You Should Own Your Games

I think this is a good place to link Stop Killing Games. There's currently an EU initiative under way to mandate that developers have to plan for the retirement of games with online services in a way that customers can still enjoy the game after the online services are shut down.

If you are a citizen of any EU country, please take your time to read through the initiative and sign it.

I already do 🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️🏴‍☠️

Consumers have always owned their media.

That's not true. There was no way to own a television show until DVDs, and now that's disappearing. Yes, there were compilation VHS "best of" tapes and whatnot, but you'd never have the entire season. Hollywood was so threatened by the mere existence of home video that they charged an arm and a leg for a copy and set up profit sharing deals for rentals, because they thought this threatened their stranglehold on charging for the theater viewing. Now we're at a spot where you can buy a "digital copy" of movies and TV shows, which is the same thing as not owning anything at all, because once their store goes down, so does your "copy" of the movie you bought.

Across the entire landscape of consumer media, there is only one industry in which this business model of non-ownership and dependence on subscription services is not rapidly becoming the norm: video games.

Think of how many songs, movies, or TV episodes you can get through in a month for one cheap subscription fee. Now think about, on average, how many video games you'll get through in a month. That's just simple economics. It's usually more worth it to buy the games outright.

Games will likely never be free from aggressive and unnecessary DRM software. AAA titles in particular are falling victim to faux-live service systems where games cannot be played without a good internet connection, even if they are singleplayer experiences. I am not saying that buying the newest release from EA for $80 will guarantee your long-term access to it. It won’t.

Games will only never be free from this stuff if you keep accepting it as an inevitability and pay for them. In the meantime, do what you can to support the Stop Killing Games initiative. I wrote my representative asking for consumer protections for this stuff, knowing that she's a member of the other party and likely doesn't care, her e-mail response indicating as much too, but it's better than doing literally nothing.

Think about the titanic power of the music industry in the 20th century. Back when people paid to own music, music idols were at the center of pop culture.

It's funny, because all I heard back then was that the artists made hardly any money off of record sales and made all of their money touring. Now I rarely go to concerts because Live Nation is going to tear my eyes out with ticket prices, and there's no competition I can go to instead.

I don't see Game Pass as a threat to gaming. Their subscription numbers have stalled out, and they're not doing the lousy things with it that Nintendo does, at least for now. Once again, just simple economics. Even Nintendo's online subscription will eventually fade, perhaps over the course of a decade or more, as PC becomes more and more the de facto way to play games.

Meanwhile, in 2024, the video game industry will turn a staggering $282 billion in revenue. Video games worldwide make more than twice the money of all film and all music combined.

OK, but how much did actual game sales make? I'm willing to bet the proportion of that money this is citing that's hyper-exploitive microtransactions is pretty damn high.

I have no real interest in a library over owning games (I did pay the ~$30 difference in Black Friday sales to add the library for a year on PS5, but I own my games for the most part), and I think everything being day one gamepass on Xbox weakened their already not great first party ecosystem and encourages microtransactions to an extent.

But the biggest existential threat isn't "pay $x a year to rent a library". It's lootboxes and other microtransactions built to milk everyone they can for every penny they can. It fundamentally alters the design of games when "how can we extract more cash" is part of the process, and it's not something that just happens after the fact. It also, unlike renting games, actually pushes invasive anticheat, always online requirements, and onerous mod restrictions on games that should be single player, because they can't milk you for cosmetics if fans can make their own for free.

I never understood the appeal with Xbox Game Pass.

Like you'll have the game available for you while you pay for it, ok, but what happens when some license disagreement occurs and the game is removed or is removed because of censorship? Why not just pirating that game if buying is less interesting than paying for a subscription.

Not only that what happens when eventually a game is released only via subscription model? How people gonna pirate it? We need to hope that someone will upload the installer on the web? What happens when the game is not install on your machine but instead is the stupid idea of streaming? How pirating works for that type of shit? If people can't pirate it, how the game is preserved when they are removed from the library like I said before? That's for me the biggest concern.

If you want to own your games, buy them on GOG.

While I agree that's it's nice to have the option of a physical copy, I own too many games to want a physical copy of all of them. And if they are ever "taken away" I will not hesitate to get them back. I don't want to own physical copies of my games, but I do feel entitled to continue owning them even after the store I bought them from no longer exists. I will just download any game I have owned that I want to play again but no longer have access to the paid version. Kind of like how emulation works. I only use it to play games I own that I don't want to play the physical copy of.

Abolish IP, make games public property (among other things).