Poll: Would you be ok with games going exclusively digital?

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verdant monkai

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I was just searching for good deals on fire emblem awakening, and I saw that I could get it for around £3 (thats $4.67) cheaper as a digital download. But I'll still be getting the physical copy. Purely because holding a nintendo handheld game gives me a feeling of glorious nostalgia, when I think of my first ever game pokemon Red. Mostly though it is because I enjoy displaying my games on a shelf, rather than having them as a file on a hard drive. I look at my games and it makes me feel happy to think I can play them whenever I like and no one can easily take them away (unless they steal them via breaking into my home).

I have never fully trusted technology to be relied upon, and I know games are technology. But games aren't usually known for crashing and disappearing into the void. For example I don't really trust steam to never crash sending all my downloads to Davy Jones locker. So I only have a few downloads and will only download if its a choice between downloading or not playing, or maybe if the download is significantly cheaper.

So are you guys fine with downloads or am I just a bit paranoid? I think I would stop most of my gaming if games went exclusively digital.
 

endtherapture

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I like downloads but I also like having physical copies. I cherish my Dark Souls and The Witcher 2 physical copies. Often physical copies of games a year or so old are cheap - I got DA2 and Kingdoms of Amalur for like £5 each because obviously they're taking up Amazon's warehouse space so it's nice to get them cheap!
 

MajorTomServo

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I spent ~$120 on virtual console games over the years. One day, my wii died, and I lost all of them forever. Haven't bought a non-physical game since.

Physical games are usually cheaper too. There's sales, used copies, rentals... But with download only, there's usually a monopoly. PSN shop is still charging like $30 for Duke Nukem Forever...
 

Strelok

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Already have moved mostly full digital, only buy physical copies to get the collector's edition if I am interested. Last ones were BioShock: Infinite and Skyrim. Funny that first I checked to see if they would at least activate on Steam, or Origin I wouldn't care, just so long as I can throw out the disks, useless, space wasting relics. Get rid of collector's editions and go full digital, buy trinkets and nick-knacks from the online store.
 

tippy2k2

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I always felt the same way...

and then I bought Metal Gear Solid Peacewalker and Borderlands 2 on my 360. It's silly but it's incredibly convenient to not have to swap out my discs. However, there would be two requirements for me anytime I consider digital versus retail:

1. Can I re-download if my 360 explodes? This is why I won't buy from iTunes and chose Amazon for music.
2. It's gotta be substantially cheaper. MG:pW was $10 when I got it and BL2 was $30 (half off at the time) when I got it. If I'm going to purchase a digital game, it has to be at least $20 cheaper than it would be in real life.

It's very very very very very rare that I go back and re-play a current gen game once I'm done, let alone something from a former system so the "losing your game if/when the corporation goes down" is of minimal concern. However, I certainly understand why others would be against that logic.
 

Smooth Operator

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Not until I get indisputable legal claim on my games, right now all digital distribution platforms can take you whole library simply on the basis of their own vague internal rules and there is nothing you can do about it (unless your lawyer budget is bigger then theirs).

And let's not forget everyone already put class action lawsuit exemptions into their EULAs, Origin has a pre-defined one year limit on your games, and even in countries where this sort of product control is completely illegal there was has been no success in legal channels as companies just hide behind questionable US law.
 

Zeckt

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I have finished completely moving to digital even going so far as to sell every game in my collection that is not exclusive. It's a good feeling knowing I would not continually have my collection become unplayable due to the next generation of hardware especially with the 360's high failure rate. It became clear that buying any game on the 360 was a big mistake as with the way things go for me every game in my library would become unplayable and I would have to drop money on another 360 that would be just as likely to fail after a short while.

I don't care if a game was from last gen, if I want to play it I want to play it. I will not have microsoft create pointless boundaries for me any longer
 

shrekfan246

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Zeckt said:
I don't care if a game was from last gen, if I want to play it I want to play it. I will not have microsoft create pointless boundaries for me any longer
And what happens when the servers containing the data for downloading, or activating, or verifying the legitimacy of a game go kaput? If you bought any games that you didn't currently have installed for the sake of saving hard drive space or something, you'd likely lose access to it forever.

Steam is a pretty big titan in the industry right now, but I seriously doubt it'll be around forever, and if/when it falls if I don't still have access to all of the games I purchased on it, I'm quite frankly going to be extremely pissed. Granted, physical copies of games often use Steamworks anyway, but I'm pretty sure that I could just reinstall Bioshock Infinite off the discs and play it again without ever connecting to the internet since it's already activated on my account.

On top of that, my internet can only download up to one Gigabyte an hour, and that's when the bandwidth isn't being eaten up by my father streaming Netflix. So, yeah, I don't want things to move fully digital, because I like spending more time actually playing games than trying to download and install them.
 

Zeckt

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Fair enough Shrekfan, but steam has made it clear that they plan to not go anywhere and if they ever did they said themselves they would make all their games available for download drm free. Steam will be around for a very, very long time and it's more likely my games will be more playable later on steam rather then 360 in 20 years.
 

Casual Shinji

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No way.

I'm still a bit steamed I was forced to buy Okami HD on PSN, and I dread the day when my PS3 dies.
 

