Reflecting On My Time With PlayStation

The week-long PS blackout is over, and it really didn't do a thing. PlayStation 5s and Pros are selling out everywhere in preparation for Grand Theft Auto 6. To be quite honest, I'm actually surprised, because I though anyone who wanted GTAVI would have already bought a PlayStation by now. Apparently not.  And it makes me wonder just how many people logged in more and bought more digital games just to spite the boycott. 

Anyway, now that the boycott is over, I wanted to reflect a little on my time with PlayStation. Also, in case you're wondering, I did not participate in the blackout. I may have already mentioned earlier that I don't believe in blackout boycotts. You either boycott until the company gives what you want, or you don't. Supposedly, the blackout has been extended indefinitely for those still participating, but I can't stay offline as I play FFXIV. I could always buy the game on Xbox or Switch, but that complicates matters because of other subscriptions. We'll see. Anyway...

I was there day one for the first PlayStation which launched on September 9th 1995, just a day after my 16th birthday. In exactly one week, PlayStation as a brand - at least in North America - will turn 31. This means I've been playing PlayStation for over 30 years. I'll never forget the day I opened up my two launch games, Battle Arena Toshinden and Ridge Racer, and I saw the bottom of the discs for the first time. They were completely black! I thought I got scammed! But, as it turns out, that's just how the discs were. I thought that was really cool! It was such a fun platform and brought us amazing games such as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Metal Gear Solid and of course, Final Fantasy VII. Originally, the plan was to get a Sega Saturn with my friend, but I opted for a PlayStation instead, and I'm glad I did. It was one of the best systems I ever bought. 

The morning of October 26th 2000, I was there at the Electronics Boutique in the Aurora mall to pick up my preordered PlayStation 2. I met up with a friend/co-worker of mine and the plan was to pick them up together and walk back to our cars together just in case people got wild and tried to assault us. We got there an hour early and there was already a crowd looking to score one, but they were in for a rude awakening as the store only had 32 units, and they were only for people who pre-ordered in full. I remember one guy was so angry, he threatened to sue them! Anyway, my friend and I were 3rd and 4th in line. We picked up our consoles, and made it back to our cars with no incident. I actually splurged with games, picking up Ready 2 Rumble Boxing, Ridge Racer V, Smuggler's Run, SSX, Tekken Tag Tournament and TimeSplitters. I though I picked up a seventh, but I can't remember. I do remember enjoying Smuggler's Run a ton, though. Shame Rockstar gave up on that franchise entirely. 

The previous year, I bought a Sega Dreamcast, which launched on the legendary date of 9/9/99, and I was definitely more impressed with the Dreamcast's graphics than I was with the PlayStation 2. Most of the games, outside of Tekken Tag Tournament, were plagued by jaggies (jagged lines on the edges of polygons) as the PS2 had no built in anti-aliasing. For the first year or so, I still preferred my Dreamcast, but the PS2 eventually started building up enough steam that it became my system of choice, no thanks to the early demise of the Dreamcast. Such classics as Metal Gear Solid 2, Silent Hill 2 and a litany of impressive RPGs including Final Fantasy X made the successor to the PlayStation incredibly memorable. 

The PlayStation 3, however, is a different story. Even at the ridiculous launch price of 500 dollars in 2006 for a 20 gig SKU and 600 for a 60, the PlayStation 3 was still impossible to find thanks to a gross shortage of hardware. I failed to find any store near me that had them for preorder, and on launch day, no one had any spares to sell. I actually ended up biting the bullet and ordering off eBay for close to 900 dollars... And well, like the PS2 at launch, I remember being underwhelmed, and greatly disappointed in its launch line up, only picking up Ridge Racer 7 and MotorStorm a month later.  It still wasn't as impressive of a generational gap as the Dreamcast was over everything else. It took a while, but the PS3 eventually started outputting some seriously impressive graphics once the devs figured out how to get the most out of the Cell processor. We would see that in titles such as Final Fantasy XIII, Metal Gear Solid 4, and of course a game that still stands the test of time, The Last of Us. 

The PlayStation 4 is actually the most significant of the five consoles when writing about the theme of Sony's digital-only future because during its reveal, there was that very famous clip of Shuhei Yoshida and Adam Boyes mocking Xbox by explaining how PS4 games were traded. I already shared the clip in the previous blog, but I feel like sharing it again, so I will. 

