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Ill never go full digital until these things happen

teezzy

Banned
When I purchase my Series X, I'm just gonna buy a physical copy of whatever current NHL game is out, subscribe to GamePass, and call it a day.

The rest of my gaming is on Steam.

I'm 99.9% digital
 
I don't have the space in my house to store a collection of physical games for my systems. At some point it just gets silly. Plus can anyone remember when you didn't know what games to pack with you for your Gameboy/PSP/DS? you had to put them all in a carry case LOL?

I'm not about to do that when we now have the technology to slap so much data onto micro storage on the devices.
 

German Hops

GAF's Nicest Lunch Thief
Listen, I don't want
I don't have the space in my house to store a collection of physical games for my systems. At some point it just gets silly.

Pretty much this. I hate the clutter of physical games in my house and the hassle of driving to a Gamestop, just to interact with a heavily acneyed, cheeto-stained incel in order to get a physical copy of Spider Man PS4 version.

I'd rather go digital to acutely avoid all of that, whilst scratching my balls on the couch with an ice cold mug of Mountain Dew, as I await the downloading of Ghost of Tsushima to finish.
 
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My thoughts for consoles are the best deal wins. Why would I limit myself to digital only if I can get a physical game 30 bucks cheaper? Same goes for me when choosing digital over physical. May the best deal win.
 
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Retail discs all day.

Why ps3 force me to legitimate my library 3 in 3 months adjusting the clock of the system online? If i didnt do that, I can't play my digital games.

Why i cant play my Xbox indie games offline?

There's so many bs in digital...Im also a collector so...Discs all day!

I got some digital indies that will never get a retail release too, or when a game is extremely cheap, like Far Cry 3 for 2$ last week. And i use gamepass just to test games, if i liked, i buy the disc.

Digital you don't have guarantee of nothing.
 
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Hostile_18

Banned
Listen, I don't want


Pretty much this. I hate the clutter of physical games in my house and the hassle of driving to a Gamestop, just to interact with a heavily acneyed, cheeto-stained incel in order to get a physical copy of Spider Man PS4 version.

I'd rather go digital to acutely avoid all of that, whilst scratching my balls on the couch with an ice cold mug of Mountain Dew, as I await the downloading of Ghost of Tsushima to finish.

Plus money will be no issue for you 😂

I've been all digital this gen. It is nice to sell games after but so many games I've gone back to that i probably would have sold in the heat of the moment had i been physical.
 
Surely theres a moral aspect to reselling a game in the second hand market. The developer/publisher don't get a cut of the proceeds. I wonder what the loss of profit is.

I wait for sales on PC and i'm a subscriber to Game Pass and PSN for console gaming. Although i'm not paying full price most of the time at least developers/publishers get something.

There is no moral aspect to it. That's absurd. That's like saying there's a moral aspect to selling a car you bought new. Those poor engineers who spent so much time working on a car when the company they work for misses out on a sale every time someone buys a used car.

I love physically owning movies (Blu-ray/UHD) because one, they DO play from disc and I am also getting a better quality better version than the steamed/digital counterpart, more features and something nice to look at on my shelf. Disc games are the same as digital games in terms of content and the disc itself is just a license key once installed.

I'm not happy about digital games but that's where we are now. I do think a lot can be done to reduce the price (at least $5-10) considering there is no packaging. I would like to see some kind of digital marketplace where you could sell or trade your digital content. You'd likely have to set it up where the prices are fixed so not to compete with the official digital store and also, it would be a one time transcation. The person buying the digital game could not then resell it. Still, I think a one time trade/sell would help make digital more competitive.

We need people to largely buy the disc version so as to populate people's homes with UHD players. The PS3 played a very significant role in the adoption of Blu Ray and was the reason Blu Ray beat out HD DVD. So far 4K has been really disappointing as far as content available. There are very few movies or TV shows being released on UHD physical and I think the lack of a customer base is a very significant factor. The vast majority of releases are Blu Ray and even DVD. When movies are remastered for rerelease, oftentimes they'll only be scanned at 2K because the cost doesn't justify what they'd likely make in sales. There are fewer people buying 4K because there are fewer people with 4K players.

