Memories fade. (Off-Topic)

by ShadowOfTheVoid , South Carolina, Thursday, September 25, 2014, 09:59 (3502 days ago) @ RC

The experience, the memories, the time you spent, the joy, the pain, the frustration, the elation, the sense of challenge, the skills you gained, the friends you made, all while playing games - no one can ever, ever take those away from you. Those are the things with real value.

Yes, those memories have value, but they fade over time. There's lots of things I remember enjoying from my youth, but I can't even begin to tell you why, or what happened in the show I watched or the game I rented. When you have something that's yours that you can keep forever, you can keep making new memories with it, just like I can with my old consoles.

Tickets to the cinema, to sports fixtures, concert tickets, TV subscriptions etc. When those end - under your way of thinking - people walk away with 'nothing' as well. Obviously that's not true. Obviously those experiences still have value in and of themselves.

I'm not much of a sports person, and I've only been to a single concert (Aerosmith, Oct. 1, 1993). With movies and most scripted TV shows, those can be bought on a physical format. TV on DVD has been a thing for a good while. I have that option available to me. If console gaming ditches discs and goes the Steam route, I won't have that option.

That said, you just need to re-assess the value proposition from a Games-As-A-Service or Subscription-Based or Reliant-On-3rd-Party-Services games: "Will I get an experience of sufficient quality and length to justify the asking price before it is no longer accessible to me?"

In a lot of cases, I think the answer to that question is still going to be yes.

My answer will still be "no." The idea of spending a non-trivial amount of money on something that doesn't belong to me and can be taken away at a moment's notice does not jibe well with me, especially with consoles since they're so transient. They're released in intervals of 4-6 years and are rarely supported for more than ten years. Would I have been satisfied with my older consoles being rendered unplayable after Nintendo, Sega, or Sony dropped support? Not a chance.