This was shown during E3 of 2013, shortly after Microsoft's Don Mattrick showed off the Xbox One to the world and explained how their physical games were going to work as far as reselling and trading. This clip will always be at the forefront of my mind when I think of Sony now. When Microsoft first announced their plans for Xbox One, I was against it and boycotted and immediately set out to preorder a PS4 that day. I was lucky, and managed to snag one, and then picked it up later in the year on November 15. My launch titles were Knack, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, and Killzone: Shadow Fall. Now, I know Knack was memed quite heavily, but I actually really enjoyed it. I thought it was a fun little game and I really enjoyed the effects of all the different pieces used to build Knack. ACIV remains to this day my second favorite AC behind the Ezio trilogy, and I was having a blast sailing on the high seas. In fact, I loved it so much that I'm currently playing the remake Resynced right now. But Killzone? You could tell it was rushed to make the release. It wasn't a bad looking game, but the previous two Killzones on the PS3 were already so impressive, it just failed to leave its mark, and the campaign itself was pretty unremarkable. The PS4 didn't leave as strong an impression on me as the PS3 did, but man, its twilight years were incredible with Ghost of Tsushima and The Last of Us Part II. In fact, I still cannot tell the different between the PS4 and PS5 versions. The PS4 version looked that good. 

So this brings me to the PlayStation 5. The summer of 2020 when the PS5 was first unveiled - and incidentally during the middle of a pandemic - the plan was that preorders were going to go live on September 17th, but something went wrong. I can't remember who started it, but a large retailer began their preorders shortly after the announcement and then the rest of them began selling theirs. Suddenly, everyone was scrambling to secure a preorder and every website kept crashing due to the heavy traffic. For me, I managed to get a PS5 in my cart at Best Buy, and then spent over six hours refreshing and putting it back in until I finally managed to get the order to go through after 1 o'clock in the following morning. I was ecstatic and couldn't fall asleep for more than an hour later.

Because of the pandemic, no one was allowed to camp out and buy them at the actual stores, which is what put extra stress on the preorders. My PS5 actually didn't even arrive the day they said it would. I think it was a few days late. My launch titles were The Adventures of Sack Boy, which was fun and cute, Demon Souls, which I still refuse to believe needed to be 70 dollars, and Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which I absolutely loved. Astro's Playroom was a tech demo to show off the bells and whistles of the new Dual Sense controller - which as it stands, it my current favorite controller - and it came preinstalled. I also decided to download the quirky Bugsnax game, which ended up being digital only, and is one of the games that made me rethink how I'm going to approach gaming - PlayStation in specific - in the future. 

So as of now, PlayStation 6 just isn't attractive to me. It's not just the no disc thing, but it's also that it might be insanely expensive due to the ever increasing price of RAM and quite honestly, a lack of games. Sony doesn't have anything on the horizon after Intergalactic and God of War: Lefay aside from maybe Spider-Man 3 and the next God of War. The next Horizon game is at least three or four years out thanks in part to Sony's incessant need to keep investing in GaaS (games as a service). No discs. Expensive point of entry. No games... Why are we hyped for PlayStation 6 again?

But then when I mentioned Spider-Man 3... that's when my mind begins to shift a little. I mean, it's one thing to just not bother with GTAVI. It's just more Grand Theft Auto, but there's something special about a Spider-Man game. Swinging around in the city is just so freeing, and at least to me, it offers an experience that's far more exciting than just driving around in an open world. True Crime; Watch Dogs; Saint's Row; Mafia. All different stories, but essentially just driving around open world cities. With Spider-Man, however, I feel like a superhero! I LOVE soaring over the skies and dropping in and fighting crime and all those things. That's why it'll be much harder for me to skip Spider-Man 3 than it is to skip GTA. 

And another game I started thinking about. Fumito Ueda is one of the Sony's most artistic game developers. He's given us ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian. These games helped define Sony's PlayStation legacy as the place to play for truly unique games, and Ueda has a new one in the works tentatively called Project Robot. 

If this game doesn't make it by 2028... well, I guess that's it then. I could probably fight off FOMO for Spider-Man 3, but this game? Knowing what I know from this man Fumito Ueda and how each of his three games has moved me to tears? I need to play this. This is the "I NEED TO PLAY THIS GAME" moment of the next generation for me. Screw all the other AAA games. They are always the same thing, just with a different coat paint. This game will break my resolve and make me buy a PS6. Hmm... maybe I'll just buy a used PS6. That's smart, give Sony less money. 

