Six Hours Early on Netflix

**Jeff Gerstmann** (0:22)
Hello, everyone, welcome to The Future of Video Games. In podcast form, I'm Jeff Gerstmann. Welcome to the program. It's time to talk about what's been going on over the past week, or the week ahead, or a bit of both. No matter what happens, the future, I am ready for... I'm ready to enjoy many years of fine video games because I finally ordered my PlayStation 5 disc drive.
I'm ready to strap this on to my PlayStation 5 Pro and put discs in it for years to come. Add a Blu-ray disc drive to your PS5 digital edition console, play PS5 games and supported PS5, and I can also watch amazing entertainment. I love to watch amazing entertainment, and so I'm stoked to be able to put a disc drive on to my PlayStation for gaming. They're still selling those. I don't know why they wouldn't stop, but there's been some news, I guess the consoles that you find out in the streets, when you're out there buying a console that comes with a disc drive, they have put stickers on them in some regions. I imagine it's a stock thing, as they ship more consoles out, they will put more of these stickers on them. But the stickers say like, hey man, after January 20, we're not making discs. We're eventually going to stop making the things that go in these. So just know that. Just know that if you're going to buy any one of these, that you're going to have to contend with that. And I guess that's the right thing to do. Give people plenty of warning, because obviously, I would have to guess that the majority of people who are out there in the world have no idea that any of this stuff is coming, you know? That none of this digital only whatever is about to happen. So probably good of them, probably smart of them, like legally speaking also, to make that change. So, you know, hey, a smart move on their part, I guess, in the context of this insane thing they're doing. That is maybe not that insane, but that doesn't mean it's fun or cool. It's decidedly uncool. Strauss Zelnick from 2K gave some, a little bit of, I don't know, you know, because they're about to ship Grand Theft Auto with no disc. And he was just like, yeah, I don't know, man, like a disc. The quote that went around was like, discs don't make sense for a lot of consumers, which I think if you're in the position to be shipping Grand Theft Auto, and it's theoretically going to have an online component, you probably could try to make some case like, well, hey, look, this is a game you're going to be playing once a week for the next 10 years. Do you want to go get a disc every time that you want to do that? Of course you don't. So this is a convenience for you. I mean, the whole point of it is, it is convenient, right? He also had a lot of things to say about streaming in this. It's a IGN interview, I believe.
Kind of saying, like, oh, you know, if devices that can't play games could suddenly play games, that's 10 times the potential players.
I think people are getting a little like sky is falling about that stuff. I get it. But ultimately, I think that the types, and this is the thing I've said all along, the types of games we enjoy en masse would have to change dramatically in order to be palatable when running over a live stream as opposed to running on local hardware. I think even people who are not super latency sensitive, which I think is a lot of people, you know, they're just like, I don't know. They just pick up the controller and go, and if it doesn't feel right, they don't, you know, it takes a lot for them to go like, hey, there's something wrong here, as opposed to just like, I guess that's just what the game is, I don't know, whatever. I think that the way games would be made would have to change. You know, GTA6, like think about Grand Theft Auto games as an example here. You know, you get driving pretty fast in those games, right? You want to not crash into other cars. You want to line up headshots on other enemies. Like there's precision involved in a GTA game. And that precision becomes a little bit harder to navigate. Maybe, you know, with current technology, you know, to give them the benefit of the doubt, I guess, even though I don't think they deserve it.
It becomes a lot easier to overshoot your headshots. Like if you're aiming for a head, you held the stick for a little bit too long and it goes too far. You try to push to auto correct, but there's a few frames of latency involved. And so it takes a little bit for it to go up. And all of that becomes perceptible over time to the point where you're just like, I fucking hate this. And it makes your games feel mushy and imprecise, which I think in games that do, even if they only occasionally deal in precision, I think that that's the sort of thing that adds up over time and you lose a lot of players along the way. Imagine if every fighting, and then once you get to other genres of game, you end up in situations where you're just like, imagine if every fighting game had even more latency stacked on top of it. Because it also had to, you know, the video signal had to travel to you before you could, you know, input more commands or whatever. From a tech perspective, they try to say things like, well, you know, that's true, but if both players are running in the same server rack, then the latency between those two servers is, you know, extremely fast and that makes up for it, you know. And so I think, you know, ultimately there's like technology that can improve and streaming can certainly get better, but at the same time, it doesn't often feel like there's a lot of reason for it to get better. And, you know, the way consumers and players are being treated is just like cattle. There's a certain amount of just like, these people don't give a shit. And I get it because I think that by and large, in a mainstream sense, a lot of these people don't give a shit.