What they’re doing to gamers is a robbery in broad daylight

Digital libraries were once revolutionary. Suddenly, you weren’t restricted by the books in your local library or the CD and video game selections in your local stores. You could also eliminate the clutter and keep your home Nordic clean.

But the novelty eventually wore off. Now, we live in constant fear that the content we purchased will one day evaporate.

If I cancel my Amazon Audible subscription, will I keep my previously purchased audiobooks?

If I sell my Kindle, where do all my ebooks go?

If I purchase a game online for my PS5 instead of a disk, will I have it forever?

Questions once dismissed as paranoia are now being revisited, as fears of disappearing content have proven to be well-founded.

Sony will soon remove 551 movies, which users had already purchased from PlayStation Store libraries, for seemingly legitimate reasons. Only those reasons offer little comfort to customers.

Terminator 2, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Total Recall, Mulholland Drive, and more will disappear starting in September, with no reported refunds for users.

Here are a few colorful comments I found under our Facebook post:

“And just like that a whole generation of pirates ready to sale the digital seas and take the content they lost back”

“And they made fun of the old guys, they told us to get with the plan, they called us dinosaurs, and yet here we sit loaded to the ceiling with our DVDs, our DVD players, and our desktops still have disc drives in them.”

“I still have my DVD player, and I can easily get used DVDs for 50 cents each. When I find sales, I can get 5 for $1. I still add to my collection of over 700 movies every month.”

What can I add but to quote a famous shanty, “Here to us live long and long live piracy.”

I’m a millennial – a generation that can finally afford to pay for content but struggles to do so, as we constantly feel scammed by companies. For some of us, streaming services are only useful so we can loop the same show in the background. But since platforms don’t keep those shows forever, owning a copy on a device or DVD only makes sense.

Gamers might have it worse. Back in the day, I was forced to buy physical PlayStation games because the online store didn’t work in my region. Though frustrated that I couldn’t play the same games as my friends in London, I am now quite happy that all my PS games are physical copies.

However, it appears I won’t be able to purchase the highly anticipated GTA 6, as Rockstar has decided to release a box containing a code rather than a physical disc.

This is a tectonic shift that will likely push other developers to permanently abandon physical media.

By the way, in April, Sony rolled out a digital rights update requiring players of PS5 and PS6 digital games to check in online every 30 days to keep the game active on their consoles.

To me, that is simply outrageous. Unfortunately, the fight for digital preservation hasn’t been very successful so far.

ICYMI: This week’s must-reads

Face control at the stores

What do we know about Walmart’s emotional recognition technology? Does it even exist?

Spies tap into American clouds?

Claus Balslev, the head of digitalization at a Danish labor agency, has said out loud what many privately fear: data uploaded to an American cloud is directly shared with US intelligence agencies.

Windows 11 boycott

Some users are avoiding the Windows 11 update like the plague and cite numerous reasons why it isn’t actually necessary. Therefore, Microsoft has extended Windows 10 update program for another year.