It happened twice in two weeks: First Sony’s PlayStation Network, then Microsoft’s Xbox experienced a major disruption. Monday’s Xbox outage was especially frustrating for users, as most Xbox games these days require online authentication before they can start.
Not only were Xbox users locked out of online features, they couldn’t even launch the games they had installed on their devices. PSN players are also at risk: Sony recently confirmed that it will stop producing PlayStation game discs after January 2028.
The outage, in short, was a lesson in the tradeoffs that come with the digital marketing model — and the benefits of keeping physical media alive.
Why do game discs move?
For most of the history of video game consoles, buying a game meant getting a physical object. You bought a disc or cartridge, inserted it, the console read it, and the game ran. You can resell the disc, lend it, or put it on the shelf forever without worrying about digital rights management.
But the discs can also produce noticeable lag or stuttering during game play, since the optical drive’s read speed hasn’t increased as fast as the processing power. So publishers started preloading input data onto local hard drives, rather than taking it from disk in real time. As game file sizes have grown, publishers have come to rely on pre-installation as a stable engineering option.
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But that’s not what caused Sony’s announcement to backfire. Many gamers are worried about what happens to the whole concept of gaming ownership once physical media is off the table.
The digital “sharing” economy should have been defined by the phrase “you will own nothing and be happy.” Although it was coined by a socialist politician as a good promise in 2016, the quote has since become a meme with a very negative connotation.
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Streaming services have long shown the problem. Netflix, Spotify, and their peers technically sell access to media, which can be revoked whenever the licensing agreement expires or the platform decides it can no longer keep the title. This is not a new problem, and one of the most surprising examples is one of the oldest: the time in 2009 when Amazon removed George Orwell’s dystopia of erased history, Nineteen eighty-four, from users’ Kindles, due to a rights issue.
Similarly in the games industry, publishers can and do remove purchased digital titles from a user’s library due to licensing disputes or expired royalty agreements. Game servers are shut down when a title stops generating enough revenue to justify operating costs, making online games unplayable.
In addition to ending production of the disc in 2028, Sony also revealed that it will close its PS3 and PS Vita stores in other countries at the beginning of this August. The company promised users “will still be able to download previously purchased content after the closing date,” but only for a vague time: “the foreseeable future.”
What happens if the game discs don’t work?
If you’re looking for an old discontinued title, there are usually used copies available, and fixes are available online for some games that require a server connection. The Live-service architecture, which Sony has tried (and sometimes failed) to standardize, removes even that backlog.
Without a working server, there is no local copy to be reinstalled, no disc to be reinstalled, nothing to do but wait – exactly the position that Xbox and PlayStation users have found themselves in recently.
Take it Employeesis a decade-old racing game that publisher Ubisoft is set to sunset in 2024. Because the game required a constant internet connection even in its single-player mode, players lost the ability to launch it when Ubisoft removed it from the store front, revoked existing licenses, and shut down its servers. Ubisoft only offered refunds to those players who had purchased it Employees 14 days ago, its normal refund process.
The response from gamers was the creation of Stop Killing Games, a campaign founded by YouTuber Ross Scott. The campaign demanded that publishers not render anything that a customer has already paid for permanently unusable. It has since collected more than a million verified signatures through the European Citizens’ Initiative, and helped spark a French consumer case against Ubisoft.
At the moment, Sony is still making discs, and won’t take back games you’ve already bought. But after 2028, according to Sony’s plan, that will change; you will only be able to buy PlayStation games online. And that could put PSN users at risk of the next server crash, a legal dispute over licensing, or an online game that doesn’t refund its money.