How can people trust digital download services when...?

I have a preference in physically owning all my games. This lead to me not using Steam as much as other people or buying my PC games physically and activating them in Steam (although that's changed a bit in the past few years and I buy a lot more stuff then before). Even though space is sometimes an issue, I feel like I actually own a thing when I can hold it.

My question is how people can trust paying all that money on digital services, especially on consoles, when things like the GFWL fiasco can happen. How can you guys be willing to put all that money into something, when you don't know that you will have access to it forever? I mean, sure companies like Steam are more reliable, but what if you wanna hand down some game to your great great grandchildren as like an antique game back before things became virtual reality?

Just hearing that certain games might not transition over from the GFWL scenario makes me shake my head. I enjoy Microsoft and Sony's game services, but hearing about those sorts of things makes me apprehensive in starting an all digital library. Don't even get me started on Nintendo... I haven't played the new Phoenix Wright game (my second favorite franchise for DS) because the shit that is called the Nintendo online services...

That is why you do it only with trusted sources. Like with Steam for example. Even if they remove the game from the store you still can download it forever. Also you don't own the game but a mere licensee of the game.

It's certainly not a perfect system, but I think most (all?) of us are going digital knowing that we may not always have access to these products. It's not ideal, but I also I can't remember the last time I dusted off an old console and thought, "thank god I still have this copy of Super Mario World." The significant games will always see re-releases later on, if you're dying to replay them. The others will probably be available somehow.

But this industry is fucked up in a way others are not. Which really comes down to way consoles function. I'm not going to have to invest hundreds of dollars into hardware and spend hours searching for a legal way to watch Casablanca. But if I wanted to play Super Mario World, right now, I would either have to download an emulator, buy a Wii or Wii U (then buy a digital re-release), or track down the original hardware. There's rare movies too, but that's not as widespread an issue as it is with games. There are games that are wildly respected, that are still relatively hard to come by, or require a lot of time and money for an emulation.

Hm. I've gone wildly off topic here.

That's another thing I hate about digital downloads... They can take away your right to access your license, and I know it's technically the same for physical games but I'd like to see you try and take away my physical copy of my game. Even if they somehow ban a copy of my game, as long as I have the physical copy, I can always find a way you access that information.

Also, are you saying that Microsoft isn't reliable? I mean, that doesn't look good for them and the Xbox brand.

I lost 10% of my physical collection to a theft by my roommate. No system is perfect.

Are you like, 80?

The older I get and the more I have to worry about sharing my space with other people the less I care about physical copies of games...especially now that physical games hold no real rarity any longer. The only reason I want physical copies on consoles is so I can get rid of games I don't like or want any longer.

If you owned a physical copy of a Games for Windows Live game you'd be in the exact same position right now. Every thing is also just speculation right now. Chances are everything will still work. It's also a far greater risk owning physical media. Anything can happen to your disk and if it becomes unreadable you're fucked. You also won't be able to give your great grandchildren a dvd because dvds don't last that long even if it's just sitting in a box. If you read all the fineprint you still don't actually own the game even if you buy a disc.

Digital is far more convenient, reliable, and space efficient than buying discs and most of the time it's cheaper. I don't see any benefits of buying discs unless you're into trading in games or you're one of those crazy persons that says, "I own a disc, I own the game, I'm awesome!"

92 this July.

This is a completely different scenario. Theft is different then a company legally halting a service that you paid for and in the process causing you to lose a bunch of your assets.

Because after I have paid for the game and finished it I usually don't care about ever playing it again. I don't feel attached to any games I own, regardless of whether it's physical or digital. I view games as temporary experiences rather than personal property.

@liquidprince: Microsoft is often lying and pretending things. So yeah I do not trust them much. Right now I am handling it like that. I buy every PC game digital these days and every Console game retail. I have not spend any money on their stores so far. But I guess this will also soon change but who knows.

As for physical stuff.They can also break and you will not be able to play these games anymore. Personally I think digital games will stay longer intact than physical games.