If you've seen how adamant I've been in the past month about "NO DISC NO BUY," you'd swear I was against digital all together, but I actually am not. I just don't want digital to be the only thing. I don't want the options - choice - to be removed. I actually have bought digital-only games such as Hellblade 2, or games that came out digitally first and then physically later, such as Oddworld: Soulstorm and Scott Pilgrim. I was never opposed to digital games at all, and I believe they can and should co-exist with physical. I even own a digital-only gaming device: Playdate.

This cute little thing has a crank that folds out that can be used for gameplay such as fishing or surfing or manipulating time and it's supported by entirely free batches of software uploads along with larger, more complex games that are individually priced. Knowing how I feel about the PlayStation 6 and not wanting it because it's digital-only, I should be against this on concept alone, but I wasn't. For one, I think the difference is this machine came about from a very small company whose machine was supported by game developers that never would have had a chance of seeing their games materialize. Whereas with Sony - and especially Rockstar - they have loads of cash they can use to continue to press physical copies and still cater to the other part of their audience. Playdate is about promoting indie creativity and actually sharing free games. Sony is simply power grabbing and becoming greedier. 

I think that's the main reasoning behind me not wanting to get a PS6, not that it's digital-only, but the reason as to why. I may have been more open if I truly saw the physical format disappearing, but it hasn't, at least not in the way Sony tried to gaslight everyone by skewing their numbers. That was not appreciated at all, and it's how Sony is continuing to handle this mess that just makes it even harder to want a PS6. They're actually in court defending themselves from lawsuits saying, and I quote "reasonable gamers understand that they don't own their games." Pardon my French, but fuck off with that shit. 

Even then, as much as I want Fumito Ueda's new game, or as much as I want to play Spider-Man 3, it's this sheer disdain; this arrogance and gall; this unbridled contempt for their consumers that's going to flash in my head again when I decide to look at Amazon and check out with a PlayStation 6. Also, part of me still wants to support devs, which makes me feel bad about only buying used, but then I'm reminded that it's Sony trying to eliminate the second hand market. I want - need - Sony to start caring about this. Again, they were the ones mocking Xbox in 2013 about simply just trading a game to a friend. This was Shuhei Yoshida giving Adam Boyes a physical game. And now, Yoshida is on record saying he's moved on from physical and became digital-only. He switched up on his values. 

So honestly.. I don't know what's going to happen in the future. I'd like to think that I can stand firm and simply go without a PlayStation 6, but not getting one at launch goes against my first adopter nature that I've held since the Super Nintendo. I've been buying systems at launch for 35 friggin' years! If you would have told me that I wasn't going to buy a PS6 at launch back then, or even a year ago, I would have laughed maniacally. This goes beyond disappointment; it crosses into the realm of dystopia. 

One last thing before I go. I want to address this point again, because I've had to deal with it a LOT when I was active in Twitter (and I'll reactivate just to link this and promote this blog). 

We PC gamers haven't had physical copies in over a decade so get used to it. 

True. I witnessed this happen slowly at the beginning of the 2000s. But what I also witnessed was no one saying a single thing about it. You all quietly gave up that right, but there are two major things regarding this that makes the situation different as to what's happening in the console market. 

1) Piracy was out of hand. PC games released on physical were copied and distributed illegally the very day they were installed. There was no system in place to lock down redistribution and there was no way to curtail piracy except to control the source and make their games digital only. Granted, this didn't stop piracy, but it slowed it down greatly. What's really sad about seeing physical PC games disappear was that PC games were always in really cool boxes! Remember this? Just one example.

They had shapes! Not just simple rectangles and jewel cases, but shapes!

2) There is no unified platform holder. PC isn't a platform in the same vein as a console. Multiple companies open up their own stores and sell PC games directly to their consumers. As there was no console manufacturing overload to pay dues and fees to, publishing on PC spread like wildfire and profitability spiked when they sold exclusively as digital. But again, because there were multiple store fronts such as GOG and Steam, even though PC is considered to be a platform, there is direct competition between storefronts within the platform to help control pricing. With PlayStation, there is no competition within their ecosystem. One price and one price only in their stores. Also, you can strip off the DRM of a PC title and make your own hardcopies. 

What makes this whole situation even worse is that you can ONLY buy a digital game through PSN, a service that is NOT in 121 countries. So when PC gamers go, "You're going to PC, which is digital only, because PlayStation is going digital only... make it make sense," they aren't making a point; they're just illustrating that their clueless. The PC ecosystem is an entirely different beast than PlayStation's. 

