I’m hoping some digital buyers understand accessibility and preservation too, though. Like, it doesn’t have to be just the 10% that show this is unacceptable.
Having said that, I know gamers, as a whole, are terrible at voting with their wallets.
“Voting with one’s wallet” isn’t an action you take. “Gamers as a whole” have been voting with their wallets against disc games for over a decade. On PC, there was barely an outcry as brick and mortar stores stopped being part of the games experience. On consoles, people have been installing the games on HDDs since the Xbox 360 since actually running the game off a disc incurs atrocious load times. Gamers have accepted and paid for DLC. Gamers have accepted and dealt with day-one patches that render the data on the physical disc obsolete.
Hell, gamers as a whole chose to purchase the discless PS5. Gamers as a whole subscribe to PS+, Switch Online, Xbox Live, Gamepass, etc enough that it’s shifted the value model of the medium. “Not buying a product” isn’t nearly as much of a political statement as the wallet-vote drumbeaters think. Not buying the product is the default. Am I “boycotting” ubisoft when I haven’t purchased a Ubi game since Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time on the Gamecube? Sony’s Playstation 4 and 5 never appealed to me as a platform or product. There might be a shakeup or protest where people that do regularly give Sony (or whoever) money stop doing so, but that’s always going to be a drop in the bucket. Hell, the customers that buy physical (especially used) games for PS5, don’t buy digital and don’t pay for Plus are the least valuable customers for Sony anyway. Sony makes $0 a year off that guy where they make hundreds a year from a dude that literally just pays for ps+ and the newest COD.
The “wallets have voted” and the result for Sony is overwhelmingly “yeah, you’re gonna do just fine without disc diehards”. Games preservation purists already aren’t console customers because modern consoles are designed exclusively as anti-preservation ecosystems. The remaining reason to care about discs is the used copy trade, and that’s the same as piracy when it comes to the company. Worse, even, since there’s an entire industry and market surrounding “how to play zelda without paying nintendo” legally.
“Wallet voting” overwhelmingly rewards those that buy. Say you’re selling a $100/yr subscription service to a million people. You announce that you’re doubling the price to $200 a year. The internet gets mad. As long as less than five hundred thousand active subscribers get mad enough to cancel, you made the “right decision”. The opinion of anyone other than those subscribers doesn’t matter. The entertainment industry has reached a point of market saturation that getting more customers isn’t a feasible growth mechanism, so instead you have to squeeze the ones you have harder.
I voted with my wallet hard enough years ago that I’m no longer part of this “wallet vote”. I haven’t purchased a console game since Animal Crossing on the Switch, and haven’t purchased a physical one since Mario Odyssey - the only reason I did that was to dodge updating the console, so that I could do things Nintendo very much does not want a user doing on their console. I’ve never owned a Sony console except for a ps2, and never Xbox since the 360. My preferred platform, PC, has been used-games-free and physical-copies-free (CD keyed installers are not physical copies for any definition other than “is pretty on a shelf”) for decades, and it’s better than a walled console garden could ever be. DRM-free purchases and piracy exist on PC and gasp people still buy PC games.
If the glorified DRM key for accessing the digital game (in the form of day 1 patches and postlaunch content) finally dying is what raises awareness of consoles being a hostageware platform, so be it.
I mean, I’d daresay the gaming community has a large community dedicated to both accessibility and preservation, they’re just generally frowned upon because it’s, you know, piracy. However, only through piracy can I get an original release copy of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 for PlayStation, Dreamcast and Windows. You can only get re-releases, remakes, and the like, often which do not hold up to the original in terms of style and control.
I dare say that games are preserved more through digital means then by physical media though. You have plenty of sites keeping different versions of a number of games, old or new, without any form of DRM (or bypassed) on PC (through “piracy”, as ironic as it may sound).
Physical media nowadays are mostly a form of DRM anyway - a disc that will only work on a certain system, and that usually requires you to go online to activate it anyway, which means that they won’t work after a couple of decades (or even much earlier). The biggest advantage of it, imo, is the freedom of selling/buying or trading used copies.
