Polygon - The Days of Owning Games Are Over

Ben Kuchera shared an opinion article on Polygon about how the days of owning games are coming to an end due to progress, and how your children won't care.

We may complain about this in the comments, but the reality of the situation is that this is the future we've built. We support this new age of limited ownership, of products that exist at the pleasure of the publishers and developers. We spend money on games and services, we prop up the minimum viable products that we like and support their ongoing development. We talk about convenience when we buy digitally, and we worry about things like pre-loading so we can play the moment the game is out, but we're ultimately discussing impermanence.

The stacks of NES games that I can still put in my system to play, the PlayStation One games that still work on my first-generation PlayStation 2, these are all relics for a time that has passed. We're not buying anymore, and EA is showing us the next step towards our rented future. This future comes with benefits, and we may save some money, but let's also understand what we're giving up, and why.

This is the way forward; the way of the future. Your kids won't mind that they don't own their games, they won't know any other reality. The rest of us will worry about what it all means, as we pay for the next piece of content that will blow away like sand the moment the Xbox Two is released, or will fade from memory as we hook up our PlayStation Fives.

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More information.

Change a few words and this article would double as a pro-communist, pro-monarchist, pro-dictiatorship manifesto.

Just because the next generation will be used to it doesnt mean its right. Kids that grow up in abusive homes think that abuse is normal and continue the cycle. But, like everything else in this world, personal pride in ownership is fading. People don't own their vehicles, their homes, their lives but prefer to mortgage, rent, borrow, lease. Not sure why I'm shocked.

I guess for those British subjects that have grown up used to 'Lord Greymont graciously allowing nearby subjects to frolic on his grounds from 10-5 every second friday, will be just fine with it.'

This bugs me on soooo many levels.

*

We're not buying anymore, and EA is showing us the next step towards our rented future.

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And because I'm feeling heated and so mature this morning. .. screw you EA. Screw freaking you.

They say that but I still buy physical copies of games that I get to own. Who even uses Origin?

Buy from GoG and the game is yours forever.

In Kuchera's perfect EA world we'd all rent cars and noone would own one.
Of course, EA would be rent-a-car company.

Sadly for him, we don't live in such world.

Oh and... Sony agrees with me:
http://kotaku.com/sony-trashes-eas-new-access-program-1613262163

This change from owning to renting will lead to even more piracy. There are many people who don't want their games on a distant server where they must pay a monthly fee and use an always-on internet connection to access them.
Personally, I want to physically own my games, have them reside on my PC, and play them when and however I wish without interference. If I can't do that, I'll find another hobby.

I personally love Steam. I have way too many physical copies of games from before digital libraries taking up space in my small place. If Steam ever went under and I did lose access to my games I wouldn't hesitate to use other means to reacquire them.

Some of this is over the top. The idea that if you can't put it in your closet, expect it to lose it sounds like hysteria. If Amazon went out of business, my digital videos may be gone, but what are we preparing for? "The servers will go down"… "The hardware will die", is he planning to bequeath his children his NES collection that he was talking about?

If I still had my floppies of the Bard's Tale 2, I wouldn't have my C64 to play it on. I have had to repurchase all my really old games. If GOG goes out of business and if it also refuses to offer server access to purchased content, I may lose some games that were really old anyway and I had scratched from my HD because I didn't want to play them. But shouldn't we worry about Amazon, Microsoft, Sony, Steam, or GOG folding when one of them actually looks like they might be a million miles from it?

The whole thing is hyperbole, EA's service is novel, just the first whiff really, and has to launch and catch on before it's limited scope is even maintained, much less close all non-rental access to games.

I still have my City of Heroes & City of Villains boxes. I sometimes look at them and smile sadly. Good times, good times, and it totally sucks that they are over. I wish I could play the game again, at least for a little while. But all we have are memories and screenshots.

But as an MMO, that was expected. It's a carnival that will come to an end and move on. EA would have ALL games be like that. I don't like it, and I don't think that's the inevitable future. Sure, maybe some giants like EA are going to move that way, and a bunch of people on the gaming equivalent of a junk-food diet are going to blithely follow them, but I think that just makes the opportunity more ripe for folks like GOG.COM.

While I acknowledge that I am in the minority as a retrogamer, I think that if we didn't have those old C-64 floppies, then we wouldn't have the ability to download Bard's Tale for the C-64 emulator of our choice, and the game would be lost (at least that version) to us forever, like many of the old games that were once on university mainframes. And that sounds pretty tragic.

But it'll be the EA games and others of their kind that go that way, and get forgotten in time - their target audience will have the memory and attention span of a gnat, and won't care. But their competitors will have games with a legacy.

At least, that's how it works in my hopelessly optimistic future.

Shorter version of what I wrote above:

YOUR days of owning games are over, bub. Sucks to be you.

Me? My money is going to the other guys, who don't treat me like a wallet with legs.

This is actually really sad. And disturbing. It reminds me that I haven't bought a physical copy of a game in a few years, and when I did, it just forced me to plug the game into Steam anyway (I'm looking at you, Fallout: New Vegas).

It sucks that to own a physical copy of a game now, you have to be a Kickstarter backer that puts down like $80 or more. >.>

Aubrielle said:

This is actually really sad. And disturbing. It reminds me that I haven't bought a physical copy of a game in a few years, and when I did, it just forced me to plug the game into Steam anyway (I'm looking at you, Fallout: New Vegas).

