These days I hear more complaining over not owning the game on a Disc. I am curious to know why gamers today still prefer to own the game on disc when it’s physically useless. The consoles of today don’t even read off the discs anymore. The disc is just proof to the company that you have brought the game.

It’s great to own the discs but it’s nothing more than a piece of plastic now. It literally does nothing. Digital is cheaper and it’s a lot simpler to run a library of games without having to insert the discs in the hard drive.

I have an entire collection of games since the late 80s and it’s quite a large collection at that. In many cases I’ve had cartridges stop working due to age and wear and tear, I’ve had Disc games not work due to game servers shut down, I’ve had faulty Disc Drives and badly scratched Discs that no longer work. Now put all that into account that I paid top dollar for them and now some of them aren’t useable anymore (Junk). I jumped on Steam to see how my Steam collection is holding up and all 800+ games are available for download whenever I see fit since 2004. How on Earth could I manage to store another 800+ games in my house? And how many of my games would still work if they were physical copies?

Don’t get me wrong I love having the disc in my hand to show I own it, but does it really matter anymore? Digital might be a permanent purchase but at least it’s always there for you. I have listed the benefits of what I think are great between Digital and Physical below.

Benefits of owning Digital

No Discs

Cheaper Consoles (No disc drives required)

Faster load times

Less house space

Access to entire Library

Cheaper games

Able to download games on any machine (account based)

No Discs/Drive maintenance

Benefits of owning Physical

Install off the disc

Ownership of a game

Resale Value

Now those reasons to own physical aren’t exactly great compared to the reasons to own digital and if you’re someone who loves your games and don’t plan on reselling them, it sort of makes it useless. The fact you need an online account now to use your hardware and half of the game is only accessible online now with paywalls has really made it pointless to own it on disc in my opinion.

If anyone wants to add to my list feel free, I know there’s more with physical but I just can’t think of any.

Once Xbox One launched I went 100% digital and never looked back.

You also forgot "preloading" as a benefit. This has been one of the main factors for me. I wake up early on launch day, boom, there it is ready to play. No getting ready and going to the store or waiting for a delivery.

About the only downfall in my opinion is being able to resell a physical disc. Fortunately, for me, this isn't an issue because I never traded in games. Once I bought it, I pretty much owned it forever.

The convenience of digital games is why I like buying digitally, at least on PC that is. Like I use my Steam Family Sharing with quite a few of my friends and they have access to the majority of my steam library regardless of location which is epic where as with physical games, I have to go to them or they have to come to me in order to get the games.

But I do like the box art and physical bonuses u sometimes get with physical items so thats what I still buy some games physically

Physical is cheaper on consoles, different stores constantly have games on sale every week that makes it cheaper, even pre-ordering is cheaper with physical because of amazons 30% deal at E3 and 10% deal after.  Games take up a lot of memory, even if I upgrade the HDD its still gonna be full by the end of the generation, if I went digital I would lose all the games that are not downloaded on the console because I have no space, with phyiscal I always have access to all of them.  And disc scratches are not an issue because blu-rays are anti scratch, if you scratch them then you need to take better care of your stuff.  

Edit: To give an example, Shadow of Mordor is $50 on PSN and I got it for $30 at Best Buy last week and that's with Canada's prices, could probably find it for $20 in America.

The only reason I still get physical is because my internet speed is shit.

since i got my ps4 i only bought digital so far. got a physical disc of shadows of mordor as a bd present but nothing else. since i never sell my games, i too don't have any reason besides price to buy physical (i'm like a coupon lady always checking the store to see the sales of the week to get a nice price).

Cds DVDs and bluray do have a expiration date on them and lots of people don't know that. (well its a very big one but none the less, there's one)

I purchase the cheaper version. I don't care about owning a disc, in fact I'd rather not as it only takes up room and can be lost. So far this gen, I have bought only one disc (Borderlands THC) because I found it cheaply day one. The only time I will consider a disc is if it is cheaper at least 15-20%.

Starting this gen, I thought I will never buy a disc again. Dollar was fairly low, making the US store significantly cheaper than in EU. Today, $/€ is almost 1:1, so that advantage is gone.
But not only that, we exploited the system to split one game between three people and paid only $20 a game. That was great while it lasted, but system update 2.50 patched that, so that advantage is gone too.

So now, I just wait for a game to hit $30/€25 mark, then buy it whichever happens first (PSN store or online physical store).

I only speak for myself, surely there are arguments for both sides that are valid, but they don't affect me personally. I am not a collector to prefer discs, and I have a good enough flat internet to not care about file sizes.
I still exploit the system to resell digital games, so that also helps me lean towards digital purchases more.
With an added bonus of preloading a game and having it immediately, instead of waiting for a week until it gets shipped to my home.

There were a few digital games that got taken off PSN due to ownership rights so now nobody can ever buy them again. Thanks digital.

I think a digital ecosystem will be the NX's great "Wii-like" innovation.

There's honestly no good reason to stick with physical, and honestly, the masses will never move on on the console side completely until one of the big 3 has the balls to light a fire under our asses and force all digital on us, much like Apple did with the iPod.

Microsoft almost did it, but they wimped out at the last second, mostly because it was poorly executed. I think the NX, specifically the NXDS, will try it next. Let's see if Nintendo can execute it better. I think the rumbling have made it clear that they seem to at least be on the right track.

Physical. Digital has deluded and devalued games imo.