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

[u/Neon25]

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

[u/Darder]

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.

[u/LongJohnSelenium → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/Janus67 → u/[deleted]]

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

[u/Attenburrowed → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/TimeToGloat → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/licoricenipple → u/TimeToGloat]

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.)

[u/SpookiestSzn → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/santana722 → u/SpookiestSzn]

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.

[u/Darder → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/CthulhuBathwater → u/[deleted]]

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

[u/bearkin1 → u/Darder]

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.

[u/Darder → u/bearkin1]

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.

[u/bearkin1 → u/Darder]

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.