The physical games debate is a distraction

TLDR; You are buying digital for quite a while now without knowing it, the used games market being the only real casualty here, while your discs rot away on your shelves and nostalgia blinds us from asking for the right remedy: DRM-free digital

Sony just announced they would cease physical games production at the end of 2027, which means they won’t produce physical disc releases of games which you can buy at brick-and-mortar retailers and put on your shelf at home – and people are losing their shit about it.

It hits deep with a large portion of the gaming world, as people are having nostalgic feelings towards physical releases. They evoke fond memories of Christmas evenings, ripping the shrink wrap off cartridge boxes and losing themselves in imaginary worlds and great adventure.
And I totally get it, really. I was there.

But we have to separate nostalgia from the practical problem at hand, if we want to effectively protect our hobby and preserve the memory of our shared experiences.
I think it’s about time to take a sober look at the lie we were sold and then put on our shelves at home: the physical disc.

Some background

When it comes to console gaming, we are always talking about a piece of proprietary hardware (custom-made systems, running locked-down operating systems) that is more of an appliance than a general purpose computer. The benefit to the manufacturer is that they can (A) sell you this system at cost or even at a loss (because they know you won’t be able to do anything with it other than playing games) and (B) you have to buy those games from them, no one else.

If either of those points would be circumventable, the whole system would fall apart. If you could run arbitrary code on it, people would have access to hardware priced below market value which they could run Linux on, do office work and browse the web. Companies would buy these things in truck-loads and deploy them for their workers and in turn, the companies selling them would be bankrupt. This is why these systems are locked-down not only in hard- and software but also through legal means which prevent tampering with it.

Purchasing and running games from 3rd party platforms is another threat console makers face, so they made sure this is also prohibited through the same software and legal means. For years though, they relied on retail stores to distribute their games to players, simply because fast and reliable internet connections were not the norm and the player base was used to shop for games offline. The retailers were getting a cut of the price and this model worked out well for everyone, for a while at least.

Looking at the situation from the console makers’ perspective, the retailers cut must have always been a thorn in their side. They made sure the system was locked down and they had the content ready, yet they were dependent on a middleman to make it work.
So over the years they slowly started sidestepping retailers.

Digital distribution does of course have tremendous benefits. You can shop from home, the game you want to buy will never be sold out and game updates just magically arrive through your chimney. But it took a while to change people’s shopping habits and required some tricks along the way, like offering the hardware cheaper if it came without a disc drive. If the console makers are to be believed, we are now sitting at about 70% of games being sold digitally and they are now ready to call it.

The era of physical is over

The story is not complete though. Over the last few years there have been two trends happening that were largely driven by practical realities, not financial incentives. At least not directly.

Number one: Games have gotten bigger, so big in fact, that games were just not fitting on a single disc anymore. These physical copies were basically just license keys used to download the actual game over the internet when the disc was put into a console. The whole game was never on that disc.

Number two: A lot of games are not finished when the discs get made, they are more like bananas you buy a little green and watch them ripen at home. First-day updates are pretty much the norm for big titles these days and they often look nothing like their launch versions two years down the road.

So our games are in fact digitally distributed for a while now, they just kept cosplaying physical release in their blue or green plastic jackets, giving us the illusion of ownership.

This brings us to the last bastion to actually fall in this war: the used games market.

The end of the used games market

Another annoyance for console makers and publishers alike is our ability to ruin a possible sale for them with physical games: the option to hand over one of our games to a friend or buyer. It’s worse for them than a retail-sale, they don’t even get a cut.

I have no data on this, but I can imagine that the outcome of the destruction of this market is going to be a huge win for console makers. Not every former second hand sale will convert into a new game sale, but it gives the console makers a tighter grip on squeezing the money out of customers in a predictable, data-driven way.

We have seen this play out on Steam for a while: Games are running through a steady funnel of ever deeper discounts, scraping the bottom of the barrel by offering the game to the interested portion of the player base at every price point, over time. This strategy needs time, borrowing or a second hand sale interrupts it.

Also say good-bye to every game borrowed from the public library, a public service surprisingly few people make use of, but which is a highlight for some kids who otherwise would be unable to afford those games. This is in my opinion the saddest part of this whole move to digital. When used games cease to exist and new games rise in price, an increase in inequality is inevitable.

As a father of two, I can attest to the forces already pushing kids towards free to play games: when kids on the schoolyard meet from different social backgrounds, the lowest common denominator is always free to play, with all the predatory tracking and dark patterns included. Looking at you Roblox.

“Ownership” with an expiration date

Even if physical games on discs would stay around forever, there are threats to this model I hear people rarely talk about and which are only on the minds of a few collectors.

Disk rot. It can happen as quickly as after 20 years, even for professionally pressed discs. Your copy of Unreal Tournament 2004, the one that sits on your shelf behind you, do you really still have it? Sure about that?

Console obsolescence. If your console dies, all the games in your collection become unplayable, at least legally. You might fire up an emulator and rip your games to a computer (actually advisable, check out OmniDrive) but otherwise you’ll have to find another (working) console, which will get trickier over time.

Physical things die, it’s the nature of things.

The one true remedy people are too afraid to ask for

There is only one type of media with the potential to last forever: DRM-free digital.
A DRM-free copy can be played without circumventing copyright measures, without contacting online-servers (which will go away eventually) for licenses and if stored redundantly will even survive a disk-crash.
It allows for game preservation and gives games the chance to become part of our cultural heritage.
And when you leave this world, you can pass your collection on to your children.
This is true ownership.

Very few people are asking for DRM-free digital outright. The reason, I believe, is that against the current status quo this looks like overreach, an unattainable goal, shooting for the stars. There is collective hesitation.
But I believe with campaigns like “Stop killing games” as well as the “Right to repair” movement, the Overton window is starting to shift and “you’ll own nothing and be happy” will never come to pass.

Right now, only GOG offers DRM free games to customers and the platform even has a program under which they keep old games alive by making sure they can still be played now and in the future.
GOG shows that selling DRM-free games is possible and they seem to have convinced quite a few unlikely partners to work with them. Here is hoping that we are being ushered into an era, where owning games is not an exception but the norm.