Gaming and the Illusion of “Ownership”
By Public Service Associate Paul
Picture yourself as a child in the 5th generation of home video game consoles–a time when the PlayStation, Nintendo 64, and Sega Saturn stood like titans, engaged in a fiery battle for your imagination. You are buckled into the backseat of the family car, clutching your new GameStop gift card like it’s a golden ticket, your mind already drifting to the aisles that await. You can already see them in your head: rows of game cases lined like soldiers with their glossy covers bursting with heroes, villains, and far off lands calling to you. You push past your parents and feel the cool air as the automatic doors whoosh open. Your eyes adjust to the fluorescent lights, and you see the shelves stretching endlessly, glowing like a treasure trove of pixelated promises. You wander, starry eyed through the electric wonderland, your hands dragging along the spines of cases, each one whispering a new adventure to your imagination.
Eventually, after what feels like both a lifetime and a blink all at once, you’ve made your choice–maybe two or three if the pre-owned bin has been generous–and you race to the counter. The drive home is a blur; you’re already tearing into the shrink wrap, the crackle of plastic giving way to the scent of ink and cardstock. You pull out the thick, glossy manual, its pages alive with vibrant artwork, mysterious lore, and the instructions that feel like sacred texts.
Once home, you’ll slot the game into the console like setting a key in a lock to reveal a new world. Some games you’ll keep forever, proudly displayed like trophies on the top of the CD rack for easy replayability. Others, you’ll trade back, sending them off like birds leaving the nest, hoping the next find will be even more magical. And so it goes—an endless tide of discovery and nostalgia, bound together by plastic cases and pixel dreams. This ebb and flow persisted from that point on until now, in the height of the 9th generation of consoles and over 20 years since the release of the PlayStation, where ownership of games is dying, if they haven’t killed it already.
The executives in the AAA gaming space are already looking at the music and film industry as an example of how to transition people away from buying and owning their media physically and transitioning to a completely digital future. And if you don’t believe me, the Director of Subscriptions at Ubisoft, Philippe Tremblay, said when speaking with gamesindustry.biz that
“One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVD, having and owning their games. That’s the consumer shift that needs to happen,” he said. “They got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That’s a transformation that’s been a bit slower to happen [in games]. So it’s about feeling comfortable with not owning your game.”
They start doing that by making consumers comfortable with not owning their games, and so far, whether we like it or not, they’ve done a good job. Just like when everyone cut the cord for cable 10 years ago because everything was on Netflix, or the rise of Spotify and even Apple Music. But now, just like in streaming, one subscription is not enough, and the same issue plagues the gaming space.
In order to play online games with friends on all three primary console platforms, you must pay a subscription. In order to play backward compatible games, as in games from earlier generations of consoles, you need to have an additional paid subscription. Then on top of those subscriptions offered by your platform of choice, nearly each of the biggest AAA game publishers also have an independent subscription service to access their games. And of course, the biggest argument to this transition is to vote with your wallets and to buy physical games.
But more and more these days, even the physical copies of “games” don’t even contain the game but rather a license for the game where the game still has to be downloaded digitally. Gran Turismo 7, the most recent entry in Sony’s highest selling franchise in the company’s history, will not just prevent you from accessing the online multiplayer modes if you don’t have an internet connection or paid subscription. If you are unable to connect to the internet, when you insert the disc for Gran Turismo 7 you will have access to one single mode, and it isn’t the single player campaign, but a side mode with limited tracks, vehicles, and no ability to earn or save your progress. This trend of requiring digital downloads is not only concerning but shows no signs of slowing following the recent announcement of the highly anticipated Nintendo Switch 2 that has been marred with controversy.
Nintendo’s first party titles are not only seeing a price increase, raising the AAA standard to $80 per title, but their physical copies are also more expensive and require an internet connection to install. So aside from the aforementioned issue with accessing the game at time of purchase, and it being significantly more expensive, you will also eventually lose access to your purchase once the online storefronts inevitably shut down, even if you do personally have a stable internet connection and the physical cartridge.
Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox have all begun sunsetting their digital services for devices in the 7th generation, that’s the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii/Wii U stores. And once those services are taken offline for good, all of the games you ever purchased digitally will cease to exist. You don’t own them. You bought the right to play them for as long as the company that owns it feels like allowing you to do so. I could pull out my SNES and play Super Mario World from 1990 the exact way I experienced when I was a kid, blowing on the cartridge and all. But with the direction that gaming is heading, in just a couple of years, even if you own the original hardware and software, games as recent as 2007 could be completely lost forever.
