ISSUE NO. 15
PlayStation has officially announced the PS5 Slim, and just like I asked for in my column two weeks ago, they kept it ugly! We did it! Article over.
Joking aside, the mid-cycle refresh is now underway whether we want it or not and one thing that both PlayStation (officially) and Xbox (unofficially) are confirming is that the future will be digital. For real this time, as both the PS5 Slim and the yet unannounced Xbox Brooklin are confidently investing in a future without physical media.
It used to be that you couldn’t announce a digital-only console without getting laughed out of the room. Never mind that ownership rates of digital games have far out-paced physical media ownership for years now, the important thing was having the ‘option’ to own actual discs. With the most recent generation of consoles PlayStation and Xbox played nice and offered two models each, one with physical media playback and the other a digital-only system. But it was already over by then – there was no way the genie would be put back in the bottle after that.
But it’s not just the PS5 Slim Digital’s existence that speaks volumes about where we’re heading in terms of physical media ownership, it’s the price. With the slim, PlayStation has upped the price of the PS5 Digital from $400 to $450, so it’s not that much cheaper than the PS5 with a disc drive. This means Sony now values a disc-less PS5 pretty much the same as the ‘full-featured’ PS5. And if you ever change your mind, well, you can buy an optional disc drive for another $70, making the total package more expensive than the disc-based system.
The first-party console makers have been aggressively preparing us for this for a long time. Look at your PS Plus library, which has been getting fat off of digital games for years now, and compare it to how many discs you own. How easy is it to get a game the moment it’s released than it is to wait for Amazon to deliver you a brand new game later in the day or even after launch? In practical terms, digital has already won. Even if you get the disc version, the ginormous day-one updates hardly make for a simple insert-and-play experience.
It used to be that I would never even glance at a digital copy of a game if there wasn’t a chance to get a physical copy. But times have changed, and so have games.
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However, we’ve known for a long time that digital-only is better for first-party developers as they’re able to take home more profit without sharing with third-party distributors, and this is a big reason why every publisher was so keen to create their own digital storefronts on PC. And the secret of course is that physical games are often cheaper than their digital counterparts, barring any kind of major digital sale. While archival and digital ownership reasons are pleasant things to consider, physical’s main advantage over digital has always been price, though even that’s changing with the way physical copies of games are becoming limited, driving a dangerous collector’s mindset when it comes to physical copies of games.
But what does all this even mean for the average consumer? Well, I can’t speak for y’all, but I can speak for myself – this means I’m giving up.
I was and still am a big proponent of physical media, and when given the choice I’ll always buy physical versions. Hell, my pre-order of Super Mario Bros. Wonder needs to be picked up from a store because I didn’t want to purchase it digitally. But it also means that I no longer need to own every game physically anymore, either.
It used to be that I would never even glance at a digital copy of a game if there wasn’t a chance to get a physical copy. But times have changed, and so have games. For starters, a ton of games just aren’t released physically anymore. Indie hits like Hades don’t immediately get released on physical media and even games like the upcoming Alan Wake 2 are skipping physical releases.
It turns out if you want to be a full-time gamer, or movie and TV watcher, you can never really own anything anymore unless the big companies say you can. The original shows on Netflix remain exclusively on Netflix and Disney has only started partially releasing its Disney+ shows on physical media. A digital-only future is pretty much the present.
But rather than lament its passing, it helped clarify my priorities. Which games do I want to own? And which games do I only want to own physically? This kind of thinking makes the games I do go out and purchase physical editions of that much more special, and my collection of physical media isn’t just “stuff I like” but “stuff I love.”
In 2018 I voted for Tetris Effect as my Game of the Year knowing full-well it wouldn’t compete with games like God of War and Red Dead Redemption 2. At the time I only owned a digital copy of Tetris Effect but decided to double-dip and buy a physical copy as well, which I rarely do. Why? Because there were numerous Best of E3 Awards listed on the back of the PS4 box, including one from the publication I worked at the time – USGamer. Now I own a copy of a game I love that literally has my stamp of approval on it. When Tetris Effect’s expanded edition, Tetris Effect: Connected came out, I didn’t need to go out and buy a copy of that. I already had my copy of it.
Matt T.M. Kim is IGN's Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.
