ESSAY – Why I Don’t Care About the Loss of Physical Media
Unless I lost my original Pokemon team, then I would cry
I don’t normally throw my hat in on the hot topic of the day, because generally, I find that anything I would say has been said plenty, or is too contrarian, vitriolic, and pessimistic to read as anything but base attention-seeking. But all the hubbub about Sony ditching discs, Nintendo finally ditching carts for activation keys, GTA going digital-only, Stop Killing Games, hardware prices, the sad, sad state of the gaming industry in general, had me thinking in the shower this morning, coherently enough that I figured I might as well pinch it off on a plate for everyone’s enjoyment. And because it’s literally too hot out to go outside so what the hell else am I going to do today?
My thesis shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone familiar with me, and it probably won’t raise your eyebrows much even if you’ve just stumbled onto this article in isolation, but I’ll do my best to offer something more substantive than ‘I don’t really give a shit.’ After all, the truth is that I do care, or used to care, or would have cared if I thought it mattered, but to my eye, this current bout of justified rancor is a bit past due.
TIBERIUM TWILIGHT
Long, long ago, long before some of you were even born, games used to come in fucking boxes. Like, big, dictionary-sized crates, looming down from the shelves of Babbage’s, shimmering with holographic features, giant, glossy screenshots illustrating the reviewer blurbs and bulletpoints on the back, hell, sometimes the whole front could swing open with the satisfying audible rip of velcro, revealing a massive spread of art and marketing. They had to be like this, for one, because games used to require some not inconsequential amount of physical material to be playable – when they came on floppies, later games sometimes required stacks of them to have enough storage capacity, and even when CDs became the norm, there wasn’t necessarily enough room left on the disc for full-sized PDFs of all the supplemental material, instructions, walkthroughs of the first few hours, graphs and charts that explained what the hell was going on behind the scenes that couldn’t quite get crammed into the game itself, and that developers expected players would need to even get started.
And, of course, the standard demanded by the manuals and maps and piles of disks also drove marketing standards, because you could only sell physical copies, they could only be sold somewhere that would put a bunch of videogames on their shelves, those shelves could only hold so many games. Like birds of paradise, competition drove publishers to become flashier, find new ways to convince idling shoppers that their box had the good genes – you could pick it up, feel the materials sliding around weightily, be dazzled by a holographic skull or screenshot of a dinosaur catching lead, and cough up your money.
But that was all of a time long lost. Even before the current push to full digitization of marketplaces, game boxes had already embraced Ozempic chic, and where once there might at least be a pathetic seven-page pamphlet priming you for the experience, there’s now a code for a cosmetic skin, a sad, vain attempt by the publisher to disincentivize resale. Gone are the days of hefty boxes full of repurposed design documents, folded maps, novelettes by writers who found they couldn’t express the fullness of their narratives in the confines of MS-DOS or 8-bit gameplay. Gone are the days of sitting in the back of your mom’s car, shakily pulling the manual out of a new game box, soaking in the sketches of enemies and grainy photos of the screen with UI elements illegibly labeled, letting your imagination conjure up an even better game than the one you were about to play.
Oh, there still are big boxes, upsold as ‘collectors’ or ‘ultimate’ editions, stuffed with the kind of tacky, cheap, arts and crafts petrochemical waste products that are meant to collect dust, flood landfills, and leech microplastics and lead into the water table. But there’s a real difference between that and the starmap and plastic guide Starflight 2 came with,1 or the spiral-bound notebook that came with Baldur’s Gate 2 that added up to decent chunk of an AD&D starter set with its spell lists and dissertations on the topic of THAC0.
The world has changed, the industry has changed, and the way people consume media, especially videogames, has changed, massively and irreversibly. Sure, a big flashy box with a manual is neat and all, but would anyone even need it now? It’s rare for people to buy a game that they don’t already have a pretty good mental picture of… or already know quite a lot about. Some people hardly even buy games unless they’ve already seen them be played to death by somebody else. And if you get stuck or have a question about something, you have the ability to instantly call up every instance of someone else asking about that, you can blast your question into the aether and someone will probably have the answer within a day, no matter how niche the topic. People no longer care as much for physical copies of big budget releases unless a significant portion of their income derives from unboxing videos.
