Digitization, Gaming, and Physical Discs

Sony announced there's not going to be any physical discs for their games anymore. Interesting.

I've thought about this exact same subject for years, probably since around 2011 at least.

Now, I'm not updated about games. I don't know what people play these days. I grew up on the PS2, and once the PS3 came out, I kinda lost interest in console gaming. Already back then, this idea that there should be new and new versions of the same console brand seemed like a money grub. The PS2 was a clear improvement over the PS1, but by the time the PS3 came out, I didn't particularly care about improved graphics anymore, let alone now, with PS6 in the works. It just doesn't matter to me anymore, because a sufficient quality has been reached ages ago. And so, I might as well do my gaming on the PC now.

Besides, it makes little sense to discern between a console and a PC when they literally have the same hardware components, and even the games – the programs – that run on them are often made with the same game engines. Of course, I understand completely: as a developer, you want to maximize the reach and minimize the effort you'll be spending figuring out how a PS5 is different from an Xbox or some other gaming hardware. It's the old "hardware is difficult" paradigm. You want the same code to work on every platform.

But it's no surprise then that it'll all end up looking the same, quite literally.

By the way, what I was totally surprised about some years back was that mobile gaming is actually a more profitable market than consoles or PC games. This is because to me, actual gaming as a hobby is not dibble dabbling with your phone. But thinking about it now, it makes total sense as well: for most people, gaming is just a casual way to spend idle time. To make waiting more bearable on the bus, I suppose.

But anyway, It's the same old question again, wrapped in a different package: "how to make money with software?" And man, that's really difficult, because it's so easy to copy stuff, and there's so much of it available for free. Piracy isn't even the biggest problem anymore, because people have finally figured out that physical releases last forever.

They last forever because you can copy it to your computer and "digitize" it yourself. You can burn it on disc again and again if you want. Completely legally.

Weirdly, in the 2000s, it really didn't seem like such a problem; blank DVDs were widespread just so you could burn anything you wanted on them; laptops routinely came with integrated optical drives. Not the case anymore. I mean, if the economy was DVD-first, then why the hell would you even need a fast internet connection? The only difference is, DVD-first means more money proliferation, more support for the middleman, while "fast internet" means a bigger brunt of the pot goes to whoever provides you your internet connection.

I think the unit cost of creating a DVD is somewhere around 20 cents or less, if you make them in bulk. And the irony is that if a single DVD doesn't cut it, you could make two or three and the total cost would still be less than a single BluRay. But of course, fully jacketed DVDs come with additional costs besides the naked plastic disc. Correct me if I'm wrong.

But if that's true, then cost-wise, you should probably compare how much the upkeep of them servers and CDNs is next to that. Maybe you should think about how much it costs to run those servers yourself and why is it that you'd rather not.

Because here's one of the most important things I fucking learned over at the university, and it's a really dumb thing: to beat a regular supply truck carrying a full load of DVDs over a standard 1-hour drive, you'd need an internet connection of about 418-756 Gbps! That's 40,000 DVDs, 100 km/h, and 4.7 GB of data per disc (single-layer): 40,000 * 4.7 GB = 188,000 GB moving a 100 km in 3,600 seconds ≈ 52.22 GB/s.

So then you go ahead and think: who is 6G wireless for? Who is 7G for?

Granted, throughput is not the same as latency. But dude, can't you just put on some pants and go to the store to pick up one disc? I guess it depends.

What's interesting is that a server costs roughly the same amount of money no matter how many people are connected, until you hit bandwidth limits, which is when you invest in another server to handle that increased level of concurrency. So the increased cost is a stepwise function. In contrast, every new customer brings additional costs for the physical DVD pipeline, because each DVD must be manufactured, packaged, and physically brought back to the store, or wherever you get it from. However, with n amount of DVDs in circulation, you could argue you have however much network bandwidth those n discs bring you, if they're rewritable. Because individuals are perfectly able to exchange DVDs amongst themselves, too.

So the interesting bit here is that it's actually the logistics for DVDs end being more costly than the data storage and processing. With more human involvement. However, with DVDs, there is no real concurrency limit, and no server that could go down at any moment. This means you need to know the upfront costs for how many DVDs you need, but after that, there is no real operational risk, assuming the DVDs are functional.

The server is cheaper for distribution.

But what's the most interesting of all is the question of where can DVDs and servers be manufactured, then?

Polycarbonate plastics come from major petrochemical refining corridors (like the US Gulf Coast, Western Europe, or East Asia). And the disc pressing plants do not need to be in tech hubs. They are historically located in industrial manufacturing states (e.g., Ohio, Indiana, Germany, or Poland), or wherever land and industrial electricity are affordable.

The final economic transaction happens locally. When a DVD sits in a business or local store, the economic value is realized right there in that specific community.

However, as for the server, the raw resources come from highly localized, often geopolitically volatile areas. Cobalt is concentrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo; lithium is pulled from the high-altitude salt flats of Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia; rare earth processing is heavily monopolized by China...

And the components can only be manufactured in a handful of high-tech cleanrooms globally. The advanced logic chips come almost exclusively from TSMC in Taiwan, utilizing lithography machines made only by ASML in the Netherlands.

