Topic: Digital vs physical

@FaeKnight Ok this does NOT make any sense. I even contacted Microsoft to ask them if there are hidden downloads on the Xbox One physical games and they said that the games run just from the install disk AT least the single player stuff.

I go physical whenever I can. It just fills me with more satisfaction looking at my games collection that is taking up an entire wall in my room than looking at my Steam Library. Plus, somehow, the thought that I just bought something is more on my mind when I have to go out there and actually pick it up at the shop. Digitally, boom it's there.

Physical: Own the game forever. Have it on a shelf to show.
Digital: You need to make your own backups regularly, or risk to lose everything one day.

Physical: Borrow your games to friends and family (or sell them).
Digital: Can't borrow your games or sell them.

Physical: Only need to change cartridges, which is fast and easy since you know what's on the cartridge label.
Digital: Depending on the size of the microSD card you need to switch them microSD cards around as well, and label your microSD cards yourself (which often looks like a mess).

Physical: Buy as many games as you want. 1000+ anyone?
Digital: Most likely a 300 games limit just like on Wii U and Wii.

Physical: Can find good deals on games, many of which will be better than you will ever find digital.
Digital: You have to wait for the right deals from Nintendo or a third party directly, you cannot just browse for millions of different sellers.

Physical: Can take hundreds of games with you. These cartridges are tiny after all: A 100 games won't make a noticeable weight or space difference.
Digital: If you need to have a 100 games with you at all times without carrying an extra 200 gram bag full of cartridges.

Physical: Saves lots of memory and money (either internal storage or microSD card memory).
Digital: Prepare to buy multiple expensive microSD cards if you want all the biggest games.

Physical: If you lose your Switch or if it gets stolen, you will lose just one game with it (if it's inserted).
Digital: If you lose your Switch or it gets stolen, you will lose all your games with it.

@SKTTR

I love you ! LOL

I'd like to add to your great list another one :

Physical: You have access to the pre owned marked, meaning you can get games really cheap.
Digital: You have no choice than to buy at the Digital market price.

Physical forever !

I never see this mention but we live in a time now they sell us broken games that need patches, what good will the physical copy be when that time comes the servers and store are gone?

@ValhallaOutcast

And you don't ask to yourself the same question when your librairy is entirely downloaded or stored on the same servers ? o_O

A broken game in a physical form is still playable even 20 years after the purchase, I can't confirm that it'll be the case with DL content...

@SKTTR whole lotta reaching going on there lol!

A bit of balance is in order.....

Assuming it's not lost, stolen or damaged. You have somewhat of a point here because of the DRM involved with gaming. But in general digital copies of things are harder to destroy. My digital photos that are backed up to a HDD are far safer than my Mum's old photos sitting in a shoebox somewhere.

Again, thumbs up for pointing out an actual advantage. That's one. Even so I personally don't care about selling or lending my games, movies or music. I still have my SNES and Gameboy games and all of my old CDs. I get that some people collect for the "value" of stuff and more power to you if you do. But I buy games, movies and music to enjoy them not to turn a profit.

This is a load of crap. I don't know how you could possibly convince yourself that what you said here makes any sense at all. This is THE reason why physical media sucks. Swapping MicroSD cards? Are you serious?

I'm not convinced this is actually a thing but even if it is:
1. There are typically ~10 games sold per console. Wii U was ~7, PS3 was ~14
2. I consider myself an enthusiast, I typically get ~20-40 games per console

Who on earth is buying 300+ games let alone 1000+? Whoever this is, they aren't a typical consumer and they are going to hit other hard limits well before this game number ceiling becomes an issue. And in any case the Switch creates a file for the game whether it's physical or not so this limit would also exist for physical games.

This is generally true although there are always exceptions to the rule. For example there are sometimes discounts on eShop credit in some stores, usually ~20%. So I can look at a game at $69AU in store and $79AU on the eShop and think "wow, the eShop costs more"... but if I stockpiled a bit of eShop credit when it was 20% off (which I just did) that $79 becomes $63 and then $59 after My Nintendo rewards.

