By Nelson Schneider - 09/06/26 at 12:06 AM CT
There has been a big backlash against Sony’s recent announcement of the end of PlayStation discs in 2028. There was even a week-long PlayStation Blackout movement that... I’ve been participating in since 2014. The entire debacle, including its implications for PlayStation players’ (I almost typed “owners” there, but that’s the crux of the whole issue) rights in an ecosystem where the Company owns the platform, the store, and, ultimately, the things you “license” (again, I almost typed “buy” there) from the store, are chilling. Indeed, it’s highly reminiscent of the kind of corrupt slavery-adjacent behavior foisted of low-wage, low-skill workers in the era of Company Stores and Scrip Currency.
Penny Arcade, the Gaming webcomic that has been around for nearly 30 (!) years at this point, recently had a similar notion, calling out the current trends in Industrial Gaming as less of a new, terrible thing being foisted upon customers, and more of a return to the primordial origins of interactive digital entertainment (even when it was more analog). Arcades offered a paradigm where the user did NOT own the device, did NOT own the game, and was required to pay in real currency every time they reached the game’s Fail State. That doesn’t sound all that different from Sony and Nintendo reserving the right to brick the hardware you paid for, revoke licenses for games you paid for, and expect you, the consumer, to happily pay again for the privilege of continuing to engage with their entertainment product.
Perhaps most disgustingly of all, Sony deviously made the announcement of their altering of the deal right when the smooth-brained Normies and Gaming Tourists (and a few that have no fucking excuse) were being feverishly worked-up over the pending release of “Grand Theft Auto 6” – the first single-player “AAA” game release to be digital only on all platforms. Yeah... it’s not surprising the PlayStation Blackout failed... disgusting, but not surprising.
Since Gamers (and Normies and Tourists and Simps) don’t have the willpower to do anything to save themselves from Sony’s (and Nintendo’s) tyranny, it looks like the rest of us who do will have to pin all of our hopes on the global adoption of digital consumer rights, backed and enforced by governments across the world...
... HAHA, that’s just great! We’re literally beholden to completely broken, dysfunctional governments who are already bought and paid for by corporate lobbyists to do something in the interest of the public but NOT in the interest of the lobbyists. So yeah, we’re completely boned.
As a late Gen-X-er who came of age in the 1990s, for most of my youth, it really did seem like the world was going to keep getting better and better. But now I have egg on my face, since it turned out that literally EVERYTHING was a bubble. We lived through the Console Gaming Golden Age, and now we’re being forced to acknowledge that cheap hardware, quality games, and a general positive trend in Gaming as a hobby was a fluke and a temporary condition, while the current hellscape of premium currencies, draconian DRM, revokable licenses (for software AND hardware), and total corporate control is where things started before we were born, and where they will naturally settle again if we sit idly by and allow it.
