The removal of physical games isn’t that big of a deal to me as someone who mostly plays on PC, and the only physical PC games I’ve bought in the last decade and a half were touhou games I imported off Yahoo auctions.
Honesty I wonder why that actually became so normalized on PC while it didn’t on consoles. I’m sure Steam has a big role in it.
It’s less of a big deal on PCs because there is no store monopoly, near infinite backward compatibility, and piracy (which was historically viable on consoles but has become less so over time).
I think the main reason for this on PC has been the fact that there’s been piracy/licensing for so long.
We used to have cd keys to prove you were using the legit disc. You bought a license, and there were cdchecks. Once you were able to prove ownership with a key instead of a disc, and create your own offline installers too?
All the reasons to fight against it were gone.
On consoles you can’t make offline backups. You can’t play without constant online license checks. And once the license date rolls over you can’t play anyway.
My gog backup, I can install offline tomorrow never touch the Internet and be fine.
The removal of physical games isn’t that big of a deal to me as someone who mostly plays on PC, and the only physical PC games I’ve bought in the last decade and a half were touhou games I imported off Yahoo auctions.
Honesty I wonder why that actually became so normalized on PC while it didn’t on consoles. I’m sure Steam has a big role in it.
It’s less of a big deal on PCs because there is no store monopoly, near infinite backward compatibility, and piracy (which was historically viable on consoles but has become less so over time).
I think the main reason for this on PC has been the fact that there’s been piracy/licensing for so long. We used to have cd keys to prove you were using the legit disc. You bought a license, and there were cdchecks. Once you were able to prove ownership with a key instead of a disc, and create your own offline installers too? All the reasons to fight against it were gone. On consoles you can’t make offline backups. You can’t play without constant online license checks. And once the license date rolls over you can’t play anyway.
My gog backup, I can install offline tomorrow never touch the Internet and be fine.