Cartridges as Property

When Games Were Objects Instead of Services

The NES cartridge locked into place with a decisive click—a sound that signaled completion, not just of the insertion process but of something more fundamental. You pressed the gray plastic rectangle down into the console’s slot, pushed the tray down, and that was it. The transaction was finished. What happened next depended entirely on whether the thing worked, which it usually did, barring dust or a bent pin or the mysterious failures that afflict all electronics eventually. But those were material failures, the kind you could see or clean or sometimes fix with a careful hand. The cartridge itself was complete. It contained everything it would ever contain. It asked nothing of you except electricity and compatible hardware.

I still have cartridges from childhood that work. Not because I’ve maintained them carefully—I haven’t—but because they require nothing to keep working except to continue existing. They don’t need to phone home. They don’t need authentication servers or accounts or updates. They don’t need permission. Plug them into a working console and they boot exactly as they did in 1987 or 1991 or whenever they were manufactured. This seems remarkable now, but only because we’ve been trained to expect the opposite. We’ve been trained to expect that the things we buy will stop working when someone else decides they should stop working.

The cartridge represents something we’ve lost: true ownership. Not metaphorical ownership, not licensed access dressed up in the language of purchase, but actual property. An object that existed independently of networks, permissions, ongoing relationships, or corporate goodwill. You bought it. You owned it. It was yours in the same way a book or a hammer or a chair was yours. This was not a special privilege of games—it was the default assumption of property. But somewhere between the gray plastic of the NES and the cloud-dependent launchers of today, games stopped being things you could own and became services you could rent.

What did ownership mean in the NES era? It meant something specific and uncomplicated. When you bought a cartridge, you acquired a physical object that functioned without reference to anything beyond itself and the hardware it was designed for. There were no accounts because accounts were unnecessary. There was no authentication because there was nothing to authenticate—you either had the cartridge or you didn’t. There were no servers because the game didn’t need servers. It didn’t need to connect to anything. It was self-contained in the most literal sense. The ROM chip inside held the complete game, the entirety of what the developers had created. Once that chip was manufactured, the game was fixed in place. It couldn’t be altered, couldn’t be updated, couldn’t be revoked.

This wasn’t a design philosophy so much as a technical reality. Distribution was physical. Manufacturing was expensive. Changes were impossible after production. These constraints produced a particular kind of object: one that had to be complete before it could be sold, because there was no mechanism for incompleteness. If a game shipped with bugs, those bugs were permanent. If a game had balance problems, players learned to work around them. The relationship between developer and player ended at the point of sale. After that, the cartridge existed in the world as an independent thing.

This model aligned with centuries of property law. When you bought a hammer, the hammer company didn’t retain any claim on how you used it. When you bought a book, the publisher didn’t monitor your reading habits or require you to check in periodically. When you bought a cartridge, it was yours in the same complete sense. You could play it, you could sell it, you could lend it to a friend, you could destroy it if you wanted. These were rights inherent to ownership, not privileges granted by license agreements.

The finality of cartridges created design discipline. Developers had one chance to get things right, which meant they usually did. This wasn’t about craftsmanship in the romantic sense—it was about necessity. You couldn’t patch out a game-breaking bug after manufacturing. You couldn’t rebalance difficulty based on player data. You couldn’t add features later to justify a higher price. Everything had to work at release because release was final. The game that shipped was the game that existed, permanently and completely.

This constraint shaped how games were made. Testing was more rigorous because it had to be. Design was more conservative because radical experiments that failed couldn’t be fixed. But it also meant games existed outside time once they were manufactured. They didn’t evolve. They didn’t change. They weren’t adjusted based on metrics or player feedback or competitive balance concerns. They simply were what they were. This created a strange kind of permanence. Every copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 contained exactly the same game, and that game was identical in 1990 and 2000 and 2025. The bits didn’t change. The experience didn’t drift. If you remembered something about the game, you could verify that memory by playing it again and finding it exactly as you left it.

Compare this to modern games, which exist in a state of perpetual becoming. They launch incomplete, expecting updates. They ship with roadmaps, promises of content to come. They offer early access, charging money for the privilege of testing unfinished software. They rebalance constantly, adjusting numbers based on usage data. The game you play today might not be the game you play next month, not because you’ve changed but because the developers have changed it. This isn’t necessarily worse—some games benefit from iteration, from community feedback, from the ability to fix mistakes. But it represents a fundamentally different relationship between object and owner. The cartridge was finished. The live service game is never finished. It exists only in the present tense, only while it’s actively maintained.

The shift from property to license happened gradually, then suddenly. It started with end-user license agreements, those walls of text nobody read that redefined “purchase” as “license.” You weren’t buying the game, you were buying permission to use the game, and that permission came with conditions. The conditions multiplied. You needed an account. You needed to be online. You needed to authenticate. You needed to accept updates. Each requirement seemed minor in isolation, but together they transformed the nature of the transaction. You weren’t acquiring property anymore. You were entering into an ongoing relationship with a vendor who retained control over the thing you’d paid for.

Digital rights management made this explicit. DRM systems exist to prevent you from doing things that would be legal and normal with property. You can’t make copies. You can’t transfer ownership freely. You can’t use the software without permission from an authentication server. This isn’t protection against piracy—it’s the technical enforcement of a new ownership regime. The DRM doesn’t protect the product from copying. It protects the vendor’s control over how you use what you’ve bought.

This became unavoidable with digital distribution. Steam libraries contain hundreds of games, but you don’t own any of them. You own licenses to access them, licenses that can be revoked if Steam decides to revoke them, licenses that become worthless if Steam disappears. The games exist on Valve’s servers, not on your hardware. You have permission to download them, permission to run them, permission that depends on Valve’s continued existence and goodwill. When a game is delisted from Steam, you might retain access if you bought it before delisting, but new buyers cannot acquire it at all. The game effectively ceases to exist as an available object.

