If there's one argument that I see over and over again in recent weeks, it's the idea that games still require the use of updates in order to simply work. This is simply not true, but there's one thing pointing out the Does It Play stats. How many of the games do YOU OWN require updates? I decided to check my collection, and cross reference Does It Play to see how many of my games need the internet. I will mark games that you can play from the disc with YES, and those that require the internet with NO. For the sake of fairness, I will be ignoring games that you could only get through specialist retailers (such as Limited Run).
A Plague Tale Innocence YES
Alan Wake II Yes (though the included DLC needs an update)
Armored Core VI YES
Astro Bot YES
Dirt YES (barely)
Doom The Dark Ages NO
Dead Space YES
Deathloop YES
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth YES
Final Fantasy XVI YES
God of War Ragnarok YES
Gran Turismo 7 YES/NO (the game is on the disc, but needs constant updating due to it being online only)
Granblue Fantasy Relink YES
Guilty Gear Strive NO (story mode only has chapter 1, but that's all cutscenes anyway)
Horizon Forbidden West YES
Kena Bridge of Spirits YES
Spider-Man 2 YES
Miles Morales YES
Guardians of the Galaxy YES
Metal Gear Solid Delta YES
Need For Speed Unbound YES
Neon White YES
Ninja Gaiden 4 YES
Ninja Gaiden Ragebound YES
Once Upon a Katamari PROBABLY (it's not actually on Does It Play's database)
Pragmata YES
Prince of Persia the Lost Crown YES (albeit you need to turn the internet off to avoid the Uplay login demand)
Prodeus YES
Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart YES
Resident Evil 4 Remake YES
Resident Evil 8 YES
Resident Evil 9 YES
Returnal YES
Sackboy YES
Scarlet Nexus YES
Shinobi Art of Vengeance YES
Silent Hill 2 YES
Sonic Frontiers YES
Sonic Racing Crossworld YES
Sonic x Shadow Generations YES
Stellar Blade YES
Stray YES
Street Fighter 6 YES
Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania YES
System Shock Remake YES
Tales of Arise YES
The Last of Us Part I YES
Tekken 8 YES
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4 YES
Wo Long Fallen Dynasty YES
Yooka Replaylee YES
YS IX Monstrum Nox PROBABLY (not on Does It Play's database)
So of my 53 physical non limited edition PS5 discs, a grand total of 3 of them are just glorified download keys. The rest all have the game on it. Also, bear in mind that Guilty Gear Strive is only missing the story mode on the disc. The mode with no fighting in it whatsoever.
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/05/random-doom-fan-has-a-novel-way-to-display-a-destroyed-switch-cartridge
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2023/07/random-fan-transforms-their-nintendo-64-into-a-starcraft-battlefield
My Sculptures
Too many to count, a couple of years ago my PS3 collection was at I think 700 titles. PS2 went over 1000 and that made it really hard to collect and not accidentally buy doubles, which I did. Playstation One I have no idea, I warehouse a lot of inventory and some are split between countries. PS4 it's again hundreds but I never tried to fully catalogue them, it's the extreme end of collecting which is why I prefer now to focus on the preservation side. I spent a lot of time buying old store inventories, lock-ups of unsold units, and never playing any of them. In hindsight it's not a good feeling.
This year it's been a more balanced approach. Philanthropy was something that was impressed on me from a young age and I think the focus on 'because you can you should' somehow made it's way into preservation too, I spend a lot more time preserving books but games are a close second.
It looks like PS5 will be my last Sony effort, and there's a kind of relief there, a strange one. Zuljaras and I both depended on physical imports for so long, regions weren't locked per-say, smuggling was just the way for many retailers and suppliers in various parts of the world, especially The Soviet Union and the aftermath. I never experienced a digital game until England, it felt really sterile, hollow even. I didn't understand why anyone would want to forsake beautiful artwork (cases) for lifeless code. It's probably why I prefer hard-copies to Netflix and all of those other services that I do have but rarely use, I much rather grabbing a DVD/BluRay or VHS copy. The quality doesn't matter to me, having something tangible and of physical substance, this outweighs fidelity.
