From Ownership to Permission and the End of Physical Media

Recently, PlayStation announced the end of physical discs for games launching in 2028. The decision is, according to the article, based on consumer preference. That, I believe, deserves some reflection.

In the digital age, with fiber and 5G connections, there’s no doubt that physical media is no longer necessary, and perhaps not even preferred. On PC gaming, this has been the default for quite some time, and we already have plenty of services supporting it. Steam’s rise happened largely because of this, alongside other platforms such as Battle.net, Origin, the Epic Games Store, and others. For convenience alone, digital distribution is difficult to beat. You buy a game, click download, and a few minutes later you’re playing it without leaving your chair or finding somewhere to store another box.

We’ve watched a similar shift happen across other media, although there is an important distinction to make. Netflix, Spotify, Disney+, Amazon Prime, and similar services are subscriptions. You are explicitly paying for temporary access to a library. Steam and PlayStation Network are different: you purchase individual games, even if what you are really purchasing is a license attached to an account. One model rents access to a collection, while the other feels much closer to traditional ownership, but neither gives the consumer quite the same thing as having an independent physical copy.

Streaming subscriptions make that difference especially visible. Imagine spending roughly $200 a year between a couple of entertainment subscriptions. Over ten years, that is $2,000. You certainly received something in return: ten years of music, movies, and entertainment. The money did not simply disappear. But at the end of those ten years, you own nothing from it. There is no collection that has slowly grown on a shelf, nothing you can sell, lend, give away, or leave to someone else. Stop paying and the library disappears with the subscription. Add more services over those same years, such as HBO, Disney+, Amazon Prime, and whatever else joins them, and the amount spent becomes significantly larger while the collection you actually own remains exactly the same size: zero.

This is not necessarily a criticism of subscriptions themselves. I use them because they are incredibly practical. The distinction is simply worth remembering. When we moved from buying albums, films, and games to accessing them digitally, we didn’t just change the delivery method. We slowly changed what a purchase means.

Digital distribution and streaming have plenty of advantages. Practicality, comfort, speed of access, reduced storage needs, and the amount of content available for the price are all difficult to argue against. But there is one particular flaw: increasingly, we no longer own an independent means of accessing what we paid for. With subscription services that is obvious because access ends when the subscription does. With purchased digital games, the situation is different but still dependent on an external platform. Your collection may be tied to an account, authentication servers, download infrastructure, or decisions made years later by a company that controls the service.

Removing physical media from the consumer is therefore something I consider fundamentally wrong, particularly when it becomes the only option. Owning a physical copy gives you something that digital services struggle to reproduce: independence. You can use it without relying entirely on the continued existence of a storefront, account, or download server. You can lend it, sell it, give it away, and eventually even leave the collection to someone else. It is an object that exists independently of the company that originally sold it to you.

There is also value in that object. Before digital distribution became dominant, it was relatively common to find people with significant collections of their favorite media. Large collections of DVDs, VHS tapes, CDs, vinyl records, games, and other formats were hardly unusual. Most of those items were never going to make anyone rich, obviously, and plenty depreciated heavily, but they still retained some value because they could be transferred. Some became collectible and appreciated over time. A collection was therefore more than a history of money spent. It was something tangible that could be displayed, traded, sold, passed down, or simply kept.

Owning physical media also made sharing much easier. Whether it was music, movies, or video games, lending something to friends or family was one of the easiest ways to introduce people to new titles and genres. It’s very likely that I wouldn’t have become such a big Blizzard fan, at least back in the day, if I hadn’t first been introduced to some of its games through other people. That kind of exchange was simply part of consuming media.

For consoles in particular, I believe that experience was fundamental. Granted, I haven’t properly touched a console since the Sega Dreamcast, but that part of the experience hasn’t completely disappeared. With a physical game, you can still hand the disc to a friend and let them play it on their own console, while digital purchases tend to offer more limited forms of sharing tied to accounts, consoles, or platform rules. Back then, being able to lend or trade games with your friends was simply part of the experience, and that freedom still matters because it is one of the clearest examples of what physical ownership gives you: transferability. The physical collection itself also mattered. All my old Sega games are still in pristine condition. Mega Drive, or Sega Genesis, and even Game Gear cartridges still work. Sega Saturn and Dreamcast discs still run. Decades later, I still own them, I can still use them, and I could still lend, sell, gift, or eventually pass them on if I wanted to.

