This week brought the news that Sony will stop selling physical PlayStation games at the start of 2028. Not just for their own games, but third-party, too. Here in the world of PC gaming, we’ve largely been without physical game releases for yonks now, but this move by Sony has stirred up some discussion at RPS. Mainly, is this a big deal or, as ever, a sign of the consoles lazily trudging after the path carved on PC?
James: Right. So. My only initial thought, in terms of what this means for us PC lot, is that I could smugly indulge in the kind of misery-loves-company mockery that Keith David uses to welcome people to Hell. But then I’m no expert on game preservation, and can’t recall ever losing access to a digital game myself, so I wonder: are we actually already in Hell, or is it not really a big deal, or am I simply incapable of perceiving the games world that exists beyond the tip of my nose? Honestly, I would welcome the perspective of a grownup.
Julian: The past six months have been filled with steady reminders of what I’ve ceded to companies whose interests I’ve no control over.
In April, I received an email from Amazon telling me my Kindle would no longer be able to download books from the online library. Despite being nearly 15 years old, my Kindle works perfectly well, yet Amazon were simply switching off access to my more than 1,000 books. If I wanted to keep reading the books I’ve bought, I would need to buy a newer model. Even with the 20% discount code they sent me, a new device (without built-in ads) was going to be more than £80. (I got a refurbished one on ebay because fuck Bezos).
I’ve also been discovering just how much of my old work has been deleted from the internet. I used to be the news editor for Kotaku UK, a site that was shut down when Future Publishing decided not to renew the license with Gawker. Years of work gone. I worked for GAMINGbible, a site that’s still in rude health, but it looks like everything I wrote for them has been deleted to improve the site’s SEO. The very first site I ever worked for (alongside James, as it happens), BeefJack, has also gone without a trace. There’s a measure of vanity to this – I want my work to exist – but it also makes it harder to reference past history, resurface quotes from old interviews, or even see what I’ve said about a game in the past.
I’ve little nostalgia for physical media. I’ve a few games in old DVD cases, a big cardboard box or two, but most of them I chucked between house moves over the years. In several cases, I tried using an old game disc and found it was easier to just rebuy the game on GOG than get it working. (Looking at you, Mafia: City of Lost Heaven.) I’m not just pro digital libraries, I’m all for the convenience of cloud gaming, the less stuff I can have in my small flat the better. Or, at least, that was my thinking. But in a year where I’m realising how little control I have over things I’ve bought or work I’ve produced, and where so many companies are collapsing and turning off their servers, or changing the deal you made with them when they were shiny and new and their bank accounts were in the black, I’m going to have to examine my thinking.
There is no indication that Valve are in trouble, but if they were to come under pressure or strain – financial or political – and they dropped games from their library, changed my access to them, or simply disappeared altogether, I would lose a collection of games I have built over years. And, many of those games were either never available physically or would be hard to come by. So far, when Valve have stopped selling game, such as Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock, if you already bought the game you can still download it. But if you missed the boat, there’s no legal way to get hold of it. The other Sony news that’s got a lot less attention is that they’re also closing the PS3 and PS Vita stores. There are whole swathes of games, particularly on Vita, that will become simply unobtainable without an active store.
So, yeah, people on consoles may just be catching up to where we’ve been on PC for years, but maybe it just highlights how far we’ve been willing to stick our heads in a trap. Rather than say, ‘Come on in, the metal teeth are lovely and cool’, we should question if there’s a way to take back control.
Mark: As someone who only graduated to doing most of my game playing on PC once I decided that I fancied getting to mess about with mods more than I did making the jump from PS4 to PS5 as soon as the latter came out, my relationship with physical media’s grown very strange. Upon switching from console, I went from a fairly even split between buying discs and digital copies, having grown up solely on the former across a PS2 and PS3, to having to be cool buying everything digitally. I just sort of did it. Things might have been different if I’d grown up playing physical games on PC or had the spare cash to invest in a disc drive as part of buying my first PC.
So, here I sit, the owner of many PlayStation games on disc, but only a few early 2000s hand-me-downs from my dad on disc for PC and likely no easy way to play the latter. I still like buying physical media. The PS5 I eventually bought once its price looked palatable enough (remember the pre-RAM crisis days when that happened) now mainly serves a way for me to play DVD and Blu-Ray discs when I want to watch the odd movie or TV boxset I’ve picked up in town, unless I’m keen to fire up a game like the original Wreckfest that I’ve never bought a duplicate copy of for PC.
As such, the most immediately obvious way Sony doing away with discs hurts me is that I might have to buy whatever the equivalent of an actual DVD player would be if film formats change to something my PS5 can’t handle further down the line. I still sometimes dust off my older PlayStations and slap a disc into their drives, and it’s always nice to think that the copy of The Simpsons Hit and Run I’m firing up is about as close as I’ve got to my own family heirloom at this point.
That’s how things are for me at the moment. I don’t feel like I’ve ever really made a conscious choice to abandon physical games, more that I’ve adapted and moved with the world – well, the companies running it – around me as it’s done so. It feels disturbingly normal. I guess I’m just used to having to roll with the punches, for better or worse.
Edwin: I’m entirely comfortable with the long-protracted final death of discs as long as it goes hand-in-hand with the free circulation and archiving of videogames on the internet, unobstructed by arbitrary delistings, TOS changes, DRM software, and other commercial-legal mechanisms – including, the absolutely unrestricted right to burn things I’ve bought onto discs and other offline storage formats, if I so choose. If we could organise some officially sanctioned way of giving away or reselling licenses for games we’ve bought to other players, that would be awesome too. While I’m at it, I would like to live in the Magic Sherbet Kingdom and swim in the Lemonade Sea. Lol! Lmao!
I do have some sentimental fondness for discs and physical media generally. The crates over my desk are full of shoeboxes of heavily sellotaped PSP games. I’ve got all these horrible smeary plastic sachets of unboxed DS cartridges – like taster bags of dope, but it’s actually uncut Etrian Odyssey and Elite Beat Agents. The majority of these games are review copies, so my collection is also a record of my career.
I grew up during the internet’s infancy, when the idea of downloading a whole videogame felt like science fiction. I think I learned about 70% of what I know about economics from the PS1 trade-in market, as may be evident from my repeated attempts to write Business News. I’d go down to Gamestation with the last game I’d completed, and try to swap it for something I thought would retain a decent trade value in a month’s time. Affordability aside, the trade-in section often harboured a more interesting, eclectic selection of games than you’d see in New Releases.
As James and Julian note above, both PC and console gaming have been digital-centric for many years. This horse has long since flown. In many ways, of course, this has been positive: manufacturing and shipping discs and cartridges has a higher carbon cost than downloading, though downloading is far from emissions-free. There are, in theory, fewer middlemen: anybody can distribute a game without having to convince a retailer to shelve it. In practice, there are still plenty of monetary and institutional barriers, including those imposed by payment networks and stores with effective monopolies. Digital platforms have unheard-of control over culture generally. An influential artwork like P.T. can become unavailable, because somebody wanted to leave open the possibility of an expensive re-release in 20 years time.
Even in the age of mandatory day-one updates, physical storage media offers some security against this, but I think it’s better to push for proper legal or structural measures to protect art against erasure by the profit motive, than mourn the ability to buy new games on discs. I guess the primary thing I take from consoles going discless is that I need to do a better job of reporting on spaces for sharing and preserving games that exist outside the realm of Steam and co, including emulation communities and the ever-thorny topic of piracy.