The biggest piece of video gaming news this past week was Sony's announcement that it would end production of physical game discs in January of 2028. This won't just affect any potential upcoming PS6 console. This decision will affect future PS5 games as well, which as of 2028, will no longer be available in physical disc formats.

If it were just a simple matter of transitioning from ownership of physical media to ownership of digital media, I would be all for it!

Games being digital only would mean that publishers wouldn't have to mine for materials, pollute the environment with manufacturing discs, or burn gasoline (and emit greenhouse gases) from having to transport those discs across oceans and continents to retailers. It also means they won't end up in landfills. These would all be positive changes for the environment, which I think would outweigh the downfalls of physical discs being un-available. The biggest problem with digital-only ownership would probably be distribution for people with limited (or no) internet access. I do think that is a problem which should be addressed. Poor rural gamers deserve to be able to play new games too. But a digital-only ownership model would be, I think, a net positive.

The problem, of course, is that Sony (and other media companies) are not switching to a "digital ownership" model; they are forcing consumers into a license-leasing model. They are stripping away consumers' right to own the media we purchase. All digital purchases can be revoked from our libraries at any time, for any reason (or for no reason at all), completely at the whims of our wannabe corporate overlords. Worse yet, as far as I can recall, courts have generally upheld that "buying" a digital good is, in fact, a temporary lease of a license. I did a quick Google search for a case precedent, but couldn't find anything specific. So take that with a grain of salt, but I remember reading about some case in which Amazon (or somebody) won a lawsuit involving the revocation of digital purchases.

In fact, California is further codifying this with a consumer protection law that requires retailers to clearly disclose that the customer does not own the media they are buying. This sort of disclosure is good, but I think what the laws should be doing is codifying that the consumer does, in fact, own the purchases media, and that the retailer cannot prohibit the consumer from copying or preserving the media for personal use. But we live in a corporate dystopia that only cares about protecting corporate profits instead of the rights of the public.

Earlier today, football gaming fans got some bad (but not un-expected) news. Take Two has apparently canceled its proposed new NFL 2k video game. There wasn't any kind of press release or public announcement (that I saw). Instead, Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick broke the news in an interview with Game File. The full interview is behind a pay-wall, so I wasn't able to read the entire thing. So I was reliant on other media outlets, such as Insider Gaming, to summarize the interview.

Take Two had obtained the rights to make an NFL game back in 2020. The kicker was that EA still held an NFL-mandated exclusivity on "simulation" NFL games, which meant that anything 2k would develop or publish would have to be some kind of "non-simulation" (i.e. "arcade") game.

However, the little shreds of news that we got about this game over the years indicated that it was in development hell, and may have been completely restarted multiple times. Now, Zelnick has confirmed that the designs that Take Two was experimenting with simply "weren't working out creatively". Take Two couldn't simply make an NFL 2k game like they used to back in the early 2000's, since that would qualify as a "simulation" game. This apparently left them struggling to try to find an alternative identity for their game. Would it be something like NFL Street? NFL Blitz? Legend Bowl? Or maybe ... ugh ... their own variation of Ultimate Team, but without a Franchise Mode to go along with it in order to appeal to sim gamers like me? Well, apparently, none of those ideas really panned out, and the designers were unable to come up with any ideas or prototypes that the executives felt would appeal to a wide enough market to justify the costs of the NFL license and development.

The only product that came out of the deal was a mobile card-collecting game called NFL 2k Playmakers, which went out-of-support after only a year on the market.

NFL 2k Playmakers was a mobile card-collecting game that was shut down after only a year.

There's been a lot of depressing news lately. The rise of fascism and right-wing authoritarianism around the globe, an unstable stock market and economy being manipulated by White House for private gain at the cost of tax-payers and consumers, wars and genocides, irreversible climate change tipping points being tipped, and so much more. But through all that, there was one shining bright moment this past 2 weeks: The launch and successful landing of NASA's Artemis II mission. For the first time in more than a generation, human beings have travelled beyond near Earth orbit and around the moon. Sadly, this was a manned test run of the capsule, and so this mission did not land on the moon. For that, we will have to wait till 2028, at least.

Photo credit: NASA.

Artemis II crew: Jeremy Hansen, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Hammock Koch.

