Game:

Final Fantasy VII (1997)

Duration: 21:35

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Gamestop CEO J. Paul Rines said today that he thinks Disc based games will be around forever.
Quote
“Disc-based games will be around forever,” he says. “The market has seen physical music sales down 50% from its peak and physical movie sales down 60% from its peak, but even in a doomsday scenario, disc-based games will be around for a long time. I see a complimentary business where we sell discs plus download like the current console mode. Virtual reality games will also likely follow this model.”
If you asked the CEOs of Electronics Boutique and Babbage's back in the day, if they thought cartridges were going anywhere, I’ll bet they would have said no. Speculating about technology that far into the future is always murky at best.
This quote can’t be much of a surprise coming from a guy whose business depends on disc based games to be sold, digital is going to kill these guys unless they diversify or go all in on selling stuff that appeals to gamers without selling the games.
Makes me think of a quote I heard on the West Wing, I had to look it up but it was by Upton Sinclair, who may have like the coolest name ever.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"
Why disks are staying
Terrible internet
Huge file sizes
Bad caps
Collections
movies, vinyl, CDs
paper books!
Untrustworthy companies (2K Games comes to mind)
Consumer rights.
Why they will go
moving parts are bad mmkay!
Younger people are used to buying digital, as older gamers shuffle off this mortal coil, the number of people that insist on buying physical media will dwindle.
Money Money Money! The developer doesn’t spend as much money pushing bits as they do shipping discs, buying shelf space and wooing retailers.
What else could happen
Amiibos with the game token on it, buy the figure, get the game.
Won’t be optical media, instead we’ll go back to cartridges.
We left them behind because they were too small to hold the data, but now you can get buckets of storage on a very small card, very cheaply.
Has the age of Disc based games already passed us by? Think about it, we have iOS, Android, Steam. Say what you want about mobile gaming, but it makes up a significant piece of the gaming pie. What percent of all games released is released in physical form in some way. That number might be a bit smaller than everyone thinks.
3.5 disks story. Let me paint a picture for you…. Apple 3.5, then all of the sudden.