Topic: And they say Digital is better...

@Link-Hero To be honest, I let my small collection of games eats up dust. lol Not that there's there's much dust though, probably because it's a smaller collection neatly tucked away within the shelf (rather than exposed in a more open area where dusts would collect).

I go where it is cheaper. PC gaming has been digital for a while so I always find it a little surreal that so many older console gamers are obsessed with this. It’s all a license anyway and while I find the argument that delisted games are just inaccessible for a gamer that for instance is younger, the same could be said for out of print games. The only difference is you are at the mercy of the second hand market (which has its own problems…namely greed and hoarding) which may or may not make that game accessible to you. But I buy games to play. And I suppose that is the difference. I just want access and I am aware that I have an ok sized collection myself, but that is simply because the games were sold physically when I bought them. Personally the only issue with digital is licensing. Which is such a nightmare that there is no legal way for all games to be available. However a large percentage are and usually the most popular ones are so in that respect most consumers (not collectors) are covered.

I like collecting physical media but of all the kinds of media games are the ones where it makes the least sense. With music if you buy a CD you can rip a digital copy anyways and with Vinyl or CD you get a bunch of artwork that you don't get with digital or streaming. Also putting a record on is fundamentally a different way to listen to music than letting an algorithm serve you musics

With movies? Physical ownership by buying BluRays is quite literally the only way to have full "ownership" of the content. If you rip a BluRay you get the movie in the quality you want to play on any device you want at any time. Digital ownership and streaming generally requires an active internet connection. Also the library of movies available on streaming services in particular is fragmented and ever changing

With games, digital is pretty much identical to physical. With both you're generally tied to one platform so having the games be "more portable" isn't really a thing like it is for music/movies. In terms of quality, it's quite literally the same files so there's no difference there. So the differences between the two are pretty limited from the start. Basically these are the differences:

• Physical has a grey market while digital doesn't really "go out of stock/print"
• Physical can save storage while digital can run off faster disks/flash
  ......

actually I think that's pretty much it

I could say the same about digital games requiring an active Internet connection, which is a pretty common complaint about modern games. That's the trade-off for digital games though. To prevent piracy, "always online DRM" galore.

Also, regarding a fragmented and ever changing digital service, two words: Playstation Plus. Definitely ever-changing too. Plus, the region-restrictions of the PS Plus library is annoying as heck. Then of course, there's the lack of legacy PS2 games, which means I'm literally forced to buy a PS2 anyway just to play Digital Devil Saga. I literally have to buy a physical copy of the game at the end of the day anyway. Unlike having a healthy selection of physical older game titles on eBay or some third-party auction site, game companies literally decide which popular games they want to put in the legacy digital library, so it's not all that reliable to begin with.

@Maxenmus
Physical games also have DRM, are platform locked by design and you can be banned from your account. Also online multiplayer games have a limited life and lean heavily on that online connection, digital ownership or not

And your point about physical being the only option for some games on older platform is moot. Physical ownership of retro games on new platforms is non existent. Digital ownership being patchy is therefore objectively better here. Something is better than nothing

I don't know about that. I would imagine that if I go out and buy a CD-ROM it would still work fine without Internet connection. 3DS games don't need a connection. Switch games don't need a connection. If I pop in an SNES cartridge, it most certainly doesn't need an Internet connection, so I don't get what the "banned from account" argument came from. Banned from where? The SNES Organization?

Nobody said anything about online multiplayers. I certainly didn't mention it, so I don't know where that came from. I assume you're referring to the DRMs?

Which is why I would buy older platforms? Your argument that "something is better than nothing" is moot when that something (older consoles) is still purchasable, so it's not exactly "nothing," is it?

If all you're interested in is systems up to the PS2/GC era and PC games prior to about 1998, that's great. Just keep buying the physical media.

For anything newer than that though, you've got to deal with the fact that games may require DRM, online registration, day-one patches and optional DLC. As such, merely having physical media is not a cast-iron guarantee that you'll still be able to get the full experience, or in some cases even play them all, in a future where the servers are no longer available.

As such, for most of the past couple of decades, we've all been in the same boat whether we've got a preference for downloads or not.

@Maxenmus
If you're only interested in buying games from older systems on older systems that don't have digital store fronts then OF COURSE physical copies are better. They're the only option available to you. If however you have a newer platform then digital purchases are an option. And in the case of "classic games" sold digitally, well it's the only way you can buy those games on newer platforms. So being the only option digital is better

If your argument here is purely that games brought physically on older platforms is better than games brought digitally on newer platforms? Then that's not really a like-for-like comparison. What your argument really boils down to is "old platforms are better than new platforms"

In terms of physical games having the same issues in terms of DRM ect as digital copies of the same games. Again, I'm talking about current platforms. I brought a physical copy of GTA 5 for PC when it came out because when it launched the idea of copying multiple DVDs was more palatable than waiting a full weekend to download it. But that physical copy, it was just a code and some files in a box

Multiplayer focused games? Digital or not, their main value is tied to the servers remaining online and maintained. And by maintained I mean more than just keeping them going. I remember jumping into Mario Kart Wii before Nintendo WFC was taken offline, somewhere around 2012/2013. The game was unplayable online due to the amount of people hacking/item spamming

I guess that's probably true. I wouldn't say 1998 though since I only started getting into PC gaming later than that, around 2000, and my experience with physical media didn't fit the frustration you've described here, hence my confusion what all the complaints are about.

