Sony's recent decision to abandon the physical format for Playstation games kicked off a frenzy of hand-wringing and name-calling across the gaming media but, perhaps surprisingly, there didn't seem to be much of a reaction here in this neck of the blogosphere, other than this excellent post by Yeebo, to which I'll return later.
The main concerns I've seen revolve around three quite specific issues:
- Archival
- Income
- Ownership
The first seems like a very niche problem indeed from where I'm sitting. It pre-supposes a future in which academics are sufficiently interested in the social, cultural, technical or creative history of video games to feel they need more than a broad, historical overview. It also assumes academic institutions won't have the capacity or the will to arrange storage for themselves, outside of stockpiling commercially available disks.
We know there's already a huge problem with archiving always-online, live service and digital-only titles. It would seem Sony's opt-out from physical media just adds their future catalog to that vast, intangible pile.
You might think the onus for preservation would fall on the preservers rather than the producers, in either case. It's not as though Sony is asking for the games to be archived. I'm sure if they wanted to keep an archive of the games they've issued, they'd be perfectly capable.
The whole "Everything Must Be Preserved" attitude, which really only goes back maybe fifty or sixty years, bothers me more than the blasé "Let it all rot" attitude that preceded it. Even for the purposes of academia, representative samples and contemporary accounts usually suffice to recreate an era. Why we need to keep one of everything, in working order, like a gang of crazed, technological half-Noahs, beats me.
That may just be my lack of sympathy with the whole concept, of course. One thing that seems to have gone out of currency during my lifetime is ephemerality. We used to talk about some things being "built to last" and others being "throwaway" and pop culture was firmly in the latter category. Now it seems every last flyer and graffito must be saved for posterity.
There used to be seven day wonders and five-minute fads. There were trends that came and went. There still are, of course, but at some point we seem to have decided, collectively, to assign lasting value to them, meaning they need to be saved, cherished, preserved for future generations and studied in schools and universities.
In a way it's a welcome recognition and celebration of the work that went into creating these things as well as the pleasure and joy that came out of them. That's nice. On the other hand, it's dead-wood strewn all over the floor of the cultural forest, getting in everyone's way and stifling new growth.
It's pretty much a truism now that popular culture feeds on itself but the scavenging goes wider and deeper all the time. I'm always moaning that no music I hear any more fails to remind me of something I heard years ago. It's not old geezeritis or not just that.
Musicians wear their influences not just on their sleeves but as badges of honor. Music critics are all but incapable of describing any new song or act other than in terms of who, in the great back catalog of their memories, it most reminds them. I try not to do it myself but often I just can't help it. Everything really does sound like something else, now.
As for movies, almost all the successful ones are are either sequels or adaptations of familiar IPs from other media. Originality is almost a commercial flaw.
And games are in perhaps the worst state of all, when it comes to living off their past. Most of the most-successful games now are old. We're constantly celebrating the 10th, 20th and even 25th anniversaries of MMORPGs, but mainstream gaming is chock-full of decade-old hits that won't quit. The most ironic thing about Sony's decision is that it's not impossible that, in a hundred years' time, some of those diskless games might still be in the top twenty!
I was quite surprised to learn that developers, who put out games for Playstation, rely in part on sales of physical collectors' editions and the like. The last console I owned was the Atari 2600 and if there were any Special Edition cartridges for that, I never knew about them.
I do know something about online games, though. Digital online games. With no physical editions. All MMORPG players know about those. We have no choice. There used to be boxes but they went away. I have a whole row of them on the shelf of a bookcase next to me right now. I don't think there's anything there less than a decade and a half old.
I remember there being a good deal of angst about the end of physical media for online games. People liked their boxes. I liked my boxes. And honestly, if games came in boxes now, with manuals and posters and cloth maps, I might still buy them. They make nice keepsakes.
The question, though, is did MMORPG developers deny themselves the revenue that comes from being able to sell people a bunch of tat in a box, when they went all-digital? No, they did not!
I refer you to Daybreak's near-infamous Collectors' Editions of every expansion for the aging dinosaurs in their stable, EverQuest and EverQuest II. What were they asking for the top-end imaginary boxes last year? Let me see...
And did you get a disk for your $250? Hell, you did!
I'd call that precedent. I'd imagine any games with an actual fanbase could make out like bandits, selling digital special editions, always assuming Sony would cut them a deal. Although maybe there are console-specific technical considerations there I'm not seeing. As I said, not a console person.
