I suppose that it was bound to happen at some point but Sony just posted this;
And honestly I didn’t figure that it would have been Sony deciding to kill off physical media first. I know that Microsoft was planning on doing this when they were planning the Xbox One release and the backlash was bad enough that they backtracked on that decision.
Personally I’m of mixed feelings on this one.
Digital and Physical media both have their own pros and cons. Personally most of what I’ve been using for over the last 20 years have all been digital downloads and most physical media that I have is remnants from days gone by. And while the digital media is convenient as hell for saving space it’s also going to be completely reliant on the various stores that serve it remaining online and running later down the road. So at some point in the future when Nintendo shuts down the store for the Nintendo Switch that’s going to present issues with reinstalling my games that were purchased through their eShop. On the other hand my Super Nintendo that’s over 30 years old at this point still plays games without any issue since the game is reliant on the physical media that the game came on.
The other thing that’s going to be a change is the lack of physical media is going to create concerns around the used market for games. It used to be that you could walk into a local game store and pick up a used game for a reasonably cheap price compared to when they were new at release. With digital licenses that market is pretty much going to die off unless there’s provisions for people to trade licenses through whatever store is in place for your platform.
Another down side is that you don’t really own the game when you get a digital copy. You have a license to use the software, but you don’t actually own it and there is a realistic possibility that someone could take action that results in you no longer being able to play the game that you “purchased”. With physical media it’s a bit harder to make that happen since you have physical possession of the object that is needed to run the code.
Hell, Sony themselves, decided to remove a bunch of digitally purchased moves from users accounts a short time ago so it’s not like this never happens.
Practically this change isn’t as big a thing as it would seem since a lot of the media that’s out there is just holding a small license file to allow the game that the console to downloads to run. Even if a copy of the game is on the media the way that things wind up getting continually patched and updated trying to get stuff running without an Internet connection is generally a pain in the ass anyhow.
Kind of feel sorry for the folks at GameStop/EB Games, once the used game market dries up there’s not going to be much reason to go there unless you need some Funko Pops.
Oh, wait. Well shit. That’s not good news.