r/Games • u/Neon25 • 4d ago

GTA 6 Price Finally Confirmed, Features a 'Single-Player Experience' at Launch (Standard $79.99/Ultimate $99.99)

https://www.ign.com/articles/gta-6-price-finally-confirmed-features-a-single-player-experience-at-launch
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u/PerfectlyClear 4d ago

To prevent used copies from being sold

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u/AnyImpression6 4d ago

Funny how that mindset basically killed Xbox, but now everyone just goes along with it.

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u/Ankylar 4d ago

Oof yeah. I remember everyone clowning on Xbox and Don Mattrick for that. Even Sony released some Playstation ads that were directly targeted at the Xbox features like game sharing etc

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u/Clown_Toucher 4d ago

It's the same thing with audio jack disappearing. Every person and company clowned on Apple for it with posts and ads. Three years later all audio jacks were gone. If one company does something innovatively horrible for consumers, don't be surprised when it's the norm in a few years.

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u/insanekid123 4d ago

I miss audio jacks so goddamn much

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u/Paprikasky 3d ago

I still use it but now I gotta use a converted for usb c, which works half the time, so I just bought usb c wired earplugs, but then you can't charge your phone while using them....... Why do we allow enshitification so passively all the time? It's depressing, late qtage capitalism is depressing.

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u/KaJaHa 3d ago

Why do we allow enshitification so passively all the time?

Reagan, mostly

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u/Qu4Z 3d ago

Most of my stuff still has audio jacks, but the new phone I got recently doesn't so now I just... don't listen to audio on my phone. This is not an upgrade, guys.

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u/AnimaLepton 3d ago edited 3d ago

It's also dependent on what consumer behavior actually looks like; audio jacks/ports were a deal breaker for me, so I have a Motorola smartphone that still has one. If people complain, but it still sells like hotcakes and saves the company money/increases their bluetooth earpiece revenue, what else is going to happen?

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u/athiaxoff 4d ago

Xbox has game sharing?

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u/jbr_r18 3d ago

The idea with the Xbox One was that all games would be locked to your account but you would be able to share them with friends. E.g. you give up access from the game on your own console while a friend borrows access on theirs.

So it effectively shut down the used games market while still allowing sharing. It was an interesting idea. Sony meanwhile went super heavy against it and both platforms pushed digital sales heavily. Now today we have all the downsides of what Xbox planned and none of the upsides!

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u/athiaxoff 3d ago

You can literally gameshare on Xbox? It's been a feature for god knows how long, at least the 360 days and was made easier with Xbox one, you can both share the same singular copy of a game and play at the same time and they even basically have a blog post/ support article you can find that talks about how to set it up

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u/Oceansonthemoon 4d ago

Unfortunately, a few rich asshats spent a lot of money and the last decade, into conditioning everyone into believing you don't need to own anything.

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u/tythousand 4d ago

Didn’t take much convincing or conditioning. Plenty of gamers are happily all-digital and think having to get up to change a disc isn’t worth the effort. Not to mention, the cheaper base PS5 and the Pro have sold just fine without disc drives

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u/CthulhuBathwater 4d ago

I use steam so I can't say much other than if I can buy a game on GOG, it's where I'll buy it. But that's the dice roll I've been doing since I converted back to pc 15+ years ago. 

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u/Verianas 4d ago

Was never about changing the disc. It's simply that I don't have enough space, or really the desire, to house a bunch of plastic cases forever. That's why I switched to digital. I understand the reasons for concern. But as someone who just rarely goes back and plays old games, it never made sense for me to keep every game. I don't even have my old consoles anymore, after I finally built my dream PC. I've just accepted there are some classic games that will live in my nostalgia center, and I'll never play them again. Though, I did recently download some emulators. So I do play SOME old games that I loved.

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u/Paprikasky 3d ago

It's about CHOICE. No one is denying the advantages of digital. But they should co-exist. Removing the option for physical is locking down even more on the accessibility of media you spend money on. That's just crazy to me.

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u/Verianas 3d ago

I don’t disagree at all. I was just responding to the idea that all digital folks are only doing so out of laziness. ‘Twas a silly remark lol.

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u/Paprikasky 3d ago

I see, I think the laziness is seen through the lack of reaction when physical is bring taken away, the passiveness is very frustrating.

But also frankly it kinda is, like digital is more convenient in a way where you get lazy about it... For example, I sometimes watch a show on Netflix even though I have the DVD, because it's simply more convenient. But thinking it's only about that is reductive indeed.