But what’s changed most of all is people’s relationship with and view of the titans of industry. What were once the triumphant fiefdoms of ambitious, creative conquerors, auteurs and autists joining forces to challenge the limits of hardware, to craft worlds of complexity and depth unthinkable only the year before, are now decaying hulks, adrift in a sea of their own detritus, just another machine slowly, passionlessly churning out frothy ‘enriched’ slurries to keep the masses entertained. People still pretend to be emotionally invested in the cinematic blockbusters, the billion-dollar busts, the venerable franchises flopping to the ground and dragging themselves along on product placement and celebrity cameos, but even the normie instinct to consensus-seeking atrophies when the subjects are so bland, so deadened and hollow.2
But people are still emotionally invested in games, not just in indies and auteur works, but in things that at least say more about them as players than about the corporatized, homogenized subculture being mined. Many smaller productions now get far more lavish and thoughtful physical releases than major franchises, some commanding a budget that rivals a small country’s GDP, can boast. It’s just for different reasons – no longer a direct driver of sales, they’re now effective post-success hype engines, helping to keep a studio afloat and visible without committing to rushing out additional releases that could tank their reputation and waste resources. And those same indie developers are also more apt to release on the less distasteful digital distributors, opting for DRM-less options which offer them a better cut of their own sales anyway. Big-budget games just have less to offer outside of the bloated production itself – less creative expression, less dialogue with players, and each passing year, less relevance to their own industry.
Speaking of DRM, I’ll say up front that I’m not going to bother paying lip service to the angst about ‘owning’ my games because, to be blunt, I’m old enough to have experienced many eras worth of games, movies, music, and shows be all but lost to the ravages of time. Magnetic tape crumbling, drivers no longer supported, the entire infrastructure that once kept a form of media viable, now as stark and shattered as the ruins of an ancient empire. And that means I’ve become well-versed in stretching the legal definition of ownership to be able to play games. For it to be possible, much less convenient. If there’s one thing I know for certain about DRM, it’s that it secures the livelihoods of people who work on videogames a lot less than it does for the pirates.
A TALE OF TWO BOXES
I have here on my desk two pieces of physical media, both alike in form and age but utterly unlike in meaning. I think examining them a bit will help illustrate what I think will really be lost in the coming shift… or more to the point, what won’t.
SAROS
Here is the case for Saros, one of the only true exclusives Sony, a company worth billions of dollars and maintaining an iron grip on the rights to a gargantuan catalogue of modern culture, has managed to offer up for their flagship console. Opening the case we find a disc and a little card that tells me how to redeem a 12-character code online so I can unlock a palette swap outfit for my character.
The reason I have a physical copy of Saros is not because I have any emotional attachment to Housemarque’s somewhat disappointingly safe play at following up Returnal, or because I have any anxiety about Sony deciding to withhold my ability to play Saros and dream that I might keep a contingency at hand, a way to somehow reverse engineer Saros from raw data, or archive it for posterity. I have it because it was a gift, and, obviously, there’s a little more psychological impact to unwrapping something or even just pulling something out of a fucking bag than there is in swiping to your email after your phone chirps. Once 2028 rolls around and Sony declares that discs are outlawed, I guess we’ll just have to put a card with an activation key in a bag or something to see the light of recognition in a loved one’s eyes instead of the gleam of a smartphone screen for once.
BLOODSTAINED: RITUAL OF THE NIGHT
And here is the backer case for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, a crowd-funded Metroidvania headed by the man largely responsible for the shift in the Castlevania franchise that then defined the series on the GBA and DS post-Symphony of the Night. Opening it up, well, frankly, it’s sadder than Saros. There’s a holographic cardboard sleeve, minimalist artwork on a standard Blu-ray case, and nothing but the disc inside. And, honestly, I’ll probably never even take this disc out of its case. It’s all but useless to me – when I backed this game’s Kickstarter, I requested my copy as a GOG access key, and if I ever want to play Bloodstained again, I can just download that [or retrieve one of the installers that I didn’t bother deleting from an old archive of files] instead of hunting down a USB disc drive. I don’t care much about anything on this disc, or the artwork and cheap plastic case. But I’m still going to keep it, and it means a lot more to me than Saros ever will.
When I look at this case, I remember giving away 60 dollars, 60 dollars that I really couldn’t afford at the time, not because I expected a glorious, showpiece box set with plastic figurines, novelty cufflinks, a sheet of stickers, and a metal case for a disc I would never use, [all delivered almost a decade later] but because I wanted to vote with my wallet, to demonstrate my faith that the design and designers of those games were still relevant, that games of a style ‘a generation old’ were still in demand, that those people could step away from a company with more money than sense and still find work, that the industry need not bow in unison to the moronic whims of suits who treat market trendlines as prophesy, who are blindsided by every colossal failure and every independent success, who don’t know shit from Shinola.
And while, honestly, to this day I don’t care much for Bloodstained itself, as a game, I still stand by my decision. Games of every budget have found great success after Bloodstained’s highly visible campaign brought in millions of dollars in pledges, and while I’m sure some of them would have been developed and released and received just as well otherwise, can you really say that with confidence about any of them? Would a game like Hollow Knight, for example, have found such an eager audience, been released with as much confidence, had there not been such a strong indicator of demand just a few years before? And though I don’t like Ritual of the Night a lot, I do really love the 8-bit-style spinoffs that spawned as a result of its crowdfunded success. Oh, I’m sure Inti Creates would still have found work and still be around in a different world, but I’m glad they got to make the Curse of the Moon games.
