PS4 in Book Six: Trying to Hold On 2019

Friends:
Back from conference.
Will write more later.
Looking forward to catching up, responding to notes, and getting work done.

One thing I was excited about after the E3 presentations this year was coming home and getting the new Borderlands DLC downloaded. Silly me, the updates for Mortal Kombat 11 and Borderlands 2 were so big that I wound up having to delete many things from my hard drive. Now, it should be noted that I don’t really HAVE a lot of things on my hard drive.... so this meant deleting things like Evil Within, Batman: Enemy Within, Let It Die, Friday the 13th The Game, and the Funimation App (I don’t have an account but MBFITWW does so we typically keep it for when he visits).

NOW… interesting thing about all that:

Whenever something like this happens, when I need to completely purge the PS4 hard drive to free up space for required updates and/or DLCs, I think And this is why I’m so passionately against the No Physical Copy trend. The big talk that more and more gamers are adopting is “Physical discs are unnecessary. New platforms should be streaming and digital only. No discs to buy or plastic boxes to hurt the environment.” And I think… man, I get why people hate lawyers… because we get in the way of these kinds of dreams. Invariably get overruled. And when inevitably proven right, our “told you so” just makes people even more pissed.

Because you see… digital downloads cannot be “resurrected” with the same ease as simply putting in a game disc. Sure, many will say (correctly) that as long as I’ve downloaded it once, if I erase it from my hard drive… there is still a record of ownership/purchase/download, so I can just download it again. No problem. Need I remind you, however, of the most important thing about digital non-physical ownership in the modern world?! Everything, everything that you simply “download” is a License to Use. The stuff you click through without reading? All of it will have wording along the lines of “By agreeing, you acknowledge that you do not own the product and merely retain a limited usage license voidable by The Company without notice and without monetary remuneration.” In other words… no physical disc… then that $60 game you “own” can be removed from your system, the Game Store, all of existence… and the company can just sit in their palace of cash laughing at you. This concept relates, perhaps, more directly in Digital Only Games… like from Tell Tale Studio. They’re bankrupt. They’re gone. They were a WONDERFUL game studio, but they no longer exist.

Which means… very likely… at some point (likely soon)… all of their wonderful content will be removed from Digital Game Stores. I doubt very much that the content will be removed from people’s systems who have downloaded that content… but they won’t be available for purchase or download again. WHAT, then, does it mean for someone like me? Someone who, for data needs, needed to delete some of my Tell Tale Studio products temporarily. When these products are removed from Game Stores, Game Libraries, and other Downloadable spaces… will I have lost these games forever? Games I paid money for?

This… is the old man telling people that the Microwave will irradiate your nutsack. I get it. I do. But I also have the burden of knowledge since I’ve actually READ a lot of those things for which normal people simply click “accept” and move on.