r/truegaming

Due to the recent decisions by Rockstar to only release GTA 6 in digital form and Sony's move to move away from physical media on Playstation we've had a huge influx of threads discussing this topic.

Some of the more common points of discussion have been:

• Players are of the opinion that physical media is still popular among gamers despite the claim by said companies that digital is by far the most common form of purchase for games.
• Digital‑only releases make long‑term preservation harder. Games could become inaccessible if storefronts or game servers shut down.
• Digital purchases are often licenses, not transfers of property.
• Digital copies can't be easily resold, traded in or shared among friends.
• Publishers cite cost savings of digital only, players fear the move is about pricing power and controlling the marketplace.

We ask you to keep all discussions regarding this topic within this megathread and will be removing any further threads concerning the topic - at least for the next few days/weeks.

1: If this is the 1000th post about this you've seen on reddit, I'm sorry.

2: Yes I know a lot of people prefer digital. You don't have to tell me.

Sony cites "changing consumer preferences" for this choice. But let's look at that, shall we?

The fact of the matter is, Physical Games STILL SELL. Less than digital? Maybe, but there's clearly a market here.

My evidence? PHYSICAL GAMES. THEY STILL EXIST.

There's nothing stopping any given publisher from JUST releasing a game digital-only. And yet digital-only releases have been reserved mostly for smaller titles and stuff like FreeToPlay Online games.

Most major releases HAVE shipped on a disc. THey would NOT do that unless they saw value in it! Clearly, Physical Copies sell and make money! It's a buisiness model that works!

If this choice was really reflecting "consumers' habits" and Physical just wasn't good enough anymore, we would see Third Party Companies giving up first, and THEN sony would actually respond to that. NOT the other way around!!!

The fact is, the biggest most heavily-advertised games every month have CONSISTENTLY had a physical presence, unless they fit into one of the categories I mentioned earlier!

Companies don't do things that make them absolutely ZERO money. That's why we see a lot of game releases on the Switch, and not quite so many games releasing for the Atari Jaguar. The Companies still continually putting out Physical Releases are themselves proof that Physical Media ISN'T DEAD!

Now many would argue that Physical Sales aren't as high as they once were. True! And there's a solution to that: You can just print less copies! If you lose money printing more copies than are going to sell, then that's your own mistake, and that's been the case since before Digital Games were a thing.

Those Digital-Only releases I just mentioned? Most of the biggest ones GET physical releases, once they've proven themselves popular enough!

And if they're deemed popular enough to sell, but not popular enough to get a wide release, what happens?
They're usually picked up by a company like limited run games, and they produce a small enough amount that they can put out a physical without having to worry about it flopping!
This goes for both indie games and small games from AAA Companies. For example, both Rain World and Persona 4 Golden were released physically on PS4 by Limited Run Games.

You CAN just produce only as many copies as you expect to be able to actually sell!

Printing LESS copies because LESS consumers buy Physical over Digital makes sense. Printing NO copies, DOES NOT.

One thing I want to address is that Yes, physical IS more expensive for companies than Digital. But the way some people talk about it, you'd think that Physical copies are actively choking these companies to death. That's... they aren't.

Even on a system like the switch where Physical costs more to produce, the only way to lose money by selling physical games is to have a massive amount of unsold copies. And that's not that big of a deal when, with the cost of videogame development these days, a flop game will STILL represent a loss of possibly hundreds of millions of dollars, even if it only comes out digitally.

The costs of printing physical media are just production costs. They still make a profit, and historically, they have made ENOUGH profit.
The reason companies salivate over digital sales is because they can make far more money by eliminating those production costs. And I believe that the prevailance of Digital has made them feel entitled to the most profit-per-sale they could possibly have. But, they aren't entitled to that Profit.

This is my response to anyone citing something like Gamekeycards as evidence that 3rd parties really have given up on Physical. It's not done out of necessity, but entitlement. Speaking of which...

Now, some of you might be saying: "But Reddit User, 3rd parties already killed physical, all these Current-Gen games just require downloads!"

Listen to me.

THAT IS NOT TRUE. THAT IS MISINFORMATION.

I have USED an offline PS5 and MOST games can be played perfectly fine. I'm utterly convinced that the ONLY reason people believe that it's normal for PS4/5 games to require downloads is because people just DO NOT KNOW THE DIFFERENCE Between Downloading and INSTALLING.

