In Medias Res

A little while ago, I forget exactly when, I was backing up my laptop's hard drive and had to format an external SSD in order to do it. When I finished, I thought, "Huh, this is a pretty cool drive, I should get another one," and went back into my email to see what it was called and how much I had paid. This was not an exceptionally fancy or large drive, but at 2TB, it offered enough room for me to be able to move a lot of large files around with ease, which is what I was after. If you have been shopping for any home computing components within the last 8-12 months, you've probably already guessed the next part, which is that I found the exact same drive I'd bought years ago had more than doubled in price. I just checked the same item, and in the intervening months, it has essentially doubled in price again, ranging from $350-$700 for a piece of hardware I paid around $100 for in 2022.

You will discover all of this for yourself if you try to buy any piece of tech anytime in the foreseeable future: due to a lot of convergent factors, most notably the mass buyout of memory and processing components by AI companies, the cost of consumer electronics, which has been relatively low, is now soaring, and there's no indication that it will slow down or reverse. In 2020, if you could find a Sony Playstation 5 to buy online from a retail store, you would pay $500. If you wanted to buy that same console 6 years later, when there's no shortage of stock, you will pay $750. The typical lifespan of a console generation is 7-8 years, and usually the price drops by 30% or more by year 5.

Playstation is not alone in raising prices, but in the midst of this crisis, and the overall crisis in the gaming industry, which is shedding jobs at an unprecedented rate, Sony has also announced that they will no longer be releasing physical editions of games for their consoles as of January 2028. Now I suspect that the majority of people reading this have not purchased any video game, let alone a physical copy of one in the past 5 years, but it's indicative of a wider trend in tech that is more troubling when you combine it with the rising cost of digital storage. Just before Sony's announcement of doing away with physical games, they revealed that over 500 films would be removed from customers' digital libraries due to licensing changes, with no compensation for those affected.

This is the future that most tech and media conglomerates want: one where you pay a continual fee for access to what they choose to give you, with no alternative. They would love to look at the past 50 years of the physical media ownership model, in which you pay for a product once and own it forever as an aberration. The more abstract your relationship to the art and entertainment they produce is, the happier they are. In most cases where they can get away with it, they won't even give you information that makes it easy to compare a piece of work's performance to historical models, preferring meaningless but impressive sounding metrics like "hours watched" and "impressions". All of this obfuscation and uncertainty combine to make sure that they have no obligations to you, just a funnel attached to your wallet and some promises of convenience and simplicity.

Downstream, this makes lots of things that have driven the creative engines of society archaic or outright impossible. The same companies that own the platforms have no incentive to make anything available that doesn't maximize their profits. This not only hurts those of us who want to own physical media, it makes it next to impossible to create reliable archives for media like games, which can disappear completely without notice if licenses change or a platform disappears. This problem is magnified when the only legitimate copy of the media is controlled by a single company and/or platform. If Sony's servers are the only place you can play a game, and they decide they don't want to let you, there's no alternative. This is not a hypothetical; there are a huge number of games that cannot be played without resorting to piracy or obtaining a hard-to-find used copy for hundreds of dollars or more. Many of those games are Playstation 2 or 3 exclusives, which will not play on newer hardware, so you also must have access to a functional 15-20 year-old console, and the technical know-how to get it to work with a modern entertainment center set-up. As expensive and inconvenient as all that is, if those physical copies weren't obtainable, there's almost no chance that any of these games would be playable, to say nothing of the many games from intervening years that only existed as digital downloads from now defunct storefronts.

I've been online long enough to remember the fights over whether media piracy was going to destroy the music/movie/games industry, and how the threat of rampant piracy helped create the current media ecosystem by incentivizing companies to make their content more widely available and with maximum convenience. I've always believed that piracy does act as an emergency backstop against losing a lot of media, but it shouldn't be the only line of defense, which is what it will be if the only way to access that media is at the pleasure of Sony, or Disney, or Nintendo, all corporations that have historically refused to cooperate with many preservation efforts, resulting in the near impossibility of analyzing important cultural and historical works. Giving up the ability to collect and archive those works shouldn't be the price we pay for convenience.