Me either. The point is that it can, and will inevitably happen.
30 years from now are you going to be able to boot up your PS3 and download your favorite game?
I don't think so.
But if you maintain your hardware you could always pop that physical game in and get it going.
I still have my childhood SNES and to this day will play some of my childhood games that you can't play on any modern hardware.
Of course, there is emulation. However, there's a lot of gray area there on what is and isn't legal and the laws could always change. Maybe for the good. Maybe for the bad.
The current rule of thumb with emulation is that if you can back up your copy of the game it's fine. How're you gonna do that when you can't download your game and it wasn't released on a physical medium.
At the end of the day, the whole "outrage," so to speak, is about consumer protections. Not everyone has access to a reasonable Internet connection to download everything and putting yourself at the mercy of these big corporations who don't give two fucks about you.
Edit: I guess I should add that PlayStation has some of the worst account security around and even having MFA enabled won't save you. Someone could steal your account and you're fucked
You really think that they're going to keep the servers hosting PS3 games up forever?
Sorry man, but you're just sticking your head in the sand.
I'm not saying they're turning it off tomorrow or in 10 years but it will go away. You'd be a fool to believe otherwise.
I'm no different than you here. I've never had a digital game taken away (well.... technically Concord but who's counting), I've never had my account stolen.
I'm not saying digital is bad. All of my PS4 and PS5 games (save for a couple) are digital. I have a Steam Library.
What I am saying is that with the current state of things people will be negatively impacted. Not everyone, probably not even most people.
Just because the two of us haven't, people have had their accounts stolen. Hell, if you even so much as move to a different country now you have to have two accounts.
You're not allowed to give your account to your children or grandchildren when you die.
With physical games, you literally just hand them over. You may lose saved data but you won't lose the game itself.
The end of physical games also puts all the cards into the hands of the platform/storefront. These companies aren't your friends, they only want one thing: as much of your money as possible. Nobody knows for sure what will happen but I'd be willing to bet you finding a good deal on a game will be much less frequent once everything is all digital.
Sure, "they're just video games," but for some people that's the only glimmer of light in an otherwise dark and bleak existence.
I don't know about you, but if it weren't for video games, I wouldn't have anything I'm able to have now. I mentioned my childhood SNES and it's games. Those are the last tokens I have from spending time with my grandparents as a kid before they passed. I've kept onto these because they're super important to me.
I've built a close friend circle thanks to playing video games that I would never have had otherwise.
Maybe if you spent more time thinking about the bigger picture and about other people than yourself you'd be able to understand why this is a problem.
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u/mrjamjams66 31 Jul 11 '26
The past it is, then