News story entirely based on tweets. Garbage.
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Build/Buy an AMD machine.
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Install SteamOS.
Alternatively for 1, you can wait for SteamOS to be working on Intel or Nvidia systems and build whatever you want after that. Or just use regular linux.
Bazzite (which is essentially SteamOS, but on a Fedora, instead of Arch [btw], base) works just fine -- excepting Big Picture / Console Mode, which is still buggy -- for both Intel and Nvidia.
I mean, Valve doesn't sell games on physical media in the Steam Store either that I'm aware.
Does anyone sell PC games on physical media?
I'm not 100% sure that it's the physical media its self that's the issue, it more so that the digital versions require verification from a server to be playable.
Xbox and PlayStation can shut the server down and your digital game becomes useless.
Steam I think this might be a issue, but I don't remember hearing this happening yet.
GOG you buy the game and get all the files and executables, so if GOG goes out of business your game still run locally.
Last game I can recall buying for PC and physical was Farcry. I never had to many either but the rest were all from the 90s like diablo, and command and conquer red alert. It all stopped when half life 2 dropped which was basically when steam became what it is now and that was 2004.
I think mine might have been Oblivion. Specifically the Shivering Isles expansion. Or The Orange Box. Oblivion and TOB came out in 2007, but Shivering Isles was at least a year after.
Last time I bought them was the Close Combat series from Slitherine/Matrix Games, which does war games.
checks
Looks like they stopped last year:
Dear Wargamers,
We want to share an important update with you.
Starting March 1st, 2025, Slitherine will no longer sell physical game manuals or physical copies of our games through our website. This marks the end of an era, and we understand how much these editions have meant to many of you over the years.
There is a trend away from Physical purchases to digital, and a decreasing number of new PC’s even have DVD drives and very few laptops meaning the potential market has been shrinking for years. This, combined with increasing delivery costs, environmental awareness, and more red tape on international deliveries, all combine to make it unviable.
For those who appreciate the tactile experience of a physical manual or a boxed edition, this is your final chance to secure a piece of wargaming history. You have until February 28th, 2025, to purchase from the remaining stock, after which these products will no longer be available.
- Go to therapy
- Quit Fortnite, Apex, and League
GTA 5 runs perfectly on Linux out of the box. So do all AAA releases. What are you basing your assumptions that GTA 6 won't work on? Have you even played games on Linux in the last 6 months?
Unless you're talking about GTA 6 Online, your comment makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. And if you do in fact mean GTA 6 Online - again, go to therapy and cure your addiction to predatory money extractors.
Oh yes, people are flocking to W11, flocking I tell you!
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Me a few weeks ago: Oof, the Steam Machine is a tough sell.
Me this week: Lol, Sony is going to lose customers to Valve.
Windows 11 in the headline is missing what is happening right now. Steam OS being generally available very well might change the landscape of living room gaming. Playstation is about to be reduced to a peripherals brand.
These articles feel like cope. Most people aren’t as invested in physical media as our small corner of the internet. I doubt this decision will hurt Sony, and Microsoft and Nintendo will probably follow suit soon enough.
It's interesting, cause i just saw them mention this subject about gamers being mad at playstation in the national news in my country, so if that's anything to go by maybe it's causing more of a stink than we think.
That's somewhat misleading. You can't reduce physical media availability then point at it saying "look people aren't buying it" because they don't have access to it in the first place, by design.
I mean I'm sure since digital media has become mainstream there's a shift, but it was a planned force shift to increase profits.
Aside from Nintendo, how often to today's games actually fit on physical media and not require downloading/patching to play?
Actually asking, I don't have any consoles.
Most games from my small-to-medium sized collection fit on a single blu-ray disc. Only some bigger AAA releases don't. I think only like 2 games I own have more than one disc - Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2.
Well they don't always, but you can just use multiple discs in that case. I think final fantasy has done this as well as a recent example, but this has already been done since the days of games still being on CD.
That's not because of the discs lol. If you afford to spend 300 million on slop like concord, you can print discs. And a franchise like gta 6 can definitely afford them.
I'm sure they'll be fine compared to the 30% that sony/steam takes.
I don't see why not, they could before couldn't they? Even if you want to stick to the cost argument, i don't have to care about that, cause i need to look out for myself as a consumer. If they can't provide a way for me to own the game, i'll simply take my business elsewhere. There's a reason i opted to buy a disc edition ps5 instead of a digital edition, because i didn't want to be locked to their storefront. That hasn't changed one generation later, so if that's the only option i'm just not going to buy it. Also, you claim physical is dead, but the situation is more nuanced when you look at the sales on a per game basis. There are definitely a lot of games that sell more digitally, but there are also first party titles like rift apart that have a 75%/25% physical/digital ratio. I think they're definitely taking a risk alienating those first party customers by going digital only, but we'll see what happens i guess.
If they screw me over then no i don't want them to make more products, i can live without.
I mean, they don't HAVE to go out of business, i'm just saying i wouldn't buy the game if i knew upfront that the game wasn't on the disc. It's not that i never buy digital games, but i usually never buy them full price, if i do it's usually on pc, and even then it's rare.
I'm not sure what else you want me to say, i've said my piece. I can't feel bad about every company that goes under because i didn't buy something from them, otherwise i would be living under a bridge. I don't want to be at the mercy of the one single storefront that exists on playstation going forward, so i won't be buying those consoles anymore.
Wait, i'm confused now. Have we been talking purely about multi-disc this entire time? Cause if so, there aren't many games that even need this, and usually games that are big enough to need 2 discs are made by companies that can afford it, like rockstar and square enix.
There used to be CDs that came in cereal boxes, occasionally a game would be on two disks.
Also starcraft was on two disks for the installation, though I believe the second disk was for expansion to the main campaign.
Oh, Starcraft! I can only afford 1 copy but want to play with my friends... install multiplayer only on secondary pcs. or was that warcraft 2, or both
I was there too. I remember installing Doom from floppy disks. I've just never had an Xbox or Playstation, so I have no context for how those medias have evolved over the years. I assumed at this point they were mostly digital already.
I'm sure the last time I bought a physical box for a game was a WoW expansion. I don't recall if it had physical media. Either way, unless you're looking to play games with anticheat, I wouldn't recommend Windows
The tiny improvements windows have been doing were only because they saw SteamOS coming.
They still keep doing nasty stuff under the hood that they won't let you turn off in home editions.
Where do they get their physical releases from on PC?
It is actually entirely possible to have fully functional physical copies of PC games, albeit with extra effort.
You can buy DRM-free games, and burn them onto blu-ray discs. Of course, you're gonna need a blu-ray drive, but at least you're completely free to do what you want. You can also buy blank cases and print cover art for them. Again, a lot of extra effort, but it works and is fully independent from corporations.
Well you can actually own your games on pc even if they're digital. Games don't have to be physical to be able to own them, but on consoles physical is the only way to own, which is why it's considered important on those platforms. If consoles as a digital platform were as free as pc, it wouldn't be as big an issue.
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