Locking Classic Games Behind Subscription Services Is A Mistake

Please just let me buy Dino Crisis…

​Please just let me buy Dino Crisis…  Read More Gaming

It sucks settling for digital products in the modern age. I will always prefer owning a physical version of something I love instead of a license that can be taken away by a corporation with little notice. When we put money down on a video game on the PlayStation Store, we’re not purchasing something that now belongs to us, but the right to play and engage with it inside a platform that, one day, will cease to exist. Art is being erased in pursuit of profit all the time.

But throughout the past console generation, PlayStation has been doing right by its legacy. Well, kinda. Astro Bot was a platforming love letter to the console giant, while it has made a habit of releasing classic PS1, PS2, and PSP games onto its digital storefront. We live in a world where you can download and play Mister Mosquito whenever you like, only to realise that it was never very good before immediately uninstalling it. That’s the case with plenty of classic games like this, but their quality isn’t the point.

Sony also locks a handful of its classic titles behind its higher PlayStation Plus tiers, asking that you have an active subscription in order to access them. If the titles in question are still available to be purchased outside the service, that’s okay, but with Dino Crisis, that sadly isn’t the case.

At the time of writing, there is sadly no option to access the game unless you are a PlayStation Plus member, and that’s absurd when the opposite precedent has already been set. You’re taking away the option of ownership and telling players, new and old, that if they want to experience a piece of PlayStation history, they must do so indirectly.

Nintendo is a nightmare for this too. Once upon a time we had the Virtual Console over on the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS. But with the dawn of Nintendo Switch Online, this marketplace of classics was brushed aside in favour of a service featuring a very limited library of titles. It isn’t a bad way to play classic games, but it is a restrictive one where digital ownership just isn’t an option.

My 3DS and Wii U are filled with downloadable titles I can return to if I wish, and Nintendo spent several generations making this a standard practice only to suddenly take it away. Experiencing crucial parts of gaming history is becoming the benefits of pricey services, instead of being made more accessible via independent digital purchases which anyone can take advantage of. At least Xbox has developed a habit of selling original Xbox and 360 games for pennies, many of which have also been enhanced for new hardware.

Classic Games Are Being Screwed By Our Digital Future

Behaviour like this from all the platform holders is going to lead us to a place where the history of video games isn’t going to matter so much as how they can charge us to play all the games we can’t access anywhere thanks to fading physical hardware and boxed units that are too expensive for most players to get a hold of. I own a copy of Dino Crisis, and I’ve seen it through to completion a handful of times, but plenty of others haven’t, and I’d hate for that opportunity to be sullied by misplaced corporate greed.

Like streaming services that host decades of film and television, corporations are selective in what they decide to preserve and present to the public. This is a bad way to approach all forms of art, yet here we are utterly powerless to do anything about it.