We live in a world of flesh prisons, shackled to weak boned and prone-to-breakage mechanisms dragging slowly rotting slabs on oh too delicate frames. We are the very soul, the absolute conceptualisation of impermanence. But do you know the one thing in the world even more transient than the lives of the beings who dwell within it? The digital world we've reared and shaped and play-acted as some un-breakable cloud of perpetuity. Do you really have faith in the ever shifting sands of finance? Think that money drifting about it going to last longer than you? Than your memories? Foolishness, Dante! The second a cloud service rubs in the way of profits your ever precious data is first on the chopping block and you'll be privileged if your data holders alert you before they get deleting. Which is why you should never fall for the lie of the 'digital future'.
Never really suspect that any company decision is ever made with the benefit of the customer in mind. The absolute best anyone can hope for with a relationship like that is vested interests, and what exactly are the interests of Microsoft? Of any game publisher? They want users. Perpetual. Unfailing. And then want those users to be subscribers. Recurrent payment models are so much more attractive then winning over the needy by trying all the time- Bleagh! Who has the time to go around making content that earns it dues? So much work! It's so much easier if you can force people to pay for access to content already provided! Thankfully we have idiots like Stadia tipping their hand early in that regard and alerting the public of the endgoal of games hosting. But don't think that means they've shifted goals.
Microsoft have recently unveiled the ways in which they are edging towards this eventuality with the excess and frankly shocking amount of layoffs they thrown down within the first few weeks of 2024. It's a wonder that anyone is still left at the company after the several hundred jobs that have been cut, all around Xbox and the brand new studios they spent years trying to purchase. Which is a little galling when you remember that Microsoft recently crossed another milestone towards becoming the most profitable company in the world briefly. Although to be fair I guess no corporation is a charity, and if there's any long standing division of Microsoft that hasn't exactly been proving it's value to the collective recently- it's Xbox. (Not to say that justifies the insane number of layoffs, but at least I can understand it.)
One such heavily effected aspect of Microsoft have been those that handle physical distribution of games. Jez Cordan reports that Microsoft has laid off entire departments dedicated to maintaining relationships with retailers and manufacturers, basically cutting off contact with perhaps every aspect of physical media as they stalk towards an all digital future. The Series X is heavily rumoured to be receiving a digital-only counterpart in the near future- (which will ruin the console's viability as a 4K Blue-ray player: but go off, I guess.) and this is just more evidence that this isn't a case of catering towards a niche, but rather forcing the hand of availability to be more in line with their own plans. Microsoft appear to have run short on their plan to frame themselves as 'the peoples' champion'- now they're just making power moves regardless of who's in the way.
Now the immediate effect of this is somewhat unknown. Xbox with Microsoft over them is one huge company with a lot of weight under it's belt, which likely means the example they set is going to have a ripple across the industry. As people become more aware of the costs that go into physical manufacturing, as well as the third party cuts they could potentially be getting a deal off on, they'll move to digital. But what do you think is going to happen once the physical market is erased completely? Then hosting costs are going to start going up, developers are going to end up with a worse deal then ever, discoverability will become a total nightmare and they'll have nowhere to go because the big boys like Microsoft and Sony own the entire market.
Speaking of discoverability- where does that factor into these discussions? As the video game landscape becomes more and more crowded, the struggle for talented developers to stick head and shoulders above the crowd becomes more vicious. Store shelves were already a fight and a half, both those who made it there were going to get some amount of interest. With the digital market, no barrier to entry, these indie darlings will be in the hands of store runners to show off the gems- and if we're talking about Microsoft's own storefront- well, they ain't nothing to write home about! The Xbox store is a mess of user unfriendliness, with practically everything being a chore to explore and targeted searches being even harder to pull off than on the Nintendo E-Shop! (Insult very much intended!) Whereas the Windows store shamelessly throws it's best quality games in with it's piss-poor quality apps- no care given! Developers would be on their own to advertise with Microsoft running the scene.
And of course there is the second hand market, which is a huge avenue into the gaming hobby for newcomers. Do you think casual gamers rock up to becoming lifelong fans by buying a new $70 game to see if they like it? No! They pick up old second hand legends and fall in love with the great stories of yesteryear, slowly find themselves drawn into grander and grander experiences until they slip into the money-grind of modern recent release gaming. The more you erase the low-cost entry into gaming, the more you make the ever increasing retail prices of games a distant prospect for the next generation of gamers- this is bullet-meets foot levels of stupid right now and I don't think anyone is really acknowledging what it happening right now! Short term decisions with horrific ramifications shouldn't be the norm of an industry this big!
But what is there really to do in recourse? It has become increasingly clear, from the machinations of Twitter to the woes of Facebook that the people in charge of these large media machines stopped instinctually developing the year they rose to prominence and thus fall further out of touch with each passing year. The obvious pitfalls we pitiful commoners see coming a mile away are totally outside the viewport of these razor-focused imbeciles, and the consequences are wiped away from the mouths of the infirm by their sycophantic underlings too cowardly to point out the mountain the industry is heading towards. So Microsoft will kill the physical medium, then they'll realise their folly in a decades time, 10 years too late to reverse course. Well down, Xbox- you've played yourself again.
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