That's the point of digital.. you don't own the game, just the license to play it.

There is nothing wrong with this, and in a way it's probably beneficial for the industry. Take Nintendo for instance, they sold Ocarina of Time on N64, Gamecube, Virtual Console, and 3DS. Would it have made that much difference if you were forced to buy the game again every 4 years in order to keep playing it?

If you look at it like that, then digital licenses should be like half price day one.

I have several hundred games in my Steam account and have avoided GFWL for the most part except for Viva Pinata which was on sale for 99p but I got what I wanted out of it but I've had no issue with any of my games since 2004. I've owned my Windows Phone since 2010 and I've lost more apps due to them being removed from the store and no way to get them back. When it comes to digital content I guess you're best off just not trusting MS.

All my old CDs are scratched, lost or at my mothers house. I've moved so many times and its just a hassle. No media format lasts forever.

Companies do this whether it's for digital game downloads or not. Television services, internet, phones, drivers licenses, really anything can be revoked just cause. Payed for or not, and you don't get a refund.

Steam has been around and has never screwed me over and the company continues to grow so they've earned my trust.

Microsoft already shut down the original xbox live and are soon shutting down GFWL and while some publishers and developers have taken steps to address the situation about GFWL, Microsoft themselves have already decided that all their first party stuff on GFWL will die with the platform. They have earned my complete and eternal distrust.

Sony has done some great stuff with PS+ and for whatever limited gaming i see myself doing in the next couple years on PS3/4 they've earned just enough trust from me. I would probably not go all digital on PS3/4 but since i have no plan to use their platforms outside the occasional exclusive it's ok.

GOG has the best possible business model but extremely unlikely to ever be applied to newer releases from the major publishers.

And as far as PC in general is concerned, outside of GOG, is it even possible to buy a game at retail that isn't linked to one platform or another anymore?

Hardware breaks, software breaks. At least you have a chance that your digital copy can be carried over to another device. The only physical games I buy are Wii U games only because of the lack of storage space. Yeah, I know I could get an external drive, but no. Not going there.

I believe people should always be vigilant over digital goods because we do not own them. You know, be a good consumer and make the decision for yourself. However, I think there will be a time that avoiding digital will become more difficult as the gaming world changes from psychical to digital goods.

@liquidprince: well I think the big answer to this is that going digital creates the less likely chance that a game will become rare.

The fact is games that you own could get destroyed in a natural disaster, robbed hell you can get married and your wife could hate that you have a huge collection of videogames (welcome to my scenario). What's the difference. Owning something forever can be a challenge in its own right.

Going all digital does have its risk, yes valve can go out of business one day. But hopefully with tons of support it won't happen.

Let's face it if we ever have a disaster like steam going out of business hopefully there will be enough notice were you can get a really huge hard drive and then install everything you own.

But I will say with digital I found I get better sales from the likes as steam and the humble bundle then I would get with a retail store like Best Buy or Wal-Mart.

Right now my biggest complaint going all digital is the horrible interfaces from Xbox and PlayStation that don't make it easy to see what you own with out it being installed on your console all the time.

And I will say one more thing being digital as videogames are they are such a archival medium. The fact is most gamers don't need there old systems to play certain classics they once owned. It might not be the most legit way of playing classics but everything exist on the internet.

We have to show trust early on, and push when we think our rights as customers aren't being met.

Digital distribution is in it's infancy, so we'll see all kinds of crazy scenarios happen before things get standardized in a way that is beneficial to everyone involved..

I know that Valve says that in the event that things go south for them and Steam crashes to the ground, people will still be able to play the games they bought, but I wonder how true that is.

Anyway, there's too much in the way of me going all-digital. Questions of service reliability and ownership, the file size/download speed issues, and always-online connections that developers and publishers continue to insist we want and would be better off for having even for single-player content are just some of those reasons.

