It’s time for a “Right To Own” law for games
Yesterday Sony announced that PlayStation games will no longer be available on physical discs after January 2028. Just last week it was revealed that physical editions of GTA 6 will just be empty boxes with a download code inside. Take these two pieces of news together with Nintendo’s introduction of Game-Key Cards and the direction of the games industry becomes clear.
We’re trending towards a time when all video games, even for home consoles, will be digital-only.
You might be wondering what the problem with that is. After all, PC gamers are perfectly happy to run all their games digital-only through Steam or Itch. Heck, with a couple of exceptions all Chequered Ink games are digital-only.
There are two major issues here: lack of ownership and a lack of preservation.
These days the whole entertainment industry is trending away from ownership to renting. We used to buy music on physical albums and films on video or DVD. You could listen to them or watch them whenever you like, for as long as you like. If you got bored of it, or you needed to claw some money back in, you could sell a CD or DVD second-hand for someone else to enjoy. Now we have Spotify and Netflix, where you pay monthly and you own nothing.
It’s the same with games. A physical video game is owned by you, to be used whenever you like, and you can lend or sell it to anyone you want. If physical copies cease to exist, or just contain a download key, you are left owning nothing. You can only play the game yourself, for as long as the digital store allows you to access your games – which brings us to the next problem.
Physical copies of games, whether cartridges or CDs, last ages. If you’ve still got 40 year-old carts from your NES there’s a good chance they’re working. As long as you have the physical copy of the game and a working console you can play it forever. If it breaks – there’s some chance you can even fix it.
Digital copies of games will be lost, there’s no doubt about it. Games are getting bigger and storage space is limited. These days we are encouraged to delete the games we already have to make space for new ones!
What happens to your Game-Key Card of Pokémon Pokopia when Nintendo decides to shut down the eShop for Nintendo Switch, like they did with the shops on Wii, Wii U and 3DS? It becomes a useless flake of plastic, that’s what happens.
Digital games will not last 40 years into the future like physicals – you’ll be lucky if they last 10.
The big console manufacturers at Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are not going to save the day. They’ll argue digital is cheaper to produce and that it’s what consumers want (which may be true to some extent). Privately they’re content to destroy the second-hand market and take full control over when, where and how you buy their games.
The solution must come in the form of new laws, giving us the Right to Own, based on the same principles behind Right to Repair laws.
Before the Right to Repair movement kicked off, big tech companies like Apple and Samsung made it difficult to repair their devices without paying them to do it for you. Increasingly, Right to Repair laws are forcing big tech companies to make their devices easier and cheaper to repair.
We need to approach the death of physical games with the same pro-consumer mindset.
If you buy a video game, even a digital copy, you should own it forever. Following this simple principle, publishers and manufacturers should be forced to provide the means to preserve your own games. For example, such a law could stipulate that:
Companies must provide a method by which consumers can back up the game in a playable format (like being able to store the game file on a USB or SD Card).
Games backed up in this way must be DRM-free, so that players can access them even if the digital store goes offline.
If the game becomes unavailable for purchase through digital stores, players should be allowed to redistribute these copies however they see fit.
Yeah, sure, it seems like forcing companies to make it so that users can endlessly produce DRM-free copies of their games might introduce open season for pirates. But here’s the thing: it almost certainly won’t.
It has always been possible to pirate music by copying tapes, CDs and MP3s, and some people do. But most people don’t, and never did, and the big record companies are still here thriving. Same with films, TV shows and yes, video games.
Anyone who buys a DRM-free game on itch.io could share it with whoever they want – the door is wide open for video game piracy already, but consumers aren’t as evil as companies want you to think. Most people are happy to support developers by paying for games, and in quantities large enough to sustain the industry.
It’s extremely easy to pirate old NES and GameBoy games, but Nintendo still sold millions of copies of “Virtual Console” games on Wii, Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. People are still paying extra for the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack to access Nintendo 64 games.
Piracy is a non-issue, based on the gut-feelings of publishers. People who want to spend money on your game will buy it, people who don’t won’t.
If the games industry bigwigs want to phase out physicals, they’re going to have to give us ways to truly own and preserve the games we buy. If they won’t do that willingly, we’re going to need laws to force them (and fast).
germansingergirl
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