Space exploration has felt rather stagnant for decades. The focus on the space shuttle and space station programs kept manned space flight in near Earth orbit, while deep space missions have all been done by robots. There's been quite a few robotic missions. Multiple rovers have landed on Mars, some of which are still active long past their expected expiration dates. Probes have visited the planets of the outer solar system (as well as the not-a-planet-anymore Pluto). And probes have even done test landings on asteroids and comets! I do not want to diminish these accomplishments one bit. They are all extraordinary technological and scientific breakthroughs on their own. Landing on asteroids and comets is especially significant, because they are a stepping stone towards mining and resource extraction from such celestial bodies, which could hopefully pave the way for abandoning our capitalist economic systems in favor of a post-scarcity model. But as cool as these missions were, they haven't been manned missions. People weren't actually going to these places.

At least not until now. With Artemis II, a group of 4 human beings (Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen) travelled around the moon, and saw the far side of the moon with their own, human, eyes. That is something that hasn't happened since the Apollo missions of the early 1970's.

Photo credit: NASA.

Artemis II witnessed the Earth "set" behind the far side of the moon.

My partner and I have been planning on buying rooftop solar panels for our home for years. We had been saving up for it for a while. We were hoping to save up more, so as not to have to finance the project very much (if at all). But when Donald Trump was sworn in as president again in January of 2025, and promptly began to disassemble the federal government and replace it with a single-party, authoritarian police state, we figured that home solar and electric vehicle tax rebates would not last much longer. We moved quickly to spend what we had to get the ball rolling on solar panel installation before the administration would inevitably terminate federal tax credits for solar installations, which they did in August.

We tried moving as fast as we could, but there were delays in the installation due to defects with the house's roofing tiles. We just hoped that projects that were initiated before the announcement of the tax credit repeal would be grandfathered-in. Thankfully, Republicans were "kind" enough to keep them going through the end of the year.

In any case, we finally got the project completed at the end of August, and now have functioning solar panels on the roof of the house!

We also now have a couple months of lower energy bills due to the panels. Unfortunately, we did not get the panels installed early enough to take advantage of all the summer sun this year, but now that we are in the autumn, and the air conditioner isn't running as often, we should start seeing credits on our power bill for the electricity we are exporting back to the grid. By the time next summer rolls along, the expectation is that we will have banked enough credits that our energy bill will be down to little more than just the baseline connection fee (which I think is currently $18.50). We should still be able to qualify for the 30% tax rebate next year, which should put another nice chunk of cash back in our pockets.

We now have functioning solar panels and have taken the largest step to reduce our carbon footprint.

At the end of the day, though, we didn't do this for financial reasons. We did it because it's the right thing to do. Even if I knew for a fact that I would never get a return on investment from installing solar, I would still have wanted to do it in order to reduce my personal contribution to the carbon emissions that are contributing to climate change. The fact that it will provide a financial return on investment within a few years is just icing on the cake.

While the federal government continues to dive head-first into inept authoritarianism (which I will continue to say, while the government still allows me to say it), at least state governments are still occasionally doing what they are supposed to do. Earlier this week, the state of California passed a new law requiring streaming services such as Netflix, YouTube, and so forth to limit the volume of ads to be no louder than the volume of the actual content.

This may seem like a minor thing that shouldn't need legislation. Which is true. It really should not require legislation, as streaming services and advertisers should have known to self-regulate this to begin with -- especially considering that there is already a similar law for broadcast TV and radio! But then again, when does corporate self-regulation ever work? But even though this bit of self-regulation would seem like common sense, this has been a massive pet peeve of mine for years, and it still had to come down to a government regulating it.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets frustrated by having to turn the TV volume up almost as high as it will go, just to be able to hear and understand dialogue in a movie or TV show, only to have an ad come on and deafen me, almost blow out my speakers, shake the house, and wake up any family who are sleeping. I've been ranting and complaining about this privately, at home, for years (and have probably posted complaints about it online a few times). Now, it appears, that streaming services might finally have to address the problem.

The new California law doesn't go into effect until July of 2026, and I don't live in California, so I might still be waiting a long time to see this change in my own personal TV and movie streaming experience. In fact, it might never change at all. But I am hopeful that it will. It is quite common for corporations to implement state regulations in their products and services for all states or jurisdictions. This is because it's often simpler and cheaper to just apply the change everywhere, rather than have to have different versions for different jurisdictions. So if YouTube, Netflix, and so forth have to develop an algorithm to match the volume of ads to the volume of content, there's a good chance that new code will be applied to all their content everywhere; rather than having to specifically check and apply it only if the viewer is in California.

So there's a strong chance that, even though I don't live in California (and many of my readers probably don't either), we will all benefit from this new California law.

Thank goodness for California!