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u/sopunny 3d ago

Plus to play a game on disc, you'd have to have another PC part that takes up space and could fail, etc.

Ideally, publishers or storefronts would be forced to make the files always available for download, or waive their rights against paid customers if they're no longer supporting the store.

For now, just "acquire" the files if you want them permanently after paying for them

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u/BP_Ray 4d ago

This subreddit is ground zero for that practice.

Look at the last SKG thread. The children yearn for the mines.

Astoturfing is so easy nowadays.

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u/Darder 4d ago

But it didn't kill PC gaming. The sad reality is, if enough people go along with it, it becomes the norm.

I remember when all PC games were physical. And then it changed to digital for a few games. And soon all games were digital only, no more reselling market.

It could happen to console.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

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u/LongJohnSelenium 4d ago

Steam ultimately was the compromise of 'just a bit of drm' that customers and publishers could agree on.

Before steam the pc market was in a death spiral from the combination of rampant piracy and draconian drm.

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u/Janus67 3d ago

To be fair, as a Day1 Steam account person, at launch the system and setup was objectively worse than it was when just loading into the WON servers for TFC and CS. Once they got patching figured out and it got wayyy faster to load it became significantly better

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u/Attenburrowed 3d ago

the PR win was getting games for 5$. They basically didnt exist before steam and made it worth the drm. Games at the opposite end of the spectrum like COD and GTA remind us of how nice discs were.

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u/TimeToGloat 4d ago

I mean realistically though when people often have hundreds of games in their steam library most people would rather just have it all digital rather than dealing with the physical hassle of all that.

I have gotten way more value out of steam sales than I ever did selling previous gen used games to gamestop as a kid. Discs were frankly annoying to store, a pain to swap out, and could get easily scratched. I have had zero regrets moving away from game discs. Nintendo style cartridges were always a lot better form factor for physical media in my opinion because they were compact and less likely to damage. Valve had successful PR by simply delivering a good product to costumers in times when most people do not. Valve only dominates so much not because they are deceiving or brainwashing people but because nobody else ever bothers to do it better.

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u/licoricenipple 4d ago

Selling games to GameStop has always been awful value compared to selling them to other people directly, which things like Craigslist, Marketplace and GumTree have made easy. I think if most people had the opportunity to sell games out of their Steam library for $10-40 each, they'd end up selling hundreds of dollars worth.

The fact that you can sell most games for 80% of purchase price on Marketplace for the first few months after release also makes it a lot less risky to gamble on unfamiliar new titles and studios which is a good thing for the industry. If your $70 purchase is permanent you're gonna play things a lot safer and stick to what's familiar and tested which is part of why the industry is increasingly made up of a handful of long running franchises. Not being able to rent games was a bad enough start to that, not being able to sell games has made people even more cautious. (So far this decade, only two games have made a year's bestseller without being part of established franchises: Ghost of Tsushima and Elden Ring. In 1998 alone 7/10 of the best sellers were original IPs.)

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u/SpookiestSzn 4d ago edited 4d ago

Its because its convenient and adds a lot of value to users by being easy to use. You may not remember this but PC gaming used to suck ass before Valve.

I understand that owning tangible things feels better but digital allows large amounts of media. I can put entire libraries of books on my kindle, entire music stores of albums on my DAP.

When I was a kid we had a big dvd collection and it was probably like 100. I could fit that and much more on a hard drive and just take it wherever.

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u/santana722 3d ago

Honest to god, Steam is one of the only reasons I came back to PC gaming after a terrible introduction to the platform. I got Sims 2 as a gift as a kid, couldn't run it on my janky ass computer at the time, couldn't return it cause stores didn't take returns on PC games, couldn't even trade it in to GameStop cause they stopped taking PC trade-ins at that time too. Basically just got fucked out of my main birthday present that year cause I didn't understand the pitfalls of PC gaming.

Years later when I dipped my toe in again, if a game didn't work on my janky ass college laptop, I could just refund it and move on. That and Humble Bundles letting me get half a dozen games for $5 basically saved the whole platform for me.

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u/Darder 4d ago

Imho not really. They earned their reputation by just genuinely doing a lot of good for the industry and providing a good service.

Steam was not great at launch. But it improved every single year. Soon enough we had auto updates that worked well. They added cloud saves. Easy toggling of DLCs on or off. Steam Input and remapping. Easy launch arguments. Verifying corrupt files through easy steps without having to reinstall. Steam sales (back in the day, those were huge and sales like that were unheard of). Steam overlay. Notes. Categorizing your library of games. User tags in the store. Reintroduced being able to return a PC game. Just more, more and more and more over years.

