Axebox
There is every indication that Microsoft is set to fire a large swath of game developers and/or shut down entire studios in the next few days.
While Microsoft is weighing canceling Blade, it’s also exploring options to sell Arkane Studios. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Microsoft is trying to spin off Compulsion Games, Double Fine, and Ninja Theory, too. GamesBeat reported this week that Microsoft is actively looking for a buyer for Undead Labs, the developers behind State of Decay. If buyers are found for these studios, then they’ll avoid being closed, but sources stress these talks could take months in some cases.
If some of those studios sound vaguely familiar, it’s because they were showcased in the recent Xbox Games, er, Showcase. Like three weeks ago. Ninja Theory is the one developing Senua and Undead Labs has State of Decay 3, a game series that I have very much enjoyed in the past. If the studios don’t find a buyer soon though, they may be shuttered and the games canceled, no matter how close (or not) to release they were.
What has been interesting about this latest round of layoff news has been the general Reddit sentiment. A few years ago, there was an appropriate level of outrage when Tango Gameworks got axed right after releasing the award-winning Hi Fi Rush. With this latest teaser round of studio closures, the reactions are, at best, ¯\(ツ)/¯. Some are straight-up supportive.
…and more and more, I find myself falling into the latter camp.
To be clear, I find Microsoft generally abhorrent. I shill for Game Pass because I consider it a great value for consumers (for now), but everything else about Microsoft is bog-standard megacorp bullshit. Asking for your games division to have a 30% profit margin like the rest of your monopolies products is absurd. Buying studios and then shutting them down so that the IPs are forever entombed is tragic, let alone the reality of layoffs in this economy generally.
However. HOWEVER. Sometimes… there’s no baby in the bathwater, and you’re hanging on to dirty bathwater for no reason. Sometimes it’s been so fucking long since you’ve checked on the baby that he’s done grown up and moved out of the house. If Undead Labs gets dissolved and we lose State of Decay 3, I will be sad. Or would have been, if I hadn’t done some cursory Google searches:
A 2022 investigation by Kotaku reported on a sexist studio culture, which was abetted by Philip Holt, the new studio head who replaced Strain, and then-head of HR Anne Schlosser.[15] Schlosser was removed after a Microsoft HR investigation. The toxic work environment, which continued after Schlosser’s departure, led to a high employee turnover rate, especially among experienced staff. These issues, combined with a lack of design vision, contributed to extensive delays in the development of State of Decay 3.[15] Employees also blamed Microsoft for not living up to its goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion by not responding to reports of abuse in a timely manner.[15]
Back in April, I wrote Game Development is Expensive for Dumb Reasons. This is the sort of thing I am talking about. Presumably not every studio has the same skeletons in their closets, but the point is that these companies are not releasing games faster because of incompetent (at best) leadership. It does not have to take 6+ years to develop a game. The original Mass Effect trilogy came out in 2007, 2010, and 2012. Can you imagine how long it would take for any other trilogy to come out these days?
Arguably, Microsoft should not have bought all these studios in the first place. Or maybe if they didn’t buy Activision Blizzard, they would have had the time to let the devs cook longer before layoffs. But it could also be true that many of these studios would/should have died on their own via natural selection. We’re used to being outraged by publishers closing studios, but I somehow doubt that Undead Labs could have gone 6+ years without another product to sell without folding on their own. Mayhap it was the Microsoft money that encouraged the foolishness and dulled the scrappy edge.
I dunno. The sympathy I have for game developers in general is at an all-time low. The live-service bubble is for sure popping, and the economics of AAA games in general is collapsing along with it. And it kind of has to, for everyone’s sake. The status quo is being made possible by only the most extreme psychological hacks, FOMO, battle passes, gacha mechanics, etc. Remember when these companies were incentivized by, you know, selling more copies of the game? The indie and AA developers remember because that is pretty much all they have access to. We should get back to that.
Soon enough, there may not be another choice.
That Siren Song
The Switch 2 FOMO is hitting me pretty hard.
