Perhaps a card/stick that the game is stored on so instead of running the game on the card (like a disk), it is simply stored on the card and you download its content and play it on your console (essentially like having a back up of your game). However though, to avoid piracy, they might have to have a system so that you can only play the game if the card is plugged in, even if the game data from the card is already downloaded.
Interestingly the sales of UHD movies grew last year (which I think you had previously mentioned), but in comparison to 5 years ago it still is a shell of itself. It will be interesting to see if that growth continues. Over the last year, when walking into my closest bricks and mortar store to browse for movies the UHD section has grown while the BD and DVD sections continue to shrink.
This is what I can't get my head around and couldn't agree more.
The issue is likely cost. High capacity storage isn't cheap, and even though you can get around bit rate by installing the game to a local drive, the actual storage device would likely push the price of physical media games up a lot.
100% that's the whole intention behind it. By getting rid of the free market, they'll have more control on what the market value for games will be, and you can be sure they'll use that to squeeze as much money as they can out of you. I've also mentioned in an earlier post that we can't discount the possibility of them leaving game stores in the dark should they decide they only want to sell games on their own digital storefront. We can't say for sure if that will happen or not, but it does certainly bring us one step closer to seeing game stores rendered obsolete.
The price for sale has next to nothing to do with the price to produce. Especially with storage and ram these days.
While you aren't wrong that the prices are massively inflated at the moment, and production cost is the real number, you have to consider, what incentive or motivation is there for a company to sell these cards as a physical games medium for significantly less than as a generic storage drive. There is none. So the cost to the consumer would still be astronomically high. The prices need to come down, sure, but they're still volatile.
These companies don't buy ram or storage to inflate the price, they buy it to be on top of the "ai" game*: running useful ai models requires a lot of data, this data need to be stored on a fast medium (ssds) and for training (feeding the data to gpu systems) the data needs to be processed many times so something even faster than ssds is required: ram.
This is actually being fought in court, at least for DRAM: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/1124...ed-dram-price-fixing-and-collusion/index.html
This is why I am convinced what the public wants, should regulators act under anti-gatekeeping laws, is not to allow third party app stores on the console (something that already happens on mobile), but rather pushing them to keep making physical media - costs be damned.
Paywalled article.
The EU has admitted they can't do anything to prevent Sony to discontinue physicals: https://www.techspot.com/news/113088-eu-cant-stop-sony-ending-physical-playstation-game.html
You would be right, except for the fact that it is actually crime in most countries whether you like it to be or not. When you pirate a game, you are duplicating copyrighted material without authorisation to do so. You are not stealing ownership of the game. In addition you are also depriving the the rights holder of funds relating to sale of licenses to use the software.
People in general conflate possession of physical copies as "ownership" and wouldn't take nothing else, which is the issue regarding the opposition to this move. Rightful or not, worth noting that Limited Run Games is also known to bandwagon on this (given complaints I heard about their delay rates).
Yeah this is exactly the point. Precedent has been set for this behavior for a while. Amazon has already been known to remove things off of peoples kindles for several years now. Now Sony has gone in and removed 500+ content items that people had already paid for.
