[LandenLove]

In my opinion, disc based games have been a ridiculous way to sell modern games because they are physically incapable of storing the amount of game data required for modern AAA games. I understand that they still exist because of the resale value, but solid state storage similar to Nintendo Switch cards makes more sense to me.

On an even more personal note, very few modern games, if any, are worth purchasing for my own enjoyment. The gaming landscape overall has dropped so low that I don't even care anymore.

[asimovDev]

>very few modern games, if any, are worth purchasing for my own enjoyment

Side question, do you happen to play games that don't have a gun or a ball in it? I always hear people say these things about modern games and it's almost always turns out to be people who play call of duty , sports games and maybe they have played something like assassin's creed or a racing game once in a while, and have never played any indie or non AAA games or anything that isn't made in USA or Japan. I agree there's a lot of dreadful about the gaming industry right now, but there are so many games worth playing that it's just sad to read stuff like this

[LandenLove]

Again, that was a personal take. I understand millions of people are still able to enjoy modern video games.

I am primarily an FPS gamer. Old school COD was great. I also love older version of Minecraft. Also most Valve games. Portal 2 being my favorite.

If I had to summarize my major problems with modern games/game industry they are this: Unrelatable stories (to me personally), micro transactions, poor optimization, and planned obsolescence (You can never player Overwatch 1 ever again). Then there are other bonus problems like the fortnite-ification of games, E.g., putting every IP know to man into a single game.

Also, loot boxes. Horrible, disgusting business practice. Literally selling gambling to children.

[asimovDev]

Yeah I agree with micro transaction and obsolescence. It's sad that Valve revived PC gaming while also making it worse (they invented battle passes, lootboxes and DRM), I, nevertheless, still love their games (I keep playing L4D2 to this day with my friends) and TF2 was my favorite multiplayer game

[LandenLove]

I love TF2 as well! To be a little less negative, I will say that game engines like Godot give me lots of hope for the future. It sets a good foundation for future game devs to make something great. Also, game devs now have access to lots of different platforms to publish their games.

[Chu4eeno]

Do you have any recent games you recommend?

[asimovDev]

Final Fantasy 7 Remake games (one of the best modern RPGs with amazing combat and extension / sequel of the iconic PS1 RPG)

Balatro (roguelite game with poker cards, very addicting)

SIGNALIS (isometric shooter with puzzles ala Silent Hill)

A Space for the Unbound (beautiful story driven sidescroller set in rural Indonesia, great OST and pixel art)

Dredge (lovecraftian horror fishing game, pleasant gameplay loop and fun mechanics, even my mom who doesn't like video games liked it).

Sword of the Sea (just play this one, same creators as Journey)

Call of the Sea (first person lovecraftian puzzle game)

and some older ones from pre 2020:

Nier: Automata, Death Stranding

[kuerbel]

I might add:

Cozy: Tiny Bookshop and Stardew Valley

Action: it's triple A but God of War and GoW Ragnarök are pretty good imo. If you don't mind formulaic Horizon zero dawn and forbidden west have a good story and storytelling but gameplay wise it's a bit stale. Clair Obscure of course.

Weird: graveyard keeper - it has a lot of grinding, it's a hit or miss I guess. It's older but it has pixel graphics so not much of a concern I guess

Also weird: Disco Elysium

Also weird: Baby Steps

Rogue: Hades and Hades 2

Climbing: Cairn. It is SO good.

[kuerbel]

What genre?

[HDBaseT]

A PS5 Bluray can hold 100GB of data, sure some AAA titles are in excess of 100GB, although that is still 100GB that the player doesn't have to download, plus they enable re-sell-ability and partially maintain the status quo of "owning" a title.

[stuxnet79]

How much of that 100GB is actually optimized usage? I suspect that a hard cap on the size of the game would lead to a better quality product. The size inflation of games has literally gone insane. I was looking at my Steam library and Tekken 7 was taking up close to 100GB of space which makes absolutely no sense, because it has the same fundamental gameplay as Tekken Tag 1 which was released on a 700MB CD ROM for the PS2's launch.

[musicale]

Tekken 7 does not need to be 100GB.

And with improvements in procedural rendering, textures and environments should become more compact than pre-rendered (and games should load faster as well.)

[LandenLove]

I was completely unaware that PS5 discs could hold that much data! But that leads me to the next question, what is the read time look like on that? lol. I found this manual on google for the ps5 disc drive, but I don't understand these units.

