Technology

This is yet another nail in the coffin of physical media. Or, in other words games you actually own instead of long term lease.

I think the steam deck is genuinely the only console worth buying these days.

It would be so funny if the EU decided Sony was a gatekeeper on the consoles without disc drives and forced them to allow 3rd party app store on them.

Hey, a guy can dream.

One big reason people still play on consoles to this day is because they own a physical copy of their games and can play on their consoles even offline.

Sometimes

for that value just get a pc honestly not a locked down freebsd based console

At $700 you could build a pretty decent PC that would last a lot longer (3060 12gb, Ryzen 5 5600, 16gb of DDR4), and build a steam library that you'll have 20 years from now. I've had the same monitor, keyboard and mouse for an easy 10; controllers don't last that long. They're reaching a point where there's less and less of an actual argument for owning one.

Unfortunately, physical media for gaming died when always-online DRM was normalized. It doesn't matter if you have a game on a disc when you have to phone home every time to use it. The corporation may still block your access.

One more step in ensuring no one owns anything. Lease or rent are your options.

Reminder that you can put in whatever you want in a PC. And that you can get a decent gaming machine for 1k (700+PS plus).
CD Drive? No problem. DVD? Of course. Another SSD? Get some random 50$ thing and throw it in there. Floppy? Harvest some old PC and voila.

Physical media or full rejection. Fuck you business school zombies squeezing blood from rocks

Sony's problems are twofold:

• They are charging an absurd amount of money for a game console
• They are selling a game console that has practically no first party games for it.

If they had plenty of the latter, they could weather this. But there are still games releasing for the PS4, and they have had 1, maybe 2 PS5 releases that would qualify as first party this year (that don't bubble down to PC).

Jesus christ, Nintendo is gonna win it all aren't they?

Nintendo is going to continue to eat everybody's lunch with decisions like this one

I stopped buying consoles after they wanted to charge me to use the internet. That's not how this works.

Paystation

They don't want you to own* physical media anymore.

All good points in the comments, but something I haven't seen a anyone talk about yet:

WHY is a DISK DRIVE $80??? All it does is read a disk. Any encryption on the disk would be decrypted on the console. External disk drives are like $20. If you specially brand them maybe you could go up to $40.

But $80? That's like a Gameboy Advance. That's a miyoo mini plus. That's an entire console in itself.

Ahhhh, so my ps5 is the most superior PlayStation still, good to know.

799€ here, 920€ with a disc drive. That is stupidly insane for a console. We're almost breaking the 1000€ barrier for an "upgrade", not even the new generation.

I'd bet my money Sony is just testing the grounds to see if they can set PS6 price in a few years over the 1k barrier.

I think Sony never wanted a physical media PS5 console. The design made it seem like an after thought. Like a growth on the side of sleek lines.

It's too expensive. $500 is already too much for these things.

But capitalism's gotta capitalism.

Wow, just buy or build a comparable PC at that price point

You can't share or sell the games... Looks like a bad investment...

Nah I'm good with my 2017 jailbroken switch with free games lol

What games are even worth it? Sony has like 5 'must play" exclusive games on their console

Like it or not the majority of game purchases are digital these days. It's a sad development for sure. I buy all my console games as physical discs myself.

Why can't you just plug in a random-ass USB 4KBR-disc drive?

Or sell one that we can use to bring in games from PS1, 2, 3, 4 and 5? And state that the drive will be able to be used going forward, into the next gen and beyond.

They've got a rich gaming history at this point and they don't care because they'd rather sell you an $80 digital copy that they can take away at any time and you can't trade it in or really own it. And it's the same with PC games as well, courtesy of Valve and then everyone else.

If the future is digital, we need laws that allow us to transfer ownership of digital content. It would have to be secure, obviously. Not just "steal somebody's console and trade all their games in".

How much space does it come out of the box? I bought my PS5 a year ago.

It came with 667GB of space. Some games take up 100gb.

And now you want to make it digital only??? Uhhhh, fuck that. You better be giving me like 1000 terabytes.