We’ve come a long way from the era when joysticks and single-player campaigns were seen as nothing more than fodder for basement-dwelling nerds. Nowadays, more than 3.5 billion people play some sort of video game, and the global industry is larger than music and movies combined.
But there’s a catch: It seems that the bigger gaming gets, the less you own of the games you play.
Goodbye, physical discs
The days of holding a game in your hands are probably numbered. Cue “Slipping Through My Fingers” by ABBA:
- Sony will sell new PlayStation games as digital downloads only starting in 2028, the company announced earlier this year, partly because that’s how most people buy games now anyway, and partly because premium games are increasingly too large to cram onto a single CD.
- The biggest release of the decade, the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto VI, will also be digital-only.
This practice angers gamers and consumer advocates because you can’t actually own a digital game—you’re buying a (revocable) license to play it. Sony is now facing a proposed class-action lawsuit that claims the company doesn’t make that distinction clear enough.
Meanwhile, a cloud gaming surge is coming…
…the CEO of Grand Theft Auto parent publisher, Take-Two Interactive, recently predicted. Cloud gaming lets you stream video games from practically any device.
That’s helpful as the AI boom jacks up console pricesming into a subscription service that’s beholden to price increases or, say, Microsoft’s recent decision to impose monthly streaming limits for Xbox Game Pass. “We’re introducing this model because the cost of providing cloud gaming grows as more people use it and play for longer,” Xbox said
Looking ahead…gaming companies might turn to in-game advertising to offset rising cloud costs and give players a way around usage caps. Xbox already started testing ad-supported game streaming in July.—ML
