I remember having a goal of eventually publishing on a Nintendo and/or PlayStation console, when I first got in to game dev. Now they've both gotten so far away from gaming as I knew it that I would be embarrassed to publish on either company's consoles.

Now my focus is to be able to publish high quality games that run well on those anbernic/miyoo/ayn-style handheld devices. Those things are actually priced for consumers and the ones that have card slots provide a method for physical media. And of course, using those as a floor, the games could always upscale for more powerful machines.

I'm just so tired of this continual march toward investor appeasement at the expense of the consumers. They're games. They're entertainment. For people to play. Not how I want them to play them; how people want to play them. People shouldn't have to have an account to play them. They shouldn't have to invest a month of rent to play them. They shouldn't have to worry about me revoking their ability to play them. It's just so frustrating to see how far we've gotten from "drop in a quarter and enjoy". The industry is in sad shape and getting sadder by the day.

To play devil's advocate here, imagine a world where the exact opposite has occurred: physical media (CDs specifically) is the norm, and there's no DRM, so the raw data can be copied right off of it. In this world, scalpers scoop up all available inventory of physical media from local retailers, consumers pay a premium to them for the original product, the scalpers sell cheaper copies where the game binary has been modified to insert advertisements or mine cryptocurrency, out of the woodwork appears a cottage industry of companies offering services to modify game binaries and connect them to the ad networks and crypto exchanges. The scalper gets a cut, the gamer gets a cheaper game, everyone is happy.

This is very sad. I bought a PS5 with disc precisely to “own” the games. End of an era, I guess.

It's a pretty cynical move for certain. Hang on to the disks/consoles you have, ready for the boom in the used disks market.

I hope for the EU to come after Sony. Before you could argue that you could buy games as a disc and just play them. It of course was a monopoly before, but now it is pretty clear

I wonder why Sony or Microsoft don't try to 'game' the used market by becoming the used marketplace for virtual copies. They can charge a commission for every game that changes hands.

I thought CDs were (mostly) no longer being produced. I'm surprised this decision was not made years ago.

Haven’t bought a physical game in at least 15 years (because of Steam). I do wonder how many people still buy physical copies these days.

Not sure what the sales are like on PS but at least on Steam you can find great deals for the digital copies as well. (You lose the reselling though)

Bummer! Based on the current trajectory, PS6 will be the first non-handheld PS I will not own.

This move, executed when storage prices are as outrageous as they are? Again, class warfare is being waged one-sidedly.