Hideo Kojima, who, let’s face it, has a lot of skin in the game when it comes to making Sony’s PlayStation as successful as it has been is worried for our future as we head down the dystopian pathway of owning literally nothing and subscribing to every form of entertainment.
The news last week that Sony are dispensing with the pesky inconvenience of physical games was met with global condemnation in the gamer community, not that they care, as people realised, even if they don’t buy physical games themselves, where this was all heading.
Remember at one point we had Netflix and maybe iTunes for music. Then along came Amazon Prime, MGM+, Spotify, Tidal and all the rest. You couldn’t get all the TV and movies you wanted on one streaming service, so you had to pay for two. You can’t get all the sport you want in the one place, so you need to pay for four if you want to watch your team every week. The rights holders selling off their products piecemeal for the most cash not giving a hoot about the end user.
Sony has been even worse, selling content on their digital platforms to users and then just removing it from their libraries further down the line, even though they have bought it, when the deal runs out with nary an apology. And still we subscribe.
Kojima has now joined the discourse as he believes that media will, in future, only be offered on subscription services from the start as he told the Il Cinema in Piazza festival which was held in Rome that he believed what is coming is scary for us all
“If that happens, what will happen is that I won’t own the data,” he says. “Some company will own the server and say, ‘You can turn on the tap for a certain amount of money each month.
“It’s certainly conceivable that the data will stop being distributed. “When that happens, I won’t be able to watch my favorite movies or play my favorite games, and that’s what’s scary.”
“Like Netflix or Amazon there’s a server somewhere, and you only have the right to turn on the tap. When you turn it on, the data on the server comes out.”
Keeping the tap analogy going, we also know from experience that when you do turn on the tap, sometimes it’s pretty poisonous what comes out of the end.
Authored by
Paul McNally
Paul McNally has been around consoles and computers since his parents bought him a Mattel Intellivision in 1980. He has been a prominent games journalist since the 1990s, spending over a decade as editor of popular print-based video games and computer magazines, including a market-leading PlayStation title. Paul has written high-end gaming content for GamePro, Official Australian PlayStation Magazine, PlayStation Pro, Amiga Action, Mega Action, ST Action, GQ, Loaded, and the The Mirror. He has also hosted panels at retro-gaming conventions and can regularly be found guesting on gaming podcasts and Twitch shows. Believing that the reader deserves actually to enjoy what they are reading is a big part of Paul’s ethos when it comes to gaming journalism, elevating the sites he works on above the norm.
