There is a very famous video during the console war of 2013 where Microsoft said a bunch of weird shit about DRM and watermarking games to your console and controlling software purchases after the fact. This video referenced above may be the most malevolent assault since Sega did what Nintendidn't. Just… blood everywhere. Gandalf suggested that a wizard is never late, nor are they early - they arrive precisely when they mean to. Microsoft's doom is that they are perpetually late, except when they're so early people don't even understand what the fuck they're talking about.
The famous video is here to remind us that thirteen years ago, the all digital future was essentially forestalled by a consumer revolt against some of those ideas. It's a strange thing to discuss, because that's more or less been how I have done shit since the advent of Steam. But you do have to cast your mind back to a time where you would go to a game store and they would just tell you straight up that if you didn't preorder a PC game they weren't going to stock it. PC games were orthogonal to… hang on, Mike might want to read this. They were inimical to… gah. Well, PC games simply had nothing to offer the fundamental model of a game store; they could not be endlessly sold and sold again. They were unlike Soulcalibur in this respect, which is a tale of souls and swords eternally retold. The empty box with a code in it was just business as usual for my slice of this shit sixteen years ago, but then, we've always been the pervert uncles of the hobby; real Ham Radio type motherfuckers.
So when Sony says they're done with discs, they've been selling machines without drives for a minute so I guess it tracks. As soon as the storefronts hit the box, material stores were always going to atrophy. They will claim more and more of each purchase, and the interesting, consumer forward parts that even Xbox One proposed to leaven the transition to "digital ownership" just don't come up. They no longer have to ameliorate it at all, the frog is boiled. That doesn't mean I like it; I don't. Railing against the inevitable is just, I dunno. A hobby, you might say.
(CW)TB out.
