Your Future In Binary

Nowadays, it’s considered abnormal by the majority of people to have a hard copy of our information, and soon it will be the same for all our entertainment content. I’m quite fond of nostalgic things, so I love poking around in the nooks and crannies of  my house and finding old music, or books. I especially love finding old games.
There is just something  pleasant about having a hard copy of a game that has gone out of print or is a timeless relic. For example, I recently turned up my boxed “The Legend of Zelda: A link to the past”. Sure it’s easy to find a new version of the game on GBA, and if you’re into emulation ,well then I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to run a version on your pc either.
But what I have is different. It’s a tangible link to my childhood, when games were still a new and fascinating thing. Taking the time to assemble a SNES and blow the dust out of the cartridge is a much more satisfying way of experiencing the past instead of just booting a ROM.

So what does the future hold for the games we own now? It’s a well known fact that as the gaming medium expands and progresses, the majority of content will come from “the cloud”. With this being the case, Consoles will evolve past the need for disc drives and the need for physical content. That leaves us with mountains of content that may well be rendered useless in the face of coming generations. What this means is that your new “Orbis” or “720/Durango” may be top of the line, but in no way backwards compatible. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does have financial ramifications.
Lets say the next generation Xbox is released and sells millions of units in its first week. Unless Microsoft have a massive launch lineup, most of the customers will still rely on the Xbox 360 for their online gaming needs. So does this mean we need to pay for two Xbox Live subscriptions? Making games backwards compatible is one thing, but having an online gaming service that collectively spans two consoles is a herculean task, making 2 subscription the only viable option. Further more, will the Playstation Network stay free? With the somewhat disappointing sales of the “PS Vita” and a Q1 loss of over $312.000.000, it’s hard to envision Sony’s next major platform having free to play, online capabilities. So this is potentially another subscription.

Will we even own the games that we are going to be playing when it all inevitably goes digital? It may be that we purchase the right to use the product on our system, but at the discretion of the creator. It is entirely possible that the games would be stored on the developers,in house servers. If this is the case, what would happen if that company were to goes out of business and closes, what happens to the product they made? Does it “go offline” and vanish or will we have it stored digitally in our console?

I personally think that we should do everything in our power to ensure that we have hard copies of our content, digital should be an option, not a choice made for us. Whats more is, when you buy a CD you get the case, the artwork and the bands notes. When you buy a special edition game you get a special case, Dog tags, Diaries, Patches and Paintings. With a digital copy, you can only receive digital content that you can’t touch or feel, its nothing but code.

Digital content can be lost very easily, the wrong press of a button, or a simple case of a platform crash. With digital content you need to be able to prove you own the game, and to do this you often need to authenticate your account, and with authentication comes DRM. And lets face it, DRM is like internet adverts, they are just a necessary evil. If anyone remembers the Diablo III DRM outrage, amplify that to encompass the entirety of console gamers and you’re close what can be expected.

The need for hard copies is greater than you think, be it for content, or just proof of ownership. While digital certainly has it’s benefits, it has just as many flaws. Kinda like being a vampire in Skyrim, it has its ups and downs.