WHAT’S IN A BOX?
Boxes – funny old things, aren’t they? You’d be understood in thinking that boxes, cases, and containers are becoming redundant as more game services move over to digital cloud platforms – to some, especially PC gamers, who have long since been pushed out of the physical retail market, they seem quaint, reminders of a time where a 500mb game would come spread across ten floppy disks and an instruction manual that rivalled the Harry Potter series in size. Those were the days where games weren’t nearly as numerous or widely accessed, when it truly was a niche hobby enjoyed by few – far from the golden age of gaming as we know it today.
But in my opinion, the box is still an important part of the retail/consumer process. You’ve all seen how heated up people get about a good game with bad box art (See the BioShock: Infinite Dudebro Debate for a better idea of this) and the disappearance of paper manuals still perturbs many gamers even now. The kind of people this upsets might come across as sad or petulant to a lot of the gaming crowd, but you’ll usually find that these gamers are the ones who still pine for the days when games came in cardboard boxes and felt much more personal. In other words, the core of the audience, gamers who have been playing for over a decade and much more besides.
So what happens when you pick up a box? Why do some people swear by hard copies? Because it’s a physical connection with a product. It makes you feel much safer and much more comfortable parting with your money because you own a hard copy that’s not going to vanish if a company goes down or implements some fascist DRM measures. What happens with your hard copy is almost entirely up to you, and it’s likely to be safe until your interest in the game is exceeded by your need for an emergency coffee coaster. You can stick it on a shelf somewhere with all of your other boxes and feel smug about it. There’s all sorts of reasons why gamers think boxes are important, and our reverence of them is culturally fused into our community because – and this next one might come as a shock – most core gamers are avid collectors of well, anything. It’s how most games keep us hooked and doesn’t it make sense that we might feel the same way about our game collection too?
I mentioned before that having a hard copy makes us feel more secure in our purchase. Given that we’re technically buying licenses to play games rather than games themselves from the bigger publishers (licenses those publishers might revoke if they start running out of money) having a disk makes you feel entitled. You have a box – you own that box, and it makes you feel like you own that copy of the game. How ridiculous would it be if 2K stormed into your house at midnight, picked up your 360 copy of Borderlands 2, and absconded with it into the night? It would be theft.
Yet, when we buy digital copies of games, our product, and our money, is completely in the hands of someone else, most likely a huge corporation that wouldn’t give two fucks if you’ve had to reformat your PC and didn’t know you could only activate your serial key or bullshit ‘passport code’ once. It’s gone, and they don’t owe you anything because you didn’t read the terms of the license. Publishers enact these reasons under the flag of combating piracy, but in reality it’s to stomp out the second-hand games market and drive up their own sales. They don’t make anything when you pick up a preowned game on Amazon for ten quid less, it goes to small businesses or individuals, and that’s no good to them.
Maybe that’s why we’re clinging on to boxes and manuals so much. We associate them with a time where we didn’t have to worry about DRM or half-assed online passes to play games with our friends. We associate boxes with the freedom to do what we want with our purchases, be it lend them to some buddies or sell them on when we’ve had our fun. How many games do you have, lurking in the recesses of your bedroom, that you don’t want to just throw away but you can’t play or even just give away any more? It might not be as prevalent on consoles as it is on PC, but believe me, the day is coming where consoles will begin to use that same Nazi-esque measure, and any concept of a preowned games market will go out of the window entirely. Console gamers beware – DRM is coming your way.
