@bybeach: Not sure if it is 100 bucks worth of hassle but finding good blu-ray playing software for PC is not the easiest challenge. From my maybe fifteen minutes of searching the other night it was a mess of ad/spyware supported software, paid software with limited reviews, and questions of whether said software has the right licenses/keys (?) to read modern blu-rays

I am sure with a bit more effort it would be doable but I ended up walking into the living room, shoving my gundam unicorn blurays into my xbone until I saw which one had the UC summary episode, and then went back to my PC to rip that deceptively small file. Not the end of the world but enough that I am probably going to make sure I still have one "reputable" blu-ray player in my house for some time.

@gundato: I read your post enough till I understood it. Tacked on garbage I do understand by experience. But not being confident in it reading all disks?

So noted, and thank you. The Asus external Blue Ray player goes for $98.00 just for point, so not much difference, and it looked the only one I had confidence in. But my searching rationalization for a PS5 buy over Blue ray, well....

I knew Sony wasn't going to let The Demon Souls remake go free. Maybe as a timed exclusive, but I doubt even that.

@brian_: I don’t think that playstation realizes how much physical factors into games actually being played. If I march my happy self down to gamestop and I make a purchase there’s a big chance that I made that purchase factoring in trade in value, potential gift giving, and feeling like I got a deal with sales stickers. When I buy digital on Xbox it’s because I’ve skimmed the published every Monday evening sale prices for the week. I skim through reddit list that someone generates. I look at the price and I go yep, yep, or nope. Since it’s alphabetized I look at the price first and then look at the game. If the price doesn’t inspire me chances then the game isn’t up for consideration. Sony sales are a little less structured. Even your grocery store has sale circulars on the same day every week. Sony seems to celebrate some sort of pagan holidays at random.

How does marketing now work? Are they just going to leverage twitch streamers because some kids like going to the store to look and plot on games for future birthday money or report cards. Sometimes they can get mom to pay it forward on future unkept promises. Now all purchases are going to require mom to queue up some app on her phone? Pretty unceremonious to get guarantees from your kid without them having a box that can be taken away. How do you share with your brother. Will mom guess my password is a dirty word? Maybe mom will let me click the buy button on her iPhone 11.

For full price games well those are typically purchased within 48 hours of release. Sometimes I’ll just do the $5 down. Sometimes I’ll do the whole purchase price and I forget it’s a nice surprise to just walk out. Does Sony do the preorder thing digitally with $5 down? So I spend $60 and then just wait sounds fun... maybe I get a copy of the previous game to tide me over. Nope? How about a refund system? Maybe? How about a return system if the game is broke or bollocks? Can I loan it to a friend when I’m done? Trade it in for a discount?

What I’d love to see happen is what I’ll call the “fortnite effect” (TM) happens and kids don’t want any of the new consoles they’d rather just play the games they have. I think there’s 70,000 entries for games on giant Bomb. We are saturated. PlayStation flop so hard that they have to do disc based backwards compatibility.

I only buy full retail on games since I know I’m helping my local shops and I know eventually the games will trickle down into maybe even dozens of different hands. Digits doesn’t do that. And I swear I might just make the Series-S my PUBG box and never buy digital so we retain this disc economy. I mean we could all be driving electric cars. The means is there but gas means something to too many economies.. discs are too big to fail?

Seeing the confirmation that Sony's bumping its blockbuster games is the thing that's pricing me out of getting one of these things. It's pushing things to $140 in my country, which is more than I spend on a week's groceries. Hopefully this trails off as fast as the last time they tried to pull this shit here and it's just game stores trying to cash in on early adopters, but with the price hike finally hitting NA as well I'm not so sure.

At the very least I'm going to be staying far, far away from any digital-only consoles next gen.

@fourthzine said:

PSN has weekly sales that starts on Wednesday around noonish. It started on Tuesday for about the last 10 years but it's recently shifted to Wednesday. They also have flash sales on the weekends sometimes. But the whole thing has been pretty well scheduled for a very long time.

