I have a really hard time letting things go. I have the same photo library in Google Photos and in a bunch of hard drives inside my apartment. You know the “bro math” of taking 20 underwears to a trip because “what if I shit myself everyday, 3 times”, I need to have all my media preserved in different places because what if Google loses one of their datacenters and all my photos in it?

I do this because I don’t trust “access” the same way I trust “I have the file right here”. If you’ve ever moved countries, changed ecosystems, or watched one tech company eat another one, you know the difference matters. Convenience is nice, but you’re paying a price for it, and I am not talking about the subscription fee.

The “right to access” is not the same as ownership, yet, somehow, the whole industry spent the last decade trying to convince us those are basically the same thing. They are not. That whole “you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy” line was supposed to sound futuristic, I guess, but to me it just sounds grim.

#HoarderLife

I am, without any doubts, the ideal customer for physical media.

I like shelves. I like cartridges. I like hard drives. I like knowing that if a company wakes up on some random Tuesday and decides to kill a service, merge a platform, rename a plan, or add AI to something that used to just work, my stuff is still my stuff.

This doesn’t mean I’m living in a bunker made of indestructible Nokia phones. As I mentioned, I use Google Photos. I pay for Spotify. I stream movies. I live in the real world. But I don’t confuse convenience with control.

So yes, all my photos are in Google Photos. And yes, all my photos are also stored locally. Because when a company says “don’t worry, it’s in the cloud”, what I hear is “future Pablo, this is your problem now.” (Also: future Pablo, link the degoogling post here when you finally write it.)

The Concord situation

Concord was such a disaster it basically looped back into being interesting. You bet I have a copy of it in my shelf, but this is not the focus here.

Sony launched Concord in hopes to make millions of dollars. Fair, I am not an anti-capitalist or anything like that, but these companies drooling over the possibility of making infinite money from loot boxes really makes me die inside each time I see it. Then Concord launched, and it bombed, it was so bad that Sony didn’t even try to fix it, they simply refunded everyone, took down the servers, and removed the digital version from Playstation Store. So far, so good.

What really makes me question the reality we’re living is that Sony forcefully removed the game from players’ digital accounts. To put this into perspective, imagine purchasing a T-shirt that you like, maybe you’re a collector and want to have all T-shirts ever made. Then the T-shirt manufacturer finds out that there’s a misprint in the T-shirt, goes to your house while you’re asleep, and takes it away from you.

That’s what Sony did. They remotely sent a command to everyone’s PlayStation to delete Concord from their local hard drives. How is this a thing?!? A game people had “bought” stopped existing the moment Sony decided the experiment was over.

Yes, people got the money back. Sure it was a useless game without the servers, but that is not the point.

The point is that Sony showed, with zero subtlety, what a digital purchase actually is. Not ownership. Permission. Temporary, revocable, account-bound permission.

Now compare that with P.T.. Konami pulled it from the PlayStation Store after the Kojima breakup, which already sucked, but if you had downloaded it before that, it stayed on your console. People held on to those PS4s like they were carrying cursed treasure. That was bad enough already. Concord managed to make it worse.

The old version of digital was “you can’t buy it anymore”. The new version is “you can’t even keep the useless dead file you already had”. Amazing progress.

Anime people already learned this lesson

Gamers are not even the first victims here. Anime fans got a speedrun version of the same thing when Funimation got folded into Crunchyroll.

People had digital copies tied to Funimation that simply did not make the trip. Not “please wait while we migrate your library”. Not “we’re sorting out licensing details”. Just gone. Crunchyroll’s own support page says those digital copies are not available there anymore.

You “bought” that movie you like so much so you can watch it whenever you want, even though it’s super easy to just pirate it, but no, you paid for the thing, to then poof, it’s gone.

Back in the DVD days, this problem did not exist. You bought the disc, threw away the plastic wrap, put it on a shelf, and that was the end of the negotiation. The publisher could disappear, get acquired, or explode in a corporate merger and your movie would still be sitting there, ready to go.

That is what ownership looks like. Beautiful. Just beautiful.

The subscription era

Game Pass and PS Plus are the kind of deal that sounds amazing until you stop looking at the monthly price and start looking at the years.

Let’s say you pay around €200 a year for a premium game subscription. In ten years, that is €2,000. And what do you have at the end of it? A receipt history and some fond memories, I guess. I mean don’t get me wrong, I think the ultimate thing we have in life is good memories, that’s what makes life worth living, and that’s why reliving these memories is so important. Replaying that crappy game from your youth as an adult brings so many good memories, and you can do that because you still have your SNES in your parents’ house with all your games. Just plug and play.

