July 1st, 2026
It’s the start of July! The beginning of the latter half of the year! We’ve reached the peak and it’s all downhill from here as we race to December 31st!
How’re y’all doing today? I’m doing as good as I can, I guess? At the very local level I’m doing okay. In the grand scheme of things less so, but ya know. Can’t do much about that personally!
Last Thursday my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew came over to swim and it was a fun time! My nephew really enjoyed the water! It was also nice just hanging out and chilling with them and shoot the shit for a few hours. We also ate lunch at the pool where I got these really good burger sliders and fries, though I didn’t have ketchup which sucked. Was on the pricey side of things (for me) but it beat having to get out and look for food elsewhere.
The thing about owning a physical media collection (or a digital one you pirated or whatever) is that no matter how much time goes by you will always have it. This comes to mind with the recent news of Sony no longer doing physical games come 2028 which is a bunch of bullshit. The other reason is that I finally watched the Legend of Crystania film for the first time! I movie that I own on VHS! A VHS tape that I bought all the way back in 2013! It took me thirteen years to finally get in the mood and go “Ya know what, let’s watch this movie.” When you own something you can just start watching it without having to worry about if it’s streaming on whatever streaming platform of choice you have. You just walk over to the shelf, pick it up, and pop the sucker in and go. I don’t have to worry about the digital license to suddenly vanish because Sony didn’t want to pay some fee or whatever bullshit.
If there’s a movie, tv show, or video game you like then ALWAYS be sure that you OWN it. Have that physical copy on hand. Or if you go the piracy route then make sure you have the files and it’s not sitting on some cloud server that you don’t have control of. Make sure it’s in your house! You never know when one day you’ll get an itch to revisit or check something out and you’ll be glad you kept it around instead of having to go on a hunt for it.
Anyway Legend of Crystania was alright, nothing special. I liked the animation but really didn’t care for how much they debuffed Pirotess in the film between Record of Lodoss and this. Sure, hundreds of years passed, but still! She barely fought in it at all! Like at one point she starts up doing some acrobatics only to immediately get wrecked. Man. Pirotess doesn’t deserve that.
Also popped in the first Gundam 0083 tape dubbed and watched that the other night. Been a long ass time since I watched it and I’ve forgotten most of it, so it’s been enjoyable. Never finished it either so maybe this will be the time for me to finally do it.
And that does it for this week’s blog post. I’ll see yoooouuuuuuu next week! Bye beeee~!
At least she’s a cute old fart if that’s the case.
“Make sure it’s in your house!” But also elsewhere, in case it burns down or some other catastrophe happens. That can be as minor as visiting children breaking it. Or yourself, I’ve broken a DVD before!
Though I prefer physical to digital (pretty much all of my Switch collection is physical, despite having some of the proto “Game Key Cards” that only serve to download the game), there’s a reason why Sony did it, and as flimsy as it is, it requires people understand what it involves.
For one, people that worry about physical are people who intend to replay the game over and over again. This means the majority of the RPG fans, as well as the open-world fans which may involve some overlap. In most of these cases, PC is a better platform because it allows for mods to be installed, which effectively revitalize the game – games like Neverwinter Nights still remain popular because of their mod community, more than because of the game itself.
The ones that’ll most likely be least worried about will be those who already cycle through their games – those that play Call of Duty (which will always “update” to the newer version), or those who play 2K games, or sports games. Because each successive game will be an “update” to the previous one, it makes little sense for such games to be retained – they’ll be likely erased digitally once the new one releases, or sold when owned physically. In that regard, such gamers won’t have an incentive to keep the games, as there’s no burgeoning mod community to keep those games relevant when the newer game potentially has all they want and more.
FGC and FPS gamers are somewhat in the middle, as rather than a mod community (at least for FGC games), the relevance is their competitive worth. Something like Street Fighter III is still played worldwide, even having competitions, despite being a game that’s years old, and for a good reason – the mechanics of the game are very distinct from those of their successors, making the skills acquired there relevant. FPS on the other hand (and by that I don’t mean CoD/Battlefront, which are by definition FPS games, but something like Doom) relies greatly on modding, both for single-player campaigns and multiplayer – even a game like OG Doom is relevant because of its community.
Evaluating all three, Sony most likely figured that the average gamer cycles through games in a short amount of time and then keep them on a bin, with games they’d like to replay present via PC for their modding communities, so saving a couple cents on going all-digital is good business for them. They certainly don’t care about second-hand markets (which is the *major* reason to keep physical – not everyone has money to spend on a brand-new console and the latest games, something notable in the US and Europe to a lesser extent that it’d be further south or east, with places like China or Latin America pretty much depending on those), and they want to avoid piracy by keeping their games through a tightly-controlled interface (though that doesn’t mean there won’t be people that bypass this to dump the games once downloaded), so there’s little reason for them to keep a physical presence – they believe consumers will choose their console to play their exclusive games for a couple months, then drop them like trash when the fad dies down.
Ultimately, it’s a money-based decision, and there’s very little that can be done other than keep the pressure. Most games are multiplatform nowadays, so companies like Capcom, Square-Enix or Konami won’t see any loss from trying to capture as many people as possible. Given how Microsoft has gone and done big layoffs, their studios will most likely split off or die down anyways, but that’s something that’s happening already, and the studios that churn yearly games (like Activision/Blizzard) won’t be affected because of the cyclic nature of their games. Ultimately, what this might do is effectively take Sony out of the console business provided they keep their games ported to PC, as no matter how good the next Spider-Man or Wolverine or Horizon may be, if they underperform because of loss of customers, they won’t be able to recoup.
Physical media won’t really die, because companies intrinsically recognize its worth. What will happen is that physical media will become prohibitively expensive only as collector’s editions, which will be just as bad,
Huh, what pride flag is that on the 5th panel
Ireland.
How old is Owen, anyway?
Around 28 this current chapter.
For reference Doris is 23.