@liquiddragon: next you’ll be telling me their ps plus free offerings are available on the 1st and the 16th of EVERY month without fail like some sane console I know. From what I see the dates for the sale are 9/16-10/1. So that’s not as frequently refreshed as Xbox is doing it. I’m sure there’s parity with price since the 360 and original Xbox sales are still I thing I feel like a system with “fewer games” has more sales on “more games” whereas ps3 sales are stuck on a 2012 console. PlayStation really needs a major Nelson to help get the word out on their sales. I can’t figure out if Sony is overestimating their customer loyalty or if they haven’t figured out what their 10 year plan is. I’m sure both are right.

@fourthline: some sales go on for longer than a week but they have new sales every week regardless of on going sales.

@liquiddragon: so you think that sales thing is going to happen on PS5 games at all for the first week? Second week? 2020? Guess these guaranteed sales are a lock on a brand new system that is only selling PS5 games.. Maybe that’s why they raised the base price for games to $70 so they could discount to $65. As a consumer I’m #winning there.. clearly.

looks like the leaker was once again correct. Glad I was wrong and Sony matched the price. Will be getting the Disc Version of the console, because I don't mind spending the extra $100s because most UHD players cost around that price anyway. But $400s for basically the same console is a nice price, especially since the Series S is a hardware downgrade for $300s.

However, I'm afraid Sony might pull a Nintendo can keep their exclusive games for digital download at a high price in the future with them rarely going on sale at their PS Store, while the disc versions will be available on sale at places like Amazon and such for 10 to 20 percent off. I believe investing in the disc version will overall pay off.

@fourthline: they’ll go on sale when the time is right like any other game. Why would brand new games go on sale at launch? The $70 bump is clearly the new standard and should be expected on Xbox as well.

I think I shot myself in the foot with this launch, my dream console is if Sony offered the hardware of the Xbox One S with a disk drive for $400. When I factor in the additional $100 with disk drive, a new 4k tv/120 hz monitor, then that adds up.

I guess I won't get a PS5 until 2021 at the earliest. But on the bright side, I can play both Miles Morales and Horizon on my PS4 Pro. Nothing to complain about there.

@fourthline: That makes zero sense. The amount of games removed from digital storefronts in minuscule compared to the sheer amount of games added per day. The amount of games on Steam has gone up significantly year over year:

https://steamspy.com/year/

If anything, it’s physical retail whose total price will remain steady or go up over time. A digital game takes no physical space, whereas an old copy of Madden does. Eventually the lowest priced games get binned or donated to make room for new full priced games.

In any case, I don’t know why you are pushing this line of argument. As a PC and console owner, I can tell you straight up that PC games have been consistently cheaper for years. Once again, I don’t see any evidence that a digital storefront will result in higher prices.

Pretty crazy to see that the total cost of the steam catalog decreased with ~37% during the last steamsale. Seems like plenty of digital publishers see the value in participating in sales. People might not all want or have the means to buy a brand new game for MSRP, but are able to jump on board at a lower pricepoint. publishers rather sell 400k copies of a game at 20$ than 300k copies at 25$. And a nice sale helps to create buzz and attract eyeballs around a certain game as well, even if it's an older game.

Looking at my personal situation i recently bought games like Normality, The Room, The Hex, Sherlock Holmes, Kelvin & the infamous Machine, Momodora, the Brothers in Arms games and the portal games. I wouldn't have (re)bought any of these in 2020 if they didn't catch my eye during a big sale as i scrolled through my wishlist. Saleprices made me spend money. The platform holder , publisher and developers extracted money from me instead of getting 0$ for as long as i had ignored these games.

Nintendo has probably studied the price elasticity among their audience and realized that their own games are perceived as core to the platform and will sell fine at a high price. As long as they stick to their higher prices, most Nintendo owners will realize that if they want to play the games that were a main reason to buy the system for, they have to pay what Nintendo asks for. That's not necessarily a strategy that a publisher like Wadjet Eye or Devolver can aim for. Ubisoft wouldn't be able to convince people that an old game like Watch Dogs 1 should cost an equal amount as Watch Dogs Legion. Offering sales at different pricepoints is how publishers sell the most copies during the lifetime of a game.

The real nittygritty sale strategy lies in figuring out whether it's more valuable to drop the price with 5% and carefully scrape the customerbase little by little to extract as much money per sale, or whether the shock of a deep discount increases the quantity of purchases by such an amount that the marginal revenue being lower is warrented. I remember Doom went for a huge sale pretty quickly, while a publisher like Square-Enix tends to take small steps with it's pricedrops.