INSTALLING is copying data from the disc. I've been told that the console can pull Data from the internet if that's faster than reading the disc, but all the data you need to play IS on the disc.

As for the PS4/5 games that really do require a download, they're basically always one of the following:

• Day One Patches

Games that are unplayable without a Patch. This is often just general incompetence. We all know about the practice of "finish the game with updates", it sucks but I dont think it's relevant to this discussion specifically.

• Forced downloads of the games just because.

This is done purely to devalue the physical version. People are meant to see it, go "oh, what's the point if I have to download anyway?" then buy it digitally and give the publisher more money.

• Disc not included to save costs.

Mostly "download-code-in-box" games, but also can take the form of a single disc requiring a download in cases where the full game on a disc would require a second disc in the box due to size.
This is done out of. Stinginess.

I think this practice reveals something though. Clearly, companies DO see value in physical releases, even when they aren't giving them to us.

They are still going through all of the effort, in these cases, to ALMOST make a physical copy. The box is all there, and some of the time they even still have A disc inside! If they really ONLY wanted to release these games digitally, nobody was forcing them to do this!

These releases are a CLEAR and direct acknowledgment that there is a market for physical, and that companies still see value in catering to it! They aren't true physical, but they are an ATTEMPT to sell to people who want to buy physical games.

They would NOT EVEN BOTHER if physical was REALLY "dying".

In the case of some of these games, they seem to be actively trying to dissuade people from buying physically by requiring a download.
That is not what a Change to Reflect Consumer Preferences looks like. That's an attempt to kill physical games. You don't need to go out of your way to kill something if it's really already dead.

I mean, even GTA 6 felt the need to manufacture a stupid box just to hold an empty code.

...Oh yeah, SPEAKING OF WHICH-

"Okay, but what about GTA 6? Doesn't that destroy your entire Argument?"

So I'm sure somebody will have said, "Okay you're saying that every major game comes out physically, but literally The Most Anticipated Game ever was revealed to be digital-only like five minutes before sony announced that they're stopping Disc Manufacturing"

ignoring the fact that even they still felt the need for a fake box with a code in it...

Man, I'm just sick of GTA 6 being seen as the End-All-Be-All of the gaming industry.
It's a huge game. I get it. But it's still just one game.
A single game, even one this important, should NOT have the ability to kill of Physical Media any more than Sony should.

Is it a blow to physical? Sure I guess, but it's Just One Game, and I absolutely DO NOT believe that sony made this choice BECAUSE of GTA 5.

The fact remains, there are COUNTLESS games that still warrant physical releases. Even the publishers I associate most with hating putting out Physical Games, like Square Enix or Activision, still constantly put out actual physical games without compromise.

And I think that's what gets me the most.

Why should Sony get to make this decision for everyone, when other companies are still willing to make Physical Games?

It's a little unclear whether or not sony's ultimatum of 2028 means that they just won't manufacture physical copies of their own games, or if they'll be preventing third parties from producing any physical Playstation Games after that date.

But either way, it seems entirely obvious that PS6 will NOT have a disc drive, and thus, physical copies of PS6 games won't be an option for any company.

And that just fucking sucks!

There ARE still plenty of companies and plenty of games that are just FINE getting released physically! Sony SHOULD NOT have the right to stop them from doing that!!!!

With movies or DVDs, even if Digital and specifically streaming has almost fully taken over, you can still get DVDs, because nobody can stop companies from just producing their own DVDs, and nobody can stop a company from just selling DVD players.

With Game Consoles, that isn't the case. There's no way a 3rd-party can just make their own version of the PS6 that has a disc drive, and they aren't going to just casually print PS6 game discs that can't be used on anything.

And that! Is bad!!

Physical Media Is Not Dead. But Sony wants it to be.

This was going to be my opening, but I'll move it to the end.
Last of all, I'm going to throw MATHS on the table. I've seen the statistic that "85% of sales are digital" thrown around a lot, but people are taking that to mean things that it doesn't mean.

First of all, it's a percentage of SALES, not of consumers. This doesn't mean that 15% of people buy ONLY physical, and 85% buy ONLY digital, and anyone saying "this affects only 15% of people" is reading the facts wrong.