A year ago, I was saying that the Switch 2 was too much money. A few months later, I bought an original Switch and too many games. Well, it certainly felt like too many games at the time. Six months later, Little Man has played through many to exhaustion, and we’ve now moved onto Breath of the Wild as a kind of stretch goal. That one is a bit too complicated for him at the moment – he mostly wants me to play so he can watch – but hopefully he’ll gain some more confidence soon.
Up to this point, Switch 2 kind of felt unnecessary. And it still is, for the record. But it is also a fact that Nintendo is planning a $50 price hike for the device this September, which makes waiting kind of a fool’s errand. And the games are kind of catching up. Mario Kart World is whatever, but Donkey Kong Bananza appears like it could be equivalent to Super Mario Odyssey, which Little Man is able to play and beat mostly on his own. I’m vaguely interested in Pokemon Pokopia. I’m extremely interested in the Ocarina of Time remake, especially after recently rewatching the final boss fight on Youtube and… not remembering it looking like that to my 16-year old self. I recall it being one of the most exciting and cool final boss fights I’ve ever played. Alas.
Regardless, $450 for a base model Switch 2 or $500 for one that comes with a game still feels bad. Paying $50 more this Fall will feel worse, of course. There are a couple of potential workarounds.
Get over it- Keep an eye on eBay/Facebook Marketplace/Craiglist
- Costco recently had a sale on Nintendo eShop cards, where it was $170 for $200, or $85 for $100. Stacked up, you could order a Switch 2 bundle direct from Nintendo for $425. Even with the sale over, baseline Costco sells cards for $10 less than face value, so $450.
- Some other retailers have similar shenanigans as Costco, such as Newegg, GameStop ocassionally, etc.
- Keep an eye on physical reselling spaces, like… GameStop, I guess, or pawn shops in general
Get over it- Hope there is some kind of special sale heading into the price increase
- Double-down on alternative gaming methods
That last one is what I “should” be doing, honestly. If GOG Galaxy is to be believed, I own 1,495 games across Steam, GOG, and Epic. A large majority of them would not be appropriate for Little Man to play, or too difficult, or impossible to play at all outside of a dedicated PC experience. But not all of them. A few from some recent bundles, like Lil Gator Game and Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip are less than 2 GB apiece and seem like good, kid-friendly, goof-around games.
After browsing through almost the entire list though… the options are a bit thin. I made a list of 17 games, which include some more “stretch goal” titles like Portal and No Man’s Sky. Minecraft would be on there too, of course, and is/has been one of the principle driving forces for a living room console in the first place. And won’t you know it, there’s a Switch 2 version of Minecraft coming out soon to take advantage of the increased hardware…
Steam Machine is $1000+
Remember eight months ago where I imagined a fantasy of the Steam Machine costing $650? Apparently, it was a bargain at nearly twice the price:
I took that screenshot directly from the Steam interface. It’s official. Valve is legitimately selling a 512GB Steam Machine with no controller for $1049. That’s a big yikes. Suffice it to say, Valve will not be capturing the coveted Azuriel market, or arguably any reasonable market whatsoever.
The funny/tragic thing though, is that this pricing is actually pretty spot-on when it comes to off-the-shelf computer components these days. From the various Reddit posts, a few people have been able to use PC Parts Picker to find slightly cheaper configurations. For example, this one clocks in at $971. However, there is a big difference between a 6-inch cube and a bog-standard 17″x8″x17″ case.
That said, once you are in $1,428 territory, you may as well buy a CyberPower or other prebuilt PC.
Ah well. I still anticipate the Steam Machine will sell out, considering how the Steam Deck also sold out despite getting a huge markup. At this price though, I just don’t see it affecting the broader videogame market in the same way that the Steam Deck did. I never bought the Deck, but it absolutely influenced what other companies offered in the handheld space. In this case, the Steam Machine is likely just another grave marker for the AI madness that has gripped the economy.
Stop Killing Games Stopped, Possibly Killed
You may or may not have heard about the Stop Killing Games movement, which was an attempt to raise awareness and foster legislation around the games industry predilection towards, well, killing games they sold. For example, it is not uncommon these days for single-player games to authenticate or “phone home” on start-up. If the publisher decides to shut down that authentication server, whoops, your game is bricked. Other multiplayer games may feature both online and local multiplayer modes, but will still be nonfunctional even via local connections if the overall game is shut down.
