Own It Until You Don't
July 1st, 2026
In light of recent events, a few select words, looking back the path that led us here.
The industry is falling all around us. Ever since Covid, the façade of
normalcy all major players had been building up from the seventh gen onwards
had been building began to slowly and glaringly crumble all around; the more
recent rise of AI obsession executive blindness only sped up the symptoms of
an ecosystem based on unsustainable live service models that completely
devalue that talent of established and upcoming professionals; the hatred of
the mere idea of artists maintaining long-standing careers festering into a
string of lay-offs and studio closures that are recently becoming a
daily occurrence
.
It’s the bread of each new day, misery as normalcy.
It was a self-fulfilling prophecy; from the moment the medium’s worst
impulses were open to be glared and exploited, every movement from then
onward suggested a good result for the consumer and developers was bound to
be either a pit meant to expand the bubble, or a ploy to be taken advantage
of in the moment and throw in the gutter later.
Case and point, I am not surprised by
Sony’s latest announcement of the total discontinuation of physical
media by the start of 2028
, but I find it hard not to be reminded of how they vehemently expressed
respect and adoration for the secondhand market, how they mocked Xbox’s
blunders by showcasing the act of sharing a disc as something completely
normal, almost second nature to the industry itself. Was it not normal? Was
it not guaranteed? Was it not the bare minimum a consumer, a player, should
expect?
It was apparent then, but even more now, that it was merely playing pretend,
a safe game of masks that hid the deep desire of owning complete and total
control over every part of the game-to-player transaction, the
intermediaries or, hell forbid, the people’s agency over the games they own
spelling a cancer over that desire.
The road up until this point has been filled with the near future
masquerading as mistakes; there
was Ubisoft putting ads for their future releases on their own games and
calling them ‘’technical errors’’
, but at least in that case we haven’t seen the blunt of the damage yet… but
then there was the
PS Store’s sudden shift to adaptive pricing, which was as quietly put
down after being activated in equal silence
, but now it becomes even more obvious that this is the future that awaits
us 2 years from now on.
They’ve already made up their minds; they musthave the say
in every new transaction, they must keep moving forward to their perfect
future where everyone is willing to let go of their ownership and in which
all have the means and Wi-Fi speeds to make digital or cloud gaming their
way moving forward. It’s a future that isn’t there, and it would never be,
but they are gonna try and force it no matter what.
The past decade has consisted of a collective effort to turn physical media
into a headache, and over and over again we see the structures that
supposedly uphold this new way of play fail consistently and showcase how
ephemeral these files and data can be, and time and time again we are asked
to pwetty pwease look the other way and accept that this is how things must
be.
They keys jingling have taking, and still are, taking many forms: the
prospect of game pass, Nintendo making digital games cheaper than physical
ones… none of them can change the fact that three years from now, any online
store can be shit down and unmeasurable amounts of arts be lost to the sands
of time.
We know this, because it keeps happening.
And the moment they convince us to just forget about it out of sheer apathy
or exhaustion, it’ll be the moment we will lose any semblance of the
industry at large being anything besides a check for the manufacturers, a
pit of tar for the artists, and pure white noise for the rest of us.
Thank you so much for reaching this point.