There is an important caveat here, though. A physical disc is only meaningful as preservation if the game actually works from it. If inserting the disc merely starts a download, requires mandatory online activation, or depends on servers to make the game usable, then much of the advantage disappears. A plastic disc that contains little more than permission to download something is not what I mean by owning physical media. The important part is not the box or the shiny disc itself. It is having a functional copy that remains under your control.

I’ve actually experienced the usefulness of that distinction myself with Warcraft III. When Blizzard released Warcraft III: Reforged, I strongly preferred the original game. For a long period, however, Battle.net pushed players toward the newer client rather than simply giving me straightforward access to the old version I wanted to play. I even tried using old digital installers, only to end up back in Blizzard’s newer ecosystem. What eventually saved me from the whole problem was painfully simple: I still had the original discs. I could install the game I had bought years earlier and play the version I actually wanted instead of the version the platform owner had decided should replace it.

There is something slightly absurd about that situation. The newest distribution system, designed around convenience, made accessing an old game more difficult, while discs that had been sitting around for years still did exactly what they were supposed to do. Blizzard has since made a legacy version available again through Battle.net, but the episode remains a good example of why independent copies matter. A company can change its mind. A launcher can change. A storefront can disappear. A product can be replaced by another product. The physical copy does not particularly care.

I understand PlayStation’s decision from a business perspective, and I don’t blame them for it. I’m actually an example of why that model works. Personally, I haven’t really known what a game CD or DVD is since I bought StarCraft II in 2010. Almost everything I purchased after that was through digital downloads. It wasn’t exactly because I didn’t want the physical versions. In fact, part of me did. But with StarCraft II and the World of Warcraft expansions, my priority was getting onto the servers as quickly as possible, and that outweighed the appeal of having a collectible box. I knew plenty of friends who made the opposite choice and waited for their boxed copies while the rest of us were already playing. Personal decisions and choices, I guess.

With other media, I was also used to having collections. Music CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays. Nowadays, not so much, partly because many new titles simply don’t come out physically anymore. In a way, there often isn’t even a choice to make. I still help Catarina collect vinyl records, which is currently the only physical media collection still growing in the house. There is something satisfying about watching that collection slowly expand over the years in a way that a Spotify library never really can. One is a convenient list of things we can access. The other is actually ours.

I don’t game nearly as much as I used to, but I do regret not buying the StarCraft II expansions in their physical boxes, if only so I could have them on the shelf alongside the rest of the games. Especially Heart of the Swarm, which was the one I enjoyed the most. If StarCraft III ever comes out, I’d probably make a point of getting a collector’s edition. That doesn’t mean I suddenly want to buy every future game in physical form. I don’t. Digital distribution won me over a long time ago, and for most games I would probably continue choosing it even if both options were available.

But that is precisely the point. I want it to be a choice.

There is a fundamental difference between acquiring an object and acquiring permission. For most of the history of consumer media, buying something meant taking possession of a copy. The publisher could disappear, the shop could close, the company could stop supporting the product, and the copy sitting in your house would still be yours. Digital distribution changed that relationship. Increasingly, what we call buying means being granted access under conditions controlled by somebody else. The experience may look identical today, perhaps even better, but the underlying relationship between consumer and product is not the same.

Convenience made that trade remarkably easy to accept because, most of the time, nothing goes wrong. Steam works. PlayStation Network works. Spotify works. Netflix works. Our libraries are there every time we open the app, and therefore the distinction between possession and permission seems mostly philosophical. It only becomes obvious when something disappears, a service shuts down, a license changes, an old version gets replaced, an account is lost, or a company decides that the thing you bought should now work differently.

That is why I don’t see the end of physical games as merely the disappearance of discs. The disc itself is not particularly important. What matters is the disappearance of an independent option. Consumers are trading ownership for convenience, and eventually we may reach a point where the trade is no longer optional.

I like digital distribution. I will continue using it. For most things, I will probably continue preferring it.

I just don’t think convenience and ownership should have to be mutually exclusive.