Once built, the servers are clustered in specific data center corridors chosen for tax incentives and cheap power – most notably Northern Virginia (which handles a massive percentage of global internet traffic), plus specific hubs in Oregon, Ireland, and Finland. Money spent on cloud infrastructure is extracted from local communities and funneled directly into these tech hubs.

So who gets employed? Who gets the munnyz?

That one's easy: the DVD model creates an extended employment chain of physical labor. It relies on a workforce with low barriers to entry, distributing income across multiple working-class sectors. Industrial plant operators, logistics, transport, and retail.

However, the server model replaces the physical workforce with software automation. A single 42U server rack capable of serving millions of digital streams does not require an army of workers. It requires a tiny fraction of highly specialized, high-income labor. A single site reliability engineer (SRE) or cloud architect can manage thousands of servers simultaneously using automated scripts. The amount of human labor dedicated to your 40 Gbps pipeline is measured in mere minutes per month.

Software code scales horizontally without adding human headcount.

Moreover, DVD money circulates within the community via local retail wages and business taxes, whereas, for the server model, the revenue flows straight to the balance sheets of multinational cloud giants.

In my view, despite Finland being a local hub, this is not the long end of the stick (as in the better end of the bargain). Although politically, this arrangement works like a hostage does: you wouldn't want anything bad to happen to your oh-so-important communications, would you? To some meager degree at least.

I remember in the 2000s, it felt like games were being made in a somewhat business-as-usual-style. But now, you start noticing that people do buy used games. People can be entertained by old stuff, made years ago. It's not exactly about market saturation, rather it's like "do I want to pay for something new or would I rather just pick up something I'd already forgotten about".

Thinking about it, this is actually right at the core of why you grow out of things: it's not that the target audience doesn't fit, although that can be a factor too, rather it's that you just know too much. You've too much experience, and you become less obstinate about superficial things.

The thing is, I don't think entertainment products can carry the economy. And, coming back to Sony, I think the looming question is: if people don't have anything to counterbalance games with, why would they want to play them?

And moreover, why wouldn't you want to pay money to print DVDs if the whole point of the game is that it's just data? Unless of course gaming is literally about everything else. All the important things are in between the lines, in what's not being said. It's all about the gaming culture.

Because you know, thinking critically, nobody's taking what you own away from you: you can actually burn the purely digital releases on discs even now. You could reverse-engineer the digital release so it's self-sufficient, and doesn't need an online connection for DRM and stuff. You can own things. All you need is a nerd by your side.

It's just that the economy needs to keep going, and you'd think you'd want a job too, because that can be your ticket to other good stuff in life. There's nothing wrong with digitization in the specific sense I've been talking about here, it's just that it doesn't support that many people.

And in my view, you can kinda see the need and the desperation in how people act now that the market's become more and more purely digital, so to speak. How many people do you think can become influencers before that market surely saturates?

The problem is that digitization, taken too far, makes things utterly redundant, literally. So much so that there's no point in anything anymore, because there couldn't possibly be. Hell, I'm thinking you could construct a mathematical proof of this.

And yet, there's a serious bottleneck, hindering market growth too: if you're fucking poor from the outset, then the only way to really make money is mostly through preexisting digital services and social media. That's because renting physical offices and cloud services and things turns out to be really expensive for anything except the most basic stateless web server!

It's because the owners own things, and so they can hold out on you forever. And the reason why that's even possible is that these are not necessities, strictly speaking; you need food, not servers. And that's just fucking great, because it goes to show that only one layer of indirection is required to completely obfuscate anything that goes on in the background.

As long as someone pays. And even if they don't.

I think the zeitgeist in general is that, instead of being all about providing fair compensation in exchange for services you need, it's become all about rug-pulling and underhanded tactics to stay ahead of everyone else, because people have started to see the whole world as utterly relative in nature.

I don't think anyone cares about what you know or what you can do anymore. Rather, it's about squeezing out that final, remaining 1-2% relative improvement out of every single thing, and every single person. It's the number-go-up philosophy at play.

Come to think of it, maybe that's behind the race for improved graphics in games, too. Behind the race for AI. Behind the race to implement automatic data analysis pipelines, shit like that. Behind the reason why data science is a thing.

It's also why some people actually care about Ivy League universities and things of that nature. I mean, when did you last hear the question "what are you interested in?", rather than hearing the question "where did you graduate?"

It's funny, how practically no one is accountable to prove to me the relevance of anything anymore; how what they're doing helps me or otherwise provides a public service in general. The focus is just somewhere else, isn't it? It's like the focus is in making people more dependent on the web, sucking on the teet of automated pipelines and algorithmic feeds. But the irony is that some people are already so disconnected that they can't even fathom what the public reaction might ultimately be.

It's funny because, for years I wondered whether games becoming mainstream had any spillover effects on how people behave now, like the wheel, the hoe, or indoor plumbing must have had. And for the longest time I couldn't figure it out, until I realized that everything's a game now; relationships, business, education, your life, everything. And that alone should make it worthless, because it means there is no continuity and no security anywhere to be found.

In the back of your mind you think you can just reload a save and that everyone else is just a fucking NPC. Oh, I admit, that NPC meme was funny the first time I heard it, but things have this insane way of first being a joke that everyone gets, and then a few years later becoming everyday facts.

That is, you thinking that NPC stuff about other people being the everyday fact.