The VGBees Interview: Phil Salvador, Library Director at Video Game History Foundation

Yeah, that's great.

All right.

Let's switch gears a little bit to maybe some broader issues.

I'd love to dig into, listen, we didn't plan it this way.

Maybe we could have seen it coming.

I don't know.

That's maybe a different conversation.

But of course, if you listen to the BGB's podcast this past week, We did cover extensively the move that Sony has announced that they're going to be discontinuing discs.

This is kind of the end of physical media.

A lot of reporting out there suggesting Xbox will probably follow suit.

Of course, what they did absolutely follow suit in doing is initiate an expected group of layoffs that was roughly triple the size of actually what I even expected it to be, which is brutal.

News today even dropping, not that this is a news podcast.

We didn't have to get into it.

But id Software totally decimated.

They're going to have to be switching to Unreal Engine, which is...

The silliest thing you could possibly do.

Insulting on levels I can't really even conceptualize yet.

I need, like, another 24 hours to maybe gather my thoughts on that.

But in this 10-day span...

We can talk about, again, the predictability of all of this, but we have more or less stamped an end date on physical disc media when it comes to having stuff on Blu-ray or DVD or whatever.

Obviously, I can predict how you feel about this, but tell me in your own words how you kind of feel about these moves.

This is what we said in the statement we put out, but weirdly, it has not hit me as hard as it has for a lot of people.

I

think from a preservation angle, it doesn't make as much of an impact as you'd expect, because obviously, a physical thing, you can put it on a shelf.

That is very important, but think as we said it's like at this point most games are not physical releases um right when they do get them i was thinking about was it i want to say it was shadow of the tomb raider where like the version of the game they put on the disc has a completely different ending than the game that it was like got a day one release so it's like oftentimes it's not even representative of what eventually consumers end up playing and blah blah so you know a lot of where my brain has been a lot of this has been Um, thinking about like, okay, how, what, how do we deal with the digital stuff that like, if, you know, it's almost like a practical, like, okay, if physical media is coming to an end, if this is realistically what's going to happen, how do we deal with this digital stuff? Uh, and of course the industry doesn't really have a good response to that.