release installers DRM-free online. No need to bother pressing plastic and wrapping it in plastic and wrapping that plastic in thinner plastic and then putting it in a box full of plastic to ship around the globe on giant cargo ships, to be ferried from the docks by big-rig trucks, to be stacked on palettes that get wrapped in more plastic, to sit on store shelves or the shelves of some amazon warehouse where they’ll get wrapped in more plastic and shipped in more trucks, so that you can pay the middleman store instead of the developers, all so that you can install the files to your SSD anyway. And if this physical media is DRM-free you could just make backups instead of holding onto the plastic… or skip the part where the plastic exists in the first place, and download the files over the internet, right to your computer, without any trip to a gamestop or stop on an Amazon driver’s daily route! And if it’s not DRM-free what was even the point of all that plastic and gasoline that got it into your hands when you need to verify the purchase with an online key anyway?

GOG, Itch, and even Steam all have large catalogues of completely DRM-free games, to say nothing of developers that don’t distribute via a storefront platform. Once you download the game, provided you don’t delete it, your copy of the game will survive the distribution platform dying, the developer being bought out by EA, licenses expiring for content, the devs patching it to make it worse, or even (if you make backups) your house burning down.

Nintendo’s out here trying to justify $90 mario kart because of the “rising cost of developing games”, meanwhile probably more than half of the new mario kart’s sales are going to lose huge amounts of revenue because Nintendo has to pay manufacturers and shippers and storefronts to move and hold onto plastic and circuit boards that are just glorified read-only flashdrives for 32GB of media. It’s been a joke that digital games have been the same price as their physical counterparts ever since companies started selling digital copies in the first place.

I think “mandatory physical versions” kinda misses the point of the issue, tbh. It’s bad digital rights laws that are the cause of the problems that you’ve mentioned, not a lack of physical media. DRM has been around a lot longer than digital downloads of games, and shutting down a game’s online services affects purchasers of physical disks just as much as digital downloaders.

Besides, mass-producing physical media is expensive, and I’d rather not give publishers another excuse to make games even more expensive than they already are.

Physical copies are kinda besides the point in terms of ownership and preservation. Just because you own the disk, doesn’t mean you have access to the software on it. DRM, as well as the laws that make it viable, have been around since well before media was sold digitally. Physical copies of the Crew are no more playable now than digital. If you want to be able to keep your games, you need to buy DRM-free, whether that limits you to digital-only or not.

On the other hand, if you want to actually own your games, we need to massively rework copyright law. The fact that a company can sell you a software licence, but add dozens of arbitrary restrictions on when, how and why you can use it is absurd, nonetheless the fact that its always non-transferable and revokable by the company for any reason. None of that should be legal.

Something like legally required to offer a no-DRM version on all storefronts would be interesting. I don’t care about physical media much anymore but I do want to own what I buy.

I would rather a law that extends many of the properties of physical ownership to digital sales.

If we’re wishing for things that probably won’t happen, how about a government agency for game preservation? Source code gets submitted before release, approval for sale is conditional on them being able to successfully build and deploy it. Then 20 years later it gets automatically published to the public domain. That way even online only games will end up being preserved.

Is this a law that specifically only applies to AAAs, or are we just shutting down literally all of indie gaming? If the former, how do you legally draw the line between who is and isn’t allowed to release digital-only titles? Even just basing it on the size of the company would effectively mean that large publishers may only release large projects and never smaller budget titles.

The Crew had physical copies.

Plastic cases, discs, etc are expensive and degrade over time. Consoles will break down. 50 years from now there’ll be too much history to keep making copies of everything worth saving. If we do want a video game preservation law, make it digital.

Emulation and piracy should be legal for games older than ~20 years, or if the parent company goes under. Online games should be required to make an offline mode patch before shutting down.

As a related example, my parents have a bunch of bookshelves packed with everything they bought over the years. And as a kid I never touched any of it because the books had become all gross and yellowed. Physical game archives will last a couple decades longer but in the end it’ll be the same result.

Is there another meaning to “PSA” that isn’t “public service announcement”? It confuses me being in the title as this entire post is written as a suggestion / CTA, not a PSA.

It’d be nice but would hurt indies because indies thrive due to not needing a physical port, and only releasing one once they are popular and successful enough to afford it.

I guess you could include some verbiage that would target AAA studios, but they’ll find a way around it like they do everything else.

And at this point, I’m not really fond of most AAA titles anyway so this won’t do much for people like myself to care anymore. Physical releases are something I care about less since other issues have arisen over the years, specifically in the quality of the game, itself.

I’m always pro to retail in arts, people should care more about digitalization into other fields. As a PC gamer I’m starting to collect some used console and blurays, they costs mostly the same as digital but you own something. Also don’t forget the preservation issue.

DRM-free is one thing, and it’s something that GOG offers universally, with an asterisk for some multiplayer games, and I wish that asterisk was handled better. You want DRM-free. Your physical copy quickly becomes out of date when new patches come out, and patch cycles are frequent for modern games, even when they ship relatively bug-free out of the gate. Speaking for myself, I have no desire to have physical games anymore. I have a bunch of old PC game boxes that I just put up on my shelves yet again after moving for the fifth time in 14 years. Many of them have GOG versions, and I’m looking to replace those games with the GOG equivalent during the summer sale so I can finally eBay my physical versions away and be done with them.

A mandatory physical version is a cost for a market that hardly exists anymore, but we could all benefit from DRM-free games.

I want the law to allow resales of digital game licenses, and the storage medium shouldn’t matter.

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