A question to everyone who prefers physical games.

So I've been in and heard multiple discussions about physical vs digital. And this question popped into my mind today: With the frequency of games requiring connectivity for either entire feature sets to work (or in some cases like Destiny the game itself) or needing Day One patches to make the game even remotely playable in some cases (i.e The Evil Within ect... )

With a lot of the worry surrounding potentially getting locked out of a digital library due to a service like PSN being shut down does this in any way effect your attachment to physical? Or is having access to these games at all outweigh the fact that many of them might become crippled or unplayable in the future? Because in reality pretty much everyone still relies on digital distribution to an extent.

Because it seems to me long term preservation of current generation games is going to soley rest on the shoulders of the hacking/modding scene. I'm just wondering if you physical collectors have put any thought into this notion at all and if it does/doesn't effect your purchasing habits.

I think being able to trade something in for cash, potentially even other games, is a pretty valuable to some

Another major thing is probably just having the physical game on a shelf - some people like that feeling, to have the box/disc there to pop in and play. It probably feels more genuine as a "collection" even though yeah you still probably need to go online in order to play properly

I just like having a physical copy for most games. However if I'm going to play a game constantly at random times then it is relatively convenient to not have to switch discs (Street Fighter V).

As far as PSN dying that's what like 20-30 years in the future? At that point you're looking at another 3000 games or something to mill through and easy emulation futures for anything older than 5-10 years; what difference does it make? Like The Witcher 3 is probably the best game that's going to come out for a decade or so and I like having a physical copy but in the event that I lost it or something I could just go buy it on GoG for 2 bucks in 10 years and then play it on PC.

Realistically the only things I'm going to be on the prowl for in terms of physical games are Wii U exclusives; and I don't even own a Wii U yet. Yes I have Bloodborne and I've played close to 300 hours of Bloodborne but like any Souls game it's not going to break my heart if I don't wind up playing more of it when Bloodborne 2 comes out.

I don't buy physical games because I'm worried about the "unreliability" of digital content, I buy them because digital pricing on consoles is disgusting in my region.

In contrast, I don't buy physical PC games because Steam sales are nice, and I don't actually know that physical PC games exist anymore (the last one I got was Skyrim, and that was pretty much just a steam key on a disc).

That said, there's still a nice feeling of owning something tangible for a game I like. Waiting for a bar to fill up and an icon to show up on the menu doesn't have anything on cracking a case and feeding your system a disc.

Being locked out of online components, or the game itself, is always a concern, but for now I guess I'm taking it in good faith that it won't happen to me. The reason I prefer physical right now is that it's cheaper for me to buy games at Best Buy and also because of PSN download speeds. The PS4's hard drive space being what it is out of the box, I would prefer deleting physical games from the hard drive since they could easily just be inserted back in and I could get playing immediately (for most games). With digital I have to set aside a good chunk of my afternoon to both download and install the game.

Like I've recently decided to get Fallout 4 from PSN, because I'll most likely be able to pre-load it and I don't want to wait until late Tuesday to get it from the mail. I know I'm going to regret it a few months down the line when after I deleted it to make room for something else I get a sudden urge to play it again, or maybe some story DLC has come out, and I'll have to spend hours babysitting a PSN download.

@demoskinos: My preference for physical games revolves around my understanding of property rights. Personally, I think that in order to say that you own something, you absolutely must have two very basic rights to that property: (1) alienability and (2) an irrevocable right to possession and/usage.

If the case of digitigal game purchases, you don't have either. Your game isn't alienable because you can't sell it. And likewise, you don't have an irrevocable right to possess or use it because they can take it away by shutting off the server, etc. Therefore, you don't own them. You aren't buying the game. You are buying a license to use the game on the dev's terms, and your license isn't transferable. Fuck that.

@bceagles128 said:

Not to mention any developer can just boot you out for any reason, essentially turning your purchase into a 40GB paperweight on your hard drive.

