Do you prefer buying a phyiscal or digital copy of a game? (Same price)

I prefer having both. i.e. PC retail games that activate on steam or another download service. That's the perfect scenario. I don't have to wait hours for a game to download and it doesn't eat into my bandwidth limit, yet when I inevitably lose the box and disk I can redownload the game whenever I want.

If it's the same price I rather buy retail.

Whenever possible and if affordable to me, I will opt for a physical disc.  In the hypothetical scenario that a digital game provider goes down the drain (which can happen), I still have a physical copy for myself which I can install in with either the help of developers unlocking their games for use without the dead service, or by hackers with cracks to continue playing the products that I buy.
 
For now digital is definitely reliable and I often go that route for bargain deals on Steam at times, but as a rule I will never want to rely solely on any remote resources, which ain't just digital game distribution services.

I prefer buying the digital version just because I want all of my media to live in the cloud and I don't want to have to worry about scratched discs. Also, I hate clutter.

I only buy on steam because of sales, other than that, I would probably prefer retail.

Digital. Fuck having more crap in my house.

On one hand,you can give a game to a friend and never see it again...*sigh*
On the other you can show off....so yeah physical.
Oh and
  

Depends on the game. If it's some big release I like having the box, but I'd be totally fine going all digital.

Consoles I will only buy physical unless of course it is XBLA game.  
PC I usually don't tend to buy games unless they are on Steam or made by Blizzard (Which I get a physical copy because of their collectors editions and they do have download service)

 This is starting to change for me. I would like to stop buying closets to put my games in :P On the other hand if you have digital copies you can't resell them to a vendor who supports that.
 
But i'll go for digital just because it will always be there. With a retail disc you run the danger of damaging the disc and me not like that!

If we're talking same price here, then physical, of course :)

Digital. I don't like clutter in my house.

Physical. 
 
For whatever reason I'm illogically paranoid that one day companies will have an oopsies moment and deny all ownership of digital copies. So, I like to have the physical game in my hands to prove i own it.

i like having the stuff on my shelf. to me, digital is only useful when its a portable device. but if its a console then i want the boxes on display i guess haha

digital- I'm beyond having to use my optical drive often.

it depends on which platform. if it's for consoles i'll buy physical but, if it's for PC then i will buy off of steam.

Physical here. I don't buy very many games so clutter is not really an issue for me. And if it's the same price, then doubly so.

" I prefer having both. i.e. PC retail games that activate on steam or another download service. That's the perfect scenario. I don't have to wait hours for a game to download and it doesn't eat into my bandwidth limit, yet when I inevitably lose the box and disk I can redownload the game whenever I want. "

" If it's the same price I rather buy retail. "

I'd probably prefer the physical but get the digital, it's better for the environment.

They call me Bobby Digital...well they don't but you get the idea.

It depends on the price and platform. On PC I'd rather have the digital version. You can't trade/sell PC games easily because of one-time use keys.
 
At $60 I'd rather have the disc for console games but at $20 I'd rather have a digital download. If a game is $60 and I decide that it's not a game I need to keep after playing it, I'll sell it. I'm not interested in collecting and after several cross country moves I have no desire to keep lots of physical items. At $20 I'd rather have the digital copy. When I sit down to play a game I like being able to scroll through a list of what I own and decide what to play without disc swapping. When a game reaches that price the resale/trade-in value is usually so low that it isn't worth getting rid of.

If it's a computer game I want it on Steam. 
 
If it's a console game, I want it on a disc.

For the time being I prefer physical purely because when I really enjoy a game I like lending it to friends to see what they think of it.

If I'm paying the same I want the version I can use whenever I want, so its retail box all the way, when I buy a game digitally on a service like Live i expect to get some of the savings past to me since i already pay a fee that covers bandwidth and running of  the servers. so if they are saving on printing and packaging I should too.

It depends on the platform for me... 
 
x360 - physical only. 
PC - digital only. 

Physical. Unless I'm getting some sort of significant discount, I want to have a physical object. Makes spending money more worthwhile if I have a real world object. 

