If games stop being actual physical product, then I'm out. (Off-Topic)

by ShadowOfTheVoid , South Carolina, Wednesday, September 24, 2014, 18:07 (3503 days ago) @ rliebherr
edited by ShadowOfTheVoid, Wednesday, September 24, 2014, 19:04

I believe very strongly in being able to actually own physical property. A house, a car, clothing, furniture, electronics, and other durable goods, including video games. According to U.S. law, physical copies of books, movies, records, and console games are my property and I can keep them forever or I can dispose of them in any manner I see fit, either by selling, lending, gifting, or using them as clay pigeon substitutes. Of course, when video games (and the other aforementioned forms of entertainment) are not in a physical format, we run into trouble. Now, the problem with digital copies is that in current American jurisprudence, digital copies are not considered the property of the purchaser and thus are not subject to the first-sale rule. The fixed, tangible nature of a physical copy is what in U.S. law makes them subject to ownership and what confers first-sale rights to the owner of said copy. In other words, physical copies are considered "sold, not licensed" while digital copies are "licensed, not sold."

In addition to ownership issues, there are some very worrying concerns about the permanence of digital content. What guarantee is there that this digital content will still be accessible to me once the servers are finally shut down? Let's just say hypothetically that next generation is all-digital and someone's digital library of PS5 games gets lost because their hard drive crashes, but this is in 2030, a couple of years after the PS5 is supported (assuming it launches in 2018 and is supported for a decade). They can't re-download their games again. All that money spent and they have nothing to show for it. All those games lost forever. Also, there is some very worrying precedent for companies removing digital content from people's machines after they had purchased it, for games and other media. See here, here, and here.

The situation with streaming is even worse as you don't even have a digital copy that could outlast the shutdown of the servers. If the servers go down, forget being able to watch or play anything. And when the servers inevitably get shut down for good for whatever reason, that's the end of that. You ever have a video you like on Youtube get pulled, or a show or movie you like get pulled from Netflix or Hulu? Imagine if that were Grand Theft Auto IX or Halo 7 or Uncharted 6 or Mario Kart 9. I hope you got your money's worth.

Meanwhile, a disc is permanent barring its physical destruction and is not dependent on bits stored on a hard drive and downloaded or streamed from some server, and even if the disc does get destroyed, another copy can in principle be obtained because there are many others like it that exist in the world. The physical copy is not hindered by hard drive crashes or server shut downs; the data still exists on the physical copy and it doesn't simply vanish into the aether because a server gets shut down or the company that made it goes out of business.

Destiny exists in some shadowy area just on the outskirts of packaged physical media. My copy of Destiny that currently resides in the disc drive of my PS4 is mine. I paid my $60, and if I ever get sick of it and want to get rid of it I can because it belongs to me. I don't have to pay a subscription fee, either, unlike you have to do with, say, Final Fantasy XIV. However, it has already demonstrated to me on three occasions that my concerns over anything completely dependent on someone else's hardware are completely justified. I got the game at the midnight launch at GameStop. I brought it home, stuck it in my PS4, and I couldn't connect to the server at all at any point that night. I couldn't even create a character. I went to bed and tried again. There was some other time at some point last week where I had trouble getting online again (I don't know if it was something on my end, on Sony's end, or on Bungie's end), and then there were intermittent server issues yesterday that kept kicking me out of the game. So, if I can't do anything at all with a game I spent $60 on if my internet goes out, or PSN goes on the fritz, or Bungie's servers are unavailable, what's going to happen when the Destiny servers inevitably get shut down? Will I have a disc that has no resale value because it has been permanently rendered useless to anybody and everybody? The fact that there's no offline mode at all worries me about my ability to keep playing this game indefinitely like I've been able to with every other game I own. When Halo 2's servers were shut down, it didn't keep me from playing Campaign or local MP. Same for when the 360's servers get shut down (likely by the end of this decade).

The idea that the video game industry as a whole could transition from a "games as product" to "games as service" model, a model that will likely be devoid of physical media, and that as a consequence of this model I not only forfeit any ownership rights and become dependent on a server owned by someone else, is quite frankly a frightening prospect. I've been a gamer for 30 years. It's been my primary hobby since I was old enough to pick up a controller. I can still crank up my NES and play Super Mario Bros. or Contra or Mega Man any time I choose. When that model of doing things goes away, well, that's the day gaming dies for me. I'll still have my older games and systems to keep me busy, but the industry cannot expect any further support from me if they ever stop treating games as an actual product.

EDIT: And this is to say nothing about the technical obstacles facing an all-digital, always-on, games-as-service model. Not only is it not desirable, but it's not feasible at this point and may not be for quite some time, but that's for another post at another time.