Regarding the part where you said "where the servers are no longer available" though, I think that's also something I'm worried about when it comes to digital games. Aren't they also stored in some server somewhere, such that if Valve ever collapses as a company, our games are no longer available for reinstallation? I'm speaking as someone who has very little knowledge how the data of digital games are stored on Steam, of course. Again, with my own experience of physical media, reinstallation is usually not a problem since, you know, I have the actual disk.

And now that I think about it, the whole problem with modern physical games having DRM anyway is probably due to factors outside of games being physical or digital, like piracy for example. You could probably burn a CD-ROM and resell it just as easily as you could rip a digital game and post it on The Pirate Bay (not an expert opinion). I guess my line of thought is, isn't physical media's flaws not improved upon because it's a less popular (and therefore profitable) form of media (and not worth devoting effort into fixing) rather than because it's objectively flawed? Like, if physical games have a bright and shining future even in the digital age, they might have bothered to come up with something to fix the flaws the same way they improved upon digital media with Day 1 patches and stuff. Again, not an expert here.

I guess the reason why I keep pushing so hard for physical media in spite of all logical reasoning disproving me is because... I like physical media for what it is, the collector factor, despite its flaws. I think I'm someone speaking from the heart rather than using my head, if you get what I mean, so sometimes, someone like me would keep defending something even if 99 out of 100 people in the room claimed that it is flawed.

I'm a simple guy. If something doesn't work for me, I seek convenience somewhere else. And not being able to buy classic games I want on PS Plus is a big inconvenience for me, period.

I guess with the way games are moving forward on modern platforms though, you might be right for all I know. It's hard to make arguments for why physical media is better when it isn't even as ubiquitous anymore as digital media, which means that I have fewer opportunities to buy physical, which means that I don't have enough knowledge of modern physical games to make a proper comparison in the first place. It's like trying to argue why a dodo might be a better species than an ostrich when the former is extinct. You'd have to be interested enough to go and do actual research on dodo birds to form a cohesive argument at all, which I don't usually do when I post in forums. Most of the time, I post in forums just based on what personal experience and knowledge I have because I enjoy casual (and hopefully cordial) conversations, not because I seek some lengthy debate about why A is better than Brand X.

But my ignorance aside, I think Nintendo games are a good example why I prefer physical games as well. The eshop is gonna be closed, for example, meaning thousands of 3DS titles will no longer be available. What if Steam closes someday as well? I'm literally forced to buy 3DS games on physical form starting some time next year anyway.

But 3DS games aside, I don't think physical Nintendo Switch games have ever really posed the kind of DRM issues you're calling out here. If anything, Nintendo encourages you to go physical because you can redeem points from the game only with the game cartridge in the Switch (digital games bought on the eshop don't give you points).

Yeah, because game publishers have been discouraged to care that much about physical media anymore, so they go digital anyway with their physical games. If digital games and Steam didn't exist, I don't think this would've happened. The publishers are merely moving with the times.

I don't really play multiplayer games so I don't have strong feelings about this.

DRM certainly dates back to 1998. Not every game used it straight away though and not everyone had problems back in the day. A big reason why a lot of discs from back then can't be used, even for games that otherwise work, is that the DRM isn't supported though, so you might well have problems with them now.

That much is obvious. Still, the point is rather that games will be affected by it regardless of whether they were distributed as downloads, and this is mostly a problem for consoles. How likely is it, do you think, that Valve would abandon Steam while they're still a healthy company? Not much, I'd say, because PCs don't have that generational cycle but we're seeing the likes of Nintendo and Sony letting their older platforms go unsupported while raking in record profits.

There are ways around these things, of course. Games can be released DRM free - GOG and itch.io do it pretty much always and Humble Bundle still occasionally do even if they're mostly a Steam reseller these days.

Source code can also be released once a game is past the end of its commercial life. Id software did that with Doom and Quake back in the 90s, which has seen them ported to a huge number of platforms since. Perhaps most significantly, the games have kept selling and generating revenue, where most contemporary closed source ones are largely forgotten.

Still, that's just PC. For consoles, your best bet is that someone hacks them so you can dump all your games and save files for backup or so you can run them on an emulator. The platform holders and publishers will whinge about this incessantly, but they've only really got themselves to blame; if they actually looked after their own legacy properly, nobody else would have to step in and do it for them.