PERSPECTIVE
The End of Physical Media is a Major Blow to Consumer Rights

Disclosure: no physical games were actually damaged in the creation of the headline photo above. It's an AI-modified version of an original photo I took to dramatically illustrate the issue. The original is shown below.

Yesterday, PlayStation released a blog post that set the internet and social ablaze: "Physical disc production ending in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles." 

Most people paying attention knew this day was coming eventually, but the actual announcement still seemed to set everyone's hair on fire. While I've been buying mostly digital for quite some time now, I can totally see why some people still like to buy physical copies, and not having physical games at all does mark a significant shift in power between gamers and platform holders.

Physical games have long had a contentious history

One reason why none of this shocks me, is that it's been painfully clear for a long time that (many) game publishers didn't want gamers to have control over physical game media. In the very beginning it was understandable because it was mostly due to the rampant copying and pirating of PC games on floppy disk. One purchased copy (or stolen copy) could then be turned into hundreds of pirated copies, and that could be a significant blow to the revenue of game developers and publishers, essentially making game creation unaffordable; no one wants that. To try and combat physical game piracy, some game publishers started including physical items with the games that would either be an intregal part of gameplay, like the decoder wheel in The Secret of Monkey Island, or that required the player to input a word from the game manual that was chosen at random each time you would boot up the game. 

The next issue that emerged was video game rental stores. Similar to piracy, in a way, a store could purchase a limited number of games then rent them to 10x as many consumers, and if the consumers beat the game during their rental period or just decided they didn't like it, that could reduce overall game sales, making game development less profitable. 

Companies fought this in a variety of ways, one of the most infamous being Disney's The Lion King, which was purposely made much harder so that gamers couldn't beat it over a weekend rental period. This also made the game borderline unplayable, but has also made it infamous among retrogamers who want to prove their skill by defeating it (an unintended benefit).

Next there was the issue of used game stores, the most famous of which is probably GameStop. While you could argue having the ability to sell and buy used games should be a protected consumer right (and is legally protected under the "First Sale Doctrine"), game developers / publishers largely hated it and fought against it. For example, once the online gaming era was underway in the Xbox 360/PS3 generation, some games came with a one-time use redeemable code for online access or other parts of the game that would already be null and voided in most resale copies.

But some games are only playable today because they exist physically

Today, physical game media is a key aspect of our ability to preserve classic games for current generations to play and experience. While you see some games get rereleased every generation or two, others are either not popular enough for anyone to bother rereleasing them, or their licensing is so convoluted that it is impossible to do so. 

Even from my own game collection, there are examples of more modern games that aren't available to be purchased any longer, and the only way I can play them is by owning a physical copy (or emulation). Take the original Ninja Gaiden for the first Xbox. While you can still purchase and play the upgraded (and arguably superior) Ninja Gaiden Black via backwards compatibility, the original release of Ninja Gaiden is unavailable on the Xbox store.

Then you see older games getting pulled from digital storefronts all the time. I have a long list of original Xbox and Xbox 360 backwards compatible games saved in my Xbox Store cart that I hope to be able to purchase in the future, and every so often I'll see one that has been pulled from the store and it's price has disappeared. You can still download the game if you already own it, but you can't buy it from that point forward. No telling how long it will be until some of those games are pulled from digital collections entirely.

To that point, I believe Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge for the Xbox 360 is still available for purchase on the Xbox Store and I highly recommend anyone pick it up before you can't buy it anymore. It has a few differences from its version in the Ninja Gaiden Master Collection, and it's totally worth owning the backwards compatible version. (to that point, also make sure to buy the Xbox version of Ninja Gaiden Black - the Master Collection version ain't it.)

The future may be in Nintendo's hands

While this announcement from PlayStation isn't surprising, it's just one more move that errodes the consumer rights of gamers (XBOX is also moving in this direction - at my local Walmart almost all of the Xbox games are already pulled from shelves).  Ironically, this seems to leave the future of physical game media squarely in Nintendo's hands (and they haven't always been the most consumer-friendly company).

The Nintendo Switch 2's Game-Key Cards don't have the game data included on them, but they do act as a physical key that grants game ownership that can be traded, bought or sold. The person who has the physical Game-Key is the "owner" of the game. While it's certainly not what gamers were hoping for when the Switch 2 launched, it's by far the best option gamers will have in the near future to still have some element of control over their game collections. 

Given PlayStation has already drawn a line in the sand regarding the end of physical media, and XBOX has already been moving in this direction, there is no telling whether Nintendo will continue this practice for the long term or not. Regardless, once the games are no longer available to be downloaded from the Switch 2 store, Game-Key Cards will be just collector items unless you already have the games downloaded on your console.

Sadly, this is just another example of gamers' diminishing consumer rights, and only time will tell how this will ultimately impact gaming's future as a whole.