I just don't trust businessmen. Developers, publishers, anyone, really. Businessmen are in the business of fucking people over by trade, and I'd rather protect myself with buying physical so that, even if the servers get shut down, I can still play the game I paid for. I also don't play online games like Dota or Titanfall, so if a game's servers get shut down I'm not particularly affected by it.

... and aside from that, I just like owning stuff I pay for. Having a real, tangible object is nice. Same reason I still own and buy a ton of books despite also having a lot of books on my Kindle.

Speaking of just console games, I assume I'm similar to most people in that I buy a combination of physical and digital but lean heavily towards the physical. It's not for fear of being locked out of games in the future, it has more to do with internet speeds and storage space. With the size of games now, even if a console shipped with a 2TB drive, that wouldn't be big enough to buy all digital games unless you committed to deleting and redownloading and with how long it takes to download a game on these services, that just isn't going to happen.

The physical thing on a shelf is arguably the biggest problem. Especially if you have a large collection which, at some point in your life, requires moving from A to B. The convenience and relative cheapness of music has now allowed me to switch to digital but games are not there yet. Or rather, the games I want.

@demoskinos: I still prefer physical for some things. It's nice to have it for display and having some retained value for the money I spent. I think physical is still a more equitable deal for consumers in terms of providing value for the money. When it comes to consoles too, I don't have to worry about constant hard drive space management.

Oddly enough a couple studies I've read suggest it's actually very more eco friendly to buy physical (which I don't know how much I believe) but the energy costs of digital downloads certainly aren't trivial or nearly as green as people claim.

There's also a bit of sentimental element to finding a rare copy or a good deal at a store. And that there is that new game plastic smell too.

It's kinda scary too to see how many mobile phone games, especially Japanese ones just flame out and disappear really abruptly. I have to imagine a lot of those are already lost for good. Will that happen to PC games at some point? I don't know, but it's not out of the question especially as the world moves into Windows 10 and beyond. There's already plenty of games on Steam that don't really even work with Windows 7.

But I've basically gone 70% digital these days, mainly because the pricing is balanced correctly now and I've switched to being a PC gamer. If I'm basically getting a long term rental instead of a purchase, then I should receive a discount to offset my risk. Steam etc usually offer you good chances to get that.

Besides as you noted whether you buy disks or not, games tend to have shorter shelf lives tied to online service anyway now. Whether that's multiplayer modes that last maybe a year at robust player levels or being dependent on day 1 patches or off disk DLC. Being digital to some degree is unavoidable now, so you might as well take full advantage of the immediacy convenience benefits.

If I was buying games on Console I'd likely mainly still be physical. Gott admit PSN's Flash sale deals have been getting a lot more competitive lately.

I buy physical disks because its initially cheaper, I get the game before I would if I had to download it, and when I'm done I can put it on eBay, which makes the game even cheaper. It allows me to make frivolous purchases because I'm not pissing away £60, the game costs me much less if I get bored after two weeks.

I'm happy to buy on Steam and I do have Fibbage and GoT digitally on my PS4, but my yearly purchase of FIFA and the other titles I get are always physical.

Couldn't care less about preservation really. I have a little Final Fantasy collection but its not like I have the time to play them. The main reason I see for going digital is not having to drag your ass off the couch to change a disk, and I salute you if your laziness is at that level.

I have multiple reasons to still prefer physical media over digital.

For one I am a pretty obsessive video game collector, so physical media is what I prefer there. I love seeing them all lined up on the shelf, being able to browse through them that way is so much more satisfying when choosing what game to play. Not to mention actually having the cover art, disc art, and manual (although that is rare these days.)

There is also the aspect that I love working on the wiki. I want to be able to run games even if they are offline, even if that has to happen way down the line. I also like being able to scan and upload variations of box art or disc art, get UPC codes, ect.

And the third big fact is that my internet is already slow at 7 Mbits/s. Putting in a disc and letting it install and then update already takes a long time, if I also had to download every game I would never be able to get to a game until at least a day or two after I want to.

