Physical Video Games Are Like The Vinyl Market, Making Digital Consumer Rights All The More Important
You will likely have noticed that we have begun talking more frequently over the past couple of years about the importance both of video game preservation efforts as well as the idea that people should either be better informed of the terms of buying a digital version of a game, or should have more rights to that purchase, than they do today. What has spurred both of those discussions onto our radar has been the explosion in digital purchases being the primary way the public buys video games today. Kotaku has an interesting writeup about just how much this trend has progressed in less than two decades, but the simple fact is that such a change in the landscape of how people consume this entertainment medium has unfortunately not spurred any changes in the two topics I mentioned above.
So, to give you a sense of the speed with which this has progressed, the post notes that the very first day-one digital release of a game was Warhawk for the PS3 in 2007. Try to imagine today a game publisher releasing a game on physical media only, with no immediate way to download it digitally through Steam or another platform. It’s been 17 years and the concept sounds flatly absurd.
Which isn’t to say that physical media is going away entirely. It isn’t. But it’s becoming much more analogous to the vinyl record niche in the music market. Capcom serves as a useful example here.
In its annual report this year, Capcom revealed that roughly 89 percent of the games it sells are digital copies. It expects that number to reach close to 94 percent in 2024. The report also emphasized how much more profitable these sales are. Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, a new $50 Capcom game with no physical version, exemplifies that move. As a result, the company was effectively asked if it will continue making physical games during its latest annual shareholder meeting this week.
“Given that a significant number of end users demand physical games we currently do not expect to eliminate physical products,” the company said. The statement echoed a view expressed by Ubisoft SVP Chris Early last year. “Some people will always want to own the physical disk,” he said in a Q&A on the French publisher’s Activision Blizzard cloud gaming deal. “I just don’t think it’s going away. Do I think physical sales might get lower over time? Sure, but will it ever completely go away? I don’t think so.”
I tend to agree, but this only highlights the problem. As physical game copies continue to trend into a niche market, it only further highlights the unequal distribution of rights customers have depending on whether they buy games physically or digitally. If you buy a video game on a disc, you can resell that game once you’re done playing it, trade it in to brick and mortar stores or with friends, make backup copies, and all the other things you’re allowed to do when you own something. When you buy digitally, you can do almost none of those things. Which isn’t to say that those digital products cost less, of course. No, they cost every bit as much as their physical counterparts, you just get what is inherently less of a product in doing so.
And not every game follows the Ubisoft scenario. Some platforms have players and fans that are simply more accustomed to buying physical media for games. Nintendo is probably the most prominent example of this, where roughly half of its game sales are on physical media. But that still leaves half of those games being digital. What’s going to happen when there is a full on deluge of the kind of “you don’t own what you’ve bought” scenarios within the gaming marketplace?
“I think that’s kind of going to happen more and more as time marches on and more services end up shutting down for whatever reason, because there’s always going to be something newer, bigger, better coming out that will eventually out mode, whatever the current popular model of distribution is,” Fairhurst said. “I think people are going to get frustrated when they see their digital purchases evaporate.”
And it’s all the more problematic when it comes to video game preservation efforts. Because of the insanity of copyright law and its inability to provide carveouts to the law to support efforts from museums and schools, or even hobbyists, for preservation efforts on digital video games, those groups have tended to have to rely on scrounging the internet and asking the public for old physical copies of games to be digitized so that they can be preserved. As the market trends toward fewer physical purchases, or in some case games that don’t even release a physical product, that reduces the size of the needle in the haystack considerably, making it harder to find.
And that’s going to result in the loss of culture, an outcome that is both flatly unacceptable and in direct contradiction to the purpose of copyright law to begin with. The idea is supposed to be that after a limited monopoly, the public gets the content via the public domain. If the content is never going to make it to the public domain due to the cavalier whims of the content-maker, they’ve broken the contract with the public.
So, fine, it’s a digital world and my collection of PC game boxes with shiny discs and all of that cool box and manual art makes me the aging hipster of the video game space. I’m fine with that, but only if copyright and consumer protection laws keep the pace with where the market is going.