People want retail games and if the big 3 can’t cover that market a new and more sustainable subject will fill that space. Maybe it’s time to bring back physical media to PC, a more open system where publishers could make profit selling their retail games similarly to vinyls for music.
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No, physical media is not useful for PC games, you want a DRM free installer (preferably with all relevant patches applied, both game patches and compatibility DLL/mods for older games), not the physical media (which may or may not have DRM).
This ship has sailed a long time ago on PC (~15 years ago).
I think drm-free indie oriented publishers like Annapurna could make a lot of money with physical copies.
That may be true, I just don’t see the point of storing the DRM free installerі on an optical disc, something like an SD card which can be easily updated seems like a much better fit.
Most computers don’t have optical disc drives (I do have one, but I am exception and I don’t use it for data).
You can legally resell if it is on disk.
Fair point, with Steam sales, I don’t really feel the need to resell.
Yeah but your account is not even inheritable meaning you can’t even give your children your games
As someone with a collection of a couple hundred CDs and another hundred or so DVDs filling my closet, I’m not really sure everyone appreciates the logistics of holding physical media for a couple-hundred-game library.
I doubt it. At least for all but the most viral of indie games. Manufacturing physical copies is expensive and would involve minimum order quantity from suppliers.
Tbh, popular indie games could probably use crowdfunding platforms post launch to do it
I could see physical releases, at least as special editions, being a thing people would like. Though I think today SD cards would make more sense, at least if flash memory prices ever come back down.
But a SD card with a custom label in box with proper box art and a little art book inside would be cool for fans and collectors.
But a SD card with a custom label in box with proper box art and a little art book inside would be cool for fans and collectors.
Essentially Switch cartridges, but PC
Exactly
it costs a lot of money. digital is what help indies flourish. you no longer need a publisher.
Physical media has long sailed but not drm free software.
(I’m not sure which of those you’re referring to, just clearly stating)
I was talking about data storage on optical discs, not DRM free installers. :)
Perfect. 👍
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Optical media really isn’t your friend. I love it, I have loads of old games on optical discs and I bought a PS5 with its disc drive specifically because that’s how I wanted to buy the media. But I also back up what I can to spinning rust or solid state drives that can sit cold stored until I want them. Optical media will degrade. There are exceptions, like M-Disc, but the medium is slow and space consuming.
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Fair enough. I didn’t assume you were doing that for data generally. My original comment was unnecessarily condescending in tone, sorry about that.
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If the files are DRM-free as they said, then there’s nothing stopping backups. I don’t get why you’re trying to paint it as an either/or thing
I’m not sure I understand. Whether it’s DRM free or not has no bearing on the reliability of optical media as a backup format. Discs you write to are not generally as reliable as factory pressings, with some archival exceptions, so it’s not the ideal choice. I wasn’t making any argument about whether it works or not.
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I think you’re the one who misunderstood. The guy I replied to was talking about backing up digital games to disc. I mentioned optical discs have poor longevity, then you took it personally.
It’s not the disc itself that people care about, it’s having a transferrable license. People want the option to rent games, or give them away/resell after playing. Physical media provides some legal protections for that because you are buying a license attached to the thing storing the software.
Digital distribution is a perfectly fine way to get a game, if it weren’t synonymous with big companies taking away your ownership of the right to use software you purchased. You can’t share a game you enjoyed with friends. If you lose access to your account you’re SOL. If the host server shutsdown, you better have had a stable copy installed/backed up.
People don’t hate digital downloads, they hate the consumer abuse they have enabled. Stop the consumer abuse, and only collectors will care about physical media.
I’m like the only one I know with an optical drive in my computer and its not even a bluray drive. Maybe if they distributed on like USB drives? but that seems expensive
i’ve never had a hddvd or bd drive. there was one in a laptop we took in for recycling once. didn’t even bother pulling it.
I would honestly be more interested in a hard push for GOG, itch, and other similar DRM-free marketplaces.
Itch is just a marketplace tho so while most dont have drm i can Imagine games with drm can be added
The whole point of PC is digital data though.
The original DOOM was shareware, you were allowed to copy and share it with your friends or online however you wanted because it promoted and popularized the game.
CDs on PC were always just a retail medium. Unlike classic consoles, there are very few PC games that run right off the disk. It was usually an installer.
I know people complain about Steam all the time with “you don’t actually own your games” but you do own your PC and the filesystem which means you can copy that data and do whatever you want with it. No EULA on earth is going to stop you.
Of course if it ships with DRM or relies on steam to launch, then yeah that’s lock in, but that’s where GOG and pirate repacks fill the space.
It was inevitable for consoles to go full digital because 90% of sales are digital and it gets the inherent convenience of digital media, but consoles don’t let you access the filesystem and do whatever you want. It’s a locked down system with a metric ton of security to prevent you from ever copying the game data.
Retail will also always reduce profit, especially for smaller developers who need to rely on a publisher to sell on their behalf.
Steam and GOG take a 30% cut, so it’s probably better to promote itch.io or some other platform if that’s a concern.
What I’d like to see is good selling indie games doing a “limited edition” or “supporter edition” 6 months to a year after they launch. Have it be a physical box, with an SD card or Blu-Ray with custom art, plus various bits of merchandise.
Essentially, get them to make pre-order or limited editions after the game already launched and garnered goodwill instead of trying to front load all the greed.
I’d definitely buy copies if games like “Sea of Stars” or “Ori and the Blind Forest” did this
I don’t know that it’s usually naked greed for indies, as much as it’s an effort to boost initial sales and get word-of-mouth going by preying on FOMO.
