I

think I can definitely see the benefit for the first-party platform holders going all digital, you know? Definitely like they'll be making more money that way. I don't know. I have a feeling that most people won't mind as long as there is still an option to play their physical games, but like I guess I wondered, even though if you have an option, someone still needs to keep making the games. So I don't, if the platform holders are leaning more and more into digital only, I feel like there's going to be like less incentive for third-party publishers to keep making physical games. I don't know, just on anything.

Well, maybe it'll be like vinyl. Vinyl sales have been on their eyes. I know. Six or seven years in a row now. Yeah. Yeah. It makes me really sad, right? Like for all the reasons that we've talked about on Scoop before, you know, and you can go back like, you know, I was on a podcast called TechFetish 12 years ago at IGN and like you could go back and listen to back catalogs of that. And where I'm talking about Steam and like, you know, at that time, I feel like this is more like people have their arms around this more now in 2023. But like back then it was like, look, you don't own your Steam library, right? You're paying the same amount of money for something that you're just kind of like leasing permission to use and buying into these DRM schemes and and people are willing to do it not because they're sheep or their dumb or whatever, they're willing to do it for the convenience. Like, you know, it's easier and it's more convenient and all the stuff that Matt was kind of just talking about. And that's I have to admit that that's the boat that I am into. Like, I hate that I can't, you know, give a game to my friend or neighbor or sell it or whatever. Like, I can't liquidate it back into cash, you know. I can't, like I have kids of my own and I don't have like, I actually literally don't know the answer to the question of like when someone dies, what happens to their Steam library? Like, does it, does it, I'm assuming it expires with them? If, you know, Steam or these platform holders caught wind of like, no, it's not you using it anymore. It's your descendant. Yeah. Are you just going to get them?

Yep. That's a good what happens when I die. So what's good? What happens to my

Steam game? So when I die,

so what's going to look at that work laptop? They're going to be like, what are people good because they're going to make us do mandatory HR training. That's

fine. It's a totally normal question.

Well, okay. So if in the Steam community, if someone dies, the ownership of your account can be transferred by will. Oh,

cool. That is

actually cool. That's great. So,

you

know, but even so, like, that's different than, you know, that's not ownership transferring hands, right? It's just like the license to play the games. And like, all that stuff sucks. And it sucks from a game preservation standpoint of like, there are still carts of whatever, Sonic the Hedgehog, you know, old Mario games. And with a digital game, it's like, you just can't buy Marvel's Avengers anymore. It's just gone. Yeah. And like, stuff like that is only just going to be further exacerbated and just continue to create problems for the culture of video games. So I guess that kind of turned into a little bit of a rant on my part to sort of bring it back around to a point. I could make a long, long, long wrist of reasons of why this sucks. And yet I still buy all my games digitally just because like, I can press a button and then it remote installs and it's there and ready to play. And like, these are the trade-offs that we all have to make. We're all hypocrites.

I just, I just want to live in a world where I get to see a lawyer be like, and to this person, Mark leaves his 400 game steam library.

I was like, dude, that's good. I think I'm over 2000 games.

That's great. I mean, that's awesome. There's

real value there.

Like, I will say, like personally, this is just living in California. So having good internet, like I'm all, I'm all digital now. Like, I was playing Cyberpunk mostly on PC, but I needed and boot up the PS5 version for some reason. Apparently, I just don't own that game digitally, but I have a copy of it on my shelf and I go to launch it and it's like, please insert the disk and I'm like, oh, come on, man. You gotta make me get up, walk all the way over to my books. Yeah. Like, come on, man. This is so annoying. Put this disk. I never know which way the disk goes into the piece because I can't do it vertically. I can never do it right the first time. Oh, yeah. I never know which way it goes in. It

feels like it's the wrong way

to describe. It always feels like it's the wrong way. I have to imagine I'm like, okay. So the, like, the bigger side, that would be the side that you would lay down on.

So then the, okay, anyways, I've never, wait, you're, your, I've never put a disk in my PS5. I'm just not realizing. It's never been a disk. It's

like you. It's like you. You cannot, you cannot do it right the first time. It feels, it

feels weird the correct way to do it. You're because the, you think it's supposed to face being word where the hardware is, but, and it'll take it

in the wrong way. And it doesn't even spit it back out. It'll just sit there and wait for you to like manually eject it.

Like I'm stuck away for you to realize. But, but that said, California, we got pretty good internet here. Not everyone has good internet as the age old argument of like all digital, but that's, that just doesn't work for everyone. So that's, that's where it always gets a little scary.

I, I just think, you know, they, the platform holders have the data. The majority of sales are digital. But there is this vocal, you know, community of people who want their physical games. That's, that's your demand. And I think there's always going to be someone to meet to supply that demand as long as that demand is there.

Yeah. I agree. You, you just, you touched on something at the top of this conversation, Damon, which is the platform. This is a, this is a multi-billion dollar fight to be like, where do people buy their games and who gets to take their vig of like, I actually don't know if the Xbox store and PlayStation store, it's 30% kind of like what's standard, right? Like, so if you buy like, if you spend five years making, you know, some 60 or $70 game and you sell it on steam, steam just gets 30% of that. Like just for being, they're the gatekeeper. It's a toll that everybody has to pay. And like, it's such a, such not a small detail, but like a critical detail to like the future of any video game company of like, who gets to, you know, who gets to charge rent for being on their storefront where, you know, where the purchases happen.

Well, that's why there was all that controversy around the Epic Games store, right? Because people like their Steam library, because like, that's your home when it comes to PC games. But, and they couldn't understand why people, why game publishers were releasing games on Epic Games Store. But it's because the, the share is so much better over there. It's like 15% or something like that. And it's like, it makes so much more business sense. And, but people are like, but I, I like my steam library. And it's like, well, yep.

Matt, a point you're making your op-ed is that now the, the dislist PS5 slim is 450, not that much less than the full feature 500, which means that Sony values the dislist PS5

pretty much the same as the full feature one. Yeah, like it used to be that the, the, the dislist for digital only version was 100 bucks less. And then what the series S is, how much cheaper than the series X like

quite a bit, right? It's $300. It might be 350 for the new black one. I'm not sure. I think so. It was 300 when I launched.

They just announced the, the starter bundle today, which is 300 plus the three months of Xbox game pass ultimate. Yeah.

And so it was like one of these things. We're like, oh, yeah, we, we know that we're selling you a console without a disk drive. And as a, as a makeup for that, like it's going to be significantly cheaper. But with the new PS5 that they're releasing, they're like, actually, you know what, we value this pretty closely to the original, like this is as good as what you're going to get without this drive. So, you

know, and I'm just realizing this now, and maybe you actually made this point earlier, there's a $50 difference between the disk, the one with the disk drive and one without, but the blue drive that they sell separately is $80. So like what, what, that's

what, that's what

Marcus or Antic about earlier. Yeah. I'm just, I'm just, it really feels

like Sony is like, you better make the choice that you want to make now because we are going to punish you for it if you regret

it. So the stand is 30 bucks. The digital 450. So then we're at 480. And then the optional, so you can make an almost $600 PS5. If you, if you, but that's what that choice is. Yeah.