Our Relationship With Physical Media Is About to Change

If you have a subscription, you can download the videos. Voilà, Cherished videos saved and available whenever you want them.

For me physical versus digital (on games) is simple, what is the cheapest earlier?

My budgeting, I give myself one full price game a year on release.

The rest of the time I wait. Many times I can get physical copies of games that came out 3-4 months ago for 30 bucks. If I wait for the inevitable holiday sales, cheaper still. The digital versions can take two years or more to hit that price (talking console stores, I don't PC game or use Steam).

Shrink-wrapped EULAs are on very shaky legal ground and have been in at least one case deemed invalid. Generally in most places around the world you cannot change the terms of sale after the fact, which is what a shrink-wrapped EULA attempts to do. To be enforceable you would have to read and sign it at the point of sale.

Check out the Autodesk EBay re-sale kerfuffle for another interesting EULA case.

Books aren't the greatest comparison because they are a much more abstracted kind of medium. E-books certainly have gained a lot of ground, but let's not forget that books have been around for a very long time, especially when compared to the much shorter duration physical copies of video games have been.

It's also important to remember just how many more people are into "reading books" or "watching movies and TV", compared to the comparatively small niche of "playing video games". The economics of it is very much different.

Consumption is more valuable than ownership.

If it's a really good game I would rather have a physical copy. The Last of Us as an example. I thought about it at midnight but no to good of a game. Also the harddrive space. I am having to delete games all of the time on all systems to make room for others. Still have my Baldur's Gate and Dark Age of Camelot big gigantic computer boxes, and others but those I always have out.

I'm one of those people that buy vinyl. I also have a ton of CD's. I love music and have never really been concerned with how it moved to mostly digital over the years. Especially now more than ever, bands that still release physical copies (trust me there is a ton!) take care of their fans by making the physical product good quality.

I also collected games over the years, but more and more games these days just aren't anywhere near as important or making as much of an impact on me. So as far as games, I'm more comfortable with buying digital.

Thanks for the article Patrick!

Being primarily a PC gamer the only reason I go out to buy a game is because it's a console exclusive and it's a 50gb download.

If I had an unlimited bandwidth cap, I'd never buy a physical copy of a game again.

Maybe I would feel the same way if I had a small apartment and a big enough income to buy every game I want to play. Personally I'm kinda bummed I bought Wolfenstein in the Steam sale because my friends want to borrow it and I can't loan it to them. And it turns out physical copies are going for the same amount on amazon as they were during the sale (whereas Steam is currently selling it for 60 dollars). It's not that Wolfenstein is super special to me (although it is rad), it's that it makes more practical sense for me to own the physical version. I'm under the impression that people like me aren't so uncommon, particularly when you get further away from enthusiasts like us.

This.

I wouldn't really mind the loss of physical media too much. It is really nice to have all my games loaded on a hard drive to launch instantly, not to mention the space it saves. I've already accepted it with most media, anyway, so I don't see how games would be anything different.

But at the same time, it is pretty nice to own a physical disc when you're paying $60 or more for a brand new game. Having something tangible is comforting when you're spending that much money on something. Makes it feel like a more meaningful purchase.

@patrickklepek Are you a mind reader? This article (and a great one at that) hits as I just finished explaining to my father, who is here on vacation, that the majority of my games are digital these days. I picked up The Last of Us Remastered earlier while we were out, and this is one title I wanted to have the box and everything for. The only other reason I buy physical games if it's something I want to play, but don't care enough to have a digital copy and will probably trade it in at some point. The last physical game I purchased was Killzone: It's Not All Brown or whatever it was for the PS4 for this secondary reason. TLoUR is something I am willing to have out in physical form repping my tastes.

"Or maybe not. Maybe we'll give up control, games will be ruined, and we're all screwed. I'm an optimist!"

