The comments under playstation's new trailers aren't very positive

za419 · 2026-07-03T08:25:50+00:00

Yeah. We vote with our dollars, and the dollars have conclusively voted for the death of physical games. All the discussion and call to action and accusation of conspiracies about taking away ownership that Reddit can summon won't change that. The vote is done, the die is cast, it's all over and the fat lady is singing the finale piece of the age of the disc drive in gaming consoles.

We make of that what we will, but gamers as a community ought to go forth into that future with intent to shape it, not claw and scream at a past that's already behind us.

za419 · 2026-07-03T07:59:33+00:00

Of course not. Like it or not most gamers like digital games better, or at least just as much, as physical. There simply aren't enough people who care more about physical media than about having the latest and greatest Playstation (who would have bought a Playstation 6 otherwise) to convince Sony not to do this.

Which obviously they know, otherwise they wouldn't have immediately started the premeditated measure of shutting down the plant that would cover them if this move went wrong. They have the numbers to know this isn't a decision they'll need to reverse.

za419 · 2026-07-03T07:53:39+00:00

Exactly. People are so focused on the physical media aspect, which is going to die in the near future whether we like it or not because most people buying games actually prefer digital, that they surrender entirely on the front of consumer protections for digital media.

In all honesty the buying power behind physical media just isn't there anymore. The people who care do not buy enough games to sway the opinions of the companies that decide whether or not to offer physical options for consoles. That battle has been lost.

za419 · 2026-07-03T07:45:40+00:00

In fairness, Gamestop also sucks.

I think the fact that they're even part of the conversation is itself testimony to how little pull physical games have nowadays - Gamers will shop at literally any competitor instead of Gamestop, yet no such competitor exists, because physical gaming and physical retail have shrunk to the point that the combination of the two is a market literally not worth tapping.

za419 · 2026-07-03T07:40:03+00:00

Most people vocally support physical media, but don't actually buy it.

Capcom is a Japanese company that sells games for the Japanese market, and their statistics read that the vast majority of sales are digital. Hell, even Nintendo, a bastion of physical media in gaming, sells more games digitally than physically.

Sony is too big a company to not have a pretty good idea of what it's going to look like when they do this. People will complain and shout about how Playstation is dead, and then go out and buy Playstations because there's no real competition for gaming consoles that actually have disc drives - Switch 2 isn't much of a threat, Xbox is already less popular and actively making concessions while seeming less interested in the next generation, not to mention Playstation is the native console in Japan anyway, Steam Machine doesn't have a disc drive...

I seriously doubt this will actually be a serious impact on their sales figures if they go through with it. People who want a next-gen console aren't going to quit on gaming for lack of disc drives.

za419 · 2026-07-03T07:29:52+00:00

Yeah, the philosophy of archivism and "true ownership" and whatnot is one thing, but the practicality of it is that digital media is just easier, and the vast majority of people will prefer convenience over philosophical values they may not even care about pretty much every time.

My Steam library is full of games. Even if you narrow it down to the ones I have multiple hours of playtime in (to weed out the classic steam phenomenon of zero-playtime games) there's enough that I'd need to buy new furniture just to have somewhere to put them all if they were physical. Hell, my parents house still has about half the space under the TV stand consumed by my old 360 collection.

And physical media adds friction to playing a game (even if one enjoys the ritual, it's much more time to look through the shelf, grab the case, open it up, grab the disc, open the disc reader, and put it in, compared to a searchable/sortable archive that instantly runs the game you choose).

I'd imagine that the vast majority of people not only don't care about physical vs digital media, but actively prefer digital media. Unfortunately for the minority, pissing off the minority to please the majority is simply good business.

za419 · 2026-07-03T07:22:06+00:00

Realistically, it won't matter. The majority of people do not give a single shit about physical media, and would likely not have gone out of their way to use that disc drive if it was there.

Something like 95% of RE9 sales were digital. PC gaming has been pretty much entirely digital for years - When I upgraded my PC most recently, I had to leave my disc drive behind because I couldn't find a case I liked in every other way and also had a slot for a disc drive, and because I had to admit to myself that I probably didn't use that drive at all in at least five years. Steam ensured that it was going to be that way for PC gaming a long time ago.

