The Kingdom Hearts Leak and the Future of Physical Games

At the end of last week, somebody stole a bunch of copies of Kingdom Hearts
III and sold them for $100 a piece on Facebook Marketplace. According to
one of the game’s voice actors, the thief may have already been caught. The
game’s director, Tetsuya Nomura, released a statement, reassuring fans that
the most spoilery parts of the game were not on disc yet, and therefore
were not spoilerable. Just like that, everything seemed to be over as
quickly as it started. Copies already sold were out in the wild of course,
so fans will need to be wary for the next month, but by and large the
incident passed.

Nomura’s statement deserves more attention though. It was effective at
reassuring fans, but the reason why fans should rest easy was a bit
unexpected.

At the end of last week, somebody stole a bunch of copies of Kingdom Hearts III and sold them for $100 a piece on Facebook Marketplace. According to one of the game’s voice actors, the thief may have already been caught. The game’s director, Tetsuya Nomura, released a statement, reassuring fans that the most spoilery parts of the game were not on disc yet, and therefore were not spoilerable. Just like that, everything seemed to be over as quickly as it started. Copies already sold were out in the wild of course, so fans will need to be wary for the next month, but by and large the incident passed.

Nomura’s statement deserves more attention though. It was effective at reassuring fans, but the reason why fans should rest easy was a bit unexpected. Nomura essentially confirmed that retail copies of the game wouldn’t ship with the complete ending, presumably being part of the “day one patch” that is so ubiquitous these days. The “day one patch” is a way for developers to update a game as soon as it launches; when you pop in your PS4 disc, it connects to the internet, and instantly prompts a new download and installation before the game even begins. Typically we think of these kinds of patches as a necessary evil. Developers have to print the game a month or more before its release, so the ability to patch on launch day allows them to use that time to continue testing the game for bugs that may affect performance, or even break the game. In this context, day one patches are an incredibly useful tool.

On the surface, Nomura and Square-Enix have come up with another clever use for the day one patch. Foreseeing the likelihood of a leak, they kept the complete ending off the disc, so everyone would gain access to it at the same time on launch day. I admire the attempt to mitigate some of their risk, but I can’t help feeling like in the long run fans are still getting a raw deal. The physical disc I pre-ordered will forever be missing an important part of the experience, a part so important they kept it off the disc specifically so I wouldn’t miss out on it. Do you see the potential issue here? The safeguard to protect the ending could also end up preventing people from seeing the ending.

You can guarantee someone out there, probably living in an area with poor internet access, will play the game without updating and downloading the “true” ending, and will miss out on a fundamental piece of the Kingdom Hearts experience. We’ve seen it happen already just this year. Back in September, a fan playing an unpatched version of Shadow of the Tomb Raider discovered a post credits sequence that had been patched out of the game in its first update. In other words, the game shipped with an ending the developers later changed their minds about, so the day one patch replaced that ending with a new one.

Online you’ll often find people mocking those who don’t have the capability to install a simple patch, but the reality is that a lot of people just in the United States live in rural areas with poor or no internet at all. Or fit into any number of categories that prevent them from having internet for any number of reasons. Internet also costs money, and sometimes you may not be able to afford it. I understand the instant argument to this is “then you shouldn’t have money for video games,” but imagine you’re a kid who gets a video game from your grandparents, but you aren’t able to play it because your parents couldn’t afford internet this month. That was nearly me growing up; my first several video games came from my grandfather, because for a while my parents couldn’t afford them. If I grew up in an era that required a download to play Super Mario 64, I may have never played it.

As we stampede toward the digital revolution, these are the kinds of people we risk trampling. I’ll admit, until now, I’ve been somewhat ambivalent, feeling that physical copies would remain an option for the foreseeable future, and even though day one patches are being pushed more and more, a lot of unpatched games would remain playable. (As an aside, I also want to make clear that the fact that everyone pushes day one patches does not inherently make day one patches ok. A lot of a thing doesn’t make the thing good.) Maybe it’s just the one-two punch of Tomb Raider and now Kingdom Hearts, but I have a hard time thinking this optimism toward physical media is realistic anymore. It makes too much business sense for a publisher like Square-Enix to leave the ending off of their high profile game’s disc. They were proven right when the game leaked six weeks early. The leak would have been worse if they had included the complete game. With that in mind, I have no compelling reason for them not to do it, besides the people they will surely inconvenience. Those people matter to me, but unfortunately are not the publisher’s problem.

I’ve been replaying the Kingdom Hearts series this year in preparation for Kingdom Hearts III. I played the PS4 remaster, but if I wanted to, I could throw on my original PS2 disc from 2002 and play through the entire game without incident. That will not be possible with Kingdom Hearts III. If 16 years from now I want to play my original Kingdom Hearts III disc, I better hope I can still download the patch if I want to see the ending. Something about that just feels wrong to me.

Complete or not, patched or unpatched, I ultimately hurt my own argument by admitting I played the PS4 remaster of Kingdom Hearts, not the PS2 original. See, there was no need for me to play the original disc, because I was able to get a brand new one. The entire last level of the game could have been missing from the PS2 disc and it wouldn’t have mattered. In 16 years, whether games have gone all digital or not, I’m sure there will be a new version of Kingdom Hearts III ready for me to play, ending patch and all. And I’ll have a shiny piece of plastic to prove I was there on day one.