People blaming Steam for video games transitioning to digital only are retarded. PC gaming exists as an open platform. You can rip, archive and compile software with computers. That is not afforded with consoles.
You could freely emulate thousands of games and store them indefinitely on a hard drive to access whenever. Buying games from PSN or Xbox Live means those purchases are tied to an account. If you lose access to the account for whatever reason, you lose those licenses.
Gaming companies fucking hate that, though. That's why legal copies are buried to hell with DRM.
And if you say "just pirate it", well, that just ends with the games you like not getting a sequel, since the dev team and the corpos backing them didn't make a profit.
I think it is a Steam thing that led to digital gaming overtaking physical. I still remember the days when even PC gamers waited in line for physical copies of games like their console brethren, but Steam made it so easy and convenient to gave entire libraries of games be digital. Then the other companies saw that business model, and before long, you had Epic Games, EA, Sony, Microsoft, and even Nintendo copying the model. Half my Switch library is physical, the other half is digital. Same for my Xbox 360 library.
Sony just took it to the next logical step to try and become the Steam of console gaming, but they have no monopoly on that to survive making such a bad PR move. They're not as popular as Steam. Nintendo making their first party games $60 a pop even years after release is something they can get away with, since they still make fun exclusives. Sony can't, because their exclusives are nowhere near as fun, and most of what they offer, you can get on Xbox or PC.
I just live by the principle of never buying anything that the seller will take back if they find out I said the nigger word. Makes life much simpler.
That used to be a sacred right back in the peak of the Halo/CoD days. Nowadays, you'll probably get banned from most voice chats. The same people who used such language made the Xbox brand great, but Microsoft chased them away while chasing the normie demographic. A demographic that wound up with Nintendo instead. How ironic.
I got banned from Black Ops 1 server for using the AK-47 with Steady Aim or something, I don't even remember. You're not allowed to do anything "meta" in old games any more, like you have to use exclusively pistols while walking backward or some shit.
This is why I avoid such servers. Unless it's a co-op game, but even they will ban you if they don't like how you play.