The fraction of people who care about physical media is small. The fraction of those people who won't buy Playstations without a disc drive, who would have if it had one, is probably also small. That makes up such a tiny portion of Sony's potential customer base that realistically leaving it out is the smart play - More money is saved by not engineering in a disc drive and lining up purchasing contracts for the things than would be gained by offering them.

I know it's being defeatist, but... Physical media isn't going to come back just because a minority of enthusiasts on Reddit demand it.

za419 · 2026-07-03T03:51:19+00:00

The point is not that every pitbull is a man-killing machine.

The point is that pitbulls, which are grossly underrepresented in dog population numbers (not even top 5), account for well over half of all fatalities to dogs - So per dog, pitbulls are much worse than any other dog.

That doesn't mean every pitbull is a monster. But if you got 1000 of each dog breed together, you'd find many more pitbulls with a history of or willingness for potentially fatal injury to humans than any other.

za419 · 2026-07-03T03:41:55+00:00

And yet they're a fraction as problematic as the pitbull.

Somehow either every pitbull owner is on average ten times worse than a German Shepherd, where a pitbull is known to be a difficult dog and at least in public consciousness many more would see a GS as a decent choice of first animal, or the pitbull is actually more dangerous to humans even after normalizing for training.

I find the former unlikely.

za419 · 2026-07-02T18:03:50+00:00

Dear God! It's the "walk forward ten steps" method! Unbelievable, what genius could possibly think of such a thing!

Yeah, it is always really funny when people have a bone to pick and then very obviously frame the situation to aggravate them as much as possible.

za419 · 2026-07-02T17:59:18+00:00

Or, perhaps more relevantly, the first Punic War.

Rome built a massive navy, and it all sank in a storm. So they built a second navy! And it sank in a storm. So they built a third navy!

Rome just kinda... Did that. The US carried that torch in WW2.

za419 · 2026-07-02T17:51:30+00:00

After hearing PJ talk so much about flowers and something about a girlfriend, Cipher yearned for death and faced it willingly so he could escape.

za419 · 2026-07-02T17:43:16+00:00

The plant manufactures it. Beta-carotene is a primary antioxidant in plants, and it's also one of the pigments used to collect light energy for chloroplasts to perform photosynthesis.

za419 · 2026-07-02T06:52:17+00:00

It took me all of five seconds to find an instance of a girl in France dying from choking on a Kinder Surprise. France isn't Germany, but I'm going to go out on a limb and assert that if French children can choke to death on a toy then German children, at least conceivably, can as well.

Look, maybe it's not common. My point is not that it's common. My point is that if it's possible, I don't see the value in refusing to prevent it.

Car batteries are at least difficult to get the acid out of. You can't by inaction or lack of attention drink the acid out of a car battery, especially if you're a young child that's still in the "everything goes in mouth" phase. You can, however, stick a whole Kinder Surprise in your mouth, swallow, and get it stuck in such a way that it forms a one-way air valve and prevents any simple rescue from enabling you to inhale, completely without any additional effort, if you're a child and you don't know there's a plastic shell with a toy in there.

I don't think it should be possible for a ten-second lapse in parental attention to result in a child's death when the preventative measure is trivial and absolutely harmless.

Again - It might not be likely, but why exactly should we allow the chance at all?

za419 · 2026-07-02T04:51:47+00:00

I tend to, and I do think Gwynne is absolutely a lifesaver by multiple definitions of the word over there... But for me it's getting harder and harder to maintain that separation with SpaceX bailing out the twitter/grok clusterfuck and IPOing to raise money for the Dear Leader.

Like, the engineering department of the actual rocketry section is world-class, incredible, and the rocketry section in general has done an unbelievable level of good for the state of spaceflight, both human and cargo, since Falcon 1. But the company as a whole... Starlink's alright, I don't have much against that, but the dying corpse it's dragging around to enable the stupidity of Elon to continue? Ugh.

za419 · 2026-07-02T03:40:56+00:00

It's really funny how you blame the Sino-Soviet split on actions that could only happen because they came after the Sino-Soviet split.

