and of course, this will be misconstrued. The executives will shout "look! people don't want physical ownership!" and the push to digital rentals will continue... and result in even higher prices when they pull a Netflix.

Xbox is just a subscription rental business at this point, Microsoft doesn’t seem interested in gaming outside of that.

Physical versions only have value of they are complete and relatively bug free, and originally purposed to avoid big downloads.

Nowadays day 1 patching may be the same size as the install or larger negating half the point. The other half is lost because almost everything is a subscription, multi-player, or delivered with too many bugs as a beta test.

Collecting physical copies is a thing, but is niche.

Further, Microsoft doesn’t seem interested in physical sales anymore. I probably would have bought Avowed if it existed in meat-space, it doesn’t. I had a really hard time sourcing Indiana Jones and Outer Worlds 2.

If the disc version exists, can't you buy it online?

And aren't console discs de facto installer stubs?

Just curious, I play on PC where physical discs haven't been a thing for a long time.

This is basically why I’m giving up collecting physical media. I have several hundred games on disc/cartridge, and consoles from most generations, but it’s really hard to find newer games on physical media these days. Most of the good ones can’t be found used, and good luck finding a new copy anywhere.

And of course all the older physical media is also getting harder to get because people are paying a lot for it now.. like I have some games in the $80-500 range that I paid very little for years ago. I know the used sales probably don’t count to this article, but you can just look at them to see what’s going on with new physical sales. They made whole consoles that don’t have disc drives, so people couldn’t buy used and bypass them making profit, ffs. Of course the physical game market is crashing. They did that on purpose.

PS5 era is the last hurrah for physical media for me, and I honestly barely even play on PS5 because there’s just nothing to get. I’ve managed to get like a dozen discs for it, and that was difficult. Meanwhile I have easily 4x that for ps4, and prior generations are even better represented. I’d like to get the current Xbox since it’s mostly backward compatible with the one before it IIUC and I have a 360, but I just have no motivation to do so.

Prices won’t fall, not until the AI bubble bursts and the related industries shift focus back to consumer-level goods.

At best, you could hope prices remain steady for a few years and real-world incomes slowly rise to match this new normal.

Actually, I have bad news for you... prices are likely going to go up from the AI bubble plus the upcoming RAM shortage.

Prices are not going to come down. If they could get a Switch 2 in your home for $300, they would. The component parts are too expensive.

I don't think its necessarily the prices that are the issue but what you're getting for it. Games have historically not kept up with inflation and still cost less than what we were paying for SNES carts in the 90s, but now they're the 15th sequel of some franchise and are only half finished so there isn't much draw for customers.

Why would any of that affect physical software? Does steam and gog sell cartridges or discs that I'm unaware of?

This is about physical sales, not digital.

There is no digital store for DRM-free digital movies and TV shows, and I hate it. Hollywood's crying about the implosion of its industry, but they've operated as a cartel that stands in the way of stuff like this for a long time.

I agree in principle but digital doesn't come without drawbacks. It's pretty difficult to keep a .exe file accessible for 30+ years even if your intentions are good. A service like Steam is a decent solution but that's still a point of failure outside your direct control. A physical disc is simpler to keep track of in a lot of ways. If it gets damaged you lose one game, not potentially hundreds or thousands.

In the mean time, while we wait for IP law to fix itself over the course of decades, or probably just never: I have physical copies of most of my games.

... on an SD card, that I bought, formatted, and moved files onto.

Steam lets you make game backups, GOG releases are basically portable... make a backup, compress it, put it on a backup drive.

... and thats all without my pirate hat and pegleg on.

Almost got me with that hotness but I wouldn't necessarily disagree. In a perfect world, we would just own digital copies free and clear of any remote tampering.

Trouble is, physical media is relevant now because companies can't nuke your access to it once their licensing deals expire, like they can with digital streaming services and storefronts. Even digital copies are physical, they have to sit on a hard drive somewhere, and even those degrade over time. So let's say we own the hard drive, that's great, but I still need to transfer it once the disk/flash dies. It's unquestionably more efficient than disc media tho.

I have mixed opinions on physical media but. I'm starting to agree with you on this point. In the past I'm all for having the option to buy it on disc/cartridge but when you have to install the game anyway and download a day one patch it kinda defeats the purpose of it. Also offline mode on consoles if just a joke at this point.

Because the new ones are great. There has been no shortage of bangers for the last few years.

The market was just way smaller back then. Video games weren't a mainstream hobby yet.

PlayStation 1 had only just come to America a month or two prior, and the n64 wouldn't exist for another year. Basically, it was just arcade games that were popular at that point, some snes games, and some ps1 games in Japan.

Imagine "gaming" being just donkey kong, street fighter, mario, and contra, and a ps1 cost $300 usd.

"Gaming" then was about as popular as virtual reality now.