u/bowl-filled-with-air

I think 60fps, and high frame rates in movies generally, get dismissed far too quickly. I think that film culture is too overly conservative about 60fps. 24fps is treated as sacred, and anything that departs from it gets rejected before it's given a real chance. There's been the same pattern with sound, color, and digital cinematography, where each was met with claims that it looked cheap or ruined the magic, and each was eventually accepted once people got used to it. When the main pushback to a format is "that's not how movies are supposed to look," that's a preference for the familiar, not an argument about quality. Being cautious about change isn't a flaw in itself, but a lot of people seem unwilling to give 60fps a fair shot at all, and I think that holds the medium back.

I'm not saying that 60fps should be the new standard, it should be a creative choice that both audiences and filmmakers should be more open to.

The usual counterexamples are Gemini Man, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, The Hobbit, and people treat their failure of their usage of a higher frame rate as proof the format doesn't work. The movies had plenty of other problems, like weak scripts and uneven pacing, and a couple flops are a tiny sample, a movie being bad and also being 60fps doesn't mean it was bad because of 60fps, so correlation, not causation. And we've also seen the Avatar movies use 48fps selectively in action scenes and the usage of that was pretty well received as far as I've seen. The sample size is simply too small and inconsistent to declare the whole format a dead end.

A very common thing I see people say is that 60fps "looks unnatural" or like a soap opera. In my opinion that is a subjective feeling, not a measurable flaw. 24fps became the standard in the earlier eras of film mostly as a cost and technology compromise, not because it was the ideal frame rate for storytelling. We've spent a century associating it with "cinema," so anything else feels off. And I tend to agree, that it does feel "off", mainly due to the fact its so uncommon to see. Not inherently bad though in my opinion. Familiarity isn't the same as being better.

One argument against 60fps that I do understand is that the extra motion clarity can make sets, costumes, lighting, makeup, and CGI look more obviously fake, which can hurt suspension of disbelief. But I don't think that proves 60fps is inherently bad for movies. Filmmaking techniques have been developed around 24fps for decades, so if higher frame rates became more common, production design, VFX, lighting, and cinematography would likely adapt to the extra detail they reveal. We didn't reject 4k after 1080p being the standard for so long, since that also exposed flaws that lower resolutions could hide, but instead filmmakers adapted. I think the same could happen with frame rate.

If an amazing, critically acclaimed blockbuster were released in 60fps, say if The Odyssey or Interstellar hypothetically was also in 60fps, I'm quite confident it wouldn't take anything away from the movie or its success. If anything, it would enhance it. Action scenes, sweeping camera movements, and anything with fast motion would look clearer and more immersive, with less smearing and blur. And if that did happen, it would show other filmmakers the format can work at the highest level, and inspire more people to create in it instead of defaulting to 24fps.

just wondering but its very likely if not guaranteed right? at lincoln square?

I completely get why people are furious right now. GTA 6's physical edition shipping as a box with just a download code in it, followed by Sony confirming it's ending physical PS5 disc production in 2028, has understandably felt like a gut punch. And I'm not going to pretend the broader trend of media companies chipping away at ownership is fine. It isn't. When a platform can revoke a movie you "bought," or a studio can kill the servers a single-player game depends on, that's a real problem worth being angry about. But I think the reaction to this specific move, dropping the physical disc, is overblown.

1. The environmental argument deserves more attention. Physical media has a real, measurable environmental cost. Manufacturing and shipping physical game discs produces roughly 100 times more CO2 than digital downloads, about 312 tons of emissions per million discs pressed and shipped, versus roughly 3 tons for a million digital downloads of the same size. On top of that, discs are made by bonding polycarbonate and aluminum together in a way that makes them genuinely hard to recycle, so most end up incinerated or in a landfill. An obvious rebuttal is resale. A single disc gets passed between five or six owners over its life, so the per-user footprint of that disc is lower than the raw per-unit number suggests. That's fair, and it's the strongest pushback on this point, yet it doesn't erase the gap. The initial production and shipping emissions are fixed costs that exist the moment the disc is manufactured, regardless of how many people later own it, while digital downloads scale on infrastructure that's already built and largely reused across millions of transactions with close to zero marginal environmental cost per additional copy. Even generously discounting the disc's footprint for resale, you're not closing a 100x gap. I'd rather weigh a measurable, published number against a real trade-off in convenience, ownership, and resale than just wave the resale issue away, so I'll come back to it. I'm not claiming digital is environmentally free either. Data centers draw real power, but on the actual numbers we have, this isn't close.

2. The idea that discs guarantee ownership was already becoming an illusion. This is the part I think gets lost in the outrage. A huge number of modern physical releases already require online DRM checks, mandatory day-one patches, or persistent server connections just to function. Plenty of "physical" games have had entire chunks of content, or the whole online mode, live on servers a publisher can shut off whenever it wants, disc or no disc. The disc gave people a feeling of permanence, but for a lot of modern titles that feeling was already partly fiction. If the actual game logic depends on a server, the disc was functionally just a license key with extra plastic. And yes, many, if not more games, are completely playable offline with just the disc, I'm not denying that, but I think the argument still applies and will get increasingly more relevant as games became larger and companies get greedier

3. The market has already moved toward digital. Digital purchases made up somewhere around 76 to 80 percent of PS5 game sales in 2025, according to Sony. Someone will point out that the PS5 Digital Edition and Xbox Series S sold well partly because they're cheaper, which is true, and also why I purchased the non-disc PS5. I'll agree that hardware pricing muddies how much of that specifically reflects indifference to discs versus a desire to save money. But the software sales figure is a cleaner data point. That 76 to 80 percent includes people who own a disc drive and could buy physical, at the same price, sitting right next to the digital version, and chose digital anyway. Rockstar and Sony aren't dragging the market somewhere it wasn't already headed but instead they're catching up to where most buyers already are.

4. I also think that reddit is an extremely strong echo chamber on this topic. I say this while posting on reddit, so take it with the appropriate grain of salt, but this site and gaming forums generally skew toward a specific type of user, which are collectors and enthusiasts who attach real sentimental value to owning a shelf of cases. That's a valid perspective, but it's a loud minority, not representative of the overall market. The digital sales numbers above are the actual revealed preference of the average buyer. Walk outside the gaming subreddit bubble and ask ten random PS5 owners whether they'd rather have a disc or just press play, and I'd bet most shrug, and I would agree with them. This is the same pattern you see in a lot of online outrage cycles. The discussion inside the bubble is intense and unanimous while the broader public's behavior barely moves.

The one point I can't wave away is resale, lending, and preservation. Losing the ability to trade in, lend, or resell GTA 6, and losing the safety net of a disc that keeps working even if a storefront delists the game later, is a genuine and permanent loss for consumers. I'm not pretending otherwise. However, I still strongly believe that digital will be, and should be, the future for gaming and other media, but not the way it is currently going.