At one point I feel like I was leaning towards more digital than physical up to the point that my local cable company decided to implement a data cap. Now I have to buy physical instead of digital just so I don't hit the cap. Plus I do have a sizable video game collection at this point so I might as well keep adding to it. Of course it doesn't stop me from buying digital games. It just means I buy big games like The Witcher 3 or Metal Gear Solid V physically instead of digitally.

If my collection of games would help preserve a small faction of gaming history that would be nice. But the internet has done a pretty good job of doing that already so I doubt the games I own will need to be uploaded later.

I don't necessarily have a preference, but I can definitely say that having slow and sometimes unstable internet is a deterrent from going all digital. For example, I thought about picking up Shadow of Mordor in the recent Warner Bros. Steam sale, but then I realized it would take a day or two to download all 50 GB, and that would also slow down the internet activity of everyone else in my household. If those problems didn't exist, I would be much more willing to have more digital media. I do have my fears about true ownership and preservation, but I've started to care a little less about that as I've built a Steam library of 100+ games.

I value hard drive space more than shelf space.

...But, I kinda switched to Steam this year, so...

Because I have a crap internet connection, and downloading a 50 GB game sounds like absolute hell.

@demoskinos: The only valid arguments for physical media include:

1) Ability to re-sell the content easier.

2) "Neat" physical content such as artbooks, figures, etc. This one is obvious a niche, but some people go nuts for pricey collector's editions. Included in this statement is the collection clause people use.

3) Reliability of and access to high speed internet. I have 100 mbps cable internet and even my speed off PSN is decrepit at best.

After I got over the whole "I just like having a physical copy" thing, the one drawback for me that was causing me to not go full digital was the memory space. I didn't like the idea of having to keep track of how much space was being used and how much was left and I didn't feel like going through the whole process (however easy people say it is) to upgrading my hard drive.

But like a year and a half ago I realized (which Im sure everyone else already knew, but I don't pay attention so am slow to learn these things) that the PS4 installs the whole damn game anyway. So whether I bought the game in retail or digitally, it took up the same amount of space regardless which immediately made my one hold out entirely moot.

So, now I just buy things digitally. Cause it just doesn't matter anymore...

I only buy physical copies of games that have large installation sizes, like 30GB+ or so, due to my ISP's data cap (mine is 400 GB). My sister lives with me so I have to share and I'd rather not be greedy.

I used to be pretty hardcore about physical stuff, particularly movies, but these days I don't mind having everything in the cloud.

Besides, my shotgun is real, and that's all that matters.

Nintendo games are the last games I've been buying in physical form and that's just because they hold their value or increase in value when they become scarce

I really like having video games on my shelves. Also my internet is pretty slow so having physical copies of games with large installs is key for me. (Looking at you GTA 5)

I just like having physical copies. I'm almost certain all this digital server based stuff will be shut down sooner than later and then people won't be able to play old stuff, but I don't necessarily think my physical copy is going to work around that for a lot of games.

I like having a giant shelf(s) with as many complete in box games on it as I can fit. I want a fellow gamer to be like "oh man you have a original boxed version of Link to the Past? whoa I remember this.." and they can touch it and relive the memory because I've saved it and took care of it for the last 20 years. I want it to look like a library. I've apparently got about 900 games in my collection at the moment and I'd guess 600-700 of those are physical.

I like being able to touch the box, look at the box art, look at the "features" on the back and laugh at stuff people thought was amazing back then like 4 person multiplayer or a day/night cycle or something. But it also illustrates what were potentially ground breaking and important features of that game for it's time. I like reading through the booklets and seeing stuff I didn't know, corny lore stuff, a thing to order like Vigilante 8 T-shirts or other super random dumb stuff.

I just like being able to sit back and stare at my wall of games and think back on memories of every single game, good or bad. Or see something and think "hmm.. I actually kinda liked that game but didn't play it much.. maybe I should pop it in?"