But even if there are, there's always merch. Bands worked out years ago that's where the money is. Daybreak cottoned on late but they're all-in on it now. Want a mug with the symbol of your class? A poster? A mouse mat? A T-shirt? Any of the extras they might have bunged into the Collectors' Edition box, back when there was a box?
Anything, in fact, except a disk with the game on because you can't fit the fricken' game on a disk! How small would your game have to be now to fit on a single disk? EQ is ancient and quite small. The installation on my drive would fit on three DVDs. Neverness To Everness, though, would need a dozen. And what's actually going to be on these disks the archivists want to preserve?
Sorry - we covered archival already. Let's move on.
And so we come to ownership, which I'm now realizing probably ought to have a post of its own. Ironically.
That was Yeebo's main concern, I think, and so it is most peoples', for very good reason. Some very, very big businesses are hell-bent on converting the capitalist system to a quasi-feudal Lords and Peasants arrangement, where at best we're all tenant farmers on the Lord's lands and most likely we're merely digital serfs.It's not an appealing prospect although, just as it was in the middle ages, it does depend on what sort of Lord you've got lording over you. If it's the typical squeeze em 'til they bleed then feed what's left to the hounds type, you're pretty much screwed but if it's the responsible steward of the land sort you might at least hope for a quiet life with Sunday mornings off for church.
That, though, is a somewhat bad example. GeForce Now only lets me play games I already own or games I don't need to own because they're free to play anyway. It doesn't pretend to sell me games that only exist on their servers for as long as they care to keep them running. No, for that you need to go to Steam.
We all talk about our Steam libraries as games we own but ownership there is predicated on Steam a) continuing to exist and b) not morphing into something else. As everyone always says, if you want to own your games, you have to go to GOG.
But do you want to own your games? Some of them, sure. The ones you know for certain you'll play again. The rest, though? Not just the ones you bought in a sale and never played or played for an hour and didn't much like or even the ones you finished and were glad to see the back of?
Not all games have much replayability and not all of those that do actually get replayed. I can count the number of games I've replayed on the fingers of... hold on... yes, one hand.
Re-experiencing entertainment is a bit of a niche hobby anyway. Most people don't do it or that's been my impression.
I re-read a lot of books, often more than once, but when I talk about re-reading at work, in a bookshop, with people who read obsessively, nearly everyone thinks it's a downright weird thing to do. I was thinking about movies the other day. I re-watch those as well, or I used to, but I doubt there's any movie I've seen all the way through more than three times and not many of those. For most people it's once and done and then maybe once more that they didn't plan on, like when a friend drags them to see a movie they saw already.
And that's probably the right way for everyone other than the poor old professors and students who have to study this stuff. I'm in the process of clearing cruft out of my house. It's going to be a year-long job, if I'm lucky. I have a lot of comics, magazines, books, DVDs and VHS cassettes. That I own. Most of them I read or watched once, if that.
Would I have been better off to have rented them? Then rented them again, if and when I ever wanted a second go? I'd sure as hell have a lot more space in my house now. And probably more money in the bank, too, assuming a rental culture priced itself appropriately.As for games, of which I also have quite a few boxes from the old days, I was delighted when I could just download the damn things so the only space they took up was hard drive space. And even that's a pain, frankly. Cf. my current enamorment with playing the things on someone else servers.
And I'd be happy to rent. I'd prefer it, honestly. The only hard copy media I use these days are CDs for music and physical books, the former only because I have to have something to put on wish lists for birthdays and Christmas and the latter because I work in a bookshop and I get a shit-ton for free.
I'd love to drop both and go all digital. And also I wouldn't. I'd hate it.
Because physical objects feel nice and look nice. It's not about ownership for me. I really don't care about ownership all that much. I care about access but that's a different talk.
No, it's about tactility. Touching stuff is hard-wired into us. You can't touch your digital games which I'm guessing has as much to do with the furore over Sony's decision as anything else. How many people really go to Gamestop to sell their old disks or hand them on to their friends or descendants? I bet most of those disks sit on a shelf to be looked at and sometimes taken down and handled for the sheer pleasure of it.
That's what I do with my old PC games, anyway. The question is, do I miss not being able to do it with the new ones?
Hmmm.... well, I didn't until you asked me but now I'm thinking wouldn't it be nice to have a box with Neverness To Everness on the front and a cloth map of Hethereau inside that I could pin up on the wall.
