That is, Apple is now phasing out DVD drives from its machines. Of course, this started a few years ago with the Macbook Air, but it's now continuing with their cheap line of desktops. I'm not surprised that Apple is continuing with this, it's the kind of thing they'd do; as the article's speculation says, and I agree, it's quite unlikely Apple will stop there and not move on to removing disc drives from more of their computers. Sure, you can get an external drive, but that's not exactly the best solution compared to internal.
On the other hand, of course, this was quite obviously coming. As if Apple'd stick with physical media, when instead they can push people towards using Apple's web store more, and can get rid of that ugly disk drive in their console too? Hah!
... I think everyone can guess what my opinion of this is. Of course I'm not exactly fond of Apple, but this kind of thing shows exactly why that is. Function matters more than form, darnit, Apple! And despite what Apple fans and the DD-only-future faithful may say, there are lots of reasons to want physical media. You have clearer ownership of something physical; you get more for your money (physical product and packaging too), lots of things aren't available as digital downloads; things can be removed from DD stores and vanish from legal access, because there's no way to buy a used copy of a DD product; bandwidth limits are getting worse, not better; and more...
But Apple cares for form above all and Steve Jobs hates things like buttons and media drives messing up the clean styling of his systems, so disc drives are out.
(And yes, I thought that iMacs dropping floppy drives in 1998 was stupid. Basically anyone wanting to actually use one needed an external drive of some kind (floppy and/or zip, usually), that was before flashdrives after all, and that internal CD drive wasn't a burner...)
I'm not too surprised this game got cancelled -- since Inafune left Capcom, and he was Mega Man's creator and biggest defender, it's not too surprising to see this and Mega Man Universe both get canned -- it is a bit sad. I mean, I'm definitely not a MML fan (sure, it's an okay 3d action-rpg franchise with some terrible controls, but it's not Mega Man at all...), but the games are okay at least, and it's too bad that this was canned, though technically it wasn't because it was actually never greenlit for production.
Anyway, so afterwards the fans got mad. As that second link above shows there's a twitter war with some Capcom Europe PR people, a Facebook protest page that has 20,000 likes now, lots of anger on Capcom's forums, etc. I'm sure there's no chance any of that will make the game get un-cancelled, but when you give people who'd been waiting that long (MML2, the last one, was released in 2000 or 2001 after all) some hope and then take it away, they're not going to be happy.
Would the game have sold, though? Honestly, who knows. That depends in part on how good it'd have been, and now there's no way we'll know that.
So, the September issue of PCG just arrived (on that note, September issue, in early/mid July? Yeah... but anyway.), and in it, they announce some changes, including that they're upgrading to heavier, nicer paper (good) and that they're dropping the discs (not so good).
Now, I say this in general there because PCG is the last PC gaming exclusive mag publishing in the US. In Europe there probably are some PC gaming magazines which still come with demo discs, but in the US this is the last one, and it's dropped its disc now.
Now, of course, many people get CDs. For games and demos, a single CD has been near-useless for most of the last decade; while I'd subscribed for five years before that point, I stopped subscribing to PCG for many years in mid 2001 mostly because of how much thinner the magazine was getting (it's even thinner now I think, under 100 pages every month), and also because the discs now could only hold two or three demos instead of the 10-15 they had years before. I said that if they ever switched to DVDs, I'd be back.
Well, they never did, but I did resubscribe anyway last year when there was a $5 for subscriptions deal (on that note, the subscription's about to run out... I wonder if there'll be anything similar this year). I'm glad I did now, because now, even if it's not as good, I have the last issue of the PCG CD...
As for the DVD thing though, while the normal subscription never included them, they did make it so that the newsstand version came with DVDs some of the time, but subscribers continued to get CDs. Yeah, that really never made sense to me, people who subscribe get punished? But anyway, the result was that by the last year the disc had on average maybe one demo on it, and it couldn't be something major because those demos would be larger than a CD. In addition, while in all of my older PCG issues each CD came in a custom cardboard sleeve printed with art and the list of games on the disc on the back, the ones from the past year just come in a generic papersleeve. It's pretty lame, so cheap... So on those regards I can see why they'd drop the disc, it can't hold much and I assume that DVDs are just too expensive (though maybe if the mag still cost $30 a year, like it did in the '90s, instead of $20 like it does now it might be more possible... I imagine that that price would simply be too high for these days though...).
