Reading gaming news is usually an interesting and prescient activity for me. What feels like a couple of weeks ago though, I logged on to read some of the hardest hitting gaming news I think I have ever seen. I remember logging onto Threads with my morning coffee and reading the countless posts about the news. Not many stories in this category tend to make people feel an existential crisis. This one was different.
The signs had been there for several years. The dwindling digital sales, the increased cost in physical goods, the need for everything needing to become worse and worse as time goes on. Nothing gold can stay, as Robert Frost says.
Some people said it was necessary to happen. Others ‘said what did you expect?’ Then some people just didn’t seem to care at all. Sure, I guess it’s not the end of the world, but for a lot of us, it feels like it. In 2028, people who play video games will have to make a choice about whether to have a choice at all.
The Feeling of Physical Games
A few years ago, I went to an estate sale of a friend in my small Iowa town where I picked up a rather large stack of various physical games from some previous generation consoles–Nintendo Wii mostly. I’d been just starting to get serious about my Mr. Dave Pizza gaming channel and blog, and I was enthusiastic about all things games. I negotiated a reasonable price for both of us and took them home.
This stack started a chain of events that has occupied my time and business for a good few years. You see, these games initiated an appreciation for physical media and retro games that I did not have before in my writing or any of my personal knowledge base. I turned the games I’d bought from the sale into a lifestyle.
To be completely truthful, I have hardly bought any physical media since my late teens. These were the days when I would go to Wal-Mart after every shift and bring home at least one or two physical PC games to play. I loved the feeling of the raised covers and glossy embossed chunky boxes. The entire experience instilled feelings of nostalgia that failed to be reproduced for several years after physical PC games stopped being a product on the shelves.
These assorted console games I got from the estate sale made me feel that nostalgia in some new way. The feeling of the covers, the discs and their meaning. Not only did I own the game–but I owned the game!
Physical Games as a Business
Around the fall of 2024 or so, I was let go from a position that I had hoped would turn into something more long term. My finances weren’t in dire straits, but they did become restricted by this news. This was around the time I started selling games as a means for income.
It was just some basic things at first, some of the games I had gotten from the estate sale, a few things I had from gaming conventions. I was surprised how quickly these things turned into cash. I was now an eBayer–something which always seemed slightly out of reach as an actual business.
A lot of people complained about resellers during the pandemic when retro game prices shot up to their highest premium ever. Everybody wanted to get into retro gaming, sitting at home all the time, not wanting to doom scroll so much. That initial resentment soon passed and retro gaming became a little bit more respected in the aftermath.
I was looking for video games at garage sales and thrift stores now. Getting deals on old PS2 games, learning about Xbox 360 lots, starting to get really into it. This past year I turned it into a fully fledged business in many ways–streamlining many aspects of it. Life has been pretty good, or at least it seems that way.
I follow other video game businesses too, from my local shops, people on Instagram, to the popular Quick Flips–known for documenting their journey over the past few years.
The Very Bad News About Selling and Collecting Physical Games
So what does all of this mean for me? Can I keep doing my business? Will my game store cease to be? Well, no, not exactly. The future looks different though. I can no longer depend on physical media to exist forever. I won’t be selling PlayStation 6 games out of my house twenty years from now and neither will you.
Collectors who have shelves and shelves of games in their apartments or basements–or what have you–will stop at PlayStation 5 and collect no more. I suspect that most likely Xbox will be next, and perhaps even Nintendo–but we do not know for sure. It doesn’t look good either way
If PlayStation wants to take your game away from their library or close the store or even make it unavailable they will. Then that game will no longer exist. Gaming history will become ephemeral–something akin to a YouTube channel that gets deleted. Maybe.
Why The End of Physical Games is Just Bad
Normally, if I were to write something like this, I would end on some positive highlights. Negativity doesn’t really sell. And maybe there are some positives–like the fact that hardware will still exist ,that this isn’t literally the end of gaming, or that maybe I don’t even want to do this forever anyway. But they’re not the kind of positives I’m clinging to.
Overall, this is a very bad development in consumer rights. It means that game shops will eventually be a shadow of what they once were. Also, it means that collectors will stop taking pride in their collections. And lastly, it means that refurbish businesses like mine will die.
It doesn’t even anger me, truth be told, it just makes me sad. It’s not just that the games will be gone. It is that everything I created in my business will be gone.
Sony will not change their minds. Xbox will not change their minds. Nintendo will not change their minds. PC game sellers will not change their minds. This is just bad news.
Final Thoughts
So what do I have to say that will wrap this up? Don’t take part. Don’t buy Sony, unless it’s retro. But if you choose to, I won’t judge you. It’s just the inevitable becoming the inevitable. I think the thing that makes me most sad is knowing that, some time in the future, those physical games just won’t exist. If I decide I want to start a massive shelf collection of PlayStation 6 games, I just can’t. I’ll never find a PlayStation 6 or 7 game at a garage sale or thrift store. And that, honestly, hurts. It hurts to know they won’t let us have our games.
I’m Mr. Dave Pizza. I write about indie and retro games. I hope you enjoyed this article. Be sure to check out some of the other articles on my website, and don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel! Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy your physical games while you still can.