As I knew before I started, there's no answer to any of this. I like it and I don't like it. I think it's important and I think it's trivial. I think we should keep everything and I think we should let it all fade away.
But what I really think is I'm glad it's not me that has to decide. Well done to Sony for pulling the plaster off. Let's just hope too much skin didn't come off with it.
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For me, I believe it's more about historical references. I recognize that tons of authors and musicians and other creators' stuff will vanish without any acknowledgement of their existence, and that saddens me. I look at books on my bookshelf and realize I can't even find about 1/2 of them in a library concerns me, because who gets to decide what lives on into posterity and what doesn't seems random at best and capricious at worst. Fifty years from now will people think we all listened to Taylor Swift in the same way it certainly seems like people of my generation believed everybody back in the 40s listened to Glen Miller and nobody else?
ReplyDeleteIn archaeological digs, the archaeologists look at graves for what people valued at the time. That might have been true then, but it certainly isn't true now. When my dad passed away, my mom put a golf club and a sweater with the university he loved in there, nothing else. No mention of his love of listening to baseball on the radio, or the religious books he read and re-read. Or even a wrench, signifying his love of cars.
I guess my concerns boil down to "Who gets to decide what is important?" Do we trust Sony and Microsoft and EA to tell the story of what is important to future generations? History may have been written by the victors --ask the Chinese about Tiananmen Square-- but I don't think that should necessarily be the case.
In exactly the same way that what's successful and popular doesn't give you much of a handle on what's good, neither does what survives tell you what used to be popular or successful. It's always sobering to go look at the Top 40 from decades ago or the Best Selling Books lists from the last couple of centuries and see name after name after name that you've never heard of. Posterity is a crap shoot.
DeleteIn most ways that matter, no-one does decide what future generations get to know about. Some things have tenacity and persistence, others don't. Some have powerful advocates, others get written out of history. Perhaps more importantly, what does and doesn't carry over tells future historians a lot more than what's in the works themselves. For example, I can tell you the names of several 19th century novels because of their importance in the development of English literature - The Moonstone, The Castle of Otranto, The Monk, to name three off the top of my head - but I haven't read any of them and neither have most people, even those who studied the subject.
By the same token, I imagine future students of gaming will be more than happy to learn the names of games like Pong or Doom or World of Warcraft along with a brief summary of their impact and why they were important, without ever needing or even wanting to play them.
I actually know of The Moonstone, because my mom had the mass market paperback (in the era of the 45 cent paperback) on her bookshelf. (Yes, she read it, because she only kept books that she'd previously read and liked.) Were it not for that I'd not have known it existed, because I didn't take any college level-British Literature classes.
DeleteWe're back to my usual barriers to entry issue, where we have reduced the barriers to publishing anything, books, videos, music, games, low enough that the numbers of titles appearing have mushroomed. You don't need a publisher, you can pay a few bucks to publish a Kindle edition, or start a web site, or go to substack and create a newsletter.
ReplyDeleteFor video games, you just need to give Steam $100 and not violate a few of their restrictions and you're there. And, technically, you don't NEED Steam, you can setup a web site and do it yourself. People have just convinced themselves that Steam is somehow required.
And most of it is not worth saving. It is nice that the Internet Archive backs up my blog, but it will garner no interest in 100 years. The push to save everything seems like crazy, obsessive hoarder behavior, something I know about from dealing with my parents generation. (And myself, honestly. I have a lot of stuff stored away "just in case.")
I get it, that sloppiness basically lost us something like half of Shakespeare's work... or maybe more than that, we don't quite know... so we're determined to make sure that won't happen again. But saving slop... and AI slop is now polluting the "back everything up" efforts... so we have a giant Katamari Demancy ball of shit in which there could be a gem, but how would we even find it, seems a futile effort.
And yes, that leaves us with Redbeard's "who decides?" problem. But somebody has to decide at some point, because not deciding at all isn't helping.
Also, as my post going up later today will mention, I had to chuckle at Sony somehow screwing up going all digital in a world where we happily accept Steam and have made it the primary PC gaming digital storefront. It didn't help that they yoinked a bunch of digital items they had "sold" people within a week of them making this announcement. But still.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, Nintendo happily goes on selling physical media because they know their ecosystem, which often involves parents or grandparents wanting a gift to wrap.
And don't even get my started on XBox. The Steam Box will be outselling that once the hardware supply issues get solved.