There is an experience to it all. It feels fun and nostalgic to sit on the floor, pick a game, pop open the case or box and feel it, put it in the console, hear all the machinery inside and hope it's going to work and seeing the start up logo up come on the big screen right in front of you face, and then leaning back and playing for a bit. Feel like a kid again.

My most recent major additions were a complete in box model 2 Genesis and then my friend bought me a complete in box Sega CD to go with it. I never had a Genesis as a kid. It's interesting to look at the games on the back of the box and such.

Also, all of this stuff could be resold down the road (which I don't see a reason to do yet).

And I still think it's absurd that digital copies cost as much as a physical copy. I might as well get a physical item with it as well if I'm going to pay the same price.

We already had this discussion elsewhere, but I'm still going to chime in here anyway: The idea that not having access to the game at all (digital) would be preferable to having a possibly buggy version of the game (physical) is crazy to me. I get wanting to play the ideal version of the game, but I'll take something buggy or broken over nothing.

So when Xbone was going to do its hole thing I was against it due to how it all seemed anti consumer and forced. I however liked the idea of an all digital console, I do it with my pc so why not my console.....until I had have to just download a few gigs onto my console.......then the speeds are so terrible even with a wired connection buying a game one day does not mean I will be playing even that day sometimes, let alone a few hours later.

So if I want to play a game asap then picking up the physical disc waiting upwards of 20 mins for an install and dling a 2 gig update lets me play far sooner.....also I will buy the damned things far sooner as the physical products go down in price and the online digital store keeps a stupid price on games for years if not forever.

Price and download speed are the two things that stop me me from being all digital....plus I can't trade in my super expensive long downloaded games.

Too many benefits for a low income gamer like myself to lose out on by going the more restrictive and more expensive all digital route.

@demoskinos: I don't know about "you physical collectors" and all that. I'm not a collector per-se but given the choice of putting a disc in and then download a 1gb patch from PSN for 5 hours or buying the game digitally and downloading it from PSN for 24 hrs, with another 5 hrs slapped on top of that for the patch, I rather go with the disc.

It's not a matter of me collecting anything, although I do like having boxes on my shelf, it's more a matter of convenience. I recently bought Assassins Creed Unity digitally. First time I bought a full game digitally off PSN. It took forever to download, quite literally over a day. I had no idea if I was downloading the patches or the main game because the XMB is kind of a clusterfuck about those things. Then it told me it was finished, but halfway through a mission it told me it's still downloading so I can't keep playing.

I mean it was a mess. I've bought big games from Steam that download within an hour and I'm on my merry way. With console gaming it's just not there yet.

@oldirtybearon: nothing beats that "old book smell" that all libraries have

My reliance on physical media summed up in two parts -

I'm in a test market for Comcast usage caps. 300 GB a month. I average around 250 GB of usage. Hope the test goes well for them and they roll it out everywhere soon so everybody can see how cool it is.

I bought a physical copy of Destiny but didn't bother with the DLC. Decided to get back into it with TTK and took advantage of the Gamestop offer so I got TTK and the DLC for the same price as TTK alone if buying digital. I'll start buying major releases digitally when they let me trade in the bits for e-bucks or whatever.

Depends on the game, how much it initially costs, and if I like it enough to warrant buying the physical copy.

Having lived in places where fast, reliable Internet is simply not a thing you can count on, every time you have to download a 40GB game is a hassle. Even if a Day One patch is required, the 2-ish GB or whatever that patch might be is nothing compared to the full game -- especially if you juggled hard drive space a lot and need to delete/re-install games with any sort of regularity.

That said, yeah, there are some cases where the online nature of some games today can kind of make me ask, "Why even bother with the retail disc? This experience isn't great either way."

I sell games on EBay unless they're special to me so physical is the way to go. Also I have a internet data cap and unplugging my modem and I stalking a game offline saves me data vs downloading 20-50 gigs online every time I buy a game.

I buy digital games whenever the price is the same as physical. Literally the only thing stopping me from going all digital is the pricing. In the UK most of the time digital versions of games are like £15 more expensive.