Goofguy

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I went with the "I don't mind" option but leaning heavily towards digital. Anything can happen in either case. I have yet to have any significant problems with either of them. I prefer digital only because I'm not interested in the physical parts of games. I don't care about collector's edition goodies, manuals (unless there's lore) or the cover art, I just want the game.
 

w9496

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I prefer discs to downloads.

There are really good reasons to have both, but I like discs because I don't lose all of my games if something happens to my Xbox's hard drive.
 

Mullac

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Casual Shinji said:
I dread the day when my PS3 dies.
Yeah, this is one of the reasons why I don't like downloads. It almost feels like I don't actually own the game.

Also, I just like to look and hold a game case/manual.
 

shrekfan246

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May 26, 2011
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Casual Shinji said:
No way.

I'm still a bit steamed I was forced to buy Okami HD on PSN, and I dread the day when my PS3 dies.
To play devil's advocate (since I stated my opinion in the mirror of this thread), how would owning a physical copy make a difference if the console were to die? Either way you need to replace the console and can't play until you do.

Worrying about the PSN dying out and leaving you unable to redownload should your console die is fair enough, but you're free to redownload any games you've bought off the PSN.
 

Casual Shinji

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shrekfan246 said:
Casual Shinji said:
No way.

I'm still a bit steamed I was forced to buy Okami HD on PSN, and I dread the day when my PS3 dies.
To play devil's advocate (since I stated my opinion in the mirror of this thread), how would owning a physical copy make a difference if the console were to die? Either way you need to replace the console and can't play until you do.
Well, you would still at least have it. It wouldn't have just desolved into nothing.
Worrying about the PSN dying out and leaving you unable to redownload should your console die is fair enough, but you're free to redownload any games you've bought off the PSN.
I know, but that's only available for I think three times. So should you be so unlucky as to have your console get busted thrice in a short number of years, it's bye bye downloads. Also I had my PS3 die once and I remember it being a giant pain in the ass to reactivate my account on a new console. When I look at the games I've downloaded I can't help but feel like there's a little timer above them counting down. I'd be okay if they gave you the ability to store downloaded games and such on flash drive or something.
 

shrekfan246

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May 26, 2011
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Casual Shinji said:
shrekfan246 said:
Casual Shinji said:
No way.

I'm still a bit steamed I was forced to buy Okami HD on PSN, and I dread the day when my PS3 dies.
To play devil's advocate (since I stated my opinion in the mirror of this thread), how would owning a physical copy make a difference if the console were to die? Either way you need to replace the console and can't play until you do.
Well, you would still at least have it. It wouldn't have just desolved into nothing.
Worrying about the PSN dying out and leaving you unable to redownload should your console die is fair enough, but you're free to redownload any games you've bought off the PSN.
I know, but that's only available for I think three times. So should you be so unlucky as to have your console get busted thrice in a short number of years, it's bye bye downloads. Also I had my PS3 die once and I remember it being a giant pain in the ass to reactivate my account on a new console. When I look at the games I've downloaded I can't help but feel like there's a little timer above them counting down. I'd be okay if they gave you the ability to store downloaded games and such on flash drive or something.
Well, I'm pretty sure the PS3 is compatible with external hard drives. Though I think the drive has to be formatted for FAT32 instead of the normal NTFS, and I'm not sure if the files for Okami specifically are just one big file that's 6 GB, or multiple separate files that just make up the 6 GB... if it were just one big file, that wouldn't be any help because FAT32 only holds individual files up to 4 GB in size.
 

Casual Shinji

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shrekfan246 said:
Well, I'm pretty sure the PS3 is compatible with external hard drives. Though I think the drive has to be formatted for FAT32 instead of the normal NTFS, and I'm not sure if the files for Okami specifically are just one big file that's 6 GB, or multiple separate files that just make up the 6 GB... if it were just one big file, that wouldn't be any help because FAT32 only holds individual files up to 4 GB in size.
Yeah, I don't exactly know what that means, but it sounds like it sucks for me. :(
 

shrekfan246

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Casual Shinji said:
shrekfan246 said:
Well, I'm pretty sure the PS3 is compatible with external hard drives. Though I think the drive has to be formatted for FAT32 instead of the normal NTFS, and I'm not sure if the files for Okami specifically are just one big file that's 6 GB, or multiple separate files that just make up the 6 GB... if it were just one big file, that wouldn't be any help because FAT32 only holds individual files up to 4 GB in size.
Yeah, I don't exactly know what that means, but it sounds like it sucks for me. :(
Well, theoretically, if you could separate the files for Okami into two groups of 3 GBs, you'd be able to put them on anything larger than 8 GB or so as long as it were reformatted properly.

I don't know how the files for Okami are set up though, because I haven't dug through them on my own PS3.

EDIT: Also, I don't know how well that would translate into getting it back on the PS3 or running it... XD
 

Silly Hats

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I primarily play PC.

I like physical copies for collecting and simply because my internet doesn't allow my to download a 14gb file whenever I want.
 

ResonanceSD

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Are digital downloads cheaper than retail? No? Well then I'm good with still getting physical copies.