Today there was an article by Kotaku (yeah, THAT Kotaku) that made light of a Japanese tweet by Sony that might have mentioned something about the upcoming PS4 not supporting CD’s. Just a rumor, and no one else has brought this up to my knowledge, so in my mind, unless we get some more confirmation one way or another about what’s going on here, then we probably should write this off as Kotaku being Kotaku (seriously, guys, get off of whatever grudge you have against Sony already: it’s been 7 years since they got you for violating NDA about Home, and you’re the reason we even HAVE these abusive and restrictive embargos and NDA’s now).
But this is not what is the most troublesome. Hell, if that’s all it was, then yeah, I usually ignore Kotaku anyway. Brian Credente has proven on several occasions to me personally that he’s not a real game journalist. Hell, I would suspect he could join Geoff Knightley in the Doritos aisle.
But what really is bothering me is in the comments section of that story on N4G. Holy crap, are we ever ready to, if God forbid this were actually true, bend over and lube it up for Sony to royally rape us in ways we could never imagine. This happened with Microsoft when they were screwing us over in the hardcore games department and closing down first party studios so they could get more money to spend on buying up third party games and exclusive DLC. And now we’re doing this again. Oh, and I highlighted Microsoft’s screwing over because if I didn’t, I would get accused of somehow being anti-Sony. Hell, I might just be by even bringing up the article as a negative for me in buying a PS4 if true.
But back to the article itself, the comments were saying things like “who buys CD’s anymore” or being smart ass about it and bringing up cassettes, VHS, and 8 tracks as things that the PS4 would not support, either. They were even insulting those that might want the PS4 to include CD support.
Really? Is THIS what we have become? Not only have we become a bunch of elitists who cannot take a joke when it’s actually a joke, as we’ve proven in the Funny or Die article that I wrote about, but now we’ve become tolerable to anything and everything that a company does regardless of what rights they trample on, what sense or lack thereof that a decision makes, or what inconvenience it will cause. I’ve never seen so many people willing to let people screw them over congregate in one place. Why do I let it bother me? Perhaps this is the type of crap companies read and think that they speak for the rest of us. Believe I’m just a Chicken Little? Well, think of the many things in the gaming market that has happened because some idiots decided to never shut up and never be mature about what they said.
People whine and cry about the Gamestop business practices. Many are valid points about the CHAIN! But the end result? We don’t care that the industry is using this as a reason to try to take out the ENTIRE used game market! Do we say “no, that’s NOT okay?” NO! Of course not, we condone and encourage THAT to. As long as it means Gamestop gets put out of business and those people who we think don’t know a single damn thing about games are out of a job to pay for college or their house or food or whatnot, then why should we care? Let’s let Microsoft put in that restriction in the Nextbox! Let them continue to get exclusive DLC that doesn’t sell third party games on their system anyway! Close down those first party studios that are giving you real exclusives that are actually good! Who cared about Age of Empires anyway? It only spawned three or four games! We didn’t really care about that game that we bought the second it hit shelves! Nope! Hell, we’ll buy anything that says Microsoft on it! C’mon, Microsoft! Which PS4 third party exclusive game will you make sell out because you’re too addicted to me too ware? We want to know so we can wait longer for the game that will be subpar on your platform that can’t actually handle the game! We’ll play it anyway while you make us keep that copy when you suckered us all in when we realize that your version sucks...oh, wait, it doesn’t. Microsoft knows no wrong! I forgot!
Do I even HAVE to get into the Sony hacking debate? Hell, how hot button of a topic is that not because Sony had an issue with Homebrew or whatnot, it’s because we made it into one because we’re too immature or too irrational to think with reason. Insults to ANYONE who dared to even question what Sony did to try to stop whatever they were stopping were met with so many insane comments (that never got moderated in any sort of way and even got someone promoted TO moderation. Thanks a lot, Cat!). Hell, people on this site told Sony to drag Geohot all around the world (which they did) to get him to not be able to fight Sony? What, did they even know that if Sony actually fought him in a fair legal battle, they might lose? What were they so scared of? If Sony was actually in the right in that case, then why did it matter WHERE the case was tried at, and why did it matter WHO Hotz hired on his legal team? But enough with the questions! Go ahead, Sony. Take away something for no good reason. Fight that piracy by restricting the console more and more when you know it’ll happen anyway! Fight that Homebrew that you have no real reason to be scared of! Hell, we only want to pirate games! There’s not any REAL programmers who can prove that they understand the PS3 Cell structure that everyone kept saying was a bitch to develop for! There’s no way anyone sitting at home making some small game could possibly prove a triple A developer that’s whining about Cell development being too hard wrong! And we don’t care how much goodwill Anonymous meant to do when they called you out? Hell, what have they done, anyway? That girl in Steubenville, Ohio, deserved to be raped by half of the high school football team! How dare they stick their nose in their business that would’ve never gotten the attention it did…err…DIDN’T, deserve, and how dare they stick their nose in your business when you’re doing such a good job protecting us against…whoever it is you’re protecting us from! I’m sure those are some bad people you’re protecting us from! Worse than mass murderers and serial rapists…oh, wait!
