<div class="header-image"></div> <table class="table-header"> <thead> <tr> <th colspan="2"></th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>2026-07-08</td> <td style="text-align: right;"><a href="About.md" class="internal-link">About</a></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> # The Physical Media vs. Digital Debate Misses the Point  In the last week, Sony announced that it will abandon physical discs in favour of a purely digital distribution system for its Playstation games. This will happen in January of 2028. Naturally, this has caused an uproar among Playstation and gaming enthusiasts, who insist that by getting rid of physical discs, gaming companies are going down the road of licencing product, rather then selling it. The news does hit a nerve, especially since it was only a couple of weeks back that Sony also announced [551 movie titles will no longer be available for streaming](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/sony-erases-digital-content-from-libraries-were-reminded-we-dont-own-what-we-buy/) even if they were made as a digital purchase. The fear, understandably, is that Sony can simply decide, at any time and for any reason, to revoke any digital purchase. Payment in no way guarantees ownership. But while this is all true, and it's really about time the public woke up to this fact as it seems they finally are, having a physical disc in no way guarantees ownership either. Not in these modern times, anyway. 20+ years ago, before digital storefronts existed, having a console and buying a game *did guarantee ownership*. Having a DVD player and buying a movie *did guarantee ownership*. Now, though, even getting a game on disc can very well prompt an online check to make sure the disc is legit, prompt a login to an account, force an update to download, etc. If the online server goes down and is unable to perform these checks, you could very well be unable to launch the game, even if you bought a physical copy. This is the point that everyone seems to be missing. On the other hand, if I buy a digital download from GoG (Good old Games), I can download a DRM-free, self-contained executable that I can save to my NAS, and install without an Internet connection. I can store it for 50 years, come back to compatible or emulated hardware, and still install and play it because it doesn't insist on connecting to the GoG storefront. If I REALLY want to I can burn it off to a DVD±R disc and store it that way. Movies and music can be bought digitally this way too, though not many people actually do this. Which is a shame, because it goes to show that people don't really understand the argument, even while they rant and rave about the loss of physical media. Physical media really doesn't have anything to do with this. It's not about the distribution system. It's about ownership. The "You will own nothing and be happy" meme is very real in this sense. Actually it's even worse. There's an amount of doublethink that's happening here. These companies are *selling the illusion of ownership*. When I flip through available movies on these platforms, such as Prime Video to use a different example, I am often given the choice to rent a movie or to buy it. "Buy" in this sense is trying to sell me the movie, so that I will own it. But the thing is, even after choosing the "buy" option *I don't own the movie*. All this means is that I can watch it on the Prime Video platform whenever I like and they won't charge me for it. I can't download and store it locally, or take it to a friend's house to watch. If my Internet goes flaky I won't be able to watch it either. If I lose my job and have to cut back on costs and decide to go with a cheaper, low bandwidth internet connection, or cancel my Amazon Prime account, I won't be able to watch those movies that I "purchased," and this would be the perfect time to return to a movie library that I spent years collecting. And to take that scenario to video games, if I pop in a disc to play and there's 200 GBs of updates to install before I can play a game, then maybe by next Tuesday I'll finally be able to play it. Buying digitally, in this modern age, *should* be a legitimate choice. I should be able to buy a movie, and download it locally to store it however I like, be that on a NAS, on a USB thumbdrive, burned to a disc, uploaded to a Dropbox account, or whatever other storage medium I like. It should be mine to make that choice. And there are places to do this. Music has come a long way since the [rootkit Sony (again, it's always Sony) put on CDs to keep people from copying it](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal). There's lots of places now that allow you to choose the format (FLAC or MP3, sometimes WAV even) and download a DRM-free copy after purchase. There are even some places that allow this for movies, though the selection is usually sparse. As consumers, we should be demanding these options. Choose with your wallet. Now, with this all being said, there are, of course, use-cases for subscription services. And this is fine. Having access to Netflix's massive library of movies or Spotify's library of music for a reasonable cost per month can be useful. But in these scenarios, nobody is selling me shit and calling it ice cream. When I subscribe to Netflix, I'm aware that I will only have access to this library for as long as I pay the subscription and have a decent internet connection. I am aware that the library can change at any time. I know that I don't own any of the music available for listening. Netflix has its own issues with dishonest advertising (such as crippling resolutions to 720p even when paying for UHD or 4k), but the question of ownership is not one of them. Even with streaming video game services like GeForce Now has its place. As a Linux user, getting Battlenet reliably installed on a gaming machine is always a pain in the ass. And it breaks with every update. I'd basically given up keeping it running, until I linked the GeForce Now service to my Battlenet account. Now I can play any of those games easily on Linux, and it can even be on my low-power writing laptop. Though the irony here is that I'm using a service to get by the fact that I don't actually own the games I bought from Blizzard. Once I install my games and get them working, I shouldn't have to rely on the Blizzard storefront, or worry that losing access to that storefront will prohibit me from playing the games I bought from there. It's strange to me that, in this modern-age, something like PC gaming is in many ways just as complicated as it was back in the days of getting Doom to run on an 8-bit machine by messing with hi-mem and .bat files. And the reason it's so complicated is not to overcome some hardware limitation; it's to overcome an artificial limitation put in place by the game manufacturers themselves. Is it any wonder that piracy is still an issue today? Software and movie pirates don't have to deal with all these issues, and in many ways piracy easier than getting around all the artificial limitations of legitimate consumerism.