5 Greedy Decisions That Changed Gaming For The Worse

4. Loss of Physical Media

In 2004, Valve did something that would end up drastically altering how games are sold. In a world where CD/DVD/Blu-ray collections were revered as prized possessions, Valve made Half-Life 2 available on a certain platform called Steam. The game had to be either downloaded directly from the online storefront or any purchased physical copies had to be digitally authenticated. Aside from crashing Steam’s servers, it was a glimpse into what the future of video game sales would look like. Subsequent to this, Sony and Xbox would make their console games purchasable through digital storefronts, not to mention the emergence of the App Store and Google Play as the marketplace for mobile games. 

The writing was well and truly on the wall in 2020, when Xbox and Sony announced their next generation consoles will also come in versions lacking a physical disc drive. It was the clearest indication yet that industry was moving away from physical media altogether. 

For the companies, the economics of this shift is simple. Physical media costs money to produce, transport, store in warehouses, and distribute. Maintaining online platforms, though requiring substantial resources of their own, helps eliminate these costs. In the end, the bottom-line favored the switch to digital games. 

Today physical games are at risk of vanishing altogether. The convenience of buying a game sitting at home with a click of a few buttons, combined with game publishers making the need to download at least some components of a game mandatory, has ensured retailers of physical games have almost disappeared from the equation. Such has been the impact of this transition that PCs do not even come with optical CD/DVD drives anymore, unless purchased separately. While this has brought about some positive changes, such as digital storefronts being an easier entry point for independent publishers, the loss of physical goes beyond the economics and has had an emotional and cultural impact on consumers. 

Physical media brings more than just the actual material or content people enjoy. It forms a physical embodiment of nostalgia and fond memories. For many, physical media such as game collections served as expression of their interests, their likes, their identifies; something they derived a unique happiness from as they expanded and curated their collections. This would especially be true for collection enthusiasts, who would spend considerable amounts of money and time maintaining and adding to their prized game cabinets. 

There was a time when purchasing a game was an experience unto itself, with the trip to stores and the time spent exploring their vast isles being something people looked forward to. Today this is another social practice that has been lost to the convenience-driven mechanisms of a perpetually online world. The evidence is not anecdotal. In a study published in 2016 in the Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, researchers found that respondents who preferred physical games over their digital counterparts, did so because of the ease of retrieval and use, resale option, and tangible traits such as box aesthetic and associated collectibles.  

While it is true that individuals’ preferences for type of media are highly subjective, with many people at least partially preferring the convenience of digital downloads, the fact remains the decisive choice between physical and digital games is being taken away from gamers by the companies. Furthermore, the near complete digitization of games has also facilitated the excessive monetization practices found within games today such as in-game purchases (but more on that later).