Like it or not, a digital only future will hurt not only gamers but movie enthusiasts as well.

About the marketplace, see my comment below.

Physical products have a value that naturally depreciates from use, which creates a natural market for new/used products.

A digital license doesn't.

If you can't understand that I don't know what to tell you. You are right in that PHYSICAL games should be treated the same as cars.. but not digital.

The value of something is the match what the seller is willing to sell something for, and what the buyer is willing to pay for it. With physical the condition determines a significant percentage of the overall value; but not all of it. Otherwise we would see Barbie's Rainbow Bedtime Stories in pristine condition than say a banged up used copy of Conker's Bad Fur Day. Assuming equal scarcity.

You're not going to find as many people willing to spend as much on a three year old as you are on a new release that had built a lot of anticipation and mind share. And prices should reflect that.

The problem with Digital is that there is no re-selling and "usage" is actually hard to emulate on digital except if you implement an algorithm that actually simulates aging of code...etc. etc. it's such a humongously complex concept when put in front of Legal Research. By the end of the day going digital is a decision that has to come with advantages as the used game market is not going to go away by anything but value proposition.

If I go digital I must have advantages in Pricing or in Sharing or in Compatibility. Something has to be better than simply buying it physical and being able to re-sell it and get back at least 10-20 € from my original investment. This is something that gaming companies will either have to thing about it (consumer friendly) or they solve it a little bit like nintendo...which I don't perceive being very consumer friendly, even for the sharing function you need to be "online while starting the game if it belongs to the other account you are sharing with..."

So, yeah. Let's see what happens in the future.

If Sony and Microsoft wanted to encourage digital, they could introduce something like the Community Market on Steam. And allow people to sell game keys for as much or as little as they wanted. Let the market sort out how much a game is worth. I believe Valve make a percentage of every sale made on the community market, and the devs do too. I could be wrong here though.

The market would address some of the concerns people have with digital. I know I would be more likely to purchase a digital game if I had the freedom to sell it.

Countries should also introduce laws the forces owners of digital store for refund the full dollar value of purchases made on accounts that get banned.

Digital is the future!

The physical media in video game industry is lucky to have survived this long... Or perhaps it is only due to the absolute stubbornness and entitlement of gamers!

The music industry was taken over by the rise of mp3s, iPod, and streaming. People still buy CDs and vinyl but they are the minority. The movie industry was taken over by the rise of digital stores like iTunes/Google Play/Amazon Prime and streaming services such as Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, Amazon, etc. Sure, some people still buy DVDs + Blu-ray but again they are in the minority.

The video game industry is next and it won't be so lucky! The reason physical media still exists for music + video is because it offers better quality. Streaming music through Spotify and watching movies on Netflix is good enough but for enthusiasts they can get better quality buying vinyl or Blu Ray.

The same can not be said for games! Games won't necessarily perform better on physical media vs digital. If anything, a game loaded onto an SSD will be accessed and load faster than what a spinning disc and laser are capable of.

People will argue "but digital music + video is easier to download/stream compared to video games!" Yes...that definitely has gave physical games a bit of extra life but there is no avoiding the fact that digital is becoming more popular which means internet quality is improving and/or more people are just accepting what the future holds by moving to digital.

The writing is on the wall. Rising digital sales. Physical game sales falling. Microsoft buttered up everyone with the All Digital Xbox One S and now Sony is firing a warning shot with the All Digital PS5. Oh no, physical media will stick around for a while yet but it's only a matter of time.

You can try hang onto your discs and drives for dear life but you'll need to let go eventually. It's best to just do it now and get it over with. There is no avoiding it. If you refuse to go digital then your only option will be to not play games. Us on PC have been all digital for years. I haven't bought a physical PC game since 2005. Trust me, it's really not that bad. In fact it is simply better.

