Sega proving we all need to preserve media

I can understand leaving behind cartridge media that you can't make compatible with your newest game console. I can understand not being able to play videotapes in a DVD player. I can understand not being able to play CDs on an MP3 player. I can understand not being able to plug a hardcover book into your ebook reader. As the technological generations progressed, the previous generation's hardware was made incompatible. However, even though the N64 couldn't play Super NES games, you still had your Super NES, which you could swap out for your N64 and play at leisure. Even though a DVD player couldn't play your VHS collection, you could swap out the DVD player for the VCR and watch your tapes at leisure. Even though you can't get a copy of The Communist Manifesto onto your Kindle, you still have your hardcover copy that you can just open up and read, leaving your Kindle in the other room.

There is no more "next generation of technology", no more "newer faster processor", no more hardware divide for the corporate feudal state to hide behind in order to obsolete last year's releases. No matter what it says on the outside of the device, it's exactly the damn same inside the device. All smart devices, all computers, all game consoles, all consumer electronics with a screen and a filesystem use either an ARM64 or x64 processor, they all use the same kind of memory, they all use the same data storage. So, when a corporate feudal entity announces they're discontinuing a media series, they're just trying to get more money out of you.

Sega recently announced that they were de-listing huge swathes of their games from all the DLC services where they're currently available, giving absolutely no reason for it, only that "we're doing this, be happy about it." Here is the complete list, and I'm sorry for having to be the bearer of bad news.

While one can only speculate as to the motivation behind removing nearly their entire roster from Games as a Service, one can reasonably assume that they intend to start a DLC service of their very own. Just like how Disney removed all their name-brand offerings from Hulu and Netflix in advance of launching Disney+, or how CBS removed the Star Trek franchise from streaming in advance of launching Paramount+. Given this is how large companies behave these days, one can only imagine the imminent rise of SEGA+ or some such thing, drawing its content from this list of nuked games.

If you have not yet been radicalised into media preservation, this should do it. There is absolutely no reason for any game download service to go offline except for corporate greed. Really, I've talked about this before, how Games as a Service is just corporate greed, through and through. Just like how Nintendo shut down the eShop, despite thousands of people still playing their 3DSes, or Microsoft shutting down its ebook service and running into the night with people's money.

At this point, I need to bring up the concept of "abandonware" again. Abandonware is a grey area of copyright law where no one is currently attempting to profit from the sale of a software program. Come December 9th, when Sega pulls the plug on all these games, until their new DLC service goes into operation, all 60 of these games qualify as abandoned. At this point, you are well within your rights to download them from a media preservation site, such as the Internet Archive. If a particular game, say Altered Beast, never gets put back onto the service, it will remain abandonware in spite of it and can be downloaded from a preservation archive and played on an emulator in broad daylight.

That's hardly the point, anyway. Even if it does get onto SEGA+ or whatever they decide to call it, the fact is that this giant company has the power to control access to its products. With physical media, even taking the cycle of entropy into account, the company is not able to assert any control over the media it produces. Redbox is a recent example of this. When Redbox terminated business, any DVDs in circulation stopped being able to be returned and are now the property of the people who rented them. Say you rented a bunch of movies in advance of summer holiday from Redbox in late June 2024. You watched them, a couple you watched a few times, and then you went back to Walgreens the 2nd week of July to return them only to find that the kiosk had been removed. What did you do? Did you package them up at your expense and send them back to Redbox like you used to do with Netflix? Did you drop them into the wastebin on your way back to your car? No, in all probability, you took them back home with you and they're now a part of your collection. There was a video rental store in my hometown back at the millennium that went out of business while I had 5 videos, 1 Nintendo 64 game, and 2 GameCube games rented. Did I track down the manager at home and give them back? Well, the manager had been arrested for tax fraud, so he wouldn't have been at home anyway, but no. You can imagine I absorbed all those rentals into my collection. That's my point. The only way you can be assured of constant, uninterrupted access to your Media as a Service is to disconnect your device from the internet and never reconnect it; and there are even devices that won't work unless connected. Your right of ownership has been removed from you and placed back onto the company.

This is why I advocate so much for physical media, and why I say Chromebooks aren't computers. Most Chromebooks have no media slots (some don't even have USB or SD ports). The only way to combat premium content delivery is to acquire the relevant media in the physical plane. Sadly, even this is not possible for many of us. Maybe our computers have no media ports, maybe the item we want isn't available as anything but a downloadable license.

In the interim, however—we have pirate streaming sites, torrent seeders, and datahoards. We have software like MakeMKV, tools like GodMode9, and people like anadius to give us what huge multinational corporations have taken away: ownership.