Recently, the movement made it all the way to the European Commission, where it had perhaps its best hope of achieving something actionable. Unfortunately, it fell short.
The Commission considers that at this stage it cannot propose a legal obligation to keep video games playable after they stop being provided commercially. This is due, also, to existing intellectual property rights. Under EU copyright law, rights holders enjoy exclusive rights over their creations. In addition to copyright, other intellectual property rights may also be relevant as they may protect different visual and technological aspects of a video game.
Existing EU consumer law already provides for important safeguards protecting the economic interests of consumers. Video game providers must inform consumers about the duration and the conditions for terminating the contract before the consumers signs up for the video game. The Directive on digital content and digital services provides consumers with remedies when the content or service provided does not conform with the contract and what consumers could reasonably expect. Consumers may be entitled to proportionate refund of their purchases.
My title is a bit sensationalist, as the movement continues on along other avenues. In the US, there is the Protect Our Games Act moving forward in the California legislature. Back in the EU, I believe the focus is now on the Digital Fairness Act, where some of the goals may still be achievable.
What I really wanted to talk about with this topic though, is the frustrating counter-arguments surrounding it. Specifically, the sort of “you can’t just legislate that” or “how it is achievable needs to be expressly defined” arguments. Uh, no. As demonstrated by the apparently worldwide age verification push – and insane attacks against VPN usage – shit gets mandated by fiat all the damn time.
I understand that that is… perhaps not the sort of comparison that invites sympathy to a movement. Nevertheless, the sort of reductive, prescriptionist mindset of “you can’t do that because it doesn’t work that way” grinds my gears when, in fact, people have to put up with crazy, non-consumer-friendly changes all the time. See also: Congressional approval for wars longer than 60 days, repaying unconstitutional tariffs, rampant corruption, etc, etc, etc. Just because we have normalized “buying” revokable licenses to play the games in question doesn’t mean we have to accept it forever.
Hell, go nuclear with it: force game companies to replace the words Buy/Purchase with RENT, if it’s in fact just a revokable license. Let GOG and any other storefront that allows for offline downloads continue to use Buy/Purchase, assuming the game can still be played with the servers shut off. “But Azuriel, what constitutes ‘playable’ if it requires 100 TB servers to function?” “What if the devs ‘update’ the game to be Pong in the last patch before shutdown and claim that they made the game playable?” Simple – see ya in court! Maybe have some teeth in there so that there is an automatic refund (to include DLC and cash shop) mechanism until/unless the publishers demonstrate they were in the right.
Things don’t have to be shitty. We used to own things, no matter what the EULAs said. If you still have a functioning Playstation 2 and a PS2 game, you can go play it right now. Warner Brothers doesn’t get to remotely delete the DVDs on your shelves just because the studios merged and then shut down. Your books are (probably) not written in disappearing ink that takes proprietary lamps to display.
“But what about all the potential games this could hurt?” Fuck’em. No, seriously, if the economic viability of your entire design is predicated on smoke and mirrors and otherwise leaving town before the bill comes due, maybe don’t make that game. Maybe nothing of value will be lost.
I dunno, guys. I never played Anthem, even when it was “free” on Game Pass. But it’s gone now for everyone, including the people who bought it, forever. Even though, technically, you could spin up a private server, assuming you don’t get sued. Sure, IP owners own the IP, so if they don’t want to sell it anymore, that is their right; Disney used to “vault” their classic movies on a rotating basis, presumably as a marketing ploy or whatever. If you had bought Cinderella though, you could still watch it. If someone can prove they purchased Anthem, what’s the actual harm in letting them run a copy?
The industry just seems to keep coming back around to having pirates offer the superior version of the product, e.g. one that works. I understand why things are set up this way, but they don’t have to be. Nor do I have to figure it out for them. Maybe fewer $80 game rentals is exactly what we need.
Gaming News Roundup
A lot of gaming news came out this week. Here is what I have been keeping an eye on.
Fable (Feb 2027)
I never got into the Fable series back in the day, as they were XBox exclusives for a long while. Technically, the first and third entries are in my Steam library, but Fable 3 crashing during an auto-save didn’t cut it in 2016, let alone a decade later. What is cutting things, is this 30-minute gameplay trailer.
