Why I don't invest in online games catalogues

During the Wii and Wii U era, Nintendo would drip-feed us with a plethora of classic games via the virtual console. Those games came few and far between, and the emulation quality may have been mediocre at best, but they gave us a way to buy games that only used to work well on low latency CRTs. It let us pay to get access to some games that were out of print, and it also came with ownership. We bought it. It was ours to keep.

My girlfriend subscribed us to Netflix, and while there are many great shows on it, its problems became immediately apparent: shows would get delisted. We basically raced through watching all of Friends because we heard rumblings of its eventual delisting.

On PS3, I bought Scott Pilgrim VS The World, but other friends were not that lucky and when they were financially stable enough to buy it, the game had disappeared from the store.

The difference here is that while both situations were awful, I at least got to keep my copy of Scott Pilgrim VS The World.

With an online service, you are at the mercy of whoever is controlling the store as well as the various contracts they themselves are at the mercy of. So far, if you buy a digital game, companies are not allowed to come and take them back. With online services though? Games that you paid for as part of the service fee can be delisted at any time and without any warning. This means that I simply cannot get invested, as my investment may be rendered null at any point in time.

Online services grant you a license to play a game on their service under very specific conditions. You must abide to random DRM spotchecks to ensure that you are continuously funneling money to the provider. If you cease monetary transactions, your games get taken away, and your save files get deleted. If the company decides that it doesn't want you to play their game, it reserves the rights to just take it away at a whim. It also ensures that you cannot mod said product and that they have an easy means to monitor how you use said product, punishing you for enacting your right to modify your own property. It forces you to update your firmware, threatening removal of your games if you refuse to comply. When the service inevitably ends, changes into something else, all of your hard-earned progress vanishes. Your Donkey Kong Country save file gets deleted and you have to start over when the game finally makes it on the next console, if it does at all. This is all about one thing: Control.

I care about my right to own what I pay for. I do not ascribe to the beleif that service providers should be allowed to sell you a license to play their game with a plethora of caveats intended to control every little facets of your experience. Online services may seem convenient; and they can be, but actively removing one's ability to outright buy something is absolutely anti-consumer. By enabling these online services, we are throwing away our freedom to play games on our own terms. We are throwing away our ability to own games, to modify them, to play them at a later date without worrying about our saves being arbitrarily deleted. We are throwing away our ability to travel without the Internet for over a week and play Super Mario All Stars on the plane ride back home.

Online gaming catalogues are anti-consumer. They are an inferior alternative to emulation, and as Gabe Newell would say, it is indicative of a major service problem.

How can things be made better? Honestly, Steam has done a great job in that regard. They let us download our games, let us mod them, and even give competitive prices with good sales. But the most important part is that your games don't normally get taken away. They stay with your for a very long time. With Nintendo, I got used to losing my games with every console iteration. Then they asked me to buy them again and again, until I decided to no longer invest in their back catalogue, not because I did not like said games, but because there just wasn't any cross gen carryover of my games and save files.

Again, I want to own my games and play them on my own terms.