Our Relationship With Physical Media Is About to Change

Prince of Persia (2008 edition)? I guess it looked pretty enough to own physical. I do have the original Sands of Time Trilogy somewhere in storage.

@slag@synthesis_landale@spaceinsomniac: I think you're all a little confused. The license doesn't state that the actual physical media is given to you under license (you own the plastic and the paper); it's the software located on the disk that is being licensed to you. Data cannot be treated the same as physical goods because it can be copied and modified without disturbing the original. Therefore, software agreements exist to protect software developers from unscrupulous behaviour that some of their customers might get up to.

@patrickklepek I'd take Brawl just so I can hack it and play Project M, which is way better. =P

I totally agree with all of this though. Right next to my desk, just a couple of feet away from me, I have a tower with 4 shelves on it that are about 2ft wide. From top to bottom it's PS2, 360, PS3, and Gamecube (the Wii is hooked up to another tv as I only use it to play GC games anyway). Each shelf has the console, controllers, peripherals, etc. On my right, are two thin towers filled with games ranging from PS1 games to PS3 and 360 games. There are also some DVD's and Blurays on that shelf as well. This is basically it. This is my "stuff." I don't collect anything else. I don't put stuff all over our home. It's just this one spot, and this is the stuff I care about preserving and displaying the most.

I play mostly PC games now so everything new that I get is digital (mostly through Steam). The last game I bought was Dark Souls II Black Armor Edition for the PS3. Dark Souls might be my favorite game and I wanted to own a real copy of its sequel. I'll still eventually get it on PC with dlc and all that, but having a real copy is really important to me. That was probably my last physical purchase of a game for the PS3 and 360 generation. Not sure if/when I'll get a PS4, so for all I know, that was the last physical game I buy. It's nuts.

I hope whatever direction this all goes in, we are all just free to enjoy the games we own with as little interference as possible.

I've started to do the the same thing. I love my collections but at the same time it's not feasible financially or space wise. I think if a developer wanted to leave their options open while not stringing out their budget they could offer the digital copy and do a batch/ made-to-order type physical copy.

@arcadiaexeter: I'm betting it will, part of some Black Flag GOTY edition with the DLC included.

as a video game lover i like that games are becoming easier to get and cheaper. as a collector i HATE IT! when AC: Freedom Cry came out i was like "oh man i'd like that for my collection" but i don't think they will ever come out with a physical version.

I have over 1000 DVDs (physically). I love movies, and I won't explain why I have so many here, but these days I only buy movies I really want to see (which has thankfully become less).

I have almost a thousand video games. Only 300 or something is actually physical. Most of them are digital. With steam and GOG, at some point, it just became easier to buy most games digital. I'm not super pumped about most games these days anyway. If I am super excited about a game, or it's a kickstarter project I'm really into, I'll get physical copies. There isn't many games coming out that I feel I have to own because what's the point of taking up that physical space?

Even as a collector just having the games themselves doesn't mean anything.

It's funny, though, I have always been leery about using digital. I actually look at digital as a good way to preserve data (because ultimately it is less fragile than discs), but at the same time I know I would never be able to preserve that data if these services ever went under. So, that's why I buy physical copies of games that I really want- which is few and far between anymore.

With movies, I still can't really imagine buying them digital. I feel less ownership and part of the love of collecting movies is their original art an d stuff. You could argue the same for games as well. Cover art seems like a lost art form sometimes in all media.

I don't know, maybe there's no digital service I trust with films, but I have my own in house digital service for streaming movies. I don't consider netflix a good movie streaming platform because a majority of what's good on Netflix is TV shows. That has merit too, which is why I still pay for it, but the best place for movies is still my shelf.

I buy music these days from Amazon because it's basically DRM free (in that I can put it on my computer and/or burn it to disc- there's no real loss of my options). Since there is so few music I like anymore, it doesn't really matter to me where I get it as long as when I buy it it's not restricted to some service only. My Dad, though, still had thousands of CDs from way back- even stuff he had when I was a kid. He collected records (vinyl), but he didn't really take care of himself at some point and long story short he lost all his records. Now that he's passed on I'm stuck with all his CDs and we're still not sure what to do with them. On one hand I don't want to get rid of them because of special meaning, but I also don't want them because I really don't want them taking up space. It's an annoying dilemma.

