everyone is talking about a hypothetical person who needs discs and I would be more sympathetic to the argument if they could name a person in the current year who needs discs. as it stands I hear a lot of "when I was a kid we couldn't afford new games and being able to borrow games meant I could play games that I otherwise couldn't" which was true but is not true now. the <18 demographic is overwhelmingly-to-exclusively playing always-on live service games. the ones who aren't are in fandoms for games that are very cheap purely by accident (Deltarune etc) because AAA budgets are not being spent on things that anyone who isn't a 25-35 year old male would like. linear single player games are uncslop now unfortunately.

but honestly when was the last time we bought a physical game? I literally own a PS5 and I've never bought a new disc for either that OR a PS4. there's no reason to because you're just going to have to sit there for an hour while it installs then adds the day 1 patch. the other thing re: the used market is like. the Playstation Gamepass equivalent costs less than what Gamestop charges for one used game (occasionally 2x less), and for $15 you can play literally the entire Sony back catalogue. the Gamepass model is the huge elephant in the room here contributing to the decline in the value of physical games.

Don't get me wrong, I'm aware this isn't a very common model for consumers these days. That is, in fact, what's disastrous for gamers and bad for the medium. They should be doing that. They would be spending less money and they would be constraining studio behavior in beneficial ways.

Sekiro is a bit of an extreme example here but I priced out a couple of few-year-old Playstation games I wanted to play over the weekend and all of them were $5-$15 more expensive on Ebay (to say nothing of Gamestop) than on the current Steam sale. obviously Steam will not have console exclusives, but off the top of my head there are exactly two console-only Sony games. and also this does not cover Nintendo first-party titles because frankly that's a special situation and warrants a separate conversation

there's a conversation about wanting to Own A Game but imo speaking as someone who owns a great many games that's an orthogonal desire to wanting to play a game legally

everyone is talking about a hypothetical person who needs discs and I would be more sympathetic to the argument if they could name a person in the current year who needs discs. as it stands I hear a lot of "when I was a kid we couldn't afford new games and being able to borrow games meant I could play games that I otherwise couldn't" which was true but is not true now. the <18 demographic is overwhelmingly-to-exclusively playing always-on live service games. the ones who aren't are in fandoms for games that are very cheap purely by accident (Deltarune etc) because AAA budgets are not being spent on things that anyone who isn't a 25-35 year old male would like. linear single player games are uncslop now unfortunately.

but honestly when was the last time we bought a physical game? I literally own a PS5 and I've never bought a new disc for either that OR a PS4. there's no reason to because you're just going to have to sit there for an hour while it installs then adds the day 1 patch. the other thing re: the used market is like. the Playstation Gamepass equivalent costs less than what Gamestop charges for one used game (occasionally 2x less), and for $15 you can play literally the entire Sony back catalogue. the Gamepass model is the huge elephant in the room here contributing to the decline in the value of physical games.