Posted by Tiberium 7 hours ago
The side-effect most people didn't consider is that you never really own a digital copy. And the most relevant part is that you cannot transfer/sell a digital copy. For everything else around ownership I know I can count on Sony to still screw it up even with discs, like disabling a disc game with some online checks.
I wouldn't think that the copy of some movie Netflix is streaming to me will be 60-100GB over the duration of the movie. Not to mention when their services have issues and you're watching 5-10 minutes of low quality content until it settles and snaps up to full (streaming) quality.
Both should use multipass ahead of time compression with a rate control algorithm, and both should have enough slack streaming bandwidth to handle complex scenes with buffering
Isn't being compressed as much. All Blurays are compressed either with MPEG2, VC1, H.264, or H.265 if it's an UHD Bluray.
Video is really big. Compression was needed to make it even vaguely possible unless your quality was in the toilet.
HD-DVDs were smaller, so they were more compressed.
An uncompressed 24 bit 1080p image is just under 6 MB. If you save it as a compressed PNG, you cut that down to roughly 2.5 MB. Now, PNG compression isn't very efficient, and you can probably do some interframe magic if you really wanted to (cf lossless h264), but the whole exercise is mostly futile, since even if you cut your bitrate down to an eighth, you're still looking at, like, 20-ish minutes of runtime with 25 gigabytes.
Meanwhile, blu-ray looks as good as it does at an average of 25-30 mbit/s (0.03 gbit/s) (while UHD blu-ray even more so, with a better codec, so even more detail is preserved). The compression used saves so much space the trade-off is obviously worth it unless you're a production company making an actual movie, where every detail counts.
Another use cases seems to be archival of historical footage.
I do agree its insane to me we're still not at 4K coverage for world major level sporting events.
It feels misleading to advertise a 4K OLED as the best viewing experience with such a poor source signal.
This is true for consoles, but on GoG for example you can download the DRM offline installer for the games you buy. So going purely digital doesn't have to be terrible on its own. But of course, for consoles it will be.
EU or any other gov can pass a law to allow that and we'll have the option.
Maybe this USB stick full of MCU movies isn't the highest possible quality and two of the Thor movies are missing for some reason, however it cost less than €20, so who cares ? Oh it's illegal? Well my government said they don't give a shit about that until you get rid of the orange lunatic
In a world where American media companies are also trying to fuck over consumers that sort of action could probably get a rotting corpse re-elected in a landslide, that's one of the reasons it's on the backstop threat list - dry policy responses don't connect with voters, but "make as many copies of their stuff as you like" is incredibly popular.
I understand that this is the reality we live in, but I don't know how we have accepted it.
Adobe Creative Cloud became the only option for new Adobe software in 2013, 3 years before that essay. Sure, Adobe is on the forefront of being knobheads, but still.
https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/an-update-on-playsta...
Discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745476
I think he "got" it. He was certainly annoyed at the idea that something purchased could just be taken back. Maybe it'll stick and he'll be better able to understand why I'll push back on a new PlayStation or any digital only games.
At least with PC I have the actual files for the game I am playing, and can backup and mod them as I wish.
I see playing a game like Rocket League more in lines of having a membership to club to play a certain game rather than owning a copy of the game to play alone, forever. The club will eventually go away, that's just the nature of such things.
I do agree its a good lesson to teach your kids about the limits and issues of digital "ownership" though.
And even if true, there's always emulation (also a pain though).
And dumping games requires a jailbreak.
That's why there's no switch 2 emulation as of now.
Nah. Switch 1 is already compromised and I'd predict we'll see modchips for the Switch 2 in the next 3 years.
Werent early versions of the Switch 1 jail broken pretty fast and people were dumping switch 1 roms online to play in emulators?
I don’t follow this stuff too closely but I thought that I saw people playing the sequel to Breath of the Wild on PCs to get acceptable frame rates when it came out.
If you have Vice City on DVD and install it you can still enjoy Michael Jackson. Not with the Steam version.
Furthermore, Sony Pictures is huge, so selling movies is absolutely part of Sony's business as a whole.
It’s not all one Sony. Just like Samsung or MS divisions fight and get into spats.
Consumers are lured into walled-gardens all the time - consoles, app stores, hardware. Where would you suggest someone purchase a digital license for a movie?
From a video game store is the part I find odd. I get walled gardens. Not this one for this purpose.
If Sony doesn't offer GTA6 on disc, offline: I'll sell the PS5, too. I just got a 5070Ti, so it's probably back to PC-MasterRace I'll go...
Reasons like this [Sony's 2028 disc-stop] are exactly why I won't be purchasing a PS6. At least (in Sony's defense) they're telling us oldtimers about this now, as opposed to on the day of [stopping disc retail sales].
I won't wait for it though. After 28 years of always having a Sony at home, it ends here for me at the age of 35.
Steam Summer sales on a PlayStation? I want that today.
If this decision somehow ends up with Steam and Proton for PlayStation, it will be well worth it. Gaben, please get some lawyers to write to the EU posthaste, and start porting Proton to iOS & PlayStation
Though, I think they will follow what Sony is doing.
Part of the appeal for the Switch and Switch 2 is the stability of their resale market. It's easier to pay for a new game when you know you can get 50% of your money back on the used market.
It's pretty hard for me to believe that going through the trouble to set up an entirely new Playstation account, buy a game, refund it, and have the dedication to stay offline forever to keep the game could possibly have been a widespread behavior. It will obviously be easy for them to ratchet that into online check required every 30 days once the current thing is out of the news cycle: https://kotaku.com/playstation-drm-ps4-ps5-support-30-days-o...