Read speed BD-ROM (66 GB/100 GB) ~10×CAV BD-ROM (25 GB/50 GB) ~8×CAV BD-R/RE (25 GB/50 GB) ~8×CAV DVD ~3.2×CLV

[klausa]

Doesn't really matter, PS5 games can't be played from disk anyway; they have to be installed to the SSD first.

[kmeisthax]

It's weird to say this, but BD (including 4K UHD BD) is actually really old tech. Sony was talking about quad-layer discs back before they deleted the mandatory disc caddy from the draft BD spec! OK, practically speaking nobody had their hands on a quad-layer disc until BDXL in the mid-2010s, but even then that's still old.

As for why nobody's made a higher-capacity disc... well, they did. It was even an industry standard. You just never heard about it because it was exclusively intended to be a replacement for tape libraries. I guess rolling out this tech to consumers was just too impractically expensive?

You can absolutely do resale rights with solid-state media, too. On the other hand, the Switch library is littered with games that require downloading an update in order to play. Switch 2 went further and had games that shipped as a pure license key with no data storage. The underlying economics of game distribution are actually really unfavorable to any amount of overhead. Hell, the reason why physical games even still exist AT ALL is because we can press BDXLs for pennies.

Going back to the stagnation in optical media, the read performance hit a wall a while back, too. You basically can't stream anything off these discs anymore. Hell, some Internet connections might actually be faster than an install from optical media! So that's not really the advantage people think anymore either.

The resale ability is basically the only reason to keep physical media around, though - and I'm surprised we haven't seen a renewed attempt to kill physical. I mean, with movies, most stores have already removed their BD sections; you basically can only buy those online or at some Barnes & Noble stores.

[kuerbel]

I've read just a few days ago that the sale of physical media is going up again. Even just slightly.

https://www.techradar.com/televisions/blu-ray/weve-seen-an-i...

[danbolt]

> In my opinion, disc based games have been a ridiculous way to sell modern games because they are physically incapable of storing the amount of game data required for modern AAA games

I’ve worked on a few AAA games with large install sizes, and I personally don’t believe this to be true. Or, I think it’s due to a lack of financial/organizational incentive to skim things down. The cost of storage and distribution is offloaded to the digital marketplace and consumer. Nobody’s KPI is tracked to the download size.

In projects of that size, you’re often trowling through a big proprietary graph of assets. This might be akin to UE’s reference viewer, or maybe less sophisticated. It’s hard to do and very unlikely to be on the roadmap.

[garciansmith]

Memory for Switch games is more and more expensive, or at least I assume that's why so few physical games have come out for the Switch 2 (plus the whole "key-card" thing with no game date on the carts). With discs you could still use them to install a game, even include multiple discs if you need to. But as another poster noted, for a game that'll sell a ton like GTA6, it's all about just killing the resale market to make just that much more money.

And on a personal note, I feel we are living in a gaming golden age, so many amazing titles, especially indie ones, out there in every conceivable genre. If anything the problem is finding them, since there's so much being released these days. And I say this as someone who still also plays older games (especially 3rd, 4th, and 5th gen).

[dehrmann]

> but solid state storage similar to Nintendo Switch cards makes more sense to me

These likely degrade in 5-10 years, and have you seen the price of NAND lately? AAA gaming is going to get to be out-of-reach because of storage costs.

[LandenLove]

I don't know what the degradation for NAND storage is, but another aspect that I didn't mention in my original comment is the fragility of disc based media. In terms of scratches and other damage.

[kuerbel]

You have to treat a blu ray very badly to get a scratch in it. It might look like a DVD or CD but it's not. It is much more resistant to scratches as it has a protective coating called Durabis from TDK. Sony uses their own proprietary coating.

[HerbManic]

While this is true, it is a sign of the customer losing control over their purchases. When the servers go dark, the game does too.

Yes there are some practicality issues with physical media but they are kind of trivial to the costs of just handing over all control to the publishers.

[moomoo11]

same. the last game i purchased that i enjoyed was cyberpunk, although that also got boring because at release it had some issues..

i recently bought battlefield 6 and that has been fun, but even then idk how to describe it. there's just no soul anymore.

i don't think it is because i'm getting older. back in the day there were teamspeak communities that ONLY played battlefield, and that was really fun.

now it is some discord servers, nobody really plays 1 game, but many on rotation. so for me, it feels like every game is just solo with whatever randoms show up.

so i've stopped playing lol. i like to think i got to play some cool games during the golden era, before enshittification, where people formed communities around one game.