This will affect anyone who's ever so much as thought of buying a disc.
If I buy 15 Physical Discs and 85 Digital Games, then I just AM that statistic. Does that mean I would be unaffected by this? OF COURSE NOT.

Also, let me say: even if the statistic is true, it does NOT justify killing Physical Games. 15% is a lot of people. We should not NEED other people to deliberately boycott digital games in order for digital games to not be a replacement for discs. Like I said earlier, if there's just a reduced demand for physical games, then print a reduced number of discs. Printing NONE isn't responding to consumer demands it's ignoring the (SLIGHTLY) less lucrative demands.

I also have no doubt that this data is also skewed by forces that they intentionally ignore. How many games in that 85% are digital-only titles? How many of them are games that get discounted to significantly below what a new physical copy can cost? And on the other side, I highly doubt that 15% physical accounts for used sales. It's not impossible for Sony to track physical games including used copies, but it's unlikely.

[I'll freely admit that I havent done as much research into that specific statistic as I could have done, and I might be proven wrong on that front, but I wanted to air the greviances I've had regarding it.]

All of this serves to imply that when a consumer is presented with a $60 Game which they can buy either physically or digitally, they will choose Digital 85% of the time. But I think it's pretty easy to understand that things are more complicated than that, and really that choice is more likely to have a much more even split...
Without even mentioning the fact that very often, it's a case of $60 Digital, and, like, $30 Physical.

Sony, despite everything I've laid out, and despite this being their own doing, wants to be seen as passive in this. They want the narrative to be that Physical is dying and now it's being laid to rest. But it isn't. They are killing it, Deliberately.

Why? For the sake of control. To have a single storefront that they rule, where the prices aren't affected by supply and demand, but simply are what they say they are. Where they dont have to share profits with distributors or pay to manufacture discs. Where games aren't owned, only rented, played only with the express permission of an outside force, like we're children.

That future disgusts me.

It's also done out of EGO. Confidence. Their idea is surely that the people buying physical will come around, they'll have no choice, and then they'll have a world where everyone just buys the games digital and gives them more money than ever before.

You've probably heard the argument of "what about people with no internet?" before. I wouldn't blame you for writing them off as a hypothetical strawman in these arguments. But up until about 7 months ago, I WAS that strawman.

I didn't have no internet, but I lived in rural england and the wifi was so slow (2MB/S download if you're lucky) that a 50GB download would take 12 hours and have to be left on overnight. Downloading big AAA games was so slow that I functionally couldn't do it. If I wanted games on my playstation, I'd be ordering physical copies online, or taking a bus to a city with a used game store. I never bought a single used game on my playstation 5. I didnt even keep it connected to the internet.

It doesn't feel good to know that if I hadn't coincidentially moved to another country, I would be the Acceptable Losses in a hobby I love.

I don't expect this post to change sony's mind, but I hope I can at least make people understand that this isn't something that naturally happened to Physical Games.

Thank you for listening to wahtever this was.

Hi there folks, terrible time to be a PlayStation fan hey? The news about them canning physical production has been really disheartening to hear. I think the average pundit will make comments about how most people buy digital anyway, and it's a select group of diehards who care about this stuff. I have been living in the global south for about 11 years, so I just wanted to talk about some particular use cases for why physical media is so important.

Onboarding New Players

I've lived in places with horrible mark ups on games, no digital storefront for that region, and e-commerce services like paypal not being usable, so it was prohibitively expensive or incredibly inconvenient. A copy of the Uncharted trilogy would run you $120 three years after launch for example.

The ability to just lend someone a game was not just a major source of community, it was kind of a necessity to play games in the harsh economic climate. Yes, gaming subscriptions like PS Plus and GamePass exist, but with the ever ongoing war on password sharing, lending games remains the easiest way to get new fans of a series.

The internet is forever, until it isn't

A lot of people having been talking about revoking licenses being a huge issue with digital game libraries, which is true, but I also just worry about the internet in general.

I've dealt with weeks or even months long bouts of wifi disconnectivity due to expensive internet fees, lacking internet infrastructure, or the good ol' government internet shutdown during moments of high political tensions.

