By Emily Johnson | Feb 07, 2026
Kojima's words from half a decade ago were pointed. He suggested that people would eventually lose the ability to freely access the movies, books, and music they had come to love, placing himself in the category of those who would be left without access. While his comments were primarily framed around concerns over media control and censorship rather than the gaming industry specifically, they carry a weight that feels increasingly relevant as physical ownership becomes a relic of the past. What once sounded like an alarmist take now lands quite differently when one of the last major console manufacturers is moving away from physical media altogether.
A Direction the Industry Has Been Heading For Years
To be fair, the writing was on the wall long before Kojima said anything. PC gaming had already gone almost entirely digital years earlier, and rumours of an all-digital Xbox console circulated as far back as the Xbox One era. The shift away from physical media has been gradual but consistent, and Sony's decision merely formalises what the market has been trending toward for a long time. What makes Kojima's 2021 comments genuinely thought-provoking, though, is not the observation about digital replacing physical — it is the second part of what he said.
He warned that even digital ownership would not be permanent, suggesting that individual users would eventually lose control over their own digital libraries whenever significant changes or disruptions occurred in the world, with access potentially being cut off without warning.
That is the part of his prediction that feels most resonant right now. Moving to an all-digital model does not simply mean buying the same game in a different format — it means that the product a person pays for exists entirely at the discretion of the platform that hosts it. Licences can be revoked. Servers can be shut down. Companies can change policies overnight. The sense of ownership that came with a physical disc or cartridge disappears entirely when everything lives in a data centre that someone else controls.
Cloud Gaming and What Comes Next
The logical endpoint of this trajectory, many are now arguing, is cloud gaming becoming the dominant model for the industry. It has been floated as the future before, most notably through Google's Stadia platform, which ultimately failed to gain meaningful traction. The conditions then were simply not favourable enough to push most gamers toward a model with latency issues, compression problems, and a complete inability to modify or customise games. But the landscape has shifted. Gaming hardware prices have climbed steeply in recent years, making the prospect of a cheaper cloud-based alternative far more appealing to a wider audience than it would have been even five years ago.
If cloud gaming does become the mainstream model, it would represent exactly the scenario Kojima described — a world where users do not own their gaming experience at all, but simply rent access to it through infrastructure controlled entirely by corporations. The ability to modify, preserve, or even simply hold onto a game would be gone. Kojima's 2021 comments were made in a broad cultural context, but their application to where gaming appears to be heading is difficult to dismiss. Whether or not that future fully arrives, the fact that his words are resonating so strongly right now says something meaningful about the direction the industry is moving in and how many people are only just beginning to feel uncomfortable about it.