I was recently in Pakistan and almost every game was a physical hard-copy that had been smuggled in through the UAE. Many countries today still depend on that physical market, Sony don't realize that if the figures say Country X, it doesn't mean that was the last port of entry for those units. They don't and can't track those cross-border shipments, which is why I think they are in for a moment of realization when the countries that were supporting those physical import sales suddenly won't be. Nor will they be making up the difference in digital sales.
I didn't want to mention it in those recent articles, the comments are fatigue. But each time some clever clogs said 'just use a VPN' they were saying 'just risk your account'. It's against Sony's terms of service not only that but Sony have banned whole accounts just for using a VPN on a phone while visiting the App. That's the reality of a digital future, people talk a lot but haven't experienced those restrictions yet. With a disc we know no one is coming into our homes to remove, censor or alter what we paid for, and if they did I'd shoot on sight, extreme? perhaps but I really do mean from my cold dead hands, physical media really is becoming endangered.
I might collect vinyl next. I was recently talking to a film producer Friend, he's why I entered the film industry, he opened all of those doors. We talked or rather I listened about the importance of physical media, something really interesting stood out. He said that the industry mindset was 'a movie isn't complete until it's on a hard-copy'. I thought about that and he was right. On set we had dailies, a kind of combination of scenes on a tape or disc, they'd be viewed as an early indicator. The same for editors, they'd get the dailies too. But ultimately a film wasn't truly 'finished' until it was on a tape or disc, or as I heard often 'in the can'. I explained what was happening with games, it wasn't their area but they understood. I thought it was worth mentioning and perhaps the same mindset applies to some Developers and in having their 'work' in their hands.
I will say this too. Yesterday or perhaps the day before? Someone in a comment said home-owners don't want plastic cluttering up their homes, it took every fiber of my being to not say 'then buy a bigger home buddy, or two' but that's an attitude I try to avoid with collecting too. I'm aware I put a lot into collecting, there is a sense of just because I can I do but I much prefer to see peoples smaller neatly curated collections to walls of titles. Like I said to Werehog not too long ago there is something really special to having just one wall of things/discs, it captures some of that person's personality, it's humble. Collecting is definitely a balance, I don't think I'll ever get there but I do think Sony's (stupid) decision will affect how I see collecting, we'll only really be able to go backwards and limited availability means the price can only go up. Which I hope won't mean less collectors, I like the quote of 'a wise old woman once said, the key to happiness is to collect something', code to me, a cloud, that's not collecting, it's convenience. And to me a life of convenience causes less connection, isolation, and hampers the developments of passions. Collecting is a passion for so many people. It's a window into a persons passions, in my music circles we have a joke of 'don't show me nudes show me your playlist' I don't want to see someone's Steam library, it's just lifeless.
These violent delights have violent ends & in their triumph die, like fire & powder Which, as they kiss, consume.
@GirlVersusGame@LN78 Hold on a second...you guys got over a thousand games!?!? That's incredible on such a small number of systems. I'm not even on 1000 games total for all of my systems combined. Wonderful job.
@ShadowRJ With physical titles on modern online consoles (PS4, PS5, XBONE) and cartridge based Switch and retro stuff, closer to 1700. My fastidiously maintained PriceCharting inventory got completely screwed up last year (for reasons too depressing to go into) so I stopped keeping track.
@ShadowRJ I think the two factors are age and resources, LN78 is obviously older (no offense LN but I'm assuming the 78 is a date of birth) they have probably been buying games their whole life, I imagine it could be as simple as 'this year Santa Claus brought a Genesis, the next a Playstation'. Then as their hobby grew they followed each generation and never sold any of their games. I'm not trying to put words in anyone's mouth, I just see patterns in collectors circles. Few I've met just one day woke-up and decided out of the blue to collect, I did. I didn't know what gaming was until just before the PS5 launched.
I try to collect for the right reasons and not to just spend money, books are a good example. I've had books burned because of the way the world is now. The last one was a first edition collection of Harry Potter. I found when I visited Moscow at Christmas that it along with many other books had vanished. It's because Witchcraft is seen as taboo now, I have hundreds of books about actual Witchcraft but it was Harry Potter that was destroyed. It was seen as a threat to my morals and ideals, I couldn't contest it.
