What Happens When a Game is Gone?

When the Xbox One was announced, I was among those who disliked the policy regarding the way that physical media was handled. As I recall, a game license could only be transferred once after initial installation, and then it was locked for good. I remember the installation of physical media to the Xbox One, and then being able to play that game without the disc (although there was the puzzling restriction of the disc needing to be verified once every 24 hours, which I felt nullified the benefit of playing without the disc in the first place). This was a move by Microsoft toward convenience for the player, and toward a fully-digital gaming landscape.

Flash forward a few years and I'm married, and my wife happens to also like to play videogames. She loves Skyrim, which she played on my Xbox 360, so I bought her the physical edition of Skyrim for Xbox One. She would become annoyed if she had to get up and change the disc in the system to Skyrim if I had played something else before her. Then, when it came time to buy her some new games, I asked her if she would prefer the digital editions or the discs. She knows I like having physical media, but she just hates the inconvenience of changing a disc. So I bought her Disneyland Adventures and Lego Harry Potter Collection, both digital editions.

Disneyland Adventures worked out because the disc only had a few gigabytes worth of data on it and the rest would need to be downloaded. I never looked into the disc situation with Harry Potter. But one thing I do know: I cannot buy either Lego The Hobbit or Lego The Lord of the Rings for her in digital form. Why? Well, they're not available. I watched a YouTube video recently that discussed how neither game is available for purchase due to some legal hangups of the involved parties. After very minimal verification of the claim, I see that I cannot purchase either game from the Xbox digital marketplace (which happens to be my preferred marketplace). Now, I can't say for sure whether either game was available in a fully digital form on Xbox, but I can verify whether it was available on Steam. If you visit the game page on Steam, here's what you see.

As you can see, the game is not appearing in store search results and is unavailable for purchase. So even if I wanted to purchase this game, I couldn't. I could maybe purchase a physical copy second-hand for Xbox 360 from eBay or another retailer. I could download a cracked copy of the game for PC or a bootleg for a gaming system (which would need to be hacked or modified in some way). But I cannot purchase a legal digital license to this game anymore from Steam, Microsoft, or other such vendors.

Recently, it came to my attention that the Scott Pilgrim game is also unavailable for purchase. I'm not especially familiar with the game, but I'm fairly certain that the distribution was digital-only. Now the game is essentially lost to anyone who wants to purchase it. Gone. Poof. It may as well have never existed in the first place because no one is going to be able to get it now. If you have it, great. Don't let that hard drive crash.

You may say "well, I still have the license, so I'll be able to re-download it if it gets lost." Think again! Servers go offline and services shut down. My Ultraviolet movie licenses are in peril. And that copy of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay that I bought from some digital game service in 2010? I know I can't get that back. I don't even remember the name of the now-defunct service from which I purchased it. You may think that your license on Xbox or Steam is rock-solid, but it's not. Imagine if your license was from K-mart. In 1992 no one would tell you that K-mart was going to be out of business in 17 years. No one would tell you the same about Steam right now. But at some point, a game or other digital media that you purchased will have its license in an uncertain state, much like this woman who allegedly had her Kindle wiped and Amazon account locked.

As much as I love the convenience of digital media, I contend that there is no substitute for physical media. Forget about the case, the artwork, the manual, and the ability to lend it to others. Physical media allows you to theoretically keep your media forever.

Now, it's true that DVDs and so forth have a lifespan, and that lifespan is far from infinite. I think I recall hearing that disc-based media really only has a shelf life of 25 years before the moisture and degeneration take over. But 25 years is also a lot longer than Scott Pilgrim was available for purchase, and far longer still than Lego Lord of the Rings was available for purchase. Now the only real way to play Scott Pilgrim is by piracy.

The alleged bane of the media industry is almost a requirement for the preservation of gaming. Yes, you must break the law if you want to play any de-listed game that you do not already own. You get to go out to a shady website, risk a dozen viruses and other such malware, and hope that there are enough others out there who are willing to provide the download of a cracked game for you. All because you want to enjoy art that you would otherwise pay for, and in many cases, would prefer to pay for. It is not the fault of the prospective consumer that Developer A and Publisher B and License Holder C cannot agree to terms that would allow said prospective consumer to legally purchase the game.

Back before bootlegs were a thing, if a manuscript or some such piece of art or literature were destroyed, the world would have to go without it. It would eventually be forgotten and no one would know what was truly lost. Not so with the age of the internet and the ease with which one can create a digital copy of something. Even if all the museums in the world burned down, we would still have preserved versions of art that would be available for an individual to enjoy. So thank goodness for the pirates out there who take the time to create 1:1 copies of digital-only videogames.

If the media companies cannot come to an agreement on the availability of certain games, then they will make pirates of us all.