With many places becoming increasingly authoritarian, and climate change becoming more and more disruptive to public infrastructure, your ability to access your library is going to become less and less of a guarantee. I know that sounds like small potatoes, but art is all that really holds our hearts together when things are looking bleak.

We don't know what's next

I can't look into a crystal ball and tell you what the world will look like in the next 10 years. I won't be so pessimistic as to say the apocalypse is coming nor will I be so naive as to assume everything's gonna be hunky dory. What does give me some peace of mind is knowing that I get to carry the things I care about with me, and this news really eats away at that sense of optimism.

You know that Sony and Xbox announced that they won't be supporting discs anymore, it most likely means that new gen consoles will be without CD readers as well.

Big part of the community freaked out, but I am convinced we don't need discs at all.

What was the purpose of CDs?

• Play and install your games offline
• Share them with your friends
• Keep the game after it's delisting
• Physical token of ownership

But discs are pretty much useless as of now. You can't install it offline, you need internet connection to do it. CDs are not immortal, and most likely will fail to read after 20 years or so. They are pretty bad for ecology, it is pure plastic. And generally speaking not many people buy them.

But they don't fail at one point: Token of ownership. Corps cannot come to your house and take your discs, they can do it with your account tho. We don't need discs, we need a way to own games, and share it's ownership.

This is what GOG does on PC. Unfortunately platforms like GOG are not possible on consoles, cause Xbox and Sony monopolize market on their platforms, and I think it is fair. But if we want to have real ownership, which is better than CDs, and can live together with store monopolization by corps on their platforms, what options do we have?

I'm not the man who likes to put crypto in every hole, but I think it is perfect for this. Cut off trading, coins and other scam crap. We talk about ledger, about blockchain. Personally I would love community to force corps to consolidate ownership on blockchain. They can't take it from you, you can share it with others, no one can duplicate ownership, everyone is happy.

I would love to hear community reaction on this, and I would love to have ownership of my games, without useless piece of plastic in my house.

We all feel the squeeze of digital-only gaming, but I wanted to actually map out the math behind why it’s happening and how much economic value we are bleeding.

I just finished writing a full economic breakdown on how the death of physical media is basically a textbook oligopoly play to distort the market.

A few core takeaways from the research:

• The Vanishing Aftermarket: Physical discs created a natural secondary market. Used games competed with new games, putting a natural ceiling on prices. By deleting the disc drive, companies are deploying "Artificial Output Restriction." They become the sole dictators of price.
• Weaponized Empathy: Companies pitch digital-only as "saving space" and "convenience." In reality, they are removing your property rights (the ability to lend, sell, or preserve a game) and replacing it with a highly restrictive, revocable license.
• Ecosystem Lock-in: Once you have thousands of dollars locked into a digital library that you can't migrate, the switching costs become too high. The platform can then quietly raise prices or force subscription tiers, knowing you have no leverage to leave.

If you get banned or a server shuts down, your purchase can be erased. We are moving toward a model that treats the player as a recurring revenue stream rather than a customer buying a finished product.

I put together the supply/demand graphs, an infographic, and a video essay diving into how antitrust pressure and returning to physical media (even in limited runs) is the only mathematical way out of this. If you want to see it let me know and ill post in comments if you'd like.

Curious where you all think the breaking point is for the average consumer, or if we've already passed it.

In the context of the recent announcements by Sony, I've seen a lot of people help them push the narrative that consumers don't buy physical anymore by using that single piece of data. But it's a very nice cherry picked number that helps Sony justify that narrative so they can save on hardware, on producing physical games, not have to compete with other stores and the second hand market...

The truth is that this number includes games that aren't available physically. Now, if you have even a slight understanding of statistic, you may understand why that number is very deceptive... The fact is that when games are available physically, players consistently still buy physical copies. SpiderMan 2 sold 54% physical and Astro Bot sold 55 physical for exemple. I think physical sales are still going down as Sony consistently push digital sales, but it's far more complex than ''player preferences''...it's mostly Sony's preferences and how they get you to play digital, in their own self-interest.

Not only that, but that data doesn't say a single thing about all the players who mostly buy games on the second hand market.

In short, focusing on that data is just Sony is showing a picture of what serves them rather than a true representation of what players prefer.

Now, you can argue for or against the disappearance of physical games if you want, but I feel like it would be nice to stop misrepresenting that number as ''players don't buy physical anyways''.

