DRM-free software” which is the true holy grail (all the advantages of piracy, with total legality and legitimacy!). To preserve software, it must be able to be copied instead of tied interminably to something perishable like a disc or single hard drive. Or, for that matter, a single online account that might suffer anything from a banning to deletion for inactivity to just “lost password and forgot the email and can’t get access anymore” to “the company that operates the servers the account uses no longer exists”. And piracy needs to be happening during the release windows of the software, not “be respectful and wait 5 years” - the only reason retro console libraries are as well-kept as they are is because people were dumping games to play for free back in the day.

Those Wii redownloads are tied to specific console IDs, and those console NANDs are just as vulnerable to damage or deletion or loss as normal physical media is. They’re even worse than account-based DRM’d media since account-based media at least tolerates hardware damage or loss (but not account bans or service EOL). Thankfully, every digital purchase on Nintendo platforms other than Switch 2 is fully preserved and made available. This would be impossible if Nintendo’s anti-piracy measures had ever worked for an entire console generation. Switch 2 games, on the other hand, are currently “loseable”. You might be reasonably sure that Nintendo will never delist DK Bananza until (insert threshold where you think it’d be acceptable here) but game preservationists also care about game versions. And it’s always possible that Nintendo finally managed to nail it and piracy for Switch 2 won’t happen ever (or for a sufficient definition of “ever”).

Game key cards (and discs for update-reliant or online-focused games) are in a weird place. The main reasons people claim to care about physical games are “preservation” and “used games” and those don’t actually overlap.

From the preservation standpoint, GCKs and discs that don’t have the whole game are both pretty shit. There’s an argument that buggy broken v1.0 is better than nothing and that’s objectively true, but neither of these things provide actual software preservation in the face of (for example) storefront closure or account banning. GCKs and all discs are useless for preservation of online games, of course: what are you doing with that Highguard or Concord disc? A further argument is that even a complete game burned to a disc that relies on DRM isn’t truly preserved as it won’t outlive the death of the DRM boxes themselves, when every Nintendo 3DS dies you’re not going to be able to play that pristine physical copy of Pokémon Moon. Used physical games themselves are also a physical product that can decay or be damaged or lost - you can’t say that a game with a million extant discs being traded around between various people is a “preserved game”.

A completely different appeal for physical games is simply the ability to resell. Your gaming budget goes a longer way if instead of spending $60 three times to play three games, you’re spending $45 three times and also selling the games for $30 after you’re done with them. You could play ten first-party single player Nintendo games legally on the Switch for $0 if you always bought used and sold the used copies for the same price you bought them for. Game-Key cards and discs for incomplete/online-only games do facilitate this perfectly, though GCKs lose all value when the CDN of the storefront closes and discs only lose most value in this situation.

That assumes every single disc buyer becomes a person that doesn’t ever buy capcom games. Given the margins lost on each physical sale (licensing fees, manufacturing, shipping, the retailer’s own markup), as long as half of those disc enjoyers become digital purchasers Capcom has already lost nothing.

Additionally, how many millions per year are spent on used Capcom game discs? If literally every used Capcom buyer stopped ever buying Capcom products, Capcom loses $0. If any percent of those used game buyers becomes willing to pay full price (or hell, digital on-sale price), that’s more money in Capcom’s pocket to offset losing true physical media diehards.

For a console storefront operator like Sony, there’s more nuance because “Sony games” and “exclusives” aren’t direct value generators. The value they generate is in getting “give sony money for monthly subs and non-sony games machines” in customer’s living rooms. Taking the losses inherent in physical/used copies makes financial sense if it drives platform dominance. For Capcom, who doesn’t operate a storefront or platform, it’s just about how many sales, how much money per sale (changed by platform fees, disc manufacturing costs, and DLC postpurchases). A used game without DLC is $0 for capcom but is a sale. That’s worse than a pirate being $0 for capcom but would maybe have been a sale.

“Voting with one’s wallet” isn’t an action you take. “Gamers as a whole” have been voting with their wallets against disc games for over a decade. On PC, there was barely an outcry as brick and mortar stores stopped being part of the games experience. On consoles, people have been installing the games on HDDs since the Xbox 360 since actually running the game off a disc incurs atrocious load times. Gamers have accepted and paid for DLC. Gamers have accepted and dealt with day-one patches that render the data on the physical disc obsolete.

