PlayStation's Techno-feudalism is Here

Over the last three years, algorithms and Big Techs have been at the center of my research. The core theme deals with the epistemic erosion inflicted upon human cognition — first by social media algorithms, then by deepfakes, astroturfing, and now by advances in artificial intelligence. During the planning stage, I stumbled a few times upon a new term: technofeudalism, popularized by Yanis Varoufakis in 2023. It refers to a new economic order and social hierarchy in which large tech companies no longer work as service providers but instead operate as "feudal lords" who control digital territories (clouds), with control over the means of access to digital markets and services.

Below them are the vassals dependent on the digital fiefdoms to operate. Think of your favorite YouTube channel or a website you access often (I'd be so happy if it were ours!) — both are, in one way or another, dependent on Google, the feudal lord who dictates the rules of the digital territory.

To sell their products, vassals must pay tributes such as commissions, data, boosts, or domains to the feudal lords of the platforms. They become subservient to the lords, following their orders with no possibility of mobilization if, for example, the monetization criteria were suddenly changed.

At the base are the users. To access services like shopping, communication, entertainment, or even work, they must submit to the rules of the platforms and pay the tribute to the feudal lord through subscriptions and unpaid labor by offering data to improve search engines or artificial intelligence tools.

The term has its share of controversies and criticisms, especially for treating technofeudalism as a new economic and social stage that overlays capitalism without empirical supporting evidence. The alarmist tone is also rejected, but we need to recognize how it applies to the daily routine of many.

Self-employed workers are dependent on apps like Uber; portals live at the mercy of Google's metrics and ads; digital influencer profiles need engagement on TikTok and Instagram; shopkeepers cannot remain competitive without entering marketplaces like Amazon and eBay; and now the video game player depends on authorization to access the game.

The rise of artificial intelligence puts technofeudalism in greater evidence with the promise of implementing these tools into the workflow and daily routine to expand productivity. The gaming public already feels the financial weight of AI, and the PlayStation 6 for four digits in dollars seems a real possibility with each increase in component costs and, consequently, in console prices.

Through the end of physical disc manufacturing starting in 2028, Sony takes the next step toward technofeudalism, where players have less agency over games and become more dependent on the company for a habit that was once completely autonomous: playing video games.

In the days following Sony's announcement, the press dissected some of the practical consequences of the measure. Polygon argued that even players who already buy only digital will be affected: without discs, there is no more secondary used market, and anyone who wants to play a title released after 2028 will have to buy it at full price directly on the PlayStation Store.

Gamespot showed how dynamic pricing affects the buyer's experience. Two Brazilians paid different amounts for Stellar Blade on the PlayStation Store, and first-party games like Astro Bot also appeared with different prices for different users. The practice is controversial and has already generated class action lawsuits alleging that digital prices are, on average, 47% higher than physical discs. With the end of physical media, aside from this comparison ceasing to exist, Sony gains a monopoly over game pricing on the PlayStation platform.

In an authorial and critical piece, IGN shone a spotlight on the timing. Sony communicated that it would remove over 550 StudioCanal films from users' accounts in Europe, and they would disappear from the libraries of those who had bought them, without reimbursement. The announcement came in the same week that Rockstar had confirmed Grand Theft Auto VI would not be released on disc and the physical version would come with a download code inside the box.

The decision with GTA VI has clear reasons and works as a bitter pill for a historical problem: with codes, companies control access to the game through downloads and avoid leaks, but the end of discs also eliminates the used market, normalizing games as exclusively digital and, finally, stripping the user of the right to own the product.

All media fronts, despite taking different angles, agree that the practice is harmful to the player and that trust in digital purchases is an illusion. The technofeudalist proposal that Sony is now joining presupposes that the user is authorized to access the game without it belonging to them. If, by chance, a user has their account wrongfully banned and cannot get resolution through a programmed PlayStation customer service chatbot, they will lose access to their games until an email or ticket is answered and grants them the account back. If they cannot, they also lose all the games they had purchased. If their favorite game leaves the catalog or lacks backward compatibility with some future PlayStation model, they will be at the mercy of a port or remaster for the new generation.

At stake are the definition of ownership and the consolidation of a fiefdom. In traditional capitalism, whoever buys a disc owns a material good and holds complete autonomy over it — that game on your shelf can be lent, resold, donated, or just left there as part of your personal library. In the digital model, the consumer becomes a tenant while paying full price.

Unlike other controversial decisions in PlayStation's history, this one will hardly be reversed. It closes a tradition that began before the disc was the medium on which games were inserted, but they were essential for the popularization of the genre as an entertainment giant.

The cartridge era brought video rental stores with game catalogs. At the time, games were considerably expensive — adjusted for inflation, pricier than today. Renting cartridges was the most economical option for lower-middle-class families. The model only worked because the cartridges had no fixed owner: even if the user could not own the Mario cartridge, having the Super Nintendo at home ensured you could always rent it at a lower cost for a weekend.

Rental remained part of disc culture, but it began to compete for space with an even more disruptive tool regarding sales numbers: piracy was made easier by the change of media and by technological advancement. On one front, it was money slipping away from the pockets of publishers and platform holders; on the other, the popularization of the gaming market in emerging countries like Brazil was reinforced. If there are so many adults over thirty years old eagerly awaiting GTA VI today and willing to pay, it is because many had contact with the series through GTA San Andreas bought at a street market during adolescence.

