Physical PC games (and Red Dead Redemption 2 for PC)
- Thread starter dowie
- Start date
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Now we don't have physical media, developers have an excuse to release pile of ***** and then patch it for 6 months after. When it was on discs, at least it was pretty much fully playable.
It's even the same on consoles these days.
It's even the same on consoles these days.
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Same for me - never had an issue and used them for quite a while.
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Clicking 'buy game' on steam, paying with paypal checkout, and then seeing the game installing rather quickly just doesn't cut the mustard.
Going to an actual store to buy a game with some money you'd run into as a teenager, bringing it home and opeing the case, pouring over the manual beforehand in anticipation, it is time you think, the rest of the manual can wait, you press the button and your cd/dvd re-writer clacks open, you take out spice girls greatest hits and place it back in the case, you press the button in the centre of the case, the disc is imamaculate and it fits perfectly on your index finger, have you ever seen anything so beautiful? You place the disc carefully in the tray and press the same button to close it as you did to open. Clack. You hear the drive start whirring and the little hourglass symbol pops up. Do you want to install Delta Force on your C: Drive? Watching patiently as the percentage bar slowly creeps up and your PC is making all manner of noises in the process. Finally, it has installed. I am overcome with excitment for this, I have been reading the same article in PC Gamer for weeks now. I double click the desktop icon, and magic happens.
When PC gaming truly was the master race.
Going to an actual store to buy a game with some money you'd run into as a teenager, bringing it home and opeing the case, pouring over the manual beforehand in anticipation, it is time you think, the rest of the manual can wait, you press the button and your cd/dvd re-writer clacks open, you take out spice girls greatest hits and place it back in the case, you press the button in the centre of the case, the disc is imamaculate and it fits perfectly on your index finger, have you ever seen anything so beautiful? You place the disc carefully in the tray and press the same button to close it as you did to open. Clack. You hear the drive start whirring and the little hourglass symbol pops up. Do you want to install Delta Force on your C: Drive? Watching patiently as the percentage bar slowly creeps up and your PC is making all manner of noises in the process. Finally, it has installed. I am overcome with excitment for this, I have been reading the same article in PC Gamer for weeks now. I double click the desktop icon, and magic happens.
When PC gaming truly was the master race.
Great times, apart from the spice girls bit
I built my current PC with a Blu-ray drive but it's just used for movies, not games. It can even burn discs but I've never had the need, especially now we have thumb drives with far larger capacities.
Getting back onto physical PC games, even when PC games came on CD ROM it started to be impossible to trade them in due to the CD key codes.
When you could no longer trade them in then the high street game stores couldn't make as much money out of PC games like they can by selling second hand console games for a fiver less than retail (in direct competition with the brand new games).
So game shops stopped stocking many PC games, and it was at this point that Steam started taking off.
I remember a games publisher some years ago saying they tried to get the retailer 'Game' to stock their latest title and the retailer said there's no demand and the entire chain would only buy a few copies. The publisher took out his laptop, checked his steam publishing stats and said 'in the time it's taken for you to tell me there's no demand, Steam has sold 30 copies."
So Steam literally saved the PC gaming industry as retailers were not stocking many PC games because they couldn't sell the same copies over and over again, taking all the profit, unlike consoles.
Steam also saved us from having to use no CD patches to play our legitimately bought games and later managed to make the scourge of limited activations go away.
Getting back onto physical PC games, even when PC games came on CD ROM it started to be impossible to trade them in due to the CD key codes.
When you could no longer trade them in then the high street game stores couldn't make as much money out of PC games like they can by selling second hand console games for a fiver less than retail (in direct competition with the brand new games).
So game shops stopped stocking many PC games, and it was at this point that Steam started taking off.
I remember a games publisher some years ago saying they tried to get the retailer 'Game' to stock their latest title and the retailer said there's no demand and the entire chain would only buy a few copies. The publisher took out his laptop, checked his steam publishing stats and said 'in the time it's taken for you to tell me there's no demand, Steam has sold 30 copies."
So Steam literally saved the PC gaming industry as retailers were not stocking many PC games because they couldn't sell the same copies over and over again, taking all the profit, unlike consoles.
Steam also saved us from having to use no CD patches to play our legitimately bought games and later managed to make the scourge of limited activations go away.