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by Insanity·1mo ago·view on hn ↗
Haven’t bought a physical game in at least 15 years (because of Steam). I do wonder how many people still buy physical copies these days.

Not sure what the sales are like on PS but at least on Steam you can find great deals for the digital copies as well. (You lose the reselling though)

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Unlike Steam keys, there are no ways to distribute Playstation keys outside of Playstation platform. By removing retailers and second hand markets, what exactly would make Sony or any other publishers to continue offering any deep discounts on their products on a closed platform, especially when their biggest competitor Xbox has dropped the ball heavily.
I constantly rotate physical games for my PS5.

I'm in the UK, and CeX is a great shop to trade in a game for store credit once I'm finished with it, then pickup whatever I want to play next. Most of the time I can completely cover the cost of the next game with the credit received from the trade, or use some store credit leftover from a previous visit!

When a Sony studio Insomniac Games were hacked and a lot of internal documents were leaked, there were statistics for Sony's first party titles and their sales stats and what the split was between physical and digital sales[0] and for some of the titles, they sold mostly physical compared to digital. Apologies for poor quality, couldn't find a better image

[0] - https://imgur.com/lDhRmUh

Due to the steam sales and deep discounting its easy to buy games on steam for much cheaper then the consoles. For console where a game may be £60 for several years, buying physical means you can resell. For anyone with a budget, it makes a huge difference on how many games you can play.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is €59.99 on Steam and if you wait for a sale €14.99

For PS4 you can buy the disc version for €19.99 regular price and €17.99 on sale. Used discs start from €9.

If you don’t mind waiting for a sale then Steam is great. Otherwise PlayStation is a better deal.

For context, I purchased physical PS4 copies of: RDR2, GTA5, Fortnight, and 2077 – for about Steam's online price for just RDR2 – all "used," from Game$top. They play perfectly, hopefully forever...

Steam is the entire reason I even bought an offline PS4Pro in the first place!. Years ago, they required an update from Win7 to Win10 (in order to keep playing my therapeutic GTA5, which for some reason required an online connection for single player gameplay?!?!). After some rageful months without Trevor'ing, I bought my first-ever gaming console – love it. Stays offline, just in case Sony wants to brick my PS4, too (fucking hypothetical corporate bullies!)...

Imagine a day where Sony drives around with trucks broadcasting WiFi signals instructing rogue, ostensibly-"offline" PS5s to self-destruct, via backdoor GHz...

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Welcome to /hn/ – I've appreciated many of your varied contributions (keep it up!).