The End of Gaming (as we know it)

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing.” -some genius somewhere

It’s official, we have a release date for the highly anticipated GTA 6. After over 13 years of waiting, fans will finally get to return to the world they love on November 19, 2026. I don’t play GTA myself but I used to watch my older cousins play and I can recognize a good game when I see one so my first inclination was to be happy for the fans. However, upon learning that there would be no physical copies of the game and that the price for the base game was 80 HUMAN DOLLARS, that excitement quickly turned into annoyance, then genuine anger.

There has been a push to reduce physical media. DVDs of new movies are hard to find. Laptops and cars no longer have slots for CDs. Physical books are becoming prohibitively expensive for the average reader. At every turn, our leisurely activities are being digitized. The narrative surrounding this is that it’s making media more accessible. Shows, movies, and music you couldn’t easily find before are now at your fingertips. The whole world at the tip of your finger. Sure, whatever. In reality it just means that our rights to ownership are slowly slipping out of those same hands.

Take Netflix for example. They’re just uploaded your favorite show from when you were 16 and you start it from the beginning for the nostalgia. But you’re busy and life gets away from you and by the time you return to finish it, it’s already been removed from the platform. You’re still paying for the service but your access to this show has been removed. You don’t own shit and your ability to enjoy it is predicated on decisions made by suits in a boardroom. Suddenly, that “accessibility” doesn’t seem so worth it.

Let’s say you open Disney plus to watch a movie you’ve seen a million times before. Only now, this watch is different. You can’t place your finger on it but something has been altered and now it’s all you can think about. Are you losing it? Well, no. Disney has just changed the original work to align more closely with a business interest of some sort. Maybe the colors look faded to our standards so they have been updated for brightness. But you liked how “dull” everything looked. That’s part of the original charm of the movie. Well that’s too damn bad, you don’t own it so you have no control over how it’s altered.

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Now let’s say there’s a character whose actions no longer align with the companies messaging. Maybe they have a quirk or say something that gives their character texture. This is important context into who that character is, sure, but corporate doesn’t like it. Who then can stop Disney from changing it, destroying the story, and feeding it back to you without you even being able to object? No one and even worse, this is now the definitive version you have available. Your memory of this film doesn’t matter because it no longer exists on the platform. This might feel like an extreme example but this has already happened several times on the platform and will continue to happen. Go watch Lili & Stitch and tell me if that’s the same version you remember from your childhood.

And now the gamers. I consider myself gaming-adjacent. I play games here and there, mostly on long breaks and usually some sort of simulator. But there is a culture around gaming and gamers alike. One thing that fascinates me about gamers is that they have this shared sense that the experience of gaming is deteriorating. They know they aren’t having as much fun as they used to. The impulse has been to blame “outsiders” i.e. minorities, women, women minorities, etc. People who have a desire to destroy gaming by daring to imagine themselves in these worlds. If a gaming experience sucks it has to be that there’s too many of them in the game or one of them must have designed. Always focus on the them, but none of the it. No mention of the faceless organization that charged you $75 dollars for a download of what should be a $40 dollar physical game. No mention of the fact that that game is completely digital and if they so choose (and they so choose a lot) can be purged from the system at any time due to licensing issues or database dumps. What do you think the anxiety of losing all of your data at any time does to the gaming experience?

GTA 6 being digital is incompatible with the experience the game aims to capture. Say what you want but games like GTA foster community. Game swapping was common and a good way to make friends as a particularly shy individual. What happens when nothing can be shared? To make matters worse, Sony recently announced plans to phase out ALL physical disks for Playstation games. You could pay Sony a million dollars for every game they make and if they decide to purge all of those games, you would walk away with absolutely nothing. This WILL be the end of the gaming experience as we know it. Period.

I can’t express enough how important physical media is. We are stuck in this consumerist hellscape. Nothing is free but the benefit should be that we actually GET THINGS for our money. That we control what we do with the goods we buy with our money. Without that we are all just dumping our money in a hole and setting it on fire for the entertainment of the oligarchy. This is completely at odds with how we are meant to enjoy art as humans and I have to ask, who does this benefit? And when is enough, enough?

Moving all of my books and records from apartment to apartment has been a hassle but I’ll gladly do it every year before I rely solely on shady mega-corporations to honor my purchases.

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