I’m neither impressed nor offended. It’s... fine I guess?

Kids/teens without the ability to make their own digital purchases, as well as non-tech-savvy (grand)parents who need to fulfill a Christmas/birthday wish list.

I could see this being a way to revive the “iBook” brand that predated the MacBook brand.

I know someone who frequently travels to visit family several hours away, so he keeps a Series S at his family’s home while having a Series X in his own condo. Saves the hassle of transporting a console back and forth between the two homes.

Even without digital distribution, Gamestop still feels like a shambling corpse.

The PS4 and Switch flew off store shelves despite having zero BC. The PS3 dropped BC altogether when it received its slim revision and still clawed back the sales crown from the 360. Even the 360 sold millions of non-HDD units (HDD was required for BC and the base models did not have it).

If you have PS+ then any PS4 games you play on PS5 will have saves synced which can then be accessed from a PS4. This won’t work for cross-gen games that have separate PS4 and PS5 executables of course, but the vast majority of PS4 titles will be fine.

It all depends on the architecture they use for the internals.

Physical releases enable a secondary market. Discs/cartridges can be resold, traded, and lent out. Even if the disc contains literally nothing other than the licensing data.

It sucks for rural customers who lack fast/reliable internet - but this is nothing new and video games are just late to the party.

I’m not doubting the figures here, given the prevalence of predatory microtransactions in free-to-download mobile games.

Chances are his criminal record would lead to automatic denial-of-entry to a lot of countries.

People often don’t realize how long PCs can really last for basic, non-demanding needs. Apart from hard drives, 10+ year old components can keep on rocking for a long, long time if you clean the dust out every now and then.

Sadly on Xbox (and increasingly on PS5 too with Activision games) the Blu-Ray often doesn’t contain a fully playable v1.0 build anymore so the disc ultimately doesn’t save you from much downloading in the long run. 

To be fair, PC games haven’t had physical releases in years, and even the last few physical releases had zero resale value as they just contained codes to redeem on Steam/Origin/etc and the disc would be very very far behind in updates. These days, even prebuilt desktops no longer feature optical drives, and…

You can lend out and resell discs.

Gamestop has no more reason to exist. It would’ve gone the way of the dodo if not for the 2021 short squeeze.

Since the PS4 and XB1, going physical makes zero difference in terms of storage requirements. All games must be fully installed to mass storage. The disc is nothing but a license to unlock the files.

“It’s a possible sweet spot that GameStop, as the only brick and mortar gaming chain still standing, could cater to.”

The Fireflies weren’t “about to murder him”. They were fully prepared to let Joel walk away without Ellie (under Marlene’s orders) until he fought back. Up to that point the Fireflies were neutral at worst towards Joel.