I've chronicled my love (OK, addiction) for Videogames on this blog time and time again. Many times I've wondered whether I'd still be playing videogames as a drooling octogenarian, clutching a joypad in my withered hands as I ventured through virtual worlds well into my old age.
Lately though, approximately 50 years after I first encountered a videogame (Pong, in a leisure centre cafe) I've been wondering if the industry's self-destructive nature and greed would see me jack it all in.
Skyrocketing hardware costs (due to my hated nemesis, the rise in the use of Gen AI) and expensive games (often just cursory 'remakes' of older titles, or cash-in IP franchises) were slowly killing my love for gaming and I've been buying fewer new games as a result. Now it seems the one game I'd been looking forward to this generation (Grand Theft Auto 6) has taken the initiative with finally doing away with physical disks, opting to provide you with a single download code in your game box, and off the back of this announcement Sony announced that they would no longer create physical disks for new releases from January 2028 onwards, ensuring that whatever the PS6 is, it won't likely ship with a physical media drive.
Two things happened right there:
1) Sony ensured that there would only ever be one place you'd buy your games from after 2028, the Playstation Store
2) You would no longer 'own' your games. You would only own them for as long as your PSN account stayed active (and anyone will tell you what a pain in the ass it is to lose access to your digital accounts, and have to jump through a lot of hoops to try and prove your previous purchases or validate your identity to get them back).
Sony's own EULA (End User License Agreement) states in clear tones that if an account is not used for 3 years, Sony reserve the right to shutter that account - permanently - at which point you will lose access to any titles you purchased under that account.
I've seen various industry reactions to the announcement about physical media entirely missing the point that "Pointlessly collecting pieces of plastic and stacking them on shelves" is somehow aberrant behaviour. Folk are all too quick to point out that they've only been buying digital purchases for years, resplendent in their smugness about their superfast broadband connections somehow allowing them to download multiple-hundred-gigabyte titles in super quick time. For me, on my meagre 300GB connection it takes all day. Fine if your country was forward-thinking enough to do a proper job of fibre to household, but not so fine if your entire network still relies on copper.
This annoyance also extends to what happens in the future when you decide you want to play your games but can't any longer, because your console is too old and is no longer supported by the company that sold it to you. Again, Sony (who really are showing their true colours here) have just shuttered the PS Vita and Playstation 3 storefronts, meaning that you've got nowhere to go to pick up your purchases for those older consoles. That really pisses me off, because nearly all of my Vita games were digital purchases and now the one sole game I bought media for (a crappy tennis game I actually got with the console) will be the only game I'll be able to play on the thing ongoing if I accidentally erase the games I've got installed.
On the PS3 things aren't too bad, because that comes from a generation of consoles where the actual game (the full game) was included on the disk you bought, and could be run or installed from the console even if it wasn't online. Sure, you'll be getting the unpatched version of that game - which again presents a problem if the game was unplayable at launch - but I guess it's better than nothing.
Recently there have been mass layoffs in the industry as the real and actual effects of all this greed begin to take their toll. Quite frankly, the reason those teams are closing is because the companies who own those developers no longer understand nor care about their consumers, and are only interested in games that follow on the tails of a well-trodden franchise (take Forza Horizon for example, a game now in its sixth iteration with barely much difference between all 5 other than a bit of 'prettying up' as the titles jump from console generation to console generation (the series started out on the Xbox 360 but Microsoft at least realised it'd sell pretty well on other consoles / platforms, so wisely released it on PS5 and Steam).
The industry can't go on like this.
Worse than that, nor can I. I've lost all love for it all, spending my spare time replaying old retro titles from 20 years ago or more (thanks to some excellent emulation possibilities afforded by the Steam Deck). I'm always careful to only emulate stuff I already own as a physical copy, and could even rip my own disks if I wanted to cover my legal ass. But there are millions of gamers out there who don't have a moral compass, and I am fairly sure the routes they'll be heading down are more nefarious, with piracy rife in the film and music industry, it doesn't take much of a leap of imagination to see the same thing eventually happening again with Videogames.
None of the current "Big three" (Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft) seem to care much about the turn of events. Nintendo's latest console, the Switch 2 was about as lazy an update as I've ever seen, again merely giving the new console just enough of a processor / graphics / memory hike to sell you the same tired old franchises "remastered".
Microsoft have killed off so many of the studios they mass-purchased in a buying frenzy that they could barely put together a decent game even if they wanted to. Their much-vaunted new console does at least look like they're working on digital preservation, with some purported new method of validating previous purchases allowing you to re-download digital versions of those titles (which for the Xbox 1 S and Xbox 360 games often involved a lengthy download on what felt like the world's slowest servers, with only certain titles offering backward compatibility in the end anyway).
It's all looking bleak. I hope I'm wrong about it all but it feels like it's time to claw all that gaming time back and do something more useful with it instead.
Comments
Post a Comment