I don't really trust digital services, not even Steam. But, the bigger these services get and the more costumers they have the bigger the problem the company who is running the services would have on their hands if they were to treat their costumers poorly as their service ends. GFWL was a failure and was barely like so, shitty as it is, it is easier for them to get away with treating costumers poorly. If Valve were to do something similar with Steam all hell would break loose.

@liquidprince

Steam has a backup plan if in a worse case scenario they do go away. Gabe Newell mentioned that they had a contingency or a kill switch of sorts that will allow you to be able to download and keep your games (making a backup of it) and wouldn't require Steam verification, in the event that if they go out of business. Very unlikely to happen considering how big Valve is now but at least they've actually thought about it and have a plan in place

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Because you don't have to trust all of them or none of them. GFWL was always shit. Steam is pretty much agreed on as being much less shit. As for wanting to give your grandchildren your old games... I guess that depends on the person. I doubt I'll care about most of these games in 50 years.

They're usually half price three months out, and three quarter off six months later.

I mean, on disc or digital, all the games relying on servers have this problem. EA and other companies routinely shut down support for their games. World has changed, there's upsides and downsides. Shutting down the DRM platform is kinda shitty though, and opens up a lot of questions about digital rights. If you really want to play a game, there's ways to make them work.

The games on a disc isn't even the final product anymore with all the patches. On PC you could potentially archive the patches. On consoles, I'm not so sure.

I don't need to have access to video games forever. Ownership has never been something I've been concerned with. So long as I can pay for access to a game and play it without that access being revoked before I'm finished with it, I don't really care what happens to it afterwards.

I treat digital distribution platforms as services whereby the offerings of said service are subject to change at any time.

TRUTH

PRIDE

GARME JURNALIZM

I honestly don't give a shit if they take away my license for my digital games. I usually only play my games once and that's about it. If there is a game I really like then I would go grab the physical copy of it.

Like some of the people here, I value my space more than my physical game collection. My music collection already takes up a ton of space and I don't want to add games into the mix.

As of now, I just go where ever the game is cheapest. I just don't care at this point.

What this dude said.

Because I do trust them. I fully believe that if Steam were to shut down for whatever reason, they'd allow me to download my games in some amount of time before shutting down. Which wouldn't be perfect, since I'll need to buy a huge HDD and put all my games on it, but I can make it work. I will own them forever.

I also trust Origin. Possibly even more than Steam since they reliably give me a refund if a game doesn't work where Steam doesn't, more often than not. Also, I very very very very very much trust GOG.com. I already have back ups of the games I bought on their site, DRM free.

I also prefer owning physical copies, but being worried about being able to play the game forever isn't one of the reasons. Also, Games for Windows Live also goes for boxed copies of those games. You will have the same problem with physical copies if I'm not mistaken.

@liquidprince: Both have their upsides and downsides. I'm fine with digital. Hell, I was going to buy a physical disc copy of Tomb Raider DE but my store didn't get any in so I simply just went on my PS4 and downloaded it. At first I was like no... i'll just wait for a physical copy. Then I got thinking what really do I gain from a physical copy? I don't sell or trade my games and all games have to be installed and there isn't even a fancy manual or packaging to get excited by. I just think you have to get over the mental hurdle of thinking so far ahead to scenarios that might not even happen. I mean hey what if say.... your house burns to the ground?

All your physical "things" will be gone right? If you had a digital copy of all your PC games on steam it wouldn't matter all you would have to do is buy a new PC and you would still have all of your games. I also think you should be more worried about here and now rather than 10 years in the future. Because who knows what 10 years from now even is in the landscape of technology.

Homeowner's/renter's insurance would cover the potentially hundreds of dollars of physical games that died in a fire. But yeah, there are positives and negatives to both. I usually end up trading in games eventually, and I like to lend games. But, it's annoying to have to get up and switch discs.

What really burns me about digital is the inflated price considering there are none of the manufacturing, shipping, or inventory costs. I'd definitely buy more digital games if they were priced cheaper.

And, the PS4's disc drive is really small for large next current gen games.