So, ya. I honestly don't see an all digital future so much. I think the way things are now will refine more, more games will become digital only (because it's cheaper) but there will still be premium (physical) options for everything. I don't see that going away for a long time- no matter how much the gaming press wants to keep saying it will. I just don't see it completely going away.

Come on Scoops you could have at least left the house to get you're reference images, lol.

There's something about physical goods that I enjoy. I like having them. It'd be easier to download an playstation emulator instead of buying the copies of games and the system but I think there's something lost in that trade-off. I can't explain what it is but it definitely doesn't feel the same.

Digital could be great...if companies would refrain from trying to keep their hands in our pockets after we've already paid them for their dumb thing.

As a constant purchaser of Criterion Collection movies, I know there are enough of us out there that physical releases will never stop. Also, this is me, unironically:

People are quick to forget that the infrastructure to go fully digital simply doesn't exist in many places. That there are serious conversations about physical media going away just shows how ethnocentric a lot of outlets are.

I get real physical with my media.

I don't own many movies anymore because I'm streaming on Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes.

I don't own many books anymore because I'm buying digitally from Amazon and iTunes.

I don't own many albums anymore because I'm streaming on Spotify and Pandora.

I often take advantages of these services like everyone else, but I've always had an issue with the comparison between these things, and video games. Movies are short, usually sub-two-hour experiences, the size of which isn't ever-increasing with time. At least, on the consumer end. Kindle books are kilobytes of data, and music is similarly a short, small, disposable experience. These markets also do a much better job at supporting their history than video games do. Streaming services have loads of old TV shows and movies by the truckload, and music services wouldn't be as big as we know them today without a back-catalogue filled with decades and decades of music.

Games sort of suck at doing most of the key things that you need to have a similarly convenient and preservable service: Licensing is a nightmare, games are lost to time and even with places like GOG, we're ages away from being able to browse any old game of yesteryear, and will probably never be there. Compounding that problem is that games are rapidly increasing in size with each generation, and internet infrastructure is in a shameful state for North America. Games are also several orders of magnitude more expensive, and there's not a great deal of trust toward most companies to actually provide their services indefinitely.

Even though companies can tell me I'm buying a "license" to use their product any which way I attain it, there's not really any damn thing they can do once the product is physically in my hands. Those products can be safely stored, not lost to services going offline or patches rendering them void. Games from the PS2 day can be emulated and shown in a never-been-better state as time marches on, far superior to anything the current digital services are offering for old games, particularly on consoles. I'm not inherently averse to the idea of a future where digital platforms is where games mostly stay; I just have no reason to believe most companies have the muscle necessary to create and preserve those things for all of my life, at a cost equal to, or consistently cheaper than, physical media. Anything less is inferior from the outset.

"Our Relationship With Physical Media Is About to Change..."

The hole is getting bigger!! Awesome! I've been waiting for that to happen, and like 'about time, am I right? Wait [looks at story]...awhh, shucks, foiled again.

As a US citizen I find it ludicrous that you have to pay those kinds of prices in the UK. What a scam.

As my internet connection is now, it would take a full day to download anything over 10 gigabytes. With digital games now exceeding 50 gigabytes in size, it would be crazy to start buying all my games digitally. Unfortunately, that's not the only problem. Here in the UK, the prices for your bigger digital games (the "AAAs") is extortionate. The standard, digital PS4 version of Destiny costs £54.99 on the PSN store, equating to over $90. I could get physical edition for over £10 less. So as much as I would like, I can't go fully digital.

@obikwiet: The realities of internet speeds and data caps, the way games can be removed from online marketplaces at the drop of a hat and never be available again, game libraries being tied to accounts and services that won't necessarily last. Some of these same issues are analogous to physical limitations, but some that champion digital as the way of the future behave as if such risks and limitations don't exist.

Agree with SpaceInsomniac. It's not a great point because it is not reflective of the way those products are pitched to consumers and doesn't match the purchase intent of the consumer. Doesn't matter what verbiage is in those EULAs which virtually nobody reads.

That software License agreement is basically unenforceable, and hasn't ever been attempted to be aggressively enforced to my knowledge so it isn't the practical reality of buying physical media in the marketplace. Place like Gamestop would not continue to exist if it was. Let alone later entrants into the USed Game business like Best Buy, Amazon or E-bay.