If they ever offered a DVD subscription I never read about it... I'd like to know if such a thing ever did exist, but really it should have! And still having CDs in 2010, that's just a joke. Of course though, I thought that still having CDs was kind of a joke in 2002; I had a DVD drive then, had PCG offered a DVD edition of the magazine, even for a bit more, I might have paid it; even though I did have cable and could have downloaded the stuff too (and indeed, that was one of the reasons why I stopped subscribing, though the significant page count reductions in the magazine itself (and, arguably, quality reductions as well, though I do think in quality at least it's rebounded some in more recent years, page count wise it hasn't at all), and the shrinking amount of content on the disc, were the main reasons). As I've said, the discs showed me demos and other stuff I'd probably never have found, or thought to download, on my own. For a PC gamer that's a nice thing to have I think.
But anyway, yes, as far as I know that really is how it was, and yes if I am right about that it's dumb. The only explanation I can think of is that newsstand copies sell for more (remember, that $20 or $30 is a lot less than the cost of buying all of those issues on the newsstand), so maybe that's why they put the DVDs there? But that doesn't explain why they didn't make it an option for more money, which I can't remember them ever doing, at least.
Also, apparently European PC gaming magazines often include full version games, but in the US that has always been extremely uncommon, so that's not a reason to keep including discs. US gaming mags do cost less than European ones though.
Even so though, it is sad. One of the major reasons I subscribed to PC Gamer in 1996, in addition to the big, thick size of the magazine (200-400 pages a month!) was the great demo discs, and the section in the magazine that went into detail about each demo and its controls too. It was great. The disc pages were downsized over time, along with the size of the magazine, but still, I liked having the discs...
So yes, I will miss PCG discs. I still have my five year collection of those discs from '96-01, after all, and it's fun to go through them sometimes and look at those old demos... and also, particularly earlier on (1996, pretty much), PCG had a fairly impressive demo interface, even in that age of multimedia disc interfaces -- you didn't just click on buttons and menus, but it played like a graphic adventure. You had to solve a simple little puzzle to go down to the PC Gamer Underground. Once there, you could explore the office, looking at various desks, which would have things like things to click on with little voice clips on the answering machine, or a rolodex-like thing with contact information for all the companies with demos/content on the disc, information on other magazines from the publisher, little joke bits (anyone who remembers Coconut Monkey would remember that PCG had a good sense of humor), etc. I liked that at the time. :) Later interfaces simplified things, perhaps unfortunately, but still I did like the discs.
Up through 2002, at least, PCG discs are all marked with a number, like 7-7 for Oct. 2001 for instance. The first digit is the version number of the interface it uses, and the second the issue number since that interface was first used, so that'd be the seventh issue with the seventh interface. Neat little touch.
Now, most people are going to say "who cares, just download the demos! I mean, why did the discs fade 10 years ago anyway, it's obviously because of broadband, etc". And that's true. However, I would say that having it on a disc there got me to try things that I'd probably never have bothered to download, if I had to go look up each demo individually and choose to download it; even if I wasn't going to download that demo, having it on a disc in front of me made me more likely to want to try the game. I know PCG said they will still have a downloadable supplement to replace the disc, hopefully this will keep that tradition but hopefully with a bit more content than the single-cd discs have been able to for many years now.
Anyway, I hope that PCG's changes go well. I'd like to think that there's still a place for a dedicated PC gaming magazine, even today. It's a solid magazine, too; the 5-page article this month on how the adventure game genre could be improved was pretty interesting, for example, and in last month's issue PCG refused to go for the overdone DNF-bashing and gave the game an 80%.
So every 3-4 years another one of these movies is pumped out. What's the deal with this? It's a VERY specific idea for a "genre". I'm really sick of people switching bodies due to some tiki curse or whatever only to find out just how "hard" the other person has it.
Just once I'd like the twist ending to be that only ONE of them learns that lesson, the other person actually WAS completely right about their life being harder than the first person (let's say a citizen of Somalia changing places with a busy American business man). No seriously, if another medical drama tries to tell me "everyone has problems" as though all problems are equal and the lesson is apparently "suck it up and stop complaining"...