If its a console game id by retail. Why pay the same price for something that costs them very little to distribute and nothing to package? Besides for the same price I can trade in the retail copy and get some cash back. I still laugh at XBL games on demand. Like im going to buy a 2 year old game digital copy for a full $49.99 when I can pick it up 2nd hand for $15 - $20. Pointless.

same goes for music, i would rather own a physical copy rather than a digital one.  i think it's because of the real sense of ownership when i own a disk of some sort

Digital on the PC
Physical on the Consoles. 
 
I haven't had a a disc drive on my computer for years and I have no intention of changing that.

"Digital. Fuck having more crap in my house. "

Ebay refuse to sell my downloaded games and I find them harder to part-ex.

I prefer having a physical copy, but I think I prefer the actual action of buying to be with digital, since it's way easier and I'm lazy.  In an ideal world, you could buy a digital copy, and a physical one would be sent to you. :)

You forgot to mention if the digital version is on Steam or not. If we're talking about console games, I'm going with the physical copy.
 
edit: Portable games are best in digital form since you don't have to carry around a dozen or so carts/UMDs when you want some sort of variety.

" Digital. Fuck having more crap in my house. "

" I prefer having a physical copy, but I think I prefer the actual action of buying to be with digital, since it's way easier and I'm lazy.  In an ideal world, you could buy a digital copy, and a physical one would be sent to you. :) "

" @j_meyer_13 said:

" I prefer having a physical copy, but I think I prefer the actual action of buying to be with digital, since it's way easier and I'm lazy.  In an ideal world, you could buy a digital copy, and a physical one would be sent to you. :) "

You know, that might not be a bad idea. You buy the game and you can download it immediately, for a small extra fee you can have a physical cope shipped to you as well. Of course they'd need some way to tie the physical one to your download or else you'll have 2 games for the price of one :) "

Physical  
 
- I use gamefly for majority of my games 
- Unless it is bioware/rockstar or literally 5-8 $ I always resell my games.

" If its a console game id by retail. Why pay the same price for something that costs them very little to distribute and nothing to package? Besides for the same price I can trade in the retail copy and get some cash back. I still laugh at XBL games on demand. Like im going to buy a 2 year old game digital copy for a full $49.99 when I can pick it up 2nd hand for $15 - $20. Pointless. "

Surprising number of people are for voting physical copies (myself included). We all should keep this in mind when next we hear someone describing how they dream of a purely digital generation in the future.

" @jozzy said:

" @j_meyer_13 said:

" I prefer having a physical copy, but I think I prefer the actual action of buying to be with digital, since it's way easier and I'm lazy.  In an ideal world, you could buy a digital copy, and a physical one would be sent to you. :) "

You know, that might not be a bad idea. You buy the game and you can download it immediately, for a small extra fee you can have a physical cope shipped to you as well. Of course they'd need some way to tie the physical one to your download or else you'll have 2 games for the price of one :) "

Naturally.  I doubt anything like this will happen, but like I said... ideal world. "

If the price is the same then I prefer a physical copy.

I'd rather have a physical copy if the price is the same, mainly due to collectionist reasons, but nowadays I was using DVDs so little and so far between that I disconnected my DVD drive on my PC, so I can only buy digital. And, to be honest, I'm not bothered by it.

it's never the same I have never seen a physical copy cheaper than a digital copy on steam :)

C: Both 
 
I prefer having the thing on my shelf and being able to pop in a DVD and install the game when ever I get the itch to play it, and not have to wait a day or two for the game to download, but I like knowing I will never have to worry about losing a CD key or have my disks break and be stuck with nothing to show for it but a cardboard box. Plus I live in the country, and the closest gamestore is an hours drive away. I don't feel like trying to bum a car from someone, paying for the gas or spending my time to drive for two hours every time I want to buy a game. Plus steam always sells games cheaper then anywhere else. 
 
Pretty much the only time I buy physical games any more though is when I buy a console game. And when that happens it's usually months after it has come out and is cheap, so I don't have to worry about the shitty shipping taking forever to get here. 
 
I can't wait for the day that I can buy any PC game boxed and have it install to my Steam account. I would happily pay an extra $5-$10 per game on steam if it meant they would ship me a boxed copy. Or better yet, I would be willing to pay $50-$60 a year if it meant any game I got on Steam was sent to me in a box too.