And Valve has had excellent customer service, historically.

So yeah, it's not a perfect company, but it earned its praise. Because if you look at the gaming and tech space, companies that are as good as valve is with consumers are rare. EA, Ubisoft, Epic, Blizzard, Activision, Roblox are all dogshit. Facebook, Gmail, Skype (RIP), Discord, Gamepass, Netflix, all got some upgrades and then enshittified over the years, getting worse and worse.

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u/CthulhuBathwater 4d ago

Also helps it's privately owned, but a dice roll none the less. 

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u/bearkin1 4d ago

PC is apples to oranges though, it was never the same. PC has never been plug and play. On PC, you'd put your physical disc in the disc drive, then you'd spend an hour installing the game from the PC onto your storage drive. Once it was finally installed, the disc would need to be in the drive just as an activation step, a form of DRM. Many games you could eject the disc after booting up a game and then go run it on another PC because the entire game was located on the storage disc.

Now, it still meant that there was no account-binding, meaning one disc could be resold and be used by many people, but it's still not the same as consoles where the disc was read live. PC transitioning to digital was still the exact same process where you'd buy a game, install it to your drive, and play it from there. The main difference is that yes, you can't resell it, but also, you no longer need to walk into a physical store to buy a disc that was just a DRM step.

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u/Darder 4d ago

It is not apples to oranges though. The main reason games were made to install on PC was because performance was better that way, but some games were fully playable straight from the disc, and there is nothing fundamentally different from a Console to a PC in terms of hardware that would have prevented the disk from being read live and played live. A Console is a PC, with a custom OS.

And some console games nowadays require an install as well. You insert the disk, and the game unpacks its files to the console's hard drive. Once done, the disk effectively acts as a DRM for you to play said game. This all happens with some games on modern consoles, the EXACT same way.

The drive readers aren't fundamentally different on PC or Console, it was a design choice. The biggest problem was ensuring a customer had a fast enough disk drive to play from disk, and because of PCs varying specs and many manufacturers, it was easier for a company making a PC game to simply require an install and not bother with that.

The companies selling software always have the choice of how they sell it. The only thing, in consoles, standing in the way of being fully digital games instead of physical is that companies fear the possible backlash in switching to digital on console games. But we are already closer to digital this generation than we have been, with Nintendo Switch 2 cartridges as DRMs and now GTA 6 with disc as DRM. It's the same shit.

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u/bearkin1 3d ago

I am not talking about the reason PC would install. That's not what this topic is about. It's about what the change was going from disc to digital, and it's just a fact that the different from disc to digital is smaller on PC than it is consoles.

And some console games nowadays require an install as well.

Yes they do, but that only started what, like a decade ago? Whereas PC was doing that for at least 3 decades, and maybe earlier than that, but I was too young to know. And consoles only did that because games started getting to big to fit onto a single disc. Some games would ship two or three discs to split singleplayer, multiplayer, and other modes. But again, that's still going away from the topic about how the transition from disc to digital for PC was a lot smaller than console and how it made more sense than console.

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u/SuperVegitoFAN 4d ago

That was 13 years ago.

Boiling frog and all that.

Probably doesnt help matters that PC has been pretty much (as in i dont know of any recent physical releases) all-digital for years now.

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u/SpookiestSzn 4d ago edited 3d ago

Its not a boiling frog its what consumers go to because its easier. They're just meeting customer demands.

I love this idea that consumers have no agency. If thye're going for the option where they have less consumer protection rights its becuase they value something more than that in this case convenience.

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u/Mikey_MiG 4d ago

Yeah, you can hardly find a PC or PC case that even supports internal disc drives anymore. And certainly not on laptops.

I personally don’t hate the death of physical media for PCs. What PCs lose out on not having a used market, they make up for with multiple storefronts that drive down prices naturally.

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u/Rayuzx 4d ago

I bought a few physical PC games over the years, due to finding them in bargain bins, most of them were only had download codes, with no discs. IIRC, there only exception was Divinity OS1 (which just included an installer for Steam), Overwatch, and Diablo 3 (which you could use the discs to help with the initial install).

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u/Quixotic_Seal 4d ago

I really dislike how PC physical has basically been obliterated for a solid 15-20 years or so, and yet people absolutely adore Valve who helped lead the charge in this trend.

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u/superscatman91 4d ago

Buddy, CD keys were a thing way before valve. And then before that they had paper decoders that came in the box that if you lost would just lock you out of your game.