One of my aspirations, once I reach a point where I run out of new games to try and still have some money to spare, is to get a cartridge of Full Quiet, an NES game that was my second favorite played in 20243 to put on a shelf in my office. Not because I want to drag a fucking NES and a CRT in here and play it ‘properly’ or because I think it will have any value in the future, but because I think it would be nice to get to pick it up and look at it. It would be a visible part of my workspace, something I can use to remind myself or show someone else an example of what I do, and why I do it. “When do you think this was made?” I’d say as I held up the cartridge, made from the same plastic as all the garbage I was complaining about before. Pretty cool.
Sony won’t take that away from me. Nintendo doesn’t have a say. Rockstar can go fuck themselves up the ass. They don’t matter, and it’s turning out that they hardly ever did. I threw away my installation discs for GTA4. I play Game Boy games on my Steam Deck like an adult. The Playstation 5 doesn’t even have any fucking games. What are they gonna do, tell me I can’t play fuckin Astro Bot anymore? Pokemon Mud and Sand? You guys realize there’s like, a lot of games I could play, right? It’s not 1992, I don’t have to beg my mom to rent one thing for a holiday weekend.
So don’t get me wrong, I do get it. If you are still forming emotional connections with… whatever crap is comin down the pipe from Sony and Nintendo and Rockstar and the like, yeah, it sucks that you’re not going to be able to put it on your shelf, you’re never going to see your child’s face light up as they rip open Santa’s present on Christmas morning, you might one day lose your favorite game to the shortsighted and cynical machinations of a multinational corporation. I’ve got my stash, and like any Boomer with a house you’ll never afford, I’ll gleefully outline what I’ve got that you don’t.
THE PHYSICAL MEDIA I’LL NEVER PART WITH
My Game Boy and
Metroid II: Return of Samus
The first game I ever beat on my own, the most triumphant credit roll in gaming history, some of the best atmosphere and exploration in the tightest package, and in my opinion, one of the games closest to perfect ever made. I still play Metroid 2 around once a year, and I will until my hands can’t hold a brick for about 2 hours at a time.
Pokemon Blue
I don’t really like Pokemon all that much, I’m not the guy who’s doing Nuzlocke shit in his 30s, I really don’t care that Game Freak are among the laziest and least competent development teams to ever get a Golden Ticket. But when Red and Blue came out in the States, it was like nothing the gaming world had seen since Super Mario, and I was there for it, borrowing link cables and ripping the plastic off Prima strategy guides when the cashier was busy so I wouldn’t get yelled at for stealing spoilers. You guys realize we had to buy books full of GameFAQs shit? Wait until you find out how we had to get porn.
Gargoyle’s Quest
Not the best game on the console, but one that I’ll never forget, and never give up. A weird combination of open-world RPG and platformer with some of the best tinny music ever made for the Game Boy, an exhilarating power curve, and a protagonist more radical than any real mascot dreamed of.
For the GameCube [which I don’t even have anymore but I guess I could dig up a Wii]
Metroid Prime
After losing our consoles and any hope of keeping up with that front of gaming in a house fire, mine was a PC-gaming-only household out of economic strategy – we could either get a Super Nintendo... or a rig capable of running Quake and Command and Conquer decently, and I stand by our family decision. But that means I did experience Super Metroid entirely via magazine articles in the grocery store, and didn’t actually play it until the series had already made the leap to the third dimension, a generation after almost every other franchise of its ilk, and thank God they waited. I went halves on a GameCube with a buddy of mine purely so I could visit Tallon IV, and some part of me never came back.
Chibi Robo
The definitive ‘charming’ game, Chibi Robo is all about doing menial chores and endearing yourself to a dysfunctional family while exploring a single small house, as a robot whose head is only as big as the plug he has to shove into wall sockets to recharge himself. Chibi Robo is longer than you’d expect, more fun than you’d believe, and more emotionally effective than you could possibly imagine. Metroid Prime may have been the reason I wanted to get my hands on a GameCube, but Chibi Robo was why I paid my buddy for his half so I could keep it.
Eternal Darkness
From the greatest ‘cutesy’ game to one of the greatest ‘horror’ games, Eternal Darkness is something that almost defies easy explanation. Imagine Resident Evil, but with a revolving door of playable protagonists, a story spanning millennia, the best Lovecraftian vibe since the original Alone in the Dark, and a level of raw, fuck-with-the-player meta-bullshit that would probably piss me off if a dev tried it today. Like Gargoyle’s Quest, it’s nowhere near the best game on the platform, but it’s way up there in my memories of it.