The systems presented are very gamified, as I am sure the originals were as well, but I was impressed nonetheless with the overall game vibe. “Romance any random NPC” telegraphs that romance isn’t that deep, but maybe that doesn’t matter if you take a shining to a particular barkeep or general narrative. No doubt there will be forum posts detailing RimWorld-esque grotesqueries such as swooning the orphan whose parents you murdered for no reason.
But you know what? Good on them. When you build a sandbox, sometimes you are going to uncover some buried shit.
Anyway, I’m excited. It’s also going to be on Game Pass, so there’s that too.
Palworld 1.0 (July 10th)
After my original forays into Palworld two years ago, I have not touched the game since. While the zeitgeist has moved on, I was waiting for precisely this particular bit of news, e.g. a version 1.0 release. I do not have grand delusions that any developer takes versioning seriously, but if you are going to pick a particular point in time to make final determination as to the quality of a game, I figure 1.0 is about as good as anything.
You can watch the latest trailer here. It has nothing on the very original teaser trailer, but then again, nothing else really could.
Valheim 1.0 (September 9th)
Same deal as Palworld. Played for almost 50 hours five years ago, and stopped once I ran out of Early Access road (and encountered placeholder monster drops). I have some concerns about what I have heard about the Mistlands experience already in the game, but we shall see. Trailer here.
Abiotic Factor: Entropic Break (Autumn 2026)
I almost didn’t include this one, as I am not entirely sure how I feel about it. Specifically, Abiotic Factor is getting a DLC released later this year. Which is good! But I spent nearly 160 hours playing the game already, and I’m not certain whether I want (or am able to be) sucked in back in. Trailer here.
Guild Wars 3, Anti-Hyped
I had intended to make a post earlier in the week, when rumors that ArenaNet were planning a big reveal at Summer Game Fest began surfacing. But since things were going to be revealed on Friday, I figured I may as well wait. In any case, the rumors are true: Guild Wars 3 is a thing.
I could not be any less hyped. In fact, I feel negative hype.
The trailer is whatever. It’s fine. The issue is that this announcement effectively kills Guild Wars 2 for me.
Although I haven’t been posting too much about it, I have low-key been playing GW2 for several sessions each week pretty consistently. My goals have mostly revolved around completing the weekly Wizard Vault quests to earn currency to purchase some of the account upgrades in said Wizard Vault (bag slots, etc), with some farming routes on the side. From a game perspective, both of those activities were in service of working towards additional Legendary items to share amongst my characters. And remember, getting a Legendary means you never have to worry about that specific gear slot again.
…until there is an entirely new game that obsoletes all your work.
This isn’t my first rodeo – I’ve played WoW for more than a decade, and every expansion had green gear better than your raid purples. The continuity though came in the form of cosmetics/transmogs, titles, mounts, toys, Achievements, a sense of pride and accomplishment, gold, etc. There will undoubtedly be Hall of Monuments deal wherein you can get some exclusive skins in the new game for having X or Y achievements in GW2, just as there was coming from GW1, but it is not the same.
I dunno. People still play “dead”/maintenance mode MMOs all the time. Of all the alternatives out there, GW2 remains a fairly unique example of one where horizontal progression means you can indeed do most anything you want to as soon as you hit the level cap. If I were solely interested in exploration or drinking in the scenery or whatever, then there would still be a lot to like. However, I still prefer form and function, and if not for the hitherto meaningful function of Legendary crafting, I don’t see much marrow left on the bones for me. Nevermind how difficult it will be acquiring the hundreds of components of these items once the population winnows down, events fail for lack of players, and economy withers.
We shall see, I guess. Guild Wars 3 is going to launch into beta in Fall 2027. No word yet on any plans for future content in GW2 leading up to that (or afterwards).
Impressions: Metaphor: ReFantazio
I will not be finishing Metaphor: ReFantazio. Primarily because it leaves GamePass in like four days.