Never give up control as a consumer. One of your rights as a consumer is choice. That's why our government breaks up monopolies. Make reasonable demands and vote with your dollars. I see this as the best and safest route into our digital future. When I buy a game (or license to a game) I expect this to fulfill certain requirements. I want to be able to play it whenever I want without any barriers. They pulled Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 off PSN last year. If I want to play it single player or local multiplayer with a friend I can. It is still installed on my hard drive. The DRM for this is invisible and unintrusive.

I find the willingness of consumers to just lay back and take it kind of sickening. You should have demands when spending your hard earned money. If you can't play your games whenever you want you are not buying them, but more akin to renting them. They have red box for that and you will not have to pay $60. Assassins Creed 2 put some crazy always online DRM on top of the less intrusive steam DRM. This is just adding unneeded roadblocks showing they don't respect you as a consumer.

It really blows my mind that the same people willing to lay down and let these companies do what they want with DRM are very vocal about the way gross free to play models take advantage of consumers. The really gross free to play models can only take advantage of the stupid and uninformed. We only criticize this because we are afraid this will leak into our beloved hardcore games. The hundreds or thousands of dollars we spend on games could vanish in an instant if we don't stand up for our digital consumer rights. Thank you and good night.

Patrick, this is a great read and you've pointed out exactly what is happening, physical media is becoming less commonplace but more special to the people purchasing them. All of the DVD's I own are of movies that are very special to me in one way or another, and I just purchased the collectors edition of dark souls 2 but downloaded infamous second son.

It's easier to just download something, but my favorite things I own physical copies of.

The hell is Evil Bong?

I used to be this way with books around the time of the first two kindles. But I found myself more in the way of consuming books, not reading them. It got to the point where i was buying stuff i didnt even want to read just so that I would read it. I gave that up, started going back to the local (new) library, and got physical books, then books on cd for free. I find now that I read less than i did when i first owned the kindle, but I seem to enjoy myself more, even if i do not own that content.

I still dont really feel comfortable with or even agree with the whole concept of "you dont own this game that you paid for."

Seeing that copy of Watchmen on Bluray above Patrick's tv... it's funny that single item sticks out. I do really loathe that film. BTW, interesting read Patrick. I lag behind going all digital. I really want to, but physical copies of console games go cheap faster than the digital versions. So I wait for a sale and pick up a copy of <insert random title> once it goes on sale somewhere (usually amazon).

I used to have vinyl disk music when I was young. I miss it, there is something about the sound, though it can be roughly matched if you are not into compression. Lately I have bought some digital downloaded (non-compressed) albums' by Bevis Frond, and it and they sound very good. Also the album covers plus inner liner pictures and art are included. I will expand the practice via Band camp, I need to instruct myself and get it going to check the catalogue.

But done as well as Steam does, digital for games is just a no-brainer for me. I do not care about Steam as DRM, it's when it is combined with Microsoft live or whatever Max Payne used that pisses me off. What a f**king hassle! Microsoft literally barred me from playing an already purchased Dark Souls for months because I made the wrong decision on how to rectify a situation that was absolutely not my fault. Sucked. The lesson is that one digital master is enough, and that is how it should be presented to the end-user. Don't muddy the waters.

And as time goes, it's just no problem to me to go digital, except for the collector angle. I installed shelving behind the sofa in the wall, and it is full. Got some good box art though, keep not throwing it away....

I dunno. With the first few blockbuster games of this generation of consoles being 50+ gig installs, I can't see physical media quite going the way of the dodo just yet. i live in the most connected country in the world (South Korea) and I still shudder at the thought of downloading 50 gigs of something. I can't imagine trying to download 50 gigs in the podunk Canadian town I'm from. Also, memory is pretty much constantly getting cheaper. We might see a resurgence in cartridges soon enough. Which would be totally fucking awesome!

I only buy digital. I used to import from Hong Kong to get around the high prices, but now I just wait till there are discounts (or till a review makes me happy I waited).

