Shponglefan wrote on 2026-07-04, 15:43:
lti wrote on 2026-07-04, 15:26:
In a few months, everyone will stop talking about Sony going download-only, accept it, and continue using their services. That's how it always goes.
Exactly. People complained when Steam first launched, claimed that people would never give up physical media, etc.
We saw how that went.
I hate to say it, but Humble Bundle played a big part in the gradual acceptance of that for me. On Steam I have hundreds upon hundreds of games available that I've paid a fraction of their normal or even Steam-sale price for. It's nice if I want to try something "new", I can just look through my huge backlog and play one.
On that note, the vast vast majority of PC games I buy these days are unlikely to have ever gotten sold in retail form years ago. I only did a little bit of research on this, but as best I can tell there were less than a thousand PC games released per year throughout most of the 1990s. In recent years there have been as many as 10,000-16,000 games released per year. Of course, a lot of it is probably low effort asset-flip stuff, but a lot of it also is not. Having dabbled in some game development over the past 25 years, I can definitely say that the industry feels much much more open to independent developers having a shot at selling their games now vs how things were in the pre-Steam days.
The ever dropping price of games is a side effect of the market being so jam packed, but also has a lot to do with the lower cost of entry. If I had to figure out how to get a game published (so it can have a physical release) while still being profitable and not getting ripped off by the publisher in the process, I would have absolutely zero interest in ever making or selling a game. On the other hand, since a person with a good idea and the skills\team to bring it to life can pretty much put a game on Steam (or itch.io... there are probably others), I still have it as a thing I'd like to try eventually if everything falls into place.
(Side note: A Japanese indie developer consisting of only two people recently put out a silly multiplayer hide-and-seek game called MECCHA CHAMELEON where hiders paint themselves to blend into the scenery and it sold 10 million copies in less than three weeks at around $5 a pop. This kind of thing was utterly impossible when games had to make it to store shelves to be successful.)
From a game preservation standpoint, I think we're in much better hands with Valve and Steam than with game streaming or subscription based services becoming the norm. A lot of game executables can simply be run straight from their folder without Steam running, and as far as I can tell Valve isn't preventing them from doing this or forcing them to have DRM. I'm not saying Steam\Valve aren't in the business of looking out for their own interests, but they at least don't seem to be actively trying to destroy game preservation. They are not a member of the ESA, afterall.
One thing I absolutely do not like though, is the fact that so many larger budget (not sure if "AAA" really covers them all at this point) games are open-world, online-only games though. I honestly avoid as many games like this as possible. Requiring accounts to sign into the games themselves is also not something I am a fan of. The likelihood of some person cracking an exe (or being able to run some perpetually offline Steam client) in the case that Steam ever goes belly-up drops to near zero for games that are functionally reliant on online servers for the game to work at all.
Now for some blitting from the back buffer.