For me it comes down to price. If I am buying within the launch window I go digital. If it's outside of the launch window then the price is usually much better for the disc.

For me while there is definitely advantages to digital I can't justify switching when the only advantage I get is not having to get up to switch a disc.

I'm generally paying them an equal amount of money(more if I don't get it at release) for something that costs them less to produce(don't have to pay for all the packaging materials, shipping it to the store ect) and it takes up a larger portion of my monthly data, the download speed wasn't an issue when I got a game but it was far enough from launch that it probably helped. Then you factor in that I don't get to lend the game to a friend that I think would enjoy the game when I'm done. If I'm paying $80-90 than I want something I can hold and isn't going to use up 1/10th of my internet downloading it.

Basically regardless of whether or not the game can play in the future there are way more positives as opposed to negatives when it comes to buying physical copies. The only positive for digital I can ever come up with is not having to get up to switch a disc and I'm a) not nearly that lazy and b) have been getting up to switch discs/cartridges for 20 years, I can't think of a single time when I genuinely thought "I wish I didn't have to get up and walk 5 ft to change games"

But to each their own... and this of course is talking about consoles, Steam is a whole other beast

On PC I'm pretty much an exclusive Steam user (and the non-Steam cases are still downloadable --- last actual physical PC game I bought was probably City of Heroes). The main reasons are probably similar to most: the pricing and the convenience. The latter is mostly driven by the fact that I don't even know where I'd go to buy most of those games in physical form or even if it exists.

On console it's more mixed. I tend to prefer physical because the pricing is not a factor and convenience is arguable. I tend not to buy games pre-release so downloading pre-release isn't really relevant to me, and at that point it's way more convenient to just pop in to Gamestop or Best Buy on the way home from work (depending on the game I might reserve it via the website). That said I have downloaded some games (esp. for 3DS since there's an extra convenience factor for a portable). I do place significant value on having a physical case & manual (sadly going away in most cases); if digital cross-buy were a universal thing then that would be great (and there's no great reason it shouldn't be). Having to put a disc in to a system is not a big deal for me (I tend to play only a few games at a time anyhow).

While I understand your position I must point out that owning the physical media doesn't really change anything when it comes to property rights in this case. In theory at least (since it has never really been properly challenged) regardless of physical or download you are buying a license to use that product due to the nature of how the EULAs on these games are constructed. Hell, most console EULAs are the same as well in that you are licensing the hardware for personal use and promise to be a good little boy or girl with your gamebox that you just spent hundreds on.

In practice this becomes a different thing as I don't see anyone kicking down your doors to get that copy of FFX HD because you invalidated the license, but I just wanted to mention that for many years now we have already been "agreeing" to licenses on our games, regardless of the way we purchased them, outside of a few exceptions.

this generation with its huge essentially required patches and installing the game on the drive anyway as made me go full digital.

also as a hip twentysomething who moves a lot and has a NES collection I want to have to have as few boxes as possible.

In saying that I hope the modding community does their thing and archives all this shit

Having access to the games regardless does outweigh the regular need to download large or frequent updates. That said, in the cases of games like Destiny, where the game straight up needs an online connection, I'm more likely to pick up the digital version if I want to buy the game. That sort of thing does make me feel less likely to buy a game, though, particularly at launch at full price. Especially if the game is something I'd be more inclined to just play on my own without caring much for its online features (Need for Speed 2015, I'm looking at you).

For me it's mostly the nostalgia, and the experience of going to a store with friends to pick up a copy of game.

My reason for buying physical is 100% collecting. I don't care that it takes space, I just like having a shelf with stuff in it. Same reason I buy movies on blu-ray.

To be fair, unless there's a collector's edition, I do buy digital on PC.

I'm aware of what you're talking about demo but that's certainly not a deciding factor for me. In general I agree with you about preservation.

And while it's true many games (physical or not) use some connectivity I think this is a slippery slope. Many, many games still do not require any connectivity. I was out of town and playing MGSV offline for a week for example! So yes, while "everything is online" today, there's still lots of "safe, offline" products. Maybe.