Aside from that, there are a couple other things working against ReFantazio. The biggest of which is the fact that I literally finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 a week or so prior. In many ways, Expedition 33 felt like a repudiation (or perhaps more charitably, a “reimagining”) of the classical JRPG formula. I disliked the dodge/parry mechanics in Expedition 33… but will admit it has been a bit more challenging than expected going back to a fully turn-base system. Watching enemies just sorta attack me and being unable to do anything but take the hits feels bad now.
Exacerbating things, ReFantazio has a sort of rock-paper-scissures punishing design. Instead of everyone getting a single turn apiece, there are turn “orbs” that only get half used if a given attack/spell happens to trigger the target’s weakness. For example, if you cast a Fire attack against an enemy weak to Fire, your next character can use the remaining “half-turn” to pile on the damage. So, theoretically, if you were facing a boss with a weakness to Fire and all your characters had Fire attacks, you could get six turns in a row.
Problem is, this also works the other way around. Enemy hits your entire squad with an AoE attack and any of your characters happen to be weak against the damage type? Bam, extra attack, which could very well be another AoE one. Later on, if one of your attacks gets Absorbed or Reflected or whatever, you actively lose extra turns, because fuck you, apparently.
This sort of design is interesting… on paper. One of the principle conceits of the game is that any of your teammates can channel any of the Archetypes (read: jobs) you have unlocked. Recruit a knight-looking dude that literally starts out with the Knight Archetype? Make him a Mage. Make your whole team a Mage! Characters can also “inherit” skills from other Archetypes as well to really get some combos going. The problem is that all of this revolves around either looking things up ahead of time, or getting unpleasantly surprised by getting smacked around. There is even an in-game feature that shows you what the most-used composition was across all players for the dungeon you are about to enter, pseudo-Dark Souls style. Which… thanks, I guess?
The real nail in the coffin for me though are the time limits.
I have railed for years against plots premised on fake time-sensitivity – “rescue Ciri before it’s too late! Or take a few weeks questing, whatever” – so you would be forgiven for assuming I want actual deadlines. I do not. At least, not in long-form games like RPGs. So imagine my dismay when in the first post-tutorial section of ReFantazio I get notice that I must clear the dungeon within 10 days or else I lose the game. Also, each day is divided into two parts, so you can talk to one person in the morning, another in the evening, then time passes. Dungeon delving takes a full day though.
Is it a serious, tight deadline which you must relentlessly optimize? Probably not. But it was enough of a mental friction point that I wanted to look up what happened if you beat the dungeon early, which inevitably led to spoiling elements of the dungeon, and at a certain point the game unraveled, reductio ad absurdum style to the paint-by-numbers that it was. Stack Mages at this part, then switch to Brawlers, farm infinitely respawning enemies at this next bit because the final mobs are level 20, etc, etc, etc. I was already primed to grind levels considering the timer otherwise makes it more difficult to do so later, but seeing the solutions already laid out ahead of me flipped a switch into the off position.
Overall, it is probably my own loss. The plot looked interesting, I loved the frequent anime interludes, the UI is pleasingly hyper-stylized. It has a 94 Metacritic score, for god’s sake. Which, is somehow 2 points higher than Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, by the way.
But I’m really, really not in the mood for another lengthy game that is a chore to actually play, and certainly not when it’s leaving Game Pass in a few days. Metaphor: ReFantazio will either come back, get in a cheap bundle, or I’ll catch it on Youtube.
About that E33 MoCap
I heaped a lot of praise about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s (E33) character animations already, and yet I feel a bit remiss for not showing what I was talking about. Below is a Youtube link to a “behind-the-scenes compilation of several early-game scenes, which includes both the finished game sequence (sans official voice actors) + the motion capture actors.
I would not consider these to be spoilers, as they occur within the first 5ish hours of the game. But…
In my First Impressions post, I said the following:
Nearly 14 years ago, I was blown away by Mass Effect’s wink, and here in Expedition 33 I just witnessed a character search another’s eyes to see if they truly meant what they said. You know, her face close, the silence, her eyes going back and forth with purpose, debriding the layers of your soul. I don’t know how, but they captured it. The bar has been raised again.
Feel free to watch the whole four-minute video, but the soul debridement happens at around 3:25.