So, we'll just have to see... I'm still hoping for Sony to dial all this back, or that some compromise can be reached, or maybe I can just make peace with the entire situation and accept the fact that I'll become a hypocrite and buy a PS6 so I can keep gaming... All I can say is, thank God I never got any PlayStation tattoos.

I Feel Defeated

Today started off with not so good news. Not really surprising to anyone, Sony has officially responded to the outrage and backlash over their decision to end physical media.  Essentially, Sony CEO Lin Tao's words read to me as any typical CEO would do: "We heard you. We just don't care." I've already accepted the fact that physical gamers were spreadsheeted out. Sony's already looked at all the numbers and figured there's enough digital-only gamers to keep them afloat. Maybe they're right, but that doesn't help me feel any better as a customer. As a fan, I feel scorned. 

I will be honest. I'm not taking this very well at all. I've had three previous blogs I chose to delete. Some of you may have read them. I chose to delete them because they came off too negative, and I ultimately wasn't happy with them. This one isn't that positive in of itself, but at least it won't have any cursing in it this time. This blog will also serve as part of a process to better get a grip on my mental health and temperament when interacting with my community online. 

Again, I will be honest. I haven't been proud of my behavior. Whether it's on Facebook, Twitter (I will never call it X), or YouTube, I've engaged with - and poorly - the opposition pushing back on us physical gamers wanting to preserve our media. I just won't understand why there is pushback on us for wanting to preserve our rights, and not being able to understand why here's such a lack of empathy and a surplus of apathy regarding the topic has produced a lot of frustration. I hate that there's a civil war developing in our community over physical versus digital. I think some people think that physical gamers are against digital media. and I'd like to believe that most of us aren't; we just want to the option of physical to stay. 

If you don't know, there's currently a planned protest running from August 23rd through August 30th. You would think as passionate as I am about this topic, I would be participating, except I don't like the idea of blackout-style boycotts; I just don't think they work. All these boycotts do is tell companies when they'll be back. The only effective boycott is one where the consumer stops giving the company money entirely until the company capitulates to their demands. I'm also reminded of the blackout boycott against Big Oil in 2011 that had people not going to gas stations on April 15th. What happened was the oil companies saw spikes in profit on April 14th and 16th. And well, what are you going to do? You need gas in your car. None of these protesters had the conviction to sell their cars and just use public transit or get a bike. Blackout boycotts just don't work. 

What works is promising the company you're not going to give them your money. The perfect example of this is the Xbox One protest of 2013 when Don Mattrick not only announced that the Xbox One would be an always-online device, but effectively an attack on the used game market by controlling the rights to the games on disc and making used game stores check in with MS so MS could take a portion of all used game sales. There was also the policy of the Kinect needing to be included and connected to the Xbox One along with the gaslighting from MS saying it just wouldn't work without it, and there was nothing they could do about it. And of course, there was the infamous Sony PSA about how to share PS4 games

So, we revolted. We not only voted with our wallets, we spoke out. We let MS know that we weren't going to buy their upcoming Xbox One, and they saw our conviction by the lack of preorders. When you tell a company you're not going to give them money and you stay true to your word, you'll be surprised how quickly a company will change their tune. They reversed all the policies we didn't like, and I went out and preordered an Xbox One that day.

I think that's what most of us protesting hoped was going to happen. If enough of us said we were weren't going to buy a PS6, surely they would listen to us! I mean, we flooded every single social media post Sony made, whenever they made them, and a lot of game companies caught strays as a result. Some smaller indies even saw their announcements of their new upcoming games drowned out completely. I even used my own graphic when I was protesting.  

We were everywhere. And we made our voices heard. But, there was one thing that caused our voices to fall on deaf ears and that was the absolutely crazy success of GTA 6 preorders. Within its first week, Rockstar sold over 50 million copies, and this included the "physical" editions that were nothing more than a code in a box. I'm pretty sure Sony wanted to make the announcement they were killing physical media sooner, but they were waiting on Rockstar to start selling GTA 6 to prove to shareholders and say, "Look! See? They say they want physical media, but they'll buy it digitally!" So clearly, Sony thinks they can get away with it. Maybe they will... 