Why this is happening: Corporate telos, Price floor manipulation and Abusing Loyalty

Sony is a corporation. Its sole purpose is generating profit for shareholders. There is no moral component to this; they are simply executing their purpose. By eliminating physical media, they transition to a closed ecosystem where they exercise total control over every transaction on their platform. This is not about convenience for the user; it is about eliminating the middleman and securing a complete monopoly on sales.

The existence of physical media creates a natural market pressure on digital prices. Retailers have limited shelf space and need to clear inventory, which forces price drops and fuels the second-hand market. Removing the physical disc eliminates this competition. Without it, Sony can maintain a price floor—keeping games near launch prices years after release—because there is no outside force to undercut them.

Sony is utilizing dynamic pricing to exploit their user base. Their data allows them to profile consumers based on purchasing habits. If the algorithm identifies you as a "loyal" user—someone who spends money frequently on their platform—it can display higher prices compared to a casual or "passive" user. In this model, loyalty is not rewarded; it is used as a metric to determine how much you are willing to overpay. And consumers confirmed they are willing to overpay. Sony knows that a vast majority of users are now loyal customers who will accept the digital monopoly. The data is clear. This is a big reason why it is happening now.

What might happen: EU vs Sony Digital rights clash

I expect Sony to face EU scrutiny via the Digital Markets Act (DMA) around 2029. The long-standing argument that a game console is a "specialized device" or a niche product will no longer hold up in court. With tens of millions of units in the EU, PlayStation has evolved into a major digital gatekeeper. Once the physical alternative is gone, the EU will likely categorize it as a platform that must be opened up, similar to how they approached Apple and the App Store.

The current industry practice of selling empty plastic cases containing only a digital voucher is a deliberate legal maneuver. It acts as a defensive shield against antitrust regulators. Sony needs to maintain the appearance of physical retail participation so they can argue that they are not a monopoly and that the user still has a choice in where they purchase their software. It is a strategic façade, not a genuine commitment to physical media. Whether this holds up under EU review is doubtful, but it is their current line of defense.

The potential FAFO: Steam on PlayStation ?

If the EU forces Sony to open up the platform, the entry of third-party marketplaces is a logical business consequence, not just fan theory. Publishers like Epic Games and Valve have already spent years fighting Apple and Google specifically to avoid the standard 30% platform tax. The moment a console is legally reclassified as a gatekeeper platform, these companies will immediately deploy their launchers.

While there might be massive architectural and operating system barriers of running PC software on PlayStation’s proprietary OS, Valve has already built the technological solution for this and it's called Proton. Originally developed to make Windows games run seamlessly on Linux for the Steam Deck, Proton proves that Valve possesses the translation layer technology necessary to bridge disparate operating systems. The technical hurdle is already halfway solved; the only real barrier left is the legal one. Once the EU removes that barrier, the arrival of alternative storefronts becomes a massive commercial inevitability.

Bonus Point: The Macro Strategy - Pivot to Premium

This digital lockdown aligns with a broader shift in Sony’s corporate philosophy. For over a decade, Sony attempted to compete on a wide, mass-consumer level across multiple divisions (smartphones, televisions, hardware) and failed miserably, incurring massive losses outside of entertainment. Their modern profitability was achieved by abandoning the mass market to serve high-end, niche segments.

The PlayStation division, which historically relied on subsidized consoles sold at a loss to capture mass volume, was in direct philosophical opposition to this corporate ethos. The announcement that they will no longer subsidize hardware signals that PlayStation is finally being integrated into this premium strategy. Sony already executed this blueprint successfully with their audio division; their high-end headsets achieved both market dominance and premium pricing simultaneously. They are applying this exact model to gaming, repositioning PlayStation not as a cheap mass-market utility, but as an elite product that the mass market will covet and save up for. They have little choice in the matter, as manufacturing realities dictate that the upcoming PlayStation 6 will likely cost upwards of $1,000 USD MSRP.

Way before "you control the buttons you press" became the thought terminating cliche it is now, the go-to line people would (and still sometimes do) use to defend games from being criticised on account of poor balance was that you can just choose to not use it. Overpowered gun? Just don't use it. Magic is OP? Just don't use it. This gameplay style or build breaks the game? Ignore it, why does it affect your experience huh?

