...This is such an oblivious take, and very disappointing coming from him, as I like his musical work... Even if most of the games he worked on are, funny enough from decades ago when physical media was fine.
“It’s unfair that something you bought becomes unplayable when the service ends.” As a player myself, I can understand this perspective, and I sometimes feel the same way. But, well… Do physical items outside of digital products last forever? Most of the time, they don’t, right? Physical things always have a lifespan and will eventually break. Digital products, on the other hand, generally don’t have a lifespan.
Physical objects can get worn out to a point where they can no longer work as intended, yes. Humidity can affect physical media, just like excessive heat. Kids or uncaring people can treat them poorly and break them, or damage them enough to stop working correctly.
...But how is *any* of that related to this conversation? We are not clamoring for physical media because the current pieces of plastic corporations are selling us are falling apart in a matter of months or days...
Maybe if we're talking about the controllers they're peddling to us, I guess. All three console makers are giving us controllers prone to drift (and they're entirely uninterested in fixing them as this has been going on for many years, in the case of Sony they want you to buy a more expensive controller with detachable sticks so you can KEEP buying them when they go bad) and other issues for stupid prices, while smaller companies are offering stuff with less catches for less money.
...But I digress. The people are protesting because all the modern reasons as to why physical media has been worsened are artificial, designed for and are related to, and here's the important part,
consumer rights.
Heck, one could even argue environmental reasons, old physical media can still be used, the same won't be said about PS4/5, Xbox One/Series, Switch games that come incomplete and Game Key Cards, etc. Those will be straight to landfill trash. All of those will require a connection to servers that will end at some point.
The consumer ends with nothing, and the corporation has all the control over them, which is exactly why they want and have been conditioning the mass to go digital for so long, more profits for giving less. And just like microtransactions, dlc, and the like, people just accepted it out of a mix of convenience and lazyness, now we got to a point where the push is at long last starting to annoy them enough to getting angry (we'll see if actually taking any action).
The problem is that it's not even a digital vs physical issue, it's entirely on the rights and liberties of the consumer. With different laws, Digital media could be as good as physical (think of GOG's executables you can store wherever you want and use them without having to connect anywhere, but with the law squarely on your side).
This entire conversation is always taking weird angles to obscure the real issues because that's what the industry wants, look how "panic mode" Ubisoft and co got with the Stop Killing Games.
...About the "porting" comment, that's... Quite the weird assumption. Even after decades of a lot of mediocre porting, bad remasters, iffy emulation compilations, remakes that throw away the original's essence and such for games that are still playable through their physical media, people still get excited and buy them (they may get disappointed later, but they do).
People would be far less jaded by re-releases if they actually were, generally speaking, good. But for the most part the higher ups give little time, little budget and little help for most of those to come out well. Remasters are often seen as plugs to cover holes in release windows, and as such they often end up, something to cover empty space, who cares about quality.
But anyway...
I don't think it's worth raising arms and getting angry though. His tweet has at this point in time, not even a hundred likes (or upvotes or whatever the hell twitter names them, I've never used it and I'm not starting now) so it's... Like a drop of water in the middle of the rain.
It's not a company talking, it's one dude that either doesn't understand the underlying issue or just needs to put a good face for the corporations he works with. Which is a bit amusing as he tries to defend two companies that at one point (one still does it, it seems) pushed very hard to not let the workers put their names on the credits.
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