Wedged
Sony announced they'll stop producing physical discs for Playstation games in January 2028.
It's been a long time coming.
Remember back in 2007, when Microsoft tried an extraordinarily convoluted version of this? It was the original Xbox One announcement, and there were so many levels of cluster**** that I won't review them all. The point being that the big console manufacturers, excluding Nintendo, have wanted to kill the used game market for a long time.
The future happens slowly, then all at once, as the saying goes.
It's terrible for consumers, but when has anything ever been announced that's actually better for consumers?
Will game prices drop because the resale market dies? No. Is there any benefit whatsoever to consumes? Absolutely not.
I honestly wonder if Microsoft and Sony--the gaming divisions, at least--will survive. The BOM for the Playstation 6 is allegedly almost $1,000 now. AI and tariffs have inflated component pricing to such an insane degree that new hardware is almost guaranteed to fail.
So here's the conundrum for Sony/Microsoft. You desperately want to kill the resale market. You release a console to do that, but it's so overpriced that sales are lousy. The only base you have left is last-gen consumers who refuse to upgrade because physical discs aren't available anymore. Do you go ahead and stop producing physical discs in 2028 and risk alienating them further?
Maybe it doesn't matter as much as I think it does. Sony and Microsoft already have digital-only versions of their consoles out, and they sell well. This just feels like an inflection point for the industry, and not a good one.
It's also hard to see another game with the budget of GTA VI ever being made (no, don't mention Star Citizen lol).
Meanwhile, Nintendo must be thrilled. The Switch 2, even with the price increases, is still significantly cheaper. They'll still produce physical media. They occupy a unique niche in gaming, and they'll be around long after Sony and Microsoft have moved on.
The Book Which Dare Not Speak Its Name...
...because I don't have one yet.
If you're lucky, really lucky, you work every day on a creative project, sometimes for years, and every once in a while you have a moment. It might be more than a moment; it might be a week, or even two. And in those moments, you suddenly have the creativity you'd been looking for day after day.
In a funny way, it resembles exercising. I used to run because it was good for me, and it was, but it was all workmanlike. Because I ran all those times, though, I occasionally had one of those transcendent runs where I entered a deep flow state and time passed without me thinking about it.
That's a long-winded way of saying that in the last ten days I've had one of those moments. I had a list of outstanding issues, as well as stretch goals, for the book, and every single one has been checked off. It all fits into the existing work, it reads well, and it makes the book complete.
I feel very fortunate.
I respect the grind, but those moments when the grind disappears are both wonderful and a relief. It's hard to write a book. At least, it's hard for me.
The book with no name will make it by the holidays. It might even be sooner.
A Revelation
Where I grew up (South Texas), no one pronounced the "p" in raspberry. It was just "rasberry."
I didn't even know it was spelled with a "p" until well into adulthood.
I was working on the book this morning and there was a moment that called for a raspberry, or a rasberry. Unsure, I thought maybe I could just call it a strawberry because we said that as kids as well.
C was in the kitchen when I came out of the study.
"When you were a kid, did you call it "raspberry" or "rasberry?" I asked.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"You know, when you skin your knee."
"I never heard either of those," she said.
"What?" I asked. "How is that possible/"
She responded, absolutely deadpan: "I was not an athletic child."
A Summer Respite
I assume you're all familiar with the necessary walk-ferry-walk-swim-walk-subway-walk journey when I swim, since I've written about it without pause for six months now.
Well, it may be gone for the next two months.
Astoria Park, which is within easy walking distance of our house, has an absolutely massive pool:
(thanks, Wikipedia)
It opened for the first time last weekend. Today, I went to see if I could swim laps.
It's not shown in the photo, but the area to the left of where the photo ends has four lanes for lap swim, only each lane is the width of 3-4 regular lanes. What this means is you can have 8+ people circle swimming in a lane and it's still easy. I passed one person the whole time and no one passed me. You never see the people on the other side of the lane.
Having a spacious feeling when you're swimming laps is a rare and prized experience.
This pool is also long. Really, really long, because it's 50+ meters (53, I believe). It makes for an endless lap.
Everyone was incredibly nice, which is what Astoria is like in general. What a place.
Friday Links!
Have a great weekend, everyone.
I genuinely wonder if any of these "gurus" are ever legitimate: The Real Love Company made her feel whole. Then ‘Daddy’ said to strip naked.
Another archive article from the remarkable Skip Hollandsworth: Poisoning Daddy: How a loving daughter and star student stole barium acetate from her high school chemistry lab, put it in her father’s refried beans, and almost got away with murder.
A terrific story: Mail Between Heaven and Earth: On Japan’s Post Office For Letters to the Dead.
Underrated: ‘David Bowie was a crazy workaholic’: Labyrinth at 40 – an oral history.
This is quite wonderful: For 60 years, an 84-year-old has let a deck of cards build his map.
What an incredible thing to see in person: We got a sneak peek of the final space shuttle set to go on public display.
From Wally, and he said it's one of his top three games: A team of Anarchy Online F2P ‘froobs’ defeated the MMORPG’s final raid boss after two years of prep. Grim times in the console world: Fears for Xbox as it puts its developers on the chopping block once again. This looks terrific, and since I live here now, I can even go see it in person: Exhibit showcases Jack Kirby and creation of superheroes. A national treasure: Cracking stories, Gromit: Wallace’s long-suffering canine companion to tell all in memoir. This is genuinely incredible, even with its limitations: The First Vibe Coded MMORPG Is Free, Open Source, and Surprisingly Complete.
GTA VI
The price of the "standard" edition for PS5 and Series X was announced yesterday. $79.99.
