All of this just dilutes the real issue. Ask the majority of people who are complaining about a lack of physical media why they want physical media, and they’ll tell you that it’s so corporations can’t take it away from them after a year or two.

This can still happen with physical media. Physical media on consoles these days is already closer to a download key than a complete, ready-to-play game. There are already examples of disc-based console games that are unplayable without some kind of online intervention. At the same time, it’s been proven possible to run a profitable business with DRM-free downloads. I’d suggest that AAA publishers use DRM for 12-24 months, then switch to DRM-free, because they’re concerned about the critical initial sales period. This sort of thing has happened in the past on PC.

Physical media are no guarantee against corporations stealing their goods back after sale. Offline DRM or no DRM are.

“To ensure the best possible player experience, this game will not run until the latest updates have been installed… Downloading… Error: Resource not found. Please try again later.”

I prefer to buy from GOG, itch, or anywhere else that offers explicitly DRM-free downloads. That being said, a surprising number of games on Steam are actually DRM-free (or as near as makes no difference). They don’t make it easy; you need to dig through your Steam folders to copy the files out, and sometimes you need to jump through a well-documented hoop or two, but it’s doable.

More info here: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam

There are also orders of magnitude of difference in their staff levels and budgets. Both sides of the equation are relative. I don’t know of any techniques for creating good content quickly and inexpensively that only work for small indies and not for large AAA studios.

It’s a fuck load of work to make a game. It is kinda ridiculous to go to all that trouble then just stop after making 2 hours of gameplay, like 2 hours total without even a good sandbox.

Not that it’s Steam’s fault, but this is the same way of thinking that has led to big budget, story focused games getting padded with repetitive fetch quests and annoying collectibles that unlock progression.

Yes, it’s a lot of work to make a game, but the only way to extend the play time of a story-focused single-player game without having to do even more work, is to water it down with low-effort filler content that reuses the expensive assets.

Choro-Q High Grade 2 (a.k.a. Road Trip or Road Trip Adventure) for the PS2.

Just one more in a very long line of low-budget tie-in video games for a popular line of toy vehicles for children. Most western reviewers try to play it for the racing (which I admit is buggy and middling at best) and dismiss it as trash.

But it’s not about the racing. The racing is incidental; just a bit of action to break up the rest of the game and give you an overall goal to aim for. The real game is exploring a huge open world, meeting hundreds of NPCs, getting involved in their stories, solving mysteries, and digging up every last collectible in the game.

A few years ago I stumbled down a rabbit hole that led to the Shadow of the Colossus fan theory community.

If you play the game normally, you’ll wander a deserted, forbidden land and defeat the 16 colossi, revealing a little more back story each time, see the finale, and finish the game.

If you explore every nook and cranny of the world, make careful charts, compare the PS2 original and the re-releases, and even hack the game to take the camera out of bounds, you’ll find an astounding amount of detail that, at first, seems to be wasted. But over the years, fans have turned all of it into a surprisingly coherent possible expansion of the game’s universe, including linking it more directly to the developer’s previous game, Ico.

For a long time, many people were sure that some hidden secret remained buried in the game, to be revealed if only the right set of actions could be discovered. Most of the community seems to have given up on that now, but looking at what they assembled, it’s hard to shake the feeling that there still may be something to it all.