I'm very curious how well the PlayStation 6 will sell in terms of preorders. I just think it has too many things against it. For one, there won't be a disc drive, so us collectors are out. For two, the cost is going to be prohibitively expensive. I'm thinking it's going to start at 1,200 at least. For three, there's nothing in their pipeline past Intergalactic, so what's the point of buying a PS6 when everything will still be on 5. Also, there's this:

This is visual interpretation of a patent Sony recently filed showing an all-digital controller. There are no physical buttons; it's all one unbroken surface. The idea is that you can program and position your buttons wherever you want, and on paper, that sounds awesome. But in practicality, I think it's a bad idea. I've played mobile games before, and I don't really like touch screen controllers that much, because fingers tender to wander. I prefer tactile buttons so your fingers can feel where they are and feel the resistance of the buttons. I don't even think the best haptic feedback will be a replacement for good old fashion physical button tech. 

Sony says they aren't feeling any negative impact on their business since the announcement of getting rid of their discs. Well, we'll see what happens when the PS6 underperforms during preorders. They'll no longer to have to answer to us, the customers; they'll need to answer to their shareholders. 

So, where does this leave me? I was prepared to leave behind Grand Theft Auto VI, because I was planning on waiting them out and hoping Rockstar would press a physical copy (or Limited Run or iam8bit or anybody), but well, that's not going to happen at all. Missing out on one game? Easy. Yet, if I really care this much about my physical media, that means I have to miss out on an entire console generation. I've been buying systems at launch since the very first PlayStation (technically, the SNES if you count launch windows) and PlayStation has always held a very special place in my heart; it's where I spend the most of my hours gaming on. Now, I feel betrayed. I feel discarded. I feel... defeated. 

Gaming has always brought me joy. Just sheer joy. Nevermind the amount of times where I got frustrated and angry enough to break a controller, a game, or an entire Vita. It's just been my number one source of entertainment and I've loved collecting it in physical form. I mostly always bought new because I enjoyed the feeling of cutting open the cellophane, popping out the disc and reading the manual (although manuals have been gone for years). Now, I look at the future of Sony, and I see... nothing. I can't hold a digital game in my hands. I can no longer get that feeling of pride of sliding a case into my shelf and watch my collection grow. Instead, I'll have to worry about whatever license holder suddenly develops a conflict with Sony, and Sony reaches into my PS6 and yoinks the data away. Or heaven forbid be the extremely unlucky guy who has his PSN account hacked, and Sony decides to delete the account versus fixing it... 

So, I will overcome the FOMO. The PS6 as it stands is extremely unattractive. No discs; no games; no buttons on their controller; no chance of being affordable. It has nothing for me, and that's going to soften the blow. We'll see how I feel after the PS6 has been out for a few years, if they have exclusives good enough to override my willpower and let the FOMO claim me. Or, they could end up earning me as a customer again if they would just let us back up our games like PC gamers have done for years... 

What I've decided I'm going to do now is add to my rainy day backlog. If I haven't linked it before, you can check it out here.  I just recently bought a Game Gear with a flash card that has 500 Game Gear games and 500 Master System games, and I've acquired an Xbox 360 Slim after fearing to turn on my OG 360 and watching it suddenly RROD. I plan on buying a whole bunch of 360 games and also plan on doing some Vita shopping before Sony finally closes the doors for good on the store. AFter Wolverine, which was already preordered with reward points, every PlayStation game going forward will be bought used so Sony no longer gets my money. This also means no more buying fancy schmancy PS5 controllers, which was starting to be a problem. If I want to buy a game new, I'll buy it on Xbox or Switch 2. Or hell, I might even invest in a gaming laptop and do GOG and Steam (how I would have loved Steam to have been cheaper, but that's another blog.)

It's hard letting go, and like I said, I've been with PlayStation for 31 years now. I knew digital was slowly overtaking physical, but that's not the point. Physical, contrary to popular belief, is not dead. Visit your local library and see how many DVDs and CDs they still have. By the way, they have books, which will never stop being printed. People still enjoy physical. People still want physical. Physical is still profitable. Hell, charge us an extra 10 dollars for a physical copy to make up for the 1 dollar it costs to press a piece of plastic.

 It's just, I don't like the way this was handled. I don't like how they announced their decision in an emotionally devoid blog ironically ending with their slogan, "Play Has No Limit." I don't like how Sony mislead us with skewed numbers. I don't like how they aggressively gag ordered their employees to not talk about the situation, or how they claim Blu-Ray is dying when in reality they just wanted to invest in AI microlenses. I don't like how they've ignored us, and I especially don't like how Lin Yao finally addressed us in a very verbose way of essentially telling us to "deal with it." If that's how you really feel about us then, Sony, we'll move on. Thanks for the memories. You'll still always have the best system start up sound in history (PS1). 

