Despite Google pulling the plug on Stadia, cloud gaming or gaming as a service continues to be the direction the gaming, movies, and anime (and manga for that matter) will move. There’s too much profit to be had and convenience for video gaming not to move this way. Video games as a service would allow you to have a Netflix-like selection of games to play on any compatible device. This should reduce the cost of consoles and other gaming devices. However, as Stadia shows, when the service ends, as it will eventually, you lose access to the games you’ve purchased or enjoy. While Google is reimbursing Stadia adopters even for the hardware they’ve purchased, these players no longer have access to these games (Farokhmanesh, 2022).
We’ve already seen this in the movie streaming realm. Movies are regularly removed from Netflix for reasons ranging from moving to a new streaming platform, Netflix not paying for the license to stream that film, or copyright fights about various parts of the film. This extends to anime and manga too. Funimation/Crunchyroll could pull a title and you lose legal access to it. Likewise, online manga venues can do the same. Even saving the content to a Kindle or a Kobo reading device doesn’t protect that content. Amazon has removed books and even wiped Kindle devices in the past and that is fully within their rights and terms of service (Brown, 2012). So too Netflix, Crunchyroll, XBox, Nintendo, Sony, and others have the ability to shutdown, remove, block access to whatever content their terms of service (which none of us read) allows.
When you purchase a movie, video game, book, or similar piece of intellectual property, you don’t own it. You buy a license to consume and use it within certain legal limits; those limits are what copyright law handles. Even when you buy a physical copy of the game, the game may stop working or remain in a buggy-unplayable condition, when the servers the game requires are turned off. This, again, is within the rights of the company that produced the game. User licenses are not indefinite. This becomes even more problematic as software-as-a-service or gaming-as-a-service takes over. You lose the ability to play even a partially function version of a game. But this also becomes a problem as technology progresses. Unless you have hardware a game was design to run upon, sometimes the game will not run. Emulation remains a good option, but it is imperfect and, sometimes, games will not run on emulation because of DRM (digital rights management) and other technological reasons. I keep an older PC around because of this problem.
In many cases, unless someone has dumped a ROM (read only memory) of the game, released a security-unlocked–and illegal–copy on the Internet, or otherwise copied the game, film, or anime, that piece of content can disappear. Consider the case of Disney and the original Star Wars. The film has been changed and re-released so many times, that the original film has become fairly rare and unable to get legally. In other cases, the content disappears entirely, even from the underground areas of the Internet. As interest wanes for the content, the files disappear because people stop sharing them or remove them to make space for content people want. The Internet isn’t as permanent as people think. The files may remain somewhere, but without easy access, for all purposes, the content disappears. While many people assume the companies that make the content have the originals, this isn’t always the case either. Copies get lost. Source code gets lost or compilers no longer exist.
I’ve encountered this problem with my research. Out-of-print books become rare, such as Kitsune, Japan’s Fox of Mystery, Romance, and Humor by Kiyoshi Nozaki. I haven’t seen a physical copy, and I managed to find an, admittedly illegal, digital copy on an obscure website that no long exists. How much worse will this become as books and other content become digital or, worse, services?
I prefer physical content whenever possible, but as I mentioned, physical video games, DVDs, and other items (with the exception of books, which can last for centuries) doesn’t guarantee you will continue to enjoy the content. DVDs suffer from disc rot. Sometimes it doesn’t take long for this to happen. It depends on the quality of the data foil layer. Cartridges have better longevity, so I’m optimistic about the durability of the Nintendo Switch, but as gaming turns into a subscription service and physical media disappears, we run against the limitations of hard drives and other storage mediums. Even solid state can degrade because it lacks the bit-etching, so to speak, of ROM chips. Perhaps in the future, one-way ROM etching will make up the gap, allowing us to create our own back-up cartridges for digital-only games.
All of this points to how impermanent intellectual property is. Even books, which have proven their longevity under the right conditions, aren’t as durable as clay-tablets and stone. A good portion of modern life could disappear into the ether as time grinds on. For content locked behind pay-walls and on servers, time’s grind may well cause it to be forgotten and lost. Cutting electricity to several devices is all it takes for something like an anime to disappear forever.
Despite this, I like the convenience of access streaming and software-as-a-service offers. Most of the time, what I want is available. Crunchyroll/Funimation offers most of the anime I want to watch. Back in my day (I couldn’t resist!), anime was scarce. You may have found an obscure VHS with Speed Racer or Akira, or you may know someone who had bootlegged recordings. The shift toward streaming has many positives, and I suspect a shift toward cloud gaming, despite Stadia’s failure, will also have many positives. But as I’ve discussed, this comes at a cost. At the same time, is the cost a problem? Should we have continued access to video games, movies, and the like for posterity? After all, magazines and other ephemera are meant to be temporary. Perhaps some video games, films, and other content aren’t meant to be preserved.
You’d think, as a librarian, this idea would conflict with me. However, as a librarian, I’ve discarded and disposed of a lot of books and ephemera that were not long relevant or even misleading. On the other hand, as a researcher, I know you cannot guess what bit of information may be a missing link to a puzzle. Basically, I’m mixed about the direction content is heading. This very article will eventually disappear into the digital ether. As soon as I stop paying for hosting, poof, it’s gone. And it is truly gone once my home file-server fails. Is this a sad event? Perhaps. It is a fact, however, that nothing lasts forever. Even Super Mario Bros. will, eventually, disappear. So while this process shouldn’t be hurried along, it also cannot be denied. The shift to digital subscriptions for video games, anime, movies, and books has advantages and problems that we need to keep in mind. Most of all, the truth of impermanence needs to be in our minds.
Reference
Brown, Eileen (2012) Why Amazon is within its rights to remove access to your Kindle books . zdnet https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-amazon-is-within-its-rights-to-remove-access-to-your-kindle-books/
Farokhmanesh, Megan (2022) The End of Google Stadia. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/google-stadia-shutting-down-phil-harrison/
I think there’s a trend in general toward the “subscription model”, if merely as a means to maintain income from a product. And it’s not restricted to intellectual properties, such as books or music. Anything controlled through a smartphone app, from a bike computer to the heated seats in a car can be rendered arbitrarily unusable, blurring the idea of “ownership”. More concerning to me, however, is when a large corporation pulls the plug on access to entire domains of shared information because they can’t make it profitable, as with Google and Panoramio, Kitara Media and Gather[dot]com, or now Amazon and dpreview. Imagine if Mc Graw-Hill, HarperCollins, or Thorndike Press had the ability to make entire lines of publications suddenly disappear? And yet, such is the nature of anything committed to an online platform.
Since libraries are by design resources intended to provide temporary access, it would seem they’re inevitable targets for becoming virtual resources. Do you see this happening?
Libraries that focus on materials will be and are threatened by virtual resources. Libraries are inconvenient compared to digital resources: you have to take time to travel there, return the items, deal with the fines, wait on items to arrive, and other inconveniences. However, libraries that have shifted toward social centers and embraced their original calling as a “poor person’s university” still do well. Subscription models cut deep into already reduced library budgets.