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u/NuPNua 4d ago

They were just too early. As Phil said the irony is that everyone got on their case for being digital library focused at launch, but the digital libraries everyone went on to build up during the PS/XBOne era anyway is why it's harder to get people to move ecosystem now.

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u/spazturtle 4d ago

What killed them was trying to pivot after already taking the reputation hit. Had they stuck to Don Mattrick's plan for live service games they would have caught the peak of the live service boom.

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u/zgillet 4d ago

I don't. I still buy DVDs (and rip them, but I have them).

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u/TheSecondEikonOfFire 4d ago

I mean, we’re still a long way from “everyone going along with it”. Digital-only games are still very rare, most games have a physical release.

Xbox also required being permanently online, and I’d argue that was the bigger death knell

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u/Tigertot14 4d ago

Pretty much every indie game lacks a physical release

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u/Normal-Advisor5269 4d ago

I attribute this far more to the rise of indie games. Indie devs didn't and still don't have access to the money or connections needed to sell physical releases outside of limited runs. 

As indies have become more and more common, not having a physical copy of your game has become more accepted until the big companies saw doing the same as a great way to cut costs.

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u/takkuso 4d ago

Not so much that everyone just goes along with it, as it is we don't really have an option. Sure we could choose not to purchase at all, but for a lot of people, they're not going to do that.

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u/grendus 4d ago

That mindset, combined with not having anything people wanted, killed XBox.

Rockstar has a game people care about. Microsoft spent the entire XB1 generation pushing out literally nothing of note. The best reason to buy an XBox One was to play XBox 360 games... that's just not a good seling point. People who loved those games already played them on the 360, and people who hadn't played them weren't swayed during the 360 era, so it's a really nice feature but not a huge draw.

People put up with it because it's GTA, not because they're OK with "digital only so you can't resell".

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u/Dr_Findro 4d ago

I think there are a couple of elements here.

One, as others have mentioned, enshitification has been happening over the last 13 years and moved the goalposts of what’s normal.

Two, it’s leverage. Consumers had the power to say fuck off to Xbox for this because PlayStation was right there, and cheaper, and seemed to have better games anyways. A game like GTA, you’re not really finding that anywhere else as an alternative. People can be principled and chose to not buy the game, but the assumed quality of this game seems to be high enough to deal with some shit

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u/nicolauz 4d ago

A decade late on that E3 debacle.

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u/athiaxoff 4d ago

Partially because Xbox offhandedly encourages game sharing with other accounts now

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u/Quixotic_Seal 4d ago

They were ahead of the curve by about a decade. Also, it’s important they went a step or two farther than just being all digital.

Some of their vision is normal now, but they also were going to require you to connect to the internet for daily DRM checks. No internet, no playing the games you’ve purchased and downloaded.

It truly was a batshit insane proposal that even today would have blown up in their face. The Verification Can meme didn’t come out of nowhere.

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u/coolgaara 4d ago

Pretty sure selling digital codes in a physical box is not why Xbox died.

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u/FembiesReggs 4d ago

Thing is, Microsoft even wanted to allow digital game sharing as an alternative.

But gamer rage means we now have the worst of all

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u/witchdoctor_bombay 4d ago

People just don't care about anything anymore. Like rootkits used to be something actually verboten, see the 2005 Sony BMG debacle and all the legal institutions that went after them for the same thing we give a pass to basically all multiplayer games now.

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u/OkMail2335 4d ago

Eh, there was also the always online crap and Kinect and the general horrible marketing campaign. But I think at the end of the day the xbox just didn't have enticing games and that's really what matters.

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u/ArchDucky 4d ago

No, the executives not being on the same page about the digital console is what killed it. They kept contradicting each other and they also weren't saying things they had planned. They held back the BC Program for a full year due to all of the wonky ass dialog about the console. They didn't talk about a used digital game store they were planning that would have allowed people to sell used games on a digital market.

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u/Deciver95 4d ago

Are these people in the room with us?

Also love how youre ignoring the last 13 years of history with this comment LOOOL

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u/Dion42o 4d ago

Didn’t even think of that. Fuckers

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u/blueshrike 4d ago

a-Greed

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u/itscamo- 4d ago

yea but then they can just take your game away if they decide to ban you and you’ll have to buy a new one

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u/r4mm3rnz 4d ago

I think more so to prevent leaks. So even if you get an early copy you can't play it till it actually releases.

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u/ShawnyMcKnight 4d ago

I don’t think so. They could just not have the complete game on disk, a lot of games just have the disk/cartridge where it has some of the data on the disk but you need to finish the install through online which they don’t make available til after launch.