All of it is so ridiculously good that I had to look up whether Sandfall Interactive had invented some secret tech or whatever, because why isn’t every new game coming out like this? Did they pour 80% of their budget into mocap or something?
Near as I can tell… nope. Or, technically nope. Most of the magic outside the performances themselves comes from off-the-shelf features of Unreal Engine 5. So, in many ways the “secret sauce” had a lot to do with being a new, smaller team without a lot of tech debt being able to pivot to an entirely new game engine at the perfect time. As this article points out, most of the work they did in UE4 had to be redone entirely due to the engine differences. One could imagine how much work would be thrown away if instead it was in a custom-made engine. A larger studio with 500 developers with 15+ years of experience on a proprietary engine is thus unlikely to be able to match E33 anytime soon (if ever).
Which… goddamn. Talk about perfect time and place.
In any case, I am a bit more optimistic about the (gaming) future. Sandfall Interactive probably doesn’t quite qualify as an “indie” studio, but I do consider these smaller teams to be the best path through the coming industry implosion. That we get to enjoy premium facial animations while doing so is all the more a bargain.
Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 – Complete
I finally beat Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 (E33) over the weekend after about 50 hours.
I’m not going to go into specific spoilers in this post, but I’ll slap a Yellow warning just in case.
Undoubtedly, one of the burning questions you have after my prior two posts complaining about it, is “did the combat system get any better?” And that answer is… Yes. Technically. Right at the very fucking end, when it least mattered. And for largely all the wrong reasons.
To be clear, the combat system is the exact same as it always was. If you disliked having turn-based combat with quick-time events baked into it from hour one, you’ll still be annoyed with it way later. What eventually changes is that you unlock a large enough variety of Pictos and opportunities to farm the shit out of mobs for special items that permanently increase your ability to equip more of them, that mobs no longer survive your first turn. By the end of the game, I had one character that always acted first, and just spammed the Free Aim attack, usually randomly generating enough extra AP to keep going until everything was dead. If they ran out of AP, they did a Base Attack which hit twice and regained them 6-8 AP to use in their second, bonus turn.
Getting to this point was not a cakewalk. One of the key Pictos necessary for the build only dropped from an optional boss fight that took me over 20 minutes of Dodge/Parrying to defeat. And to even get to that strength required a lot of farming various other endgame zones for drops that leveled up your weapons.
The kicker though is that the game basically forces you down that path. At the beginning of Act 3, you gain access to the final dungeon right away. Which is fine, refreshing almost. When you speak with your companions though, they have “companion quests” available that send you elsewhere in the world… and those places have a MASSIVE, overwhelming increase in difficulty from what you have experienced to this point. I have never seen this design in a videogame before, probably because it is dumb. Having optional harder dungeons – the equivalent of Ruby and Emerald Weapon in FF7 – for flexing? Cool. Hiding companion closure quests behind said harder dungeons, which will ultimately result in you overpowering the final boss as a result? Not cool.
Alternatively… maybe you are just really good at Parries/Dodges. In which case, you will take literally zero damage from any encounter and (eventually) beat every fight without any issue.
You might be asking why I’m dwelling on the combat system when that is not why E33 won all the Game of the Year awards. I’m dwelling on it precisely because that is not why E33 won all those awards.
E33 has some of the best art direction I have ever seen in any video game. It has some of the highest production values of any soundtrack I have heard in any video game. Seriously, I was going to go through the OST and suggest some in particular to give you a taste, but goddamn there are 150+ songs and any one of them would be a signature track in any other game. The dialog and character animations feel raw and real. The plot can be trippy and gut-wrenching at the same time, leaving you with impossible choices.
All of that… and I hated playing it. I have zero issues with the way combat is presented, the UI is slick as hell, every new Picto acquired caused me to reexamine every possible synergy (which I enjoy doing). I’m not incapable of the Parries/Dodges, I just don’t like that they exist in the game. If they don’t bother you, or hell, if you enjoy that they exist? More power to you! No doubt E33 is a god-tier game for you.
