Tariffs and the (Impending) Doom of Physical Games

I’m going to start this post off by saying something that might seem unrelated to this class, but stick with me.

I love books. Over my 25 years of life, I have accumulated around 600+ books – I just counted for your benefit – and I am certain to accumulate many more. I love being surrounded by my books, I love seeing them every morning and every night, I love flipping idly through them, I love writing in my books, and I love lending my books out to my friends.

But – I also have a Kindle. And as much as I adore each and every one of my precious books, I also get a whole lot of use out of my Kindle. I see its benefits: easier to carry, more durable, instant access to any book in the world. But, for the 600+ books I own physical copies of, I only have about 50 books on my Kindle, most of them downloaded through the Kindle Unlimited subscription with little thought and less care.  Indeed, I can say with confidence that my Kindle will never replace my beloved library.

But what would happen if I stopped having a choice? What if digital downloads were the only way that I could access and read books? A chilling thought. And yet, this could be happening to the video game industry before our very eyes.

As we all know (and likely wish we knew less), freshly inaugurated US President Donald Trump has wasted no time in throwing the world into economic turmoil by imposing (or threatening to impose) tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada. And while we are Canadian, I actually want to focus on the Mexico side of this issue. Because, according to this article from Ars Technica, video game discs are predominantly manufactured in Mexico. This means that if sweeping tariffs are imposed, the costs associated with producing physical copies of video games will increase.

Physical video games have been on the outs for a while, with some sources reporting that in 2022, digital games accounted for 70% of all video game sales, with this disparity growing each passing year. This seems to suggest that a future where video games exist in digital form only is not impossible, nor is it very far. Indeed, as costs to manufacture go up, so do costs to buy, and people are already not buying physical games at the current price point. Therefore, it seems unlikely that video game companies will deem it worth the cost to continue producing physical games.

This, for me, raises a broader range of questions with respect to digital vs physical media ownership. One on hand, digital ownership has a ton of benefits: potentially unlimited storage space, instantaneous access, convenience, and, often, a lower price. But for all of these benefits, I think there are also genuine concerns about shifting to a digital only media model. The biggest is the fact that we will no longer own any of our media. Indeed, everything we ‘own’ digitally is actually just licensed content that we can lose at any time, at the owner’s discretion. The true owner can determine what we do with the content, and as such, we lose a lot of the rights that we often associate with property, such as the right to resell or lend content and the right to keep something indefinitely.

If you will allow me to get on my soapbox for one moment, I have to admit that I am a little bit wary of this shift that leaves media control entirely in the hands of a small number of companies. It makes it more likely that certain pieces of media will disappear entirely, and further fractures people’s sense of community as the sharing economy dwindles. Furthermore, we enter into these licensing agreements with no ability to bargain on our side: those who own the media will have unilateral power to dictate what we do with it.

As such, I think that physical media is very important for more than just sentimental reasons, and it is troubling to me certain industries are at risk of disappearing physically all together. When is the last time you bought a DVD, or, indeed, a physical game?

What do you all think of this debate? Do you disagree with me about the importance of physical media? Am I being alarmist (very possible)? Also interesting – the intersection of owning physical media with intellectual property rights. What does owning a CD, for example, actually get you?

Leave me a comment and let’s discuss! In the meantime, I will be in my fortress of books, flipping and annotating at my leisure.