this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
380 points (98.7% liked)

Technology

58303 readers
18 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

The only question I have is what’s gonna happen as game discs are just becoming an access token to download the game and its updates.

That's a big concern. There's communities trying to document which games are complete on the media and can be played from start to end without updates (so no major game-breaking bugs or huge performance issues) like this one:

https://www.doesitplay.org/

I'm also part of a FB group that collects cartridge information for Switch games, to document if there's revisions with all updates included.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CEABCBrPv1tWf89hSZqUunK0JW-sQo8XpxuvZhdtHQs/edit#gid=0

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It’s good that people are worrying about this. Although, I haven’t heard of any disc game not being able to be played. I guess it would only happen if Sony/Microsoft go bankrupt or decide to close PlayStation/Xbox game updates servers.

It ain’t likely to happen but it’s important to be able to preserve games for the future as they are part of history just like paintings.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I haven’t heard of any disc game not being able to be played.

There's a number of games that don't come with the whole thing on disk/cart, usually including only the early stages and the rest needs to be downloaded.

Hogwarts Legacy and Jedi Survivor are two fairly recent examples.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

As long as you have a way to download the data that ain’t a problem for me, but if one day Sony or EA closes without giving the update data to be available for everyone that would be a problem.

Still I don’t see the advantage for them to only put the early stages on the disc. Are they saving money this way?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Either saving on media costs (25GB disc instead of 100GB disc, maybe 1 disc instead of 2 if the game is too big), or even having more time to work on the game.

Developer makes sure the early stages are properly tested, send the disc for manufacturing including only those, use the manufacturing time to tweak/bugfix/optimize more stuff the rest of the game.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Tech Tangents did a video on disc games where either the DRM server is down or incompatible with the disk (e.g. the disc games requires an unsupported version of Steam). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZYy9KzFT2w

It's about PC games rather than console though, after Microsoft got huge backlash when they proposed online DRM for their discs and Sony said "we work offline!" and the PS4 crushed the XBone, that killed that idea for a couple more years

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Okay I’ll watch to inform myself. Thanks