The Continued Strain of AI Development on the Console Industry

So this happened....Also, it takes effect April 2, which I found hilarious, because someone had the foresight to not have it happen on April 1. (Disclaimer: I didn't realize the Pro already increased to 750 before, so when I mention a 200 dollar increase, it's when the console was first released at 700.)

You and me both, Bubbles. This... is insane. That's all I can say at this particularly level of mental capacity. This console generation is... fucked. That's all I can say. That's all I can really say... I've been gaming for somewhere around 40 years, and I've never, ever seen a price hike like this... I've never seen a price hike on the cost of a console before this generation, let alone a second one, let alone the second one being this steep!

I remember when I bought my first console with my own money. That was the 8-Bit Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990. I know, I was late, but my parents were adamant that it would get in the way of my schoolwork. So, after I graduated the fifth grade, they decided to let me use money earned on my report card to buy my first system. And, it was 100 dollars. Yeah... a console costing only 100 dollars. Now, the PS5 Pro is going to be 900 dollars, exactly one NES in 1990 short of a rack. Also, Xbox has gone up in price twice already: this generation with the Series X sitting at 650 (600 for an all digital) and the Series S at 400.

So, in my 40 years of gaming, I don't think I've ever seen a video game console hit that number (900). I mean, we had Sony's own PS3, which debuted at 600 dollars for the 60 gig SKU, but they quickly worked on bringing that price down after rough sales. There was the Panasonic 3DO that launched at 700 that never had a chance not just because of the price, but because of the abysmal library. Then there was the Neo Geo at 650, only because it was essentially an arcade board crammed into a console shell. The problem with the Neo Geo, however, was not the price more as it was the price of their games, which averaged more than a couple hundred dollars because of all the RAM used in their cartridges: you were essentially buying encased arcade boards. 

With this outliers out of the way, gaming has for the most part been affordable. In terms of inflation, the average cost of consoles has stayed relatively the same, so one can make the argument that gaming has only become cheaper with everything else being impacted by inflation on a greater scale. Games themselves have also hit 80 dollars but that was Nintendo testing the waters, and Xbox embarrassed themselves badly thinking their consumers were ready to pay 80 dollars for Outer Worlds 2, doing a complete 180 I think it was like a week later. Nintendo has yet to drop another original first-party title at 80, but I wouldn't put it past them to sell the new Zelda or Mario at that price. 

So what's driving up these console price tags? Well, last year, you could blame tariffs. Nintendo delayed their Switch 2 preorders trying to figure out whether or not their prices would be affected by the tariffs, but in February of this year, Congress shut down tariffs on a lot of things, including electronics, so the major cause of these prices skyrocketing can only be one thing: the rise of AI.

AI development is a juggernaut right now. Every major tech company trying to secure their own models and compete with them are essentially buying up whatever land they can get their hands on and devouring resources at an astronomical rate to make RAM and chips and other components. NVIDIA is a monster right now, being the sole supplier of these components to select few companies at exorbitant rates. Not taking in account any of the harrowing factors AI development has on environmental conditions or jobs in the industry, NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang was essentially quoted "It's good for business."

Meanwhile, us gamers have to pay the price. Remember when PC gamers got hit hard trying to find the newest graphics cards at reasonable prices because people were buying them up to mine cryptocurrency? That was just from individuals buying up just graphics cards. Now, multiply that by a magnitude of three and you have entire corporations buying up not just graphics cards, but RAM and raw components in their never ending quest for the next data center, and now the effect has bled into the console industry.

And that's just AI's influence with getting the electronics manufactured. This isn't even taking into account the effect AI is having on the development of games themselves. Right now, backlash from gamers when they detect any game having any form of AI generated assets is scathing.  Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 lost a Game of the Year award for its use of generative AI, and all they did was forget to swap out a placeholder with actual art. Gamers don't want generative AI in their games. Take one good look at the travesty that is Black Ops 7 if you really want to understand why, yet here comes Asha Sharma, new CEO of Xbox, fresh from Microsoft's own AI division, insisting she's not going to shove AI into Xbox games, yet at the same time is facilitating Copilot to be introduced into Xbox. If there's any woman I can't trust as far as I can throw, it's her. 

