Sony’s PlayStation Network shut down for a little over 24 hours Feb. 7. The outage affected millions around the world and spurred conversation about the ownership of physical media.
The PlayStation Network is an online entertainment and gaming distribution service accessed by over 100 million users on a monthly basis. At about 6 p.m. EST Feb. 7, users began to report a network outage worldwide.
Although this outage only lasted for around 24 hours, the shutdown raised concerns for players who exclusively access content digitally. Chris Miles, a junior studying creative writing, was among the users impacted by the outage.
“My friends and I have a Minecraft realm and we're not all on PlayStation, but most of us are,” Miles said. “It was 24 hours (for) these other people who aren't on PlayStation to get ahead of us. It's kind of unfair.”
When the PSN shuts down, all online features go down with it. This means gaming online with friends, buying PSN store content, making micro-transactions and playing online-only games is impossible.
These effects are expected when PSN servers go out; however, players were shocked to find other features shut down as well. Digitally-bought offline titles were inaccessible during the outage because a “console needs the internet to confirm that you have a license to play it,” according to TheGamer.
Jay Cline, a junior studying film, collects physical media across a variety of genres, including PlayStation games.
“(A) big portion of my collection is my physical video games for PlayStation and whatnot, but I also have a decent Blu-ray collection for films,” Cline said. “I usually try to buy all of my games physically, so that way stuff like (the PSN outage) would never affect me.”
During the 24-hour shutdown, PlayStation users were only able to play games off of physical discs and previously paired disc drives. This would not be a problem in the past as all games came with a physical disc. Nowadays, over 70% of video game sales are in digital form, and many games require internet connection to access.
“It's a popular thing in the video game industry where games just get delisted and removed from your library,” Cline said. “And I think physical media is a really good way to prevent that from happening to, at least to the best of our ability.”
When buying video games digitally, consumers are not buying ownership of the game. They are buying a license to play instead, meaning publishers can remove access or delist a game at any time, even after money is spent.
According to PC Gamer, a new law in California has made it illegal for distributors “to use terms like ‘buy’ or ‘purchase’ in relation to digital goods,” including video games.
OU’s manuscripts archivist Greta Suiter works with physical media daily at the Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections.
“You usually think of audio media. It could be a record, a tape, an audio cassette tape, VHS tape — usually something that you need something else to play,” Suiter said. “But it's tangible.”
This includes video game discs, but it’s not guaranteed that every game comes in a physical addition. At an increasingly frequent rate, retailers are choosing to publish digital-only.
“You have to know a certain amount of technology to be able to access these things, and I think that changes over time,” Suiter said. “Different people at different ages are more adept at using the technology in different ways, so you have different audiences accessing things in different ways.”
Owning the physical item does not always guarantee forever ownership of any item.
“The physicalness of it deteriorates over time,” Suiter said. “There's a preservation versus access thing, where, if you play a tape, and something happens where the tape breaks, then you might have lost that tape.”
There are both downsides and upsides to owning physical media of any kind, but in an increasingly digital world, the choice between tangible and technical is beginning to wane.