The Katamari Demancy metaphor is incredibly apt. Wish I'd thought of it!
DeleteI just think it's a ridiculous proposition to begin with although presumably if/when quantum computing becomes a practical proposition, digital storage won't be an issue any more. But retrieving anything worth having will be. It'll be the ultimate version of a needle in a haystack except you won't know the needle's even in there.
The storage/retrieval issue isn't what bothers me so much as the inevitable stultifying, calcifying effect on all future creators of knowing that vast, unknowable pile of pre-existing work is there, looming over them like one of those unfeasibly large moons we see in games, waiting to crush the life out of anyone who dares to try to add to it, imagining they've thought of something new. We'd get better art if we had regular purges of the old than if we kept it all.
I've been pretty vocal about this already, but I certainly don't care a whit that Sony is ending disk production of games that release in 2028 and beyond.
ReplyDeleteOf your 3 pillars, ownership is the one where I can understand the concern for the sake of other people, but with all the bad stuff happening in the world, whether your copy of Mind's Eye will be on the shelf waiting for you to play it in 20 years ranks pretty low.
Of course if they changed their minds about this, I wouldn't care about that, either. Well, I suppose I'd be happy for the sake of those who DO care but it wouldn't impact me. I couldn't WAIT to stop buying physical media.
Like you, I can count on one hand the games I've played more than once. Horizon Zero Dawn and.... maybe there were a few others I started a 2nd time but quickly dropped.
I don't get the love of Steam, either, but that's a whole other thing. I happen to watch a YouTube channel about "adult games" and they're always talking about Steam banning games. So Gaben is our Gatekeeper, and everyone is OK with that.
I still say GOG is the ideal platform. Folks like me can just play digital games and not worry about stuff. Other people can download the archive and burn it to a disk and bam, they've got a physical copy that'll last them the rest of their lives.
I didn't use the annoying "First World Problems" tag in the post but I sure was thinking it.
DeleteI was resistant to Steam for a long time but now I'm a big fan. It's just so convenient and so much better-organized than I could ever be on my own. It's not going to last forever but while it does, why not make use of it?
GOG, on the other hand, I have an account and quite a few games there, thanks to Prime Gaming, but I almost never go there. It's quite possible I've never actually played any game via the platform. I think the name puts me off. It sounds so backward-looking it makes me not want to associate myself with it.
I was reading your post and had the feeling that something was missing, and now after a while it has occured to me: Choice (in the right amount).
ReplyDeleteRight now we're flooded with both too much irrelevant choices (like, what to listen/watch/play) and a growing issue of relevant choices being pulled from under our feet (like, who's gonna decide you and other 3,200 employees are to lose your livelihood because of a decision maker's bonus). Or what mental moron are you to "vote" for so his campaign sponsors are free to screw you and your neighbour and a few billion people more that aren't even supposed to be able to vote but there they are with the consequences falling like bombs from the sky. Literally.
Yes, most culture things are used once and gone. I barely watch films any more, haven't watched a TV series for a year at least and although I scout for music in a casual way that's because music usually is a short term commitment: a few minutes and done, you've listened to those favorites. My Steam library contains a few titles I played though once and done. And some that were launched and racked single digit hours of play time and didn't click. It would be a mess if that was physical items taking space in my bedroom, as do the boxes of games of old I will not play any more but there they are. The artwork and the memories are good, but all in all, whether they're memorabilia or trash is my choice to make. Steam works because the big kahoona hasn't become an idiot, which is good, but if he went mental or was replaced by an idiot, hundreds of millions of people would be left with no choice, much as we have no choice about YT not becoming a slopfest, people's environments being destroyed because of data centers or the mercenaries at the EU forking out public money into private profits to chase trains already departed and bound nowhere (like the current batch of stochastic AIs).
So now, whether you can or can't play a Sony videogame you paid for will be decided by Sony alone. It's not the end of the world (and physical copies also stop working, consoles break up, discs are scratched, and likely you will play it only once anyway) but, shouldn't we have some agency on whether we deserve something back for the privilege of parting our money to feed a multibillion juggernaut? If even it's a piece of plastic that means "you could if you wanted to because at one point this mattered to you"?
You sound like you're well on the way towards what I think is the only real, lasting solution, namely doing without. It's only when you realize you don't need any of this stuff that you can really begin to appreciate and enjoy it.
