Does This Mark THE END Of Physical Media?
Yo, yo, yo! Best Buy recently announced they’re removing all physical media from their shelves. Now, this isn’t that surprising. If you’ve ventured out to a mall in the last decade, you’ve probably noticed that physical media aisles and stores are getting smaller and smaller. With the rise of streaming services for video, music, and now even most games, the writing’s been on the wall for a while. We’ve been witnessing the end in real time as we upgrade our internet packages to stream better quality at faster speeds.
It’s not like this was forced on us, either. We all kind of opted for this future by spending less on physical media over time. And who can blame us? Fifteen dollars a month to access the majority of music at any time, to listen to on any device from anywhere, so long as we have a few bars, versus paying twenty dollars for a single album seems like an easy and obvious choice. Twenty dollars to access hundreds of games a month versus eighty dollars for each single release? Again, a lot cheaper than renting was back in the Blockbuster days.
Maybe streaming games versus movies versus audio isn’t all the same, but there is something amiss nonetheless. The streaming future, for the most part, simplified life and made access to almost anything we wanted so convenient that it made torrenting seem complicated.
Lately, I’ve been feeling some type of way about physical media, even though I’ve long opted for the digital counterparts. And maybe it’s not even the physical counterparts going missing that has me in my feels; rather, it’s the way that we no longer own anything and, like cattle, are being ushered into this content-as-a-service future where we kind of pay for the experience but are at the whim of those gatekeepers for access. Once these servers shut off, then the content we thought we owned also disappears.
We saw this recently with Sony when they removed access to Discovery films which users had previously bought. This raised the collective consciousness of the internet to ask, if buying isn’t owning, then does that mean piracy isn’t stealing? See, it used to be simple: you bought physical movies, games, music, and so long as you had the device to play them, you were good. You could trade, buy, sell, and collect these mediums; they continue to hold a value. But with everything moving towards digital leases and things being less and less about digital ownership, it does raise the question: what happens when the lights get turned off?
What happens to our virtual game collections if Gabe Newell decides he’s had enough and it’s just time to turn off the lights? Okay, so maybe that won’t be for a while or ever in our lifetime; Steam seems to be doing all right and still making a bunch of money to operate. But the point kind of remains: what happens when these servers turn off? How are these collections passed on, preserved, experienced, and relived? Continual remasters, remakes, HD updates… with more and more games relying on hosted servers to even run, what happens to all those Apex skins and heirlooms if Respawn decides it’s time to turn off the lights? What value do the millions spent on V-bucks hold when Epic decides to retire Fortnite? You can’t really download and run them locally or bring over a bunch of consoles together and create your own giant LAN easily.
Ubisoft, at least to their credit, have been honest with us when they said gamers need to get comfortable not owning their games. At least in the physical game era, while online multiplayer may have ended, you could still set up everything you needed to run things in-house. Or, right before everything got hosted in the cloud, it was still possible to run your own gaming servers for you and whatever community remained to enjoy and play together.
I mean, physical media has its limitations also. What’s a VHS collection worth when the media itself decays or requires antiquated hardware to consume? What good are all those DVDs everyone quickly lined their walls with when we all moved to 4K TVs and Blu-rays? Was the expectation that we just re-up the newer versions of the same content every era? How is an ever-evolving free mass multiplayer gaming experience, even one riddled with cosmetic microtransactions, in any way worse than paying upwards of $100 yearly for incremental game upgrades when the worlds continue to grow?
I’ve always had a weird relationship when it comes to physical media, so much so that I could never stand the thought of just how wasteful much of it felt. The digital leases we consume now do have some convenient perks of offering us seemingly more for less. Yet at the same time, there’s a certain affinity I have towards my antiquated CD collection that I can’t play anymore, an ability to share an experience when playing games together in person without needing to be online with four friends on a local setup where no connection to the broader world was needed. I want to collect old copies of classic games with the consoles I find so that I can revisit those with my own kids, even if they are just 8 and 16-bit pixelated messes compared to what we have at our disposal now.
This may be where the digital hoarding subculture proves its case that emulation of abandoned ware is the true preservation, or maybe it’s just a true reflection that everything is temporary and should be enjoyed in the era it lives in. I probably have more questions than answers at this point, but it does seem like the future we’re headed towards is one where everything is just borrowed, and that just has me feeling like all this is just a tad bit more hollow than it ever used to be, just one power outage away from ceasing to exist.
Anyways, that’s just what’s been on my mind lately, and I’m curious to know how y’all feel about this. Do y’all miss physical media? How much of your lives have gone digital-only, and how much has gone subscription-only? Let me know in the comments below. I read everything and send replies as best as I can. Also, if you’ve made it this far, drop a like and consider subscribing; it really helps with pushing this video out to more people. Till next time, peace!
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