The death of physical media is not imminent. I'd put money on it. I have a hard time believing that many of us who grew up around the NES era will ever get over the cart fetish (now the disc fetish). Most importantly, when I buy a game, I want it to be mine, to play or to sell as I see fit. It's easy for someone like Patrick, who I am sure now earns a nice paycheck, to forget about this key aspect. I often spend only $10-$15 on games I only play for a short duration, as I am able to turn around and sell it on Amazon when I am done. If I had to pay $60 for a game I could finish in 8-10 hours, I would avoid the game entirely. There will always be a market for physical media, and I think we'll find, as in the past, that there will be a big backlash toward companies that try to altogether abandon the medium. Unfortunately though, the era of real instruction manuals appears to be gone, which is too bad.

I work at a used bookstore, and I've personally sold tons of records and CD's over the past month alone. While there is still a market for used media, it will continue to be consumed by people who are looking for a good deal, or collectors. I wouldn't even call most of the people buying records collectors, per se. For many of them, they've had a number of records already and a turn table, so buying another good album for $5 is a decent choice, even without considering how "rare" it is.

For many people, myself included, driving older cars, buying cheap CD's is the cheapest and easiest way to listen to good music on the way to work.

DVD's as a physical form I think are going out faster than CD's though, and way faster than vinyl, as people tend to want HD these days, whether streamed, or for the often surprisingly cheap blu-rays. We're currently having a problem selling a lot of DVD's; people who buy them just want to pay a few dollars for a movie and that's it. Anyone who is willing to pay more than like $5 for a physical copy tends to start looking into blu-rays.

I think games on disc are going out of fashion even faster than DVD's. With how fast the internet is these days, you can download a decent sized PC game and install it in less time than it would take to install a game off a CD several years ago. Most game discs tend to be useless once you use them; you install them, use the CD-key, then it doesn't matter what happens.

Considering that I trust my game collection to be safer in my steam catalogue than in a bunch of boxes in the garage, for me buying games in discs doesn't make much sense anymore.

Sorry if I sound like I'm not taking this seriously, but the title to this article sounds like something right out of an intense action flick or a trailer for one.

Hear me out with this, but imagine if this article had been written by Jeff.

Not only does he routinely express hope for an all-digital future, but holy shit that man is utterly invested in the concept of physical game media when it comes to everything in his house.

I'm not a fan of the all-digital future. Fuck the future.

BD and DVD are still superior to digital and streaming. You don't get any of the cool special features when you stream the content or buy a digital copy.

I like how this article could have been written 4 years ago if Patrick was more of a PC-centric gamer.

I will always hate the idea of a digital only age. I have no issue with digital always coexisting with physical, but as a replacement, it sucks.

I copy and pasted that exact paragraph to post the same thing. You don't own any games, Klepek!

I have used the same philosophy with TV shows and movies. I used to buy the ones I really liked on bluray/DVD. But you know what? When I want to watch them again (which happens), I can't be bothered with actually using the discs I own. I watch it digitally.

So for me, actually owning the discs is useless. I'm basically buying covers to support the creators.

Maybe the new thing for games will be digital standard releases, but physical will be more expensive collector's editions. In these you might just get the code for the game, a book and a statue or something.

The actual disc is worthless to me in most cases (in fact, I haven't even bothered hooking up my computer's DVD drive to a SATA connection).

I won't buy much digital games on PSN as long as their price is even higher (!) then a physical copy of the game.
It's also convenient for me to have my games physical as downloading a game again will still take much longer then installing.
Another plus: I can lend the game to a friend or sell it when I'm bored of it.

So, still too many plusses on physical copies against digital.

It's very interesting reading about this stuff from the perspective of someone who lives in the US. You talk about streaming TV, music, or movies as if that ain't no thing, but I think you'd find reasonably large populations of other countries, (for example Australia, where I am) where that is simply not the norm, far from it in fact.

I dream of something other than a crappy ADSL2+ connection which barely even qualifies having a "2" or a "+", but there isn't anybody who can provide it too me, there simply aren't any providers in my area (I suspect that this would also apply to many Americans living in more remote parts of the US).

