With the disappearance of physical games, are you ok with not owning your digital games?

Spyxos said:
Pc Physical games market is gone. Xbox is also just saying goodbye right now. Ps5 pro was delivered without a drive and the signs are not exactly rosy for physical games.

Most of switch 2 games dont have a full game on a cartridge. It will probably soon be eliminated over time. And the physical nintendo exklusive games are more expensive so that people buy digital versions for switch 2.
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This. Discs are a thing of the past. They hardly make anything on them anymore. I hate to break it to the Sony Ponies but they are not just going to make discs for PlayStation games. This gen will be the last of it imo. And you know what? You will all keep buying and that's all that matters to your favorite company. Just like you did when Sony decided to charge to play online when you were so against Microsoft doing it and so on.

It's not worth buying any of the big 3 anymore imo. They don't care about making anything new anymore and the games play exactly the same way they did 2 generations ago with the same lame franchises over and over again. You could have literally skipped this gen and you missed nothing other than GTA 6.
 
MacReady13 said:
Microsoft doesn't need to be the market leader in consoles to have a massive say in what happens. Besides, want to game on PC? Microsoft would love for you to have Windows to play the VAST majority of games. And we all know PC is sticking with physical games...

Either way, console gaming was physical. With the introduction of consoles without disc drives and subscription services, why the fuck would people want or need physical media?
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You were asking why ms doesn't get any criticism, so i gave you an answer.

Everything was physical at one point. The reason why people don't want it is because the pros outweigh the cons for the majority of people. I would even say the majority of people with disc based consoles have their libraries as digital why don't they have physical libraries?
 
I don't really go back to games that I buy after I beat them, and I haven't bought a physical game in several years. Digital is fine – at least you have pretty immediate access to the game if you want to redownload to do another playthrough or fuck around.
 
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No

And if everything just move into that direction I can just stop getting new games. This is not water or food, I can just skip it and I will be fine. Besides, old games with physical media are right there, and they are usually even better.
 
I had a coworker who had a fire and lost everything. She lost all of her family photos from before her iPhone/iCloud backup began, she lost all of her movies (some of which is out of print) and her son lost all of his games.

Once this happened to her, I moved all of my games, saves, and movies and music to an offsite file backup service and scanned all of my physical photos to iCloud. If we had a huge destruction of personal property, I could bounce back with only needing to buy hardware, the rest is backed up.
 
Spyxos said:
Physical games are disappearing more and more. And the future clearly lies with digital games. However, I find this anything but good. The digital games do not belong to you, you cannot resell them and in general you can lose all your digital games at once.

You only have to say the wrong thing and the account with all the games can be gone. I also find it absurd how it is almost celebrated here that physical games are dying out.

If we at least owned the digital games and could do whatever we wanted with them, I wouldn't be against them.
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People are stupid and they celebrate less freedom for some reason.

"You won't own anything and be happy."
 
I'm a PC gamer, I haven't owned my digital games for over 20 years now

I'll still buy physical on my consoles whenever I can but if that goes away then what exactly am I supposed to do about it? The corporations control the Earth, normal people can do nothing against them
 
Nintendo first party and PS5 fully support physical. Xbox is even still printing physical game codes for Sony fans.

Even with Nintendo and Sony allowing basically physical digital editions (still sucks), guess what? I can sell them. They're infinitely more valuable than digital games.
 
My biggest gaming regret was buying physical disks during the 360 era. If i had bought digital, I'd still have them to play. Been all digital since, but to each their own.
 
Yes and no. I don't much care if I have a game on a physical disc in a box but I absolutely care about the risk of losing a game because the store goes tits up or I lose my account for whatever reason. I'm currently having issues with my Rockstar Games account where it's like my account has seemingly just disappeared from their servers for whatever reason. I've been in contact with their support over the past few days and still don't know if they'll recover it.

It's why I always buy DRM-free games on GOG when given the choice. I can accept losing a game if my hard drive dies the same way I could accept losing a game if the disc got scratched. But losing it due to things out of my control is much harder to accept.
 
Whatever your feelings about digital games, understand one thing: You do not buy them. You lease them. That's the price of immediate gratification. It's a price that will only grow graver once publishers have all the power.
 
When that time comes I'll reassess my purchases when buying games at full price moving onward from there.
However

I haven't traded games in quite a long time. By the time I even think to trade them in, they're sub $10 in value (depending on the game). So why bother? I just keep them and grow my collection.

