Support Physical Games

[Shadow1980]

rjason12 said:

I’m right there with you, but unfortunately we’re in the minority. People really don’t care about their ownership rights and the majority likely still won’t care even if their favorite movies/music/games get delisted, become unavailable or even censored. Crazy how so many people are against “big business” but will so easily give up and enable them to do whatever they want. All in the name of “convenience” but is digital media really all that convenient?

If there's one thing I've noticed over the course of my life, it really does seem that for a lot of people, the worst thing you can do to them is inconvenience them. Convenience is valued above literally everything else. And I mean that when I say "literally." I worked retail for 17 years, and I've seen people get apoplectic because they felt inconvenienced over having to wait for anything. When I worked at Party City, I had customers blithely ignore all the bright green signs we put up whenever we were out of helium, grab balloons, sit in line, and then foam at the mouth when told we couldn't fill up their balloons ("hOw CoUlD yOu Be OuT oF hElIuM? yOuR'e A pArTy StOrE!"). I've seen countless people driving down the road who are clearly willing to put their lives and the lives of everyone else at risk just to try to shave a couple of minutes off of their trip, speeding like maniacs, weaving through freeway traffic, running red lights & stop signs and passing stopped school buses. I've seen people road rage because someone wasn't going fast enough, or because they cut someone off and the other person had the sheer unmitigated gall to *gasp* honk at them. 

And then there's the laziness that a culture of convenience produces. Good lord, are there a lot of lazy bastards out there. When people know there's other people who will clean up after them, they'll intentionally leave messes and generally refuse to clean up after themselves. They don't put things back where they found them. They just toss stuff wherever. I had a customer who came in last minute looking for a gift bag, I walked him to the spot since we were about to close, he grabbed one off the peg hook, decided he didn't want it, and dropped it on the ground with me standing literally three feet away from him. And "buy online, pick up in store" and later curbside pickup being added to that was one of the biggest time sinks that kept us from doing the rest of our job. Just the entire idea of a brick-and-mortar store doing people's shopping for them and walking their purchase out to them galled me because of how it catered to the most base laziness in people.

A culture that not only produces people like that but encourages those habits will also produce people who will absolutely act like being bothered to go to a store to buy a game or having to get up and swap discs/cartridges are just the absolute worst. Of course there would be countless people who would give up ownership of the things they buy, thereby ceding all power to the big corporations they continually complain about, just to save a few seconds here and there. We continually see what happens with digital media. Titles being delisted from digital stores and from streaming services. Titles even being remotely deleted from people's devices with no refunds offered. Yet even after all the valid complaints about those things, people still keep investing in digital-only, like someone who keeps putting their hand on a red-hot stove and wondering why it hurts every time.

People need friction in their life. I know it sounds like something an old person would say, but a little bit of work here and there helps build character. While I understand and even agree with the sentiment that people ought not have to devote countless hours of their lives to working just to keep a roof over their head and food on the table, I do think there is plenty of necessary work that needs to be done, and a lot of it should be done by humans. We shouldn't get to the point where we're like the society from WALL-E, just sitting our lazy asses in a recliner 24-7 with a screen in our face and our every need catered to by the mere push of a button.

Anyway, I've written at length before in many posts how I'm a big supporter of physical and have long had an adversarial relationship with digital distribution. Anything I care to actually buy at full price, I will buy it physically if that's an option. If it's not an option, then the publisher isn't getting my money. Any future console that doesn't have physical as an option is a console I won't buy. If the industry moves to 100% digital, then that's it. I'm done. I'll have decades worth of older video games to keep me satisfied for the rest of my life.