I'm not streaming movies from any service, I'm buying a couple of DVDs or Blurays once every few months. I'm certainly not buying CDs, I'll give you that, but I am purchasing almost all of my music in the form of single download DRM-free type packages from places like Bandcamp. I'm still definitely buying books, though. I read a monitor or screen in a completely different way to how I read physical pages.

And while I mostly purchase games digitally (I'm a PC gamer in Australia, so even with Steam's regional markups, it's usually still cheaper than retail, especially when factoring in transport costs of getting to a store), other forms of media are mostly not an option, either because of technical constraints, or purely economical ones.

I'm not really sure what point I'm making, if any, but I hope this is interesting at least?

I still prefer buying most games on disc. I can't stand reading books on something like a kindle and a computer screen is probably the worst place to try and read something for me. I'll gladly keep all of my music digital only though. Am I weird?

Mate it isn't going to change as soon as you think. A lot of places still don't have the internet speeds capable of handling this type of media, I even live in 5 year old housing estate and I can't even get a better speed than 2mb because there is no fibre optic cable running through the area. Most of Scotland has been in the process of switching to fibre optic for years now but the dates of when it will happen keeps getting pushed back further and further. I remember in 2007 the newspaper had an article which stated that I should be able to have access to it in 2010, but I don't see it happening for atleast 3 more years at this point.

There are so many reasons not to give up on physical media that I find the whole " get in line" inevitability of the whole thing disturbing. It cant happen unless consumers support it and we showed MS that when they announced the XBone and then triple backflipped.

The reasons digital games still suck compared to physical copies:

1, Price: digital versions of books, music and TV undercut physical prices by an order of magnitude to get their foothold, comparable digital games are like 10% cheaper tops and until they are in some subscription service for nothing they never go down in price. A month after a game comes out at retail the game has usually dropped by at least 10 bucks and usually more. Steam sales may be good but they aren't actually all that amazing. The last one kinda sucked and the sales prices for old games were still comparable to my local game store blow outs.

2, Fear of games becoming unplayable: servers get taken down all the time and some games are just plain unplayable due to this. But I can still boot up my SNES and play legend of Zelda or SF2. There is a feeling that these companies will shut off games we love in the not to distant future and we will be left with no collection at all.

3, Technological limitation: Most of the world still has shit internet, games are now fucking huge and streaming sucks ass...oh and some places (read a lot of places) have bandwidth caps.

Downloading a modern AAA game with ADSL or even ADSL 2 takes forever and can be a sizable investment of a person's monthly DL limit. when I buy a game from steam it doesn't just cost me the 15 bucks I paid for it also costs me my bandwidth and monthly DL amount, I only get 100 gigs a month for 60 bucks, most bigish games seem to come in at around 15-30 gigs so that 15 dollar game actually costs me more like $25 in real terms.

Again until these issues are sorted there is no reason to buy into this all digital future. Vote with you wallet and voice your opinion. We check MS last year and we can do it the next time asshole corporation tries this shit.

Actually just picked up an Ion USB turntable so my mother could get all of her "classic albums" from her youth onto a hard drive before the vinyls crap out. I don't have much love for the format, but the technology to move it from one generation of media to another is oddly interesting. She plays it through the computer speakers by the way, another odd blending of tech I never expected to see.

Oh and I'm with you on getting all the shelf order done by letter. Makes it easier to find stuff, at least for me. I thought everyone did it that way

I pretty much have the exact same relationship with physical media. Most of my collection now consists only of special boxsets and movies/tv-shows that are dear to me.

*salutes* - "Catherine, BioShock, Prince of Persia (2008!!), Klonoa, Mirror's Edge, Dark Souls. That's me." (mostly Klonoa)

I attempted to talk about subjects not too far removed from this here - http://truegeekradio.com/2014/01/10/lets-talk-about-preservation/ In a half assed and clunky way, a few weeks back.

