Sony won the most important generation by humiliating Xbox with physical games. 13 years later he killed them

Sony has just taken a stab at video games in physical format. Those discs that allowed PlayStation to build its empire with CDs, DVDs and Blu-Ray on consoles like PS1, PS2 and PS3now they have a death date. Starting January 2028, there will be no more physical games for PlayStation consoles.

The reactions have not been long in coming, with all industry players pointing out the impact of this decision. We will not own games because they are licenses, worry from small publishers, death to second hand and abandoning games and all because of a decision that makes industrial sense: absolute control by Sony in the distribution of games, their price and the margin they leave in their store.

But since the newspaper archive is very bloody, it didn’t take long for those who, like myself yesterday, to remember a certain moment from E3 2013 to appear: the same moment in which PlayStation 4 won the competition Xbox One with three very simple decisions, but they disrupted Microsoft’s plans. Because it was at that same moment that PlayStation won the generation.

And as the Xbox boss confessed some time later, they lost the worst generation that could be lost in the field of consoles. The battlefield? Physical games, the same ones that today have an expiration date.

When you lose the worst generation you can lose

June 2013, E3 plenary session. The great video game fair was preparing for a generational event. Both Sono and Microsoft had teased some features of the PS4 and Xbox One respectively in advance, but on June 10, the Xbox One would show off games and pricing, and on the same day but a few hours later, Sony would do the same for the PS4.

What no one expected was what was about to happen. Xbox One already had controversies behind it due to the fact that the machine had been presented more as an entertainment system (with an emphasis on watching television on it) than as a console. Besides, in a gross communication failureit was also noted that the discs needed online verification every few hours for Microsoft to verify that the game was yours.

This meant that if you didn’t have Internet, you might not be able to play your games, and the division’s boss himself sent out the message. “If you don’t have Internet access, we have a product for you. It’s called Xbox 360”. When you present your new machine, it is not elegant to say that if someone doesn’t want it, they have the old one because the easiest thing that can happen is that they end up looking at the competition.

And the competition… tightened.

After the mess with the verification of physical copies on Xbox One, Sony attacked. During his conference, starting at the hour and 57 minute mark, Jack Tretton, who was COO of Sony Computer Entertainment, spent a few minutes stating that they believed in the physical format, in sharing and reselling your games on disc and in doing whatever you wanted with them. Of course, there would be no ‘online check’ to verify the discs either.

He won a lot of applause with the speech that you can see here:

That moment, added to the fact that PS4 was going to cost 100 euros less than the confusing Xbox One, marked the generation, but there was more blood. On the same day of the presentation, PlayStation recorded a video in which two of its heavyweights did a complete tutorial of what the process of leaving games between PS4 users was going to be like.

It is one of the most iconic moments of these fairs and one of the last moments I remember in which one company went so hard against another in this console thing:

The previous generation, the PS3 and Xbox 360, ended with the two machines selling a very similar number of units, but the PS4 and Xbox One began with the Sony machine sweeping sales. Xbox retracted its policiesbut it was late and when Phil Spencer took the reins of the division and started making moves (lower the price, remove mandatory Kinect, etc.), it was… well, that’s it: late.

Xbox One sold so little that Microsoft made the decision to stop providing data on consoles sold. When that happens, things go wrong because everyone likes to stick out their chests when the wind is in their favor, and a few years later, Spencer himself commented that they lost the generation they shouldn’t lose.

Among their arguments, one made all the sense in the world: the PS4 and Xbox One was the generation of change, of the change from physical to digital, of the change from a model of consoles that were a blank canvas to one in which people wanted to continue playing their games from past generations. And, above all, the generation in which it was more important than ever to provide continuity to that digital ecosystem.

Spencer summarized with the phrase “we lost the worst generation that could be lost, the one in which everyone built their library of digital games.” As I say, it makes perfect sense because if you went from an Xbox 360 to a new console, it didn’t matter to you because there was no backward compatibility (it was added later in the case of Xbox). You had to start from scratch, and the same if you went from PS3 to PS4.

Therefore, Xbox 360 users who were not happy with the new policies were able to switch to PS4 without fear of losing anything because there was nothing to lose. However, as On PS4 and Xbox One the digital ecosystem began to developusers began to buy more and more games in that format.

If you had a PS4 with an account in which you had invested money in dozens of games, it was very difficult for you to leave it behind for the next generation to start over with Xbox One.

Sony won the PS4 generation (against Xbox, of course, because Nintendo Switch was doing its thing selling like hot cakes years later) because they bet on the continuity of the physical format that we knew. Experiments were stopped and they won over the hesitant Xbox 360 user with Xbox’s new policies. And that user began to build a digital library that, with the launch of PS5, could be carried over to the new machine.

PlayStation’s E3 2013 ‘gag’ was a stab at Xbox and, together with the cheaper price of PS4 and a presentation focused on games and not on watching the wheel of fortune from the console, it was what invited players to bet on the Japanese machine.

But of course, time has continued, now we are at that point where those who laughed at Xbox’s digital measures have announced the death of the physical format and… what had to happen has happened.

Since yesterday, the tutorial video for lending games has been flooded with ridicule from users with comments of all kinds, but with one very accurate one.

“Please make one the same but on how to share games on PS6.”

The future

With that intention of killing the physical format (which is not the first time, there are attempts like PSP Gobut now it does seem like a decided step) the question arises: what will I play on PS6 launch day?

TO ‘GTA VI‘, sure, since the game will arrive in digital formatso it doesn’t matter to you whether the new console has a reader or not, but if PlayStation 6 arrives without support for the physical format as this decision by Sony suggests, your physical PS5 library will only be available there if you keep your PS5.

With all this fuss, it has gone unnoticed that, quite possibly, the new Xbox machine, that helix to which they are going around a lot so that don’t let them go out of pricealso arrived without a disc reader. We would be in the same situation, but in The Verge they point that Microsoft is working on a system to digitize the Xbox One and Xbox Series collection.

That is, if we have physical games, we can convert them into digital licenses to be able to access them from a console without a reader. It’s a “good” idea as long as they don’t make the physical game unusable just in case, but there’s nothing official on the table at the moment.

Ultimately, for many, this situation is terrible. You no longer have to be a collector, but simply want your games to be yours, to own what you have paid for. Because digital games are not your property (at least on console and some on PC), but simple use licenses that companies can take away from you whenever they want.

If you think I’m being apocalyptic, there they are cases like ‘The Crew’Steam saying that we pay for use licenses or the number of games in physical format that, really, they don’t come on the diskso it is not known what will happen when the servers close and we cannot download, for example, a ‘Doom The Dark Ages’.

Sony itself announced a few days ago that deleted more than 500 movies from its catalog and users will not be able to access them even if they had purchased them in another example that buying is not owning. A company that for years defended video games as art now it reduces it to mere content in the most pejorative sense of the termand it’s a shame.

To end on a positive note, this image I saw by Bluesky. Because the digital licenses can be deleted, but fortunately no CEO can come to my house to take away the physical copies of my games.

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