Mine Not Yours

Okay, so I came across an article yesterday. Reading it and thinking about what it says made me sad. Granted, this is a rumor provided by an anonymous tipster and so should be taken with appropriate grains of salt, but it is worrisome that the article's contents are this close from becoming actuality.

It seems that Sony and Microsoft have it in their heads that, come the next generation of consoles, used or shared games are to be a thing of the past. Every purchased game will have its own individual string of code which will be synched to a particular console, and the game will function only on that console. To ensure this, they'll be requiring a full-time hook-up to the internet even when playing in a single-player mode or what would traditionally have been offline multiplayer. This sort of thing is already in place with, picking on the most well-known offender, Blizzard/Activision's BattleNet 2.0 with Starcraft 2 and the upcoming Diablo III.

The sad fact is that this sort of shift is inevitable. Companies are moving increasingly towards purely digital distribution methods and are actively working to phase out physical media. Since the companies in question do not (usually) relinquish their ownership of the intellectual property associated with a game and the series of 0s and 1s which comprises a game is considered intellectual property, "purchases" could quickly find themselves to be more akin to "rentals," or more accurately a limited "licensing," of the intellectual property in question.

The "creators" (or more accurately owners) of these properties love that idea. They've been trying to kill off the used game market since the mid-80s, when Nintendo went on a crusade against stores reselling games and equated it with piracy, mainly because Nintendo wasn't seeing a portion of the proceeds of that exchange flow into their own coffers (it's ironic that Nintendo is the only one of the Big Three not to have come out stating they wish to enact these protections on the WiiU...as of now).

If you'll allow me to hunker down on my rocker and take a deep pull from my glass of lemonade, back in the days of my youth my friends and I would swap games all the time. $60 a pop for a new NES or SNES title was a lot of money for someone subsisting on a pittance of an allowance. I could afford maybe one or two new games a year, not counting birthday or Christmas gifts. So I'd swap titles with others and experience and enjoy games that way. I owned Mega Mans 2, 3, and 6, but I'd played the other three of the NES era because my friends owned the original and parts 4 and 5. No TMNT 2, but I had 1 and 3. I didn't have Final Fantasy, but did have Dragon Warrior and the two Zelda games.

Under this proposed system-game lockdown, I couldn't do that. I couldn't hypothetically lend a friend CoD: Mission to Callisto in exchange for Final Fantasy XVI. Hell, I couldn't even rent Final Fantasy XVI and give it a playthrough that way (though some form of demo system will be put in place, it'll require people to pay to unlock the full game).

There's only one way I can really see this working, and that's if the prices on games were lowered dramatically. Take a look at Steam, which handles digital distribution with aplomb. I like it and while I still chafe a little at not having a thing to call my own (which I recognize as an outdated carryover from my youth), I'm okay with paying $5-$10 for a game. Hell, I'd pay up to $25 or $30 if it was a super hot new release and I had a computer that wasn't an outdated piece of crap and therefore able to run it without melting down.

The problem is that most people are not me (many would view that as a spectacular thing). They will continue to shell out $60 for the newest Madden and companies like EA will smirk with glee and continue to price things at that level. Heck, I'm of the old generation now. Many of today's gamers are ignorant of a time when there wasn't DLC available (or in some cases necessary!) for just about every game out there, when your $50 or $60 got you a finished product and you had the option to shell out another $20 or so for expansion packs that were more than just two or three missions or stages and some skins for your characters for $4.99, but contained another game's worth of content.

Part of me hopes this decision will usher in another video game crash like the great one of 1983, that people will get so fed up with the way companies are doing things that they'll refuse to give them any business and that things will return to a bit of sanity. It looks like I'll be sitting yet another generation of consoles out, but that's okay. I can huggle and enjoy splendid offerings like Dungeons of Dredmor or Avadon: The Black Fortress while the rest of the world wallows in madness.