Fuck You, Sony and Microsoft

I'm sick of excuses.  The elimination of backward compatibility on the next PlayStation and Xbox is a deal breaker with me and it should be a deal breaker with anyone who spends money on videogames.  It's simple, what if book stores decided not to sell books that were more than a year old, or if the next home video format decided not to bother with older movies?  Who would tolerate this?  With videogames, it's apparently no big deal.  People say the same stupid shit, "Just keep your old console."  First off, when the old console breaks down (it will eventually, and in the case of Xbox, I'll count myself lucky if it makes it the year), and the company can't/won't replace it because they're not manufacturing it anymore, then what?  Also, I don't have a lot of space to work with.  I have four(!) consoles hooked up to my TV.  If I buy another console, it's replacing one of those four.  If I try to keep all my old consoles, I'd have to buy one or more extra television sets.  I might, and boy do I mean might, have been willing to tolerate not being able to play the physical disc-based games, but to not be able to transfer my online titles?  No excuse.  Obviously, I was naive enough to believe that when I bought a downloadable title, it would be an unbreakable copy.  In other words, no matter what happens, my console breaks, I upgrade to the next generation of said console, that title would be mine to download whenever I needed to, provided I log in and all that.  No, that was bullshit.

What kills me is that they're going to get away with this.  I'd be amazed if this actually hurt their sales.  Videogames are pretty much the dumped-on medium of this generation.  The fact that I'm even referring to videogames as a "medium" would be laughable to most people.  What this tells me is that even the people manufacturing and selling videogames don't really respect them.  They may as well be saying, "Come on, these aren't lasting experiences.  Videogames are ephemeral, played once or twice, maybe even three or four times if they're really good, but surely you'd have the common sense to discard them after that."  What's astounding is that they went out of their way to create the desire in the first place.  They wanted us to buy, and therefore give a shit about, their products.  And then a few years later, they expect us not to respect or care enough that we'd easily drop them for the Next Big Thing.  And more than enough people go with it.  But if we don't really give a shit, then why are we shelling out hundreds on the consoles (thousands, if you really want to keep up), not to mention God-knows-how-much on building a library of games to begin with?