At $250 for 10 games, that works out to $25 per game, which is already less than the usual going rate for physical releases of Atari 2600 homebrew games and licensed repros. That is, games for the system are already selling for more than this at a rate high enough to make it a viable business for some people.

On top of that, those current releases are typically a cartridge, box, and manual, and nothing more. This series of re-releases also come with fabric badges and enamel pins like the ones you could send away for back in the day.

Atari isn’t trying to create a new market for these products. They’re catering to an existing market, but it’s a market of which mainstream gaming circles are mostly unaware.

One more note to clarify what’s already been said: While the CPU in older consoles can read data and execute instructions directly from the cartridge because it’s connected to the CPU’s memory map like all the other hardware and RAM in the system, most consoles still needed graphics and sound data to be copied into specific areas of onboard RAM, and couldn’t use them straight from the cartridge. This is because those subsystems were hardwired to work only from certain addresses, or even their own, separate RAM.

(I’m aware that the Famicom/NES doesn’t do graphics this way by default, but in terms of hardware design it’s an outlier, and getting into the weeds explaining everything related to that would at least double the length of this comment.)

Because the CPU can read and write that data so fast, however, it’s still orders of magnitude faster than reading from most external media like tapes, floppy disks, and optical discs.

I had one of these in the late 90s, although mine was smaller, and folded up like an old clamshell flip-phone. It was surprisingly good for what it was. I used to fantasize about just how complex of a game one could make with it, especially if the centers and outlines of the individual blocks could be controlled independently.

I remember the Fallout 3 issue. The objection was that allowing the in-game use of drugs like morphine and amphetamines would encourage real-world use, so they changed the names to things like “Stim-X” or whatever which somehow made it OK.

What was particularly galling was that there was a WW2 game released around the same time in which the player character could use those same drugs. In Fallout 3, there were/are negative aspects such as addiction and withdrawal to deal with, while in the WW2 game they were just straight up health restorers and stat buffs. But the WW2 game got a pass because it was “historically accurate”.

All of this just dilutes the real issue. Ask the majority of people who are complaining about a lack of physical media why they want physical media, and they’ll tell you that it’s so corporations can’t take it away from them after a year or two.

This can still happen with physical media. Physical media on consoles these days is already closer to a download key than a complete, ready-to-play game. There are already examples of disc-based console games that are unplayable without some kind of online intervention. At the same time, it’s been proven possible to run a profitable business with DRM-free downloads. I’d suggest that AAA publishers use DRM for 12-24 months, then switch to DRM-free, because they’re concerned about the critical initial sales period. This sort of thing has happened in the past on PC.

Physical media are no guarantee against corporations stealing their goods back after sale. Offline DRM or no DRM are.

“To ensure the best possible player experience, this game will not run until the latest updates have been installed… Downloading… Error: Resource not found. Please try again later.”

I prefer to buy from GOG, itch, or anywhere else that offers explicitly DRM-free downloads. That being said, a surprising number of games on Steam are actually DRM-free (or as near as makes no difference). They don’t make it easy; you need to dig through your Steam folders to copy the files out, and sometimes you need to jump through a well-documented hoop or two, but it’s doable.

More info here: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam

There are also orders of magnitude of difference in their staff levels and budgets. Both sides of the equation are relative. I don’t know of any techniques for creating good content quickly and inexpensively that only work for small indies and not for large AAA studios.

It’s a fuck load of work to make a game. It is kinda ridiculous to go to all that trouble then just stop after making 2 hours of gameplay, like 2 hours total without even a good sandbox.

Not that it’s Steam’s fault, but this is the same way of thinking that has led to big budget, story focused games getting padded with repetitive fetch quests and annoying collectibles that unlock progression.

Yes, it’s a lot of work to make a game, but the only way to extend the play time of a story-focused single-player game without having to do even more work, is to water it down with low-effort filler content that reuses the expensive assets.

I don’t know that it’s usually naked greed for indies, as much as it’s an effort to boost initial sales and get word-of-mouth going by preying on FOMO.

But yes, I’d be behind delayed special editions. More than once I’ve found out that some indie game had limited extra content for early buyers, and when people asked later if that content would ever be more widely available, the developers gave a slightly smug “Nope! I guess you should’ve backed it / bought it at launch, huh?”-style response.

I know that your life has probably been revolving around this game for months or years, but I only heard about it for the first time yesterday, and your backer campaign / launch sale ended 8 months ago. All you’re doing with that attitude is souring potential customers.

I think it’s better to offer the extras again at a later time, as part of a special edition and/or a separate bundle. Plenty of games do this, too.

If you buy DRM-free, then you own the games you downloaded. But if your downloaded game has to phone home to ask if it’s OK to run or install, you don’t own jack. You’re renting.

Choro-Q High Grade 2 (a.k.a. Road Trip or Road Trip Adventure) for the PS2.

Just one more in a very long line of low-budget tie-in video games for a popular line of toy vehicles for children. Most western reviewers try to play it for the racing (which I admit is buggy and middling at best) and dismiss it as trash.

But it’s not about the racing. The racing is incidental; just a bit of action to break up the rest of the game and give you an overall goal to aim for. The real game is exploring a huge open world, meeting hundreds of NPCs, getting involved in their stories, solving mysteries, and digging up every last collectible in the game.

I bought a physical copy for PC cheap on sale, and never played it (my PC at the time wouldn’t run it for some reason IDR).

Now I live in Japan and it’s not available for sale here, on GOG or Steam, so I hope I can get that disc to work under Linux! I see there’s an official patch that removes the DRM, but there’s one for North America, and another for Europe, and I bought the game in Australia, so I it’s a coin flip which one I’ve got. Hopefully once I install it there’ll be some clues.

A few years ago I stumbled down a rabbit hole that led to the Shadow of the Colossus fan theory community.

If you play the game normally, you’ll wander a deserted, forbidden land and defeat the 16 colossi, revealing a little more back story each time, see the finale, and finish the game.

If you explore every nook and cranny of the world, make careful charts, compare the PS2 original and the re-releases, and even hack the game to take the camera out of bounds, you’ll find an astounding amount of detail that, at first, seems to be wasted. But over the years, fans have turned all of it into a surprisingly coherent possible expansion of the game’s universe, including linking it more directly to the developer’s previous game, Ico.

For a long time, many people were sure that some hidden secret remained buried in the game, to be revealed if only the right set of actions could be discovered. Most of the community seems to have given up on that now, but looking at what they assembled, it’s hard to shake the feeling that there still may be something to it all.