A 200 dollar increase on a console. I just... I'm still stunned over here.  Granted, it was already an expensive console to begin with, but a TWO HUNDRED DOLLAR increase on a console? There's sticker shock, and there's just shocking. And that's shocking! Is Sony not aware that they just made their already expensive Pro model even harder to afford? With prices on everything else still on the rise, people are going to be tightening their belts even more, and these consoles are going to be much easier for people to rule out of their budgets. Yes, there's always people who say that gaming is a luxury. If you're struggling to buy groceries or pay rent, maybe gaming isn't the right hobby to get into right now, but I've also been of the mind that gaming is for everyone. With such a high price of entry now, that makes it harder for gamers on a budget to enter in through the secondhand market. 

And ultimately, it leads to this: the fewer consoles a company sells, the fewer games they'll sell for it. That has a vicious effect on developers, because if the publishers aren't seeing an immediate turn around, they'll shutter the studio. This has already been happening, and is happening more frequently. In fact, investors in Pearl Abyss - makers of Crimson Desert - bailed, dropping their stock by 30 percent after one day, seeing the Metacritic score of 78 on the PC. Ironically, the game would continue to go on to sell more than three million copies. The effect of investors on the video game industry is a subject for an entirely different blog. 

I keep hearing rumblings that the AI bubble is about to pop, and I seriously hope this is true. Console prices are rising. PC components are rising. Electronics in general are rising. Developers are taking shortcuts with AI in the games. Artists are losing work. I still have a theory about AI data centers adding to global warming from all the heat they put out. Everything is hitting the extreme far too quickly. I don't even want to get into war applications... 

So yeah, I really hope things slow down with AI, because I thought Skynet was scary enough without seeing a console go for nearly 1K.

Should I Even Bother Keeping Up the Fight At This Point....

Wow, okay, so it's been almost a year since I've written a blog here. I really need to get on that. I guess all it takes is something from Nintendo to light a fire under my ass to get going again. 

Before I get into that, anyone who knows me knows what kind of gamer I am, and I'm a collector. I'm not the kind that goes hunting on eBay or go to out of the way mom and pop stores looking for rare treasures (although I used to do that long ago). I'm the kind of collector that just collects what I play; I like to keep my games. I want to address one point that I hear people try to use against me all the time when I debate physical vs digital. 

"You don't own the game! You only own a license to play the game!"

Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. We all know that we don't OWN the actual game. No one has EVER debated that fact. Those rights belong to the IP holder/publisher/developer of said game. And as you said, we own a license - in this case, a copy of the game - to play it. The difference between physical and digital licenses is that when you own a copy of a game physically, it is IMPOSSIBLE for the IP holder/publisher/developer to revoke access to your license. They would need to literally hire someone and send them down to your house with a search warrant to see if you even own a physical copy that they could take back from you. 

We've seen this countless times. Games that people once had access to digitally suddenly found their games deactivated. One such case had PlayStation gamers with downloaded TV shows lose access to what they legitimately purchased: shows downloaded into their personal libraries, not subscribed to. Digital games are also subject to availability based on licenses that the publisher/developer have to continue to pay for, so if a game's becoming long in the tooth and is no longer selling, they'll delist the game so they don't have to pay music holders, car manufactures, and other companies continual licensing fees. 

"Well, a digital game being delisted is the same as a game not being sold in brick and mortar stores!"

Well, um... not really. True, if you head to a store like GameStop or Best Buy, you're not going to find a game that is no longer in print, but the key difference between delisting and out of print is that out of print games can be found at numerous sources in the second-hand market. There is no second-hand market for digital games, which is a crime, as it illustrates an unusual power grab for control over IP that isn't currently netting the holder anymore profit. 

So anyway, I've always made it my thing to buy a physical version whenever I could because I love permanence. When console games began launching simultaneously in adjacent digital store fronts, I kept going to brick and mortar stores and ordering physical copies online because for one, I'm a tactile person by nature and prefer the physicality of slitting open cellophane and opening a box, popping a disc out, and putting in my machine. I know most people don't care about that, more as they just want the convenience, but I also have never adopted an eReader just because I prefer the weight and smell of the book itself. Also, I don't have to worry about shuffling around data because my harddrive is full of game files I've downloaded onto it. 

That last line isn't as relevant today as it was even five years ago, because nowadays, consoles need to install off the disc to the harddrive (well, SSD) because optical drives can't stream the data fast enough for the systems to process, yet still, my earlier points remain: those physical copies are mine, and they'll last forever. 