I’m hoping some digital buyers understand accessibility and preservation too, though. Like, it doesn’t have to be just the 10% that show this is unacceptable.
Having said that, I know gamers, as a whole, are terrible at voting with their wallets.
“Voting with one’s wallet” isn’t an action you take. “Gamers as a whole” have been voting with their wallets against disc games for over a decade. On PC, there was barely an outcry as brick and mortar stores stopped being part of the games experience. On consoles, people have been installing the games on HDDs since the Xbox 360 since actually running the game off a disc incurs atrocious load times. Gamers have accepted and paid for DLC. Gamers have accepted and dealt with day-one patches that render the data on the physical disc obsolete.
Hell, gamers as a whole chose to purchase the discless PS5. Gamers as a whole subscribe to PS+, Switch Online, Xbox Live, Gamepass, etc enough that it’s shifted the value model of the medium. “Not buying a product” isn’t nearly as much of a political statement as the wallet-vote drumbeaters think. Not buying the product is the default. Am I “boycotting” ubisoft when I haven’t purchased a Ubi game since Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time on the Gamecube? Sony’s Playstation 4 and 5 never appealed to me as a platform or product. There might be a shakeup or protest where people that do regularly give Sony (or whoever) money stop doing so, but that’s always going to be a drop in the bucket. Hell, the customers that buy physical (especially used) games for PS5, don’t buy digital and don’t pay for Plus are the least valuable customers for Sony anyway. Sony makes $0 a year off that guy where they make hundreds a year from a dude that literally just pays for ps+ and the newest COD.
The “wallets have voted” and the result for Sony is overwhelmingly “yeah, you’re gonna do just fine without disc diehards”. Games preservation purists already aren’t console customers because modern consoles are designed exclusively as anti-preservation ecosystems. The remaining reason to care about discs is the used copy trade, and that’s the same as piracy when it comes to the company. Worse, even, since there’s an entire industry and market surrounding “how to play zelda without paying nintendo” legally.
“Wallet voting” overwhelmingly rewards those that buy. Say you’re selling a $100/yr subscription service to a million people. You announce that you’re doubling the price to $200 a year. The internet gets mad. As long as less than five hundred thousand active subscribers get mad enough to cancel, you made the “right decision”. The opinion of anyone other than those subscribers doesn’t matter. The entertainment industry has reached a point of market saturation that getting more customers isn’t a feasible growth mechanism, so instead you have to squeeze the ones you have harder.
Never said they weren’t voting. Said they were not voting well.
I voted with my wallet hard enough years ago that I’m no longer part of this “wallet vote”. I haven’t purchased a console game since Animal Crossing on the Switch, and haven’t purchased a physical one since Mario Odyssey - the only reason I did that was to dodge updating the console, so that I could do things Nintendo very much does not want a user doing on their console. I’ve never owned a Sony console except for a ps2, and never Xbox since the 360. My preferred platform, PC, has been used-games-free and physical-copies-free (CD keyed installers are not physical copies for any definition other than “is pretty on a shelf”) for decades, and it’s better than a walled console garden could ever be. DRM-free purchases and piracy exist on PC and gasp people still buy PC games.
If the glorified DRM key for accessing the digital game (in the form of day 1 patches and postlaunch content) finally dying is what raises awareness of consoles being a hostageware platform, so be it.
I mean, I’d daresay the gaming community has a large community dedicated to both accessibility and preservation, they’re just generally frowned upon because it’s, you know, piracy. However, only through piracy can I get an original release copy of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 for PlayStation, Dreamcast and Windows. You can only get re-releases, remakes, and the like, often which do not hold up to the original in terms of style and control.
I dare say that games are preserved more through digital means then by physical media though. You have plenty of sites keeping different versions of a number of games, old or new, without any form of DRM (or bypassed) on PC (through “piracy”, as ironic as it may sound).
Physical media nowadays are mostly a form of DRM anyway - a disc that will only work on a certain system, and that usually requires you to go online to activate it anyway, which means that they won’t work after a couple of decades (or even much earlier). The biggest advantage of it, imo, is the freedom of selling/buying or trading used copies.