Sometimes it seems like I'm the only person that is against digital distribution as a industry standard. I'm against it for practical reasons as well as nostalgic reasons.
Nostalgically, I love to be able to look at my game collection, and with digital distribution, there's nothing for me to look at. This means in the future, I wouldn't be able to continue to grow my collection. That would make me sad.
Practically, there's a whole mess of issues with digitally distributed games. Issues which make continued playability a problem.
The first is DRM. Digital Distribution is promoted as a way to solve piracy....the only way a digitally distributed game can possibly help against piracy is having DRM added to your console games. Otherwise, someone is going to figure out how to rip it to a disc and pirate it anyway. DRM is never GOOD for the consumer, it only ever antagonizes the consumer while trying to hamper the pirate...kinda like chemotherapy.
The second is the fallibility of storage devices. No matter whether you are using a PS3 or a 360, your HDD is based on a magnetic disc. Those have very high rates of failure(compared to discs and even compared to flash drives). If your HDD dies, you lose your game. Perhaps you can redownload it again, but what about if your HDD dies again? How often, and more importantly, how long, will you be able to redownload the game? With a disc, as long as you don't damage the disc, it will always be playable. I have 16 year old discs that still work...I do not have any hard drives working that are older than 5 years.
Finally, what do you do with your game when the next generation of consoles is released? Can you move your downloaded game from one console's hard drive to another and get the same playability as you would now? For most games, and most systems, you'll be able to keep playing your old games...if it is on a disc. I'm not so sure about downloaded games.
The PSP Go! is the first test of whether or not digitally distributed games can overcome these problems I have with it...however, it appears that Sony itself is unaware of how to overcome the last issue. How do PSP Go purchasers continue to play the games they've already bought? Sony doesn't know yet. If they don't know yet, and the launch is coming in 4 or 5 months...how in the world can we feel comfortable with moving to a full digital distribution system of game purchasing?
If you are also against getting rid of physical media, please post here!
