I used to get most of my video game info from magazines and books⁸. The argument could be made that magazines like Nintendo Power were thinly-veiled advertising vehicles, and I wouldn't fight you too hard on that. There is a blurry line between coverage intended to convince you to buy a thing and coverage intended to tell you about the thing that you might end up buying if it sounds cool.

Advertising vehicles or not, books and magazines that covered games were fun. Or, at least you could tell that the people who were writing them were having fun. Part of that is because these things didn't cover industry news like game studios shutting down or how some developer turned out to be a creep. It's not that these things aren't important, they are, but it's weird to mingle a casual overview of a cozy Mundane Task Simulator™ with article about The Very Worst Kind of Person© sprinkled in with tips and tricks for that hot new dungeon crawler

Even in the standard industry coverage articles, I don't get the impression that anyone is having any fun. I don't want to psychoanalyze anyone (So I won't), but seemingly every article about every topic is composed with the same emotionless matter-of-factness that just puts me to sleep.

Magazines effectively no longer exist¹⁰, and we didn't really talk about books. Video game books are their own weird thing that deserve a deeper dive one day, but video game books now are mostly coffee-table art books. You can't really read them because there's nothing in there to read.

I enjoy a good single-player experience, but video games are really best enjoyed with another person. Atari figured this out in 1979 and put four controller ports on the Atari 400 and 800 computers. Later consoles had multitaps, handheld consoles had link cables, arcade control panels had multiple sets of controls.

Of course, 'enjoyed with another person' doesn't always mean versus another player. You and a friend could be playing through Breath of the Wild by yourselves at home every evening, and when you meet up you talk about tips and tricks and puzzle solutions and dissect the story and do all the things that you would do when you talk about any activity.

That's a lot harder to do now. Partly because there are so many games released every day¹¹ that it's all but impossible to accidentally play a game at the same time as your friends without doing some kind of coordination.

And even if you do take the time and effort to play the same game(s) as your friends, you run into another way playing games isn't as fun any more. Games will try to sell you things.

Games are, at their heart, either a repetitive task that you do repeatedly until you fail or a series of tasks that you do like a long (or sometimes very long) checklist. Usually it's a mix of both. They're activities, sometimes with a story attached. The problem, though, is that everyone has a different threshold for how much busywork they're willing to do relative to how much reward they get out of it. What if you could make some of that work go away? For a small fee, of course. Or, if you encounter a challenge that's just outside your skill range, you can just apply some currency and the challenge is surmounted. Or maybe you just want a new outfit for your character in the game. Or maybe a whole new character. Or some extra side-stories. Or different voice lines for your character to say. Or maybe a new dance or a unique idle animation. Or a chair or a pet or anything you can think of.

Of course, all these things are optional, legally. But people are buying them with great enough frequency and profit margins are high enough that lots of games are free. The in-game-store sales pay for everything else. Some games are pushier about it than others, but mobile games are very bad about it. Some mobile games will actually interrupt your game to try to sell you something, sometimes even including a purchase to make the ads go away for a while. It's annoying, it's draining, and it turns what should be a fun distraction into a gauntlet where you have to protect your actual wallet from getting drained just a little bit more.

In those pictures above, you can see the games I own. As long as I can keep the hardware in working order, I can play the games that I bought any time I want. They can't be taken away (they could be stolen, I guess). I can't get banned from playing them. I can sell them once I've finished with them. I can do practically anything I want with them.

With Steam et al, I don't own anything. These digital storefronts are convenient, sure, but they don't last forever. The Wii store is shut down. The PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita stores are closing soon¹². Several launchers and storefronts have come and gone. Those purchases died along with them. I have dozens of games that I 'bought' and can never download again and can never play again.

For me, part of the fun of collecting things is that I can display the collection somewhere. I can look at it, other people can look at it. I curate it into an experience that's mine. Yeah, it's a little bit materialistic, and I appreciate that I am fortunate enough to have the resources to dedicate to showing these things off. But with digital-only distribution of games, what am I collecting? Licenses on a server somewhere? I can't line my shelves with that. I can't hang them on my wall.

But you don't just get games from stores. With physical releases, games show up in lots of other places. Yard sales, resale shops, Craigslist, etc. It can be fun to spend a day going to yard sales or making a road trip to a small thrift store in a podunk fifty miles away to hunt for items to make your collection incrementally more complete, or to find something that you didn't even know existed, or maybe even a cache of stuff that belonged to someone getting out of the hobby and they just want out of the house.

It's already practically impossible to find used video games out in the wild in my neck of the woods. Specialty stores have some at inflated prices, but even those are getting harder to come by. It's only going to get worse as physical media production winds down.

When I reluctantly started buying most of my PC games via Steam I did marvel at the convenience. I 'bought' a lot of stuff, but, nowadays, I barely look at it. Part of that is because I'm getting older now and I have more demands of my time than I did when the Super NES walked the earth. But, also, as the years have gone by, the things I liked about video games have slowly been stripped away in the search for more money. It's a constant struggle with subscriptions and battle passes and microtransactions and loot boxes and ads injected directly into games and ownership not meaning ownership and vendor lock-in and skyrocketing prices and games as a service and… And I'm just tired.

I just want to collect some games, you know?

This article was posted on 14 Jul 2026 and I haven't looked at it since.