Collectively, we chose a digital future for games – so why doesn’t it feel like our choice at all?

My local game store is closing down. News of its closure was, ruefully, the thing that motivated me to pay one last overdue visit. I picked over its second-hand PS4 games like a vulture, while the last remaining, slightly-mishapen Bowser plushie stared at me with accusatory eyes that seemed to ask: why are you only visiting this place now that it is dying?

Despite growing up spending all my pocket money on second hand video game cartridges and discs, doing this now – after years spent buying digitally – feels forced, like a consolatory pat on physical media's coffin. A defeated admission that we had it better then.

There’s a desperation to it, isn’t there? Clinging onto hard copies as if they’re tiny mountain grips that will keep games tangible in an inevitable digital landslide. The pursuit of permanence now appears futile, like trying to fix a chain on a snowflake.

But it was us who moved toward digital gaming willingly. We chose to make full game sales "around 80%" digital on PlayStation and "over 90%" digital on Xbox according to games analyst Daniel Ahmad. We demonstrated that we no longer need game discs or the stores that sell them. And yet the impending loss of physical games and game stores feels like a step forward for tech that’s dragging us along with it in surrender.

The cost of convenience

When it comes to video games, I’d give anything to go back to the physical world. My shelves are bare. I buy my games from a machine. Two clicks of a button and voila, the game is downloading. It’s a transaction that bears no humanity or shared sense of occasion, especially when compared to buying a game in the 00’s.

Looking back on memories of visiting my local game store brings a sharp awareness of what we have sacrificed for convenience. The thrill of finding a game you wanted for ages on the shelf and soaking in every detail of the box art. The lively in-store conversations debating which game titles were superior that month. Discovering new games through staff recommendations, or making new friends with other customers when you both reach for the only second hand copy of PaRappa the Rapper in the bargain bin.

Back then, going to the video game store for a new game was a quest in itself. A journey that required enough initiative and determination to traipse into every second hand game store in town, in pursuit of the cheapest copy of Shadow of the Colossus. That effort meant something, as did holding the game in your hands for the first time. It felt like a reward that has been earned.

When I was a teen, the clerks working in video game stores were the first adults I met who took games seriously. They didn’t scoff at them or admonish them as a waste of time. They were like guiding figures, chatting to them in the store and hearing their recommendations for other games was validating. Maybe I wasn’t so weird for being way more interested in video games than TV or movies, like the other grown ups in my life at the time would have me believe.

I remember my first midnight in-store game release, queueing up in the brisk cold on 11/11/11 to get my hands on a copy of Skyrim. Talking excitedly with other gamers while we waited in line. It felt like a magical shared experience where the game store became a safe haven for an othered passion.

Downloading a game, on the other hand, offers no human interaction. No shared excitement. Just another numbingly convenient, instantly gratifying, solitary moment between me and my machine.

This is why Sony killing PlayStation discs is not just "the latest attack on our diminishing rights" – it’s an erosion of the choice to live in an offline world.

Choice paralysis

When discs die, so do the stores that sell them. As does the shared human interaction and sense of occasion of buying a physical game in real life. We’re going to miss these moments when the next game like Hollow Knight Silksong releases and immediately crashes the Steam and Nintendo eShop, or a PSN outage removes access to our libraries and all we can do is wait, helplessly dependent on digital.

I understand that technically, digital distribution of video games is an improvement in terms of accessibility, production costs, waste management, and availability. But emotionally, it feels like a downgrade.

It might seem silly to feel attached to old gaming discs and the stores that sell them, but these plastic cases are a physical representation of the digital worlds that moved me. Gazing at their box art is like staring at an old photo, it has the power to unlock a million memories. It makes an experience that has only ever existed on a screen feel a little more grounded in reality.

In the 00’s, a screen was once a source of escape from everything. But now that everything is confined to the screen, the escape route has become a claustrophobic tunnel with no end in sight. Collectively, we all chose the digital future. So why didn't it feel like a choice?

Perhaps because PlayStation removing the option to physically own a game is not something we would ever actually choose. Yes, it's the sensible course of business action when you look at the stats of digital vs. physical sales. But in a disc-less world we are unable to trade or resell, unable to borrow from a friend, unable to buy a game in a real life store and own it for life.

We have been railroaded on to the digital path, where all roads lead to reliance on publisher-owned storefronts.

I fear we are passing a point of no return in the games industry. I keep asking myself the same question, one which also rattled through my brain when I stared at the “closing down sale” poster in my local game store: What can I do?

Can the world where we walk into a game store, talk to staff and buy a new game on disc still be saved? Or is it time to let go of those we're still holding onto? Maybe we can't stop the industry from changing, but we can support real game discs and real game stores before the choice disappears entirely.

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