My PS4 is still new to me, and I have only managed to purchase two physical games since I bought it in July. I ended up selling both of those games last week, and when I arrived home, I realized that I had pawned my way into the future. I’m going on week two now with no physical media for my PS4, and I can’t really say I’ve felt it like I thought I would.
The first time I heard someone propose that physical media would die and digital distribution would reign supreme as invisible king, I guffawed. I thought collectors (and most consumers) would always want physical media, and then realized that while I prized my shelves of carefully curated physical media and ephemera, I only really watched movies and TV on Netflix. I realized that most people I know basically watch Netflix and don’t really mess around with cable. I watch The Price is Right every morning with my infant son. That’s it.
On top of this, I noticed that I had accidentally kept true to the PS4’s indie good intentions by only digitally owning one true disc game. It was Injustice: Gods Among Us, surrounded on all sides by incredible indies like Fez, Rogue Legacy, Strider, Octodad: Dadliest Catch, Trials Fusion, and a handful of surprisingly competent free-to-play games.
It’s taken me a little bit to warming up to a future where I don’t dust off bookshelves full of plastic boxes, but I understand it. I used to buy CD’s, and the only reason I really keep books on the shelves is because it allows me to put on my fanciest pants in front of strangers who come to my house. It has nothing to do with practicality, sort of like collecting vinyl records. People can say what they will about fidelity, but every vinyl record I’ve ever bought is because I like displaying things and think they’re fun. I don’t have a reason to own an album physically, people don’t even buy full albums anymore—let alone tangible copies of them.
It’s a fairly new development that games don’t have manuals, and the backs of video game boxes are plainer and plainer because most gamers don’t walk into stores anymore and make blind buys. They don’t dual-wield boxes and read the copy on the back to make their purchase because as disc games become more expensive, the weird obscure ones cease to exist. Whenever I see a game in a store that is for Xbox One or PS4 that I don't know about, I’m blown away. All the information that used to be included in a manual was generally in-game anyway. Manuals were relics, even in the Playstation One/Nintendo 64 era.
The biggest hurdle for a long time was speed, and as the internet has gotten faster, hard drives have gotten bigger, and I can download games freely instead of playing the heart-wrenching puzzle game that was deciding what old saves to delete on a memory card. I don’t need to do that. Even when/if I fill up my hard drive, I can swap a larger one (or simply a different one) in pretty comfortably. The last hurdle is keeping up with the price drops of physical retailers, which is something that’s hard to wrap ones head around since their is no digital shelf space to free up.
In that sense, digital distribution is not quite ready yet. However, the libraries of games ready for download and the speed at which they can is better than ever. Personally, I still want The Last of Us on my shelf, it’s a handsome box. It’s something I can give up, though. In the end, I would rather have shelves full of things I really want to have on display, and not have to sacrifice space in my home to the two-disc copy of Cannibal Holocaust I bought when I was fourteen.
I remember reading about the world of tomorrow in elementary school, and hoping that one day I could just buy things on the internet and have them materialize in front of my eyes like Wonkavision. I can do that though, with songs, books, movies, video games. People can deliver groceries and pizza to my house because I clicked some buttons. I can’t download a glass of apple juice to my desk, but I can download a video game. I can get behind that.
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