Why You Don’t Own Your Own Video Games Any More

It might sound corny, but the one aspect of playing a video game that you will always own, and which can never be taken away from you no matter what, is the actual visceral experience of playing it.

Though there's no stopping the tide of an increasingly all-digital future - which many will understandably embrace for its convenience, speed, and clutter-free appeal - those feeling a loss of ownership will be forced to keep compromising for as long as they play new video games.

The message here, then, is not to obsess too much over the ownership debate to the extent that it kills your fun for the hobby, for playing them in the moment rather than endlessly worrying about their decades-later accessibility.

The prospect of games being revoked and lost to time is scary, no doubt, but they will always be far more of a feeling and an experience than a mere cartridge or optical disc.

Hell, there's an entire generation of kids raised on renting physical video games, where ownership simply wasn't part of the equation, and in that sense avenues like Game Pass have the potential to simply become a high-tech evolution of that, albeit with their own complexities and growing pains.