Last week, Sony announced that they'd be shuttering the PS3 and Vita stores, starting with select territories next month. This really bums me out! I'm sure you could make the argument that those stores don't see enough usage to justify maintaining them and you might even be right from a pure financial perspective, but it's the principal of the matter that really gets me. Sony is showing that they don't care about maintaining their history.
That on its own is bad, don't get me wrong, but it was announced in tandem with the news that new PlayStation games will no longer be printed on discs starting in 2028. GTAVI already announced it would be launching with just a digital code, and there have been individual releases here and there, as well as Nintendo's Game Key Card situation, that somewhat establish a precedent for this, but those were, to my eyes, outliers. Having one of The Big Three outright stop selling physical games (as their language, to me, implies) means the end of the secondhand market but, crucially, also the end of any semblance of ownership of their games.
That might sound a bit extreme, but look at what was announced just a few days ago: over five hundred Studio Canal films that people paid for to "own", even if a EULA somewhere defined that ownership as a mere license that could be revoked, are, well, getting their licenses revoked. People won't be able to access digital copies of things that they paid for and Sony has no intention of offering refunds or any sort of recourse. Again, the language around digital copies almost always states that this is a risk, but seeing Sony pull digital copies of content right when they're scrapping physical sales of their other content, well, it looks really bad!
This PlayStation news reminds me that, coincidentally, just a little while ago I was watching a video on Paramount's film archive and there sure is a stark difference between game preservation and film preservation, isn't there? Yes, I know that not every studio keeps records of stuff they own, and a lot of live television is presumably lost to time, but it seems to me that there is often at least an effort made to hold onto that stuff, typically. Stuff like Doctor Who's lost episodes are (I feel) looked at as anomalies. With games there's just (seemingly) no consistent efforts to maintain copies of games or source code or whatever. A lot of that stuff only exists today because people pirated it or someone conveniently just Had A Copy (like Doctor Who and some old films, now that I think about it).
Adding to the bad news, this week Xbox (sorry, XBOX) announced they'd be laying off 1600 people, with another 1600 to follow at some point later this year. That's apparently 20% of their workforce! 3200 people! That's a lot of lives that are going to be thrown into disarray because the people running things are incompetent (at best) or straight-up evil (at worst). I know I'm just screaming into the void here but it hurts to see an industry I care about so much get stripped for parts by greedy executives, just like everything else. This is unconscionable stuff and it shouldn't be tolerated, but the people making these calls are all going to continue to get paid well and no one's going to truly face consequences for any of these judgment calls. It sucks.
I don't have any answers to how to fix this or any real takeaways other than "this stinks", but, well, it's bad! It's all really, really bad! Id Software, a pillar of the industry for decades, was gutted and is now only a shell of its former self. Right on the heels of the release of some Doom: The Dark Ages DLC that's apparently very good, too! None of these layoffs have anything to do with the people who are suffering, it's entirely due to people like Phil Spencer and Asha Sharma who made bad business decisions that they're forcing other people to pay for.
Ugh. I love this industry (even though I'm not a part of it) because I think gaming is a fantastic medium that means a lot to me, and watching the same sorts of people (and, sometimes, literally the same people) ruin company after company all in the pursuit of infinite growth to please shareholders while simultaneously making things worse for consumers genuinely hurts me.
People have been talking about how modern games are unsustainable for a while, even going back as far as the PS3, but budgets have only continued to balloon since then. It's seemed in some ways like a bubble that was inevitably going to pop and this XBOX news feels like, well, a sign that the industry is crashing again. I don't know what gaming will look like in 5 years, and I'm sure indie devs will continue to exist and smaller games will be able to find audiences on places like Steam and itch.io, but all of... well, this, feels like the death knell of AAA gaming.
Sony stopping physical media and thereby killing the secondhand market, along with rumors that the PS6 is going to be upwards of $1000 (which, given the cost of the Steam Machine, seems likely) means that "AAA" will be aimed solely for the rich and I'm just not sure that's enough of a market to support it. I'm not sure an industry aimed at excluding people who can't afford it should exist, frankly.
I'm rambling, and I'm sorry about that, but these news stories over the past week or so have just been incredibly dispiriting. I genuinely try to stay positive, and I have a massive backlog to work through so I'll continue to have content for this blog going forward even if gaming as we know it changes into something smaller or less... monied, but watching a thing you love die, a thing staffed by so many talented and passionate people, doesn't feel good.
The world in general is in a weird place with the AI bubble that's almost certainly going to pop at some point, and maybe that'll cause Microsoft to do some soul-searching and correct course, but in a lot of ways the damage has been done. It's hard to see from so close, but I feel like the game industry has just crossed some sort of line that signals... something. Something is going to have to change in the next couple years and I'm not sure anyone knows what's going to be left when all is said and done.
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