There’s been some recent changes and news around the gaming industry, but also touches on the larger media landscape. A lot of is genuinely infuriating and there’s little i can do but just sit there and watch it unfold. I’ve already had a crashout in discussions with friends and people online, so this is more me trying to work out the bullshit that just went down and the larger picture. Because i don’t think this is going in the right direction.
Sony just announced yesterday that they would stop producing physical discs for games for the PlayStation consoles starting in January 2028. Just days earlier they had also announced removing over 500 movies and tv-shows from the PlayStation Store and peoples libraries, despite them having purchased those movies and shows.
In even more fun news, reports that came out today suggest that Xbox’s next console will also likely be disc-less as well.
That’s just in the last week. If you look back at just this year alone, Microsoft decided to close down Arkane Studios, shut down a number of games being planned or already in development. They’re also having mass layoffs that are kickign off in just a few days time. Meanwhile, the gaming industry has been seeing mass layoffs left and right. Bungie, along with largely shutting down Destiny 2, has kicked a large number of folks across the company and Ubisoft was not far behind in announcing its own round of layoffs.
Because of supply-chain issues across the tech-sector, impacting both the gaming industry and overall hardware sales, we’re also seeing significant increases in the price of consoles. Hell, the PS5 is now more expensive years down the line than when it launched! Xbox series will also see a new price point that’s higher than its launch price as well.
That’s without even going into the massively hyped release of the Steam Machine, Valve’s latest mini-PC meant to serve as a living-room gaming alternative to your usual PCs. While initially expected, and mentioned, as likely coming in around “typical” console price points, the final launch price came in at a much higher $1049, with Valve likely not trying to sell this at a loss at this stage. That’s a lot higher than some initial gaming consoles prices, but perhaps an unsurprising one considering the RAM and GPU issues across the industry.
None of this has been great, and it’s clear looking around that a lot of this just seems to be the gaming industry undergoing a very painful period right now. Companies are trying to cut costs, cover their margins, and be more profitable. But it also feels like there’s more than that.
Taking a step back and trying to look at the bigger picture, it seems that this is instead just part of larger and more visible patterns of this unwieldy beast that is the media industry. It feels like watching a wounded beast having bolted out of its enclosure speeding away to the wilderness.
There is no putting a stop to this beast though, it’s escaped and we’re just watching it all unfold.
To me, this is our 3.6 rontgoen moment. Just the hurt we can measure right now, but the damage is wider and we just can’t see it yet.
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Truth be told, me and physical media have never had a great relationship. I travel a lot, but i also tend to lose things frequently too. These don’t make for a great duo. My relationship with physical media has been fraught for a long time. A disc or box takes up space in my baggage that i often can’t afford to lose. I already carry a PS5, a controller, associated cables, two HDDs, my homelab device, and a number of smaller digital and electrical items for convenience. Even when i’ve carried those physical media items with me, whether it’s a BluRay or a PS5 game, the likelihood of still having that same item a year from now is pretty much nil.
Going for digital games and streaming services has been a great boon for me. I still keep a handful of physical discs of games and movies in a storage somewhere, but that’s more out of sentimentality than anything. That said, i am greatly appreciative of the fact that i do keep them as such. I don’t need to concern myself with whether or not those things will be on this or that platform or whether i’ve paid the latest subscription to some service. That’s the whole point.
I’m not bothered by the idea of digital items replacing physical media at all, but rather that we’re losing the sense of ownership. We’re not buying something online any more, we’re just paying for a license. A license as has been proven in multiple ways and as this Sony news has recently shown us, that license can be withdrawn at any time and what you’ve paid for is no longer available to you.
As Sony’s deal with StudioCanal has shown, these things will just be removed from your account. No refunds.
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We’re also seeing this shift from physical software and items to fully digital in so many places as well. I tried to get some numbers from various sources using Claude, and the numbers tell a pretty dire set of numbers.
Apparently, while i’m surprised by this to some degree, others have been expecting something like this. The Video Game History Foundation, champions of video game preservation, pretty much confirm that they don’t see this as a surprise at all.
So while this Sony announcement and move to digital may be a predictable state of affairs, the foundation at least is keeping up their work in preservation in other ways. In recenr years they fought for a DMCA exemption that would let libraries and museums legally preserve and provide access to these digital-only games. The US Copyright Office denied that in 2024, after the ESA — the industry’s own trade group — lobbied against it. And this is the part that infuriates me so fucking much: These companies make moves to kill physical access, then act shocked when asked what preservation is supposed to look like without it, while actively opposing the legal mechanism that would let anyone else solve the problem that they created in the first place!
Certainly, just writing this out annoys me to no end. Maybe i’m just at the anger stage of the grief process. Others seems to have made it somehow to the acceptance part. I’m seeing so many comments on articles and subreddits about these changes and many of them are just… resigned.
There’s comments laying out how this was also something that was still a thing in the disc-era, that you never really owned those either. It was just that it was much harder to remove a license that is tied to a physical disc. Others mention how this is now also going to make it incredibly difficult for people who rely on libraries to borrow or rent games and movies, or don’t have a reliable internet connection at home to be able to buy or browse from these digital stores.
That’s without even going into this other hoo-haa around the movie and tv-show industries, the physical releases of those things, and the lack of reliability of streaming platforms to maintain a library that you can subscribe to.
I don’t want the games that i love and have paid for not to be mine. I paid the money for it, i expect it to be mine. There shouldn’t be an expectation that you’ll lose access to The Office, which is your comfort watch, from one platform to another just because of some corporate deals. You shouldn’t have to subscribe to a whole other service because that is no longer available on the one platform that you signed up to because they were the only place legally available to you to watch on.
I’m an old hand at this internet thing. I’m not going to not pretend like many others who grew up alongside me at the burgeoning of the internet that i didn’t engage in some piracy of media; whether it was burning it to CDs via Windows Music Player or downloading some sketchy MP3s via Limewire to play on my Winamp. Some of those habits haven’t entirely gone away either. I’ve travelled the seven seas from to time when i’ve not been able to legally access things i’d be otherwise happy to pay for.
But there is a truth to the modern adage of pirates; If buying isn’t owning, then piracy is not theft.
I’ll make no bones about it, i have and will continue to pirate if given no alternative to owning and having access to the things i pay for. I’m not going to let the media that i pay for and care about be lost just because it’s another line in someone’s corporate licensing negotiations. If my media is going to be digital, it’ll be in a way that i have control over.
In the meantime, i will be making as much effort as i can in the months and years to come to preserve the media that i care for physically. Maybe it means that the small storage space i currently pay for becomes a bigger one. Maybe they’ll show up wherever i end up calling home. But at least they’ll be mine and available.