Sony Stopping Disc Production Will Be A Massive Blow To Games Preservation

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Andrew King

Published Jul 3, 2024

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A new report suggests Sony is looking to wind down production of Bl꧒u-Ray diওscs, with the goal of eventually ceasing to produce physical media altogether. That would be bad news for cinephiles, although most people who are invested in buying physical copies of movies in 2024 have already gotten used to going through smaller distributors like Criterion, Arrow, or Kino. Physical movies will survive as a niche product. But Blu-Ray discs have also been the physical basis for Sony games since the PS3. The manufacturer ceasing production of Blu-Ray discs would mean an end to physical games on the PS5 and any Sony console going forward.

Physical Media Makes Preservation Workable

If you're interested in game preservation, that's a nightmare scenario. While film has those boutique Blu-Ray manufacturers who frequently make deals with the studios to release fancy editions of their films, the same infrastructure doesn't exist in games. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Digital Eclipse and Limited Run are the closest we've got, but Digital Eclipse's titles are largely limited games that are decades old. Limited Run, meanwhile, mostly releases physical versions of indies that otherwise wouldn't get a physical release. Neither typically tackles new triple-A game, whereas Criterion has released Blu-Rays of The Irishman, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Before Midnight — all modern releases from big studios.

Limited Run has dipped a toe into bigger releases recently, with a collector's edition for Alan Wake 2 (originally only available as a digital download) arriving later this year.

In some ways, this shows that Limited Run and Digital Eclipse have their priorities straight. Digital-only indie games are at far greater risk of being lost to platform obsolescence than triple-A juggernauts, and old games are more likely to become unplayablℱe than new games made for new machines. But the end of physical releases would go a long way toward leveling the playing field, making any game vulnerable to the Thanos snap of🔯 an indifferent executive.

Even Now, Big Games Like PT Disappear

It may sound unlikely — can you imagine 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us ever being unplayable? — but we've already seen it happen to big, popular games. PT was a massive cultural moment. I remember everyone in my dorm gathering around a TV to play the short horror game, and that was how I experienced it, too. Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro directed it, which you would think would make it too big to disappear into the digital ether. But when Kojima and Konami had their falling out and Silent Hills was canceled, the "playable teaser" got delisted. A decade later, the only way to experience it is secondhand through Let's Plays, or by tracking down the rare PS4 that still has it downloaded.

If you play a lot of multiplayer games, you experience this kind of thing more frequently. I enjoyed 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel's Avengers when it launched back in 2020. But like most people who played it, I didn't enjoy it enough or see enough meat on the bone to make it a regular part of my routine going forward. So the game failed, support ended in early 2023, and it's been delisted from digital storefronts. The servers are still online, so if you own it digitally or pick up a used physical copy you can still play it. Meanwhile, Lawbreakers and Radical Heights, the two most recent games from Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski — once as big a name in games as Neil Druckmann or Hideo Kojima — are both unplayable now.

An all-digital world is a world where every game is a potential PT. When Alan Wake was delisted thanks to music rights issues in 2017, curious players could still find physical copies. The same went for Obsidian's Alpha Protocol when it was delisted in 2019. But I have iPhone games that I paid real money for that I'll probably never play again because they haven't been updated for new devices. There are hundreds of digital titles from the 3DS and Wii U stores that are probably gone for good now that those system's stores have closed down.

An all-digital future is a future in which games cannot be preserved by traditional means. Instead of saving copies of rare games, preservationists will need to save whole consoles, with those games downloaded to their ha🃏rddrives. That will increase physical demands. A single PS5 game is much easier to store than a massive PS5. T💧he goal is for the console manufacturers to own everything, to spend less, and to rake in more profits. They win, anyone interested in the history of the medium they love loses.