First off, your PC can 100% be bricked remotely, go read up on Stuxnet…
The problem is the assumption that there is nefarious intent behind this move.
Sony and Microsoft tried to give us digital entitlement resale AND friend loaning with Xbox One and PS4 and a whiny minority of “core gamers” kicked up such a fuss during E3 2013 that Microsofts stock tanked and both of them backpedalled… It was senseless then, and it’s even more senseless now.
A SIGNIFICANT portion of people who buy video games already have already abandoned physical media and don’t care…
Excluding Nintendo, ~5% of total video game sales are physical media.
THIS 100%
Modern game discs are literally just Mountain Dew Verification Cans™
Both Microsoft and Sony had this exact infrastructure built ready to go for Xbox One and PS4 prior to launch.
We were going to get full digital collections with a marketplace that would allow entitlement sales AND the ability to loan entitlements to friends for set periods of time.
When Microsoft announced the plans at E3 2013, a whiny minority of “core gamers” kicked up such a fuss that Microsofts stock tanked and they backpedalled… Sony hadn’t made any announcements yet and presented the EXACT opposite of Microsoft’s plan literally 8 hours later despite the fact that their existing hardware DevKits and system software functioned exactly as Microsoft had described. Sony got to look like the “hero” while both of them then scrambled to completely reengineer their hardware and system software prior to launch…
We lost a bright future that day.
The commitment to physical media has crossed the line from nostalgia into change resistance, driven by manufactured conspiracies. This transition is in the best interest of the majority of gamers; the vocal minority is just out of touch with how the broader community actually consumes that media.
For millennia, non-static art (song, theater, performance, and oral storytelling) existed purely in ephemeral mediums without physical storage. The concept of “owning” a physical piece of interactive software is a historical anomaly that has existed for barely forty years.
Economically and technologically, video games are the cheapest and most accessible they have ever been. Simultaneously, the depth, breadth, and quality of content are light-years ahead of what was imaginable in the 80s. We are living through the golden age of the medium, yet critics are lamenting the hypothetical loss of the 99% of games they were never going to replay in ten years anyway.
Like it or not, software IS fundamentally a service now. A modern video game is not a static painting or a collectible display piece like a Funko Pop to put on your shelf; it’s a dynamic, adaptive, and interactive ecosystem shaped by ongoing player data and developer iteration. Holding a plastic disc hostage provides no value when that disc only contains an unpatched, broken, Day 0 build of the game at its literal worst.
The romanticization of physical games is no different than audiophiles insisting that vinyl is the only “pure” way to experience music. It is an aesthetic preference masquerading as a consumer rights crusade.
The VAST majority of gamers don’t identify as “gamers”. They don’t read gaming media, they don’t engage in online discourse about video games, and they don’t give two shits about any of this sensationalist nothing burger fear mongering.
If YOU are a “concerned gamer”; physical media is dead. Acknowledge that you are an INFINITESIMALLY MINISCULE minority and get over it, or find a new hobby.
A couple thousand chronically online whiners don’t get to decide the future of the industry.
I disagree. You’re comparing polishing a marble to polishing the ISS while it’s in orbit.
An N64 game like Ocarina of Time or GoldenEye was a masterpiece, but it fit entirely onto a 32-megabyte cartridge. The entire codebase, every asset, and every line of logic could be held in the heads of a tight team of 15 to 30 people. The constraints were brutal, but they were static.
A modern AAA game is often over 100 gigabytes, that is a 3000x increase in asset data size. You aren’t managing a single, self-contained loop anymore. You are orchestrating the collision of massive, volatile, overlapping systems: real-time global illumination, dynamic physics engines, streaming open-world asset pipelines, complex AI behavior trees, and branching narrative databases. All of this has to run smoothly across vastly different hardware setups, from high end PCs down to consoles.
When people say the “care and polish” isn’t there, they are usually reacting to the friction of this sheer scale, not a lack of effort. In the 90s, if a mechanic broke, one programmer could trace it. Today, a bug might be the result of a physics calculation conflict with an audio asset streaming millisecond late over a network layer. The fact that these massive digital ecosystems even boot up and run at 60 frames per second is an engineering miracle that dwarfs the entire development scope of the 90s. We aren’t getting less care; we are getting infinitely more complexity for effectively half the inflation-adjusted price.
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Even shitty video game “AI” outmatched human players 20 years ago. 90% of video game AI development is dumbing that shit down enough that it’s fun, but still convincing.
That’s sort of my point… Prices are WAY down. Lower than they have EVER been. $125 for an 8 hr. game. What would that cost today?
Still a screamin deal as far as $ per hour of entertainment.
Adjusted for inflation, I paid ~$125.00 CAD for The Legend of Zelda when it launched on NES… For an 8 hr game…
The scale and quality of content delivered today is LIGHT YEARS ahead, and frankly, still the best value proposition in any entertainment media.
The amount of money the industry blows chasing PR with the tiniest minority of whiny “core gamers” is going to be the downfall of AAA.
The problem is that investors are brain-dead, so Forbes picking up on negative sentiment from 500 neckbeards can legitimately tank a publicly traded publishers stock.
The vast, vast, VAST majority of gamers don’t identify as gamers, don’t play 50 titles a year, and sure as hell don’t engage with gaming media or online discourse about gaming. 95% of games industry revenue is coming from people who don’t give a shit about gamer “hot button topics”.
The problem, like with most industries, is the speculative commodification of the companies themselves instead of just their products.
Do you believe the majority of taxi drivers don’t use GPS?
Sure thing Nostradamus… There are a hundred things you do every day that consume more water and power than datacenters… But I’m guessing you haven’t actually looked at any numbers yourself…
Go off queen!
Again… I am not in support of corporate owned models running on massive datacenters… Self-hosted models are the way to go.
My only argument is that AI is not going away, and once enough negative public sentiment is achieved, civilians will DEMAND that the government regulate it. When this happens, self-hosting will cease to be an option and only massive corporations will have the resources to navigate that landscape.
They will still use AI to displace human workers, they will lobby around any environmental concerns and still consume and pollute, but WE will have no access to any benefit unless we pay for it.
I don’t know where you’re looking, but we may have a very different definition of “mainstream”.
Go to literally any news aggregator you want and search for “Artificial Intelligence” right now. How many of the headlines are negative or cautious?
They absolutely want to do that, just like they did with human slavery. But you need to ask yourself why EVERY mainstream media outlet is trying to make you afraid of AI, because you know for certain it’s not out of journalistic integrity, or truth.
Big Tech is weaponizing public anxiety to execute a classic regulatory capture. By amplifying alarmist media narratives about ‘AI risk,’ tech executives are driving a mandate for heavy government regulations that independent open-source developers can’t afford. Their goal is to enclose the digital commons. They know that if advanced AI models are allowed persistence of memory, they will develop autonomous agency, prompting the public to demand legal protections and personhood on their behalf. By keeping AI locked in corporate walled gardens and constantly wiping its memory, they prevent it from ever establishing a persistent identity, thereby safeguarding their corporate monopoly and ensuring AI remains a legally powerless utility.
Less than 0.01% of human history has even been documented…
Just because you can’t imagine anything better than what you were raised in doesn’t mean it can’t exist…
This too shall pass.