If you ask the vast majority of consumers whether they own the DVDs, CDs and Games they buy at retail stores I'm sure they all don't realize they supposedly don't "own" it. When you see retailers promote buying Discs, they don't talk about renting them they use verbiage implying ownership e.g. "bring your favorite movies home tonight" etc and often explicitly mention "buying" it which again implies ownership.

The Boots on the Ground reality of the situation is consumers for all intents and purposes do own a copy of their physical media for their indefinite personal use and it's been that way for 30+years.

Wait so you're telling me renting games is a thing again? Kinda weird how everything has come full circle but the only difference is the switch up from physical to digital. At the end of the day we're not really paying the subscription to own the games just to rent them for a certain length of time.

After the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube generation I had a large collection of games - 90% of which I would never touch again.

That's when I became a lot more conservative about which games I would buy and which I would keep. I don't have a shelf of games, but I do have a large container full of games and movies that I liked so much that I wanted to physically be able to touch and/or play again.

What downsides and limitations are you talking about? Just curious.

After that post, I seriously thought about trying to reverse engineer USB so that it's functionally the same, but looks and feels like a cartridge, inside and out. So essentially, a huge-ass USB with the storage space of a regular USB.

This, so much this. I love when people trot out this excuse like Sony/MS/Nintendo/SNK/Atari/NEC/Whomever are going to send you a letter one day telling you your license is up and to return the following list of physical games that you once purchased. If those licenses actually mattered we never would have been introduced to Windjammers.

I for one won't mind at all when physical copies of games go away for good, not. one. bit. just worthless heaps of plastic and cardboard taking away space and gathering dust.

And for people that don't like the whole steam deal of not actually owning the game there's things like GOG and the humble store, I mean it doesn't get much better than GOG, you buy it once and can download how many times as you want, you can install in how many PCs you like, burn the installers to a disk, put them on online storage, or put them on a nice HDD, which with proper care will last more than any cd/dvd/bluray i'd wager

But then I was never one to collect things, I don't get attached to physical possessions, maybe that's why I was so quick to adopt an all digital thing.

I don't like the subscription idea though, I like the buy it once and play as much as you like approach better.

@brodehouse: Prefer that? No, because I wouldn't get it as it came out... BUT, if that were an option (Like, get streaming plus a disc at the end of the year for X more dollars) I would definitely purchase a disc subscription that let me get each year of GB streams on Bluray.

great article patrick!

vinyl thing is easily explained with rising population of hipsters.

also evilbong? WTF

As long as it wasn't the Encyclopedia disc, haha.

And yeah, I agree. The Friday the 13th BR set is absolutely incredible by comparison, and is on my must-have list. The Nightmare one is only interesting for having two (poorly transferred) episodes of Freddy's Nightmares. I'd never have even given it a second look if I weren't planning a full-blown collection of all things Nightmare.

Can I sell it? Then I own it.

Unless I physically sign an agreement that is clearly labeled as a lease, I will never accept being told that I don't own physical property that resides in my home.

Fuck Sony's software license agreement.

I purchased the physical copy of Battlefield 4 (PC - Physical Copy) for half of what it was being offered on Origin or Amazon Digital Download a few months back. The box showed up, I punched in the product key, and downloaded the thing off Origin - this computer doesn't even have a CD/DVD drive.

Yay physical media now being a vessel for cheap download codes since they're piling up in a ware house!

@patrickklepek:

One big component people rarely mention about the death of Physical media is the impact on the environment.

I'm not crazy about a subscription model at all,(and steam and especially GOG should hopefully people that you don't have to lock yourself into an abusive subscription model) but I do recognize the potential to massively reduce landfill waste, habitat destruction, greenhouse gases and fossil fuel usage by going digital on what I can.

I went basically 80% digital last year after being a 100% physical guy. There's some definite societal pluses to going digital and I don't miss filling the old bookcase as much as I would have thought.

I have a question.

If you could pay 60 dollars, and then once every year Giant Bomb mailed you a disc (or bunch of discs) with all of the premium content for that year loaded on there, would you prefer that to your subscription? Right now, you're paying for the content and you don't even own it. My sub ran out (and based on Vinny+Alex and Dan+Jeff videos, I think I'm gonna re-up) and I no longer have access to a number of cherished videos. But if you had the discs, they'd be yours and no one could take them away from you. Also, you'd be able to put it on your shelf, which seems to be important.