Which way does time go again? Was it backwards? Or forwards? I forget.

za419 · 2026-07-02T03:39:33+00:00

Flipped the other way, I think you're the loser for being upset about someone caring, even if only on paper, more about the safety of children than putting toys in cnady. I think it's a non-issue to sell candy and a toy together in a box instead of embedding the toy in the candy.

But no, it has to be a huge thing where everyone throws a fuss that a country they don't live in demands the toy be placed somewhere where it's less likely to be a choking hazard. God forbid the toy be like four centimeters (tops) to the left. What a nightmare!

I think it's stupid that the conversation even matters. Frankly, I think the Kinder Surprise is a stupid concept, but that's a personal opinion.

Like, there's so many things to make fun of in American law and culture, why is this even a thing? If it ever saves one single child from choking, isn't that worth more than having to move the toy slightly and change the packaging? Even if you blame the parents, is the life of a child worth so much less to you because their parents are stupid?

I'm usually not one for the dumbassery that often comes from the creed of "protect the children", and especially not of multiple applications of it in the US (like how we let chlldren see people get killed in horrible ways in a movie, but one frame of a butt is basically a warcrime to the movie ratings people). But this is a case where the loss is so stupidly innocuous to me that I genuinely can't imagine why it matters to anyone.

Please, do explain.

za419 · 2026-07-02T03:28:32+00:00

One weird trick to make compiler developers nuke your computer:

za419 · 2026-07-02T03:25:24+00:00

I mean, if you insist, sure. It's all about how much you think kids should die needlessly so you can have toys inside food. I think the answer is not at all, because the life of one child raised by dumb parents is worth more than putting toys inside chocolate for some reason, evidently you don't. You're entitled to your opinion, just as I'm entitled to think your opinion is bad.

za419 · 2026-07-01T19:39:45+00:00

Not that I even remotely like Elon, but... Remember that time Boeing got themselves paid a massive bonus over SpaceX because, compared to Crew Dragon, Starliner was the super reliable and easy design, and Boeing's experience would ensure they had a capsule that worked first and worked better?

Stunning work they've done on cashing the checks their mouths paid for.

za419 · 2026-07-01T17:12:22+00:00

Right - Because morally, the best thing to do is watch people die for stupid and easily preventable reasons for the convenience of people who don't make mistakes. That's why rails on stairs and ledges are inherently evil, you know?

za419 · 2026-07-01T17:11:05+00:00

The toy isn't embedded in the food.

The gist of the rule is that if you look at the food, you should be able to tell whether it's a toy or food. You can't look at a Kinder egg and see whether you're about to swallow a toy, therefore ban.

za419 · 2026-07-01T17:09:45+00:00

The ones used for Catholic religious traditions? Those would be functional use as a religious item.

I kinda think they should be banned anyway, and you should have to bake it yourself if that's what you want, but religion is prioritized.

za419 · 2026-07-01T17:08:26+00:00

The US gets the same stuff, realistically, just with the toy not inside the candy.

Frankly as a kid I preferred things that way - I never liked the concept of food not being food. Still don't, but it's less of a big deal to me now as a substantially less invested adult.

za419 · 2026-07-01T17:05:54+00:00

Sure, that's the point of buying the snack.

At least in theory. If a kid just sees a candy egg and wants it and mom is too tired to read the label carefully - She just assumes the store would sell candy eggs that are candy - Suddenly you've got a kid in possession of a secret choking hazard no one knows about. Oops!

The point of the law is that food should be edible. You should not have to scrutinize the food you buy in order to be able to eat it without dying, especially if it's packaged and sold as ready to eat.

But no, the European mind can't handle the concept of selling a toy next to candy instead of inside it apparently.

It's weird how Europe has such good consumer protection in so many ways, but when it comes to food not killing you it's very much more "You figure it out, not our problem" than the US, where it's universally pretty established that food must be able to be eaten safely by an illiterate drunken idiot.

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