this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
877 points (99.1% liked)

Games

49319 readers
2247 users here now

Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.

Rules

1. Submissions have to be related to games

Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.

This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.

2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil

No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.

We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.

3. No excessive self-promotion

Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.

This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.

4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts

This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you're submitting before posting to see if it's already been posted.

We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.

5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW

Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.

No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.

6. No linking to piracy

Don't share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.

We don't want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.

Authorized Regular Threads

Related communities

PM a mod to add your own

Video games

Generic

Help and suggestions

By platform

By type

By games

Language specific

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (2 children)

Consoles were always a walled garden from the very start, very purposefully so, and those things tend to squeeze customers once captured with higher prices and, sooner or later, fully enshittify.

So when consoles originally appeared I just kept gaming on the PC because it was an open platform and the only console I ever had was a WII (the original one) because their controller was at the time innovative, and honestly it wasn't really worth it.

Then, specifically for the PlayStation there's Sony, who have a long track record of anti-consumer actions that started when their leadership stopped coming from the Engineering Division and started coming from their Media Division (after they bought a Movie studio in the US), from their electronics becoming locked down and restrictive for users (they're the ones who came up with Blu-Ray, which was way more locked down to block copying than DVDs were) to the infamous shipping of music CDs with rootkits (the "Sony Rootkit" scandal)

So this increasing enshittification of the PlayStation isn't at all surprising and suspect it will get even worse than this.

Ultimately I think the PlayStation platform will end up dying.

[–] LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

PC games are pretty much locked down to the original purchaser. Console games could be bought and sold used. Once I was done with a console generation I just sold everything on ebay and made back a bunch of my money (especially since I bought most of it used as well).

PC games are a whole different beast. But now that most console games are locked to an account... there's really no benefit of them anymore. Just get a PC for your living room and install SteamOS (or similar).

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Back in the era of physical media PC games too could be bought and sold used (though only some: it really boiled down to whether it used phone-home DRM or not, something which in the PC world was all over the place).

But yeah, you were right that console games could be bought and sold used in a much more standardized way, whilst that wasn't really a value proposition in the PC were such possibility was not at all a standard feature of PC games and it wasn't really reliably supported in the broader ecosystem (for example, with game stores not usually buying back used PC games as they often did for console games).

Naturally, as a unique value proposition (vs PC games) used as bait to get users inside the console walled garden in earlier days, this feature of console games was taken away from users with their enshittification.

Personally, I always thought that in the PC world the absence of this was balanced by games being a lot cheaper and even piracy for those for whom even the cheaper PC games weren't cheap enough, and in the long run, as we see, the "much cheaper" part is being way harder for PC publishers to try and undo (they've definitely tried of late, and IMHO it's failing which is why AAA game publishers are bitching and moaning that their market share is falling) than the used console games market was, and the piracy part is even harder.

If there's one think I learned early on in Tech as a professional already back in the 90s is that in the mid and long term sticking to open tech will save you from getting squeezed, both as a professional when choosing 3rd party tech stacks and as a consumer. This has just become more so as the normalization of always-on Internet connectivity meant that the external 3rd party could control much more tightly and and in realtime how the software they provided was used, including adding further restrictions on use at a later stage.