I honestly don't trust them and I think you're being naive if you do currently. That's not to say I don't buy things digitally anyways but I understand it's a gamble. You may be saving money buying digitally (MAY being the key word) but we're being wrung dry in other ways.

The number one thing that needs to change with digital services is the terms and conditions agreements. I understand that corporations need to cover their asses but we agree to some pretty fucked up shit every time we buy a song off iTunes or any sort of equivalent. The way things are set up now we should probably have a lawyer present every time we encounter a terms and condition agreement. Who has the money for that though. :(

Even a physical copy of a game simply comes with a license to use it and not to actually own it. If you buy a boxed copy of a game and then EA decides to shut down its servers 9 months later you still may not get to play the game you paid for even if you had a box with a disc inside.

It was nice to be able to grab a game from a shelf or a box, stick it in the system and hit play, but those days are over. Games want more data transfer speeds than optical media can support. Game publishers want more control over what we purchase so they forces us to connect to their spotty servers to play it.

Blizzard has something awesome now where you can assign old ass games to your battle net account so you can download and play Diablo II without putting in the discs. That's pretty awesome. I imagine the security is pretty lax on it since they are very old games.

Consider that when you buy a game with on disc DLC, you may have a copy of the data, but you still cannot access it.

Keep buying stuff physically as long as you can though, more power to you as long as you enjoy it.

Material things aren't going to last forever, either.

Generally speaking, there are, um, "other" ways of obtaining games that might be lost.

I definitely think that strides in game preservation need to be made, though, and from all companies. Porting old games to the PC would be best, but that isn't going to happen. Digital preservation might be the best way to keep these games alive if handled right, so yes I will support it. So far I think it's being handled quite well by Steam and GOG, and Sony has done the best job in the console marketplace. Microsoft was doing well, but thanks to shutting down GFWL and the rest of the shit they've pulled with the 360, I don't want to put much faith in their digital marketplaces.

As someone who has been playing a PS2 game and a SNES game, I'm definitely concerned with keeping old games alive. I think that many of them deserve to continue to exist and remain playable.

Yeah, same here. While some people might be fine with playing a game once and then not caring about it's availability afterwards, I think the medium as a whole will suffer greatly if we lose easy access to older games. I can easily watch a film from the 1930's, or listen to music from the 1970's, but playing a game from only 10 years ago can be challenging. Re-releases help keep certain titles alive, but it's unfortunately not enough.

They don't. But it's more reliable to have something physically in hand than in some server you have no control over.

Considering the amount of games that have a digital tie-in, now days, physical runs into the same issue as digital does. And I'm with several other people here, in that, I kinda don't care if I can't play it again. I have to really, really like a game to play it multiple times and I have a great memory so it is hard for me to go back to older games I've played.

I bought Darksiders 1 and 2 through the PSN and I'll, probably, never play those games again. If I do it will be far into the future where I'll have a PC and buy it for a dollar. And I mostly play MP games, anyway.

Even if a service shuts down the content isn't lost forever. The day that game comes out there is a cracked version on the interwebs for everyone to download. I'll just go there if I desperately want to play something.

All of these things.

Yep. Also, digital makes it a lot cheaper to distribute something niche or something that isn't going to make much money. I can pretty much guarantee that the likes of Deus Ex and Temple of Elemental Evil would be very hard to play, legally, if digital downloads weren't a thing.

That's a valid thing to bring up but Steam has already earned my trust, and Sony seems to be doing well too. I am a little wary, still, that the rights to most of my games can be revoked by a company deciding to pull the plug, but that serves absolutely no one. I doubt it will happen and if it does, well, there are other ways of getting those games back. And I don't have any moral qualms with pirating software I've already purchased.

Also, as far as material things being reliable:

tell that to mosespippy here.

It could be argued that digital things are more reliable than physical things. If someone steals my computer, my entire Steam library, my Origin library, and my GOG library are all safe and sound. The only thing missing is the device that I need to play them - once I get another computer, I have access to those games again.