I understand this isn't revelatory for most people, but it should be stated every now and then that having overtuned options that break the balance of a game in half is not always a net zero impact on its quality just because you don't have to use it. Skyrim will never force you to be a stealth archer, if you dislike it being OP you can just do anything else, but it still leaves the inherent flaw that anyone wanting a modicum of challenge simply can't use that build anymore. In Spiderman 2018, the gadgets got flack for being simplistic instant kills, and while you could just not use them it felt really silly that entire dimension of combat just didn't really exist.

Granted, I don't think this is a hard and fast rule. Mgs5 is an example of a game with a lot of ways to break it over the head, but at the same time there's enough variety in the tools that there's a healthy gradient for you to get a meaty difficulty that doesn't feel like you're just missing out on options. Games with more of an explicit focus on intrinsic reward also deal with it better, the DMC games generally aren't hard at a baseline but high level execution is as difficult as you want it to be and asks a lot more of you than the extrinsic challenge does.

Been seeing lots of posts and comments angry about no more physical discs from console gamers. Pc gamers haven’t had physical copies for over a decade. What’s the difference between the audience?

I write this as someone who used to play games pretty frequently during the Xbox 360/PS3 era, but slowly stopped playing and paying attention as life got in the way of the free time I used to have to allocate towards it. I finally decided to get back into an old hobby that brought me comfort and purchased a Switch 2. I enjoy it so far minus the ridiculous WiFi limitations, but doing the research on which console to buy, what games to check out, etc. leading up to that purchase has left me floored with how absolutely bad shit is. There’s essentially no new games to call home about on consoles that have been out for several years at this point, and there’s already talks of a ps6?? Just a circlejerk of remasters and AAA microtranslop. I love the Xbox controller and honestly Game Pass is a sweet deal, but aside from that, what the fuck is Microsoft even doing? I couldn’t bring myself to buy a Series X. PS5 would’ve been the best deal between the two, but I don’t care much for the library on PlayStation Plus and honestly there’s just not enough original new gen games to justify the purchase. I’d rather eventually buy a PC. I went with the Switch 2 solely because having never really owned a Nintendo console, I have a massive backlog to keep me preoccupied and can do so with portability. Not paying attention to gaming since around 2013 and suddenly paying attention again, I almost feel violated. This is the future?? I’ve never seen an industry more in desperate need of a makeover.

Edit: A lot of you guys have made good points and there’s definitely a lot of cool indie games out there that I’m not very familiar with. I guess my perspective really stems from seeing the major players with all their vast resources, using them for absolutely greedy purposes and not even developing any new inspired content to remotely justify it. It’ll be a readjustment on my part to just to kind of tune out anything AAA.

The story changes, but the gameplay often becomes:

Drive there.

Kill everyone.

Chase someone.

Escape.

Repeat.

Because of that, I'm building a semi-open-world crime action game, and I'm designing its missions, story, dialogue, combat, driving physics, AI behavior, and gameplay systems by listening to real gamers throughout development.

Tell me what YOU want that modern story games still don't deliver.

What's the one feature, mission idea, mechanic, AI behavior, or gameplay system you've always wanted but rarely see?

Or what's the one thing you're tired of seeing repeated in almost every game?

I'll read every reply. If your idea fits the vision, I'll seriously consider implementing it.

EDIT :- It is not a story focused game it is an crime action semi open world game ...

Hey, all!

In this thread, the rules are more relaxed. The idea is that this megathread will provide a space for otherwise rule-breaking content, as well as allowing for a slightly more conversational tone rather than every post and comment needing to be an essay.

Top-level comments on this post should aim to follow the rules for submitting threads. However, the following rules are relaxed:

• 3. Specificity, Clarity, and Detail
• 4. No Advice
• 5. No List Posts
• 8. No topics that belong in other subreddits
• 9. No Retired Topics
• 11. Reviews must follow these guidelines

So feel free to talk about what you've been playing lately or ask for suggestions. Feel free to discuss gaming fatigue, FOMO, backlogs, etc, from the retired topics list. Feel free to take your half-baked idea for a post to the subreddit and discuss it here (you can still post it as its own thread later on if you want). Just keep things civil!