DeleteNot that I'm suggesting it's a workable solution for most people. I'm only starting to feel it because of my age. I used to believe implicitly that I would re-read and re-watch all the books, movies and comics I liked, let alone loved, repeatedly throughout my life. Even when it was clear that wasn't happening, I believed with certainty that I'd start doing that when I retired.
Well, I'm past retirement age now and I will be retiring properly this year and there's absolutely no sign of me going back to revisit everything I've collected over the years. I am not going to re-read the 8,000 comics in this house, listen to the thousand albums, watch the couple of hundred DVDs or read the who knows how many hundreds of books. And I'm sure as hell not going to play all the games I've played over again.
The obvious reason for that is that I realize, finally, that there just won't be enough time for it all. It took me 60 years to collect it all and with the best possible prognosis I might have another 25 (All my close family lived to over 90 so I'm hoping...). If I was willing to consume no other entertainment at all and go at it like a full-time job, I might make it through but I still have the same enthusiasm for new things in all those fields as I ever did. Why I ever thought I'd stop acquiring new stuff so as to have space and time for the old beats me.
Choice, though, is a huge problem. It was categorically easier when I was growing up and all I could do with many, many forms of media was either grab them while they were there or hear about them second-hand if I'd missed them. Now everything is available all the time and there are orders of magnitude more of it. Good luck with that!
Sounds like I'm complaining but I'm not. I wouldn't swap how things are now for how they were any time further back than a couple of decades at most and really I prefer it as it is right now. The whole daed internet thing seems fatuous to me. The only real objection I have is the way everything is driven by advertising but even then I could buy my way past that if I really cared.
I often think that if people think things are bad now, they must either have no sense of history or really short memories or both.
I agree with most of what you wrote. As a long-time PC player, I didn't initially understand what the fuss was all about with Sony's decision. I guess it's what you're used to.
ReplyDeleteI think we (well, many of us) have simply got used to the idea that all the media we consume is essentially rented; and like you, I'm mostly OK with that. I also don't tend to re-read, re-watch or replay things. We have far too much stuff in our house anyway.
My only exception to that is books. I like physical books. There's no particularly good reason, but I guess we're all allowed some quirks. :-) I'm slightly sad that I can't put my 180+ audiobooks on the shelf with all the paper ones.
I have a small collection of DVDs/Blu-Rays that I keep, because I might as well - and I do occasionally watch some of them. I also have a selection of physical PC games, some on 3.5" or even 5.25" disks, even though I haven't owned a floppy drive in decades. Sentimental value is definitely a thing. But I haven't acquired a physical game in years, including for the Switch we eventually bought.
Interesting times...
One thing digital distribution really can't compete with is house decoration. As Anthony Powell put it, books do furnish a room. When eBooks first arrived, publishers were terrified they were going to lose their market altogether and the two main ways they set about shoring up their position was to slash prices on hardbacks and put a lot more effort into special editions that looked good on the shelf. They wanted readers to think as much about what the book looked like as what was in it.
DeleteEBooks didn't supplant paper, though. They turned into a separate income stream. Prices of physical books went back up and now they're a lot higher, proportionately, than they were before in some cases. Fancy special editions, though... those just got more and more popular, especially with publishers. TikTok is a big driver of not just owning a book but owning a really nice-looking book that looks good in videos.
For hand-feel, I personally prefer old, battered paperbacks that look like someone's read them more than once but they don't look as good on the shelf as the big hardbacks with the sprayed edges and the foil cut-outs.
Thanks for the bump! I think that's a nice balanced take. I don't think that owning games per se is as important to me as the adjacent issue of becoming a society of renters. Our corporate overlords definitely seem to be leaning more on the "bleed us dry and burn our dried out husks for fuel" end of the spectrum.
ReplyDeleteOne small thing worth adding to what I have already said, is that with the PlayStation ecosystem in particular I am not sure that I emphasized the issue of thrifting and the secondary market clearly enough. Many of the PS4 games I play on my PS5 I got used for around $1-3 per game. Even if I later decide to pile all those disks up and burn them, I could not have bought and played them digitally for anywhere near that cheap.
Regardless, this is a done deal and Sony absolutely will not change their minds. My digging showed that overall only about 20% of Sony's software sales are physical media. On top of that, they earn quite a bit more from a digital sale than they do from a disk sale. They have likely been waiting for the market share of physical media to be small enough that they don't have to care whether they lose all of those sales. I have a half written follow up post with the links to back all of this up. However, I'm on the fence about whether I care enough about this topic to do second full post.