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Do you prefer to own physical or digital version of games?



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Which do you prefer physical or digital versions of games?


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Definitely physical. I'd say it's mostly because I'm old and stubborn but almost a year ago I witnessed first hand what can happen to digital games. My friend (who only buys digital games) was playing Apex Legends. He beat someone in a fair fight, but it turns out that he had just crossed the wrong player. Shortly afterwards (the match was still ongoing) he got hacked and when he tried to regain control he found out his account had been permanently banned. And the worst part? He lost his entire library which consisted of well over a hundred games. The moral of the story is, digital games can be lost in an instant (and beware of hackers of course).
 

Grey Skies

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I only do downloads these days. In fact, I don't even remember the last time I bought a physical game, because it's been years. Old games on sale are incredibly cheap on PC, and I can get 10x the number of games for the money than I could get if I insisted on discs, nevermind the sheer variety of games available only as downloads. I like this setup so much that I have no plans to buy any consoles or physical media again.

I'm not very enamored with downloading games on consoles, though. Sony clearly won't continue to host PS3, PSP, and PS1 games on its store, plus these consoles come with paltry storage, plus the prices are really gross, and to make things worse they no longer do sales for the games for these old consoles. I know a lot of people would consider a $10 or $20 game cheap, but I certainly do not. The lesson I learned from Sony announcing the closure of the PS store for old consoles was not that downloaded games are bad, but that Sony is not worth my continued business. The same thing happened with Nintendo and the Wii store.
 

Hamster Lord

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Definitely physical. I'd say it's mostly because I'm old and stubborn but almost a year ago I witnessed first hand what can happen to digital games. My friend (who only buys digital games) was playing Apex Legends. He beat someone in a fair fight, but it turns out that he had just crossed the wrong player. Shortly afterwards (the match was still ongoing) he got hacked and when he tried to regain control he found out his account had been permanently banned. And the worst part? He lost his entire library which consisted of well over a hundred games. The moral of the story is, digital games can be lost in an instant (and beware of hackers of course).

Had a friend who got his PSN account banned and had an almost mental breakdown because he had over $3000 worth of digital games gone in an instant. He eventually got his account back but that for sure scared me out of ever going all digital for good.

I will say I have a fair sized digital library of games on my PS3 and I am scared that Sony won't release some kind of patch or workaround to let those games still work once their PS3 PSN servers go down since the gaming division's head honcho doesn't seem to give a shit about older games.

I also just enjoy having a physical collection of the games I like and being able to share something physical with people close to me. I shudder to think about it but if I ever fell on hard times I always have the rarer stuff as a crutch. I do wonder if the retro game prices will level off or drop ever since they went up during COVID.
 

lolapaluuza

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Sep 22, 2020
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I don't even know, it's a difficult question. I think the digital version, because it's much more convenient. I haven't acquired a physical one for a long time, to be honest. By the way, I recently learned about the existence of skins in games and that the game turns out to be much more interesting with them. Can you give advice, have you ever been on this site https://dmarket.com/promo have you bought skins? It's just interesting to hear another opinion, otherwise I've heard that it seems to be a straight good site with skins.
 

Xickin

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I was a physical guy, but now I'm digital. I can just download a game and leave it on there. No longer do I have physically switch the disks if I fall out of the mood for Spiderman. Books however...
 

Hamster Lord

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I have a question, though, as someone who has no experience with digital prior to this current generation. Is there any actual precedence of a game being just, pulled, deleted, never given access to again in some.way shape or form? Especially for something you actually had to pay for, I don't think PT for instance is a good example as it was a free demo for a game that'll never exist. Sad that it is gone, yeah, but mostly as a "there should be an archive/museum of gaming history" to preserve the art, more than care for the actual product itself.

Considering the PS5 store is pretty much literally the PS4 store with extra stuff on it, I have a hard time believing there will be a time anywhere close that the current batch of games will just be "gone forever". And then there's instances like the Super Mario All Stars set being a timed release, and they'll stop selling it after that. The game however, will not disappear from your console or SD card itself unless you delete it. Or if the Switch or SD card get ruined themselves (hence why backup cloud saved are so important).

Other times, the game in question was a free of online-only service based game, where the idea of permanence was ways tied to the devs continuing to support it. Which is why for games like Fortnite, the late PlayStation Home, or even Final Fantasy XIV I have trouble justifying spending too much money for. Just enough to fuel my fun factor, but not enough to feel like I've lost something truly important.

People with PS3s and 360s and Wii's, are your games still there? I'm honestly curious. If they are, when most of their stores have stopped or are fading fast, then surely there's at least some semblance of "permanence" there somewhere? Then it's up to you to keep your game safe in it's storage/console, just like it's up to you to protect the game disc from scratches.

Or am I completely wrong about how all of this works? I do still get physical games, but I don't have this same hatred of digital that others seem to have. I've been getting a mix of both, and would have gotten more digitally on my Switch if it had the storage for it.

I don't know how closely this applies to the point you are making in the beginning paragraph but I think the fact that the first 4 Silent Hill games being hopelessly out of print, not really available in digital marketplaces as far as I know (Konami even pulled Silent Hill 1 from the PSOne classics store on PS3), and people having to relegate to the poorly done HD collection that had no one from the original team involved is a real shame. That's one example I can think of. And now Konami pulled MGS2 and 3 from the PSN store saying they needed to renew the rights to the archive footage used in the games - I'd be surprised to see them come back.
 

Raz

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Physical. I've been waiting for the sequel to Psychonauts for years, for example, and would have loved to have a box with artwork to hold on to.
 
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