I thought opening this post might be a great opportunity for me to metaphorically dance around about how right I have been proven in the last few weeks on a observations I’ve made in a couple of earlier posts. But as with most of my observations, I am going by what others have said and have observed and my thoughts are not wholly original. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly, for most of the predictions I make, I would be far happier if I turned out to be wrong. This is certainly the case with the subject that follows.
The context for this post is the announcement late last month that the “physical” edition of the highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto VI would be an activation code in a rather useless box. Not content with this, they also announced the game would retail for $79.99USD or I should say from that price as additional game content is locked behind an ‘Ultimate Edition‘ that costs an additional $20USD. The Australian pricing puts the “Ultimate” and $159.95 which is a price I’d only previously seen for deluxe collector’s editions of games that include a number of novelties as well as the physical game.
As if to justify all this, Sony, the company that famously mocked Microsoft’s clumsy attempt at bringing an end to physical media in 2013, has officially announced the end of physical media for PlayStation beginning in 2028. This came after another revelation that customers would be losing access to digital films they had bought in September which follows on from another such incident in 2023 that I had heard they backed away from following through with. Microsoft is unlikely to capitalise on this the way Sony did all those years ago and so we will probably see the era of physical media all but ending for video games.
Naturally, I have some thoughts about this.
The first will be to refer back to my post almost a year to the day after the first month of the Nintendo Switch 2. In that post I reluctantly defended the billion dollar corporation’s decision to charge $79.99USD for Mario Kart World. A title, I might add, that had a full physical release and has continued to receive free updates including one at the end of June adding two new rallies to ‘Knockout Tour’. The complaints about the pricing seem rather quaint given Rockstar’s recent announcement. In that post I also gave a muted defence of ‘Game-Key Cards’ which while not ideal, at least can be re-sold or lent to friends as long as servers remain active. This is not true of one-time use codes. Outside of this year’s Pokémon Pokopia which was developed with Omega Force, Nintendo has continued to publish first-party titles on the game cards.
Do I think Nintendo will one day abandon physical media? I would say that given “market trends” as they like to say, it is quite likely at some stage but this is not the point for now. They are unlikely to do so any time soon and I’m sure that the data they have would show a significant enough portion of their consumer base still prefers physical media and that there would be plenty of outrage should they pull-a-Sony in the near future.
Next I would like to refer back to my original post from 2024 on this very issue where I observed on Microsoft’s foot-shooting attempt to end physical media:
…that Sony would have done the same thing if they believed they could have gotten away with it. I have wondered before whether Microsoft decided to do this under the mistaken assumption that Sony was intending to do exactly the same thing. If they’d both adopted this policy, there would certainly have still been outrage, but they might have gotten away with it together. There is an idea among some that Sony was somehow more moral than Microsoft and not just taking competitive advantage of a strategic blunder on Microsoft’s part. Similarly, Nintendo’s strong-arming of publishers during the era of the Nintendo Entertainment System is well-documented but also often forgotten.
Don Mattrick deserves an apology. If what Sony, likely Microsoft and probably too Nintendo are going to do the same thing and they are right to do so, then Mattrick is merely an innovator that was just too ahead of market trends. He is not the villain that he was portrayed as and the scapegoat Microsoft made him when their own intentions were met with such visceral disapproval.
I don’t believe this of course. The executive bodies of most corporations are composed almost (if not entirely), by psychopaths. Don Mattrick didn’t come up with the idea of ending physical media, he just made one of the first attempts and with the full support of those above and within his circle. Valve had also done so much more successfully on PC by being much more gentle about it. This was to be fair, on a platform where their customer base has much, much cheaper options should they be dissatisfied with what is on offer. Most people knew this was where the industry was heading in one way or another because it had already been heading that way.
Something else is to consider is whether there even will be a ‘next’ PlayStation or Xbox. The prices of the current generation models have increased which is a complete inversion of console history where there were drops in price as the generation progressed and hardware became cheaper. With memory prices still extremely high and no end in sight, it is hard to fathom how anyone will be buying these new consoles on the horizon. The Nintendo Switch 2 will increase in price from September and the upcoming Steam Machine has what I consider a prohibitively high retail price.
This brings back a post from earlier this year where I suggested we have a terminal future that will see consumers “subscribing” rather than owning their own computers. Men like Jeff Bezos are naturally very excited by this given his company and a number of others have the infrastructure to control and profit by this. These latest announcements only confirm what was anticipated and like many others, I take no pleasure in being right about this.