Comment by post_break
16 hours ago
The deal with consoles is if you buy physical discs, you can trade them share them or sell them. The deal with PC is if you buy with steam or GOG, you keep the games, upgrade your pc, keep playing them. You can download them to your hard drive and keep them.
Taking away physical discs from consoles means the worst of both worlds. You can no longer sell or trade your games, and they are essentially locked to that hardware.
And because the hardware gets deprecated the store for that generation also goes away. So even if you keep the hardware working, the games are gone.
A PS3 is still useable today even with the store gone and will be useable for a very long time. The PS6 might become a brick if its secured enough.
> Taking away physical discs from consoles means the worst of both worlds....they are essentially locked to that hardware.
This isn't necessarily true, it really depends on how they go about implementing the sales. The question being, is the sale tied to the hardware or to the account?
I've bought a number of games on the Xbox store over the years. If I were to go buy a new console and log in with my Xbox Live account, I could re-download and play those games. The games aren't permanently associated with any particular piece of hardware, they're associated with the account.
Nintendo's processes have seemed like its tied to the hardware, but since at least the Wii U its technically tied to the account. This may not have been true for the Wii though, but I never really owned the Wii or Wii U. They have sometimes made it difficult to release your account from the old hardware to associate it with new hardware though, sometimes necessitating calling support if you weren't able to disconnect your account from the old hardware.
When transferring accounts to a new Switch 2, my wife's account somehow got locked and it required reaching out to their support for them to unlock it so it could be properly paired to the new hardware. Definitely a frustrating pain on the first day of getting the new console.
The "no longer sell or trade" part is almost always true though. I'm just talking about the game being locked to the hardware.