For me though? I dunno. Back in the day, 20-30 years ago, I would routinely play JRPGs and say that story is worth any amount of repetitive grind. I am not certain that that principle holds anymore. If E33 were any other game, I would have dropped it after the first 5 hours and said it was just not for me. But E33 isn’t just some other game, it’s an entirely new bar that elevates the medium in all ways… but one.
So, there it is. Glad I played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, glad I experienced it, and glad it’s over.
In An Age 
Digital Resell, 2026 Edition
Jul 9
Posted by Azuriel
The gaming news of this past week was Sony’s announcement that they are ceasing production of game discs starting in January 2028. In completely unrelated news, Sony is also removing access to ~500ish movies from customer libraries while offering zero refunds for otherwise permanently lost access to
movieslicensespurchasedrented with real money. While the ascent and eventual domination of digital has been a long time coming, it is perhaps an especially ignoble end coming first from the same company that put out this (at the time) devasting advertisement.There are a lot of different concerns surrounding the upcoming loss of physical media in the game sphere – Bhagpuss and others have shared a few – but I keep circling back to the fundamental, unresolved question of: do we have the right to resell things we purchased, specifically games?
Yes… but also no.
Everyone intuitively understands and accepts that a physical disc or cartridge can be resold. As soon as it becomes exclusively digital though, suddenly it is a wildly different thing… for no particularly good reason. We already have ubiquitous DRM, we already have storefronts capable of revoking access to games on an account level. What’s the hang-up? Other than unabashed corporate greed?
I made post in 2015 about this topic, which also referenced a 2012 legal outcome in the EU that stated software licenses could be resold. Considering that nothing seems to have come from that, suffice it to say there must have been some carve outs that game publishers just sailed their mega-yachts through.
My next follow-up was in 2019 where, spoilers, the issue remains unresolved. Although, at that time there was a new gaming storefront called Robot Cache that was set to revolutionize the market by allowing digital game licenses to be resold, with publishers taking a cut of the profits. I wonder where that ended up…
Oh. So the worst possible ending, eh?
I have been a PC gamer for decades now, for which a resell mechanism has not truly existed since the beginning. Why care now? Because we as consumers are losing out. I have specifically purchased almost all my Switch games as physical versions, because there is utility in being able to resell them on eBay or GameStop or whatever else. The only exceptions were Mario Kart 8 that “came with the system,” and Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom which were purchased at a discount via Nintendo vouchers. For all the other games, since they cost the same either way, I essentially had a choice: convenience of not having to swap out cartridges, or being able to recapture 50% or more of the value of the original price. Option B was of greater utility to me, so that’s what I went with. Sony will be eliminating that option for everyone on their platform in 2028. That’s a loss, whether you used it or not.
I don’t expect much progress on the digital reselling front in the near future, especially under current regimes, but I do feel like the topic will become increasingly urgent. The industry has been coasting on the (occasionally court-imposed) good graces of Valve and Steam, but Gabe Newell is 63 years old. Already we sort of hand-wave away the inability to bequeath a Steam library upon death, but there’s a future in which Gabe retires/dies, Valve goes public, and all sorts of corporate tomfoolery occurs. Legally, what stops Valve from revoking access to games in your library arbitrarily? A Terms of Service… that can be amended at any time?
Sony already has us trained to accept that entire storefronts can close, such as the PSP and PSOne in 2021, and now the PS3 and Vita stores in 2027. If you previously purchased a game, you can still download it “for the foreseeable future,” but it kinda makes you think. I can still download and install Farcry 2 and Kane & Lynch: Dead Men via Steam, both of which show up as Last Played in 2011. Maybe that is a trivial expense on Steam servers, but we can imagine a scenario in which a public Valve invokes the same “adapt to consumer trends” language to essentially prune the storefront. Again, what stops them? Potentially negative PR?
I don’t imagine there would be much of a resell market for my copy of Farcry 2 or Kane & Lynch: Dead Men all these years later. And ironically, IsThereAnyDeal shows that people can buy Farcry 2 “new” for like $2.40 right now. But I feel like having some stronger sense of legal ownership even over the license is necessary to dissuade future shenanigans. Or, fine, go all the way the other direction and replace Buy/Purchase with Rent.
Posted in Commentary
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Tags: Game License, Resell, Sony, State of the Industry, Storefront, Used Games