Keeping physical aside from that would be to sell them. But if they don't have real value outside of collector's item status then the reason to buy them in the first place will become minimal.

I won't have a problem buying digital 100% if and when the time comes.
 
I regularly play digital only versions of 30+ year old arcade games that were originally tied to literal physical roms and hardware cabinets. Digital is the best - probably only - way to preserve this stuff long-term.
For my personal collection of bought games - I don't really need to 'own' them - I dont get anything from it. I dont sell games except for maybe $0.50 at a yard sale because I want rid of them.
 
Nope. Honestly when the entire industry goes all digital, I'm likely just going to go retro especially if the prices keep increasing like they are. Digital pricing already sucks and the lack of ownership is just adding fuel to the proverbial fire. Imagine if these greedy companies have full control and can dictate the pricing of all games with DRM, always online, DLC, etc.

I primarily buy physical, but I also buy digital as well when reasonable. Primary point is, less choice is terrible for consumers. Next generation we will probably have $100 games that rarely go on sale even though they been available for years with diminutive discounts every now and then. An all digital generation WILL be a nightmare especially with how money hungry corporations are now.
 
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vaibhavpisal said:
That is a problem.

But maintaining multiple generations of games with me is not feasible.

Digital already is a superior method of game preservation IMO, unless I become a library myself.
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Some people have over 10k digital games. I wish I had that many physical games. That'd be an incredible home library :)
 
No.

If the future of consoles is digital-only, I'll probably switch back entirely to PC.
Closed ecosystems that run monopoly storefronts within their own systems are not working in the interest of consumers.
These are anti-consumer practices - but after years of industry brainwashing, it seems like hardly anyone cares anymore.
As long as people don't have to haul their lazy asses over to the console to swap a disc…
 
the_master said:
Some people have over 10k digital games. I wish I had that many physical games. That'd be an incredible home library :)
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Ofcourse.

If I had a dedicated large shelf showing off physical games all the way from nes era, I would definitely prefer to have physical games forever so I could keep everything together nicely.

I imagine there is large number of those people who want physical games at all costs.

Personally I would take game key cards as well, anything that gives me a box to put on those shelves.

Game preservation via my own physical games collection sounds impractical to me though. Useless headache.
 
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My main worry at the moment is what happens to my (both digital & physical) Xbox library. I'm lucky it's not huge, but it's still a decent amount of money spent on various games. I don't want to be playing them on a rebranded handheld or an 'Xbox PC' and my Series X will ultimately die at some point.
 
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Three said:
Physical is fine.
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Not happy about it but I have limited space for physical games, which is all going to pre-PS4/Switch consoles, so I don't have much choice in being digital only these days.
 
Yes im ok with it cuz i know if i cant resell, lent to a friend, etc, then i know i dont own it. I just set a price limit im willing to pay for these rentals that will be in my possession untill the platform holder pulls the plug. So i will never buy a digital game for something like 50-60€ like i do with physical games. Most digital games i buy are around 20€.
 
Yes i am. It's not like i replay games much anyway, it's cool to have them in the library but to me they dont really serve a purpose. So conevenience is more important to me than that.

I also think it's extremely likely that steam will be around longer than my ability to preserve my games myself so i literally see no downside.
 
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Yep. I don't care. I don't own any music on Spotify either. But it is funny for anyone who disses on Game Pass but at the same times owns mostly digital games. No one will own shit, from Netflix to your games. Some people even pay a sub to get all the features their cars come with.... One day we'll all be dust or rotting in the ground. Who cares.
 
I don't buy many games, even digitally not many. Last physical game I bought might be Uncharted 3, something on PS3. Most of my play time is spent with rentals, ie subscription games. I don't own any of them naturally (arguably I "own" the Essential games, as long as i stay subscribed) but I never owned a game copy I borrowed from a friend on SNES either. I just treat everything like that. And that's fine. Owning a game is kinda pointless for me. I don't replay games, no time for that. I almost never resold physical games so speculating on its value, maybe even hoping to get some rare thing that increases value is not my goal. I don't need a cabinet full with them to look at that.
 
PuaPua said:
My biggest gaming regret was buying physical disks during the 360 era. If i had bought digital, I'd still have them to play. Been all digital since, but to each their own.
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That's where I'm at. I just wish I made the switch sooner. I try to tell people this and they don't get it.
 
Going to PC gaming back in 2015 got me comfortable with the idea of an intangible gaming library. I don't know in general if it's a question of being 'ok' with it, moreso I'm not going to deny myself playing games because of it ( back in the PS5/Xbox One era I was one of those people screaming 'if gaming goes all-digital I'm out!!!!!!!').