Yeah, let’s keep letting these people screw us over! Let’s eat that cake that they would let us eat rather than the bread that we SHOULD be eating but the emperor won’t let us have! We don’t need to stay healthy!
But thing is, I’d rather not get screwed over all the time! I’d rather think for myself, and I’d rather say enough is enough. We should have consumer rights, we should be able to call out companies, especially those that we like, and we should grow the hell up and think about what we post. This is not 4chan, and you don’t have the anonymity that you might think you do. These are real people you troll, real people whose rights you approve to be trampled upon, and these are real people who have real brains that should be able to think for themselves.
So yeah, this really troubles me that we’ve came to this point. Yeah, it could’ve been going on for such a long time (and judging from how people were just letting the RIAA and MPAA trample over rights in the anti-piracy lawsuits and ideas to curb it, I would say that you’d be correct in that assumption), but the beauty of the internet is that with such issues with communities, you get to actually see it happen then realize that this sort of crap has been going on. You’re just now seeing it first-hand, though.
But has it been THIS bad? Probably not. Bandwagons probably weren’t as easy to start riding because you didn’t know they existed until your mind was made up. Why? Because of the internet giving you access to said bandwagon much quicker. Back in the day, you probably might’ve heard several different opinions about Microsoft’s DLC practices, or about the used game market, or about the Sony hacking debate, or about this CD issue. It’s a lot easier now to not only know they exist, but also to see that if you don’t join up, you’re going to be eaten alive by said bandwagon, with no one willing to help you get them to let you even breathe on your own.
You see, you might find it better to move your music or whatever digitally to the PS4 (we’ll not even get into how disastrous such a decision from Sony would be to those that still own PS1 discs of games), but for me, I have a bunch of CDs that I haven’t ripped to my hard drive yet, and I have no immediate plans to. I’m pretty sure anyone with a brain could figure out why if I just said I have so many. It would take me somewhat over a day to get everything in my collection done, and that’s assuming that something doesn’t go awry to some of the files during the process. Not to mention that if, God forbid, my disc drive fails for any reason (I’ve broken the CD tray off of mine some months ago, and about five months later, I finally got around to fixing the damn thing…only because I needed to install Windows 8), then I’m royally screwed there because I haven’t gotten around to buying a new CD disc drive for my computer. So, once that happens and I buy a PS4, I would have to connect it to my network, internet, whatever. I do that, hope my internet/network doesn’t crap out, and I’m transferring. That’s a lot of risk involved.
Or I could use a thumb drive. Only one issue: the capacity of drive, coupled with how much music I actually have (again, I said I had a lot of CDs, and more that I can thank iTunes for), and how big some music files can be, I would have to have my stick make several trips to and from the PS4 and my computer (I have now at least 5TB worth of hard disk space: 250GB boot drive, a 1TB and 2TB internal drives, and one 2TB external, and my case can hold three more…my USB drive is only 2GB by comparison).
Now, compare that to what I could do with a CD enabled PS4: pop the CD into a drive that, if it fails, I know it’s not my fault (though knowing how reliable Sony’s PS3 hardware was to work, I can assume it’ll be the same next gen). Copy the music directly to the PS4 hard drive, and eject the disc. Done! No having to worry about network issues! No having to run back and forth! Plus, quality issues from ripping the music from one format to another would not matter. We’ll know what quality the PS4 can get music into if it would support CD formats. It might not be as simple if you do it the hard way.
And assuming that Sony nixes CD support, how would that stop piracy to begin with? You have Torrents that can download entire albums. Those are on your hard drive, and you can transfer those the exact same way as people who are commenting on that article are saying they would rather do now. I know I own my copies of the CDs I have because I bought them from Amazon, went out to the store for them, whatever! I paid a lot of money for those discs. Are you saying that I have no right to use them directly into my PS4 because they are scared of someone burning a CD and putting that into the PS4 to rip? You know, maybe some of these comments should stay, because it would show Sony just how dumb that idea is and how easy it would be to get around that. Hell, if that all they had to do, then you’re actually doing them a favor, according to those that are commenting.
