Convenience isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I once thought it was. But I was wrong. The thing is, I come from the era of tapes. For music. For TV shows. Even for computer games. You think it’s bad now when your console decides to download an update? Try waiting 20 minutes for a game to – possibly – load from tape, before allowing you to feast on pixels so sharp they almost slice up your eyeballs. Hence, you know, me being quite glad when things sped up a bit.
Floppy disks! Shiny discs! The magic of on-demand! A hundred million songs at your fingertips. As many movies and TV shows as you could hope to consume in a lifetime. And games you can buy with the click of a button. No more traipsing out to the video game store in the rain.
Only, no, because half of that story turned out to be rubbish – specifically the part after everything went all-digital. And that’s because you don’t actually own anything – something Sony made abundantly clear this week with regard to movies, shortly before announcing you soon won’t own your video games in any meaningful sense either.
Disc-usted
The latest kick in the teeth for anyone who likes owning things is a post on the PlayStation blog. It explains that “physical disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028”. After that, new games will be “available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only”. This, Sony argues, is for your own good, because consumers “continue to shift away from physical discs to digital”.
That statement makes me want to scream “CITATION REQUIRED!” at the top of my lungs. But Sony probably has the numbers, in which case this is all merely yet another reminder of an increasingly grim future for gaming and media. However, it’s also quite something that the company announced this change during a week when it said it would nuke 551 movies from people’s libraries. These weren’t, note, streaming titles, but films that people paid good money for, assuming they’d own them indefinitely.
Fancy watching that digital copy of Paddington or – with some irony – 10 Minutes Gone? You’d best hurry before Sony warms up its delete-key prodding machine.
Code red
Sony is far from alone. Various companies have removed ostensibly owned content from libraries. During one especially on-the-nose 2009 incident, Amazon deleted copies of 1984. The thing is, people think they’re buying digital products to own forever, whereas you’re really paying for long-term rentals. Which is fine right up until a corporation bleats that licensing conditions changed or decides to shut up shop entirely.
Video games feel different, though. You can choose to buy a paper version of a book or a Blu-ray of a film. Sony is taking away the choice to own a physical version of a PlayStation game, leaving players at the company’s mercy. Again, Sony is not alone. Nintendo already sells Switch 2 Game-Key Cards. Presumably, Sony will soon also sell boxes containing little more than download codes. GTA VI will reportedly appear in that format too.
I hate this. And, sure, I get that there are reasons. Consumer habits change. Many games have ballooned in size, making discs less practical. Patches and updates mean a disc rarely gives you the ‘final’ product to own. But you know what? It still gives you something to own. Now there’s no guarantee Sony won’t one day just hit delete and vaporise half your PlayStation library.
Maybe there was something in the good old days of gaming – and those bloody awful tapes – after all.
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