It is not our place to defend piracy, nor to reject it due to socioeconomic aspects. Its contribution to gaming culture in a country like Brazil is undeniable, but that faucet was already shut off by Sony on a PlayStation 3 filled with controversies about prices that justified a considerable migration to the Xbox 360, still driven in emerging countries by piracy.

Sony reclaimed the crown with the PlayStation 4 and did so without piracy serving as an unofficial dissemination resource: the teenager who played GTA San Andreas now had a job and money to buy the games they wanted at a higher but still accessible price. At the time, Microsoft had published aggressive DRM policies, which helped PlayStation take the lead over Xbox for two cycles.

Despite the increase in prices over recent years, coupled with an income squeezed by economic crises, a considerable portion of the public continues to consume games. Sales may even come mostly from digital revenue, but physical media was the path that brought video games to this point. It was through lending to friends, trading games, or even reselling old games to cover the cost of new titles that a significant part of gaming culture grew.

Autonomy is also at the heart of this discussion. The rental store owner bought the cartridge and decided for how much it would be rented and for how much it would be sold afterward, and the adult who lends a game or gives it as a gift to a friend decided to relinquish a belonging of theirs. Eliminating physical media and cutting the user's right of ownership means putting an end to a timeline of countless transformations that, over decades, brought benefits to the industry even when it was hurting sales numbers.

Your children will no longer be able to share games with their friends with the same ease. Your nephew, who may like a specific game series, might not have access to previous titles because Sony did not put them in the digital catalog or had to terminate the contract with the developer, and you cannot even lend your copies because his PlayStation 6 lacks a disc drive.

The means of accessibility are being cut, and hardware scarcity has driven up console prices, while the average citizen's income is squeezed on essential fronts. The consumer looking to buy a console after the price hikes will opt for the cheaper model, already without a disc drive. Consumers with disc-free consoles will never buy physical media, which justifies the end of discs due to changes in consumption patterns.

It is true that digital games are also more convenient to buy, but by being pushed to choose it, the consumer is also legitimizing the platform's total control over the rights of their purchase, and it manifests, from Sony's decision onward, as a driver toward their servitude. It is equally true that convenience was already growing and became a habit for many during the pandemic, but it proved to be an efficient model for both sides: 78% of Sony's full game sales in the last year were digital. For Sony, it is a victory given that the company doubles the profit on each sale on its platform as it has no manufacturing and distribution costs.

Cursing out Sony on Twitter or signing a petition to bring the disc drive back will not postpone the end of physical media. The changes must come through law, and they are made through organized pressure.

The legal problem starts with the definition of what a digital purchase is. When you pay for a game on the PlayStation Store, you are buying a usage license, revocable at any moment, whose terms Sony can change without asking for permission. Your purchase is the right to enjoy a resource from that digital farm. A law that recognizes a digital purchase as the acquisition of a good is needed. The consumer would then have the right to permanent ownership and to the resale, transfer, and inheritance of the product, even if online services are discontinued.

A front requiring the obligation to maintain access is also needed. The case of The Crew, when Ubisoft shut down the servers and about 12 million copies were rendered useless, is the symbol of this problem. The Stop Killing Games movement was born from this, collected 1.45 million signatures, and pressured the European Commission, leading the European Parliament to approve a resolution that recognizes the need to guarantee citizens the right to continue using acquired digital goods.

The right to digital resale also needs to be guaranteed through a law that makes explicit the right to resell and transfer digital games. In theory, it would solve the problem of digital product autonomy: simply give the buyer the right to transfer their game to another account on the same platform. It is simple in theory, but difficult to apply in practice without risking abuse or duplication. Legislation that guarantees the user the right to access their library in case of hacking, loss, or banning of the account is also necessary.

The shutdown of the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita digital stores risks taking some of the titles available into limbo — Xenogears, for example, can only be played through official means on one of these platforms. A way is needed to maintain the cultural preservation of digital games without them being limited to piracy, publicly available as long as their sites or servers are not taken down.

These proposals already exist, albeit scattered. It has never been more necessary to remain vocal about them. They lack the political strength to turn drafts into law, or sufficient popular pressure, and that does not come from complaints on Reddit, but from organized mobilization with demands directed at representatives. Technofeudalism can handle hundreds of thousands of furious accounts with an algorithm, but a politician cannot ignore a popular force if it proves capable of overriding lobby interests.

For a portion of the public, the uproar over the end of physical media may seem like just mass commotion over a tiny problem when most game sales already happen in the digital environment. Most services also already exist as digital tools: the music you listen to without advertisers on Spotify and your favorite series on Netflix are there, and you have no right over them, but you enjoy them until the usage policies change. Your favorite series can cease to exist or migrate to another platform, and ad-free music can undergo a price adjustment or the implementation of exceptions, just like podcasts on Spotify, which have ads even on the Premium plan.

The bigger problem lies in how the examples from the digital environment we have today show how the consumer has no agency over the changes and whims of the large corporations that provide their services. Sony has already demonstrated, through dynamic pricing on the PlayStation Store, the risks of being exclusively at the mercy of just one platform for purchases and library holding. And if every large corporation seems to have a common interest today, it is to transform the product into a service you have the right to enjoy, but not the right to own: from the series you watch to your cognitive process.

With the end of physical media and without laws that protect the consumer, players are left at the mercy of the technofeudalist whims of platform holders. The project advances because the lords of the digital farms have accustomed the peasants to living with only what their systems allow them to have at the cost of their data and without one of the basic principles of what it means to be a citizen: the right to property.

Unless they start demanding laws that preserve this right for them, gamers will begin 2028 being less of a citizen.