Hell, gamers as a whole chose to purchase the discless PS5. Gamers as a whole subscribe to PS+, Switch Online, Xbox Live, Gamepass, etc enough that it’s shifted the value model of the medium. “Not buying a product” isn’t nearly as much of a political statement as the wallet-vote drumbeaters think. Not buying the product is the default. Am I “boycotting” ubisoft when I haven’t purchased a Ubi game since Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time on the Gamecube? Sony’s Playstation 4 and 5 never appealed to me as a platform or product. There might be a shakeup or protest where people that do regularly give Sony (or whoever) money stop doing so, but that’s always going to be a drop in the bucket. Hell, the customers that buy physical (especially used) games for PS5, don’t buy digital and don’t pay for Plus are the least valuable customers for Sony anyway. Sony makes $0 a year off that guy where they make hundreds a year from a dude that literally just pays for ps+ and the newest COD.

The “wallets have voted” and the result for Sony is overwhelmingly “yeah, you’re gonna do just fine without disc diehards”. Games preservation purists already aren’t console customers because modern consoles are designed exclusively as anti-preservation ecosystems. The remaining reason to care about discs is the used copy trade, and that’s the same as piracy when it comes to the company. Worse, even, since there’s an entire industry and market surrounding “how to play zelda without paying nintendo” legally.

“Wallet voting” overwhelmingly rewards those that buy. Say you’re selling a $100/yr subscription service to a million people. You announce that you’re doubling the price to $200 a year. The internet gets mad. As long as less than five hundred thousand active subscribers get mad enough to cancel, you made the “right decision”. The opinion of anyone other than those subscribers doesn’t matter. The entertainment industry has reached a point of market saturation that getting more customers isn’t a feasible growth mechanism, so instead you have to squeeze the ones you have harder.

Aside from attaching DLC to the purchase, a used-game buyer is “supporting” Capcom as much as a pirate is. It’s even worse than a pirate because a lot of pirates would have never bought the game anyway but a used game buyer clearly signals a willingness to spend money on the product. Just, yknow, less money. Turning a dude who would pay $40 for your thing into a dude who’d pay $60 is a lot easier than turning a dude who’d never pay a dime above $0.

I voted with my wallet hard enough years ago that I’m no longer part of this “wallet vote”. I haven’t purchased a console game since Animal Crossing on the Switch, and haven’t purchased a physical one since Mario Odyssey - the only reason I did that was to dodge updating the console, so that I could do things Nintendo very much does not want a user doing on their console. I’ve never owned a Sony console except for a ps2, and never Xbox since the 360. My preferred platform, PC, has been used-games-free and physical-copies-free (CD keyed installers are not physical copies for any definition other than “is pretty on a shelf”) for decades, and it’s better than a walled console garden could ever be. DRM-free purchases and piracy exist on PC and gasp people still buy PC games.

If the glorified DRM key for accessing the digital game (in the form of day 1 patches and postlaunch content) finally dying is what raises awareness of consoles being a hostageware platform, so be it.

Margins exist on physical games, especially as a third party. Capcom probably takes home some ~$25 per $60 disc game for PS5, less for a $60 Nintendo cartridge, and $42 per $60 digital game on PS or Steam. Lose a full half of those 10% of players but turn the other half into digital buyers, you’re barely short of breaking even. Then consider how many used game buyers you turned into people that actually pay Capcom for Capcom games.

Plenty of customers buy physical because hey, at the same price why not? That doesn’t mean they’ll stop buying Zelda or GTA or Resident Evil when Capcom/Sony takes the option away or Nintendo makes the download cheaper than the physical object (as it always should have been).

They don’t need to push “a majority” of current physical-preferring customers to digital, if the physical copy loses them 30% of the profit and 38% of sales for a game are physical, that means pushing half of new physical buyers over to digital and losing the other half of those customers entirely is slightly behind breaking even. That’s before assuming that a single dollar spent on used copies would have instead been spent on the eShop.

The only reason for Nintendo to not abandon these customers entirely is if they aren’t actually physical copy die-hards in the first place: they’re good little subscription paypiggies or totally fine with buying eShop exclusive games anyway. Their data currently leans in favor of tolerating the used market and lower margins on physical game sales. It will very likely shift, especially when it comes time to renew the agreements they’ve made with their manufacturing and shipping providers.

Nintendo’s doing what Sony did, testing the waters to see how many of their customers are willing to ditch physical for digital. They’re doing it by up-pricing physical first party games, while Sony did it by charging you an extra $100 (+33%) up front if you wanted to have the ability to play discs on your console. Sony is now acting on the customer data they have from their experiment, Nintendo will (as usual) be a generation behind. Right now, getting a physical copy for $60 vs a digital one for $60 is kind of a no brainer, unless you really don’t like swapping cartridges. As soon as customers start to ask themselves if having that cartridge is worth another $10, Nintendo will have the data they need.