I personally still buy physical games and other media precisely for this reason, so it's a thing. But it doesn't always swing in favour of physical media. Also even when it does sometimes the gap is small enough that the extra convenience of digital is worth paying a few dollars for.

BS

It's a thing but you're overstating it a bit. You can get a 128GB memory card for fairly cheap, that'd be enough to store every game the average person will ever download. Need more than that? Buy the 128GB now and when it's full in a couple of years get a bigger one for less than you'd pay now for 128GB.

The idea that a $60-100AU microSD card is blowing the bank for people who payed $450AU for a console and are buying $50-100AU games regularly? It's a bit of a stretch. If you are buying that many games that you need the extra storage you have the money to get a microSD card.

You're basing this statement on a scenario that doesn't exist. My physical games exist in the case I carry my Switch in. My digital games are tied to my account. If anything the reverse of what you say is true.

A broken physical game is still worth more than a digital game that you can't re-download when the eShop servers shut down. Once the data on your microSD card gets corrupted over time and you don't have a backup saved somewhere it's gone. Also, there will be a method to get updates to physical Switch games without Nintendo's servers.

In any case, most games (at least the ones I buy) are perfectly playable without updates. Some don't even have any. Though I observe that patching and updating is getting out of hand lately, especially for a Nintendo system.

@skywake You only buy 40 games per system, so several points seem BS to you, it's ok. We're not all the same.

And in any case the Switch creates a file for the game whether it's physical or not so this limit would also exist for physical games.

Good point though.

Kinda like what can happen with old cartridges and disc's sometimes

Actually, you don't lose any of your games if they're all digital, as Nintendo has transitioned to an account system and you can just redownload them on a new system after calling them and having them deactivate your stolen system.

You'll need another Switch to play them again, of course, but the same is true of physical games.

The only danger with digital is the (increasingly unlikely) chance that you won't be able to redownload the game at some point in the future. But, well, you can easily lose cartridges as well, and that's much more likely to happen than Nintendo entirely abandoning its modern online infrastructure at this point.

@ValhallaOutcast Depends on the games you buy I guess. Most games are perfectly playable without patches, even today. And whilst some may contain game-breaking bug, or weird glitches, that is also true for older games. How many SNES, N64 or GameCube games have bugs and glitches? Plenty!

@redd214 It does happen. Although I have to assume that it's more likely for one SD card to break down than an entire collection of individual games.

@Ralizah Wii? If your Wii breaks down right now, you won't ever get the Wiiware games back. I'm not worried about the near future. That's when stuff is easily replaceable, but 20-30 years from now? Those Switch servers will be shut down for sure.

@Octane "Modern online infrastructure."

The Wii shop was Nintendo's first attempt at mass digital distribution of software. They've since developed a much more modern and permanent online infrastructure more akin to Xbox Live or PSN. I really doubt they're going to entirely shut it down at this point (barring something catastrophic like a worldwide economic crash, a world war, or something else of the sort, in which case video games will be the least of my concerns).

@SKTTR "Digital: Depending on the size of the microSD card you need to switch them microSD cards around as well, and label your microSD cards yourself (which often looks like a mess)."

I present to you, the digital future!

@Cobalt @ValhallaOutcast Valhalla has a fair point. It's not so much that digital is better than physical because of this. It's that there really is no such thing as physical because of this. That broken physical game won't be playable in 20 years. Like the PS4 version of Just Cause 3 that crashed at the end of the first mission 100% of the time. Once the patch is gone, the disc is as worthless as a missing download. Add games with "always online shared world" games, and it's the same.

@skywake "Who on earth is buying 300+ games let alone 1000+? "
My X1X library currently shows 153 games including freebies and X360 BC games. I've had it less than a year. hides

It's the sales!! The get you!!

