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 movies licenses purchased rented 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…

“Thank you sincerely for joining us on this journey,” reads the screenshot of an email purportedly from the Robot Cache Team. “While we gave it everything we had, we weren’t able to attract the user base and sales traction needed to keep the store running. As a result, we’ve made the difficult decision to shut down the Robot Cache store.

“The store will officially close in 30 days. After that point, the platform will no longer be accessible, and users will no longer be able to play games purchased through Robot Cache, even if they’ve downloaded a full copy.” It’s the nightmare scenario of games with DRM. The email continues that the team can’t let people keep their games because the site’s “verification system” will go offline. Any “iron,” the site’s digital currency, will similarly be rendered kaput.

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.