Do you support physical releases of games or prefer all-digital?

No one should support the loss of physical media. Not while our digital rights are so nebulous and weighted in the favour of media corporations who offer restrictive, indefinite rental of content on their servers rather than true ownership.

I suspect a fair number of you here are too young to remember the days when physically purchasing a cartridge or disc was the only way of acquiring new video games. When games had to be the best they could be on release, as there was no possibility of a day one patch and a non-functional game would destroy a company, rather than rallying defenders with excuses and cries of "just wait for the patch! In a year it will be great!"

When there were no massive "micro"-transactions or pre-ordered DLC season passes, and you had to make enough new content of high enough quality to justify selling a physical expansion pack or new edition of the game.

In those days the physical box was all part of the experience. It would have evocative art on the cover, and blurbs on the back rather than a list of terms and conditions and notices of which subscriptions and services you needed to buy to play the game.

The manual was an essential part of the experience. In those days there was no YouTube "Before You Play" guides, "tips and cheats" websites were rudimentary and your best bet for finding help if you got stuck was hoping one of your friends had already beaten the game or calling an extortionately priced premium official tip line.

On the occasions my parents would treat me to a new game, unwrapping the box on the ride home and reading the manual; learning how to play, learning the lore of the world and characters and anything else the devs thought you needed to know or would just like to see, was crucial. Many games didn't even have tutorials. You should have read the manual. But it was also fun and got you immersed in the game before you ever inserted the cartridge.

Now most "physical" releases are just an empty box and a download code. Maybe there is a link to a rudimentary PDF manual if you are lucky.

Of course, one advantage of those shallow code boxes is that there is still competitive pricing. Physical retailers could potentially price the game lower than the console manufacturer's official store, so both were incentivised to offer discounts to edge out a sale.

In a download only future, download codes will likely be phased out too. They might persist for a little while to placate physical stores. But they will be phased out eventually. And then the console manufacturers have a monopoly on pricing. Why would they need to discount the games? They are the only option.

Mind you, for Nintendo fans that probably doesn't seem like a big change.

And again, if you have a physical disc or cartridge, it would be legally very difficult for publishers to deny you access to it, though theoretically there is the possibility that a console could be updated to not run the game if the publisher felt compelled to do so.

And physical media can be backed up (despite digital protections). You can preserve the media beyond the life of the storage device.

Digital copies are essentially a glorified rental service. It exists on their servers, and they can revoke your rights at any time. Sony just did that with movies people purchased on their service. Not rented. Purchased to own. They revoked your right to watch content you bought.

They didn't revoke their own right to keep the money you paid for it though.

Maybe in the future governments will finally catch up with the realities of modern technology, and you will retain the rights to keep and back-up your digital content. Maybe we will get rid of restrictive DRM. Maybe we can even inherit it like physical possessions.

In the meantime, physical possessions remain the type of asset governments do understand and have the most robust consumer protections for. Eliminating physical media is an attempt to exploit these loopholes.

No one should support this change.

And game key cards aren't much better. They still rely on online servers, they can still revoke your right to the content and they are still a step closer to the digital-only indefinite rental future. We should demand full games on cartridges.