I'll add
digital con: The biggest real risk of all. If the account is compromised, stolen, deleted, locked out, banned, etc, etc etc, you lose your entire library and are out potentially thousands. This is am ore likely scenario than the library being destroyed in a natural disaster of some sort on the premises.

physical pro (Nintendo Switch specific): I can play my game in EITHER of my switches, and hopefully, with cloud saves move my saves between them (just as I could do on the cart for 3DS.) For now, they are locking the digital games to hardware so I can't play my digital copy on my second machine at all. It actively gives me an error if I try to. That's a huge plus to physical, exclusive to Switch. On PS4/X1 I can log into any PS4/X1 anywhere on Earth and play my digital games (a big plus for digital in those cases.)

@NEStalgia yup you know what I meant, and with day 1 patches we dont even know how broken some games are because we never played version 1.0 of some games

Well I currently have 22 games on my Switch in total but a lot of those would've been download only games on previous consoles. For 7 of these I got the cartridge which works out to be 50.3GB saved by going with the cartridge on those. With a single 128GB microSD card and with the downloaded games I have I'm at ~110GB of free storage, if I was digital only I'd still have 60GB of free space. And that 128GB MicroSD card cost about the same as what Nintendo are charging for the Smash edition GC controller or the AA JoyCon battery pack. It's not really that much of a struggle.

Even so, the point isn't about purchases anymore because it's clear that same limit would exist for physical media. The question is more about how many games you can carry on a MicroSD card. Based on the games I have? A 128GB MicroSD card probably gets you into the 30-40 games region if you're digital only of which 15 or so are full retail style releases. A 256GB card which is still relatively affordable gets you double that.

To suffer the hassle of having to swap cards? Realistically you're well above 256GB at that point. You have close to 100 games on hand and have to suffer by having to "clean the fridge" to get access to the other 100 or so games. Meanwhile you're on this thread talking about how inconvenient that is. How it's much easier to just carry around 50+ cartridges..... and then the 512GB MicroSD becomes cheap...

I remain unconvinced

Special Editions make me giddy, but I like digital as well.

Generally I like my single-player games physical and multiplayer games digital.

IMO If a person owns more than one Switch, then Physical has an advantage. I historically have always been physical, sad to say but in the current state of things the lines are so blurred it is hard to say what is "better".
Digital is locked to one device. Physical requires download/update/patches.
Digital is super convenient. Physical can be re-sold, and often purchased at a discount, even at launch.
There are many more pluses and minus for each that other have noted.

I just tried this so I know it works, but one thing about the Switch that is really interesting is there is an option called "Match Version with Local Users" this allows a Switch with the the most recent update to pass that update from one Switch console directly to another Switch console. I have no idea if the other guy's consoles can do that. Nonetheless, in the future when the servers go down, if somehow you can find a Switch console with the necessary update, it will be possible to pass that update from one Switch to another without the need of a server. That is pretty cool.

However, it is quite annoying that when I popped in my new game into my Switch, even though I was not connected to the internet, somehow the Switch knew the game needed an update and would not let me play it without downloading it. I mean if I bought the game and left town and popped it in and I had no internet available, I would be out of luck. That is not cool.

I would prefer all the games I wanted to play came fully playable on a cart. But at least for now those days are long gone.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that that these are just video games. Just do what is best for you, who cares what other do.

This will be solved by ROMs and hacked machines when that time comes.

What Switch games are broken, or does anyone know? I had a theory that those day 1 patches unlocked the game a little while ago. Like how they preload digital games then unlock them. Idk. Makes me upset if true.

Still, I'd rather have physical.

Not sure where you pulled that out of but I have no inconvenience swapping cards. I am close to 100 games or so and those are Physical ones and some are physical Collectors editions something Digital can't do. Don't know whom your referring to or talking with but I find no inconvenience swapping cards. So hard to burst your bubble but we don't fit your bubble stereotyping. I only carry those I want to play and leave the rest at home so another stereotyping game being played here. So don't go around making baseless assumptions it doesn't look good for you.