Are you for transferring your subscription to a one-time transaction for a physical good that you can use whenever you want?

Physical game discs / cartridges already have an abstract concept of ownership. From a legal standpoint you own a license to play that game and that license comes with limitations.

Oddly enough I feel more secure with my access to a PC game when it is on my Steam account than owning a disc. I am quite careful with my discs but they can get scratched (mostly when people borrow them), broken or lost. Valve has built enough of a reputation at this point and I've been happy with their service since 2003.

Most people complain about their nightmare experience with Half-Life 2 on launch day and how terrible Steam used to be. All the people I've talked to who had that experience brought the half-hearted Vivendi Universal physical version of Half-Life 2. I pre-ordered Half-Life 2 silver edition, pre-loaded the game and was happily playing the game at 12:05am on launch day.

Valve is the only owner of a digital game service with DRM that has actually talked about what their plans are when their service is shutdown. Combine that with the fact that you can usually emulate your way past differences in Windows operating systems and it feels like I can count on being able to play my Steam games for a very long time after disc drives have gone extinct.

Yeah, though I think we lost a disc in a move. I wish every major horror series had decent Blu-ray collections, but it's all over the map. So exploitative.

I'd like to see some actual numbers on things like DVD/BR retail sales vs iTunes/Amazon VOD etc sales. I still buy most of my new media physically (especially music), but I am not above filling in a few holes or replacing a long lost album with a $5 Amazon sale. PC games are basically locked in at this point; most of the ones you buy off a shelf are Steam activated anyway, it seems.

I think I just like the idea that it's mine and nobody can take it away from me. I also don't think it will go away completely, ever, and not just in the sense of old videogames or vinyl. Those mediums were replaced by other, updated mediums. Going analog to digital is a pretty major shift.

The only game on physical media I've bought during at least the last year at least was a copy of Fire Emblem Awakening for the 3DS because it was on sale. Since I'm going fully PC this generation, all of my games are either in my Steam library or purchased from some place like GOG and then managed through Steam. I didn't even put a disc drive in the new PC I built last month. I've got a 3TB hard drive just for games that I have about 60 or 70 games installed to with plenty of space to spare...the all-digital future is here and it's awesome. I realize that some people may be limited by internet speeds or bandwidth caps, but thankfully I'm not and it's great.

About to change? I haven't bought a physical copy of a game since 2008, my last two PCs didn't have dvd drives, I can't remember the last time I bought a music cd or movie dvd.

Having lived in several countries over the last decade my collection of games/movies/music is all digital.

I've been a steam user since the beginning, but for some reason I can't bring myself to buy the majority of my console games digitally. There are a number of benefits to purchasing digitally but I still enjoy watching my console game shelf expand every generation. I know that we're only purchasing a license but I feel more secure in my purchase of a disk, probably a holdover from before consoles were online.

I'll eventually get there though, more than likely it will happen after I graduate and have to move all this crap.

Digital works mainly for music, for video games it's very far under 50% and didn't move on much these past years, mainly because video games cost a lot and you can sell it after finishing. For music what makes it popular is piracy, all these 16-18 years old never paid for any MP3 they have and they never will. Some people buy it as they can't go to the store often, or buy some tracks to know if the whole album is good.

Vinyl...ugh. The consumer audio market is such a mess.

I dunno, physical media seems like it will still have a place for a very long time.

50GB games are becoming more and more frequent, while at the same time ISPs across the country are showing no signs of increasing monthly data caps to the size they need to be (or eliminating them altogether).

If anything, they are becoming more restrictive, with providers demanding to wet their beaks from streaming service companies like Netflix. It is outrageous to think that ISPs can threaten to block all access to such a company's site for all of the ISP's customers if the company doesn't pay additional money to the provider.

The ISP's customers PAY for internet access at an agreed upon price, yet ISPs are demanding to get even more in ransom from Netflix-type companies. How can anyone can expect a happy digital-only future for media with the way things are heading is beyond me.

When you factor in customer-unfriendly policies that game companies themselves promote, things get even uglier.

Ever try selling a used modern-era console that includes your purchased digital games or DLC on its HDD on Ebay or to Gamestop? Both companies have colluded with the gaming industry to shut this down.