Of course, this is for those files that we download to begin with. Not to the music that’s already on a disc. If it’s already on my computer, then I’m not going to go through the trouble of burning, THEN ripping. But if it’s music that’s on a disc to begin with, then I shouldn’t need to do those extra steps, and it does nothing to stop anyone.
So, why are we accepting this? Of course, Kotaku could be anti-Sony and making this all up (they’ve bitten on stupid crap before), so we should wait for further info before we get all crazy here. My rage isn’t directed at Sony per se (though I’ve had bones to pick with all console makers this gen, don’t get me wrong), but at those that are willing to let things happen. You wouldn’t let anyone else, retailer, boss, whatever, get away with screwing you over (assuming they were allowed to to begin with), so why let these companies do the same. From always-on DRM and used games when we let them take advantage of something that didn’t take that extreme of a measure to deal with, to things that we’re told prevents an imaginary issue that such only screws people over without doing anything to stop any actual problem but we shrug shoulders and say “oh well” to, we deserve to be the ones buying the lube for said companies if we let this stuff happen.
Hell, at this rate, we might HAVE to ask if the PS4 supports cassettes. That might be the only thing we would be allowed to use if this sort of thing keeps up.
(NOTE: By the way, that girl actually didn’t deserve to get raped. No one does. If you actually thought I was not being sarcastic, then you proved how correct I am)
Hey gang, It’s been a whirlwind few months here at the Larian castle, attending some of the biggest awards ceremonies in our industry, and we are absolutely humbled by the recognition we’ve received from our players and our peers.
Publisher One or EIGHT and developer Team EARTH WARS will release physical standard and Deluxe editions of LOST EPIC for PlayStation 5 and Switch on August 8 in Japan, the companies announced.
Golf With Your Friends gets better again, with the introduction of a Critical Hit DLC pack and the launch of Speed Golf.
Ps4 using cassette tapes...u bad mouthing SONY?...REPORTED!
Good read dude enjoyed it.
"...regardless of what rights they trample on"
Your "right" to play CDs? Go find a 90's Walkman. I think all public trash cans are required to contain at least one at all times. Or do what everyone else did a decade ago and rip your CD collection to your computer.
I get the people who are angry over backwards compatibility. I get the people who are angry that more people aren't angry over backwards compatibility.
This... I do not get. It's silly.
I get why people are disappointed by no BC but angry? I am sure as a grown person you understand that Sony would prefer to divide their profits between PS3 and PS4 instead of risking having a ton of unsold PS3s when their console is released. The PS3 only now started to become profitable the other day and to put the PS4 out there could very well put the sales of the PS3 at risk. It is a calculated business decision. I know BC would be nice too but Sony is just not ready to toss aside their hardware in favor of the PS4 yet. And they have no obligation to. They didn't stop production of the PS3 and they are giving us options to play PS3, PS2 and PS1 games on the PS4.It's fine for you buying the product to say 'Just toss aside the PS3 and make the PS4 compatible' but business wise that is a bad idea. Nintendo only did it because they were finished with the consoles they left behind but Sony isn't finished with the PS3 yet. So why risk it's death from competition from the PS4 when you can sell both and get twice the profit especially if the plan is to lower it's price?. I know people will jump to disagree but as I have said before, if you were in their shoes and not outside looking in you would understand.
I understand where you are coming from, but will the inclusion of being able to play CDs really make the system play PS4 games better or would it really make a difference on how you play games on it. It seems like you want a Multimedia device, than a gaming system. As a gamer, as long as the GAME SYSTEM plays games and I can enjoy playing the game that I buy on it, I don't care if it plays CDs or not.
Times has changed and most of us have moved our CDs on to our computers, Ipod(s) and flash drives, etc and put our CDs up and/or in storage. We are not worried about our GAME CONSOLES playing CDs. Where was the drama or article when we learned that the Wii couldn't play DVDs or CDs or the consoles before the Wii from Nintendo.
I understand that you would like to have the PS4 play CDs, but just like any item that can be bought, they don't last forever. And if it really is a problem, play your games on PC or the next Xbox. The PC will always be able to play CDs.
One of the things that makes me laugh about N4G is when you post something with actual proof you still get disagreed with. For instance A guy started waffling on about how 8GB wont make games look better and that most graphics cards only have 2GB ram with the Nvidia Titan being the only Graphics card that has 6GB of ram so I told him wrong and posted links that the AMD 7970 has 3GB of ram and theres a 6GB version too but I still got disagrees
http://n4g.com/news/1183665...