Generally I think the angle of 'preservation' works best on PC because the community will always have back-ups for just about everything, even if the companies don't, so this stuff 'on PC' will be available officially or otherwise. Closed platform digital gaming though( console), it's a bit more precarious and I'd like to see better DRM rights. Maybe you need more millennials/Gen Zers in Government to push for that kind of thing, because I get the sense the boomers and older Gen Xer politicians couldn't give a shit if your digital game is compromised by company EULAs or not.

All that said, I don't really feel the urge to buy many physical games nowadays. The only physical PS5 game I own is Silent Hill 2 as a collectable( and it's sealed still). Otherwise I'm pretty much all digital. I've become minimalist over the past decade so the idea of having all these plastic boxes and discs stored is not appealing, and as far as basic utility the appeal for me was lost when games had to be installed to the HDD/SSD, so at that point I was pretty much like eh fuck it, it doesn't matter a great deal anymore. I do tend to treat digital games moreso as 'experiences', the same way I would pay $15 to go to the movie theatre, that money isn't coming back to me. I cap digital purchases at $20 max, the vast majority I've bought between $5 and $15 so I'm not worried about resale, nor do I loan to friends( I haven't done that since the 16 bit era lol). I don't necessarily trust that these games will automatically carry forward to like the PS7, but then I don't expect that Sony will be providing a disc drive by then either( I guess is that will end with PS6, but who knows). It's obvious where Xbox is with physical media and the whole game key card thing with Nintendo clues me into where they're trending as well. Otherwise all this shit is impermanent and I can't stress over it. These companies have pushed us towards digital, and it's incumbent on them to make sure our purchases carry forward into the foreseeable future or there's gonna be massive backlash.
 
I'll miss physical but all the years of using Steam made it less painful of not owning physical.

On the bright side, digital made it possible to buy old game at very low price and in some case purchasing games not previously available because of region restriction.
 
No. I will never be all digital on console. And, thankfully, consoles will never be all digital. There will always be a market for it, and there will be those that will produce physical games to meet demand from that market.

On PC, I'm fine with digital due to the open nature of the platform and the fact that 15 year old games I bought can still be played on my PC. (also amazing sales on PC)
 
The simple reason I buy physical games is because at some point when I want to eventually get rid of them, I can recoup some of the purchase price and in some cases even make a nice profit.

With digital I'm much pickier. I really need to know for sure that I'm going to get my moneys worth in the immediate future.

That said, I do like the instant access they provide and the lack of clutter. The fears of instantly losing your entire digital library are a little exaggerated even though I wouldn't consider digital to necessarily be a forever purchase.
 
There's positive things to digital gaming I think everyone has been down on digital gaming. It's usually just click and download from the comfort of your couch.

House Fire Destroys Collection of Over 2,000 Games


Then on September 8 of this year around 7:30pm, a house fire started in his kitchen, destroying everything in his home, including his game collection.

burning do the right thing GIF by Maudit
 
I've made peace with the fact that digital games are not in my control in almost any way, ever since HL2 on Steam. It's why I demand a significant discount for them (with a few exceptions). I'm a physical collector and really enjoy having the item and packaging rather than just a record in a database.

When a game is cheap enough digitally, I'll gladly double dip for my favorites to ensure I have the convenience of the digital product, but maintain ownership of the physical one too. To be honest, I like the way many companies have handled bluray releases where you get a disc with the full quality release and all extra content, and also a code for the digital copy.
 
It sucks physical games are dying, but I made piece with it a long time ago. As soon as physical games required day one patches to function properly, not to mention patches post-release...the actual value of ownership giving me permanence died. You're reliant now on servers (Nintendo has shut off access before), which makes the disc/cart a glorified DRM-check, and honestly why the game cart things with the Switch 2 make sense. All you're left with is the case to put on the wall/bookcase, and that you can resell it.

The only real ownership left is post-release limited-run copies that include all the files, DRM-free digital, and devs that re-release their old games in DRM-free digital years later (which should be a standard). The rest will just be improving regulation on digital media, which I think will happen in the next 10 years as other mediums are being effected by it.
 
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Yes, but not for $70-80.
On the rare occasion I buy a game at full price I usually go with the physical release.

For digital games I wait until the price drops to the point where I feel like I got my money's worth having played through the game once, even if I loose access to the game in the future. (Usually around $45 or less if it's something that's at least 15 hours long).
 
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