Digital Killed the Video Star

Things have been kinda troubling this week.

In case you haven't heard, PlayStation announced that they're going to cease the production of physical discs in January 2028 and that game purchases moving forward will be completely digital. You'll download your games instead of loading them from actual media. How convenient! The future is here!

Or, that would be the case if it didn't completely suck. For proof, look no further than the case in which Amazon deleted books by George Orwell from its users' Kindle devices . I've had some experience with this in the gaming world after Amazon announced it would be pulling the plug on its massively multiplayer online role-playing game New World in early 2027. Game publisher Ubisoft also faced class-action lawsuits after it shut down access to the racing game The Crew , and even spawned a movement called Stop Killing Games . Sony themselves even recently announced that over 500 films produced by StudioCanal that PlayStation users had purchased would soon be deleted from their libraries. Corporations can get away with these kinds of shenanigans by arguing that, when you purchase a digital copy of something, you're actually just purchasing a "license." You don't actually own it, and they can take that license away at any time that they see fit. No refunds given.

And while Sony states that they're making these kinds of changes due to the changes in consumer behavior and digital sales outpacing physical sales, one could absolutely argue that it's a money-making racket. Sony doesn't have to pay money to produce the physical discs anymore, and they can keep making a profit essentially selling you nothing but an expensive rental. Corporations like Sony don't just want to make money... They want all the money. And that's a big part of the reason why Gen Z is apparently making physical media cool again , but it's also one of the most glaring reasons why I wanted to launch my home server.

Early last year, I started playing around with an old desktop computer of mine because I always had a good amount of fun self-hosting things for myself and my family to use. And one of the best and most-used containers that I host on my local network is an instance of @jellyfin.org . I spun up a Jellyfin instance and my nephew, who has been ripping and digitizing DVDs and Blu-rays of movies and TV shows for literal years to store on his portable hard drive, imported his entire content library into it. Our humble little media server, which essentially functions as a private Netflix, now has over 700 movies and nearly 1,000 episodes of TV series and is constantly growing. While it's not a solution for video games just yet, we can store just about any other type of media that we really want to keep forever handy. @nextcloud.bsky.social is also a fantastic thing to spin up on a private server for this purpose. Creating, editing, storing, and sharing files, documents, photos, etc. alongside family communication and collaboration tools is a great thing to have, especially when you're trying to get away from prying corporate eyes. So, you know... Returning to physical media or cloud services owned by Big Tech aren't your only options to escape library ghosts.

You just need to own your media. Or, at the very least, download it. Use torrents. Whatever you gotta do. If buying isn't owning anymore, then piracy isn't stealing. 🤷‍♂️ (Just be careful sailing those seas!)