10 Biggest Dangers To Gaming Right Now (From A Dev's Perspective)

You don’t own your videogames.

And no, I’m not just talking about your Game Pass titles, I mean all of your games. Super Mario All-Stars, Eternal Darkness, Pandemonium! - you only ever owned the rights to personal use of your copy. Of course, you owned the plastic - the carts, the discs - but the game part - that was never yours.

So how’s it different now? Well, in 1996 you weren’t expecting a big SEGA-emblazoned thug to smash down your door and take your copy of Sonic and Knuckles off you when the MJ soundtrack licence expired. I mean, they could have done that, but I can’t imagine it would’ve been very cost-effective.

But nowadays, in a perpetually-online world where the games you play are simply temporarily-occupied slots on your hard drives, the revocation process for publishers is just so much simpler. On a whim, the licence-holders can simply choose to block your access to that data remotely, and pizzowza - you’re unable to play your $70 game!

On one hand, you could argue that, as we’re simply buying licences to access publishers’ games, all games are less products and more… services. But on the other hand, they don’t sell those services as extremely limited-time opportunities - they’re counting on us skimming over all of those terms and conditions telling us our access could be pulled at any time.

The future could see this balance of power shifted even further out of the players’ hands, changing even single-player titles to very transient experiences with limited lifespans.