For many, this debate whether to “buy” digital or physical games is as simple as the ease of use and convenience of digital downloads. And since the rise of digital storefronts and subscriptions there have been seldom few instances that indicate danger on the horizon for this burgeoning industry. But on February 7, 2025, the Midwest and East Coast was just clocking out from a long Friday workday and wanted to head home and relax with some video games. When they got home and turned on their PlayStations they discovered that, due to still unknown circumstances, all of PlayStation Network, or PSN was down. Players could not sign into their accounts to play online. They could not sign in to access their account info. They could not access the store or their purchases. Which meant any game, movie, show or any other paid content that wasn’t installed at that moment could not be played.
Some unlucky gamers who had recently acquired the new PS5 Pro, the PS5 with improved graphics and performance, discovered how detrimental acquiring a console with an optional disc drive could be. When trying to attach the optional physical disc drive to their consoles, they were met with a pairing error stating that their disc drive could not be paired to their console, because it could not access PSN. So now even if you own the physical copy of the game, you still aren’t able to use the disc drive without an internet connection. Then if you happened to be lucky enough to have a disc drive already functional, it’s fully possible that, again, the game you want to play isn’t even on the actual disc and needs to be downloaded from the store, that can’t be accessed because the service is down on the provider’s side.
The first game console that I ever personally owned that wasn’t for family use was an Xbox 360 Arcade. It was my twelfth birthday, and I was overjoyed to finally get an Xbox since that’s what everyone was playing. The Xbox 360 Arcade did not have wi-fi capability out of the box and so I couldn’t join my friends in playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009), not to be confused with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: 2 (2022), but what I could do is take out any of my original Xbox games, or any of the new games I had just acquired with my new console and put them into the disc drive and play them right away.
Now, with the most recent console I purchased, the PlayStation 5, instead of a 5 minute set up of plugging the console in, and putting in the game, and playing right away, I have to connect the device to the internet, connect my PSN account to the device, update the device, plug in and update my controller (yes that’s right, my controllers receive software updates that also require an internet connection), choose whether to allow data tracking, receive a forced tutorial on how the new user interface works and only then can I finally freely interact with my console. But once I put in the disc, the game files then need to be installed to my hard drive from the disc. That’s going to take about 40 minutes. And once that’s done a patch needs to install from the internet. Let’s say that’s another 30 to 40 minutes. At this point, I am 2 or more hours removed from unboxing, and I haven’t touched a single game. By this long after unboxing the Xbox 360 when I was 12, I was already in act 2 of Modern Warfare 2’s campaign.
Be it Sony’s God of War Ragnarok, Microsoft’s Hellblade, or Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda, this current era in gaming is full of the most visually striking, most content rich games in history, across all platforms. It is also plagued with the greed of C-suite executives who have no understanding of the creativity required to make a game that appeals to the markets they are trying to wring dry.
For every God of War: Ragnarok there are 3 more failed live service games waiting in the wings to sink a long tenured studio into mud, such as Concord, Anthem, or Marvel’s Avengers. All games that were critically panned and widely recognized as being out of touch with what consumers want, and they all vanished within months of release. The line must go up. Developers are pushed to increase monetization and microtransactions. The investors must be happy. Lay-off experienced developers to increase profit margins. Crank out slop for cheap, distribute digitally to save on cost of physical releases, while also increasing the MSRP of physical releases.
Before long, the acclaimed studios that brought us all our favorite masterpieces of games exist only in name, as all of the talent and autonomy are drained in pursuit of profits while the shells of these former giants are puppeted around to dance on the broken backs and spirits of those whose sweat and tears paved the way for the art.
The next step in that pursuit is to finally break the notion that we own our consoles and we own our games. If this is fully accomplished, especially now with the rising costs of games (along with everything else), I imagine that there may be another video game crash like in ‘83. And as much as I hope it doesn’t come to that, it may be necessary for the hobby to become sustainable again.
In the end, the shift away from physical game ownership isn’t just a matter of price, or even of convenience– it’s a fundamental alteration to the ways we interact with an art form that we love. Just as cinema moved from collectible boxed sets of DVDs and Blu-rays to fleeting digital licenses on streaming platforms, gaming is now heading down that long and winding road–where access is temporary, curated, and forever at risk of being taken away.
The nostalgia of browsing the game store aisles and clutching the manual in the car has given way to subscription models, server dependencies, and fleeting access. We are being trained to accept less and pay more and many of us don’t yet realize what we have lost until it is too late to save it. But this isn’t just about the games–it’s about preserving the magic, autonomy, and the legacy of the gaming industry as we have known it for decades. If we want a future where players still have a choice, still have something to hold onto, then we have to speak up now–before even this illusion of ownership vanishes for good.
Power to the players.