For the Playstation 3
Demons Souls
As much as I appreciate the simple fact that the remake doesn’t make you sit in your own flop sweat for half a minute long load screens every time you die, I appreciate almost every other change Bluepoint made far, far less. Some of the changes I just don’t like! How about that? And I’m old enough to remember when you couldn’t use the phone at the same time as the internet so the fact that it doesn’t have as many goddamn particle effects doesn’t faze me that much. I still replay the original Demons Souls about as much as I do the remake, even though doing so requires hiring a forklift to move the Monolith from 2001 from my closet to the TV.
For the Playstation 4
Bloodborne
Notice a pattern here? Bloodborne might actually be the only exclusive worth a good god damn Sony locked down for this entire generation, and nothing stings so much as realizing they’d rather tank their entire gaming division with another overpriced console that has no games than let From release Bloodborne in a state that includes a passable fucking framerate.
Other
I have a copy of Theodor Bastard’s album Pustota that I ordered online after watching a cool Flash animation set to the title track on Newgrounds. It’s pretty sick, it’s actually a decent album, and if anyone recognizes it I know they’re at least as much of an old loser as I am.
I got Ultima IX as my big birthday gift one year, and I’ve never been more excited. Until I tried installing it on my then first ever computer of my own, and realized the hand-me-down videocard didn’t hit the minimum specs for the Ultima franchise’s big leap to full 3D. So I broke open the piggy bank, mowed yards, found a used GPU on eBay, chewed my nails thinking about it being shipped cross-country, installed it myself, had a heart attack when the tower wouldn’t turn on, fixed the bent power button pins, and let out a sigh of relief when the tower came back to life. And then I had to play fucking Ultima IX. All fucking winter fighting with that piece of shit game.
I’ll keep every bit of bullshit Ultima IX came with around just to remind myself. The dinky cloth map, the tarot cards, the separate manual and spell list book, the cheap printed tapestry on a folded bit of paper. If I ever find myself disappointed in how a game turned out compared to how I imagined it, I can just go back and look at some of the garbage I stared at for hours, wondering if my Voodoo3 would survive the trip. And if you think I learned my lesson, pal, I preordered Oblivion. And Dark Souls II.
CONCLUSION
If you care about games, their availability, their playability, their quality and the creativity they express, well, you probably shouldn’t care about games from major publishers anytime soon. And that really shouldn’t be news to anyone. The games and developers worth your time aren’t jettisoning entire teams to cover the costs of yet another failed venture in NFT PvPvE Live Service AI Generative MMOs, they’re not hiding behind subscription models and taking themselves off storefronts, they aren’t spending millions on ad spots that don’t get them the millions of players they need to break even.
If you want to vote with your wallet, let me give you some advice: take a look in your wallet. Do you see ten billion dollars in fives and twenties? If not, no decision of yours will ever be noticed by a corporation. Hell, they won’t notice anything’s wrong until its time to file for bankruptcy again. That kind of activism only works one way, by propping up things that could use a few bucks, not correcting corporate behavior by withholding single-digits worth of sales. You can find games that do matter to you, that are published in ways that allow you some autonomy and ownership, and give them a little visibility, a chance to prove that they compare favorably to big-budget schlock.
Me, I’m not too upset anymore. I’ve already come to terms with the erosion of our physical anchoring to the world of games. Almost everything in our world in general is transient, ephemeral, a swirling cloud of data and legalese and profit incentives that we merely float through, absorbing money, social contact, understanding, and meaning through our thinned skins, sensitive to any changes in temperature or salinity, and all by design, to make us weak, dependent, symbiotic appendages grafted to industries to convert their capital into riches for the C-suite. If they don’t want to print disks anymore, fuck em. I don’t give a shit about the new GTA anyway.
If you’d like to read something on this topic with a little more tact and a little less arbitrary hostility, try the two articles that helped prompt my outburst today. They’re both pretty good.
used as a form of DRM whereby the space cops would randomly pull you over and quiz you on quadrant compositions
the parallels to modern Hollywood should be obvious but are not in my wheelhouse
game period, not NES game specifically
My main problem with this step, and many people fail to state, is the lost of ownership. Which was kind of happening already, but now is more obvious.
However I love GOG and buy games there too, in order to keep them. Maybe I don't care because the last console I bought was the XBOX360. But I can see the frustration of someone who bought the ps5 and now knows that every game he buys for it, will stop working when Sony wants (like when the new ps6 may exists, for example). So much money for a console that will not be useful if Sony takes down the online servers.
We’re kindred spirits, you and me. Metroid II was also one of the first games I completed on my own (and I got the best ending before my older brother discovered it!) Also, Pokemon Blue was my jam for reasons I’ll write about in the near future.
That aside, I’m not happy about the current state of the gaming industry. But at the same time, at least I have the memories and some of my favorite physical games around to play whenever I wish (until the hardware breaks anyway).