Also, as a reminder, we have a Discord server where you can have much more casual, free-form conversations! https://discord.gg/truegaming

"Similarly, some artists find that image editor tools based on deep learning models do a solid job of speeding up tedious parts of their workflows. AI tools also do a reasonable job of some managerial slog, like transcribing and summarising team meetings. These things are not nothing – they’re solid little gains that free up staff to spend more time applying their skills to more interesting and complex tasks.

Those gains, however, are a long way from the dream that executives were sold. Those developers who have tried to use more complex AI tools in their workflows, often being pushed to do so from senior echelons of their companies, generally seem far less enthused by the experience. Setting agentic AI tools loose on game codebases reportedly runs into hard limits very quickly; the codebases are too big, too complex, and too specialised, and any code produced by the agents needs to be extremely carefully vetted by senior developers – a dull and time-consuming task."

There was a commentary a few days ago from Gamesindustry.biz, which basically suggests that Gen AI isn't as transformative as hoped. While it has actual productivity gains, it isn't a game changer and has real limitations.

is Gen AI in game dev good for "managerial slog" like summarising team meeting minutes, but isn't transformative for games dev?

Are there actual productivity impacts, such as allowing a smaller team to create something that usually takes a bigger team to produce?

Do you think it has the potential to transform how games are made, such as generating NPC dialogue without scripted lines?

I've been diving into Jordan Mechner's journals from when he was developing the original Prince of Persia between 1985 and 1989. There’s an interesting point where he realized his game wasn’t fun anymore, so instead of just pushing through, he took a step back to figure out why other games were enjoyable. He examined classics like Pac-Man, Asteroids, Karateka, and Lode Runner and noted some commonalities:

1. You get a clear sense of how close you are to the finish, and how much is left to tackle.

2. There are both setbacks and small victories, and when you face a setback, it feels like your own fault, not the game messing with you.

3. You have the option to hold off on risky moves and wait for the right moment to jump in, which creates a tension that makes the game engaging.

One line that really sticks with me is: "Every event has to move you closer or further away from your goal, or it's not an event, it's just window dressing."

What’s interesting to me is that this whole idea isn’t about flashy graphics or complex content. It’s more about how players can understand the state of the game and feel like their choices genuinely matter. Even back in 1988, he was talking about concepts we now refer to as legibility and agency.

I notice that many modern big-budget games struggle with that first point. Sometimes I really can’t tell how close I am to completing anything, and the map often ends up doing the emotional heavy lifting that the game design should be providing.

Where do you feel this breaks down? Open-world games and roguelikes seem to intentionally ignore that first point, and some of them are fantastic because of it. Maybe it’s only crucial in linear games.

I don't mean sound or design, I meant the kind of mechanic literally makes you feel the chills anytime u play, sometimes playing it 3 or more times to get over it. It can a mini quick time event or switching styles mid battle or anything.

Because I am trying to make a game and I want my boss to feel like that to the audience. It's more leaning coolness of how we, the MC, kills his enemies, but I just want one boss to be really scary. I am looking for any suggestions or any game boss that u think would've been scarier if it added a feature?

So, to start we’re still seeing amazing titles like Wukong and Elden ring coming out which is great but if you remember the good ol’ days from 2015-2019ish you will agree that mostly everything from gaming software to peripherals to the actual games have become extremely user unfriendly over the past years.

Previously I would download a lightweight app or driver and I would be good to go but now every peripheral has a bloated 1 gb app that comes with a all kinds of unnecessary stuff and will literally eat up all my RAM on startup.

Also has anyone else noticed that literally everything that requires an account almost always forces you to enter your phone for “2 factor authentication” as well, like Im pretty sure that no one is trying to hack into my Razer synapse account.

Graphics have stagnated and games that look like theyre from 2017 still manage to bring flagship GPU’s to their knees, it seems like devs have completely given up on any optimisations whatsoever.

To play just singleplayer games I still need to connect to the internet sometimes and almost every fame has microtransactions built in now.

I really hate the direction we’re headed in

I got to interview Charlie Olsen, who wrote Call of Duty's original matchmaking rating (MMR) system back in 2015, the core of which has been running in the mainline games ever since. He's since left and started his own company building matchmaking for other studios, so he's about as close to "the source" as you can get. A lot of what he said reframed how I think about matchmaking, and I wanted to lay it out, because the online argument about SBMM almost never gets past "I hate sweaty lobbies."

