By: Thomas Horvath

In recent news, there has been a controversy in the digital media industry. The controversy has been elevated in discussion due to two recent events from major companies. The director of subscriptions at Ubisoft made a very controversial claim that consumers need to stop thinking they fully own the video games that they digitally buy. “One of the things we saw is that gamers are used to, a little bit like DVDs, having and owning their games. That’s the consumer shift that needs to happen.” This quote from him angered many gamers since they feel it’s unfair to charge someone for a game and have no control over whether it shuts down or not. The second example of this was from the anime streaming service Funimation shutting down without warning to subscribers. Funimation is merging with another popular anime streaming service Crunchyroll, and Crunchyroll will be doubling its prices and will not allow transferring over of Funimation purchases to Crunchyroll. These examples have made many wonder if it’s time to switch back to physical media for your products.

For these streaming ideas to work, companies will have to lower their prices. The truth is, most people would rather know they own one game forever than own multiple games for a limited time. Nobody will pay the full 60 dollars for the next Assassin’s Creed game if it will be gone when Ubsioft decides it will be. Consumers like stability, and making games on trials will ruin them for many people. A game like Animal Crossing should not be limited to a couple of months, and many other games like this rely on you playing the game over time. For streaming services, stability is important too. There’s currently a streaming war happening between many major companies, leaving many people confused about where to watch movies. For example, if you want to watch the Spider-Verse movies, you’ll find Across the Spider-Verse on Netflix, not on Disney Plus with the other Spider-Man movies, but you can’t find Into the Spider-verse on either, so you’re left confused and unable to watch a movie and its sequel.

To sum up, video game companies need to leave games away from streaming services, streaming services need to have clearer libraries, and both need to lower their prices and increase stability.