To the dev/publisher/console storefront operator, a used game sale without a DLC attachment is the same as a pirated copy. Same result: you play zelda, nintendo receives $0.

Killing the used market is why Sony’s killing discs, full stop. Sony (or anyone else) doesn’t make the full value off of a disc game because they had to pay a bunch of manufacturers and shippers and middlemen. So if a digital copy makes them $60, a physical one new makes them let’s say $35 of the customer’s $60. And a physical used one makes them $0, even though the customer paid $40. Don’t forget this also applies to third party games: Sony gets a cut of every digital sale and new disc sale, but $0 from every used sale. If a million used $40 games get sold, that’s Sony watching customers spend $40 million on Sony products without Sony getting a dime - even if we pretend that every used game buyer would be a non-buyer instead of willing to pay full price, Sony goes from getting $0 to getting $0 from those customers when they kill used games.

All Sony’s calculus has to say to make killing discs “worth it” is “some percentage of people that buy games physical (thus we get less of their $60 that they are provably willing to spend) and used (thus we get nothing from their $20-40) will now be buying digital copies”. That percentage does not need to be high.

Even Nintendo’s 38% (which refers exclusively to Nintendo games, not eshop exclusives and third parties that generate Nintendo revenue) is lower than it needs to be to ensure physical is the “right choice”. Every physical sale is a lower profit per sale for Nintendo, if they make 38% “sales” of a given game with 40% overhead (cartridges are way more expensive than blu-rays to manufacture and source), that means the physical copies actually represent 22% of a given game’s profit. And then you consider how many of those physical buyers would buy digital if the other option was “don’t buy Zelda”. That’s why Nintendo’s current strategy is to pass the non-savings on to the customer by pricing physical games higher than downloads.

Nintendo is intentionally misrepresenting the value of their physical market to one-up Sony. This is a company that argues in court that every download of TOTK from a pirate website is $60 that would have been spent on the game. Seems to me that they’d have a much easier time believing that every purchase of new TOTK from a GameStop is $60 that would have been spent on the eShop, and that some number of $40s spent on the used game would have bought it digitally if they couldn’t have the savings from a used cart.

Sell me on VR. let’s say this is a mind blowingly perfect launch. Somehow Valve sells the thing for like $600 and meets demand, anything you’d wanna do in VR is possible with this. What would that $600 get me? The only stuff I really see online that’s hype for VR is:

HL: Alyx

Beat Saber

And… 3D/VR porn videos.

Aside from those, what else am i missing out on by not having a VR headset? The tech seems super cool but I don’t hear praises sung for any other VR games than those two (and the half-joking suggestion that it’s just jackoff goggles). People talk about VRChat but I don’t think I’m interested in a positional audio chatroom with random people’s vtuber models and none of the friends i do voice chat with would rather be doing so in a virtual space.

Am i genuinely missing something? People seem really hyped for the Frame, it can’t just be for two games and a chatroom and porn, right? The ARM translation layer is really cool but that’s cool because it’ll benefit phones and tablets and SBCs more than the actual VR headset. I can see why you’d rather have a Frame than its competitors: no Facebook, works on-device or as a PC accessory, price point maybe, etc. But what are people doing with their Quests and Indexes and Vives and PSVRs already?

1: nobody’s going to do it

2: this is completely boneless. It’s not even calling for people to cancel their PS+ subscriptions.

They can Tōkon deez nuts.

Tōkon deez nuts

I mean, if it’s actually an MMO the kind of person that likes SAO won’t be able to have fun being the only overpowered god tier main character in the entire universe.

Right, now get it “generally doable” on a device with phone level specs and universality (plus a three cent cable) and watch online competitive gaming crash to the point where there’s genuinely no rational argument for installing spyware. Force every game that cares to solve the serverside anticheat “problem” instead of mitigating “most cheaters” by mandating insane levels of system monitoring.

This is why I hope that cheats end up being MITM attacks with ai slop in control. LLMs can easily do basic pattern recognition, so a device that can “look” at the screen for you and click on people’s heads would be trivial to produce with no software running on the actual game device. Get that popularized and the only excuse for rootkit anti-cheat evaporates. I’d rather live in the world where people cheat at video games than the world where the average gamer has 5 rootkits on their system just to protect “competitive integrity”.

That ten minute boot time is not normal. Something’s very wrong with your PC, especially if other games or programs have minutes-long launch times.

This looks like every other over the shoulder mass effect clone ever made. Why does “shooting the thing” have to be the primary verb for every space-era game again?

No point in watching the ad parade when 80% of the games are hat stores or GAAS slop and 90% of the remainder are remakes and remasters. The games worth your time and money are ones you’ll hear about when they’re released.