Start with how teams are actually built. In CoD, the matchmaker first gathers a group of players in roughly the same skill range and then splits them into teams as the last step. A side effect of doing it in that order is that the highest and lowest skilled players in a lobby often end up on the same team, with the middle stacked against them. So that "why is my teammate useless while the enemy team looks even" feeling isn't always in your head. It's partly structural. He was clear it's a consequence, not the goal, but it's real.

There's an even weirder consequence: a "90/10" team (one elite player carrying one bad one) will usually lose to a "50/50" team, even though the average skill is identical, because the two average players just ignore the weak link and gang up on the strong one. Averages match; outcomes don't.

Here's one that surprised me most: your XP has no connection to your hidden skill rating. The MMR exists purely to decide who you play. It doesn't feed your progression at all. So, playing out of your mind in a lobby earns you nothing extra. He actually thinks it should reward skill, but as the system stands, the number that shapes your entire experience is invisible and unrewarded.

And it's invisible on purpose, but probably not for the reason people assume. It's not mainly anti-cheat or anti-manipulation. His read is that it's psychological: a lot of players would be upset to find out they're worse than they think they are.

Then the big one, from Activision's own published white paper. When they ran a test that loosened skill matching, blowouts went up across every single skill tier, and the returning-player rate dropped for 90% of players. The top 10% came back in higher numbers (they're the ones on the winning side of those blowouts), but in aggregate, fewer people came back. Which leads to the most counterintuitive takeaway: "just remove SBMM" doesn't send the population to zero. It quietly filters out the casual players until you're left with hardcore lobbies. Retention can even look better afterward, because everyone who would have churned is already gone.

The part I found genuinely fascinating was the math, because it explains why this is so hard to "just fix." Take ELO, the rating system everyone name-drops. It comes from chess: two players, each with a number, the winner takes points from the loser, and an even match is worth about plus or minus 40. Clean and intuitive, which is why people love it. But ELO was built for 1v1 chess, and it has no "population model," so it doesn't know that a 2,800 should basically never be matched against a 1,200. Run a whole live game on it and the ratings just drift and spread apart over time. That's why chess federations have had to reset everyone's numbers, and why a game like Street Fighter wipes its ratings every season to stay stable. His blunt version: ELO genuinely breaks down if you use it for skill-based matchmaking.

It gets harder in modern games. Marvel Rivals, for example, doesn't even use ELO. It runs on TrueSkill, which adapts slowly and tends to pigeonhole you at one skill level even on a good or bad night. But the deeper problem is that it's a hero game: your effective skill isn't one number, it depends on which character you pick and which characters your teammates lock in. No single rating, whether ELO, TrueSkill, or anything else, can fully capture that. Class-based matchmaking might be the hardest problem in the genre, and it's not because anyone picked the wrong formula. It's that a single number was never going to be enough.

Which brings me to the thing I keep turning over. He made the point that "engagement" and "fun" aren't the same thing, and that studios optimize the one they can actually measure, usually short-term metrics over a two-week window that they assume correlate with long-term health. I think about Fortnite a lot here: I'll ask myself whether a given season is fun or just engaging, and the answer seems to flip with the midseason updates.

So I'll throw it to this sub:

• Do you actually want tighter SBMM, or do you want the game to stop optimizing you entirely and just hand you random lobbies?
• And for any devs or designers here: is there a version of matchmaking that optimizes for "fun" instead of engagement, or is fun just not measurable enough to ever ship?

Btw I’m a 28yo man. I feel that when we were younger it was so much easier to make gaming friends online. Now it seems like no one even likes to talk while gaming. You might meet someone and have fun gaming with them one time, but then never speak again. lol maybe I just don’t put enough effort in. I’ve got less talkative over the years, I barely even have friends irl anymore. All I do is work and sit inside. Everyone is too busy having kids or devoting all of their time to their girlfriends/wives. Even when I was with my recent girlfriend I tried making time for my friends but they all kind of disappeared. Is this apart of just getting older? 😂 I feel that life should be a little more exciting at 28. Is this why gamers talk less? Is everyone just depressed? lol

Edit- I’d also like to add that I’m a console gamer. Mostly Xbox, but I have a PS5 now as well