To clarify, I actually prefer having a physical copy of something in my hands. I like seeing my library. But there are some pretty hefty advantages to digital, and I value the longevity that digital purchases generally imply far more than I value shelves upon shelves of dusty cases taking up space.

GFWL's shutdown is unfortunate and it's a textbook case of why you should distribute your game with a well-known, well-respected, trustworthy distributor (i.e. Steam or GOG). Hopefully the kinks with digital distribution can be worked out and we can make this whole thing work well. Ideally this would involve GOG's DRM-free philosophy becoming the norm, but I doubt that will happen. The next best thing we have is Steam.

Those services have always been marketed as exactly that. Digital media distributers are only recently trying to handle the influx of customers who are abandoning physical media, and and most are doing a pretty poor job of it. After nearly a century of acknowledged permanent ownership of media, only now are these issues arising. I own 389 games on Steam, and it makes me skittish when I remember that a deauth command could remove those in a heartbeat.

If my cell provider where to cancel my phone, I could get back to precisely where I was with pretty minimal cost. The same goes for my ISP and my TV (if I were a subscriber) provider. A phone call to a new provider and $200 and I'm back where I started.

But if my video game licensers were to "cancel" Steam, XBLA and XBGoD, or GOG.com, it would be an astronomical amount of money to recover what was lost. If you lost your drivers license and the only way to get it back was to pay a toll for every road you had driven on since you started driving, you'd be equally furious if it happened. You'd also be as skittish as I about the possibility of it happening.

As someone who did lose my drivers license a couple of years ago (along with my wallet and everything else in it), I can attest to this. It's not difficult or particularly costly to replace a driver's license or credit card. A physical copy of a game, while potentially much more costly and difficult to track down (depending on the game), is also something that's at least possible to rebuy, whereas if Valve were to pull the plug on Steam tomorrow, well, there goes not only the Steam library but all of the services attached to it. And given the number of games that some people have bought off of Steam (someone I talked to on the forums in the last week said he had over 1400 titles purchased through the service), that's potentially much, much more damning.

Valve already said that if for some reason they go down you will have a long time to actually back all these games up you own. So in the end nothing will go away. Also the only reason why you can replace things like driver license or passport for example is because they already exist in a digital way somewhere. Only because of that you get a replacement of these things relatively fast. Right now physical copies can get damaged and unrepeatable much easier than anything you own on steam.

Valve said that, but if it comes to pass that Steam is going away, will they follow through? Just because Valve said that will be the case doesn't mean that it will be true.

@hailinel: Do you really think that Valve just shuts down Steam in a short period of time? Steam is growing more and more with I think over 70 million accounts. There is no way they will be gone in lets say 10 years. And by then there is a much bigger problem people have to face. Because old games often do not work correctly on newer systems anymore. But this is a problem physical copies will also face and while steam can work on fixes you will never be able to fix physical copies except with patches.

@hailinel: I think the risks of physical media, both of damage and obsolescence, is probably greater than the risk of Steam just vanishing into the night without warning, which I think is a pretty far-fetched scenario.

Also, I think this discussion might be better after we see just how the GFWL thing actually goes down.

Fuck man, I don't know. Buyer beware?

@darji: Don't bother. Or if you really want to continue this, send me a PM. I'm not getting into it with you here.

Steam caving in isn't totally unrealistic; it's been built up, and it can come crashing down. The likelihood of it happening tomorrow being incredibly remote doesn't mean that it isn't a possibility down the road, however.

Both formats have their risks, but at least when it comes to physical media, you are actively the owner of that item, and a server shutting down doesn't negate that.

@hailinel: Yup. I don't think Steam caving in is impossible. I think Steam caving in, without a fair amount of warning, and an attempted solution to the issues being discussed, is very unlikely. Also, even if Valve were to go under, don't be crazy. Steam would be bought, not stop operation.

As for being the active owner- so? I still think that, in Steam's case, the odds of the risks coming to fruition are less than that of physical media. Being able to call yourself the owner doesn't change that, it just maybe makes you feel less gypped if something happens. But that strikes me as purely an emotional response.