I will say, Factorio is a fascinating business-case that goes against the stream. They basically decided that they offer a quality niche game that would never appeal to a large mainstream audience, while it's quality is apparent enough that it's core audience would be willing to pay the price. That instead of scraping customers from pricepoint to pricepoint, it is therefore more valuable to acquire as much money for each product they sell to their limited audience and clearly communicate that they are not going to discount the game. On one hand, i can see the reasoning, on the other hand, i bet there all still a lot of people that are factorio-curious but would never pay MSRP for such an unique game that makes it hard to figure out on the sideline if it's something you'd get really into or stop playing after a day or 2. Or they might not be familiar with the game and it being part of all the subscription services and sales would have increased it's visibility and therefore it's customer-base. But it's clear that the devs have considered this choice well and chose a strategy that fits the product.

@navster15: I’m talking about Sony’s digital marketplace. Steam is its own thing. Just because it’s bargain bin doesn’t mean it isn’t playable. The way steam leverages the elitist pc mentality is coming for our consoles. There’s a reason the last ps2 fifa game was fifa 14 with functioning online wel into 2016. If digital were the only means of getting games the last playable online fifa title would be seconds after the next annual installment. They are just going to push and push the envelope.

@fourthline: @navster15: I’m talking about Sony’s digital marketplace. Steam is its own thing. Just because it’s bargain bin doesn’t mean it isn’t playable. The way steam leverages the elitist pc mentality is coming for our consoles. There’s a reason the last ps2 fifa game was fifa 14 with functioning online wel into 2016. If digital were the only means of getting games the last playable online fifa title would be seconds after the next annual installment. They are just going to push and push the envelope.

Current console game sales with the aid of retail physical copies is a race to the price of zero. Sony wants to think their games are prestige (When their not) like Nintendo thinks their prestige so we are about to see high prices at never dip. Microsoft is really the only one assessing their games at their true value disposable and move on to the next one. PC gamers that spend 1000s of Dollars (more than the cost of every game and console and a 4K tv and everything I spent on gaming this entire generation) for fetch quests and placing a cursor on an object as even a thing still blows my mind. But what should I expect from this site? They got to go somewhere.

@fourthline: Ok, so your response to me calling out you misinterpreting Steam data is a word salad about PSN. You do you I guess.

Y'all letting yourselves be fourthlined.

@navster15: it’s projecting steam data onto PlayStation data. I’ll word salad you to death. Points still stand you just have to pick out the tomatoes.

@nodima: Yep, I’m not mad. It’s my own damn fault.

@fourthline: the only reason you owned a PS4 is cuz of the free online? Lol

@liquiddragon: When you snipe at only 1 nugget instead of the whole bushell i assume that everything else is valid. I owned 2 separate PS4s. I had a pro for the launch of death stranding and played pubg and bought a PSNow subscription. Had it for the duration of healing from my broken arm so about 4 months. Got rid of it. Then got another Pro for Last of Us 2. Played through that drivel and got rid of it. I had other consoles at the time. PSN: NoirH20 if you want to verify. Money is not an issue for me. If couple of hundred dollars can make the bombcast or other podcasts i listen to more enjoyable then why not. My eyes naturally glaze over for anything nintendo, pc based, or playstation based. I get all the information i need from listening. I do have to put my hands on each system long enough to understand the operating system and nuances. I really hope you guys go in hard on the bomb and beast casters because the amount of questionable unverified... "i heard-isms," 'never played-ism,' and 'wasn't that on console-isms" that i hear on the podcast is infuriating and feels like nepotism and who you want to have a beer with over the most informed gamers which is honestly just a daily kotaku log in and maybe a reddit scroll. I don't know if the casters feign ignorance on basic stuff just to keep the train rolling or if not knowing stuff is okay. I really only care what Jeff has to say. I feel like Jeff in a sea of Dans.

Replying to fourthline is you standing in a silent room and opening up a window to be blasted by a dozen people shouting at once.

PLZ unban Ezekiel. I’d love to see Fourthline and Ezekiel go at it. That would be 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥 🔥

First I miss Brad getting to World 6 and now this.

I have not bought a physical game for 4 years either. But, I do watch an occasional DVD/Blueray on my TV. So yeah I'll pay and extra $100 to have that sort of flexibility where if someone handed me a disc (game, movie) I can just use it.