The EFF weighs in on Sony’s killing of physical discs in an article by Rory Mir and Suzanne Castillo. Mir and Castillo call it an “attack” that “[moves] the goalpost on what it actually means to ‘own’ a piece of media,” and state clearly that “[if] you bought it, you should own it.” But I wanted to highlight this paragraph:

Depriving gamers of physical discs leads to another obvious and immediate cost: data. Unlike other digital media like film and TV, video games require a ton of storage. Access to high speed internet is still abysmal in the US, making the high-speeds needed for digital game downloads a luxury some of us may take for granted. For many, a modern game can take days and exceed their data caps.

This made physical discs, particularly for the biggest AAA titles, a logical choice that also largely spared gamers from losing traditional ownership rights. With physical disks, the cost of storing the game was included in the purchase.

I seldom see mentioned the impact of digital downloads on consumers with poor internet connectivity or who pay for metered bandwidth. One downloaded game could blow their monthly allotment. In the U.S., this unsurprisingly tends to impact the least privileged communities—often Black, often poor, often rural—the most. (This realization was one of several extra bits of motivation that helped reduce Xcode’s download size over the years.)

Kudos to EFF for calling this out.