• I love physical games
• I'd prefer having only physical games
• the reason: Memory. See below if you have a lot of time on your hands.

The biggest reason I prefer physical is that I live in Australia and at best our download speeds are disgusting. Couple that with the horrendous PSN download speeds and terrible digital pricing a lot of the time it's cheaper and more convenient to just go buy a disc

Edit: that being said I'm all digital on PC, so this is just a console problem

I don't quite prefer physical games, but the EU (or at least Swedish) pricing on PSN and many other services is such that it's way, way cheaper to buy a physical copy than a digital one, so I do buy more physical games. I could've bought Phantom Pain for the equivalent of $95 on PSN, but I bought the physical discs of both Ground Zeroes and Phantom Pain (the Day 1 Edition no less) for a total of $62 instead ($45 for Phantom Pain and $17 for Ground Zeroes).

I do worry about the fact that you could lose your digital copy at any moment too. Sony did show they were willing to just shut down an entire service without any option for users to redownload their content with the closure of PlayStation Mobile last year. PSM was of course a fairly small service, but treating their users like that, I wouldn't be too surprised if the same happens with PSP, PS3 and Vita PSN down the line. Microsoft seems to be doing a better job at that, considering they said they were working with historians/archivists to preserve XBLA in time for it's closure.

I do buy most of my PC games on GOG though, since they very much make sure that whatever happen to them, I'll always have just as much access to my digital games I buy from them as my physical ones, since there's nothing stopping me from making backups of the game's installers (instead of just the installed games, like Steam, PSN and others do - that kind of backup only allows you to restore the games on the exact same machine you created the backups on, since they don't include the prerequisites and installers to make a fresh install on a new machine).

Well the PS4 has some bullshit that limits the internet speeds for some reaosn. It is seriously ridiculous.

My xbox one gets my full 300Mbps connection when wired, but the PS4 gets about 75Mbps at the MOST.

That's an issue with the PSN network, not PS4 specifically. I have the same with Steam, I usually get 50-60% of what my 50 mbps connection can do (no there's no limter on) while my PS4 maxes out my connection pretty much every time.

Edit: To clarify, I'm not saying steam sucks and psn is great, obviously my case is far less common than the opposite. But you hear stories of people changing modems and suddenly go from horrible to great, or great to horrible speeds on psn. So I guess the internet is weird/hard, and psn is extra susceptible? Obviously something they should have fixed by now though.

@voidprod: Have you tried changing where you download from on steam? I ended up getting much better speeds by picking a server just a bit further away from me, Miami is apparently quite popular on steam.

With how many games I've lost in moves or stuffed in boxes completely unlabeled, Steam, ps4, and Xbox have a better track record than I of keeping my shit together. Digital ain't too bad and life is too short to worry about what happens to your game twenty years from now.

Yeah I'm not really worried about preservation. I mean, it would be nice to know that my games still work 30 years from now, but I probably won't care about playing 99% of them. I stick to physical because I like being able to see my collection on the shelf and my American internet is shit so it's convenient to not have to download full games. That said, I try to stick to digital for games that I go back to repeatedly like fighting games.

I can buy physical games for cheaper than digital (thanks to Best Buy for really pushing it with GCU), and the "convenience" of digital becomes a nightmare once the hard drive fills up. Buying a hard drive just becomes a weird proposition of spending more money on your console so you don't have to switch discs. Which may be fine with one console, but 3? No way.

Edit: Oddly enough I went almost full digital last gen with the PS3 (when Sony finally caught up). So I've been on both sides.

All comes down to price, I'll buy whatever is the cheapest and nine times out of ten thats physical.

i'm sure whatever rights the provider has to doling out digital versions of games would be bought out or passed over to someone else at this point if said provider were to theoretically crumble in a decade or two or three; it's just too big a part of the market now. i think if you entirely didn't have access to your games there's probably some much bigger crisis in the world going on that would preclude that, and games would be the least of my worries in that situation.