realcaseyrollinsThe $700 PS5 Pro doesn’t come with a disc drive
IcePeeThis is yet another nail in the coffin of physical media. Or, in other words games you actually own instead of long term lease.
It’s not like physical media makes any difference anyway these days.
Actual disk often gets just a glorified installer, and even if it includes the entire game you’re likely to have to activate it online anyway.
The “own your games” ship has sailed long ago, unless you only buy no-DRM and your own backups.
The difference is the price of buying discs vs. buying from a digital store that has no competitors.
I’ve bought almost exclusively second-hand discs for my PS5, because they’re like half the price for the exact same content.
Sadly it’ll probably be just a matter of time before those will be phased out as well, one way or another.
Steam keys can be found dramatically cheaper than all of that.
They can, difference is a vast majority of people don’t want to buy/build a PC, or deal with a PC setup in general, they just want to press one button to make it work and sit on the couch. So the easy option for them is buying a console, it’s plug and play, while a PC requires quite some setup.
So we need Steam Box. Steam Deck just works 99% of the time. I can only complain about the desktop mode being buggy and non-steam games being a pain in the ass to install.
Then we return to the topic of not owning your games with Steam. Try installing non Steam games via the Heroic launcher and use Bazzite OS instead
Try getting non-playstation games on your Playstation. What about games from older Playstation? Can’t get most of those on there. And let’s not pretend you “own” Playstation games anymore when so many require online amd patches anyways.
Steam is more value for money and improved services and support. I used to be a die hard Playstation fan but it got old being treated like shit.
You can get generally up to PS3 games working on PC and you’d be owning those games too. Value for money is good and all but owning vs leasing is clear cut and I’ll take owning my stuff everytime, as that is valuable to me.
webheadIf you wait for a good sale, digital is sometimes cheap or cheaper. I just go with whatever is cheapest at any given moment.
I got the disc version for used games too, but the sad truth is that where I live there isn’t really a market for used games.
Or, well, there is, but the prices on used discs are often barely below retail price, if you can even find a copy.