But yes, I’d be behind delayed special editions. More than once I’ve found out that some indie game had limited extra content for early buyers, and when people asked later if that content would ever be more widely available, the developers gave a slightly smug “Nope! I guess you should’ve backed it / bought it at launch, huh?”-style response.
I know that your life has probably been revolving around this game for months or years, but I only heard about it for the first time yesterday, and your backer campaign / launch sale ended 8 months ago. All you’re doing with that attitude is souring potential customers.
I think it’s better to offer the extras again at a later time, as part of a special edition and/or a separate bundle. Plenty of games do this, too.
No, it’s not beneficial. The difference between consoles and PCs is that PCs have an open infrastructure, which lets you back up your data to any medium or service you want.
For example, if Steam goes out of business and doesn’t release the DRMs, they will easily be cracked. You cannot say the same for consoles.
There are also multiple places to buy from. Steam is pretty dominant, but only because they’re the best option. You can buy from Sony on PlayStation, that’s it.
That’s not really true. Most recent games I’ve bought, I tried to buy off Steam. But they weren’t available anywhere else.
It also hardly even matters as no one on Steam is allowed to price below Steam. So they effectively control pricing power, like Sony; the screws just aren’t so tight yet.
no one on Steam is allowed to price below Steam.
That’s not true at all.
I find it pretty hard to believe that you couldn’t find a major new game on Epic or the Microsoft store. An indie title? Sure, a lot of those are limited to Steam, because the devs prefer it. Older games are even more likely to be on GOG than Steam.
No idea what you’re on about with not being able to price below Steam. That is not a thing.
Yeah, it’s mostly newer indie or “AA” games I’ve been into.
On the pricing: https://blog.subimpact.net/2026/06/valve-allegedly-threatened-to-delist.html?m=1
But in a nutshell, the allegations is that Steam threatens to delist games if they’re priced lower than Steam on other storefronts, similar to what Walmart or Amazon are accused of doing.
if a popular console platform became a ‘free for all’, i don’t think its ‘protections’ would last very long under what would become a globally crowdsourced endeavour.
You can’t crack a required server-side download
we need offline, drm-free installers and games that are not tied to the storefront you bought them in
physical versions could be offered for those, i think it would be cool! but it’s not necessary imo. as long as it’s preservable and transferable, it’s good.
You just described GoG which I don’t even want to recommend after they sent a bunch of Nazi emails and then went “Oopsie doopsie poopsie sowwie”.
yea gog can fuck off but the way they do games distribution is how it should be for everyone imo
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I’m all for people having discs if they want them but, man, I do not want that shit cluttering up my life.
Also, I have a pet peeve:
I see a lot of people claim to want discs, but they haven’t actually used them given the choice.
Or buy DRM free. And they don’t.
For what it’s worth, I try to buy games from GoG first, first party storefront second, but that hardly even works anymore. It’s almost always only available on Steam. Maybe rarely on EGS or something, but then it’s not clear if the download is even DRM free, and it literally cannot be cheaper if it’s listed on Steam too, so that’s not really an option.
We have physical media on PCs, we even still have full control of them and can copy and modify anything we want.
Now you mean we should be buying some kind of disk which will actually offer us no more control and in fact was historically used for DRM.
Adding physical distribution overhead will definitely not help publishers (especially small ones or indie Devs) turn a profit.
Vinyl is horrible for consumers. CD was a format we eventually could use ourselves to copy and mix music to our preference.
similarly to vinyls for music.
This one sucks so much. Vinyl coming back is awful.
- It is heavy, it costs a lot and takes a lot of energy to transport
- it is made of plasticizers, usually phthalates with lead as a stabilizer
- it degrades from every use
- the waste chemicals are often dumped into rivers and streams in poor populations
- a lot of energy is used in the steaming and pressing
- the sound quality is not as good as people think it is (inner distortion anyone?) and the “warm” and “feel good” sound are easily replicated in other ways. I don’t want to dwell on this one. Lets just say mastering and your equipment have a lot to do with this.
Too bad they’re still the best.
Loudness war is STILL killing CDs and digital.
Vinyl is still unable to deal with stupid brickwalled tracks without making a 12" 2-3 tracks, so until the loudness war ends, Vinyl is still going to be the best format.
They really aren’t the best, for a lot of reasons, but I should not have brought that up. If anything you are saying the mixes and mastering for vinyl are best.
Anyways my point still stands. These are incredibly environmentally nasty. The music industry loves them because they can sell the same music to you yet again.
If anything you are saying the mixes and mastering for vinyl are best.
That’s the ticket. It’s really because vinyl is worse that it’s become better, since it can’t do the brickwalling CD is capable of. A well mixed CD will always be better than a well mixed vinyl but well mixed CDs are in short supply.
To your point:
Tiny sample size: but there is a cool test where a person played the CD and the Vinyl of a song to a group of friends. They choose the Vinyl as best sounding. So he then digitally recorded the record and tried again, playing the vinyl and the recording of the vinyl. Nobody could tell the difference!
Which means one of two things: the vinyl setup was better and/or the CD was not mastered in a appealing way. Likely is number two.
Nah. The hardware for making discs is aging, and not developed anymore. USB/SD cards are too expensive.
And digital key reselling? That’s a whole can of worms for grifters to squeeze.
Not that it doesn’t suck. I want to (legally) archive and resell my games.
…But I don’t know a good alternative.
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