The Erosion of Ownership | 10 Years Ago This Month
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Wednesday 6th April 2022
The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before. That said, even an industry so entrenched in the now can learn from its past.
So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer some perspective on our field's history, GamesIndustry.biz runs this monthly feature highlighting happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago.
Last month we talked about the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy and the harmful trends we've seen as a result of companies giving players creative ownership of games. This month we're going to be talking about how that's pretty much the only form of ownership players have over the games they play now.
In April of 2012, the next-generation of consoles loomed large. At that point, the Xbox 360 had been out for nearly seven years and its successor hadn't even been announced yet. The PS3 was going on six years, and its follow-up was similarly unannounced. Given we only went four years between the launch of the Xbox and the Xbox 360, people were ready for something new.
Nintendo had at least shown off the Wii U, although with reports that the system wouldn't even be able to keep up with the Xbox 360 and PS3, it seemed like we would have to wait for Sony and Microsoft to show off the "real" next generation of gaming hardware.
The problem was Sony and Microsoft hadn't yet said anything about their next-gen systems, which were still a year-and-a-half away from launch. However, we were starting to get some early insider reports about them with some alarming details.
In late March, Kotaku reported on the PlayStation 4 (codenamed Orbis) and offered a
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