On the end of PlayStation disks

Sony recently announced that they are going to cease all production of physical disks for the PS5 in 2028.  Given that they are a market leader, and given the overhead of producing physical disks and cartridges that I am sure most game companies would be happy to do away with altogether, this means that within a few years production of physical media for new games is likely to be dead in the water.  Damien Schubert over at Zen of Design has a thought provoking piece up about why he is perfectly ok with it.  He certainly makes a lot of interesting points. 

There are even two points I completely agree with.  First off, it's not as if you can really fit a modern game on a disk anyway, at least not something like Call of Duty and other mainstream titles from major developers.  It’s been true for some time that the disk is basically a large security key. You pop in the disk, and then your console proceeds to download anything up to a tenth of a terabyte of data.  Hell, I sometimes even get annoyed that I have to put the disk into my PS5 to run a game that's already installed on the local drive.  I also agree with “screw GameStop”  and how they deal with used games.  If you have ever shopped there, there is a good chance you agree.

However, that's about where my agreement ends.  I am a huge fan of the secondary market because I am a game collector, both modern and vintage.  It's perhaps ironic because, as I stated in my last post, when I sit down to play anything 90% of the time it's purchased digitally and installed on my PC.  But I still love collecting games.  I have a ton of consoles in my closet that come out when I have a wild hair.  I also love hunting for bargains and things I meant to own back in the day but still don't.  I once bought a Genesis just so I could play a copy of Shadowrun I found in a used game store.  Had a hell of a lot of fun with it too.  Hunting at flea markets, thrift stores, and in local retail spaces that look a lot like Game X-change has always been an important part of my life.  For me personally, a console where I can’t go shopping for bargains on used games may as well not exist. This all but ensures that the PS5 will be the last console from Sony I own.* 

Now there is another side to this coin of course.  A game developer makes exactly zero dollars on a game you buy at a flea market.  Game developers in general are also really struggling.  The market here in the US is going through a major contraction.  But I think, perhaps unfairly, that the side of the coin that has consumers on it is more important overall.  If you aren’t an owner you are a renter. Part of ownership is being able to sell something if you wish.  

From an overall societal perspective, I think the good that comes from being able to buy something and own it forever supersedes the pennies a game developer might make if people are forced to wait for major bargains on gaming platforms like the PlayStation network.  I personally never buy a game at full price, whether I get it digitally or via physical media.**  If a developer really needs my $1 when I buy a game for $10 five years after it comes out, or even the $1 of 10,000 of me in aggregate, they have bigger issues they need to tackle than whether people are bypassing digital storefronts via the used game market.  An indie studio might very well need that.  But the used game market also doesn't affect small indie studios that might actually need 1/5 of the low-end annual salary of a developer because they don't usually do physical releases in the first place.

Another argument I see over and over again is "Well digital media formats change, and media degrades over time anyway."  There is a lot of truth  in the first part of that argument.  In the PC space especially, there has been a constant blur of formats.  I had a ton of stuff on media like floppy disks and zip disks I threw out years ago (some to my slight regret if I'm honest).  Consoles have also changed formats often enough over time, at least the ones from Nintendo, to require you to either have one in a closet or buy a special reader at some point so you can use the game data with an emulator.  However, regardless of whether it's easy, once I own a game I absolutely can play it if I really want to.  More importantly, I can gift it or sell it if I wish.  The vintage gaming market is expanding over time as geezers like me enter our peak earning years.  More and better ways to access all that vintage media are coming online all the time.  

The second part of the argument always completely baffles me.  While I know that disk rot is a really thing, I personally have almost never been affected by it.  Literally the only instance I can remember was some data on a writable CD.  While I acknowledge that disk rot exists, from my experience it is insanely rare. Certainly I would say the idea that professionally produced digital media fails with any kind of regularity is a complete myth. I have never had a physical disk fail if it worked when I purchased it, and I have an absolutely enormous collection of CDs, DVDs, and Blue Rays. I also recently watched a Godzilla movie on a 35 year old VCR tape. Air conditioned storage space, low humidity, done.

Finally, for me this is all embedded in much larger issues.  Over time it is becoming clear that buying access to something online means basically nothing.  I am sure you have all read about or experienced "purchases" getting yanked on a platform like Amazon.  I personally lost access to more than $200 worth of albums I bought on iTunes during the period when they were selling everything using a proprietary format that only iTunes can play and only if you pass a license check.  Without going into detail, in the early 2000s I wasn't all that great at keeping track of various digital accounts and I moved a hell of a lot. The work e-mail that would let me reset the account I bought them on hasn't existed for more than a decade, and by the time a PC change made me realize I had lost access it was already a done deal.  If I were willing to sit on a phone for upwards of an hour, perhaps I could fix it.  But I have been replacing any albums from that era with CDs anyway, so I haven't yet bothered.  Regardless, many of those albums I "bought" I essentially no longer own.

However, it's not just about digital media to me.  Digital media rights is part of the much larger issue of business interests pushing hard to turn us into a society of renters, rather than owners.  An owner only gives you money once, a renter gives you money potentially as long as they live.  In part because of this, from the full functionality of the absurdly expensive cars we buy to the roofs over our heads, it is becoming harder and harder to really own anything.  

Digital media is one of the few areas where it's still easy to push back on that trend. I personally have cut back on subscriptions and funneled the money I save into blue ray and DVD purchases.  I also seem to be far from the only one thinking along these lines.  Some manufacturers of physical media have seen increases in sales of more than 10,000% recently.   And then here comes Sony, taking an axe to one of the major pillars of that movement.  

I certainly can see both sides of the issue.  But on the balance, I am not a fan of Sony's move.

*Perhaps the last console altogether after the Switch 2, whihc I have been eyeing

**Project Gorgon excepted, and I really just wanted to hand the studio money.  I rebought the game, which I already had access to from Kickstarter, through Steam and bought the supporter's pack on top of that.