Yesterday, I happened to watch the Giant Bomb folks playing through the new Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4, and thought it looked like fun, so I thought I might actually buy it.
So I looked on Amazon to track down physical copies, and every single version available was marked with a bit "INTERNET REQUIRED. CONTENT DOWNLOAD NEEDED". The Nintendo Switch 2 version didn't even have a game cartridge — yes, they eschewed even the odious Game-Key Card system in favour of the even more pointless Code in a Box format.
This is frustrating, because we're seeing this happening more and more, and it concerns me greatly. While I've bought a fair amount of digital stuff on PC largely because it's the only option to buy pretty much anything now, I'm still very wary of consoles going digital-only or at least digital-centric, because it, of course, raises the question of how long those games are actually going to last.
I'm not talking about online servers remaining up so people can play multiplayer or check their rankings on leaderboards. I'm talking about the game just being straight-up playable. Like, if I were to buy Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 on PS5 or Switch 2 digitally, sure, I could keep it on my storage device theoretically indefinitely, but at some point with the size of today's games, I'd likely need to uninstall it to make room for something else. If, then, I decide maybe 10 or 20 years down the line that I'd actually quite like to play it again… will I still be able to download it and reinstall it?
You may think that sounds silly, but considering that there are 40+ year old games that I still play on a regular basis, I don't think that's especially ridiculous.
Thus far, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have kept digital downloads available for "dead" platforms, even when they've closed the actual storefronts. You can still download things you bought on PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Wii, Wii U, 3DS and Xbox 360 — you just can't buy things any more. (Though there is a kind of sort of loophole with PS3 and Vita — if you add credit via the Web, you can actually still buy things; you just can't pay on your console any more.)
This is vaguely encouraging, but how long will it really last? At some point, presumably, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are going to want to turn off the servers that maybe double- or triple-digit numbers of people are using each year, and that'll be that; those games will just be gone. At that point, one would hope, the pirates will have likely "preserved" them in an unofficial capacity, but when it comes to that, you start getting into a territory where games aren't exactly "plug and play" any more. I can still pop in anything from the Atari 2600 to PlayStation 2 era and, assuming the media itself is still in working order, play the game contained therein. For the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era onwards, things start to get a little more dicey; from the PS4/Xbox One era they get a lot dicey.
I guess there comes a point where one has to consider whether they are buying games to enjoy now — in which case whether or not they're still playable in 10, 20 or more years doesn't really matter all that much — or if they're building a library that can continue to be enjoyed for many years to come. I have, up until now, very much fallen into the latter category, and old habits die hard. But from the moment I preordered the Switch 2 I found myself wondering if I'm going to be forced into changing the way I think about things.
I don't know if I'm going to buy Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 as yet. If I do, it'll be a digital version, because there's absolutely no point purchasing a physical version which doesn't actually contain the game. I guess the only question I need to reconcile in my head is if I care enough about this to take a principled stand and "vote with my wallet", as it were, or just to suck it up and enjoy the game while I can.
Oh well, Donkey Kong Bananza is out in a week, and that is on a proper physical cart, so that's something, at least.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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