Tick tock.

Why are you so excited for digital and why do you care if physical exists?

Wow - I’ve been buying games from Steam for well over a decade now. The concept of physical media is hard to grasp. It’s weird that people are still clinging onto that.
Its hilarious to me that Sony/Microsoft are the ones trying to accelerate this, like they don't realize how much better digital on PC is than console and how much gamers they'll lose. The games are way way way cheaper on PC and you have more options. If you had the choice between digital on PC and console only a sucker would choose console and they're even putting their games on PC now making the choice even easier XD. Hey let me pay more for all my games that are gonna run and look worse.

PC has the advantage in that third party stores exist and a single store doesn't hold a monopoly allowing them to dictate prices.
 
The way I see it, they maybe forced into lowering the Digital Price once Physical is no longer possible as the Music Industry never charged more for a song than a Physical Copy. What changed was that people found a niche with Vinyl costing more than it has ever done.

Companies don't want to lose sales by keeping the Prices high (since the majority of us are not stupid enough to pay £60), as well as if you lose your account, that is good money down the drain.

I don't personally believe that physical will ever go away, as people like their options, but should it come to where 90% pay for Digital, then the Companies would have to lower the price in order to keep the same amount of Sales.

I will never have a large Digital Library due to the lack of reselling and distributing the game to a friend or family, and thankfully I only pay for Digital games when they are below £10.

Sony/MS might be trying to push them but I think most of us don't want that just yet, especially when we already pay for Subs and other Utilities.
 
The way I see it, they maybe forced into lowering the Digital Price once Physical is no longer possible as the Music Industry never charged more for a song than a Physical Copy. What changed was that people found a niche with Vinyl costing more than it has ever done.

Companies don't want to lose sales by keeping the Prices high (since the majority of us are not stupid enough to pay £60), as well as if you lose your account, that is good money down the drain.

I don't personally believe that physical will ever go away, as people like their options, but should it come to where 90% pay for Digital, then the Companies would have to lower the price in order to keep the same amount of Sales.

I will never have a large Digital Library due to the lack of reselling and distributing the game to a friend or family, and thankfully I only pay for Digital games when they are below £10.

Sony/MS might be trying to push them but I think most of us don't want that just yet, especially when we already pay for Subs and other Utilities.
Don't ever underestimate the stupidity of some console gamers, these are the same people that pay to play online.
 

Exede

Member
For pc i'm fully digital and have absolutly no problem with it. Thats because i can buy games from release day on or even when preordering on discount off key reseller websides.
In opposit to consoles where digital is in 99% of cases is more expansive than physical discs. When console manufactureres change this (they won't) i'll go full digital on consoles aswell.
That's also the reason why PS5 digital can be at least 100€ cheaper couse they make easy money with digital games anyways.
 
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Tschumi

Member
I've been doing Steam for 12 years, I've never regretted it. That's all~

Edit: to be clear, I've regretted certain purchases, but I'm entirely awake to the fact that it was my own stupidity that saw me make those mistakes without due diligence, usually in response to huge sale reduction percentages, not some Machiavellian subclause of the platform.
 
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AV

We ain't outta here in ten minutes, we won't need no rocket to fly through space
The prices for digital with no physical games could very well go up because there is no direct competition and if you want to play those games, there aren’t really any other options.

For exclusives, sure. There's a very fierce direct competition for multiplats. Shit, MS aren't even asking you to buy games any more, they want you on Game Pass.
 

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
Digital or physical, whatever works for you. Physical has too many advantages for the sake of saving a few bucks on digital, though, and the nature of physical puts a space constraint on your purchases. Or to put it differently, the number of people with 500 physical games on their shelves must be tiny compared to the number of people with 500 digital games in their Steam library. Sometimes less is more, and digital pushes gaming in the direction of commodity / cheap product instead of a premium product.
 
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