That's high, obviously, but it's also the one game that could get away with it.
The only problem is that it's effectively much higher than that.
Rockstar also announced that the "physical" copies of the game just come with a case and a code for download.
In other words, no reselling.
There was an entire ecosystem of used GTA V copies being resold over and over again. For GTA VI, that ecosystem won't exist.
This is why charging $80 for the game is ridiculous. Rockstar is already going to have much higher profits from the game because it can't be resold. They don't need to be charging $10 over what is already an inflated price point for AAA games.
If I owned the stock, I'd be thrilled with their announcement. As a consumer, though, they can pound sand.
[UPDATE: Rockstar is now claiming there will be a physical disk available "in the coming months." They appear to be scrambling in response to how pissed people are about their original announcement; if this was already planned, they would have announced it at the same time. I could actually see an "ultra deluxe" collector's edition with disc for $120+ with limited availability, which would have a minimal effect on the resale market.]
Calibration and the Dark Arts of Music Games
I'd totally forgotten how one of the expert level challenges in music games was calibrating your TV and audio to sync perfectly with the note charts.
There's always a tool inside the game, but it's usually not very accurate. To do it precisely, it has to be done manually. And doing it precisely, where the buffer before and after the note is the same size, and you hear when notes should be played, is how a music game envelops you.
I was struggling until I saw a Reddit post from 2015 about the correct method, which involved multiple passes, playing with the sound muted, etc. Then I had a massive moment of deja vu when I realized I'd already read this post in 2015.
And so it goes.
I also realized, after looking at RB, RB2, and Beatles RB yesterday, that The Beatles: Rock Band represents the absolute pinnacle of an entire genre. It's clearly so lovingly crafted, and with incredible attention to detail.
I remember being good at these games, once.
Keep On Rockin' in the Free World
Thanks to the incredible generosity of a long-time DQ reader, a PS3 Slim Ultra arrived via post this morning.
I've been setting everything up, along with downloading patches for Rock Band, getting the CRKD Les Paul to work properly in PS3 mode, etc.
There are certainly some teething pains, but honestly, it's nothing compared to the thrill of playing the games again.
I dabbled in Clone Hero last week, which is amazingly versatile and I enjoyed quite a lot, but it's just not the same without a progression system.
Plus, the Rock Band series is so iconic.
I realized today I've never gone through the guitar career. I started playing drums immediately as soon as it was an option, totally fell in love with them, and never spent much time with the guitar. I'd be playing them again if our space supported a drum set (it does not).
I'm going to be starting later today, I hope.
Here we go.
The Jersey Diaspora
One of the absolute best things about living in NYC is how many people (including me) came from other places.
I was walking home from the pool last week and it seemed like everyone in Astoria was wearing a football jersey from their home country in celebration of the World Cup.
It was spectacular.
Lots of jerseys from Africa and Central/South America. Mexico, too, of course. It was like wearing a flag, and it made me happy.
I tried to order a Cape Verde jersey after their unexpected tie with Spain, but they're sold out with a six seek lead time.
That made me happy, too. Maybe a few people will discover Cesária Évora's music after they buy the jersey. That would be a universal good.
P3 Obtained
Thanks to the enormous generosity of a longtime DQ reader, I'll have a PS3 soon. It makes me very, very happy that people still read DQ after so many years.
If You Happen to Have a PS3 Ultra Slim Laying Around Gathering Dust
Particularly if it's a model 4000 (particularly a 4301C or 4303C), I'd very much like to purchase it from you.
Why? I must decline to answer for secret reasons (along with E.B. White).
Oh, all right. Here's why:
That's right. I'm getting the band back together.
The Deceit of Accoustics
We went to see Widowspeak at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn last night.
Widowspeak is one of the bands I most listen to when I write because the lead singer's voice puts me into flow state almost automatically. They just released a new album and I was eager to see them. They're also a Brooklyn-based band (I think), so they'd be playing in their hometown.
The Music Hall of Williamsburg is a beloved venue that opened twenty-five years ago (and is closing later this year. It's small (650 capacity) and it has excellent sight lines, as you can see here:
In short, everything was in place for a memorable night of music.
There was only one problem: it sounded like shit.
Actually, I exaggerate: it sounded worse than shit. It was nightmarishly bad, with the drums and lead guitar pushed so far forward that you could barely hear the lead singer (the main attraction). Plus, the sound was muddy as well. I know all these songs by heart and couldn't make out a single word she sang.
After we listened for about forty-five minutes and it was already nearing ten, I told C we should go downstairs, go to the bathroom, and go home. It was getting late (for us, and it was 45+ minutes home), we were both tired, and while I was glad to see the band live, it had been a disappointment.
We went down three flights of stairs to the bottom level of the venue. There's a bar down there with bathrooms adjoining.
I stood by the bar in amazement because coming out of the speakers in the bar was the perfect sound mix of what was happening onstage, incredibly balanced and absolutely crystal clear. A masterpiece. C noticed it right away and said it sounded like a totally different band. Somehow, in the bar, they finally sounded like themselves.
There was a live video feed playing on two different screens in the bar area, so we actually sat down and listened to two perfect songs, thinking all along how ridiculous it was to pay money for a show to have to sit in the bar for the best sound mix.
I thought all along that the person in charge of their sound had just screwed up when they initially balanced the mix, but now I have no idea what went wrong. It wasn't a particularly modern venue and I wouldn't be surprised if the acoustics were terrible. So the mix going through the board (which may have been fed through speakers directly to the bar) might have been perfect, but once it went out into the venue, it was ruined.
I have more respect than ever for the people working the sound board now.