It sucks that to own a physical copy of a game now, you have to be a Kickstarter backer that puts down like $80 or more. >.>

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I'm not against digital. Whether its boxed or not I dont' care. What I care about is that its mine. I can copy it, save it, move it, hard drive, flash stick etc. I dont' want to pay rental charges for a server for single user software.
*cough Office 365*

People never owned games to begin with. They just thought they did. Read the EULA for any game you "own". It literally says you don't own it. Companies are just looking for new ways to enforce the rights that the EULA always gave them anyway.

That said, I do like having physical copies of all my games. Sort of a collector thing, I guess.

I have a closet full of games back from the early 1990s through about 2010, but I am glad that I no longer buy anything physical related to games, and instead rely on digital downloads.

Only issue I have with digital copies of games is that I have no ability to resell them if I am disappointed with the game. I feel that digital copies should launch for 20% less than a physical copy, considering that they presumably have far lower production cost (no case, manual, or disc to manufacture and ship).

However, I do like owning my games, so I will only ever pay for DRM-free digital copies of games with absolutely no exceptions. I will not pay a cent for a Steam copy; don't want to find out I'm suddenly unable to play my games if my account gets hacked or if Valve ever goes bankrupt / sells Steam / gets a new CEO who decides they are going that my rental period is over.

If you asked me, say, 15 or more years ago if all my games would reside in remote servers and via Internet I would install them (i.e. Steam) I would have probably laughed, but that's today's reality. What if, 15 years from now, the reality is that there isn't even any software that you can install or that pirates can distribute? What if, in a world where everything is connected at speeds undreamed of today, you just connect to a service and just stream from there. You may say "no, that will not happen" today, but 15 years from now it might be perfectly ok.

As long as I get to control the experience in the same way as I always did, I couldn't care less about ownership. I didn't develop it, so I would never feel like the owner anyway. I don't think I've felt as if a game belonged to me since I was a kid.

Then again, I'm of the opinion that everything good in the world should be shared - with absolutely no second thoughts whatsoever. Unless it does harm to share it - which would be the very rare exception.

People fret about these things because they don't understand their own psychology.

If it's a big deal - people won't adapt and they won't accept it. Because people aren't children being abused by parents - they're consumers who get to decide what they pay for. If they do choose to adapt, it's because - in the majority of cases - it's acceptable to them.

There will always be a minority fighting against change, though. That's inevitable.

But even real issues that have actively hurt gaming, like DLC, is accepted by the VAST majority today. Are we not still enjoying our hobby, though?

However, if they fundamentally change how playing a game works - as in if I can't control when I want to play and how I want to play - to a reasonable degree -then it could be a problem.

Let's just say if EA represented the "norm", I'd be a lot more worried about how they manipulated the audience. But that's not how I see it.

Stingray said:

People never owned games to begin with. They just thought they did. Read the EULA for any game you "own". It literally says you don't own it. Companies are just looking for new ways to enforce the rights that the EULA always gave them anyway.

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It is not about owning games, as noticed above. It is about owning the space you play in versus renting the space you play in.
Restriction on terms of use, possibility to be kicked out anytime... The same could be said about owning/renting real estate. People might say you dont own a house either but when you rent or own, the options of use appear differently.

In a rental situation, the landlord might issue a notice to leave anytime the landlord receives a better offer to rent.

Connection speeds are not equal. Maybe, the fact that a guy with a higher connection speed come before will be more stressed in the future. If they must prioritize the access to their servers, different offers on the access to the game might be issued (pay more, get a smooth gaming experience, pay less and get what you get)
Bandwiths wont grow indefinitively. Prioritization among customers already happen on the ISP side. As video game developpers must rationalize the use of their services, some games will grow big just to make it a pain to localize them on a PC, console etc...

Up to now, players owned the space they played in: stuff like a blacklist of names to forbid the use of handles for an avatar made no sense.
When renting the space to play in, suddenly, spending money on implementing a screener makes sense. The player rents and is allowed to do less.

Well, it depends on the model. If they manage to create something similar to Spotify, I wouldn't mind it at all. Spotify trumps physical music collections all day long. However, if we end up needing subscriptions for every single publisher because they all want their own thing, it's going to be quite painful.

Steam is probably the only company who can make a "Spotify for games" that would actually work well for most gamers. Just pay a subscription and you can play any game in the entire Steam library.

There is one thing that differentiates games and music though: Save games. Losing Spotify simply means another service would take over. Fire up the songs you like and you haven't lost a thing. Losing a similar gaming service would also mean losing all save games, unless they can be stored locally as well as in the cloud.

Maylander said:

Spotify trumps physical music collections all day long.

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Err, I don't think so. Can Spotify put the cover art of one of my vinyl albums in my hand to peruse at my leisure whilst listening to a record? Nope. Give me the unique fuzzy ambiance of my vinyl collection over online musical services like that and Itunes any day of the week thank you very much.

Whilst I've gradually come to accept Steam and enjoy some of its virtues and services, I still much prefer the physical object where possible, though admittedly, my shopping for such has declined in recent years.

As far as "owning games" goes, I still have my original childhood C64 RPG collection in my possession, which I won't be selling any time soon. Emulation simply isn't fulfilling for me when it comes to the retro itch. So in that sense, long live "owning" games!