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.

The biggest hurdle for a long time was speed,

It still is, at least for a lot of people. Wolfenstein: The New Order is a whopping 40 gigabytes and Titanfall is a little bigger than that, I think (though Titanfall's massive size is due to audio). I'm all right with being all-digital on PC, since I'm not going to be taking the disc out anyway, but I am not all right with tying up my internet for more than a day just to play the newest first person shooter. Sorry, digital future, I'm going to need much, much faster internet before becoming a full convert or I'm going to need you to keep game sizes below 20GB. Preferably below 10, but that ain't going to happen.

As far as movies go, Netflix doesn't have everything and if I'm going to pay for an individual movie, it's going to be physical. Streaming video just doesn't look anywhere near as good as even a DVD and it especially doesn't look as good as a Blu-Ray, plus I don't have to worry about someone else bitching about the internet slowing down.

What I'm saying is, I can see the convenience, and a good number of people are probably already there, but the area around me is not. And I'm not going to pay tons of money for an internet that can support the all-digital future, either.

Physical media does reign supreme. In theory. Something you own that can not be taken away from you and does not rely on any externalities for you to consume will always trump storage and reliance on other parties and systems.

Unfortunately, with things like region lock that apply to music, movies, video games, books, comics and everything else along with most games requiring online registration and constantly being online and various modes of authentication (and even physical content like CDs and DVDs not actually being a thing you own, but a thing you are provided a license to enjoy as long as someone else wants you to be allowed), the value of physical media is undermined.

I am only fine with being completely digital, because there is no other option. It's great to have endless amounts of movies, music, games, and books in my life without being a home cluttered with those things like everyone I knew growing up. It's great to have things instantly accessible. No switching media in and out and searching for it or worrying about it being scratched or wearing out.

But I am only fine with those things, because if I buy most of the physical versions of them, they are nothing more than a content distribution. If I have to use Steam and sign into a Uplay account to use a game that I bought at the store or on Amazon.com in physical form... then there is no value to it being in physical form, to me. That physical item will be rendered useless as soon as someone on the other end invalidates my license or authentication or they kill the servers that host the content or the authentication mechanism.

As somebody who doesn't live in America, Japan, or some parts of Europe, I'm always shocked when "speed" is cited as the biggest issue to a digital future...

Downloading Wolfenstein would basically be my bandwidth cap for the month--a cap that seems to keep going down instead of up.

I bought the Portal 1/2 bundle on Steam the other day and I'm waiting for my cap to reset before downloading them.

I usually end up downloading my games over night. The speed really doesn't bother since it doesn't tie up my internet during the day when I actually need it. I'm glad that the new consoles are allowing pre-loading now.

You know what's really fun? When you have a few machines in a household with Steam and thousands of games owned and hundreds installed. You don't realize how often shit is updated until you look at almost a full terabyte given over to just automated Steam game updates.

I was on that speedboat (har har) myself 'till last year when I moved to my new appartment. If a promising new game came out, I didn't want to tie up my internet for two days (yeah, my connection was slow), especially so since my other half also wanted to play games and do other internet stuffs. Now though, my connection's fast enough to start downloading TLOU - Remastered in the wee hours of the morning and have it ready to be played once I've properly woken up. I still do like holding that physical copy and having it on my shelf (special/collector's editions more so), but if the price is noticeably lower for the digital option, I'll definetly pick that one (and vice versa, of course).

Good for you, supporting dem hot CBS properties.

I dunno the digital world of tomorrow is here for most developed countries, America's internet is still too patchy though, for me it takes a lil under 2 hours to download a 40GB file which is just fine by me. But it's a still quite a pricey luxury and not available for all, you need to lose shit like bandwidth caps and ADSL before committing fully to digital but as stands Fibre Optics is the tech we need for the transition and it's availability is rapidly increasing and becoming increasingly affordable.

I'm still waiting for some more titles before buying the PS4 or Xbox One, but I am completely ready and excited for the future of only buying digital copies of games. The first think I do when buying a game now is checking if it's available to download. Im tired of the dusting and having all the game boxes taking up a lot of space. It's also just kind of looks stupid having all this shelf space filled with ugly blue and green plastic cases.

Don't be a Gerstmann, give in to the digital future.

The wierd thing I'm finding about the digital future is, for a lot of boxed PC games the CDs seem pretty redundant. Especially since games these days often have gigantic post-release patches and tons of DRM, it feels like the physical copy IS the digital copy, just with the code in a box. I recently bought Diablo III Reaper of Souls from amazon, but when the disk finally arrived I found out I didn't even need it! Just put the CD key into blizzard's website, and there you are. It was also randomly about £10 cheaper to get amazon to post me the box and code than to just pay blizzard themselves to send it to me online...

I've gone almost all digital. The main problem is that there are fewer sales and price reductions digitally than there are with discs and retailers, due to less competition. A lot of games that have fallen in price on Amazon or Gamestop or whatever are still full price digitally, and when there are price reductions they often suck (For some reason Microsoft seems to like discounting Xbox One games by $10, even when said games are seemingly at the end of their sales lives.)

Dell often sells new release games with $25 gift cards that can be rolled over into the next new release, making them all effectively $35. You don't see those kinds of deals with digital (even though digital should be cheaper for the publishers in numerous ways including physical production, shipping, and middle-man costs, not to mention used-game sales.)

I can say I haven't taken a plunge into downloading a huge next-gen game. I guess in terms of speed and service, I'm comparing a demo or smaller game that can download and install in the background in maybe a little over/under an hour, as opposed to those taking forever last generation.