I am a bit older than some of you and i can remember when i bought a game on disc i could install, play and enjoy. When finished i could then sell the disc to someone else as long as i deleted the game from my hard drive..

Not sure where this fits in your argument just providing a bit more fodder...

Again, this is a symptom of the "everyone has good broadband" thinking. It's chicken egg situation. I wouldn't ever consider not having an optical drive in any system I bought or built; there's always going to be those times I want to install an older game, or even just watch a movie away from the rest of my family. Thing is so many people just go along with it as "it's just the future". PC gamers need to support blu-ray if we're ever going to see true physical release on any format again.

Publishers want to do away with physical releases entirely as it would save them a lot of money, especially as everyone would be forced to buy at RRP rather than getting a slightly cheaper deal as the physical stores compete with each other. Sure everybody has a USB port, but I'd imagine that a USB drive that could store something like GTAV (65GB!) would be more expensive than a blu-ray disc at the moment. The first step is blu-ray adoption, then once flash drive technology gets cheaper that will start taking over. If we don't support blu-ray they'll never see a reason to adopt flash drives.

Also should have mentioned the aforementioned disk may have been a 5 1/4 floppy or a 3 1/2 diskette, didn't matter...

The good news is the legal formalities are mostly avoided meaning no court or lawsuits. This is due to the structures of the TOS which is there to protect consumers. In this sense consumers are not allowed to file any lawsuits if they use the product, instead they choose arbitration which is much faster and easier. The other good side is for the corporation under American law which means the corporation gets to choose the arbitrator or judge so they can pick someone who will give them a favorable outcome. This process is much easier than the older process of using courts to settle actions which can be biased at times against the consumer or against the corporation since the corporation cant choose the judge in a lawsuit who will rule in their favor. Facebook, apple, steam, all use these standard TOS practices which is why their so popular since they provide more protection than people who pirate or buy DRM free media and have no protection that the content their playing is legally allowed under law. Just because a person buys a game does not legally mean they own it which is why DRM is used as a standard consumer measure to make sure that people who buy a game are doing so in a legally authorized manner. Noone wants to end up in jail over playing a video game, its not worth it so these laws protect the end user from this threat.

Consumer protection laws exist to protect consumers. ToS is usually mainly about protecting the company. But tbh, after reading this post, it's impossible to believe you're being serious.

Btw, could you fix the quote in your post? I accidentaly pasted parts of your post in the middle of mine, I cleaned it up now.

Hmm Im not to sure how to fix it? which part should I fix and what should I do to fix it? maybe add a space or an empty line to make it easier would help? Maybe if I retype that part as a new post it would be easier to quote which part should I do?

I think one of the factors that caused this whole issue is availability of modern hardware or internet to everybody and the way people who have it are used to it. I mean, we are all used to it that we just get clean water... but it is not so for everybody.

I am also guilty of it... some years ago i didnt think about how inconvenient it is for some people to get digital media and was having the impression that only reason why disk games-movies are still here is because of collectors. I never imagined so many people have so bad connections. Just calculated that at where i live, in Estonia, the absolute slowest internet i have seen in last few years would take about 8 hours to download the whole game. Its one megabyte download speed... never imagined people not having this is so common. I remember so clearly how painfully slow that was for me when i had that connection about 5 years ago. Now i am used to 4 megabytes of download speed and it starts to seem slow too... starting to yearn for fiber connection and its over 10 megabytes of download and upload speed.

I bet Howard, with its fast enterprise internet, and possibly fiber connection at home, didnt realize how bad things really are for a lot of people in terms of internet speed.

thank you valgusepoiss

someone on this forum who understands the real problem behind the download issue...

not the legal gobbelydook i am seeing at the moment..

Oh, Bethesda knew EXACTLY what they were doing. These people are developers, business people and have lawyers who keep them on the loop. They simply did not care about that sector who have poor Internet speeds and other connectivity issues. They, like any other business, are thinking foremost about their interests. After all, the people they are really serving is the console people who mostly won't have the problems that low speed internet pc players are having. We were left in dark because we aren't as important. That's the reality.

as i said earlier, pre odered 5 months ago, waited patiently, finally got disc and another 36 hour wait to play.... Still waiting by the way

good news however as i just got a thirty dollar refund as they have a price match policy and price i paid back in june has obviously dropped sgnificantly

Having read the tweet, I have not seen Hines specifying that we'd have to download most of the game which is the crux of the complaints: a lot of games on Steam usually have the user download a small chunk of the game (e.g. 1%) from the client before it is playable, and it's what I had assumed since it is the standard with these games.

