End Of Playstation’s Physical Games Preludes More Censorship

In late August, an organized consumer boycott of the Sony PlayStation5 video game console began.

In July, manufacturer Sony announced that, from January 2028 onwards, it would no longer release titles on physical discs, nor allow third-party publishers to do so. Instead, consumers will be forced to purchase them all online as digital downloads. This model is sold to consumers as being more convenient. However, the only people compulsory digital ownership models are truly more convenient for are greedy corporate bean-counters and power-hungry in-house censors.

As clarified by Sony in a gloating email to customers, any games purchased in this new, online-only manner, are “licensed to you, not sold,” in a completely “non-transferable” manner, meaning the company can decide to “terminate your access” to them at any time.

The general trend underlying Sony’s move toward a digital future should concern even persons who have never so much as picked up a joypad in their lives. Along with concerns over ownership versus licensing, there is the far wider and more disturbing issue of censorship by stealth. If you own a physical copy of a game, it is akin to owning a physical copy of a book; what is there on the disc or cartridge is there forever, at least until it rots. If you “own” only some digital code, however, then it can be altered in all kinds of unwanted ways via the internet without your prior knowledge or permission.

Nearly four in five PlayStation game purchases are today made via download format, and Sony sees advantages in cutting down on manufacturing and distribution costs, as well as eliminating the secondhand market, from which they currently earn nothing.

Most people do not read the digital small print of the games they are “purchasing” (or not) via download, however, and so do not realize that titles can simply be deleted from online storefronts at some future time. Those gamers who do understand the implications of Sony’s move were asked to participate in a  “PlayStation Blackout” between August 23 and 30, during which period they pledged not to make any digital purchases or even use their consoles at all. Some angry gamers are pledging to join the PS5 blackout indefinitely.

Previous Video Game Censorship

Digital censorship has already been occurring in games for years. An image of the WWII-era imperial Japanese flag was quietly snipped from the background of a level in the modern rerelease of the classic 1990s beat-’em-up “Street Fighter II,” “in an effort not to offend any parts of the Street Fighter community,” i.e., the Chinese Communist Party. Whoever knew President Xi Jinping liked pulling spinning bird-kicks whilst pretending to be Chun-Li? Other games have also been stealth-edited to be more China-palatable in this way, so such neutered products could still be sold there.

It isn’t just the Chinese being appeased in this manner, but the woke too. In 2023, Nazi references were excised from a decade-old multiformat fighting game, “Skullgirls,” which also had several sexualized depictions of the main characters edited out too.

Why did the developers do this? Because, they said, the in-game Nazi-like enemies “were always intended to evoke imagery from an oppressive militant regime, [but] we felt that the way that manifested (most notably via red armbands, flags, and symbolism) was too close for comfort – especially given the unfortunate reality that some of these hate groups are still active in various respects to this day.”

Funny, I could have sworn those guys had been defeated back in 1945 or something? Not to hysterical developers who think that Donald Trump and his Republicans are “literally Hitler.”

Rewriting the Book

Beyond video games, such censorship has also occurred with other digital media, notably e-books. The recent Kindle version of the 2006 teen-lit novel Pretty Little Liars now inexplicably features mention of the characters using TikTok, even though TikTok itself wasn’t launched in the West until 2017. The book now also includes mention of the songs of Billie Eilish: which, at time of original publication, could only have been “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” as the pop star was four years old in 2006.

It sounds like a cynical commercial means to update trashy non-books to keep them “relevant” to tweenage readers, but where does this end? Raskolnikov killing an old lady with a drone rather than an ax in Crime and Punishment? More sinister ideological edits, like Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy suddenly being full of transgenderists and Gambian asylum seekers, to show how “these people have always been here!” now become alarmingly possible too.

In 2023, e-book versions of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s novels were surreptitiously altered to remove “offensive” language “related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race,” causing such an outcry that the scheme eventually ended up partly reversed.

Video games are not as culturally high-status a medium as books, however, meaning similar acts of stealth-censorship in them do not gain anything like as much public attention, allowing digital download copies to act as a potential means of habituating the young into thinking such Orwellian actions are normal.

Once upon a time, when totalitarian regimes like the Soviets wanted to retrospectively alter the contents of their official party-affiliated encyclopedias to blot out entries about newly minted non-persons, they had to mandate citizens to manually snip out now “outmoded” sections with scissors, before pasting in new, more acceptable, paragraphs instead. Consumers need new protections against modern versions of these same kinds of abuse, such as a right to opt out of bowdlerized downloaded updates, or at least to toggle between the old and new versions, but governments currently show precious little interest in addressing these issues. 

It is in the wider interests of society as a whole, not just of gamers, that boycotts like the PlayStation blackout succeed. Unfortunately, the general industry opinion is that it will probably fail. In July, the month when Sony first announced its digital-only future, a prior incipient fan-led boycott of digital titles worked so well that… sales of physical disc-based games hit an all-time low in the U.S.

“You will own nothing and be happy,” as a World Economic Forum video once infamously put it. Not when your video games all suddenly disappear or become filled with demographically diverse blue-haired transsexual communists overnight for no good reason.

Steven Tucker is a U.K.-based writer whose work appears regularly on both sides of the Atlantic. His latest book is “Hitler’s and Stalin’s Misuse of Science.”