Speaking at the “Il Cinema in Piazza” Film Festival in Italy (translated by Genki), the Death Stranding and Metal Gear director said that at least with digital games, users have the data on their systems, something that isn’t the case with cloud gaming.
“Since production is ending in 2028, this is about video games, but I grew up with physical media, so I find it really sad,” he said. “Currently, I’ve been buying up a lot of Blu-rays, such as various movies, and CDs too.
“The situation is different for games [than movies], as they are downloaded to the hard drive, that means the game data remains on your own hardware. However, if things shift to streaming in the future, that won’t be the case anymore.”
Most discs still contain the full game, most physical releases contain discs of the full game
Some physical releases are just an empty case with a code. Some Nintendo Switch cartridges are just license dongles for the game download.
You’ve never owned a game. You’ve only ever licensed a game. This is true for all software. Removing the physical medium of distribution just allows the copyright cartel the control it has always wanted over something you paid for. But they have been hoodwinking consumers over what “purchase” and “buy” and “own” mean. Technically speaking, any game company could send you a C&D and tell you to stop playing their game forever, your license is revoked, and if you ever played it again they could sue for damages. Doubtful they would, as I doubt it would be worth their time; but this does mean they have the right to just decide their work is no longer available and vanish all digital copies; and they could also make all physical discs stop working through system software updates.
Well, you see, Ju$tice is expensive and unreliable.
So the decision of using or not the Justice System for enforcing one’s rights isn’t purelly “am I likely to win”, it’s also about “is it worth it bringing it to Court”, which is especially important when the damages one is entitled to get are low (like the price of a game).
At which point “who controls the thing under dispute”, which is theoretically unimportant in a perfect Justice System, becomes the main deciding factor.
Maybe an example will make it clear:
Anyways, the point I’m making here is that well before a Court of Law actually goes through the whole thing and determines who is in the Right and orders a certain action in favor of and/or compensation for the injured side, de facto the outcome is often decided by the actual stakeholders deciding “is it worth it taking this to court?” and in a system where Justice has costs (the bigger the costs the more that’s the case) “who controls it” is pretty much the single biggest factor in that decision.
In simple terms, unless there is some kind of streamlined Judicial process for that kind of case (like there is around things like loans) bringing a case to court to force the side in control of something to act in a certain way with it is only worth it for large monetary amounts, and generally the price of a game is below that.
It just so happens that at the moment for console games having the installer for it in a physical medium in your control is having control of that copy but, as my example above illustrates, if the game does phone-home DRM authorization checks like some PC games go, it’s actually not really under your control even if you have it in physical media.
Exactly. The only reason physical media has seemed like “owning” is because the mechanism to actually enforce their license has not been feasible.
You know how often movies or shows flip off on streaming services? That’s the future of games if the laws don’t change