You bought something and it's yours. Nothing could be simpler, and that's exactly what's dissolving. Owning means you can do whatever you want with it: lend it, sell it, give it away, keep it for thirty years, rediscover it during a house move, hand it down to your child. It means nobody has to keep giving you permission. A licence isn't that: it's a permission that is quietly renewed for as long as the other side cares to renew it, and a permission that can be withdrawn isn't ownership, it's trust that they won't withdraw it.
When a digital store closes, its catalogue disappears. It doesn't sell out: it gets deleted. Hundreds of games have already vanished that nobody can legally buy today, not even those who paid for them. A disc doesn't need servers, or valid licence agreements, or a company that still finds it profitable. It only needs someone to have kept it. And someone, thirty years from now, will open a box in a storage room and find it. Accounts aren't inherited: they're closed.
Almost all of us got here because someone lent us something. An older brother, a school friend, a cousin in the summer. Someone put a box in your hand and said try it, give it back when you're done. Lending has consequences: you have to see the other person twice, you have to remember, you have to give it back, you look after something that isn't yours. Whole friendships started that way. You don't lend an account: you share it, which is something else, or you infringe, as they call it. Lending isn't disappearing because it's technically impossible, but because it was the first thing they decided to get rid of.
A second-hand game lets someone with less money play, and lets the seller recover part of what they put in. That resale turns an eighty-euro expense into an affordable decision. Getting rid of it doesn't fight piracy or fund development: it transfers value from the buyer to the manufacturer, and nothing more.
You can give a code, of course: it arrives by email, you copy it, redeem it, it works. But nobody has seen a child open an email with trembling hands, or kept a code in a drawer for twenty years, or watched their father hesitate between two boxes on 23 December. A gift needs substance because it isn't the transfer of a good: it's the staging of the fact that someone thought of you, went somewhere, chose, paid and brought it. The object is the proof of that journey. Without an object, the gesture has no body.
What takes up space exists. It's in the living room, it gets in the way, you have to move it to clean, you have to decide whether it stays or goes. A full shelf forces you to make decisions about what matters. A digital library forces nothing: it grows without limit, nobody looks at it, nobody sorts it, and that's why nobody remembers it. People's homes speak about them; a downloads folder says nothing about anyone.
Manuals disappeared before boxes did and hardly anyone complained. They were little books with illustrations, a fold-out map, the list of controls, blank pages at the end. You read them in the car on the way home, before playing a single minute. Getting rid of them didn't save the buyer money: it saved the manufacturer money. The same goes for the art book, the only place where the work of illustrators and designers stops being invisible: printed, large, with the names at the end. Taking the art off the screen and putting it on a table where someone who doesn't play can open it. A downloadable PDF doesn't do that: it gets filed away and never opened.
Every piece has a date, a place where it was bought, someone you were with. A collection isn't an inventory: it's a biography written in objects, and you look at a cover and a whole summer comes back. A figure on the shelf serves no purpose, and that's its whole value: it says this thing I loved so much deserves to be in my home, on display, taking up a space something else could take. Film buffs have their posters, music lovers their vinyl, readers their bookshelves, and nobody finds that eccentric. Only in video games have we accepted that it's the first thing to be cut.
Digital games are edited after they're sold. Songs are removed because licences expire, characters are taken out, entire modes are changed. The version you bought may not be the one you have a year from now. A disc fixes the work at the moment it was published, and that fixing is the only guarantee that there's an original to go back to.
Real discounts aren't invented by the manufacturer out of generosity: they're forced by the shop next door. With a single seller, a single channel and a single catalogue, the price stops being the result of competition and becomes an internal decision. The consumer doesn't negotiate: they accept.
Hundred-gigabyte downloads, servers down on launch day, accounts blocked by mistake, areas with poor connection. Each of those scenarios is a reason not to be able to play something you've already paid for. A disc works in a house without internet, in a hospital, in a village, in 2045.
All the advantages of digital are felt on day one: it's already installed, you don't have to get up, there are deals. All its costs show up years later: you can't sell it, you can't lend it, you can't get it back, you can't keep it. Permanent rights are given up in exchange for immediate comforts, and there's no going back on that.
Nobody is asking to get rid of digital: it's convenient, it has made thousands of small games viable and it has broken down real geographical barriers. What we're defending here is that the alternative keeps existing. Loving something a lot creates the urge to keep it close; it's what makes people frame concert tickets, keep letters, hold on to a T-shirt they no longer wear. Digital solves access, and solves it well, but it doesn't solve this, because this isn't an access problem.
Buying a box, keeping it, opening it with someone, lending it, still having it twenty years later. That isn't nostalgia: it's the difference between owning something and having access to something. And when consoles stop coming with a disc drive, the conversation will have been closed without anyone asking us.