But this generation has been very frustrating in terms of wanting to hold the line in the war of physical versus digital. If you take a look at the design of the first PlayStation 5 models, you'll have noticed a peculiarity with the disc-based model compared to the digital-only model. The disc model's disc drive was a lump on the side of the console (displayed vertically). It was clear to see that this was a design aspect resulting from an afterthought of Sony realizing that there are still a good number of gamers left who want physical media. This was further evidenced in 2024 when the PS5 Pro was released without a disc drive. Thankfully, one could purchase one separately and slap it in, but still, that was a price-based deterrent to put off as many physical gamers as possible. 

In 2023, Microsoft began its push to cease pressing copies of some of their Xbox games.  Some of their biggest exclusives launched digital only, such as Psychonauts 2 (which apparently did have a physical, but for Kickstarter backers only) and Senuas's Saga: Hellblade 2. Both of these games I actually bit the bullet on and bought digitally, because I really wanted to play them. In most cases, if a game I wanted to play came out digital only, I would try to wait it out for a physical copy. Usually, places like Limited Run Games and iam8bit would do physical copies of games the publishers themselves didn't want to. 

And then we have last year, 2025, when Nintendo themselves tossed their name in the hat to further frustrate physical collectors with the addition of game key-cards. If you don't know what a game key-card is, it's essentially a game card that has the license to download the game from the eShop stored on the card. In essence, it works like PS5 and Xbox games that only have the license key to download the game from their respective store fronts. This allows owners to maintain a "physical" copy to sell and trade should they no longer wish to own their digital copy. The issue with GKCs is that Nintendo refused to give developers cheaper 32 gig cards to put their games on, so we were seeing games that could have easily fit on them, some even being smaller than 10 gigs, end up on GKCs because publishers didn't want to spend the extra money on 64 gig cards. So, we've had many games release on GKCs instead of actual physical media, and that puts a timer on the life of those games, because there will be a point where those games will be delisted, and the GKCs will have no value to anyone else but the current owners. I didn't like the idea of GKCs for that reason alone, but sadly, I decided there's no point in fighting these, so I bought a couple: Octopath Traveler 2 and Pokemon Pokopia. If I can't have an actual physical copy, I guess the next best thing is a GKC. 

So today... *big sigh* Nintendo decides to use a price deterrent to incentivize more gamers to adopt digitally by initiating a price disparity between their digital and physical versions. When I first heard about this story, it was originally reported that physical copies were going to be increased 10 dollars, but Nintendo had to clarify that what they were doing was instead was making digital versions 10 dollars cheaper. It only makes sense as there are no manufacturing or shipping costs associated with digital copies, and this is something I've actually championed for years ago. Unfortunately this clarification came while I was writing this blog, and now it's kinda taken some of the steam out of it, because I wrote this with full intent of ranting about Nintendo, how they've become more greedy this generation with raising the prices on games in general and making their most expensive system to date, yada yada yada. But still, the question remains....

Should I even bother keeping up the fight at this point? More and more games (and I'm actually finally installing Crimson Desert, which apparently doesn't have any data on the disc itself) are being shipped in a GKC way on PS5 and Xbox, and the new Xbox might not even have a drive at all, so there will be a point where physical media just isn't a thing anymore. PC gamers witnessed the loss of their games being pressed on disc years upon years ago. They'll be the first to tell console gamers to just give it up and get used to it, which I get, but I wish you PC gamers pushed back as much as us console gamers are still trying to do. 

What I need to do right now is weigh the importances of what really matters to me against the inevitabilities. Do I simply let go of wanting to play certain games (that will most likely be all games in the future) just because I don't like the idea of not owning my copy? Do I really want to keep putting up with constantly downloading them and shuffling data files around on my SSD? Or.. could I just embrace an all-digital future like many gamers already have and actually enjoy the comforts and conveniences afforded to them by simply having all their games in one place, leaving behind cleaner shelves and less cluttered closets? 

Ultimately, it comes down to whether or not I want to give gaming up. Either I'm all in or I'm completely out, and there's simply no way I'm willing to give up gaming for good. Granted, I have the backlog to wait out the next Great Flood, but there's a big enough part of the gamer in me that will want to continue to play the next big new game. I've been relenting over time with the sluice gate slowly opening, but there's just going to be a point where I need to open it all the way up and let the floodwaters take me where they may.