The brave new world is eliminating ownership and history

The brave new digital age is eliminating ownership and history, writes Shaun Prescott.

Conversations around digital goods, and whether consumers “own” the digital products they purchase or not, have been raging for years. But in 2019 they’re especially pertinent, with the growing encroachment of cloud-everything occurring alongside the steady decline of physical distribution.

There are few areas where this shift is felt more than in video games. When Telltale Games shut down in 2018 a big question mark hovered over the future of their serialised, narrative driven games, in particular The Walking Dead, Minecraft Story Mode and Tales of the Borderlands (among others). The fate of each has varied. For example, The Walking Dead was wrapped up by Skybound Games, rather than Telltale, and is still available to purchase digitally. By contrast, Minecraft Story Mode has had a curious and alarming fate. Minecraft studio Mojang announced in June that the game was soon to be delisted from all digital storefronts, which isn’t that rare. What is rare, is that users who “owned” the game on any storefront were warned to download the game before the June 25 deadline, because it would no longer be available to download afterwards.

Traditionally, consumers who own the digital licenses to video games have continued to have access to that game, whether it’s available for purchase or not. See: Deadpool, Transformers: Devastation, and a slew of others. But the game consumers purchased with real money only four years ago is gone forever, unless they have it installed on one of their devices.

This is cause for extreme concern for anyone under the impression that they’ll forever have access to the digital products they purchase. But it’s also a problem for the preservation of the medium. It’s feasible that in ten years basically no one will have access to Story Mode, and for people who consider games to be an art form rather than a consumer commodity designed to be chewed and spat back out by an insatiable market, that’s a terrible thought.

But technology is veering inevitably in that direction. Google Stadia is a case in point: it’s a cloud streaming service for video games, and yet, unlike Netflix or Xbox Game Pass, users will purchase games individually for it. In other words, it will function like every other games console, only the digital assets you’re “purchasing” are not stored locally. Putting aside qualms about whether Stadia will even work in Australia given our gimped infrastructure, this means your games library will only survive for as long as Stadia does.

When asked during a recent Reddit AMA what would happen if Stadia “went under”, Google’s Andrey Doronichev wrote that the company is “super committed”.

“We have hundreds of passionate people who have spent years building it,” he wrote. “We’ve invested a ton in tech, infrastructure and content.” And there’s no doubt they have. But no one can be certain that it will last forever – that’s just a quiet existential truth and hardly Google’s fault, as fun as it would be to blame them. As it stands, if you purchase a game on Steam and download it to your device, you’ll still be able to access it (maybe with some fiddling) if and when Valve goes under. But when the cloud goes, everything does.

There’s no telling how successful Stadia will be or whether it lasts, just as there’s no telling whether any game you digitally “own” will suddenly become unavailable. And physical media, in the games space, is pretty much obsolete thanks to always-online requirements and substantial day one updates. Increasingly, the likeliness of games surviving the rise and fall of platforms seems ever more remote. If you’ve got any interest in preserving a library of games, your only real option is to vote with your wallet and hope for the best.