Server shutdowns make this worse. When a multiplayer game’s servers shut down, the game stops working, completely and permanently. It doesn’t matter that you paid for it. It doesn’t matter that the software still exists on your hard drive. Without the servers, the software is inert. The game you bought becomes unplayable by design. This isn’t a technical failure. It’s a designed dependency. The game was built to need something the vendor controls, and when the vendor withdraws that something, your purchase becomes worthless.

This pattern extends beyond gaming. We’ve watched it happen with music, with movies, with books, with software generally. Ownership is being replaced with access. Possession is being replaced with permission. The logic is consistent: vendors prefer ongoing relationships to one-time transactions because ongoing relationships generate ongoing revenue. Rent is more profitable than sale. Subscriptions are more predictable than purchases. Services create dependency in ways that products don’t.

Games perfected this transition. They became services gradually, layering mechanisms of control until the old model of ownership became impossible. It happened through small steps: online activation, digital distribution, day-one patches, live service models, battle passes, microtransactions. Each step seemed reasonable given what came before. Each step made sense in isolation. But the cumulative effect was revolutionary. Games stopped being things you could own and became things you could access, and access depends on permission, and permission can be withdrawn.

Subscriptions made the logic explicit. Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus don’t pretend to offer ownership. They offer access to a rotating library of games for a monthly fee. Stop paying and the access disappears. The games don’t become yours over time. You’re not building a collection. You’re renting temporary permission to play whatever’s currently available. This is honest about what it is, which makes it less troubling than the fake purchases that look like ownership but aren’t. But it’s also the endpoint of a long transition. Games have become utilities, services delivered on demand for ongoing fees.

Battle passes extended this logic into individual games. Pay for the privilege of working toward rewards that expire at season’s end. The battle pass creates urgency, a fear of missing out if you don’t play enough before the deadline. It transforms play into labor, with clear metrics and reward schedules. It’s psychological retention engineering, designed to keep players engaged and paying. Again, this isn’t moral condemnation. It’s observation of incentive structures. Companies want stable, predictable revenue. They want players who return daily. They want ongoing relationships rather than one-time transactions. The systems they build reflect these incentives.

Microtransactions completed the transformation. Games became storefronts wrapped in gameplay. The game itself became free or cheap, with the real revenue coming from cosmetics, convenience items, randomized loot boxes. This model doesn’t require updates or maintenance for generosity’s sake—it requires them to maintain the storefront. The game stays alive as long as it’s generating revenue. When revenue falls below maintenance costs, support ends and the game becomes unplayable. The players who invested hundreds or thousands of dollars find their purchases worthless, erased when the servers shut down.

These aren’t aberrations. They’re the natural result of optimizing for ongoing revenue. The question isn’t whether companies should do this—the question is whether we should structure economies so that this is the optimal strategy. Systems produce behavior. If the most profitable approach is to never sell anything outright, to always maintain control, to always retain the ability to shut things down or adjust terms, then that’s what will happen. Complaining about individual companies misses the pattern. The pattern is structural.

What was lost when ownership disappeared? Preservation became impossible. Games that depend on servers can’t be preserved when those servers shut down. Games that require authentication can’t be archived. Games that exist only as licenses can’t be transferred or inherited. We’re creating a cultural history that will have gaps, periods where popular games simply vanished because the companies that controlled them decided to stop supporting them. Historians will struggle to document this era because the artifacts won’t exist. They’ll exist in memory and description, but not as playable objects.

There’s something quietly devastating about childhood artifacts becoming inaccessible not through loss or damage but through deliberate revocation. The games you played at twelve might not exist anymore, not because the software was destroyed but because the servers were shut down or the storefront was closed or the authentication system was discontinued. This creates a strange discontinuity. The cartridge on my shelf still works because it needs nothing except itself. The digital games I bought fifteen years ago might not work tomorrow if the vendor decides they shouldn’t. My relationship to those games is not ownership. It’s permission, and permission is always temporary.

Culture depends increasingly on corporate goodwill. Our access to art and entertainment and creative work depends on companies choosing to maintain that access. They have no obligation to do so. When it becomes unprofitable, support ends. This makes sense from a business perspective, but it’s a terrible foundation for cultural preservation. We’re trusting profit-seeking entities to maintain access to cultural artifacts, and that trust is frequently betrayed because maintaining access conflicts with profit maximization.

Cartridges side-stepped all of this by being complete at manufacture. They exist as objects independent of their creators. They don’t require maintenance, updates, or ongoing support. They don’t depend on servers or accounts or authentication. They work because they contain everything they need to work. Forty years later, they still boot. They’ll keep working until the hardware physically fails. That’s not nostalgia—it’s a material fact about how the objects were constructed.

Buying an NES cartridge was a clean transaction. You handed over money. The clerk handed over a cartridge. You walked out of the store with property. Nothing else was owed, by either party. You didn’t need to create an account. You didn’t need to agree to terms of service. You didn’t need permission to use what you’d bought. The transaction was complete at the moment of exchange. That kind of transaction is increasingly rare. We’ve become accustomed to purchases that aren’t purchases, to ownership that isn’t ownership, to paying money for permission instead of property. The shift happened slowly enough that it seemed normal, inevitable, maybe even preferable. But it represents a fundamental restructuring of economic relationships, a move from independence to dependency, from property to access, from ownership to rent. The cartridge sits on the shelf, still working, a relic of a different arrangement.