lmao I'm glad people are finally catching on the the trends of the past 20 years

Next thing you know, they'll be charging a subscription fee for using the software.

It's called PS+, and they're already charging for it /hj

But seriously. The last playstation I owned was PS4, I had so many annoyances with it, half of which were caused by sony not supporting my country properly. When I got a PC I didn't even intend to use it for gaming much (other than some indies I couldn't get for console) but I found the experience that wildly better I'd never booted up the playstation again, nor would I buy any further consoles

Them heading down this route is definitely not gonna encourage me to give them any of my money lol

I don't. If they do something stupid I don't buy it.
I don't recall the last AAA games I paid for I mostly stick to indie games now days.

That being said indie devs do make bad decisions too. A recent example is Transport Fever 3 where they partnered with Paradox, that took the game off my wishlist and onto my ignored list. Their post announcing it got zero thumbs up when every other post has over 3K.

When black ops 2 was ported to ps5, it became top 1 most played game on that platform and Sony used it as an evidence that digital is better than physical disc.

"You will own nothing and you will be happy". No inequality if everyone's equally miserable, and helps push the acceptable amount of control. Something not just these companies do, and that I have the impression that isn't even originally their agenda.

People often answer "it's enshittification". It isn't wrong but it's shallow.

Capitalism assumes expansion; stable revenue is seen as failure, not as success. And there are only so many potential customers, before you need to drop the price of the goods so low that your margin of profit lowers. So businesses reach a point where they need to expand, but can't just "add customers". They need to extract more money per customer.

But selling goods imposes a limit on that because, just like lowering prices brings more customers, raising prices shuns them away. You need to somehow disguise the additional cost, by fragmenting it into multiple small costs; because often, a customer who'd refuse to pay 50€ for the goods would pay 12 times 5€ just fine, for a total of 60€.

But why stop there? You need to expand further. 12 times, 24 times, let's charge the customer infinite times. And if the customer feels like they paid enough, they don't get the goods, even if they already paid their fair price many times over. That leads to the subscription model.

Problem of the subscription model is that customers are dumb, but not that dumb. At a certain point they'll do the maths and say "hey, I'd pay less for this if I simply bought the goods, instead of the subscription". So you need to make sure they're unable to buy the goods, and the only way out is subscription.

But if you tell them so they'll outrage. Rightfully so. So instead you disguise it as "trust me = be gullible, I'm doing this for your best interests. Noooo, it isn't because I can milk more from each of you things this way, it's just for you." Or they put the blame on something they can't control, such as "marketing tendencies" or "the industry". The later is exactly what Playstation is doing.

Gamers dont want physical media so I think it makes sense to stop making it. Its unfortunate that consoles are so locked down and this will lead to abuse of console players but thats the environment they built. I will keep trying to keep PC free because I'd hate to end up like PlayStation or Nintendo yikes.