For me it was the moment that 'if this can happen with a book, why not a game?' and that's stuck with me. England is a very free unrestricted country, people don't have to worry about media being destroyed. They don't have to wonder if a certain game will be censored or made unavailable (most days) for a lot of people physical imports are real resistance. I saw it in Syria, Egypt, the UAE, content was cut and gamers resorted to physical imports to try to experience the game the way the Developer intended. I have three PSN accounts for a similar reason and I break every single restriction everywhere I go. One-hundred million gamers didn't just vanish when sanctions came down, we adapted, broke the system and kept going. Of course a physical collection means less need to do that but the situation for many people called for that kind of 'how do we beat this system', and we did.
That's a big part of what fuels my need to collect, it's all preservation now and it has to be. If the people who can afford to collect 'don't want their homes cluttered with useless plastic' then it doesn't leave a lot of room for everyone else.
Once it becomes 'all discs are not longer a thing', that's when the price will rise and fun collecting as a hobby will become harder for people starting out. I really don't want to see that happening. Collecting should be for everyone. I've moved past 'I need this shiny thing' and more towards 'I need to protect this shiny thing'. If I look at VHS there are so many titles I have that were never mastered onto any other format the same for actual 35mm cinema reels I collect those too. If you think a game disc is big, a reel is so heavy that they arrive at a cinema in sections and have to be spliced together, some I can't lift. If streaming becomes a kind of absolute then what happens to those really obscure titles? It only takes one quick glance at the Premium retro library to realize how Sony view preservation. They can say it's the limits of the technology, how? when outside entities are able to crack and emulate that same software.
I'll share an image from another thread, those were games I selected for the 'what games would you like remasterd' how many are available on Premium or even the store? Not a lot.
And as for value we don't even get collections like previous generations. That Playstation collection was one of my favorites, I discovered franchises for the first time and got to play them all in one package. I think with digital we're losing so much and gaining so little.
These violent delights have violent ends & in their triumph die, like fire & powder Which, as they kiss, consume.
@LN78 More power to you honestly, I talked to so many people who said 'I wish I didn't sell my Playstation and one-hundred+ games to buy a new Playstation 2'. It was painful to hear about all those games they'd let go, it wasn't the price-tag either it was knowing how hard it is to find so many of them now. I started collecting Demo discs a while ago too, I think I got to about three-hundred. They were before my time but are a great part of Playstation's history.
That's the last Playstation 2 haul that I sorted through before I left England for something, I just love how uniformed and clean those cases were. They are really easy on the eyes and feel so right, which sounds really weird when I read the words but it's true. Even just looking at the picture is 'that's lovely', with the games themselves I spend far too much time going through each case, reading about each game, the manuals (they had them) and just getting a sense of the history.
With movies I mostly box them away, especially factory-sealed copies but I do like to get some onto shelves, the ones I really like. I don't like modern Hollywood so much so a lot of titles aren't as up to date and I'm not sure I want the newer stuff. I like the 50's, 80's and 90's, I got into classic cinema first, then the 80's followed and the 90's, by the time I got to the 2000s something was missing. To some people collections are chaos, I see mine as organized chaos, it's fun arranging things.
@GirlVersusGame I've always liked the idea that collections (of anything, really) are valuable because they are, to one degree or another, autobiographical - I remember the Christmas when I got Castle of Illusion on the Megadrive or the birthday when someone gave me Blood on the Tracks or whatever. I don't have any emotional connection at all to a digital file sitting on a hard drive.
@LN78 you just described exactly why I will always value physical over digital. The passion. I just can’t feel the love for a random file on an account the same way I can for a product that actually exists.
@Neuromancer
The only physical media that I have currently is a loose copy of Mega Man X4 for PS1, 5 NS1 games, and a small collection of retro games. Dont have any PS2 or PS3 games, and all of my PS4, PS5, PSVR1 & PSVR2 games are digital.
99% of My NS1 library is digital, and i tossed all of my dvd/blu-ray cases and plunked the discs in a CD binder. 😋
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Topic: How many games do you own that have the full game on disc?
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