But here we had to download 20gb out of 24-5ish.

Also the "piracy" argument: I'm kind-of annoyed that the justification was either not serious or that he thought we were dumb enough to believe it despite years of evidence that no, it doesn't actually work and makes things more needlessly complicated for consumers.

I'm having a lot of fun with the game so far and it was worth the download, but that doesn't mean that it excuses Bethesda for what they did here.

Ahahahah ...aaaand did they stop it?? NO! Why dont Bethesda do what CDPROJECT did? no protection ,gamer/costumer friendly attitude and they sell millions of Witcher 3 .Bottom line is this: You cant stop piracy but you can stop punishing people that actually buy product by releasing drm free and without 25GB download or other [censored] , and with change attitude towards gamer population.

Not everyone is CdProjekt. Not even CdProjekt in a few years of commercial success won't be CdProjekt any longer.

This does not make any sense. if you buy games in established stores you will get the official version.

Yes I know one who bought an very cheap windows version in Thailand, key did not work

Games are still sold on disc and on steam without any problems.

Hatred was released this year as in "today", it was released and quickly forgotten.

Always on drm has one downside that is has to work, people mostly accept launch issues with multiplayer games.

Launch problems with always on drm is entirely the company's problem as they could avoided it by dropping always on.

Yes criminal hackers using ddos to interrupt the servers for blackmail is the company fail.

Same with natural disasters.

It looks like its become less common, for it to work it has to be done real stuff on the server too, an just check if valid call is as easy to hack as anything else and this drives up cost an complexity.

----

On the other hand the problem with providing the game files on disc is that hackers will get access to the files far earlier often before discs are sent to stores.

Putting the game files (grapich and sound) and leaving out the few megabytes with program files would also avoid this problem.

Hello everyone I am from the Internet Service Provider consortium I want to thank you all for buying this game! It's very important to us you spend your hard earned money on a game you like and give us your hard earned money once you bought a game you have to download! Which means you have to give us your hard earned money once you hit your hidden data cap!

Thanks again svckahs!

Your local cable monopoly

I will be collecting this game from the post office later since it couldn't be posted yesterday (tempting to just leave it there if I hadn't spent ￡44.99), I will then be joining in the fun of the download nightmare when I should be playing the game. I can't wait to see the laughable download time I'm going to have for this game. I might post up my progress for amusemant and for people (some) to comment how unreasonable I'm being by complaining about a data cap. Its all right for those people to criticise those who are stuck with this problem when they are happy playing the game.

Yep, pretty much identical to my purchase of most games, including the Witcher or Tomb Raider reboot. Took about 1/2 hour for me.

That's nice, but not everyone has access to that kind of internet connection. Quite a few people have metered plans with a monthly data cap, and get charged for each gigabyte (or even megabyte) they go over the cap. So they buy the game on disc to avoid having to spend possibly hundreds of dollars in data fees just to download the game they've already spent 60 bucks on. Guess what? Now they're screwed anyway.

You'd think Bethesda damage control would have been all over this by now, looking at Amazon reviews etc.

I can completely understand people's frustration, even though I have a nice Virgin Media cable, I used to live in the middle of nowhere with a terrible broadband line (and severely capped too). What were they thinking? You can't just tweet that people will need an additional download, you need to inform retailers to put a warning up and also post some details on the official FO4 website. Their approach was way too casual and uncaring.

GTA5 install had ... what .... 7 DVDs? Cheap to press, it wouldn't have cost Bethesda much. I don't think people would get angry about downloading an additional gig or two once the install had completed, but 20Gb? That's just rude.

Don't get me wrong I really like steam. However with data caps and games getting bigger..

With blu-ray it would have been less, or is that media just as obsolete as toilet paper? You know, since toilet paper isn′t digital?

Even if your rig doesn't have bay space for an optical drive, there's nothing stopping you from buying an external drive that just plugs into a USB port. Maybe it' s a few bucks more than an internal drive, but still quite reasonable. And then you have the drive when you need it for other things.