GameStop Boss Says Disc Drives Should Be Required On Game Consoles

I mean, maybe disk drives are outdated, but being unable to buy used games or give your old game to a friend is garbage (but great for profits of the console manufacturers and game studios). Not to mention that as long as it's a digital download, you don't own the game - you lease it at a flat rate.

Limiting the options and ownership rights of the consumer for profit is bad.

He is obviously biased by his business interests, but frankly he is ultimately correct. Once consoles are digital only, console players will lose the last form of control they have over anything they own.

It is nice to be able to give a game to someone else when you're done playing it.

I mean.. he has a vested interest. But he's right we need media that isn't dependent on official servers

You all hate discs until you have a library that you can rent games for free close to you. Or you want to sell a game you already played to buy something else. I don't care of what some boss from GameStop says because at the end of the day, they run a business out of it, but complaining about physical media is something I don't understand someone would do as a consumer. Did we really learn nothing from companies simply shutting down online stores when they want?

Damn, lot of hate for physical media in this thread.

I prefer having a physical game collection, but with the way physical games are handled now, with more than half the game needing to be downloaded to the console to cut costs or because they didn't finish the game before release, it doesn't solve the preservation or ownership problems anymore.

"We miss selling you a scratched up disc for $49 with no box, that we paid some poor kid $2 for"

Nobody cares what Gamestop boss says, lol.

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Buggywhip salesman demands accomodation from the horseless carriage industry.

Yes, I'm upset at the licenseification of the gaming industry as much as the next guy but that died long before physical media did. As long as a game can die without its first-party servers, games are leased and not owned.

I hope I am wrong but I see the next generation as completely discless specially if this current generation discless versions sold good enough. The only exception could be Nintendo.

Of course they might require some deals with stores or just sell themselves the consoles online.... Because the stores want to sell games, they might still sell peripherals and redeemable cards for money or maybe CD keys... No idea tough, but if the benefits fall they might say "Nah I am not selling your console if games aren't sold here".

Discs don't have the capacity to store modern games anyways. I mean, how many disc would it take to store Starfield? Its's not going to work.

Why discs instead of cartridges, which are currently the superior physical option? I personally try to buy physical whenever possible, because I don't trust companies to not ban my account and flush hundreds of dollars of games down the toilet, and it generally feels better to have just that little extra bit more ownership over my own property.

Not often I get to say this, but I completely agree. I HATE the walled garden that is the PS store. 90 usd for FIFA? 130 usd for some random GOLD edition of a ubisoft game? No way. Let me pick those up dirt cheap two months later at a retailer who is having a sale, or from someone who has played it and is ready to sell it onwards.

I wonder why they would want that

Disc drive consoles are great for people who go months with terrible or no internet. People in the military, or just about anyone who goes out to sea can get a disc mailed to them. It is nice to have physical media to play the games off of.

In the current climate where it takes 30 patches and a year for a new release to become playable, discs are not very useful..

Discs suck, other than for used game sales and collecting.

But used games sales is a huge plus. But realistically I think we'll see maybe one more console generation with physical media.

GameStop is terrible for the industry. GameStop is chock full of terrible business practices. Fuck GameStop.

Wait... Based GameStop? I'm confused.

I don't disagree (or at least there should be a disc drive-included version and the ability to connect any USB Blu-Ray drive,) but obviously GameStop has a motive here.

And I think disc based games should have a legal requirement to have a playable version of the game on disc.

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Or at the very least, add a way to sideload DRM-free games. That's why I love my PS3, WiiU and even my Switch to an extent.

Obviously, GameStop has a vested interest in discs sticking around, but it feels like that ship has sailed. Can't remember the last time I bought a physical game and it wouldn't surprise me if the next generation of consoles do away with disc drives altogether. Not really sure how to feel about that. Kind of sad having grown up using discs, but at the same time, it just feels inevitable that consoles are going to move to digital-only distribution.

They should keep putting whip holders in cars.

I thought GameStop was going all in on NFTs and bragging about how it was going to revolutionize the gaming space because you could be more "invested" in the things because you really "own" (hahahaha, fucking as if) your own copy.

Oh, wait, *checks notes

They totally are winding that down and going "whoopsie doodles!"

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/08/gamestop-citing-regulatory-uncertainty-winds-down-its-crypto-and-nft-wallet/

Ryan Cohen making a quick spin because he's a fucking idiot, and the only thing he has to sell is an "idea" of a company that respects its consumers. GameStop ain't it Superstonkers. This guy literally went from "You'll be buying all your games as NFTs at GameStop" to "Errm, yeah, we need physical drives, you know for the gamers, not so we can continue ripping people off with used games." What a fucking joke. He didn't care about physical media six months ago because he was all-in on NFTs.

GameStop gonna get Toys 'R' Us'd hard. If this is the best Cohen's got right now, they've got nothing.

Honestly, I am all good with getting rid of the drives.

I hardly ever touch CDs these days. I keep a spare USB reader, for making a backup copy of a music CD or movie DVD/Blueray, which I use, maybe twice a year.

I have boxes of DVDs and Blu-ray in the garage, and I don't ever use them. Matter of fact, if I wanted to use them, I'd have to go find a blueray player to actually play them with.

I do all of my gaming on PC, and I don't think I have physically purchased a game in over a decade. Steam/GoG are both quite nice.

I can see them forced to have some form of resellable media Ala switch maybe. But disc's as others have stated I think are on the way out. Esp bc they're so easily scratched and everything else....like good for a time but should've had something else come in once cartridges caught back up in price. They were always quicker by a long shot....it's just that memory prices weren't there in the 90s or until now even really. If I don't like or don't want a game I want some way to sell it off and can't do that digitally bc they won't equate it to the same thing as selling a used copy XD

I have an XBox One S (and a PC) - really hits home when in Game Stop with my kids and they were looking around (mainly for figures and such), and i'm like "there's nothing for me here". Of course I haven't bought a physical PC title in over 10 years now that I think of it. I feel for the shop owners, they haven nothing for me to buy and I used to like going to shop around. Come to think of it I used to go to book stores quite often too, but not since i got my first kindle.

I did recently re-buy an Xbox 360 and it is kind of nice to browse second hand shops and such and just pickup a game that I can just play without internet etc.

Yeah keep that mindset and follow Blockbuster's fate.

Look, I love having a blu ray player embedded into my console. But the fact of the matter is, a lot of these consoles have decently high end blu ray players in, and they are expensive. Consider the fact that low end consoles such as Xbox Series S are probably losing money for every sale. Asking them to tack on another feature means they either increase the price of the console or lose even more money on every console sale.

You should have the option to select a digital or a disc version of a console. Maybe even be able to pay extra to upgrade the blu ray player inside your console to a higher quality or more capable one for those who want them.

I kept hoping that Sony would do a last hurrah with discs and make a console that plays them all. But with discs being pretty much antiquated at this point, I don't think it's going to happen.

I bought a discless ps5, because I haven't put a dosc in my ps4 since 2016. I really have no need or want for one.