It sucks to settle for digital products in the modern age. I will always prefer owning a physical version of something I love over a license that can be taken away by a company at short notice. When we spend money on a video game on the PlayStation Store, we are not buying something that now belongs to us, but the right to play and engage on a platform that will one day cease to exist. Art is constantly erased in the pursuit of profit.
But in the last generation of consoles, PlayStation has done right by its legacy. Well, sort of. Astro Bot was a platformer love letter to the console giant, while making a habit of releasing classic PS1, PS2 and PSP games on its digital storefront. We live in a world where you can download and play Mister Mosquito whenever you want, only to realize it was never very good before immediately uninstalling it. That's the case with many classic games like this, but their quality isn't the point.
Dino Crisis should not be locked behind a subscription paywall
Sony also locks a handful of its classic titles behind its higher PlayStation Plus tiers and requires you to have an active subscription to access them. If the titles in question are still available for purchase outside the service, that's fine, but with Dino Crisis, unfortunately, that's not the case.
Unfortunately, at the time of writing there is no option to access the game if you are not a PlayStation Plus member, and that is absurd when the opposite precedent has already been set. You're taking away the ability to own and telling players, new and old, that if they want to experience a piece of PlayStation history, they have to do it indirectly.
Nintendo is a nightmare for this too. Once upon a time we had the Virtual Console on Wii, Wii U and 3DS. But with the dawn of Nintendo Switch Online, this marketplace of classics was brushed aside in favor of a service with a very limited library of titles. It's not a bad way to play classic games, but it's a limited way where digital ownership simply isn't an option.
My 3DS and Wii U are filled with downloadable titles that I can return to if I want, and Nintendo spent generations making this a standard practice only to suddenly remove it. Experiencing crucial pieces of gaming history becomes the perk of expensive services, instead of being made more accessible via independent digital purchases that everyone can benefit from. At least Xbox has developed a habit of selling original Xbox and 360 games for pennies, many of which have also been enhanced for new hardware.
Classic games are being made difficult by our digital future
Behavior like this from all platform holders will lead us to a place where the history of video games won't matter as much as how they can charge us to play all the games we can't access anywhere thanks to fading physical hardware and packaged devices that are too expensive for most players to obtain. I own a copy of Dino Crisis, and have seen it through to completion a number of times, but many others have not, and I'd hate for that opportunity to be tainted by misplaced corporate greed.
Like streaming services that host decades of film and television, companies are selective in what they decide to preserve and present to the public. This is a bad way to approach any form of art, but here we are completely powerless to do anything about it.
Dino Crisis is a survival horror game from Capcom, where you guide Special Agent Regina on a mission to an island populated by dinosaurs.
