I think the last console game I bought was Metroid Dread, but I leaned physical for those as well, because their digital storefronts are a single point of failure. I've witnessed first hand a friend of mine getting frustrated with a now-sunset Xbox 360 store, a problem I could see coming a mile away even when I was in high school when the console launched. On PC, if Steam disappeared tomorrow, I could pirate my entire library. If GOG gives me a week of lead time on their store going away, I could legitimately back up those games.
Digital is more convenient. I have shelves of old games and consoles that I'm working on culling rather than expanding, especially as someone who tends to move to a new apartment every couple of years. Physical often tends to be a false sense of security in the modern age of day 1 patches and other kinds of server dependency. DRM-free is actually what you want, unless you really, really enjoy the tangible aspect of the game. Outside of nostalgia, I don't think it matters to me.
On PC I’ll buy digital because worst case if it comes unavailable I’ll torrent a copy.
For consoles I am staunchly in the physical camp because it is more likely I’ll be able to play those games in 10 years when the maker has shut down their store.
I don’t really have a strict one or the other preference anymore.
Nintendo 1st party stuff I always buy physical, Dreamcast I collect for so that’s physical too but for Xbox I buy mostly digital when on sale. I guess for Xbox its different because I have Gamepass (the £1 upgrade deal they used to offer, still 18 months remaining, but I won’t renew) so I haven’t bought a new game in like 2 years now. The there is PC… My games are all over the place!
Plus with a family we just dont have the space to keep everything forever that we buy anymore.
I prefer roms and emulators above all else as I know that as long as I back them up I’ll be able to play them. Other than that I use steam for convenience as a linux only gamer but I’m all for gog and their DRM free stance.
As for physical. The hardware fails unless its a ps2 😄. So at the end you are left with a ton of discs and you Will have to rip them to play them. Also some games are just shipping unfinished on disc and need to download patches or whatever.
Nothing changes for you, if you already own them. They’ll still be in your library like before. Visually, the only difference will be that those specific games will have no store page
Obviously in this case, no more updates. If there’s a server, it’s getting shut down. And no new players will buy it. So player count will decrease until it’s a dead game, even if multiplayer is peer to peer. But I doubt that’s the case.
For console games I always buy physical but for PC I buy digital. I have a ton of Ps1 - 5 games that I have physical copies of and they get played alot . My son is also getting into gaming and he likes to look through the games on my shelf to find fun things to play.
I ended up playing my physical copies way less than digital ones because I can’t be arsed to juggle disks and cartridges.
I sold most of my physical collection when upgrading from PS4 to XSX and bought those games digital there since Microsoft has proven to be solid when it comes to backwards compatibility.
All of my portable consoles (Switch, Vita, DSi, N3DS, Analogue Pocket) are jailbroken and digital only because memory is so cheap that I can hold all noteworthy games on a single SD card. In time current systems will end up in a similar state so there’s little point getting attached to dust collecting boxes.
I’m pretty much all digital. I know the arguments for “you don’t really own those digital copies of media,” but it still feels like it’s mine because I can still go and play any of those games whenever I want. I’d just need to reinstall it with an Internet connection.
My PC doesn’t even have a disk drive so I can’t play physical unless I get an external drive, and I don’t really care enough to do that.
Most of the time physically, it is just a code to activate it on steam.
On PC the pirates says, what you can do with it. On the console the company says if you own this movie/game you BOUGHT or not. ( See the Playstation movie “incident” where Sony removed many movies some people BOUGHT, but at least the backlash made Sone reconsider the BS they wanted to pull of. )
P.S. Yeah, yeah i know. “It iSnT BuYiNg YoU OnLy PuRchAsE a LiCenSe tO ThE PrOdUcT” But still its such b.s. that you declare it as BUYING instead of RENTING, Sony have them on their neck of the console gamers, because piracy or third party stores are not existing so they can pull of those stunts.
I often buy physical for games I know I’ll like, for the rest, mostly digital.
When I end up liking a specific digitally bought game a lot, I try to buy a physical copy as an “archive” copy, in the case the store shuts down. An example would be Hades, which I bought digital, and ended up buying a switch physical copy from Limited Run Games.
I didn’t have much physical space in my last apartment, so I got used to buying as much media digitally as I could. I got used to it, and now prefer it. And now that I’ve shifted from console gaming to PC gaming, I’m pretty much all in on digital.
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Aktywne