I'd happily pay a decent monthly subscription if it opened up the entire steam catalogue. I spend a stupid amount on games in steam sales and I never play them anyway. Everything is heading towards micro transactions already, so fuck it.

I buy all my books, because I like reading from a book over a screen, but I tend to donate those that don't make a great impression. Music I buy online and then potentially buy the same again physically if I really treasure them, as online buys have messed me up too many times.

Games, only franchises I am very involved in get physically bought, like the Freespace boxset to replace a lost disc, and The Witcher 2, as RED did a great job with it and I love the stories.

Don't want to take it too far.

I still like buying physical. Hard drives on game consoles fill up too quickly for me because I play a lot of games and I don't like deleting things that I've paid for, always scared I'm going to forget to re-download them. I still buy blurays all the time too. I'm weird like that.

PoP08 is great, good on you Patrick.

I got rid of my giant pile of game boxes from the N64 on up that I'd been hanging onto for....some reason....probably a decade ago. Between Steam, PSN and XBL, the only physical media I ever buy anymore are the console exclusives that I can't download. I'm fortunate enough to be able to play pretty much every game that interests me and I don't miss the boxes.

A possible solution to this is VR. As a former physical media collector, I actually started letting go of my need for physical DVDs when I got Delicious Library. Seeing a shelf made me ok with just ripping all my movies and storing them on DVDs. SO if someone could make a rad VR program (if one doesnt already exist) you could have infinite virtual shelf space for your digital content.

Valid points. None of them really matter to me though. I have a fast internet connection and neither Steam nor Origin have given me a reason not to trust them (yet).

I understand people being apprehensive, especially if their internet sucks, or they are worried about having access to something in perpetuity. But I will take those risks in order to never have to buy a disc again.

FUCK... DISCS... FOREVER!!!

All digital future = horrific. That subscription service = horrific It really doesn't benefit you, it benefits the company and stock holders of companies. I have not seen an increase in quality of most games since things starting going digital. A new title on steam, is either the same price or ten dollars cheaper than its store counterpart. Dropping manuals from games, quality gone up? Nope?

Folks praise an all digital future, but I really believe they have just allowed themselves to become convinced that it is better. The game sitting on my shelf does not require

A) fast reliable connection with large bandwidth caps.
B) Large storage devices (5 years is your window for problem free HDD storage, outside this, you start to gamble)

Lets weight the costs of my shelf vs the above. Does that 10.00 difference in price on steam make up for that?

I still buy physical media for films, console games, books. PC games I gave into steam because I starting buying games that just installed steam and then installed themselves into steam. Pretty clever ploy that.

Video games are "disposable media entertainment". There is no shame or fault in someone believing that once they complete a video game they get rid of it where having a completely digital library is ideal for them because the real issue for them is managing the physical stuff. Selling things like books, movies, and game can be a PITA or not be worth it so why bother keeping around what they consider junk?

Madden 25 is not going to be valuable in a few months. In a few years it is going to be mostly worthless. People are squeamish about digital things and claim there is inherent value in disks but I wonder what that is because the value is the data not the disk. They may like the game but that box and the plastic thing it came on is worthless.

Really great article @patrickklepek. For me, I will always buy physical copies of things that I truly love. While I get where people come from with wanting to have super minimalist homes/lifestyles, having rooms in my house that are totally bare and empty just don't feel like home to me. I couldn't imagine going to my Grandma's house and not having some of her ceramic figures, collector tins, books, and family pictures on shelves. It just wouldn't feel the same.

I think the big question in regards to services like EA Access is whether they will own up to how little their back catalog is actually worth to us. I can already pick up physical media at Gamestop for half or less than what they're charging for the digital download on XBox Live.

And that illuminates the other issue--right now, the market prices old games. Gamestop needs to move those old games, and they price them to move. But if everything is digital, companies like EA can decide to never drop their prices on old games below a certain point, because there's no inventory. Say goodbye to bargain bins with $5 games. Instead of demand driving price, it will be EA executives. I don't relish the thought.