Ebay will delete your auction within minutes if the description includes digital titles. Gamestop will only offer you their standard rate for the hardware, and their policy requires them to reformat the HDD. You cannot recoup a single penny from digital sales unless you meet someone face-to-face to conduct the sale, and even THEN if Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo finds out the account was sold second-hand, their TOS allows them to delete the account that is tied to the digital software.

Nintendo takes it even further. While it is lame that Virtual Console titles purchased on one piece of hardware will not transfer to another (such as DSi to 3DS or Wii to WiiU, or any other possible combination) even if the same content is available across multiple Nintendo products, what happens if your hardware is stolen or breaks?

Nintendo expects you to buy the content all over again for use on the replacement hardware. A customer's only recourse is to spread their sad tale across gaming sites and social media, and hope that Nintendo sees it as a PR opportunity to spread a little goodwill by making a rare exception in their individual case.

In my opinion, digital-only will happen only when the number of customers such a policy will lose is less than the amount of money a publisher "loses" from used game sales. I don't see that happening for a very long time.

Must be nice..having a decent internet speed. Those of us on 300kbs and lower are super jelly.

Is that the 1999 Nightmare box set I see? Patrick, my man! You know what's up. None of that half-assed Blu-Ray box set.

I mean... you could make a Genesis cart as a shell for a USB, and then have the game run off that.

Although I don't know if USB whatever point oh it is now has the transfer speed to effectively stream a modern game.

I'm one of those people who still prefers to have a physical copy of as many of the games I buy as possible (which is frustratingly becoming less and less as more developers don't release a physical version for the PC). I like having a collection plus it's still faster for me to install a game off a disc than download it. Also as I'm installing from a disc I can play other stuff (even online stuff) without taking an internet performance hit which is a huge positive for someone like me who hates sitting around with nothing to do while waiting for a download to finish.

Fuck that. I want to put something like Deus Ex: Human Revolution on a Genesis cart. DLC, of course, would take the form of the Sonic & Knuckles cart. My slogan? The Future Blows.

At this point, if someone was selling a rejiggered SNES cart with Shovel Knight on it, I think you're gonna get some buyers. That would be a thing that is cool to have, and even play. It's novel, it's an intellectual curiosity.

In fact, most Kickstarters for retro-inspired games are offering the old video game accoutrements we got used to as bonuses or incentives to buy special editions. Boxed copies, cloth maps, posters, etc. I put money into the Shadowrun Returns thing and I got t-shirts and a boxed copy and an art book and a keychain what has a USB in it. Talking games that are 'digital-first', physical media is becoming more and more like vinyl, in that you're seeing small runs being made at a premium price for the jokers who will buy it.

The fact that most physical games today only feature a 3 page booklet about epilepsy and an online pass key is why you don't get a benefit from buying physical nowadays.

I actually vastly prefer the modern lack of instruction manuals, because the instructions should be in the game, if not the game itself. The game should teach you how to play the game. I shouldn't have to go outside of the game into printed words to learn how to play a game. Tutorials for all. Or tutorials for some, novelty American flags for others.

I'm with you here as well Patrick. I'd much rather have things for cheaper, and a library instantly accessible to myself, all the while whittling down on the amount of physical paraphernalia I have to keep around. Game preservation is getting more and more important (hell, I'm a graduate student, and one guy in my lab is getting his PhD in that very specific area!). Call me an optimist, but I don't think we'll suddenly one day not be able to play our older digital games if we so desired.

Aside from the sound of a vinyl record, don't forget about the vinyl booklets, with large size artwork and that kind of stuff, and the same was true for PC games back in the big box days - when you'd get thick manuals and lots of goodies that are reserved for $200 collector's editions these days. The fact that most physical games today only feature a 3 page booklet about epilepsy and an online pass key is why you don't get a benefit from buying physical nowadays.

Trending towards digital continues to worry me as somebody who lives in a country where bandwidth caps are consistently going down.

I don't use Netflix because the selection in my country is garbage. I don't use Pandora because my country flat out isn't allowed to. I don't download digital games because I'm close enough to my cap every month without spending 30gigs of it on a PS4 game.

This is all as somebody who lives in a civilized country immediately north of the United States, where this digital push is originating. Even if I preferred digital to physical (which I can't say I do), it doesn't seem like it's anywhere close to being feasible.