Thoughts on PlayStation Digital Only Policy

If you’re a PlayStation gamer who follows the industry online at all; you will have heard of this new policy from Sony which states that they’re only going to sell digital games from January 2028. This will presumably coincide with the launch of a disc drive-less PS6.

I’ve been almost exclusively downloading my games (aside from a handful of boxes I have lying around) since mid way through the PS3 era. In the early days, it was never a foregone conclusion that I would download a new game. My brother and I would always discuss it; because at that time, digital games were often more expensive than the disc. I’m not sure it’s actually changed much still now. And you obviously couldn’t share or resell the download version which would be tied to you account (whether it be Sony or Nintendo in both our cases).

It carried on for a few years where occasionally, we’d get a disc if it was an older game and it was much cheaper to get the disc on Amazon for example (I try to avoid Amazon now. Lesson learned). But, most of the time, we’d just accept the unfair pricing and just download it. As time went on, this begrudging nature of our downloading just turned to apathy and defeat, where we just bought basically everything digitally and stopped even checking the prices on the retail versions; and I’ve been doing it that way ever since.

And now we’ve got to the point where we see a class-action lawsuit against Sony for allegedly overcharging for digital games for a very long time now; and abusing their dominant position as the only place you can download PS games (download codes from retail aside). Then we get this announcement of their upcoming policy where they’re going to drag in everyone else; many of whom have gone out of their way to avoid digital downloads for the same reasons we were hesitant for so long. And when you add in the issue of digital ownership rather than leasing the downloads (technically you’re kind of leasing the discs to a large extent these days too technically, but a lot of angry gamers don’t think about that); it’s no wonder there’s been so much pushback against it.

I think Sony forgot that a lot of the people who have been downloading games for the last couple of decades, have been doing so begrudgingly. We knew we were getting ripped off. We knew we couldn’t share or resell our games. We were pissed off about it. But at the end of the day, we valued the convenience and security (of not damaging discs, of not losing them, of not having them potentially stolen) more. Just the convenience of being able to pick our controllers up, press the PS button, then select a game from the menu without having to get up and change discs. It was barely justifiable to us. But when you have an audience of people like that who feel as if they’ve been mistreated, even as long term customers, and you add in this whole new group of far angrier people; you’re going to get fireworks. And you’re going to see a lot of people like me, who had basically given up on their rights as gaming consumers, starting to talk about digital ownership; and the situation reignite the whole frustration we’ve felt for so long before we started to feel hopeless.

They could have just given us a £10 discount per game on PS Store sales 15 years ago to account for the lower costs to them of selling digital games; which don’t require the costly manufacturing and shipping of discs and cases, and also to offset the lack of a second hand market. They should have also issued a gurantee at the time that games were ours, and that they would never disappear from our libraries. And if such a thing were to be unavoidable in future; that they’d reimburse us the price we paid for that game. It would have shut us up. But instead we’ve seen this blow up into something it never needed to be.

I think what’s most depressing to me though now, is that people are associating digital games directly with the worst of capitalist greed. Digital games are not inherently capitalist or greedy. They are the environmental option very clearly, and they can be consumer friendly if the companies want them to be. It’s so disheartening to see how little progress has been made with digital games since they came about.

Sony have created a toxic situation that was totally avoidable, and I recommend they take the steps I have outlined two paragraphs ago in order to rectify things.

I personally don’t think they should backtrack on PS6 having a disc drive. But they do need to follow my recommendations above, and they must also bring about a disc-to-digital ownership system. This is something Xbox is rumoured to be working on (well, except the ownership part I assume). Interestingly, this is also something Xbox was rumoured to be working on 13 years ago, when their whole controversy around an online-only console proposal was happening. I think online-only, and discless consoles were just too controversial at that time. It was too early to do it, even if you were to try in a consumer-friendly way.

PSP go also flopped, despite it being a pretty cool piece of hardware (it was also very much overpriced, which didn’t help). It was basically an identical situation to now. They wanted people to pay excessive PSN prices for games, and people weren’t having it. They also didn’t offer a scheme to add physical PSP UMDs to your PSN account. It was a big topic of discussion before launch, and Sony floated the idea, but they never delivered on it. There was a token gesture program in Japan and Europe, but nothing in the US at all. This meant gamers had to rebuy all their UMD games, which obviously didn’t go down well. That (and the hardware price) killed the PSP go. And it seems like Sony have learned nothing since then.

Do I think Sony will backtrack? I’m not sure. It really depends how small of a vocal minority this is, and how much solidarity they will get from other PlayStation gamers. Historically, gamers are very bad at voting with their wallets, and I would include myself in that unfortunately because of my digital buying for so many years. But at least I am willing to stand up against games like the Harry Potter game, due to the bigotry of J K Rowling, for example. Most gamers would scoff at that type of boycotting. And actually many of them are bigoted themselves. As was evident with the release of The Last of Us Part 2. Along with many other examples of games which have strong female leads for example.

In other words, I’m not holding my breath. It could go either way. It could blow over and Sony end up in an even stronger, more dominant position; with every gamer reluctantly buying games on PlayStation Store. The likelihood of this outcome would be strengthened if Microsoft and Nintendo opt to go the same way for their next consoles. Especially now that Sony have absorbed the negative press entirely and opened the door for them. If Microsoft were to relent and put a disc drive in their next Xbox, then it could get interesting. Although I’d hate to see Microsoft benefit through an opportunistic and cynical move; when they’ve shown over the years they they don’t care about their customers. That is unless they’re struggling for sales and want to appear gamer friendly for a while to improve their market position.

I’d love to see real digital ownership come from this mess. That would be a huge positive outcome for gamers and planet. But I just don’t see it. I think the corporations are too greedy, and the gamers too obsessed with physical media for that to emerge as a happy ending.