But with these subscription services? You do not have a shelf of games. You do not have something you can resell. You do not have the specific 2016 version of that game before three balance patches and two monetization experiments turned it into something else. The second you stop paying, the whole library evaporates.

People hear this and say “yeah but I don’t replay games”. Fair. Until the service gets worse.

Enters the enshittification

Because that is the real checkmate here. The trap is not that you personally need to own every movie or every game forever (well, for me it is, but let’s pretend it is not). The trap is that once enough people stop owning things, companies get to make the service worse and you have nowhere good to go. More ads, higher prices, smaller catalog, worse support, more lock-in. The usual enshittification arc.

If you want a stupidly specific example, look at the 3DS. Pokemon Shuffle was a real Nintendo game on a real Nintendo handheld and now, legally, it may as well be smoke for anyone who didn’t grab it in time. The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Anniversary Edition was free and still managed to become unobtainable. Free. Gone. Nintendo somehow found a way to make zero euros expire.

Let’s talk about Nintendo

Nintendo used to be the company of “blow on the cartridge and try again.” Very physical. Sure, their instruction manual says not to do that, but what can I say? It worked.

Anyways, now we get stuff like Super Mario 3D All-Stars being sold with artificial scarcity so the second-hand price climbs to around €130 for no good reason beyond Nintendo deciding FOMO should have a retail box. I already wrote about how this kind of pricing logic works in the collectibles world here. It is annoying there too, but at least nobody pretends it is pro-consumer.

Then came the Switch 2 game-key cards. Nintendo’s own support page literally says the card does not contain the full game data. It is the key that lets you download the actual game. Regular physical games, the game itself is the license, now they’re making it so basically the plastic shell that had the game chip inside is the license.

So now even when you buy the thing in a store, take the box home, and insert the card in the console, you may still be buying a permission slip. Physical-looking DRM. A cartridge cosplay.

Nintendo says you only need the internet the first time, which is better than always-online garbage, sure. But the preservation problem is still right there. If the real game lives on a server first, that physical product has an expiration date hiding inside it.

Cartridges used to be the whole point. Now sometimes they’re just a receipt with extra steps.

The hardware facade

I miss when phones had features that actually lived inside the phone. All of these years of technology advances, and my current phone is like 100 times more powerful than my personal computer I had 20 years ago.

My old Nokia had Wi-Fi and could do some smart things, but most of the time it was just a solid little brick that worked offline and minded its own business. I would install an app, and it would do its thing, all computing was local, all sales final. No subscription, no cloud accounts, the phone was doing the job I paid it to do.

Now every launch event is full of magical features that depend on some cloud service quietly doing the real work somewhere else. One simple example of this is all the new AI editing of photos, and I get it, you can’t really run a powerful LLM inside your phone, but then if all the computing is being done on a server, why only the latest iPhone gets to use Apple Intelligence, and not, I don’t know, an iPhone 3? It also has internet access, you know?

That means the feature is not really part of the device. It is part of a service attached to the device. So now your physical, actually super powerful phone, is just a license. Same as the plastic shell from Nintendo’s key card.

That means that you pay full price for that new phone, with all of those awesome features, expecting to own these features, but then the day the company kills that service, moves it behind a subscription tier, or decides only the new model deserves it, your very fancy hardware suddenly forgets how to do the thing from the commercial. Congrats on the purchase. You bought a screen for a server.

I highly recommend watching Common People, a very depressing Black Mirror episode, that kind of highlights this problem.

Boss, I am tired

I am not telling you to cancel every subscription, throw your phone in a canal, and live off ripped DVDs and local MP3s like it’s 2007 (although that would be awesome). I still make compromises. Everybody does.

But I do think a few rules still make sense:

• buy physical games when you can
• keep local backups of photos and files you actually care about
• prefer one-time purchases when the product does not genuinely need a monthly bill
• reject digital assets whenever you can
• be suspicious when a company sells “convenience” by removing your options

Also, physical media is not just better for preservation. It is often better for your wallet. You can buy a used game, finish it, and sell it to the next guy/gal. Try doing that with a PSN license.

Part 2 is going deeper into software subscriptions specifically, because that rabbit hole gets even dumber. Fitness apps, Adobe, “AI features”, apps charging monthly fees to write text into SQLite, all the usual modern nonsense. I already touched that nerve a bit in my Musclog post about nutrition tracking and scammy fitness app subscriptions, but I have more to say.

For now, that’s the whole rant: cloud stuff is convenient, subscriptions are sometimes unavoidable, and ownership still matters. Especially when the companies telling you it doesn’t are the exact ones with a financial incentive to make sure you never really keep anything again.

See you in part 2.